Friday Finds

Delving into History

I hope you will forgive me, dear readers, for not writing posts on a predictable schedule. As a semi-unemployed nomad, my life goes a bit in fits and starts, and the newsletter goes with it. My vehicle is fixed and I arrived at my destination!

I am preparing

• the long-awaited post introducing Coley’s toxins (which is to be the beginning of a series)

• a piece on how zooming out to a much wider lens of the history of statism might inform our current unstable situation

• an article on modern anarchy referencing articles about ten years’ prior that served as a harbinger of our current dis-ease as a society

I am pessimistic in the short-term, and optimistic in the long-term. The problem is that I don’t know how short the short-term will be.

Thoughts?

Today I visited a car dealership in a small town to take a test drive. It was a charming and unassuming place. One vehicle each from the 40s and 50s was being sold. It seems the owners like to find odd vehicles at car auctions to pepper the more modern offerings.

After the drive, I came inside to get some paperwork and chatted with the owner, the owner’s son, and a local visitor who pops in regularly and claims to be a clairvoyant who has predicted various events including the Indian Ocean tsunami of 2012. This is the sort of thing I would have dismissed outright in earlier decades — first as some sort of heresy and Satanic witchcraft in my teens as a result of my fundamentalist religious upbringing, and then as obviously fraudulent nonsense in my all-knowing atheistic twenties. Having settled into the obvious zenith of wisdom known as middle age, I merely found it interesting. He claimed the episodes of realization came to him in moments of intense focus in his work, which was totally unrelated (he was some sort of trader).

He pointed at one of the license plates on the wall:

PROPHET

“That was mine,” he said.

He rambled on at length and I could feel the owners shifting in the background as he distracted me from a potential purchase.

In due course, I remarked at many other car and motorcycle license plates from all over the world which plastered the walls of the small office, and then the owner’s son pulled out a few special ones for me.

“Prison made” in 1960:

License plates from Canada’s territories are shaped as bears! I had no idea.

Finally, this was the most fascinating of all: a leather license plate from 1908 with affixed metal number plates!

The past year has led me to believe that it may be wise to make certain “apocalypse” preparations. I arrived back from my trip at the end of the day to an ironic delivery: an Amazon package with heirloom seeds, candles, various books on homesteading and fermentation, and Peterson’s guides of wild medicinal plants and wild edible plants.

heh heh

I dislike using Amazon, but I was in a hurry. What can I say?

I am hoping to avoid canning and most freezing of garden produce this year. I learned last year that dehydrated tomatoes are superior in two ways to canned. First, they take up far less space. Second, I was motivated to snack on them because the slices taste so good. I look forward to dehydrating melon this year, too.

As such, this book promises to be a real treasure:

Have a great week-end, everybody! Here’s to unplugging now and then.