Thor's Day Thing: 10/20/22
Punchy Subtitle!
A corner of Mouth Farms.
I meant to take a picture in the daytime. Maybe for the next Thing. I made an executive decision to abandon all methods thus far for putting up fencing around the new pasture area, which you are probably all as sick of hearing me complain about as I am complaining about. I woke up one day feeling really decisive, threw all the material we’d bought over the past… god, MONTHS… in the truck, and miraculously got every unopened roll of fencing returned for full value, which was a huge relief. Drove to the nearest store that had any of the real, proper cattle panel fencing in stock, bought as much as the truck would carry, brought it home, laid it out. I spent the rest of the day doing my boring desk work with a huge weight off my chest, knowing the day after day after day of me whining, “can we please ever get the fence finished?” at everyone else in the house and having to sit through a half hour of watching someone fuck around trying to get things to stand up straight, go in the ground, etc., and waste another day while the forage in the pasture dies and gets colder were over. That night I found these incredible fucking things, and yes I’m stupidly excited about a piece of metal that screws onto cattle fencing. It will literally cut installation time by 2/3s. That’s how big a deal it is.
Pictured here: my entire fucking world right now.
The cows and adult hogs have been going out into said pasture, which presently only has the 6-line electric fence but no backing fencing (BUT NOT FOR LONG) under supervision. We haven’t directly witnessed anyone get zapped but they seem to have somehow grokked it on their own as there hasn’t been anything even remotely resembling breakouts. Everyone is loving the thousands of feet of wild corn and heather and tall grass, finding the boundaries, and being weirdly… stress-free. They even learned how to go back into the smaller enclosure at dark (which is the way we’re keeping things until the outer fence is up) in just 3 days, without even needing to lasso the lead cow and drag everyone.
I wrote a speech for my senior partner/mentor that he loved so much I got a 15% raise on the spot. I’m designing a MOOC for him in the new year that represents substantially more day-to-day paid work, so if Husbandmouth is employed again soon enough, I will probably be able to spend less time freaking the fuck out in my head about household finances every single day. We will be able to, with some credit, finance the continued Quest For A Baby.
My birthday is coming up. (No, I won’t tell you when, or how old I am.) Husbandmouth knows that I really, really like surprises. (I really do. I spend a lot of time being depressingly unsurprised.) He has, apparently, Made Arrangements. They do not fall on my birthday, so simply knowing they exist does not prepare me for WHEN. Brothermouth knows what it is. I am excited.
Last November, a couple neighbors gave us their pumpkins and gourds and squash and crap when they started getting deflated and sad-looking on their porches and we fed them to pigs. The then-alpha boar spent a non-trivial amount of time running around the pasture with a shriveled jack-o-lantern upside down on its head, which was one of the best things that has ever happened in my life. About 2 months ago, gourd vines started sprouting all over the currently-offline pasture they were in last year. The largest pumpkin is approaching 3 feet tall. Thank you, pig shit, for all the ways you enrich our lives.
I am very close to organizing the purchase of Fathermouth’s new home from our next-door neighbors WITH NO LAWYERS, BROKERS, OR AGENTS OF ANY KIND. Both parties are saving tens of thousands of dollars and are incredibly enthusiastic, and all I had to do was throw a couple hundred bucks at a title company and learn Pennsylvania real estate law.
This process illustrated something surprisingly more significant than “I’ll help dad save a bunch of money.” There are many, many bureaucratic processes that allow parasitic middleman entities to make all our lives more costly and inconvenient and stressful. These all evolved largely out of a perceived need to protect ourselves from one another, for which a class of rent-collectors and bottom feeders were happy to arise and serve us, greatly inflating the costs of some of the most important expenses and decisions in our lives. In nearly all cases, however, it is possible- if both parties involved can extend sufficient trust- to bypass these middleman processes or tremendously reduce their influence and cost. My neighbors and I were able to do this because we have accurately judged each other’s character and are willing to take a chance on one other’s character (plus, you know, we signed and notarized contracts we prepared ourselves). Consider this a low-hanging statement on the creation of parallel systems- find ways to self-advocate, especially in your dealings with other private citizens.
On to worldly things.
It will not have escaped anyone’s notice that a bunch of mentally ill people, some of whom wore masks for their Zoom call, unanimously approved the COVID injections for the childhood immunization schedule. It will also not have escaped anyone’s notice that you and I had absolutely no power over this- I had a few minutes’ bitter fun reading the thousands and thousands of comments sent in to the CDC, ranging from plaintive to furious to excruciatingly well-cited and wondering if everyone at least felt better after the huge exercise in wasted time. Comments don’t stop them. Begging doesn’t stop them. Protests don’t stop them. We don’t get a vote, so it would be facetious to say that voting doesn’t stop them. Nothing about this week’s “decision” should surprise or outrage anyone. It is absolutely nothing new.
The only way this- and everything else COVID- ends is if people stop complying. That’s it. No impassioned letters. No scrupulously-annotated 5-page theses littered with hyperlinks to studies. They stop complying and they get lawyers who help them win when they’re inevitably punished by the state for noncompliance.
I have an idea in my head to start a general legal fund- that ANY carefully-vetted legal team can potentially access- to support all opposition to biofascism at all levels of government. I’m not a lawyer or even lawyer-adjacent, and I certainly don’t have an appreciable amount of money to my name to seed such a fund. To the best of my knowledge, a truly general fund like this doesn’t exist. All I would really be able to do is offer this brilliant idea and offer to help administer it. I’m not an extremely useful human being.
As a former plebe of the People’s Republic of New York, I am absolutely delighted to see Alexandria Occasional-Cortex getting absolutely eaten alive by her former lefty cultists. I loved the weird code switch at the end and her weird appeals to victimhood (“I can’t be in a room with the lights out”) as she starts seeing her constituents as people to protect herself from instead of useful idiots to help her give TYT a return on their investment.
Some absolutely excellent reads from a source you may not have heard about before. Warning- getting anything out of this read will require you to absorb some of the writer’s earlier theoretical work or already have a grounding in the social science concept of “value memes” or “V-memes,” about which the author has also written extensively.
I noticed recently that so many COVID essays in the past few months have overlapped with issues I’ve commented on that I would be remiss in not offering people a “crunchier” channel to digest:
So, What’s a V-Meme? and Fundamental Sets of Knowledge Structures will get you sufficiently onboarded to understand the technical language the author uses in the more topical essays.
Most relevant recommended reading:
…and some more Fauci shit and more lies about Ukraine. Enough.
Good night.
Well, I commend thee. Like one day from "so we gotta resist on the ground, ourselves?" to the proto-genesis of the general fund. You got some real get-up-and-go in you, fer shure.
One general statement on any and all sources of assistance: People rarely value what they get for free. We had to start charging monthly fees (extremely minimal) for the women's center so they'd take the program seriously.
A good deal of assistance might come in the form of mutual exchanges of service, i.e. a single mother needing transportation assistance to get her kid out of the school mandating vax might not need much else, and might be able to reciprocate in related ways. Or people who need the dying car fixed so they can do the extra mileage, etc. etc.
Thank you!! Starting my day with vision of your 🎃 boar is gonna make my day💕💕. Do you have video?? Please say yes