Shouts From Down Under

Off the grid. Why do people bother? Apocalypse? Really?

What would we all do, if someone in the know, who we believed 100% (just for arguments sake) said that the civilised world was going to end in a couple of years. Life as we know it, would be over. People would have to fend for themselves. No more plugging in an appliance and turning on a switch. No more driving a car to the supermarket to buy food, vegies, meat, milk, bread, batteries, loo paper.

Easy Street just got renamed Quit Sponging Avenue.

I've been watching those micro-living videos of Kirsten Dirksen's, all or mostly about people living off the grid, building tiny homes and living a more eco friendly life. Seems like what do you know. Get rid of debt, burdens of social pressure, slavery to our sense of entitlement, minimising personal needs including physical space and belongings, and basically existing, and living quite comfortably thank you, with the bare essentials to sustain life.

It all makes sense, even without any convenient apocalypse. I know all the zombie gamers (like me) have looked forward to a decent apocalypse of government research facility stuff up proportions, where the majority of earth's population is either missing, or turned into slow moving ammunition targets so lots of fun can be had.

But real life may not be quite so simple, or work out so well once the pizza and coke shops run out of stock, and no one there to serve us, deliver it to us, take our credit card over the phone, or to supply electricity, internet, or anything else. No, not even coffins.

So, here's one video that Kirsten has on her books that caught my eye; I mean they are all good and entertaining, food for thought, and make the whole idea of independence, particularly of power bills very attractive. This video has a very plain Australian fellow featured in it, and perhaps you people overseas might enjoy the accent he has. This accent is wearing a bit thin these days, what with all the movies we get caught up in watching. But this bloke is very plainly uncity-fied.
He may seem untidy, disorganised, strange, and live a weird life where all you do is build off grid gizmos all day and nut out better and alternative ways of replacing mains power appliances.

But one thing is, he's not stupid. He's pretty cluey when you check out how he's done things, the materials he's used, the technical know how he displays, and the recycling he has successfully done. Even down to fruit, nuts and catching his own meat with his bare hands.
This might not be everyone's cup of tea. But he's living a lot less disruptive to the planet's ecosystem than most of us.
In fact, he, and people like him, put most of the rest of us to shame.



What would we do if someone said that after next year, there'd be no more stuff being written? For some reason, all inspiration, all creativeness and muses would cease. No more. What. Just what would we do? Maybe my imagination is just too silly - maybe I just go too far sometimes, thinking up things like this.

Yes, the thought of it would be better left void.

Could we survive living off the grid of literature? Would we just tell stories then? Pass verbal life lessons on to our progeny?
Would we work and live our stories instead?

But don't we do that already? Or are our stories and poems and "whatnot" (as the Aussie Offgridder says a lot) just words taken out of all reality context, and just siphoned directly from the overhead tank of our brain, through the gas burner of our masticating keyboard fingers, and saved / recycled into our Flash Drives, stored in an off site cloud server, or printed onto white bleached paper pulp?

Should we all give away, or sell, most of our belongings, and reduce our literary knowledge and imagination to the bare minimum? Then just live with only that which we need. Just use a hand to mouth writing method.
Readers would just get that which had real meaning. No fiddly bits.

Maybe we could warm up the conflict in our bare bones living story, by lighting a fire with insults, and burning a pile of USB sticks. They'd probably create quite a flare up, consuming all those binary digits.

Well, until that time comes (surely there's someone who thinks it will for sure) we might as well use up the muses and ideas still available. Because soon, all the supermarkets and brainstorming groups will disappear. Yes, we'll be looking at word and sentence oblivion.

What will we review, then?

Sparky