The Habits of Highly Successful Ghosts

or: thoughts on isolation and Oscar Wilde

I will be speaking in Charlottesville, Virginia on March 17 at The Beautiful Idea at a release event for the tabletop roleplaying game Penumbra City.

The Habits of Highly Successful Ghosts

There was a barn on the property, down in the field, plus some cabins scattered around. Including mine at the back of the property, up in the woods, up away from the floods, up away from the people. I hadn’t built it to be more than a bedroom. As I figured, when I designed the place, I would cook in the barn, work at the cafe in town.

The pandemic came rolling in, and my 12x12 cabin was suddenly the only place for me. For those first few months, before we knew what was happening, before I started wearing a respirator to stores, I lived off of my own preparedness supply and wild greens. I had no money and no infrastructure: I showered in February in the mountains (albeit southern mountains) with a plastic solar shower, drizzling 90 degree water over me in 40 degree air. I ran my laptop off my car’s alternator for work; I cooked with my camping stove and dishes. 

Every day I worked about twelve hours on improving my lot, until I could work no more. I built a sleeping loft. My kitchen started as a camp stove with gas piped from a 20 lbs propane tank outside. One rainy day in March or April, the stove’s regulator, not designed for constant pressure, broke. My cabin filled with propane and I fled outside to hide in the tent/shed I’d so recently assembled, wondering if my house was about to explode. It didn’t, and after several failed attempts I got a two-burner stove installed.

I’ve never had much in the way of habits, but I started building some into my life. Little rituals that got me through the day, through the night, through the isolation. Every evening, I watched Steven Universe while I ate my simple dinner.

My water situation started with 5 gallon jerry cans filled from a neighbor’s well and filtered through a five gallon bucket I set up with a Sawyer filter. My first sink had a foot pump that brought water out of a jerry can and it emptied into a bucket. By the end, I had a 12v water pump that drew from 150 gallons of water barrels and I had a sink that drained into a drainpipe that ran outside. I built a shower that ran off an on-demand propane heater. The first time I showered on that porch under hot water, I cried. That isn’t saying much–I cried a lot those days.

I washed my laundry with a washboard in the creek, eventually moving to a hand-crank machine on my porch.

I started with one 100watt solar panel and a cheap Jackery power bank. After two years, I had 1200 watts in an array down in the field, running 100’ through the trees into a large industrial lithium battery that had been purchased cheap because it was past its prime. 

Sometimes I wonder if being a prepper put me in that trouble in the first place: without my stash of food, water, and other supplies, I wouldn’t have had the option to isolate at all.

After maybe six months, or maybe a year, I reached a sort of equilibrium with my self-isolated life. My cabin had reached the point where it sustained me. I didn’t need to work every waking hour. I started building instruments, carving spoons, and tinkering with my house. I recorded my podcast about the end of the world, conducting interviews with internet tethered through my cell phone, run through a signal booster. I may or may not have circumvented some blocks that throttled the speed of tethered internet by changing the TTL on my computer.

During that time, I disassociated a lot. I wrote songs in a made-up language. Two years later, I found songs I’d recorded on my phone I have no memory of writing. I spent a month trying to befriend an eastern fence lizard, and I dreamt of witches in the trees. An owl came some days when I played music on the porch. I learned a lot about the rhythms of that forest.

What I didn’t do much was talk to people, not in person.

I never solved the humidity and its attendant mold and rust, no matter what I tried. Fans, vents, dehumidifiers, desiccants. It was never enough. The southern forest wants to bring everything together into one biomass of fungus and rot. I didn’t have enough power for an air conditioner, not really. Everything I’d built was constantly breaking and being repaired, because it had been built–and maintained–by an amateur. During the winter I ran a generator to top off my battery because the sun was too low for my panels, passing behind trees and mountains. The generator constantly broke too. One day a flood took out my entire solar array, washing panels hundreds of meters away.

All the while, I was mostly, but not completely, alone.