PP #33: Darkness Descending
Project: Pioneer #33, May 8, 2024 Wednesday 12pm
This post is a little late, as Giavana, Pia and I took a quick two-day trip to a big city to work on our escape route (dual citizenship, 2nd passports), as time is a wastin’, pioneer friends! We’re covering our bases, as living in Trumpistan isn’t an option for us. More on that trip, our observations, and other updates below!
Project: Pioneer is the live weekly reality journal of a couple and their small dog as they leave their ‘normal’ life in a luxury apartment for a new semi-off grid life in a small recreational vehicle. We cover prepping, politics, spirituality, afterlife, RV life, and personal finance. Most posts are free, more personal posts are to reward our loyal paid subscribers. Audio podcast at Substack, Apple, and Spotify)
In this journal post:
Updates: Blackout
The Descending Darkness (Politics)
You Are What You Eat (Health)
What’s Next?
Updates: Blackout
We thought we had a power outage. After stepping through the normal troubleshooting steps (ask the neighbors if they’re out also, checking breakers, fuses, connections, GFI, cord connections) I was stumped. We had to resort to generator power while trying to figure it out, which was good, since we hadn’t had to use the generator (luckily! surprisingly!) all winter.
If you pull an RV up to a campsite and just plug your 30amp or 50amp power cord into the plug on the pole, you’re playing with fire. Campgrounds have notoriously bad power grids. If there’s a sag, surge, or spike, either due to bad equipment, lightning strike, or other cause, you could fry your entire rig, or possibly burn to the ground.
So, like many wise and prepared RVers, we use a power management system (PMS). It’s a unit that plugs into the campground electric source and monitors the voltage, amperage, and other factors, controlling current downstream to your rig. If anything swings out of the safe zone, it cuts power to your RV to protect it. The cutoff threshold is 134 volts, but our PMS was reading 127. It’s still above the normal range of 115-120 for AC power, but not unsafely above. I couldn’t understand why it was shutting off on us. I was sure it was the cause, since bypassing it allowed power to flow to White House.
A quick call to the company’s tech support line confirmed the PMS was misbehaving and should be replaced. I asked about a warranty, and they said it should be covered, until I told them we weren’t the original owners, it came with the RV when we bought it used. It took some talking to get them to cut me a break and do the warranty replacement. Until then, we’re basically unprotected, which makes me very nervous. Hopefully no thunderstorms until it arrives!
Other than that adventure, here in Pioneer-land, we’re now in a groove. Weekdays are quiet (so far!) as the weekenders are back home. Starting on Thursday, they begin to roll back in, and that’s kind of nice. It feels like the weekend starting early. The excitement builds to a crescendo through Friday and Saturday, then dies out on Sunday as most everyone packs to head home. This past weekend, it rained non-stop so things were quiet.
We take walks through the different areas of this sprawling campground, taking note of the different sites we might prefer if we’re here next year. Some of the sites have small testament signage to Trump, but surprisingly not many. Even the denser cult members seem to be wising up. Giavana likes being in the belly of the beast. She makes the good point that it might be the safest place to be should they go on the warpath if/when (hopefully) he loses in November, or goes (rightfully) to jail.
People are friendly, and helpful, for the most part. We’re in a regular groove now as our routines have adapted to the new site we’re in. It’s very nice having the awning out for shade (when the sun does appear!) and the fireplace for its therapeutic benefit. We haven’t yet taken part in any of the recreation activities or used the game room, but that will come with time.
The Descending Darkness (Politics)
We’ve been noticing lately that pretty much every where we go, people seem over-stressed. It’s across all age groups. We all know what the kids have been through with the COVID years. It was worse on them than probably any other group. There seems to be a kind of PTSD that’s festering below the surface, roiling in the deep, in all of us. It’s not surprising, because those were incredibly stressful times. We were all being pitted and divided against one another before COVID, and the pandemic only made it worse. It still festers, aggravated more as we near elections in November.
In the big city these past two days, darkness seemed to hang over everyone like a low-lying heavy quilted Amish blanket of fog. Everyone walking, cramped together, faces in their phones, expressionless automatons stumbling through another day. The constant onslaught of sirens, garbage/urine stench, pushing them forward. I’ve lived near and spent lots of time in cities all around the country in my life, there’s always some of this, as it’s a rough life. But I’ve never seen it this comprehensively bad.
We don’t see it as much here in our woodland Pioneer enclave. By the time folks roll in here, they’re pretty damn happy to be away from the rat race and hamster wheel of their real life. It’s escapism. So, they’re busy getting hammered or just relaxing and having fun. That part is understandable as well. However, in talking to some of them, or overhearing their conversations, you hear this uneasy dance, people trying to feel each other out as to what side of the divisive societal environment they’re on. It’s stressful, and can get ugly quickly if there’s a mismatch. That’s why Giavana and I play our role as uninformed undercover double-agents here in the belly of the beast.
The descending darkness feels driven by the fact that half our leadership is openly fawning over our normal enemies (dictators, autocrats, fascists, communists) and broaching the idea that maybe life like that won’t be so bad for us. It’s the usual playbook followed by those folks throughout history—vote for me, give me complete power, and I’ll set everything up just as you’d like it. We’ll get rid of those nasty immigrants, and anyone who doesn’t look/act/dress/love/worship just like we do. It’ll be wonderful. Except, it never turns out that way. It only leads to misery for all but the people at the very, very tip-top.
I think deep down, we know this is true, even those in denial. Many people likely feel powerless, it’s a black tide coming and nothing will stop it. This theme is prevalent in some of our best literature through the ages, because it’s based on actual history. Think about the Lord of the Rings, The Hobbit, The Wheel of Time. The evil powers are descending on the happy villager smurfs, and only a hero can save them. Sauron, The Dark Lord, is coming from Mount Doom in Mordor with his army of Orc mutants. Be that hero, it’s not too late. Vote, organize, resist!
On our city trip, we had a discussion with a Canadian citizen over dinner. She said the same thing is happening in her country. A Trump-clone challenger from the far right is polling ahead of Trudeau. This is how it happens—one big domino (the USA, most powerful country in the world) falls, and the rest is piece of cake. The evil dream that failed in WWI and WWII finally achieved—the planet carved into a neat set of cooperative dictatorships, forever.
It’s hard to understand why folks just don’t remember what made our country great in the first place—taking in those that other countries didn’t want, or who felt they had a better future here, and were willing to work hard for it. I suppose many of the folks behind this movement may not have gotten that far in school, so that might explain it. You see it every time you watch that Jan 6 footage, that day when American lost its innocence, it’s reputation as the pride of the world, the only country that has always had a peaceful transition of power. Our exceptionalism is lost. We are unraveling. We were in the 60s as well, and managed to recover. Hopefully, we will again.
You Are What You Eat (Health)
That stress is just one ingredient in the burbling stew of our restless society. Technology seems to have grown to a point where we’ve lost our ability to manage it. I worked in tech, in an era where stringent quality assurance testing was an actual thing. We would never dream of releasing software or hardware onto the public without several layers of testing (stress, security, user acceptance, etc). These days, it seems that’s gone. We’re the beta testers—the paying users. All that quality testing expense gets in the way of profits and executive bonuses, right?
Quality is down across pretty much everything, for example vehicles, food, drugs, and passenger jetliners. One of the first things Trump did after getting elected was to sign executive orders to get rid of this “expensive, profit-killing red tape.” He dismantled nearly 100 policies focused on clean air, water, wildlife and toxic chemicals. He rescinded an Obama regulation that ensured your tip actually went to the server, and not the owner of the restaurant.
I talked in previous posts about how Giavana got food poisoning twice recently. Microplastics are now present in our rain, which means they’re being consumed by everything, even our plants. Seafood and freshwater fish are rife with plastics in their meat, as our oceans, rivers, and streams have long been full of it. It’s not hard to figure out why. The recent drone video of boaters throwing huge trash cans full of plastic trash into the ocean and celebrating was sickening. Rich kids driving mommy and daddy’s expensive, big-ass boat, so I’m sure they’ll get a slap on the wrist. The big damage is done by commercial trash haulers and other means, though.
Cows now have bird flu (which has a 50-60% death rate in humans). It’s being detected in milk samples, which are safe for now (so they say!), other than the new and very dangerous “drink raw milk” fad being pushed on your kids by TikTok influencers. If this spreads to pigs though, we’re really in trouble, as pigs have very similar biology to humans, and it’s then an easy jump to us. It could become our next very bad pandemic. Really, we shouldn’t be drinking milk after our first few years. This was the last straw for us. We switched to soy (the red carton of Silk soy milk original—it’s fantastic!). We mostly only use it for coffee, as we get our calcium and D from other sources.
What’s Next?
It was soooo nice to finally get home from the city. The contrast was vivid. A few hours earlier, we were surrounded by concrete, steel, wall-to-wall people, noise, stench, bumper to bumper traffic. On the approach to our pioneer heaven, we had nothing but lush green quiet and beauty. We can hear the birds sing. There’s no place like home, Toto (I mean…Pia!).
The dual citizenship effort has taken priority over our other endeavors, as it’s very time sensitive. Giavana has been a force of nature in this project, and it’s not a simple one. We’re most of the way there, and it will feel good to have that box checked.
It’s May, so there are lots of events coming up soon. My family is essentially a May birthday one, so it’s a crazy month. But, amid all this, we still need to stay focused on the task at hand. We’re working on ensuring our state votes blue in November. We’ve got to get back to planning and researching our hopeful someday log cabin home (complete with survival bunker), whether it’s in the wonderful USA or somewhere else, should this become Trumpistan.
Oh yeah, and pray for no bad thunderstorms until we get our protection back in place!
This pioneer journey continues… Don’t forget, commenting is now turned on for everyone on these free posts. Let’s interact! Too many of you reply to us personally, share the love with the Project: Pioneer community :-)
“When fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross.”
—Sinclair Lewis
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