Praising Roy

 

Ugh:

Spent the day yesterday playing hookey.  Had a good rest, didn’t even bother to leave the cave.  I am not ashamed.  

While I still am playing the doomsayer, I want to clarify the bilious diatribe that tI threw out yesterday.  We are heading into a bad rough patch.  Probably the worst that most people have ever seen.  I am guessing comparable with 1873 or maybe 1907.  Might even go whole hog and challenge 1929 for supremacy.

But what will play out this time is a complete mess that has never been cleaned up, save for the sacred preservation of Wall Street and Corporate bonuses.  So we got that going for us.  

But, I want everyone to notice that the greater bulk of folks during these imbroglios seemed to have gotten through them.  Being of an age where I can remember the oldsters talking about the great depression, it seems to have focused them and became a valuable part of their life experience.  Not that they wanted to return to them, or thought of them as “the good old days”, but they did count the experience as useful.  I don’t think that there are many or any alive now that were competent adults back then, the best that you have is the gilded memories of the generations following them.

So, we have been going through some shit, and we will survive it.  The political class are still clowns and have no ability or desire to rein in the bankers who are our current owners.  So this will probably mean that what we will have to do is significantly downshift our lifestyle.  This is what people are considering the end of the world.

There really isn’t a need to go all bullshit crazy as I did in the past.  It really doesn’t take that much effort to get by on less.  Kill your TV is the first step.  That is the main conduit for all your manufactured desires and your touchstone for your excess.  Get yourself enough food to last a while.  3,000 calories a day aren’t that difficult to maintain when you start using meat as a condiment instead of the main nutrition source (but always save up for a meat binge as a celebration).  

I am not worried about electricity up here in the Northwest.  The dams provide us what we need.  If push comes to shove, I suspect that the long lines leading down to California might start having “Technical Difficulties”.  Water isn’t a problem here in rainyland.  

You see, what everyone is freaking out about is the idea that all of their purchased lifestyles are no longer going to be available.  Well buckaroos, in spite of Hillary’s insistence, we are going back.  The free-form lifestyles that we envisioned and that Madison Avenue designed for us will be going away, but our lives won’t.  

I think that the best analogy I can think of is an 80’s-90’s kind of cultural reference.  We have been living in and our expectations have come to demand that “The New Yankee Workshop” is the way that we want to run our lives.  Norm Abram was the best ever. Loved him.  He had everything that we wanted.  Smooth and sleek and stylish stuff was made.

But the truth of the matter is that we are going to be looking at a future where Roy Underhill is more appropriate.  The Woodright’s shop is clunky and silly, but it does things well and uses less to get there.  Maybe Roy Underhill should be our role model and Norm just an awkward memory of a wrong turn