Dropping the Ball

Dropping out of college had seemed logical at the time.

The cult of my youth lost a game of "20 Questions." My parents' city mouse/country mouse marriage failed, so true love was a fairy tale.

My milk-toast middle class upbringing taught me many life lessons: Owning nice stuff did not make you a nice person. Money could buy happiness but just as often didn't. Modern “civilization” was a thin fabricated veneer over animal humanity. The “education system” taught submission.

Sometimes people worked hard and stayed poor. Most talked themselves into liking whatever they ended up doing with life. Poor, middle class, either way you had to make your own fun like the rest of the world.

All school felt like prison to me. A desk job and a mortgage sounded like signing up for treadmill death before life had even begun. Was that all that humans were good for?

So with nothing but the ground beneath my feet, I walked away from my comfortable life, to discover what, if anything, was important. And I began working.

I didn’t mind hard labor, it was like getting paid to “work out.” Love, or the instinct to breed, seemed important; I fathered four sons and worked endlessly to keep the tribe solvent. They thrived, thanks to nepotism; my second father-in-law was shop foreman at a cement mine, where I found a niche.

Thirty years labor now and my body breaking down. Seduced by the system, I have worked too many hours for the same fake betterment I’d abandoned years ago. Like a washed-up athlete, I struggle on, and still wonder sometimes: for what?

I've found nothing of any real worth besides my little family, so I work to further my wife’s contentment, and my sons’ success, whatever that means. Enlightened self-interest: their joy brings me joy somehow.

There is no master plan, no final destination. My road is mine alone. I don't know nor care what motivates others, it doesn't matter. One generation begets the next; this is mankind’s only immortality.

I have tried to convince my sons that higher education might keep them from working themselves to death. Best to fight the beast from the inside--in comfort. (More animal thinking, preferring maximum survival margins.) Unsurprisingly they also found academia too confining and regimented, and dropped out one by one. They wanted simply to live life, no matter how “poor.” To be happy with music, conversation, food, the outdoors, love making and/or sex, games, dancing, friendly voices, and general revelry. The stuff you can’t always buy and sell.

I mourned their stubborn insistence on going their own way, their future joint pain and heart ache. But the culture of owning crap is diseased. Their rejection of it is a triumph, they are already successful.

A revolutionary act: to exit the rotting structure and step into the open air, to seek authentic life and simple joy. The young man who had done the same 30 years ago decided to be proud of them, no matter how rough the roads they picked.

"Dear God, My Power's Disconnected!"

What To Do, What Not To Do, What Not To Not Do,

Why, and Why Not, In No Particular Order.

Never Pay Another Electric Bill--Ever!

Is that you crying out, weeping uncontrollably? Unpaid bill cut you from the gigawatt grid? Congratulations! Never pay the voltage-vending vultures again! Ever.

A massive human majority has lived without one microvolt, millliamp, or megawatt meandering through their mud hut, unless angry gods struck it with lightning. You easily can too.

Without billions of electrons screaming through your modern digs, your soul begins to merge with the Ancient Ones’. At night, lights out, the appliances quietly dead, you do what folks did in the dark nights of eons past: lie pleasantly, thinking your own thoughts until you fall asleep. (If roommates are twitching and babbling due to Electronics Withdrawal, bring back Bedtime Stories.)

The silence is bliss. No beeping microwave oven! (Why the five shrieking beeps when zapped? After the first beep the rest fire impotent beeping rage, OK, I get it, you’re done, shut the beep up!) No consciousness-shredding blenders or grinders, no vacuum whine, no televised liars loudly scrapping for the last pennies of the poorest. No butt-rock or fake country pop radio, no frightening refrigerator groans. What Heaven Sounds Like: Nothing.

Why wait for the local Global Fornication outlet to pull your plug? Pull it yourself! Life without electricity is free, and will save you exactly 100% of your electric bill. Here’s how:

1. Forget the ‘fridge/freezer. If anything, the refrigerators of the pampered United States contain out-of-date condiments, left-overs of unknown provenance, wilting/rotting vegetables, industrially produced farm animal juices and chunks, and vacuum sealed beverages with little or no nutritional content. Eat or toss. Condiments are for psuedo-aristocratic blow-hards; leftovers should go to the neighbors, the dog, or the neighbors dog; always eat vegetables immediately; drink only human milk (preferably from the breast); better to eat your neighbor's fattened dog than some anonymous corn-fed beast; and warm drinks get you just as drunk or sugar-buzzed as cold.

   Freezers take questionably processed food and add ice crystals to make it taste worse. Ice dilutes drinks. Unplug and hose it out, make it a toolbox or storage shed or vanity. You can live on beef jerky, peanut butter, bread, fruits, vegetables, beans, and rice.

2. Never vacuum the floor again. Sweep it, no matter what kind. It will still be cleaner than old school mud, straw, and dung floors.

3. Blenders, food processors, and mixers can be replaced with knives and some rocks. Be creative, and quit being so picky about everything.

4. Eliminate the electric oven. Most of your new diet will be raw, for the rest get a little gas stove, or a barbecue grill. Open a few windows if you do this indoors, or you will die. Or, go ahead and die, carbon monoxide poisoning is painless and leaves a fairly clean corpse; electricity becomes, properly, meaningless.

5. In cold weather wear all your clothes at the same time, in hot take ‘em off. Use that stove again if it’s freeze-to-death cold, though the latter is more “energy conscious.” Or move south, sit in the shade, and drink lots of liquids, naked.

6. All electronic amusement devices can be replaced by story telling. Or “conversation,” an ancient inter-human data transfer ritual. The electronically addicted will quit complaining in a generation or two.

7. Cell phone users: smash it with a hammer. Be grateful that none of those jerks can call you any more. Did you really want to be available to everyone on the planet? And who is so important that you must call them constantly? Plan ahead for once. Visit friends instead of yelling into a doo-dad at them. Your lazy kids can walk home from their boring school activities instead of calling for a ride. Or make ‘em stay home and read and do homework and clean the kitchen, like in the just-as-bad old days.

It has been said that “It is better to light a candle than to curse the darkness.” But most work must stop if it’s dark, every lover is beautiful in the dark, and Lily White’s Birthday Party (sleep) is always better in the dark. So instead, “It is better to be grateful for the darkness, and go to bed.” No power? No problem!

Brown and Pink Thinking

The Cheap Dude is a complete racist. That is, he hates all ‘races.’ The human race is the only race, and mostly ignorant, childish, and arrogant. We are all God’s mongrels.

Divisions in the world by race are bogus. ‘Race’ is a creation of governments and societies to keep certain groups in a lower class status. Somebody has to do the grunt work: the desperate, the conquered, the robbed, the stolen. Keep them hungry and frightened, they’ll do as they are told, dirt cheap.

The old Book good Christian folk pretend to believe, states that mankind is one race. God “…hath made of one blood all nations of men….” Acts 17:26. This is not ambivalent, wishy-washy, equivocal, nor “taken out of context.”

Science has proved beyond question that essential human DNA is exactly the same among all humans, from aborigine hunter/gatherers (clearly superior culture, by the way,) to bank Owners with their golden toilet seats. No ‘race’ can be superior to another ‘race’ because there is no such thing in human genetic reality.

If “The Bible” and “Science” agree on something, it is likely as correct as any knowledge can be. Hate (or superiority) based on “racial characteristics” indicates profound intentional stupidity. Haters “reap what they sow,” that is, blind irrational hate.

Good and bad, dumb and smart, high and low, every ‘race’ contains every kind of person. ‘Racial’ divisions keep the Owners’ power safe. If we in the trenches are busy hating each other, we will never figure out who really deserves our hate, nor act accordingly.

Cheap Dude was raised in a mostly kind-hearted cult, with one little flaw: it was openly institutionally racist. His adult life was mostly spent in small towns, full of kind, hard-working souls, many of whom were also happy racists. There were no ‘people of color’ in town to know, let alone hate, but “My daddy hated niggers, so do I.” This is neither rational nor righteous.

So Cheap Dude became a complete racist. He especially hates rich folks who have plenty but help no one. Who whine about the most recent immigrants, and who want 500 years of slavery, theft, and murder to disappear with a patriotic wink. He has known many such folk.

Every person on the planet wants two main things for self and loved ones: A warm dry safe place to live, and enough food to feel well. We can try to make this happen for everyone, or not.

Be it hereby decreed: A conscious step in the evolution of our species, by deciding, as a planet, to play nice no matter the melanin. Just say om. Let the War Salesmen wait in the food stamp line for once.

Dumpster Living At Its Finest

No Fees, No Deposit, Move In Today!

Trash dumpsters are sturdy shelter in a pinch. Dirty, perhaps, but what of that then?

Wash your face, act respectable, and walk to a part of town where buildings are lived-in and fixed, and trash is regularly collected and hauled off. Behind the ritziest retailers are the ritziest dumpsters. Uptown they call ‘em “waste receptacles.” Wasted humanity can do worse.

Good choice. Clean and landscaped.

Furniture stores throw out bed-sized cardboard, plastic sheeting, and old furniture. Come back after hours, climb in, wrap up, and stretch out on a busted couch.

Offices and their suppliers toss reams of shredded paper, a good nest for humans or rats seeking snack and warm sleep. Be careful of clothing stores’ pointy racks and hangers. Laundries, barbershops, the various crap vendors, check each one, and live wherever smells sweetest.

Don't get recycled just yet.

Grocery and restaurant trash-pods may reek of rancid vomit, but free food is regularly provided. Beware broken glass, grease, rottenness, birds, bugs, and other mammals. Treat the late night staff well, many are just a paycheck or two away from being your bin-buddy.

Beware of the exclusive cardboard facilities! Sometimes they are crushed and bundled for recycling. If you are mashed in with a batch, it is worthless for recycling, and your fault. Just take some of the nicer pieces and move on.

Upscale recycling facilities with a view.

Now that Depression Too has settled in, all the huge construction dumpsters are lying in empty rows in the industrial neighborhood. Not too stinky, and, with enough help, flipped sideways and ready for immediate move-in. Can’t burn down a solid steel shanty-town!

Always be certain which day is trash day, obviously. Haul-truck hydraulics mash meat and bone with the rest. Don’t do society any favors, stick around and be a bother.

Turn these on their side for easier access. Or cut the fence and try the trailers.

Perhaps as our Empire crumbles, a few festering U. S. metropolitan areas can join the ranks of the world’s great cities, where the poorest poor squat and scavenge at the edges of garbage mountains. Keep all of civilization’s waste in one place, preferably away from the delicate senses of the rich.

Such home-grown dump slums will bloom someday, our garbage is high grade! Why let it all go to waste? The future armies of the poor must live somewhere. Be a pioneer, hitch a ride on the trash truck. Think of it as getting in early on the next “boom.”

%$#@!

Bomb the Children

Munchies Not Murder

Paying taxes would be less painful if they went to a better cause.

The media, bought by and speaking for the rich, insists on cuts to our meager social welfare net. People who can’t afford food and medicine have no political power. This same media asserts, by its assent, that continual war spending is wise and unquestioned. The rich American warlords “contribute to election campaigns” (bribe) for political influence, to keep the blood flowing.

Feeding the hungry and healing the sick are noble goals for every society, “religious” or not. A great nation should take care of its poor, widows, orphans, sick, and disabled, always and without question or censure.

On the other hand, what a complete waste of money to bomb, torture, and murder people in far away countries for no reason. No religion’s holy book suggests blessing the War Salesmen.

In general, it is much nicer to feed people than to kill them. Maybe even more “righteous”.

So go ahead, peace-loving nations. Spend tax money on policemen and firemen, libraries and colleges, food and medicine. Not on bombs, planes, ships, and death. There is helpful stuff for our soldiers to do right here. Maybe the engineers of destruction could build something useful.

Money for munchies and medicine, not murder and mayhem!

Beat the Children

A bunch of States want to make food stamp recipients pass a drug screening. The Drug Testing Industry is delighted; a big chunk of the food stamp budget potentially devoted to collecting, shipping, and analyzing wee-wee. Lawyers too, for the flood of challenged results. 30 million drug screens (monthly? yearly?) will be a whole new industry in itself.

Brilliant. The best part is the kids meal deal. Your folks use drugs, little Susie, so now you can’t have anything to eat. That’s family friendly. Sniff this white powder, sweetie, you'll feel better.

Most drug users can quit any time for job and probation wee-wee “screening.” If not, they find a way to cheat the system, which are many. Or switch to good old alcohol, the culturally approved and most vicious killer of all. So, mostly, this is a bonus for the testers, and the politicians scoring points on the backs of the poor.

To whatever extent drug testing “weeds" out the “druggies," the #Occupy movement may be the winner. Hungry mobs are angry mobs, to quote Marley’s ghost.

No one in this land of plenty should ever go hungry. A little bread for the poorest, for children and old folks and disabled. Even for healthy adults, during times of true unemployment. The Good Samaritan did not ask for a pre-assistance urine sample.

Food stamps are one of the few good things our beloved bureaucracy bestows on Average Man. Leave them alone you greedy self-righteous buggers. So what if a few stoners get fed--in fact, give ‘em a few bucks extra, they’ve got the munchies.