It’s no fun being an Uber Doomer, so I’m not. Most of the uber types clotting the internet doom sites appear to be living in apartments in populated places. Maybe a couple are out in the sticks on a slow ass dial up connection – the Nostradaemuses from the Outside. I’m sure a fair share are like me – zipping around on high speed DSL basicly fucking off while the wife is at work bringing in the Fed Res Notes, hehehe. But all doomers have pet theories, and I frankly am getting tired of anything that has to do with a fast crash apocalyptia.
The World As We Know It can be summed up as a world where for all practical purposes there is unlimited electricity and transportation. Flip the switch, lights come on, the clothes get dry, and the well pumps water. The bathroom space heater works on demand. Having lived without a drivers license for a ten year block (bad boy) I can tell you that a person with a car is absolutely free to do as he pleases anywhere in this country. So The End Of TWAWKI will be the day that the power is off and paper bags are on all the gas pumps. That’s the definition of collapse. I could give a rat’s ass whether it comes from above or below or from domestic political stupidity or EMP bursts courtesy of X Nation.
How does that translate to reality in my world? Well, the wife teaches at a local college. She has been in her department longer than anyone else so as long as the college has a hundred students a year signing up for English classes we can pay the electric bill. At 3 bucks a gallon the commute costs 18 bucks a week. Oil at 200 a barrel (worst doom stat I have heard) makes it 75 a week – sucks, but it is doable. Reality is that real unemployment would have to approach 25% before the community colleges shut down. When that happens the whole thing is so bazzoo that the mortgage industry shuts down, debt becomes uncollectable from the shear volume and numbers of folks gone belly up. I don’t buy the doom speak that says our gov’t is secret arranging a coordinated and engineered kill off of 2/3rds of the population. The food trucks will roll. The power may be out or unreliable beyond the most populated areas but that won’t bother me. Got water from a spring, a hand washing machine, and we can heat and cook with wood.
Now let’s Doom the fuel situation. Oil field depletion is a fact, jack. Gawar is in decline, the North Sea is crashing, Cantrell is toast. Oil sands ain’t gonna do diddly. !0% reduction of production a year for five years – hell, let’s fuck this baby up and say the Strait of Hormuz gets blockaded and we have an immediate 20% cut in the worlds supply. Gas is ten bucks a gallon, drive less, pay more, or cancel your subscription to Netflix. Don’t buy the wide screen for the idiot box in the third bedroom. And I’m sorry to say it, folks, but it’s really that simple. No buts. You be the fool with the multiple hour commute? Walk the closest bus route from your house and drop job apps at every business on the line. Oh, prosperous American, it might make more sense to sack groceries at the A&P than spend big money gas in the big money car to the big money job, y’know… Do your own math.
I’m not really a doomer as much as I am a cynical sumbitch. I go by a suburban tract deal and see miles of shadow box fence to keep in their stupid yappy dog and think about what kind of barn all that lumber would make. Y’know, like something actually useful? Thousands of yards of concrete going into an offramp to nowhere? Huge engineering projects to drain a mucky place where birds hang out so’s that another strip mall for soon to be out of business dress shops, recruitment centers, and taxpreparers can go up? A dog grooming parlor fer cryin’ out loud. Everybody has their own personal category of “Fug ’em”. Mine is the patrons of these icons of affluence. Pink fucking poodles…
I’m looking at our nice carpet on the floor. That was the wife’s main demand when we bought this place – new carpet. I put down some linoleum in the kitchen and bathroom. I can sweep those floors, but the carpet is gonna look like shit when the vacuume cleaner won’t run. I think about the places I have “lived” in for the majority of my life and feel like I am in some kind of Disneyland here. Let’s see, a shell of a school bus in the woods. a chicken coop, a 15 foot travel trailer (for years), various construction sites – live for free while refurbishing a gut and strip job, the old Sears van (aqua marine with a 3 foot peace sign on it), a garage, a tarped pole stucture waaaay off in the woods, and various couches and crannies during my beach bum years. I don’t give a shit what happens to some wastewater engineer’s domestic bliss when the city lets him go – I shit in a bucket and make compost. The building inspectors, zoning and planning commissars, department of redundancy department lackies, traffic engineers, tax accountants, politicians, inspectors, detectors and home wreckers can all go to hell in a handcart for all I care. And the “elites” can all live happily in their Bilderberg compounds far far away from my worthless side hill dirt patch.
The wife was looking at a teacher’s employment opportunity listing the other day. Found a job offer for double her salary at some community college in a Chicago suburb. Took her all of two seconds to stop reading. We could do just fine here on a quikie mart paycheck. Hell, I could mow lawns in the summer and pay the bills for the year. I must say that I am incapable of fathoming a 1600 dollar apartment, parking structure fees, a 100K+ employment contract, and his and her jet skies. But what really stumps me is a couple with a joint income of a couple a hundred thousand having financial difficulties? These are the folks paraded about on the “economic hardship” news articles in the MSM. Fug ’em. If they spent a year camping out in Mom’s garage they might get a better idea of what to do with that 200K income. But they won’t do it voluntarily. They will continue to wreck economic havoc at all levels of the spectrum, and wind up camping in the garage anyway.
Susie Suburbia and her cleaning lady will all suffer the same fate. Guys like me who live upside down from the norm and sideways off the food chain are immune to such fate. When the power goes out and there are paper bags on all the gas pumps the rich will fire up their generators and poor slobs like me will roast varmint on the wood stove. I won’t be surfing up the Drudge Report to know how godawfull it is out there in Plasticland.
comrade simba 