making the best of here

MAKING THE BEST OF HERE

Before we begin today, a short word on the book “Fleeing Vesuvius”. I don’t know where I found this mentioned at the first time or I would give that site credit, but whoever did just keep in mind I don’t blame you. This book sounded really cool. Today’s leading doom and gloom dudes yak away on Peak Oil and climate collapse and etc. and a fun a tasty time is had by all. And, come on!, the title has a lot going for it ( for those who don’t do much geology, could care less and even refuse to look this up, we’re talking about the Italian volcano whose ash buried a bunch of Roman dudes, many of who still had looks of surprise on their faces, “what, me, worry?” ). Well, all the “famous” writers were Irish tree hugger types I’d never heard of. Except the Russian doomer ( reinventing collapse ) who wrote a great piece on sailing and The Parties Over author who did an intro. And only about the first fifty pages were resource depletion doomer porn and almost the entire rest of it was crap on local currencies. Who gives three deep fried turds about local currencies!?!? How to eat is pretty important. You can barter until things stabilize and then worry about a non-national currency. What a friggin waste of paper. I got a lot of good ideas from reading the book, but I wouldn’t recommend it to the casual reader. I got your local currency hanging, bitches!
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Almost all doomer writers, plus soft-doomers who are absolutely no fun at all since they approach this whole thing as a alternate to assembling plastic models rather than jumping to the nearest rooftop and screaming in a rather feminine pitch that the sky is indeed falling and you had better get your ass under shelter, write about all the places that suck purple engorged monkey organs and only a few places are worthy of collapse residence consideration. I’ve done the same. Of course, I’m not just another fool trying to get you to move up to Idaho or western Montana, you are very welcome current said residents that I’ve kept the unemployment rate lower and your property taxes lower, so I get extra brownie points. Do you really honestly want to live next to a bunch of Yuppie Scum AFTER the collapse. My goodness, I want to kill them all, preferably by stalking their wobbly asses until their MRE fattened hides are winded and they’ve fired their Mattel Toy carbine in panic until it jammed and then I can move in for the stewpot kill. Mmmm, taste like chicken. I certainly don’t want to move next to bunch of Yuppies that survived. They’ll be cutting down all the hillside trees causing erosion so that they can stay at a comfortable 85 degrees in the winter, and then wanting to take all the corn crop and turn it into ethanol to keep their SUV’s running. Friggin mutts. And, seriously, you don’t think all the non-preppers from the nearby socialist campuses and urban centers won’t figure out their country cousins wandering about in the woods in camo aren’t holding out on the freeze dried? The sheer numbers you have to kill will deplete your ammo. Nobody wants to go to Nevada, as it doesn’t conform to the Yeoman Farmer ideal. We will lose the monopoly on prostitution ( an institution I applaud, but won’t support due to the high costs ) and gambling, but the remaining fools will be the new crazed desert barbarians.
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But, I digress. Today’s article is about making the best of where you are rather than hopelessly dreaming about a location you won’t ever see. I don’t advocate staying in collapse suicide locations, I’m just saying if you have a will ANYWHERE is survivable. I doubt if you will survive, one who doesn’t have the gonads to move now, nor the fortitude to withstand a bit of discomfort ( eeehhh! A sawdust bucket ?! Gag me, dude ). But I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt and speculate that circumstances are beyond your control and come the time you will strap back on your testicles and become a Billy Bad Ass. All areas have something going for them ( we will largely focus on post-collapse bennies rather than current ones since petroleum skews the location factor ). The northeast, crowded as hell, and with lots of nukes, is held up as the worst example of where to live. Ah, but what makes it bad also makes it good for you. The NE has plenty of hydro-power, small scale, and wood. There will be multitudes of sheeple to enslave to clear overgrown former farms, clear the forests ( your first objective, warlord wise, is to secure the forests and kill any unauthorized wood cutting. They must freeze in the dark so you may fuel your empire ), salvage buildings, etc. If you are ruthless and cunning, there is lots of fodder to use here.
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The South will have racial problems and malaria, along with flooding from inoperable levees etc. In true Carpetbagger style you can move in, play the factions against each other, let the weak die from subtropical diseases and then re-impose sharecropping to take advantage of long idled farmland ( the wait should have restored a lot of once productive land ). And once things normalize, you can re-introduce tourism for the frozen Northern rich. Moving to the Southwest, the problems multiply. There is a serious lack of water ( the same with Nevada, but we mostly avoided populating the dryer places- most cities here are near natural bodies of water, unlike Arizona and southern California and such which rely on wells ), a serious resentment from Mexicans that we stole their land fair and square ( which they are welcome to, in my opinion- after living five years closer to the equator in Florida, I got serious sunburn from walking under thirty minutes out in the Arizona sun, hence, no place for white boys ) a lack of much of anything other than ore mining. But if you want to go Apache, you can rule this scorched craphole. Hell, I love the desert ( of course, high desert is much different than low desert ) and this one is not a place I’d want to stay. If you live in a city, nearly any one will do, if you avoid becoming a serf, you will have a lifetime of resource mining to make you rich.
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My basic point is that if you become a fearless warlord, you can rule and prosper in any undesirable location. Or, if that just doesn’t suit you, staying behind the throne can also work ( most valuable knowledge set would be fabricating gunpowder and explosives [ ammo cases an added bonus ] from raw materials ). If you insist on staying in an undesirable location, it will be impossible for you to NOT be enslaved. You become the eater, or get eaten. The more timid can move to Survivalist Country and live off supplies long enough to evolve into a more ruthless hunter over time ( or, engage in trade so you can hire others to protect you ).

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My e-mail is jimd303@netzero.com
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