degringolade

Eastern Washington Wheatfield

I admit it, I tend toward the slightly paranoid prepper mindset. For what it is worth, I have finally gotten the “gun-up” part of that mindset purged, but I am still of the opinion that we are smack dab in the middle of a long-term decline. But the way that I look at such things has changed over the years. In the long ago, I saw myself as a stalwart warrior, protecting hearth and home from barbarians. Now I see myself as a tired peasant trying to figure out how to ride out a particularly irksome period of multi-government insanity.

Now, the vile trumpster and the cabal that feeds him his stupid ideas is running headlong into the problem of only having stupid and harmful options available to them. There is no way that we can get out of the shitshow better off than we are today. Most everyone who seems to have what I feel as a grip on reality outline a near and mid-term scenario of “you ain’t seen nothing yet”.

So, do I think the end of the world is coming……naw. Do I think that the luxuries that have somehow become essentials are going to be heavily modified…most certainly. Do I think that our present governing elite has the desire or ability to make the necessary changes to allow the least precipitous decline…certainly you jest.

So you ask, what do you propose? Well, truthfully, there really isn’t all that much I can do. I write to congress and they return nicely formatted form letters telling me how they tried but failed. Living in Oregon means that, for the most part, legislation is accomplished only in a performative, virtue-signalling way because, well, that is what Oregon is all about, but it makes for a comfortable, non-useful decline but appears to be mostly involved with kicking cans down the road. I like to peek in at county and local levels, because those poor sad saps are like the student body officers that infest every high school in America. Useless offices with no true control of anything.

But I am oddly optimistic anyway. I suppose this is because I have given up on the odd idea that my desires and values have anything to do with how the world turns. Using the phrase I always tell my sons, I think that after 72 years, I have managed to “calibrate my expectations”.

I work on daily projects and try to not take other people's drama too seriously. I mind my own business and try to stay on good terms with the folks around me. Rice and beans are my friends and I can even manage some portions of pork routinely. I just diluted my nine-year old whiskey and I take walks and try to raise my step count back to >5,000 (steps take a hit in the winter)

I just watch and try to realize that I am not in charge and it certainly isn’t my world anymore.