old habits

OLD HABITS


Well, only three weeks to go until you can rent “The Road” at RedBox for a measly buck. Plus tax, since your local government is facing the hideous prospect of having to survive without three times the superficial staff levels of yore. You can help out your buddies at the state and local level by buying and renting more crap. The ones responsible for ensuring your eat out meal costs double due to needless regulations and safety features ( one of the Elko Basque restaurants just tore up their front sidewalk, dozens of workers and a mess of heavy equipment, to install wheelchair ramps- I sure as hell won’t eat there since I’ll be paying for that one out of one thousand gimpy bastard customer ). I don’t know why this movie was treated as such a red headed step child. You couldn’t find it at any theatre, then it takes six months to get on DVD ( Avatar was out in, what, fifty days? ) and then it was darn hard to find out that release date ( May 25th ). The official web site didn’t even have it listed. Why did they even bother making the thing? I’ll bet if it was a piece of crap European faggot movie it would have gotten awards and been advertised five times every prime time TV show and had day time talk shows and NPR hawking it.

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We are all living in the forest of petroleum, and it is damn hard to see the individual trees. Look at the extreme difficulty everyone has in identifying how to do anything without petroleum inputs. The tendency to assume the institutions that were spawned in response to a surplus of oil will survive after it is all gone ( we can all agree that we have already passed Peak AFFORDABLE Oil, the only question remaining is if the global inventory is now shrinking and how quickly it will run down ). The glib answer to the reduction of oil question that we will all grow organic and live close to the field which ignores our present living arrangements of city sprawl thousands of miles away from the primary crop regions ( obviously some local areas are nicely situated, but odds are you are part of the urban mass far away rather than a lucky local ). This makes it a bit hard to conceptualize life after the oil. Yes, obviously we will return to being peasants in a new Dark Ages, but aside from knowing a mud hut is in our future, have you given any thought to the minute details of daily life? More importantly, have you thought about why the old habits were formed in the first place? I’ve struggled with the problem and have no more answers than you. I do have a few insights, not because I’m too smart but because I’ve stumbled on them through experience.

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For instance, spring cleaning. Have you thought about how that tradition started? Next winter, turn off your central air and only heat with the sun or with wood you can gather by hand without motorized assistance ( odds are you’ll only find enough to cook with rather than heating the whole house ). You will usually only keep it under sixty inside, and that is with decent insulation. It is too cold for cleaning. On a few nice sunny winter days you can try to catch up on this or that but odds are you’ll be waiting until spring for a thorough cleaning. It wasn’t because housewives waiting for spring because they were so anal about dirt that they arbitrarily picked a seasonal date to clean extra, it was because they had to clean up after a season of no to spotty cleaning. With wet hands and an inside temperature of 55, you give up the idea of cleaning PDQ. On that note, let’s ask a somewhat related question. Why in the hell could you think females were exploited and mistreated in the bad old times? They were in the kitchen all day. The only warm part of the house because wood was expensive or scarce ( in Europe, not in the colonies ) so only cooking was done ). The husband had to go outside and look after livestock and run off wolves or whatever. Those bitches had it made sweet.

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Bathing habits. Now, obviously, medieval folk were disgusting and foul pigs, throwing offal into the streets and bathing once a year if ever. And, yes, bathing habits improved afterPasteur proved bathing water won’t kill you. Yet, that occurred about the same time that coal came into use. It isn’t a coincidence. Americans had plentiful fuel and only bathed once a week so it isn’t a perfect correlation. Habit from Europe played a part. But surely lack of water heating fuel had something to do with bathing habits. We could on about wardrobe, such as how a hat ( or wig, perhaps? ) was necessary to retain body heat and clocks made a portable coat ( open in the day when it was warmer, a much better solution than the homeless wearing a down coat in eighty degree heat so they will be warm that cold night ). How refrigeration will be largely unnecessary once fruits and vegetables are out of reach as is dairy or meat. Keep that in mind before you buy a new fridge. The real difficulty of any transportation without oil accounting for the lifelong rooting to one spot or the cities always being built at the water transport. The point here is that old habits are a good tool to study, as they were centuries of solutions without surplus energy to real problems. That study would still leave open a lot of questions such as why organic/French Intensive practices didn’t arrive until recently. You would think the real likelihood of starvation yearly might encourage the adaptation of promising new techniques. Anyway, hopefully food for thought.

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