Extrication Update

I have a few minutes so I thought I’d share a bit of progress I’ve made the past couple of days.

I’ve decided I don’t like the term “drop-out.” I don’t feel like I’m dropping out of anything. For the time being I’m going with “extrication” because it has connotations of disentangling myself from wreckage.

Time: Need To Pass Along A Couple Clients

I’m unloading a couple of my web design clients that are causing me too much stress. They’re not bad clients, I’m just overextended and tired of being afraid of my business in-box. So if you’re a good web designer with lots of WP, LAMP, CSS, H5 & a little jQuery/AJAX under your belt, send me a note — paula at mythodrome dot net — and possibly I can pass you a couple hundred bux of work per month. Or if you know someone, let me know that too. I need to find a replacement designer quick.

Money

Without these clients, it looks like with some juggling I’ll be able to get my expenses down to about 1/3 my remaining income. I feel pretty stupid for not doing this math sooner but oh well — everybody has to start somewhere right? Anyway, so today I cancelled my cable TV. I also went to a really cool butcher shop down on California and set up a deal to get scrap meat for Zeke. Each Monday I’ll pick up 15 lbs of scrap meat for about $12 – $15.

(Sidebar: If you have dogs, you can save a ton of money and feed your fuzzy kids way better nutrition by switching them to a raw meat diet. Here’s the Wikipedia page about it. I feed Zeke the prey model, or as close to it as I can get.)

I’m also in the process of quitting smoking. It’s shocking and nauseating how much money I’ve been wasting on cigarettes. I have about 4 weeks to go in the quitting process, and after that I’ll have another significant (cignificant?) chunk of change to squirrel away. My big hurdle is going to be Verizon. I’m locked into a two-year data contract which I need to break, but it costs a few hundred dollars to do that. So I’m still looking into my options there.

My first immediate goal is to collect $1000 to sit on for when I get booted out of my squat. I have to set up a proper cash flow spreadsheet so I can see when exactly I will accomplish that, but I’m going to shoot for three months. I’ll be damn proud of myself if I can save $1000 in three months, on <$12,000 per year.

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Work Hibernation

Okay — after taking last week off I’m seriously behind on work. I need to code like it’s 1995. Longer-form articles will be light for a couple weeks, but even when I’m crazy insane busy, I still usually manage to update my G+ account. My running commentary is here, and my reading list is here. You shouldn’t have to set up a G+ account just to read but if you want to comment I think you’ll have to.

I went on a little funk-fuzz-thrash spree over there recently, so pardon all the vids. I don’t normally do that sort of thing but hey.

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Bits & Pieces From Ran’s Stay

Update 02.21.2012 5:30ish PM — Dude you are way a neat freak. Fly your freak flag with dust-free gusto!

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So Ran was here for a few days this week, it was a kick-back and easy visit. He’s a lot less dour than I anticipated. I had a lot of fun bullshitting with him about everything from bigfoot to manga porn. He really does make an apple pie every single day and eats most of it himself because — get this — he needs to keep his weight up. Pffffft.

I learned a few things from Ran while he was here:

  • How to fix my garbage disposal. Yay! Thanks man!
  • The Virgo definition of “slob” roughly correlates to the Aries definition of “borderline neat-freak neurotic”
  • Trader Joe’s has the best dumpsters
  • How to play Scrabble, and how to strategize the game
  • Traffic jams suck far worse than I remembered. Maybe they’ve actually gotten worse since the 1990s. It’s no wonder people get out of their cars and walk up and down the highway shooting other motorists. Absolutely nothing is worth doing that twice a day, every day, for 40 years in a row.

One of the more important things I learned was not something new, but something which I’d forgotten. My lifestyle in Portland was so different than it’s been since I came back, and in particular my diet… I used to detox-fast periodically while I was there, I made much of my own allergen-free food and got pretty good at it, and it’s possible to do without spending a small fortune. Or a large fortune for that matter. I’ve gotten away from that for ten years now. Ran’s ultra-healthy road food really brought all this back. Nutrient-dense food that’s free of industrial nasties has a certain quality about it that’s hard to pinpoint but unmistakeable, and while it takes a bit of getting used to after being accustomed to industrial food, I can almost hear my blood cells thanking me in audible English. I didn’t have a single stomach issue this week — after having two of the worst gall bladder attacks I’ve ever had in my life within the past month, and in spite of the fact that we were eating wheat every day which I never ever do. The fog in my brain was even starting to lift a bit. I definitely need to get back to that. When the weather gets warmer I am going to do a springtime detox-fast for the first time since about Y2K. I am very much looking forward to it.

The big takeaway though was just being away from work and going analog for a few days, while sharing a bit of mental environment with someone who never got sucked into the middle class grind. I’ve been stuck on the fringe of the middle class grind since I quit my last full-time “career” job back in Y2K, always struggling with this or that, never quite realizing the reason for my struggle is because I’ve got one foot planted in money-world and one foot planted in freedom-world. I have the worst of both and the best of neither. Since I was 20 years old I’ve known exactly what I want to do and how I want to live. I didn’t realize how close I am to these very old goals until Ran observed that among the various good folks he’s stayed with, I’m pretty far out in the margin. Not sure I would have known that without an outsider’s eye.

So, from here getting myself extricated from money-world tentacles is little more than a matter of planning and discipline to stick with the plan, working on my health, and getting creatively resourceful. I’m excited and motivated.

Addendum

Ran’s stay here at my semi-squat worked out so well that I’m considering opening up that bedroom to other dropout minded passers-through. I definitely do not want a long-term roommate, so that is out of the question. However, I really enjoyed having a generally like-minded person here to hang and banter with for a short time. If you’re near or passing through Pittsburgh and would be interested in visiting me in the abandoned house for a couple-few days sometime around April-ish, let me know in the comments and I’ll email you back.

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A Rant, Forgive Me

I’ve been utterly crushed with work lately, which is both good and bad — I should be able to get caught up on some bills but at the same time, coding and design work sap all my creative brain energy and the last thing I want to do is sit at my computer a few more hours. So Mythodrome has been lagging a bit.

This is actually a deeply frustrating cycle I desperately want to break out of. I know that in many ways I am fortunate — I am self-employed, I work at home, set my own hours, sleep when I want, work when I want, and do work I actually like for the most part — but even still, the things I love most get relegated to the periphery while I stare at my computer screen, day in and day out, trying to forge CSS and Javascript weapons with which to beat Internet Explorer into compliance. In the meantime I have two lengthy articles I want to finish, a really fun drawing that’s going to take me a year to finish at the rate I’m going, and a gorgeous, sweet dog who’s depressed because we haven’t been to the dog park in weeks. Plus my semi-squat needs a lot of cleaning and some minor repairs that I don’t have time or energy to do.

I’m getting closer and closer to complete drop-out mode just simply because I can’t stand it. When I look over the last couple of years I realize that the things others consider truly tragic have been actually the things that make me feel better. For example, I spent about two months in 2009 living in a van. I was genuinely all right in that van! The way-back seat was motorized so at the press of a button, it would bzzzzz down into a bed, and a super comfy bed at that. I slept in a state park and showered there, and did my cooking over a fire. I had my clothes, my sketchbooks, and a few things I needed. It was solitary, comfortable, and peaceful.

My semi-squat is another supposed tragedy — on my god, Paula’s living in an abandoned duplex in the ghetto. The other half has been gutted and is completely trashed, totally uninhabitable. Well no, it’s not abandoned, I’m here. I’ve paid upwards of $700 a month for apartments that were not as habitable as is this one. For the first several months I was here, I hated it. All I wanted was to make enough money to get a “real” apartment. It slowly dawned on me that leaving this place to pay several hundred dollars a month for less space and more rules would be insane. I took stock of what I’ve got here and holy shit, this place is a gift from the gods. I keep expecting the man to come in here and harsh my mellow but I don’t even know if that will ever happen. There are houses on this street that have been abandoned for years and no sherriff’s sale, no foreclosure, no nothing. As far as the market is concerned, this place is quite literally worthless. It is not even worth the money it would cost to conduct a sherriff’s sale or a foreclosure.

Here’s another supposed tragedy — my bed. I have a really nice queen-sized mission-style platform bed with an expensive futon mattress in storage. I have not brought it here in the event I have to pack up on short notice, and I haven’t wanted to risk losing it. So I got an air mattress. A nice one, but it’s an air mattress. What a sad state of affairs. Well, no — actually my air mattress is quite literally the most comfortable bed I’ve ever slept on in my whole life. I sleep like a baby, wake up with no aches and pains. If I had to replace my whole bed setup on short notice, pillows and everything, I could do it for less than $120. And that’s buying everything brand new.

And woe unto Paula, for her house has no heat! Pittsburgh winter with no heat! I have two space heaters and that’s it. There’s been times when Zeke and I could see our breath in here, but the two space heaters keep my work corner plenty warm. The kitchen is cold, the bathroom is cold, but I’ve gotten used to it. And in fact, when I go to other peoples’ houses I’m sweltering. It seems crazy to me to keep every last inch of every single room perfectly toasty day and night. My electric bill for the whole winter so far is about $450 — less than a single month’s electric heat for most standard sized houses.

For a while last summer, I was working 20 hours per week and making a grand total of $900 – $1000 per month. Money was really fucking tight, to the point that I was going hungry sometimes, but I had free time. I miss that terribly.

So I guess in writing all this out, it helps me see that I have some further downsizing to do if I want to be able to pursue the things that really interest me. I’ll have to get out my calculator and do some planning. With no rent, $1000 per month should theoretically be a breeze.

I’ll keep track of my downsizing project here for you guys. And thank you for indulging me this rant.

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Quick Comment On Ran’s Comment

Ran commented:

I’ve noticed that primitivists use a trick in their definition of “civilization” (and also “city”). They define the word by looking at the past, and then project that definition onto the future.

I hadn’t noticed this before, but that’s true. This is also what economists do when they predict economic performance for the next quarter, year or whatever, even in the face of things like peak oil. Whatever happened in the past is certain to continue into the future in exactly the same way, right?

Also, Jason commented over at G+:

[C]omplexity is all of a piece. Joseph Tainter has a good explanation for why this is. With the interconnectedness of all the various forms of complexity (James Burke has illustrated this in a lovely fashion with his Connections series), limiting any one form of complexity (like, military complexity) necessarily limits the growth of complexity in all other areas.

This is a really good point and something I’m not too familiar with. My first thought on this is that limiting some form of complexity in the beginning might limit the growth of complexity as the society moves along; however, what happens when one form of complexity — say, military complexity — gets removed when everything dependent upon it has already developed? I think that’s what Western empire/civilization will have to face. I’m inclined to think that in this case, the existing complexities will respond in the way computer and biological networks do: the missing piece is either considered a error and alternate paths are constructed, or the missing piece is treated as an empty space and something else moves in to fill up that niche.

Interestingly, Western mythology in Revelation describes that exact process. In Christianese it’s referred to as “the judgment,” after which a (comparatively) utopian civilization emerges. Fascinating stuff.

And on a total and complete aside — if you’re on G+ come find me! I’ve started a Mythodrome circle to which I’d love to add you. If you follow me there send me a note to let me know, I’ll add you to the Mythodrome circle and then ‘share’ it with you.

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