Physical items and Mimesis

[degringolade]

Whew:  Went to bed early last night (19:30) and slept like a log.  Nearly ten hours.  I feel much better than I did yesterday.

Not certain that I am quite ready for retirement yet.  But I sure would like to figure out how to stretch the hours in my day a little bit so that I have more time.  Last night's sleep convinced me that I have to keep a weather eye on my sleep habits if I am going to feel well.  I also should keep better track and control on my ongoing intoxicant research to maximize the positive and minimize the negative.

Going to have to consider a second carboy for my ongoing intoxicant research.  I am thinking that going to a two stage fermentation for my beer will provide better results.  I am normally not a fan of plastic, but I may well go to the five gallon bucket primary and then to the carboy for finishing.  But to do this I will need to examine the space requirements and the current state of my storage areas in the small apartment I live in.

Screed

I get tired of the gloom and doom merchants.  Granted, things are not looking all that good, but enough really.  Look, we are entering a decline.  Kunstler (AKA:  The Angry White Guy) calls it the long emergency.  JMG wrote a book about it called "the Long Descent".   I tend to agree with both of them on the single point that things are going to change and folks are going to have to look at their lives and decide what has to go.

You see, that is the nut of the matter.  Something has to go.  Here in America we have always thought that you fixed something by adding shit to it.  Sometimes you fix things by taking things away.  But that very thought is anathema here in the US.  We have imbedded in our culture, our economy, and our psyches that more is always the solution. 

I think that I tend to look back.  This is probably a function of my geezerhood.  But now that I am listening to streaming music on my laptop and writing this for no one else to read, I find that I am not particularly any happier than when I listened to KCPX on the old Farnsworth radio and writing in the dogeared notebook while in the bedroom on the farm.

The quality of life is not mediated by externalities.  It is a function of contentment and simply being able to say "enough".  Here in the western world, that is a hard mental place to find.  Our entire lives are bounded by physical items and mimesis.