Sunday: Yesterday, when the huge electric bill arrived, double the cost of last month, I began to fantasize once again about using an occasional clothesline. Last summer, the newly entrenched Georgia Power really gouged us, and I can feel it coming again. During one summer month last year, the bill was $700, highest I've ever seen, due in full at the end of that month. Then they had the audacity to send another monstrous bill for the next cycle, due at the beginning of the following month. In other words, due only seven days after the first bill. Of course I called and raised cain, but in the end, as the monopoly electric company, they can do whatever they please. Reminds me of the old joke, "Where does the 20-foot high, 700 pound green monster park his car?" Answer: "Anywhere he wants!"
I would probably never use a clothesline. Been there, done that during the hippie days, and it wasn't all that economical. I have a friend in his sixties who still lives a semi-hippie lifestyle out West. He works for cash here and there, but will not, cannot, commit to a traditional 9 to 5. Apparently, he lives cheaply by growing some food, salvaging items from the dump, trading with neighbors, heating with wood, and using a clothesline. Because he has a higher degree of self-sufficiency compared to most people, he feels he would survive longer if society collapsed. I often wonder about that. When I was a back-to-the-land hippie, we believed that too. We had the land to grow food and produce wood for heat. We had a well for water. What else would a person need for survival? Now I believe that if an apocalyptic event ended civilization, the back-to-the-landers would not be in any better position than the rest of us. The garden might feed them a little longer and the wood might fend off the cold, but eventually, they too would need goods and services of an established civilization, such as gasoline to power a chainsaw or a generator to run the freezer to preserve the garden vegetables. They may be several degrees of separation from mainstream society, but in the end, they are just as dependent on it.
I love novels about apocalyptic events, for example, The Stand, by Stephen King, and On the Beach, by Nevil Shute. At the moment, I'm reading The Road, by Cormac McCarthy. It's scary to think how quickly civilization could unravel. Remember the economic ripple effect just because the airlines didn't fly for three days after 9/11? All it would take to bring the country to a standstill would be sudden permanent damage to the internet. A permanent nationwide electrical and/or telephone black-out would end civilization real fast. It would do more than just hurl us back into the 19th century, where people did live civilly without eletricity and phone. Because our lifestyles are dependent upon modern technologies, we would quickly regress way past recent centuries, right back into rival clans or neighborhoods fighting each other for survival. In The Stand, one of the characters says that the group that would survive and eventually rebuild civilization would be the one that happened to include a couple of surviving tecchies.
It's been a quiet, happy weekend. I just love flowing from one activity to another whenever I feel like it, no pressure, no timeline. I still have more shredding to do. The amount I've had to do confirms what I already knew, that I worked my tail off this year doing a job under very difficult circumstances. There's talk that the State Legislature is on the verge of passing a law decreeing that the VALIC retirement accounts, which I have from my years at GSU, may now, for the first time, be allowed to roll over into the state Teacher's Retirement System, which I'm in now with the school system. If I could buy out the next 6 years with the school system with my VALIC account money and have 10 years with them, I would do it in a New York second. Even though my pension income would be tiny, at 20% of my current salary, if we could manage to live off that, combined with my social security, and another job that's a better fit for me, as well as Liberto's income, I'd be happy as a bluebird. I really like being a homebody at this stage of life. To think I once felt empty and depressed at home when I was a young thing in my twenties. Now I feel enriched and content---although, pushing all the fantasies aside, I'm sure I wouldn't feel so overjoyed without enough income to cover $700 electric bills.
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