Single Isolation

Once, when I had been married about a year Megan went to a friend’s wedding with our son. I regret not going with her because I failed the friends who were getting married, but I don’t regret the five days I spent by myself.

I knew I needed to do some soul searching about my first born son Jack, who must have been about 14 year’s of age at that time. Having our toddler, the ever energetic and smiling little Henry in the house brought into living the giant hole I’d created by abandoning Jack when I was young and ignorant of life.

I could go into minute detail how that came to be, try to put it into a context someone might have a scrap of empathy for, but for this I will just take my failures as a young father cold and unsugared. 

After I dropped Megan and Henry off at the airport I took a vow of silence and went home alone. I wouldn’t speak until I heard her voice. I turned off all devices but my phone. 

In the silence of our house, Albuquerque sirens wailing through the walls, I began unpacking the thousands of items I’d been hoarding and dragging with me, rental to rental. Some of it went back into my teens. Boxes of yellow-pads spilled out on the floor, a dozen screen plays and several neatly typed manuscripts splayed among them. Hundreds of items, prob every crappy plastic chotshki I’d ever picked up at a fair booth. 

I began to see myself. I began to understand both the depth of the mistakes I’d made and how they seemed unavoidable at the time. Day two was deeply depressing. I leafed through a hundred yellow pads with daily reminders written on them that I was a failure, incapable, that something was wrong with me.

Who knew you could write the sentence “what’s wrong with me” in so many different ways? At least that’s an accomplishment.

By day three I found myself hollowed out, weeping as I lay on the floor in my pile of reminders.

The Death of Universal Redemption

A V-Log tour of our suburban permaculture home in Spring 2020

Check out our home food production system in its toddler stage, and before the leaves come back.

With the inevitable collapse of the neoliberal scheme of greed and war, I see humanity's only hope in communities working together to grow food locally, supported by small local farms, but mostly--and most defensibly--in collections of people growing intensively in yards and cooperating in crop choice and rotation.

I call it hyper-local agriculture. I believe that after this crisis, especially if the food distribution system starts to wobble, people will be looking for genuine alternatives to the way we grow and distribute food all over the world.

I'm building a model of a system based on permaculture and other inspiring people's work, that I hope to share with my neighbors.

Nothing I'm doing is original, but I try to find the simplest methods, the cheapest methods, and the ones that will be accessible to anyone willing to give it a lazy try.

Here's the video I put together with the kids. I plan on doing a number of these as the seasons change this year and maybe into the future.

Liberals agree with GOPs, grandma should die for the economy