tools or toys

TOOLS OR TOYS


I know most of you want your cake and eat it too. You want your climate controlled SUV, but you also want to get rid of those hanging cellulite stalactites growing underneath your engorged buttocks. You want to stop off at The Colonel’s for a bucket on your way to the heart doctor. You want to feel secure about your energy future as you turn up the thermostat on the heater that burns Saudi oil. Alas, life isn’t about getting without giving. If you want out of debt with cash to burn after each payday, you can’t drive to your McMansion in your new car, stopping to fill up and charging your purchase ( dragging your short of breath blubber to the Slim Jim and Twinkie aisle ). And, if you want to prepare on a budget for the big obvious cliff fall just ahead of us, you MUST do away with all the unnecessary toys. I’ll give you a primary example, which still shames me to this day five years later.

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What used to be called the Volcano Stove, now I think the Zip Stove. This is a toy, not a tool. A tool is the Dakota Hole, a hole straight down into the ground with an adjoining slanted hole that connects to the bottom. You put a couple of rocks around the straight hole, place your pot or pan on that, then feed wood into the slanting hole. For indoor use, you use bricks or adobe or even tin cans, forming a L shape. The small horizontal tube feeds the wood, the vertical tube holds the pot on top. If you want a supposedly correct engineered shape that does the same thing, but available commercially, a Foldable Pocket Cooker. That stove straddles the line between toy and tool, but at least it is only $12. The Volcano Stove cost $100 after you include a wind shield and a few back-up fan motors. This is really no more than a toy. It should last me my entire post-apocalypse life span and uses solar recharged batteries. But it was never truly necessary. It was a Yuppie Scum Survival Toy. The shame burns my soul like sulfuric acid. When a product that will either never break or is replaceable by low tech is acquired this is a tool. All others are toys. That chainsaw might be priceless for felling trees for refugee roadblocks, putting in ten years of heating wood in one week after the Forrest Service stops enforcing cutting permits as their headquarters is nuked, or whatever, but you had better have manual saws in backstop because chainsaws won’t last too long into the collapse ( we set aside the danger and noise signature issues for now ). One is a long term tool and the other a short sighted Oil Age toy ( I’m not disputing them as tools NOW, but they are not tools long term ). A $1200 composting toilet verses a $20 sawdust bucket also comes to mind.

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Your car is definitely a toy. I understand that you can’t procure a mate without one ( except perhaps a hairy armpitted eco-freak which might not be all bad if she knows which herbs mute pain, which mushrooms get you high, and she’s memorized the Kuma Satra ). And getting to a job is difficult. But imagine yourself stuck with one, still owing on it, and gas is $15 a gallon, if available. Then it reverts to a toy for the rich. Everything epitomized by a Yuppie lifestyle is a toy. You must get into the habit of asking yourself what the most affordable, best designed, and won’t be shut down with the grid or sputter to a stop without oil. It is just like thinking you can throw a switch and go from Yuppie to Frugal, from electric powered to manual, from supermarket to full calorie garden immediately. All skill sets require practice. And time to practice. Learning how to make do with the simplest tool also needs practice. You can’t go from car to bike overnight. You need to build your muscles, learn how to dress for the weather, how to balance a load, etc. I’m not saying the needed skills are hard, just that it takes practice to make them as easy as possible, while also saving you time and money. Any fool can spend away a problem. It takes practice to do it cheaper and easier.

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On another topic, there seems to be recent rumblings about me blathering off-topic. Have you ever known me to just throw out a life lesson and leave? Of course not. I throw in a personal example, season it with hateful bile, then present you with some food for thought. Most survival writers professionally spout out measured allowable toxic doses of radioactive fallout. I would have to add a bit about the nuclear power industry, the theory that the US stole all the science from the Nazi’s, go on about the 1950’s friendly fallout fiasco, make a racially insensitive remark about slavs or Japanese and then give you some vaguely recollected figures as far as doses went. I ask you, who was more interesting? If I go on about the peaceful chirping of birds and my home brewed coffee experiments, they too have a purpose. I am highlighting how easy and rewarding living in a tin box on junk land is. How there is no need for expensive toys. Every damn thing I splash on a computer screen is pertinent. You just need to pay attention. And, what about irrelevant Nazi technology musings, you ask. Narrow minded specialists are great up to a certain point. Then, they miss something from another field that is quite pertinent. I think a generalist is desired, and different thinking is beneficial. Don’t close your mind, a one way system builds up toxins.

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Last but not least, the Wednesday Urban Survival is talking about projected wheat crop failures of something like 70% if memory serves me right. Spring wheat, anyway. Following too much drought, now it is too wet. Oh, Jim, please don’t be so negative. Don’t think it all means The End. Fine, ignore it. When you can’t buy wheat, don’t blame me.

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My e-mail is jimd303@netzero.com
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