After I got back from the last trip, my Starlink sputtered and died. It’s about a year old. They diagnosed it remotely and said I’d need a new router. They’d be sending one for free, and even crediting me a month for lost service, but it would take a while to ship.

I switched over to my phone hotspot and went on as usual. A couple days ago I checked the usage on it and I was down to about eight gigs for the month. I normally use about three gigs a day, and that’s mostly watching videos, so to ration, I stopped watching videos, and sought out audio podcasts instead.

The best thing I found was this:

B&G Podcast 15: BAGR Roundtable Discussion

A half dozen of the leading luminaries in what is called variously green anarchy, primal anarchy, or anarcho-primitivism, which describes my political religion in a label about as well as anything can.

It sort of amazed me how un-pessimistic these people were; I almost found myself objecting at the sentiment that things could still change in time, maybe–an outside shot I guess. I still do object. But the simple fact that smart people who have thought a lot more deeply about the matter for a lot longer than I have could still have hope … well, it was secretly, privately heartwarming.

I guess their point is not so much that we might avert the final disaster and go on, but that … there is no other or better way to live in any case.

Something like that.

And, although these people were gathered to discuss a philosophy, they seemed remarkably allergic to philosophy writ large.

What matters is not what we think, but what we do. Out there in the real world, in its still theoretically wild pockets.

Fuck Facebook of course. But even … fuck Starlink too.

Real life is not what happens on our little techno-boxes.

It’s not even what we write, though they all are writers too.

It’s what happens when we try to resist being domesticated. What happens in environmental terms, and economic ones too.

But not about how much money we make. Economics in the original sense; how we live, how we keep house, or if we keep house.

What happens when we try to throw off the chains that bind us, have always bound us, the chains we can barely even see or believe exist.

We’re gutshot. There’s a hole in you. There’s a hole in me.

It was engineered into us, by the civilized, and by civilization itself.

What do you try to stuff it with, and what goes into your soup?

These are the important questions, but the civilized would prefer we laugh at them instead, and get back on our hamster wheels.

***

I’ve been stuffing mine with a radical decluttering.

That storage locker, the one I emptied out for money a few weeks ago, is now about two-thirds full again, but with shit that used to be cluttering up this oikos, my ranchita, my house.

It’s been work, but so long overdue, and satisfying.

As the shit drained away, the casa felt like there was twice as much autumnal air in it, and I breathed.

As space opened up, there was space to sort and junk more; an upwardly spiraling vortex of good started to emerge.

There is still a lot of shit.

But I have it by the scruff at last.

Mainly I need to finish off the room that is half kitchen and will be half roastery, and finish of the lab or office I’m sitting in right now. Those are the big jobs. There are little ones too, bed, bath, and beyond. Closets. Tools of a dozen kinds.

The tide flows out, and yet the boats rise. Magical.

I laid down a fresh crop of rugs.

I haven’t been writing or filming or doing one damn thing, not even the easy thing, about making money, but I feel surprisingly little guilt about it.

I’m drinking less coffee and more bone broth in the cool evenings which will soon become cold ones.

It’s been easy to get to sleep, and get back to sleep if I choose to after waking and pissing.

I live as these cats around me live, in the moment primarily, with manic and depressive interludes that also flow. I make sure they have food, and water, and whatever love they individually require.

I am blessed with the care of one lone correspondent, which is enough.

I wake to sleep and take my waking slow.

I learn by going where I have to go.