Coming up for air. [repost from gnn.tv]

haven’t blogged in a while. At first, this was due to a severe lack of internet. But now, I have a raging 3mbs connection, and I’m still not blogging much. Oh, I’m online, jumping around the permaculture and primitivism forums, but I haven’t had much to blog about, since most of the news seems remote and absurd from where I’m standing. Monday morning, I awoke to the first traces of sun rippling across the top of our tent and stepped out to watch the first slow sunrise on our property. The bugs, hawks and snakes were still asleep and a few hyperactive alligator lizards darted along the dirt hunting ants. Next to the tent, the grass was matted and spiraled, looking to me like a deer bed. I doubt we had a deer sleeping two feet away from the tent, but up there, anything seems possible.

Not wanting to wake my fiance, I spent an hour or so pulling out coyote brush and making plans to clear the area housing the animal pens. The prior residents left the place a fabulous disaster, with trash ranging from a Volkswagen clutch to three camper shells in various states of dissolution. I flipped one camper shell onto it’s side, revealing an intricate network of tunnels dug out by carpenter ants, along with two ringneck snakes and a garter snake. The ringnecks are gorgeous snakes, dark emerald green with a crimson stomach and a slender serpentine grace. Talking to neighbors up on the hill, they are apparently quite rare, though my boss has video shot at our property of three of them in an intricate intertwined mating.

So far, I have done lots of road clearing and trimming. In two months, the well goes in. Yesterday, we got our first generator a 4500 watt screamer that will serve to run our tools as I finish reinforcing the foundation. I’ve sorted out maps, resources, and a list of likely materials I will need to start getting the cabin up to modern living standards.

Coming down the hill, Venezuela has privatized the last of its oil fields, bush is vetoing the war spending bill, more static is coming up about the Virginia shootings and the overpass in San Francisco is likely to suffer delays to rebuilding caused by steel shortages. I shrug. None of it seems to effect me anymore. It’s not laziness of apathy, more a creeping sense of “I told you so.” that plays on my conscience. I tried to change the world, now I try to make my own; far enough down a dirt road that none of this will bother me, though the only broadcast entertainment that comes in clearly at the cabin is NPR. The sea level would have to rise about 2000 feet to give me beachfront property, the bees, wasps and butterflies are voluminous and the other wild animals leave hints to their presence, bear scat, a deer antler, the soft gobble of wild turkeys shaking through the trees. No, politics is someone else’s game now. I have to worry about water, power and heat before winter arrives. Worrying about winter before summer officially arrives gives you a sense of perspective you seldom have living in the city. I don’t have to worry about heating bills, just limbing trees to stop forest fires and getting this old woodstove fixed up. I don’t have to worry about a facist crackdown, the paddywagon would never make it down my road, and if it did, I doubt it would make it past my neighbors.

No, there is nothing for me to be angry about anymore. I know the world has problems, and I might still try to fix them, but for now, they are yours. I’ve got my own. Simpler, easier to fix, easy to understand, hard to figure out why we left such simple living behind, no matter how hard the work may be.

Anyways, I have to go, I have design work to do before heading back up the mountain and the soundtrack I’m working on is about rendered and therefore ready to send. Yeah, some mountain man. ;)