I Don't Have to be Organized to be Prepared
or: lack of focus doesn't mean lack of action.
I don’t have a lot of updates for you this week, but as a reminder I maintain an affiliate sales list of the books I’m reading over at Firestorm Books, a queer- and worker-owned bookstore in Asheville. You get a 10% discount and I get a 10% cut and Firestorm gets to keep its doors open to help build radical infrastructure in Appalachia.
And I’ve been telling people to get prepared for years now, but it feels more urgent than ever before right now. The war is dragging on, and strategic reserves of oil are getting low, and there’s a lag between supply disruption to manufacturers and farmers and the impact on prices and availability at stores. It’s always best to get things before there is a run on them. If I have one specific piece of advice, it’s that if your car is due for an oil change get it now, and it doesn’t hurt to have an oil change worth of oil on hand. Motor oil is likely to experience shortages before fuel itself.
Some of my other posts about preparedness (that aren’t paywalled like this one, since this one is more just personal musings:
I Don’t Have to be Organized to be Prepared
There’s this crow that lives nearby that is convinced that 6am is a really good time to scream and sing and yell, but I am convinced that 6am is a really good time to be asleep. I’m also convinced that it’s a good idea to sleep with my windows open, so the crow tends to win that particular battle of wills and he certainly did this morning.
Rintrah doesn’t mind me waking up early, because he wants to go out and pee and to patrol to make sure nothing nefarious and skunk-shaped has made its way into our yard overnight. But despite thousands of years of breeding that has built him for specifically that purpose, I steal his glory most mornings and lock him inside while I go out and check the yard first. Because de-skunking a dog makes us both miserable.
I don’t have a good sense of smell. I can mostly only smell strong things, and scent is an interesting sense because the things that smell strong tend to smell bad. So most of what I can smell is bad. Cat piss. Rot. Gasoline. Skunks.
Rintrah still smells a bit like skunk from the last time he escorted a black and white creature from the yard, despite how much baking soda I’ve rubbed into his fur and washed out with soap. I don’t mind the smell, if I’m being honest. He smells like old weed a little, and I don’t smoke but that doesn’t mean I don’t like the smell of old weed.
So the crow woke me up this morning, and Rintrah went out and came back, and I dutifully typed out a whole memoir piece about the first time I got a pair of lockpicks, and then I promptly fell asleep again.
And in that piece, I talk about how I listen to my dreams, how I let the literal dreams I have when I’m asleep tell me how to behave when I’m awake. And when I fell back to sleep, I didn’t dream about picking locks. I dreamt about stairways and lists, about the ill-ease that’s settled over me lately, about trying and failing to solve tasks while worrying about my loved ones. Maybe I’ll post about lockpicking sometime soon. It was a story where I thought I was going to be the hero, valiantly picking locks to save parties and shows as a young squatter, but it was really a story without heroes, and a story in which most of the characters went on to die young.
And it’s not the story I want to tell today.
There’s been a certain aimlessness to my days lately, and I’ve decided in proper anarchist (and author) form to blame that on the zeitgeist instead of on my neurotype or decisions I’ve made.
My thoughts have been scattered lately. My days are broken up into an unrelated series of tasks—paint the closet, go to meetings, research and write for my show, lift heavy barbells in various configurations, research preparedness, try not to spiral about the state of the world.
I’m doing most of these things badly, because I’m distracted and unfocused. I got spoiled by a few rainy weeks and fell off watering my garden for a week and half my starts are dead. Vegetables are going bad in my fridge while I subsist off of protein bars and frozen food. With my podcast writing, I’m rapidly approaching the “all the work while crying” line on the chart.
