Slate’s End of America

Slate is doing a series this week on How America Will End.  Having ended our thought experiment and theorizing ten months ago, we’d like to welcome Josh Levin to the party.

Once again, the best way to read NIJOT is from the beginning in chronological order.  It’s a bit of a slow (and in hindsight innaccurate) start, but things heat-up by Halloween.

If you find our little mindgame interesting, I also suggest you check out the NIJOT reading list on GoodReads (sorry, sign-up required).  I’ll be adding to that in the future where this blog remains more static.  Comments are always welcome, but please stay in the ’story world’ for dated posts.

The NIJOT Reading List — Part 3 — Being Ready & Rebuilding Civilization

So I’ve spun this yarn about horrible things happening.  Maybe I’ve made the case that it is a plausible scenario (hopefully not probable, but at least possible).

So what do you do?

You can keep involved and try to prevent the bad things from happening.  But you can also be prepared for bad things when they inevitably do happen.  This eclectic mix of books is a place to start:

PREPAREDNESS NOW!: An Emergency Survival Guide for Civilians and Their Families

Boy Scout Fieldbook

The U.S. Army Leadership Field Manual

Standard First Aid

The Unthinkable: Who Survives When Disaster Strikes – and Why

SAS Survival Handbook: How to Survive in the Wild, in Any Climate, on Land or at Sea

The U.S. Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual

Getting Out: Your Guide to Leaving America

The Anarchist Cookbook

Art and Science of Dumpster Diving

The Secure Home

 

That’s the short-term.  But if you were really on your own (like we left the McNeils)…then what?

Food (can you tell my wife compiled much of this?):

Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life 

Gardening When It Counts: Growing Food in Hard Times

The Forager’s Harvest: A Guide to Identifying, Harvesting, and Preparing Edible Wild Plants 

Barnyard in Your Backyard: A Beginner’s Guide to Raising Chickens, Ducks, Geese, Rabbits, Goats, Sheep, and Cows

Gaia’s Garden: A Guide to Home-Scale Permaculture

Seed to Seed: Seed Saving and Growing Techniques for Vegetable Gardeners

The Organic Gardener’s Handbook of Natural Insect and Disease Control: A Complete Problem-Solving Guide to Keeping Your Garden and Yard Healthy Without Chemicals

How to Grow More Vegetables: And Fruits, Nuts, Berries, Grains, and Other Crops Than You Ever Thought Possible on Less Land Than You Can Imagine

Storey’s Basic Country Skills: A Practical Guide to Self-Reliance

Storey’s Guide to Raising Pigs: Care/Facilities/Management/Breed Selection

Storey’s Guide to Raising Sheep: Breeds, Care, Facilities

Storey’s Guide to Raising Rabbits: Breeds, Care, Facilities

Storey’s Guide to Raising Dairy Goats: Breeds, Care, Dairying

Build a Smokehouse: Storey Country Wisdom Bulletin A-81

Making Cheese, Butter & Yogurt: Storey Country Wisdom Bulletin A-57

Home Cheese Making: Recipes for 75 Delicious Cheeses 

Preserving Food without Freezing or Canning: Traditional Techniques Using Salt, Oil, Sugar, Alcohol, Vinegar, Drying, Cold Storage, and Lactic Fermentation

Wild Fermentation: The Flavor, Nutrition, and Craft of Live-Culture Foods

Solar Food Dryer: How to Make and Use Your Own Low-Cost, High-Performance, Sun-Powered Food Dehydrator

Root Cellaring: Natural Cold Storage of Fruits & Vegetables

Putting Food By

Blue Ribbon Preserves: Secrets to Award-Winning Jams, Jellies, Marmalades and More

The Whole Beast: Nose to Tail Eating

 

Shelter and everything else:

Urban Homestead: Your Guide to Self-sufficient Living in the Heart of the City

Solar Water Heating: A Comprehensive Guide to Solar Water and Space Heating Systems

The Big Necessity: The Unmentionable World of Human Waste and Why It Matters

Handy Farm Devices and How to Make Them

The Self-sufficient Life and How to Live It

Wild Color: The Complete Guide to Making and Using Natural Dyes

Biodiesel Basics and Beyond: A Comprehensive Guide to Production and Use for the Home and Farm

You Can Farm: The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Start & Succeed in a Farming Enterprise

The NIJOT Reading List — Part 2 — How Did We Get Here?

As I worked on this project, random people stopped me and said “In your blog, that stuff you write, it couldn’t happen like that!”

OK, nobody said that.  I just had that conversation in my own head.  Over and over.

So we tried hard not to wander too far too fast from what we see around us.  Here is a listing of books that talk about the situation we are all in right now.

 

It Can’t Happen Here!

Aside from being the title of Sinclair Lewis’s fiction from the 1930’s, this is also the primary argument against a coup in the USA.  I hate to tell you, it has already been tried:

The Plot to Seize the White House: The Shocking True Story of the Conspiracy to Overthrow FDR

War is a Racket: The Anti-War Classic by America’s Most Decorated General 

 

The Bush Administration’s Abuse of Power:

Law and the Long War: The Future of Justice in the Age of Terror

Torture Team: Rumsfeld’s Memo and the Betrayal of American Values

Blackwater: The Rise of the World’s Most Powerful Mercenary Army

The Terror Presidency: Law and Judgment Inside the Bush Administration

Torture and Democracy

Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Iraq’s Green Zone

Bush’s Law: The Remaking of American Justice

Takeover: The Return of the Imperial Presidency and the Subversion of American Democracy

The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How The War on Terror Turned into a War on American Ideals

Angler: The Cheney Vice Presidency

The Shadow Factory: The Ultra-Secret NSA from 9/11 to the Eavesdropping on America

 

American Unpreparedness in a Changing World:

The 9/11 Commission Report: Final Report of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States

Open Target: Where America Is Vulnerable to Attack

The Edge of Disaster: Rebuilding a Resilient Nation

Your Government Failed You: Breaking the Cycle of National Security Disasters

The Post-American World

Memo to the President Elect: How We Can Restore America’s Reputation and Leadership 

The Utility of Force: The Art of War in the Modern World

 

Peak Oil:

Hubbert’s Peak: The Impending World Oil Shortage

Beyond Oil: The View from Hubbert’s Peak 

Twilight in the Desert: The Coming Saudi Oil Shock and the World Economy

The Long Emergency: Surviving the End of Oil, Climate Change, and Other Converging Catastrophes of the Twenty-First Century 

 

Gloabl Warming, Food Security, and Other Threats:

The Omnivore’s Dilemma

An Inconvenient Truth: The Planetary Emergency of Global Warming and What We Can Do About It

The Great Warming: Climate Change and the Rise and Fall of Civilizations

The Botany of Desire: A Plant’s-Eye View of the World

Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed

Hot, Flat, and Crowded: Why We Need a Green Revolution–and How It Can Renew America

 

Americans in Bubbles and Echo-Chambers – Talking Past Each Other:

Just How Stupid Are We?: Facing the Truth About the American Voter

The End of America: A Letter of Warning To A Young Patriot

Give Me Liberty: A Handbook for American Revolutionaries

The Divided States of America?: What Liberals AND Conservatives are Missing in the God-and-Country Shouting Match!

The Big Sort (a Slate Blog)

The NIJOT Reading List — Part 1 — Fiction

I’ve never been confident that the link in the Blogroll properly fed people to the GoodReads account I set up in connection with this project.

If you have been there, then this may be a bit redundant.  I’m starting with the fun stuff — fiction.

 

Forty Signs of Rain, Fifty Degrees Below, & Sixty Days and Counting (Kim Stanley Robinson): This series has been called by one of my friends “Global Warming:  The Series!”  A tipping point in global warming has been reached and our heroes are scientists and politicians (mainly scientists) in Washington, DC trying to find a way to reverse the effects of global warming or at least mitigate the disasters it will cause.  I liked it because it didn’t fall into an Armageddon-like all-or-nothing solution.  Things changed, a lot, and people found themselves adjusting – sometimes badly – but still adjusting to the new normal.  I also think the politics of the later books reflected a lot of the climate campaigns happening now.

World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War (Max Brooks):  Mel Brooks’s son decided that he liked zombie movies and wrote a semi-serious guide for what to do if caught in a zombie outbreak.  He followed that up with World War Z, a much better book purporting to be the notes gathered by a journalist researching the aftermath of a global zombie apocalypse.  Yes, zombies aren’t real, but to paraphrase the guys at Zombie Squad, if you are ready to have your friends and neighbors come after you to eat your brains, you’re probably ready for most disasters.  Brooks makes a compelling case that the U.S. and the world is not prepared for disasters, large or small, that are likely to come our way.

Oil Storm - film (James Erskine, director):  Oil Storm was probably the most direct inspiration for NIJOT.  The movie was a fictional documentary on the effects of a cascade of events that cut-off much of the oil supply to the United States in the Fall of 2005.  The first event was a fictional Hurricane Julia striking the Louisiana oil hub at Port Fouchon.  The story proved scarily prescient when Hurricane Katrina just narrowly missed fulfilling Julia’s role.  The movie focused on both the high-level politics and the effects on everyday life that an oil crisis could cause.

Night Watch (Terry Pratchett):  Although this story is set in Pratchett’s ever-popular Discworld fantasy setting, this book has some very real and harrowing lessons about revolution, authoritarianism, and abuse of power.  Sam Vimes is Pratchett’s avatar of Rule of Law and this book shows why such a rule is so important.  An MIT acquaintance said that this is the best book on fascism ever written in the English language.

The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress (Robert Heinlein):  If you can get by the dated looks at technology and Heinlein’s inevitably strange sexual politics, this book is an entertaining primer on revolution and colonial independence movements.

1984 (George Orwell):  Welcome to the surveillance state.

It Can’t Happen Here (Sinclair Lewis):  I’m ashamed to admit that I have yet to get my hands on Lewis’s story of the fragility of democracy in America.  The 1930s are gone, but Lewis’s assertion that “When fascism comes to America it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross” is still chillingly accurate.

Space Wars: The First Six Hours of World War III (Willliam Scott, Michael Coumatos, and William Birnes):  This one I’m a little ashamed to admit to having read.  The prose and characters are worse than the worst Dale Brown thriller.  That said, the plot is based off of actual war-gaming scenarios and shows just how vulnerable the new information economy is.

The Long Road Home: One Step at a Time and The War Within: One More Step at a Time (Gary Trudeau):  Tudeau maimed one of his characters that we had all known for so many years and then took his audience through the process of coming to grips with that injury and what it means to come back from war.

Into the Forest (Jean Hegland):  There’s never really an explanation of what is happening in the outside world as the two teenage girls in the center of this book are forced to make do on their own.  Things just slowly come apart until the very idea of security and home is being questioned.

World Made By Hand (James Kunstler):  The author of The Long Emergency takes his theories of where the world is headed and places it in the lap of a semi-autobiographical character living in a post-Peak Oil upstate New York.  Pompous and elitist as hell, but still a good read.

Roll Credits

Hello all and welcome as I finally break the fourth wall.

For those not sure, yes, NIJOT is offically complete as a story.  It was always concieved of as a one-year project, and I think we got everything into the story that we intended to.

I’d like to extend some special thanks, especially to my wife who pushed me to try this in the first place instead of just talking about “wouldn’t it be neat if…”  As you know, she quickly got wrapped up in the project more directly and added a much-needed home-front perspective.  As you don’t know, she was the one who pushed and prodded to make sure that the gaps between posts weren’t a whole lot longer.

The characters presented in NIJOT were often based off of or mixtures of actual people we know here in the Davis Square area.  This became less and less true as the story progressed, but I’d like to thank my friends and family for the inspiration they provided.

I’d like to thank those of you who joined in the project by adding your in-story comments.  In particular, Peter Stinson (who I swear I have never met before this project started) both commented and drove a fair bit of traffic our way.  Other folks at the Alternate History discussion boards gave some needed feedback and support.

That said, the comments are now open for out-of-story questions, discussions, and abuse.  What did you all like?  What didn’t you like?  What was plausible?  What was absurd?

On a technical note, if anyone knows how to re-arrange the posts in WordPress to allow for easier reading in the order posted, please shoot me a note.  Now that the day-by-day portion of the project is over, I’d like to make it easier for folks to read the ‘archives’ in the proper order.

Wednesday, September 30, 2009

Everything we can pack is packed.  We’re keeping both cars in the garage until after midnight (zero-dark early hours Clark calls it – must be a military thing).

We’re signing off here.  This going to be the last post here for a long time, probably ever.  I don’t see us getting a landline phone to the cabin anytime soon, let alone a cable-modem.  I’m not sure that many folks will miss us.  There are bigger things to worry about than just another refugee family.

Refugee — there’s a word that just has a dark hole at it’s center.  We’re leaving home, leaving a place we’ve come to love, a house that we worked hard to buy and where our daughter took her first steps.  And we’re not handing it over to some other family to build their dreams in.  We’re locking it up, leaving most of our stuff, and running.  

The locks won’t last long.  Somebody will break in and clean out anything they think is valuable.  Our furniture, our library, hell the flooring, will probably get turned into kindling this winter.  God I wish we could bring more books…books are civilization (along with hot water).

Nope, eventually the skeleton of this place will become a home for someone new…someone more desperate than us.  I still have the paperwork to claim this place, but it won’t be ours anymore.

And for all that, I sill feel guilty for all we do have.  When I was out haggling for gas this afternoon I saw one of the other Davis-area Dads.  I can’t remember his name, I suck at names, but he’s Connor’s Dad.  Beats me what he was looking for or buying or scrounging.  I was tempted for a second to invite him and his boy along with us to the woods.  April could have a playmate that way.

But we already have five people going to a cabin built for maybe three.  We don’t know if we have enough food for ourselves for winter.  We can’t play at charity.  You don’t reach out for a drowning man unless you are damn sure of your footing on solid ground.  Otherwise you both drown.

I tried getting touch with the rest of my family down in CT.  ’All lines are currently busy.’  A medic-type down at the Convention Center said she’s with the Red Cross and will get word about Gil down to Liz.  I can’t imagine her going far from her little beach-community, her people, and her grandchildren.  They’ll find her, and she’ll get by.

The saying is that there is a Chinese curse: “May you live in interesting times.”  I don’t want interesting anymore.  Let me just look out for my own.  Chop wood, carry water.  Let my fences make good neighbors and may my fences be far off.

Wednesday, September 30, 2009

I feel like a thief. 

But I’m a mother and I’m happy to shoulder that guilt.

Avery gave it up last night. Apparently we were one of the last kitchens in the city to stay open — everyone else shut down three nights ago. We’ve been so consumed by trying to find Gil — and then finding Gil — that I failed to notice. Avery called me at about 11 o’clock last night. I was still numbly moving around the condo, just moving with no purpose, when I got the call. 

She was shutting the kitchen down and handing out all the food in the warehouse. She wanted to give the folks who had worked there first pick.

Dad and I got in the Passat and loaded up. Mostly rice and beans, about 250 lbs. of flour, a case of dried powdered milk, several boxes of carrots and sweet potatoes and onions. Some of the peach preserves and apple butter and even the pickled beans. Every single scrap of chocolate and sugar I could find. There was a whole pig’s worth of cryo-vacced primals that I strapped to the roof. I also took the pressure cooker, the Hobart mixer, a couple of knives, and every bloody fucking one of those tomatoes that I canned. 

I can’t believe that was only a month ago.

Driving back through the ghostly streets gave me a bone-deep chill. The riots down in Southie were too far away to hear, but I could see the dull red glow of the fires off the low-slung belly of the clouds. I was driving, Dad was riding shotgun — literally. He was crouched in the passenger’s seat with the double barrel cocked and held across his chest. The same man who had stopped me from firing just a few nights ago was ready to shoot. Happily, there wasn’t a soul in sight. 

We’re leaving. 

Paul and I and my folks talked about it until late at night, after I got back with the food. The violence in Southie has stayed contained so far, but with the kitchens shut down, the shooting war in Connecticut and the Berkshires, and the city a target for the US forces, it’s just not safe here. And winter is coming.

It’s 80 degrees today, but the London plane trees are starting to show yellow around the edges and it got down into the 40s a few nights ago. Unless there’s a massive relief effort, the city is going to be a humanitarian disaster this winter — there won’t be heat or food for all these people. We’re very well stocked, thanks to my efforts and last night’s raid on the warehouse. 

But that just makes us a target here. Already we get looks from some of our condo neighbors. We’ve seen evidence of someone trying to jimmy our storage locker open. Two of the chickens have gone missing. And it’s still September. In the cold heart of February, I get the feeling we’d be murdered in our sleep for the food in our kitchen. 

With my folks here, we can pile into two cars and bring up as much food as humanly possible to the cabin in the woods. We’ve got food, water, and fuel up there. I planted potatoes back in the spring that should be ready soon, plus there’s a giant wood lot filled with plenty of deer and dead falls, and, most importantly, a scarce population that entirely used to self reliance.

I doubt any fighting will make it to the North Woods. We’ll be able to hunker down for the winter. 

Paul has already gone out to trade some things for enough gas to make it up there. Mom offered up her jewelry but Paul said that our liquor cabinet would be worth more. I insisted on keeping a pair of vodka bottles, but he’s been in and out all morning, taking a bottle of brandy and coming back with a five-gallon can, going out with three litres of wine and coming back with a gerry can. 

Dad’s been doing guy things out in the back with the cars. Mom’s been taking care of April while I gather up heavy blankets, first aid supplies, tools, that sort of thing. She looks white faced and pinched. She’s worried about her dogs. They are huge and eat a lot. We don’t know if we can take them. I know she loves them like her children but if it’s a choice between feeding my mom’s two dogs and feeding my daughter, the matter is simple. 

Dad just came in. He traded the cryo-vacced pig primals for a car trailer to hitch to his SUV. That doubles our carrying capacity. We may be able to take some of the books.

April has been very quiet, very still. She occasionally asks about Paw Paw, sniffles, and then goes and sits in a corner with her stuffed rabbit. Right now she’s asleep in my bedroom so I can pack up her room. Going through her toys to pick out what we’re going to take has been tough — we only have so much room, both in the car and in the cabin. I want to sit and hold her, to croon songs and read to her, to hold her and promise everything will be okay. 

But I feel guilty already for taking a few moments here to rest and get my thoughts together and to tell you all, our friends, that we’re leaving. April will have all winter to heal, in the quiet woods. Right now I need to think about surviving. 

Paul’s back. I gotta go.

Tuesday, September 29, 2009

A kid from the National Guard came by this afternoon.  They found Gil.  He was in the Convention Center and never had a chance to get out.

I’m sorry about my rant last night.  It wasn’t logical, it served no purpose to scream into the internet.

I’m mostly just numb.

 

From what we’ve heard, things are getting really strange out west of the city.  A bunch of New Yorkers have seized the bridges over the Hudson all the way up to Albany.  Governor Paterson is apparently saying that he won’t allow his state to serve as a base for government terror.  After 9/11 and the Halloween attacks, New Yorkers have some special moral high ground to preach about bombing civilians in cities.

I don’t know what it will do.  The US units in Connecticut hold pretty much the whole state except places where there aren’t enough people to matter.  Everywhere between here and there is essentially lawless.

Where does a government lawyer fit in here?

I find myself just going over our inventory of food and supplies over and over.  

I’ve gotta go, April’s awake again.  I just pray she doesn’t ask for Paw-Paw again…not sure I can deal.

Monday, September 28, 2009

They’ve called off the search for survivors for the night.  Maybe they’ll look more come the dawn.  Clark and I headed back to Davis Square when the head of the recovery efforts declared that they weren’t going to be using the big floodlights tonight like they did last night.  They’re afraid that the lights will attact more attention from the US planes that were buzzing Southie all day.

Cowards.

I’d tired.  I’m burned (literally in ca couple of places).

The Convention Center in Southie is a smoldering wreck…mostly a crater.  (some guy in uniform said there are at least four different craters but I can’t see it).  

But they’re still pulling the living out.  

And they want to stop looking.  Dammit, MY FATHER’S IN THERE!

Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck.

Why did he have to be at that blagglefest?  Yeah, cause standing on a stage telling the guys with the bombs have no right to be there is going to make the LESS like ly to hit you.  What kind of logic is that?

The place stunk.  They said it was mostly burning plastic and insulation, and maybe some of it was from when I puked…

I losst track of Clark for a while there.  All i could think was that Neve was gonna shoot me with that shotgun of hers if I got her father killed too.

I’m not making any sense.  Like any of this does.

Fuck it.  You want the city, come take the god-damn city.  It’s not like Boston, like New Engalnd ever was athreat to the world’s only super-power and the assholes who run it.  Just take what you want and let us go back to having our heads in the sand.

Except I want my father.  After everything we went througn back in December, he’s got to still be alive.

Yeah right.  To hell with you all.

Sunday, September 27, 2009

Does anyone know anything about wha the hell happened?!

Paul and my dad are trying to get downtown right now. I begged them not to go, the whole fucking city looks like it’s on fire. I would have sat on Paul if Dad wasnt’ with him. Dad’s very level headed.

The men in uniforms on the street say it’s just a fire, that they fire department is on it, but no fire eversounded like that, damnit. KABOOM! They are fucking bombing Boston! 

If you know what’s going on, please please call me. If you have heard from Gil, please call. The cells seem to be up, Paul calls every fifteen minutes. We can’t reach Gil, though. 

The news is coming in really garbled. NPR says that they are trying to get a man on the scene, something about Southie being a mad house. Gil’s at the convention center in Southie and I am terrified that Paul is going down there and going to try to get past all those angry old mobsters and those terrible old bridges. 

If you know anything, please CALL!

Sunday, September 27, 2009

As predicted, things have gone from bad to worse. My folks arrived last night with most of their possessions… but not all. Apparently they got charged “tolls” for entering the city and when they didn’t have the cash, the men with the guns took jewelry instead. Mom lost her pearls, her wedding ring, her emerald earrings, and some costume stuff she had in a box that was clearly visible from the street. They also took my dad’s wedding ring.

Her engagment ring, her mother’s pearls, my grandmother’s locket, and several gold chains were all in a pouch in her purse. She kept those. 

They arrived to find me hauling my self out to the kitchen for another night with The Shotgun Brigade. (That’s what the three of us with guns have started calling ourselves. Gallows humor.) My dad — he used to be a Ranger a very long time ago — heard what I was doing, reached into the trunk of his car, and pulled out his hunting rifle and then insisted on joining me. 

There was a very long line outside of the kitchen warehouse when we got there and people screamed some awful things at me for “cutting the line.” When I waved my gun and tried to explain that I worked there, they just got angrier. 

There were several attempts to rob the place and one partially succeeded. A large group of angry men rushed us at about midnight. I was angry enough and tired enough that I swear I think I was about to fire. My dad stopped me. He’s a rock.

They got away with several boxes of food. Mostly cereal and some canned veggies. 

If they were starving, if they were hungry people trying to feed their families, I wouldn’t be so livid. But they are just stupidly frightened (or maybe frightened stupid) and scrabbling food to hoarde. They probably have plenty of food still at home, but it’s like those bank runs this time last year — once people start to lose faith, it all comes down like a house of cards. 

And the thing is, I really feel like they raided us just to be doing something. They feel everything going to hell and instead of just hunkering down, they feel like they need to DO something. So they steal food. Which causes this whole cascade of mistrust. 

Dad and I arrived home just an hour ago. We’re going to sack out now that the rest of the folks are up and about. Good thing, too. There weren’t enough beds for all of us to sleep at once. Gil’s off to the convention — Paul says he’s frothing at the mouth about everything, about the betrayal of the people. We’re frankly a little worried about his heart. Or a stroke. 

I’m going to bed.

Saturday, September 26, 2009

The house is quiet, the streets are desserted, there are no lights in the city. 

Over the summer, with clear skies and warm nights, the darkness didn’t seem so odd. I was raised in the country with no streetlights — I’m used to that absolute black. But fall blew in on a storm two days ago that knocked out all the electricity and had us all pulling out the wool sweaters. Between the heavy cloud cover and the fact that no one wants to put a light in the window, and the fact that dawn doesn’t come until 6:30….

I feel like it’s all coming apart at the seams.

I was awake to see the early morning dark because I got tapped to guard the kitchen warehouse last night. Apparently, I’m one of three people in the whold staff who can use a gun without blowing my foot off. With the General gone, things have gone from got to bad to HOLY FUCK pretty damned quick. We’ve got people from the outlying ‘burbs pouring into the cities on the rumour that it’s better here. We’ve got people from the city leaving for… I don’t know where. In the day time, it’s confusing but still normal. New-normal, but it was safe on the streets. The rumours were flying fast — the General’s daughter being held at Gitmo, troops on the Mass./R.I. border, spaceships at MIT (which really wasn’t the most ridiculous thing we’d heard, believe it or not) — and people we gathering at any public space to talk, natter, worry, debate, argue. 

Once the sun went down last night though, with no electricity, it got bad. There were roving gangs of looters and roving gangs of “neighborhood watch” types trying to defend their little chunck of city, and roving squads of military types who are trying to protect everyone but don’t have a command structure right now. 

I know all of this because I spent the night sitting at the warehouse with a loaded shotgun, some emergency flares, a bullhorn, and an extra-strong cup of the last coffee in the city. Happily, in Cabridge at least, guns are pretty damned rare among the general population and the Neighborhood Watch types and the looters were mostly unarmed. And there’s really nothing quite as frightening in the dark as the sound of a double-barreled shotgun being ratched. Most folks would give up. Things died out about midnight, happily.

We did let one group of armed types with uniforms take some food. Not a lot, but we weren’t sure that they weren’t actually the military types. I miss the General.

Today is going to be tough. Tonight is going to be tougher. If I wasn’t so wired and tired, I’d be panicking.

My folks called on the cell last night. They and their dogs are on their way up today. They are putting as much food in the car as my dad can manage. I asked them to bring dad’s hunting rifles, too. And I told them to come in the daylight only and on backroads only. It’s going to be a tight fit with them and Gil. Not that we’ve seen Gil in three days, what with the “convention” going into overdrive. 

Avery was a little white around the eyes this morning as she took over guard duties, talkinga bout her relatives in Kansas. She’s sort of the driving force that holds this little kitchen together and if she bugs out… 

I’m so tired.

Thursday, September 24, 2009

They announced the deal.  General Carlson is in exile (welcomed by Portugal if by nobody else).  A Committee on Reconciliation comprising a bunch of ‘luminaries’ and four of the six New England governors is coordinating with US authorities to investigate the Capitol bombing and ‘ensure law and order in the Region.’

It’s a sell-out.  There are already US Army troops in parts of Connecticut.  The Groton sub-base is one of the first places to again fall under US sovereignty.

Don’t believe the media that all of this is going smoothly though.  At least one convoy in the Berkshires got bushwhacked this morning.  I also heard that a US delegation to be sent to Boston was called back because of ‘worries over security on the ground.’

Gil is frothing at the mouth.  On this I agree.  These people, especially the military ones, don’t have the authority to be negotiating let alone capitulating to US thuggishness.  Gil of course is focused on the ‘representatives of the people’ convened for the Constitutional Convention.  He’s all geared-up for that group to assert that it is the only true government on the USNE.

I don’t know about all of New England, but it sounds like the conventioneers have the moral and political high ground here in Boston.  I don’t suppose they care much up in Maine, but I’m not sure they cared about us cityfolk at any point in the past year.

Wednesday, September 23, 2009

The rumors are flying furiously here in Boston and in the blogosphere.  But this one I believe.

On relatively good authority, I’ve heard that General Carlson has left New England.  An Air France 747 bound for the Azores left Logan early this morning with no filed passenger list.  Supposedly General Carlson, his family, and few of his lieutenants were on the flight.

Somebody cut a deal and I get the feeling we here in Boston are the ones getting hung out to dry.

Tuesday, September 22, 2009

Why do I bother to go into the office?

Nobody is trying to get any work done.  Yeah, we have some more hurricane clean-up tasks.  There are still Muslim refugees to get legally settled.  But nobody wants to push paper when bullets might start flying.

The rumor at my office is that Gov. Patrick, Gen. Carlson, and Gov. Rell are having serious talks with a bunch of US muckety-mucks to try and defuse this whole situation.  On the news we’ve heard that the EU is offering to mediate…or maybe it’s just France.  It seems not everyone always agrees with Monsieur Sarkozy.

Gil in particular is frustrated by the rumors.  The Convention was getting close to a full draft of the NE constitution.  Now all the delagates are too busy talking in back channels or pretending to talk in back channels or being offended they aren’t being invited into closed-door meetings or sitting around behind closed doors repeating what everybody already knows.

And the fragile distribution systems are falling apart.  Neve’s food center didn’t get their shipments today.  And a bunch of teens and pre-teens tried to take off with a cart full of bread from one of the bakeries.  That hasn’t happened in weeks.

Just gotta try and hold it all together.

Monday, Sept. 21, 2009

We didn’t do it.

At least I hope to God we didn’t do it.

No.  There’s no way.  

Folks in New England may have no love lost for George Bush or for the USA in general, but that doesn’t mean that we’re going to send a bunch of folks down to DC with a bomb to blow up the Capitol!  Even if we’re trying not to be part of the USA, we don’t hate the US government that much…we were all Americans not so long ago.

Okay, so was Tim McVeigh, but…no.  I still don’t believe it.

We’re on our own here.  We’ve got plenty of our own problems without planning some way to get…what was it…four guys, a front loader and a couple of dump trucks full of ANFO across the border, through god-knows how many checkpoints and into Washington.  And not just into the city, ramming it right into the Capitol building.

Why would a New Englander do that?

I’m not just asking about humanity’s inhumantity here.  What purpose does it serve?  Why attack the Congress.  We don’t have any issue with the Congress except that they refused to reign in a despotic chief executive.  If we we ere going after a a buidling in DC, wouldn’t it be the White House? Or maybe the Pentagon.

No, I don’t buy the line that the Bush White House is pushing.

Islamic terrorists makes more sense to me.  Uighurs and Palestinian terrorists have been using construction vehicles in their attacks since last summer at least.  The Iranians have more cause than we do…we only got hit by a little airstrike, not a full-on bombing campaign.  And does anybody still remember al-Qaida?

But nobody’s looking at them.  Everybody is just calling for the heads of all of us ‘bluebloods’ on a pike.

Not good.

Thursday, Sept. 17, 2009

The military action earlier in the week was probably some high-level message from the White House to the Boston leadership. (We totally need a spiffy house for our president, once we get a president. Maybe the Thoreau House? “Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also a prison.”)  I know it had a huge impact on the local psyche — the undercurrent of conversation at the kitchens was nervous bordering on hysterical.

But what really punched home the message for me wasn’t the bombs.

It was the prayer group.

Watching that nutjob Richard Land on television hold hands with his faithful followers and call down God’s wrath upon our heads for turning our back on “good, right, Christian America,” made me want to scream. The mobs of “righteous Christians” — read: crazy Baptists or Evangelicals — chanting for our firey damnation made me want to weep.

This is why we seceded, really. It’s not about an election … okay, it was about the election, but it was also about the fact that the old U.S.A. had broken into two factions: crazy-ass devout Cultural Baptist types who thought they were always right and everyone else, who knew that they were wrong.

Wrong about what? Pretty much the whole hit parade of cultural hot-button issues in the past three decades or so: Censorship. Sex ed. Abortion. Death penalty. Gay marriage. Birth control. Religious tolerance. Evolution v. creationism. Separation of church and state. Women’s rights.

Whenever the Right opposed these, their fundamental argument always came down to some version of: “Because my god said it was bad.” And just because they didn’t like something, they insisted that the whole country toe that line that they saw drawn in the Bible.

When I tried, in polite conversation about these issues, to point that I didn’t worship as they did, that their Bible was not really relevant in my worldview, my politics, my religion, or my Constitution I was not met with a logical response. I usually got anger, bafflement, and, on one memorable occasion, a red-faced man screeching “Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live!” in my face.

Sadly, I’m not a witch. If I were, I could wave a magic wand and say “Bippity boppity boo!” and those mouth-frothing zealots would let us live in peace.

Monday, September 14, 2008

OK, scuttlebut here is that the overflying planes we F/A 18 Hornets from an aircraft carrier somewhere off the coast.  Hanscom AFB got hit with something, possibly Otis AFB down on the Cape too.  The Pilin Leon is also apparently sitting on the bottom of Dorchester Bay.  The thing is, we had that Venezuelan tanker empty weeks ago…you’d think the Navy pilots would be able to tell how high she was riding in the water.  I guess maybe it was just a warning about what the can do to the next tanker that comes to Boston.

It sounds like this was an isolated strike, for now.  Nobody has mentioned anywhere else being hit.  There are people freaking out here, expecting to see Marines landing on Revere Beach and paratroopers falling on Harvard Yard.  I don’t think that’s gonna happen; or maybe I’m in denial.

Monday, September 14, 2009

Does anybody else know what the hell is going on?  We got woken up at 5 AM when a couple of jet engines whent sceaming overhead (April hasn’t really settled down since).  Most of the radio and TV stations are fuzzy and garbled.  Grid power is still out, but that means nothing.

There have been dull thuds to the south and and the west.  I hope they aren’t bombs.  Or if they are, that it’s just our guys practicing or something.

I know this might pop-up on RSS readers.  I know WordPress stayed up when Gmail went down last Halloween, so maybe it’ll work again today.  Please, if you’ve got news on what’s going on in Boston, post a comment.  We really only know what we can see from the roof.

Friday, Sept. 11, 2009

I didn’t even realize the date until I sat down to write this. Now that I think on it, it’s dreadfully appropriate.

I spent the day today dealing with setting up a refugee camp.

Not for the hurricane mess. Other folks have that task well in hand. I had been running around doing extra stuff for that but yesterday morning Avery tapped me on the shoulder and then she discretely walked me into a small room to ask me to handle a delicate situation.

At first I figured one of the guys in the kitchen — a real handsy playboy — had gotten too frisky with one of the college students one too many times. I was dreading the talk because he has fantastic knife skills and takes most of the prep off my shoulders for dinner.

No, this was way worse. 

Turns out that the U.S.A. had finally and trully enacted the Muslim Registration Act, which, oh God I’m just figuring it out now, I’m so stupid, went into effect today. Of course it did. Fucking politicians and their god damned symbolism. Anyway….

Since a lot of Muslim communities in the U.S.A. have noticed a very very high “disappeared” rate in the past year or so, the registration act had a lot of them truly and deeply terrified. And so, suddenly, a number of large groups apparently picked up stakes and made for the border — the U.S.N.E. border. They arrived at the Vermont border just after dawn yesterday with plenty of stuff and, they thought, enough money for a decent grubstake. 

They were leaving houses, property, buisinesses behind. But they were willing. And I got tapped to try and get a handful settled into Cambridge. Apparently, the fact that I know what “halal” means makes me a multicultural whizz. (Note to self — is that why there are no Muslims in the community kitchens? Can we start a halal kitchen so I don’t get stuck with this job again. ‘Cause it’s going to happen again…)

This seemed like a fairly easy job — find landlords willing to rent to the families, show them around, explain the T, basically give a freshman orientation. There were other places where the job wasn’t so easy — some of the refugees were showing up with no money, not nearly enough stuff, some were sick, some spoke little to no English. Apparently, someone has a sick fuck sense of humor and sent a whole bunch of very angry, very fundamentalist Muslims up to the northern end of New Hampshire to work on a farm up there. Hee. I’d pay to see that. But the smallish group they sent on to Cambridge (who is “they”? Do we even have an immigration office? A policy?) were all very well-educated, had good cash reserves, good job skills, good language skills. No chadors, anyway.

And then, this morning, their bank accounts got frozen. Apparently they didn’t make the transfers fast enough or something, I don’t know. Paul tried to explain it but I’m just too tired to grasp the complexities of interegnum international banking. 

Suddenly the whole thing became much more complicated. Made even more complicated by the phone call in the middle of the day saying that I should prepare for a whole lot more over the weekend. Apparently some violence happened in Kansas City, of all places, right around lunchtime, and suddenly more Muslims are streaming east. I should start looking into ways to house and feed and clothe whole bunches more. 

The thing is, I am mildly ashamed to admit that I really don’t understand what halal means. I mean, no pork, no booze, no blood, I get that. But I’m sure there’s more than that. And if they really want halal, meaning meat slaughted by a religious guy with the right paraphanalia, they are probably scrod. Can they eat scrod? 

I have a lot of wiki-ing to do tonight. And reading books. And logistics. 

And I have to talk Avery out of her brilliant idea to put this new group in Brookline. Sigh.

Wednesday, September 9, 2009

Neve, April, and I took a little break from the city and were up at the cabin this past weekend.  I think it helped cool things down between me and Gil.  This is all for the good as I just don’t have the temperment to fight with my father.

That’s all well and good, but it was chaos in the office when I arrived today.  All work on new transit planning is on hold while the USNE authorities try to deal with the wreckage from Hurricane Erika.  We missed out on the details up in the woods, but I can tell you that it sounds like most of the media stories aren’t really saying how bad it is.  Long Island took most of the damage, but the southeast coast of Connecticut and a bunch of Rhode Island is hurting.

I’m not sure how things are going in New York, but New England just isn’t prepared to handle something like this on our own yet.  A lot of the emergency tasks usually fall to the state National Guard units; but General Carlson has most of those units holding strongpoints on the western border or guarding bases and nuke plants.  The few more units are up in Maine on ‘training exercises’ convincing the Mainiacs that it would be a bad idea for them to try and be independent of Boston.

So, the roads are blocked, people are panicked, and a bad food and essentials distribution system is getting worse.  My Army Corps co-worker, Sargeant Lederer, gave me a crash course in logistics and quartermastering today and I’m sure there is more to learn tomorrow.  For now, I’m going to grab some sleep before going back in early.  There’s rumors that the Canadians might help out, so we’ll need to define routes and staging areas for them.

Thursday, September 3, 2009

I love my Dad.  He’s a great guy, he does good works, and he is committed to doing the right thing.

He’s also a minister by schooling and training and a self-taught computer techie and administrator later.  Now he’s crashed on my couch and taking the T into the convention center everyday for political planning going on down there.  Like I said, I love him, but he has an idealist streak a mile wide and I’m sure that it’s gonna get him in trouble.

Gil hasn’t been involved in any kind of politics above the city level since the the SDC went belly-up in the sixties — he once confided in me that he felt guilty for ’selling out’ and not continuing on with the Weathermen like some of his compatriots.

Well, now he’s a representative of what we can best call the old-Hippie Party.  These veterans of yesteryear’s culture wars are intent on seeing that the New England central government conforms to their more egalitarian hopes.  

And it’s driving me nuts.

Gil is spending all his time in committees trying to get a ‘right to employment’, trying to define a national minimum wage over $10/hour, trying to make all education funding come from regional income taxes instead of property taxes.  When I try and point out that there are more important issues to get defined – common defense, appeals courts, foreign policy, election policy  - he gets strident saying that we have to make sure that the foundations of New England don’t repeat the mistakes that made the USA so systematically corrupt.  My retort was that then he should be working to avoid a unitary executive, unless he liked the idea of living under General Carlson’s guns for the foreseeable future.

Gil thinks that if the people all get a fair shake, everything will turn out OK.  I don’t.  There’s always a opportunity somewhere for someone to grab power — they will always try to make that grab.  The best way to prevent that is to make it in someone else’s interest to grab their arm first.  Politics of divisiveness Gil calls it.

My father is so optimistic, so positive…I’m gonna kill him.

Sunday, August 30, 2009

Okay, so I’m one of those moms. I bake my own bread, I can my own food, I sew quilts. I wore April in a sling and she only plays with wooden toys and eats organic food. Despite all fo this, I haven’t gone to far as some other Cantabridgian moms have. I admit it — I still watch TV.

April doesn’t. The only Nick she’s ever seen was at the doctor’s office, she doesn’t know who Elmo or Dora is, she’s avoided all the Disney stuff. But I still like my TV. I watch House and Mythbusters and The Daily Show back before the gov’t pulled it off the air. I like some cooking shows and I love The Closer.

So I’m really annoyed at the this whole delayed fall season. I get that the U.S.A. now has much more stringent rules about what can go on the air — they call it national security, we call it censorship. But the fact that the office of free speech or whatever they call it didn’t present these guidelines until now, two weeks before the first episode of House was supposed to go on the air! The fact that there’s talk of not letting the telecoms export the shows to the U.S.N.E. at all….

Damnit, I need my Hugh Laurie fix.I have to know what’s going to happen with House and Cutty! Is she or isn’t she? I’ve got a friend who is all kinds of twisted up over the delay in the Desperate Housewives premiere, too. The whole Bree plotline has her freaking out. And what about Lost? We’re all dying for more Lost!

I guess I can’t complain too much. I mean, we seceded. We don’t get a say in what the U.S.A. gov’t does any more. And while the U.S.N.E. gov’t would never censor any damned thing, Boston isn’t really a hopping center of film and television. I just wish California and New York would secede, too, so we could keep getting our shows.

I really miss John Stewart.

Thursday, August 27, 2009

The students are coming! Or not.

Boston is unique — possibly in the world, certainly on the continent — for it’s unusually large number of colleges and universities. I think we’ve got 85 or something. It makes the city one of mankind’s great brain trusts, which is nice, but it also means that every year, right around Labor Day weekend, we get a massive shift in demographics. Hundreds of thousands of students from all over the country arrive with futons, laptops, brand new sweatshirts, little Pathfinder maps, and pretentious posters. The weekend is hellish if you need to go anywhere or do anything, but actually quite fun if you don’t.

There’s always a freshman wearing way too many clothes branded with the school logo. The freshman who arrives and buys a fez from the guy in the Garage so that he can be known as “The guy with the fez,” not realizing that there are already a dozen others out there. The students shuffling around with cases of beer or wheeling a keg on an improvised bicycle trailer. Not to mention the slews of moving trucks, abandoned couches, and broken box springs.

This year is likely to be different. We’re not sure how yet. Colleges are being close-mouthed about how many students have called to decline positions, how many have accepted. After last year’s loan crunch, when so many students couldn’t go because they couldn’t secure funding, they are playing the numbers close to their chest. Clearly the big names — Harvard, MIT — won’t have a problem. But Harvard has a $26 BILLION endowment, so it’s not like a bad year is going to hurt their bottom line. The smaller colleges, though, may be sucking wind.

And if the students don’t come, a lot of the retail stores that depend on them are going to go under. We’re losing stores pretty quick already, but the students are their real life blood.

But what parent is going to pay $40K a year to send their kids to a place where you can’t get fucking sunblock? Are U.S.N.E. colleges even accredited in the U.S.A.? With the constitution in flux, what rights do students have as opposed to citizens? What currency will they be accepting? Will there be heat and electricity all winter?

Then again, some of the reports we hear coming out of the U.S.A. sound a little scary. The “Muslim Registration Act” is a little terrifying, for example. Maybe folks will be sending their kids to the U.S.N.E. to get away from crap like that.

Tuesday, August 25, 2009

Well, Gil didn’t show up with clocks. Or sunblock, for that matter.

He showed up with four suitcases and a steamer trunk. He’s moved in.

Because of his status as an organizer and leader in his neck of the woods, he’s been elected to be a delegate to the constitutional convention that’s going on up here this fall. It doesn’t start for a few more weeks — Paul can tell you more about it — but Gil is up to mix, mingle, network, and rub elbows with the leading lights of the new nation.

His wife is still back home. In theory, she’s staying there to finish the harvest. (Gil’s garden could feed an army!) But Liz isn’t much for leaving her little neck of the woods and I worry a little. Gil loves his wife, but he’s deeply passionate about this new social experiment and I think Liz might resent that. She also resents the idea that she might have to leave her kids and grandkids for the big faraway city.

If I thought either of them were reading this blog, I’d erase that last paragraph.

April is thrilled that her Paw-Paw is staying with us. Frankly, I’m happy of the extra help with the garden and the chickens and the childcare. Gil excels in all three areas.

He’s so optimistic, so excited, that it scares me a little.

Sunday, August 23, 2009

My kingdom for a bottle of SPF 45.

The city has slowly been running out of some things, most of which I don’t care about. For some time, many women have complaining about a dearth of their favorite cosmetics/facial products. Apparently Aveda won’t cross the border, for some reason.

I usually use Aveeno and Burt’s Bees, but as that became harder to find I switched to Dr. Bronner’s without too much grief. (I even scent it a little with some essential oils I made from the herb garden. My hair and laundry smells like rosemary this week!) Conditioner has been harder to make-do with, but I’ve got a giant bottle of no-more tangles for April’s hair and I’ve cut mine to chin length to compensate.

But this week, April dumped my whole last bottle of sunblock down the toilet and suddenly I was out. And I can’t find any more anywhere.

I understand that there’s a gray market in these things. One of my dear friends spent a largish amount of money on a case of 12 bottles of her foundation powder. But her “connection” only deals in European cosmetics. There isn’t a profit margin in regular sunblock because the communities centers are supposed to distribute it. But apparently they ran out. (There’s a rumor that there was a rumor of a run on sunblock which of course cause a run on sunblock and everyone’s hoarding it.) The community center swears there’s more due in from Maine any day now, but she’s been saying that all week.

In the mean time, it’s high August, 95 degrees out, and harvest time and I have to go pick crap in my garden with long sleeves and long pants to try not to get a second-degree burn. I’d pick at night except it’s barely a crescent moon and I can’t see expending the oil or electricity for the light. I hadn’t noticed how dark it gets at night now — city glow is a thing of the past, I guess.

We got a call from Gil this morning. It was way staticky, cell phone reception is still dicey sometimes in his neck of Connecticut, but we managed to understand that he’s coming tomorrow on the train to visit. I hope that I managed to convey my request for as many bottles of sunblock as he can get. I’m not sure. He might show up with a suitcase full of clocks. Gil’s a little weird sometimes.

Wednesday, August 19, 2009

I am hot.

It’s actually unusually cool here in New England today — overcast, gray, only about 72 degrees at the peak — which is why we chose today in the first place. But the fact remains that I’m still HOT. Even after a long cool shower.

Today was a massive canning day down at the community kitchen. I was stuck in the tomato section all damned day.

Twleve hours of blanching, peeling, grinding, food milling, heating, stirring, packing, sterilizing, salting, and boiling. So much of canning is about boiling. You boil the jars to sterilize them. You boil the water to blanch and then peel the tomatoes. You boil the tomatoes. You pour hot tomatoes into hot jars and then submerge them in boiling water!

I wanted pickles. Pickles don’t require nearly so much heat and I actually like the smell of hot vinegar. But apparently, because I refused to be the head of this committee as well as the winter committee, Avery got her revenge by sticking me with tomatoes.

Could have been worse. The peaches portion of the kitchen did not go well. See, there was some brandy involved…. Pure rotgut, but still.

There were some nice benefits, though. I brought in some of my own produce and my own jars. Everyone agreed to stay and it was just two batches of 24 jars each, all of which took maybe fifteen minutes at the end of the day when everyone had gotten good at it. If I had done that at home, without the Hobart to do a speed-sterilization and an army to grind the food mill (I don’t do whole tomatoes), it would have been an all-day project that kept me up well past April’s bedtime.

The clouds are supposed to remain tomorrow so there will be more canning to come. I bribed Avery with the promise of cinnamon buns and got moved to the pressure canning station. Pressure canners, Mason jars, and, most importantly, Ball lids are suddenly worth their weight in booze and everyone is dredging them from basements.

Happily, I’m a canner from way back and have a nice supply of jars. The lids have cost me some effort and baked goods to get, but they are worth it.

On a only tangentially related note, I discovered an ancient apple tree today, hidden in the bracken and trash trees of the old railroad right of way. It’s deep in the greenery where only drunks, teenagers in love, and toddlers go. In another month, the apples will be totally ripe. And I’m going to pick the hell out of that tree, grind ‘em up, and stick that cider into a carboy in the basement. Booze is starting to get really dear around here and I’m guessing a couple bottles of rock hard apple jack will go a long way to making our winter a little more comfortable.

Sunday, August 16, 2009

The pineapple is a traditional New England symbol of welcome and hospitality.  You see it on quilts, on those seasonal flags everyone flys, and carved into the lintels of buildings.  But you can’t grow pineapples in New England, so what gives?  The story is that all the New England sea captains would stop in Hawaii on their long  trips to trade tchochkes in China and load up with pineapples to help ward-off scurvy among their crew.  When they got back to their home ports in Salem or Mystic or wherever, they’d get their big paycheck and then celebrate with one of the left-over pineapples.  The pineapple crown would be placed on a fencepost in front of the house to announce a successful trip and to invite the community in to share some of this amazingly sweet tropical fruit and celebrate.

I thought of this tradition when Josh and Becca invited us over today for an old-fashioned wine tasting.  Becca’s parents were visiting from the Netherlands (recently relocated from North Carolina), and had brought with them a full case of European wines.  Dark Burgundies, German Rieslings, Italian Chiantis — it was beautiful.  Becca decided that she couldn’t keep such a bounty to herself and invited over another three couples.  We hired kid-care for the day and spread the tasting out over two meals and snacks.

Things have been hard on the oenophiles of New England for the last few months.  Wine is not high on the list on necessities for import.  While New England does have bunch of local vineyards and even a few places making some very good fine cider,  they haven’t had any time to gear-up to replace all the missing imports from California and overseas.  Just one more thing sacrificed on the alter of priorities.  *sigh*

Thursday, August 13, 2009

I think I’ve got myself a steady paycheck.  Nothing is certain yet, last minute benefits negotiations are always a pain, but the new Regional Transit Authority has given me an offer to work for them.

Deval Patrick and the other members of the Council of Governors decided to merge a bunch of the quasi-independent transportation bureaucracies (MassPort, MBTA, Turnpike Authority, MARTA, and a bunch of smaller groups) in a plan to make sense out of transport in the US of New England.  Mostly, they’re trying to make as much of the region be economically car and truck-free as possible.

To start off, I’ll be working on what the locals here in Cambridge are calling the ‘Veggie Express”.  The old Central Massachusetts Railroad used to run straight from North Cambridge out to the Pioneer Valley towns of Amherst, Hadley, and Northampton (straight from a major farm area to a big ol’ market).  The line shut down in pieces between the 20’s and the 70’s.  Now I’ve got a bunch of land title and use assessments to go through to see how fast we can get the line running again.

The law part of it could be a real mess.  The fact that part of the right-of-way is now covered by the MassPike isn’t going to make things easy either.  However, this new combined transit group has some serious clout and the big-name pols (the ones who haven’t left for safer pastures in the ‘mainland’) are big behind getting this nascent country all knit up with working rail lines.  This is just one of the light-rail, passenger-rail, and even freight-rail proposals getting pushed forward.  I heard at least one team at MIT is working on human-powered passenger rail cars in case the systems get their electricity cut.

Wednesday, August 12, 2009

So, how many people caught the pirated “Good Morning America” broadcast this morning? I didn’t see it myself — newstainment usually does rate high on my priorities for pedaling the generator — but I heard about it from the talk around town. Our broadcast pirates got anywhere from ten minutes to almost an hour of broadcast time (depends on where you were on when ABC managed to get control of the feed back). Even at the ten minute-mark it was enough for some tough questions to be asked of the Bush Administration and a small mob to form in Times Square.

Talk around here is that this is another Children of Liberty move…that they’ve moved to New York City after ‘liberating’ New England. Or maybe it’s a CoL franchise or copy-cat. I’m not so sure. Yeah, these guys were organized, but they seemed more violent than the initial CoL pranks were here in Boston. They also never gave names. CoL always signed their hacks, often with the Crispus Attackus name.

No, I think this is something different…something a less playful and more harsh. I just hope NYC doesn’t end up going through the crap we’ve dealt with around here in the past 6 months. They’ve had enough trouble in the past decade.

Saturday, August 8, 2009

Another week of walking the fine line of law here in the US of New England. I managed to make some boiler-plate contract law dance enough yesterday that a few big European multinationals are willing to do business here (we think and hope). A French attorney from Nestle was particularly helpful this week, giving me some examples of contracts they’ve used in other “non-state administered areas” (I just had to get him to explain some of the French).

So that’s it. We’re a country…or not. New England has joined an elite fraternity of unrecognized states. Hell, we’re doing pretty well for ourselves in that group too. Unlike most de facto states, we don’t (yet) have a foreign sponsor (unless you count Venezuela). That puts us ahead of Northern Cyprus (Turkey), Nagorno-Karabakh (Armenia), or Abkazia, Transnistria and South Ossetia (Russia).  We’ve certainly got a better economy than Somaliland or Kosovo.  Yup, looks like our only competition in this new fraternity is Taiwan – and I don’t think anybody here is harboring dreams of conquering the ‘mainland’.

All told, following the Taiwanese example doesn’t look all that bad, even if the Bushies insist that the rest of the world follow a One-America policy.

Friday, August 7, 2009

Can I make a petty complaint?

I know, we’re better off without the thugs shooting people, without the government shutting down our internet and phone. I know electricity has been on reliably since the Provisional Government took office and that babies are getting formula regularly. I’m all for it. I love The United States of New England.

I hate the fact that I can’t get my books.

Commerce between the USNE and USA has been dodgy at best. Essentials are getting through, even if we have to route them through Canada. But no one except me seems to regard the latest Janet Evanovich as essential. And when they do come through, the prices are astronomical.

I’m usually one of those women who is at the bookstore on the day a book is released. My local store — Porter Sq. Books — is very good about accommodating my impatience. I have certain authors that I like to read ASAP — Evanovich, Reichs, Elizabeth Peters, Charlaine Harris, and Kim Harrison, among others. They all have had books out in the past six months. But between the violence and now the revolution, I don’t have Stephanie Plum’s 15th book, damnit, and it’s killing me.

My relatives in the Carolinas have tried shipping some of them to me packages seem to get waylaid. I’ve actually seen signs up in the Square asking to rent books — “If you have the latest Johanna Lindsay, I am willing to pay $10 to borrow it for one day.” That’s a good idea. Not that I’d read Johanna Lindsay — bodice rippers aren’t my thing, for one, and for another, her history is somewhat iffy — but if there’s anyone in the city with the newest Sookie Stackhouse, I’d be willing to trade fresh eggs for a few hours alone with it.

I also miss good chocolate. Sigh. The price of freedom.

Thursday, August 6, 2009

God, I am exhausted.

I just spent the whole morning in a meeting about winter shelters. It seemed odd to be sitting around a table in the community hall talking about blankets and heating oil and whatnot with sweat trickling down our spines — it’s 85 degrees here in Boston — but I suppose it’s my own damned fault. I’ve been tugging on sleeves and poking people in the back for a month trying to get them to talk about winter.

So Andromeda — she’s the head of the community center in our neck of the woods — put me in charge. That’ll learn me

You know what’s funny, though? Once I was put in charge and put out a call for people to help me (and conscripted a few, the baked brownies to bribe a few more), I found out that I wasn’t the only one worrying about it. Last year, if you’ll recall, people died. Even before Halloween, they were talking about heating oil prices doubling. Of course, after the attacks, those prices seem hilariously quaint. Like $4/gal. gas.

We came up with a lot of good ideas that can be enacted locally. A lot of it is education: teaching people how to stay warm with less fuel. Things like: dress warmly. You’d think this would be a no-brainer, but people still tend to think of heating their homes instead of heating themselves. We’re looking into buying lots and lots of silk and merino underwear from the Vermont Country Store to distribute. Blanket drives to make sure everyone’s got a nice snuggy warm bed. Pamphlets on why short skirts and high heeled shoes aren’t the best bet in 20 degree weather.

Home energy audits. Rapid-response medical teams.

And, of course, emergency shelters. The community eating centers — we have GOT to come up with a better name for those! — can hold a lot of people, but we need to make sure they are properly heated. And outfitted with blankets, cots, urns to heat coffee and tea, etc. Phones and phone trees to check on the elderly and ill. Cars and a gas budget for picking up people who have run out of heating oil at 2 a.m. on bitterly cold nights. Private areas for children, moms, nursing moms.

There was a HUGE debate about co-sleeping that I finally had to end by standing on a chair and using my “mom voice.”

And, for my sins, I got elected to go up a level. Apparently, I need to go to the city administrator for the whole Boston area — not just my little corner of Cambridge and Somerville — and try to convince him that we need to do these things on a city-wide scale. Andromeda was suggesting that I should think about working on a state- or even region-wide scale. (Region or country? Are we a country?)

Going up a level means politics. I hate politics. I hate dealing with people I don’t know who can’t be bribed with brownies or strawberry jam or beet pickles. (The local military guy, as it turns out, doesn’t have a sweet tooth but remembers his Baba’s beet pickles fondly.)

It also means budgets. Buying enough silk and wool underthings for my slice of the Commonwealth is one thing. I can do that math. I know those people. Buying enough for the whole of New England — how do you make sure everyone gets enough and no one gets double and what about people who have some already, we don’t want them to have extra, but aren’t they getting stiffed, what about people who are allergic….?

Sometimes I just want to beat my head against a wall.

Tuesday, August 4, 2009

It is about noon. I just got back from the food market and I’m shaking my head.

The food ration cards are pretty basic — you get so many stamps for meat, so many for milk, so many for fruits and veggies, etc. You can use them at the grocery store, the farmer’s market, or at the government food distribution centers. Those of us with pre-paid CSAs have managed to wrangle an exemption, happily. Of course, enough people have left the city that the CSA folks usually have left over meat or eggs or veggies or whatnot and can sell it (at a nice profit!) to people who line up waiting.

Now, here’s the thing.

I arrived this morning at a food distribution center with some other folks from the community kitchens. (Free, no ration cards necessary.) There are two different bays. We were at bay 1, where they hand out large quantities of raw goods there — 50 lb. bags of rice, beans, grain, flour, sugar, oil. A whole pile of red clover seeds, which is weird but we picked some up for sprouts.  Huge primal cuts of pork and lamb.

In bay 2, there’s the food that you might have bought at the supermarket two years ago: boxes of Cheerios and packaged cheese already sliced and Pepperidge Farm white bread and orange juice in cartons and jars of tomato sauce and whatnot.

Now, for those of you not struggling with the ration cards, I’m going to let you in on a little secret. One box of Cheerios gets checked off your card with a stamp. One 50 lb. bag of rice gets the same stamp.

Usually, if I’m going to the food centers (this one is in the armory down Highland Ave.), I go at the ass-crack of dawn because we’ve got to get breakfast on the table. Usually it’s just a handful of us from the community food centers mucking around in Bay 1 with our lists and our heavy-duty bike trailers. Today, for a variety of reasons that don’t bear mentioning, we wound up going late.

And, once again, it was mostly just us mucking around in Bay 1. We had the Food Center ration cards and were hauling giant piles of grain for porridge and jars of molasses (fewer stamps than sugar) and beans and whatnot. There were only two other groups — large families obviously pooling their ration cards and speaking (I think) Vietnamese and something Mike assured me was Lebanese.

Bay 2, however, was mobbed. There was a line out the door, people shoving and arguing. There wasn’t enough tomato sauce to go around, announced the nice man doing the handing out, and there was a hue and cry from the waiting crowds. I was stunned. Jarred tomato sauce? In AUGUST? New England really isn’t the land of tomatoes, but in August we’ve got them coming out our ears. The folks at the farmer’s markets are practically giving them away, even at inflated prices.

After I finished the food center’s buying, I did some private shopping. Brown rice, lentils, giant jugs of oil, even a case of cream (I’m making butter and freezing it, now that electricity is up reliably). A scary big bag of red beans. Even some of that red clover — I’ve never done sprouting before, but it can’t be that hard. Gil does it.

I walked away with enough food to feed my family for months. For about ten stamps, a week’s worth on my card.

The nice people next door were complaining about a shortage of coffee and Lactaid milk. (Two stamps, fully 20 percent of their ration.)

Monday, August 3, 2009

I respect Gen. Carlson and what he’s done to restore order here in Boston.  It is much better to seeing his…I guess I’d call them militia…out guarding streets that seeing those damned black Humvees we had in town all  Spring.  That said, did we really need this de facto independence?  The legal landscape around here is a fucking mess.  What is going to happen to all the court cases that are ongoing in the federal district courts of Mass and Conn and RI, and Vermont, New Hampshire, and Maine?  (answer, the judges are just going to ignore the situation for now and make their rulings)  What about cases in other districts with New England plaintiffs and defendants, or out-of-region parties with cases in New England districts?  (answer, everybody seems to be appealing for now…or just not showing up in court).

OK, I’m a lawyer, so the court cases are what I think of first.  Hell, on a personal level this is good for me.  Someone has to generate all the extra motions ans responses and opinions.  As a former Fed employee used to dealing with slippery-bastard companies spread across hell-and-gone, I have a lot of the case-law for this crap down pat.  Work is good, it keeps my family fed.

But there isn’t good precedent for sections of the country that have rejected central Federal control.  Yes, the South in the Civil War did honor the legal contracts and contract law from the US, but they also passed their own Constitution too.  Not to mention the whole declaring independence thing and the war.

Crap, scaring myself here.  Everything is working well here.  Everyone is happy.  Yes, food and gas are on ration cards.  Yes, we still have troops (the common mix of former vets and former Guardsmen) standing at street corners.

But it’s so much better now than it was in June…right?

Thursday, July 30, 2009

Only a man would describe our past weekend in the blase terms that Paul used.

There’s some quote of Orson Scott Card’s that I can’t recall right now about how women make civilization that I would love to insert right here but I can’t find it.

The North Country House is, in the roughest possible terms, done. Rain and wind only comes in if we let it, there’s running water all the time, hot water if the sun’s been out. There’s some small amount of electricity — the turbine is up and running and we can keep lights on OR a refrigerator running. Not both at the same time. But that’s it.

We slept on sleeping bags on the floor. I have plans drawn up for a bed with heavy wool curtains to pull around it to help keep it warm int the winter, but we ran out of money before the cabinetmaker got any work done. We cooked on an open fire pit in front of the cabin with the cast iron skillet I brought up. (We brought up a small camp stove but there’s no propane to be had in the North Country. A couple of folks have cornered the market and aren’t selling.) We peed and pooped in the composting outhouse we installed back when we were still living out of the Vardo.

All of that is fine and even fun in July. But winter is coming.

April and I spent most of our time setting up house — or rather, I did. April ran around and laughed at all the space. I swept out all the debris left over from the workmen, cobbled together a couple of basic shelves from the leftover wood, set up the root cellar, made lists of things we need and will never be able to get our hands on.

Paul split wood. Pretty much that’s all he did the whole time we were there. We’ve got the start of a nice woodpile, but even with the second-hand log splitter we borrowed off one of the workmen for the summer, it’s not nearly enough.

“Enough for what?” Paul kept asking me. “We don’t do a lot of winter camping. Shouldn’t that be enough?”

I don’t know.

Wednesday, July 29, 2009

We just got back from an extended weekend up in the mountains. It wasn’t that much of a planned affair; we just decided to go when we got our gas ration card for our portion of the Venezuelan bounty sitting in Boston Harbor.

I had forgotten how nice it can be to just get away from people. Up in the far north there isn’t any of the politics that weigh down every conversation and even the air here in the city. That’s not to say that the people up there don’t care, it’s just that it doesn’t really affect them as much. It doesn’t matter what flag is flying on the flagpole…the cows still need to be milked. People in Boston just seem all the more manic after the slower pace in the country.

Anyway, we hauled bunch of our camping stuff up to the cabin along with some preserves, dry goods, and a chunk of Neve’s seed collection. We figure the root cellar up there is a safer and steadier-climate storage space than the chickenwire storage cage in the garage here. Hopefully we’ll be able to make visits up there more often, and not need to draw down on our food stocks here when we do.

Thursday, July 23, 2009

I was in one of the office towers in the Financial District this morning to attend a deposition (a lawyer buddy of mine needed to fill out his team so that the other side didn’t have more people in the room than he did). Anyway, the building had an amazing view of the harbor, and smack in the middle of the harbor is this massive ship wallowing in the water with at least three tugboats that I could count and few Coast Guard boats as well. I kept on having my eye wander out to this monstrosity in the harbor while the two primaries argued about settlement terms (yawn).

I called up one of my old EPA contacts (the same one with the information on all the submarine dealings in New London last week) to ask about this thing. The Pilin Leon, named after a Venezuelan beauty queen, is an Ultra-Large Crude Carrier – an industry term for honking-huge oil tankers.  She’s been dispatched by Citgo on the direct orders of Hugo Chavez to help relieve any energy crisis here in Boston and New England.  Since we don’t have much of our own refining capacity, she’s apparently been filled with fuel oil, gasoline, and jet fuel in her various tanks instead of the usual crude.

Boston also doesn’t really have the facilities for off-loading all that oil, so it sounds like Pilin Leon will be sitting in the middle of the harbor with some temporary pipelines running out to her for the duration.  I suppose that is Mr. Chavez’s point in sending the ship here.  It is as blatant and public an insult to the Bushies as he can fashion.

International politics aside, I’ll take whatever help we can get.  There are plenty of things that we don’t produce here in New England and trade with the ‘mainland’ US is pretty sparse right now.

Wednesday, July 22, 2009

I’ve become a seed saver.

Here’s a quick lesson in botany for those of you who slept through 6t hgrade biology or whatever. Most fruits and veggies on the market these days are F1 hybrids. They don’t breed true. That means that if you planted the seeds of the tomato you had on your sandwich today, the fruit you’d get next summer would bear little to no resemblance to the fruit you’re eating right now.

Heirloom fruits and veggies are “open pollinated”, notated in seed catalogs as OP. They are usually less lovely to look at that the supermarket stuff.  But they have been bred, tested, selected, for hundreds or sometimes thousands of years to grow and produce reliable harvests. AND, the best part (for me, right now) — if you take the seeds out of your plants and save them in a little paper envelope, come next spring, you get more just like it.

Why does this matter? Well, most of the stuff you get at regular supermarkets has been bred for looks, transportability, and ease of harvest rather than taste, reliability, and variety.  The plants often require heavy amounts of fertlizer or ‘cides (you know, pesta-, herba-, fungi-) to grow. Plus, and here’s where all of this becomes really relevant — you need to buy new seeds every year.

With the dollar suddenly worth less than a Peso (I’m only slightly exaggerating, sadly) and transportation still deeply unreliable, I’m guessing that I’m not going to be getting any seed catalogs this year. My friends all say I’m nuts, things will have settled out by winter, I shouldn’t be stinking up my house with fermenting tomato seed soup. (Don’t ask, but by god, it does stink to high heaven.)

I say that in New England, the smart money thinks at least four seasons ahead. So I’ve become a seed saving fool. I swoop into prep stations at the community kitchens and scoop up handfuls of trimmings before they hit the compost heap. I do odd things to my friends’ lunches and wind up with a table full of gooped up napkins drying in the sun. I grill vendors at the farmer’s markets about varieties, then I take notes and go home to my (small but growing) library of books and take more notes. I’m letting some of my carrots and other plants go to seed instead of digging them up and eating them now.

I’ve already got a whole garden for next year tucked into a shoe box. It’s amazing how little space it takes up.

Also, we got a breeding trio of eating rabbits yesterday. My friends are aghast that I’m going to feed April bunnies. “You’re going to eat Thumper?” they cry, horrified. I smile and refrain from telling them that I’d raise and eat Bambi, too, if I thought I could.

Sunday, July 19, 2009

I know my blogroll isn’t very long. I guess it’s just not something that I think to maintain or add to much. However, one of my entries over there on the sidebar has come up with dead air. Shotguns and Sweetpotatoes is no longer available. Yes, some pages you can grab from the Google cache, but Mr. SnS is off the air.

I wonder why. Did he decide that it was too much work? Did he decide that the time was ripe to bug-out for his little slice of security in the Michigan UP? I hope the shutdown was his decision.

I’m also a little annoyed. I’d been thinking about what to pack in our place up in the Great North Woods when I found the SnS blog. Immediately it was a load off my shoulders. I didn’t need to compile so much information because this guy was doing it for me. I could just hop over there whenever I needed to to pick out books on wilderness survival or building defensible homes or sustainable agriculture in the north country of the US. While my liberal soul felt uncomfortable with his emphasis on firearms, at least I knew where to get information on what guns to put in a home defense battery when I chose to build one.

Now all that information and compilation is gone…up in a puff of digital smoke. Well, I’ve got to start compiling this stuff for myself now. Instead of building a new page here on NIJOT, I’m going to use Goodreads, a tool built to share booklists.

If you want to see my budding library for our cabin in the woods, go to my Goodreads profile. I’ll try and keep it up-to-date and get it better organized. If you’re already in Goodreads, you can add me as a ‘friend’ and get updates whenever the list changes. Let me know if this is useful for any of you all.

The cure for bad information is more information.

Friday, July 17, 2009

I don’t know if this has made the news in the rest of the US yet (or even if it will).  I’ve heard bits on the TV and more from former EPA colleague who heard it from a Coast Guard guy.

Apparently, when Gen. Carlson made his ultimatum to the military forces in New England to back him, disarm, or leave, most of the Navy vessels in New England ports put to sea.  There were a few destroyer exceptions (some up in Bath, ME on refits), but pretty much, we’re without a Navy (we still have our Coasties, God Bless ‘em).  One of the ships (or in this case boat) that didn’t leave was the USS Alabama (SSBN 731).  The Alabama is an Ohio-class ballistic missile nuclear submarine.  She’d just been put in dry-dock at Electric Boat in Groton to be converted from a ballistic missile sub (SSBN) to a cruise-missile sub (SSGN).  Apparently she still had her nuclear-tipped Trident missiles on-board.

According to the Coastie who related the story, the captain and crew of the Alabama wanted to get her the hell out of New England.  The EB workers and managers said she wasn’t safe to sail.  So on Tuesday night, a chunk of the crew broke into the EB dry-dock, re-floated their boat and headed out into the Thames River.  Turns out, the EB mechanics knew what they were talking about.  The boat started taking on water as soon as it hit the river and lost power before they cleared Fisher’s Island.

A couple of Coast Guard cutters from the Academy went out and helped some tugboats pull her back up-river.  There was some ‘discussion’ between the Navy folks at the sub base, the Electric Boat people, and the Coasties.  Admiral Burhoe (Superintendent of the Academy) had the boat tied-up at the Academy’s docks.

Apparently there is now a commission from the UN and EU meeting in New London to oversee the transfer of remaining nukes from New England territory to the US ‘mainland’ without anymore hijinks.  The Europeans are understandably a little nervous about the threat of civil war in a country with 30,000 nuclear weapons (all except the Russians who must be loving this I imagine).

Monday, July 13, 2009

Some punk in off-the-rack cammies just tried to steal my fucking chickens.

The chickens spend much of their day scratching among the plants up on the green roof. They keep the bugs down and help aerate the soil and their occasional droppings add nitrogen to the soil — or so I’m told by Ms. Bessler who knows about these sorts of things. We’ve got a coop where they roost at night (locked-up tight due to feral cats and a local raccoon or two). About half the eggs get laid there, too. We sometimes find the ones laid among the garden. It’s a slapdash affair — we had no idea we were getting chickens, after all — but it works well enough.

Anyway, I was home today because April’s got a summer cold that she probably caught at the giant community dinners we’ve been attending. We were painting — well she was painting, I was reading a book — our on the porch when she said, “Mommy, oh! Look! There’s a nice man on the roof! With the chickens!”

“That’s nice, dear,” I muttered and then heard a SQUAWK!

This guy is up in my (tiny, sad, droopy) tomatoes running after one of the chickens. I hollered for Paul to come get April and as soon as he could see her, I clambered up onto the roof. “What the fuck do you think you’re doing?’

“We’re appropriating these here chickens, ma’am, for the troops.”

“The hell you are!” I put my body between him and the chickens (who knew whose hand fed them, if nothing else, and ran behind me when I showed up).

“Ma’am, it’s for the troops, you don’t want to be unpatriotic, do you?” He smiled and he was a good looking kid, maybe 19 or so, and you could tell he got a lot with that smile. And for a few seconds I actually thought that this guy was real army — the new New England one, at least, if not “regular” army.  Then he cocked his head and all but winked at me and said, “It’s to feed the soldiers, ma’am.”

I don’t know if it was the “ma’am” or the heavy handed pseudo hick accent but this guy pissed me off.

“Boy,” I spat out the word, “if you’re a soldier then I’m a supermodel. If you have an actual order to appropriate these chickens I want to see your commanding officer and I want payment.” He hesitated for long enough that I knew I was right — this guy never met a Drill Sargent in his life. I’ve got military on both sides of my family and there’s something about boot camp that just never wears off a man, much less a kid less than five years out.

“Get the hell out of here before I call Lieutenant Hooper,” he’s the Army’s guy in Davis Square, “and he kicks your ass to the harbor.”

His face got hard and cold and for a second I thought things were going to get ugly. You could see this kid doing the math — here’s an overweight middle aged woman in bare feet. He could take me. And he could have. All the bluster drained out of me just that fast and he saw me come to the same conclusion.

Just then Paul clambered up onto the roof. For those of you who have never met Paul, he’s nearly six and a half feet tall and broad at the shoulders. The guy took a long look at Paul. I took that opportunity to grab a shovel and raise it up in a threatening pose. That was enough. He ran.

(For those of you wondering, Paul had had to take the time to drop April with Ms. Bessler before he came charging to the rescue. Yes, yes, the smart thing would have been for me to stay with April while he climbed up. Yes, yes, I know. Hindsight.)

I have to wonder how many folks he’s fooled with that act? There are a lot of “victory gardens” around — he’s probably taken off with a lot of food that way. I wonder why? It’s not like anyone is going hungry right now. Maybe he’s just a black marketeer? Maybe he’s just greedy? Maybe he just has a weird fondness for chickens? (Ew! Grossed myself out there.)

Still, the chickens now get a human guard when they scratch on the roof.

Friday, July 10, 2009

I’ve managed to get in touch with the whole extended family — my side and Paul’s. They are fine, living a little leanly, but okay. My brother’s got a broken arm from a scuffle at the local grocery store. Apparently, even though they all live in the verdant hills of Connecticut, there’s just not as much food to go around.

I suspect that it’s a matter of distribution rather than amounts. Even Cambridge has enough food … for right now. It’s July and the farmers are rolling the stuff in by the truckload. There’s still some fighting — MIT, again, is a flashpoint, I wouldn’t go near the salt-n-pepper bridge for love or money. Not even for lemons.

It’s the little things — like lemons — that are really disconcerting. There’s more food available in markets and whatnot than there’s been in a while. Apparently the pro tem government is helping farmers fill up their tanks and they’ve got somebody organizing caravans to save on gas. (I said it before and I’ll say it again — the Children of Liberty have one ass-kicking Quartermaster.) But there are no imports from outside of the region.

Radio Free Boston — the announcers using their real names now — says it’s not a blockade, just a matter of logistics. The ports and the trains will but up and running soon.

For now, New England is doing pretty good — our farms produce got meat, veggies, fruit, milk, potatoes. But no one is growing wheat or rice in New England. There are no citrus or olive trees in New England. There are no spices in New England. Herbs a plenty but no cinnamon, clove, nutmeg. It’s going to be hard to make apple pie this year.

I seem to be the only one thinking ahead to apple pie season, though. Everyone else is having a party. The soup kitchens have become community kitchens and I spent my day making enormous batches of black bean soup. Vats of it. With fennel and carrot slaw on the side. For the first time in my memory, there are more volunteers than we need. And it’s the most happy I’ve seen anyone in almost a year. There’s singing and dancing in the back, and there are lots of pretty college students waiting the tables. People kiss me on the cheek and tell me to lighten up when I grumble.

I don’t know. Maybe I’m a dour sourpuss. But my people originally came from Russia and there’s one thing any babushka knows, deep in her bones, even in the laughing heart of summer:

Winter is coming.

Thursday, July 9, 2009

I went out for a visit out to the CostCo in Everett this morning.  We regularly hit the warehouse store on delivery-day (Neve knows someone who knows someone) to see if we can grab some bulk essentials.  I was among the door-busters and headed straight for the rice and canned-goods (along with everyone else). All the price signs were handwritten and caused a lot of people to pause.  Prices had taken a huge jump – try 50-60%.  Things weren’t cheap before, but this was crazy.  People were milling around the place either dumbfounded or shouting prices at the gods.  Most of the food items (the only reason anybody was really there) also had their prices listed in Euros, Pounds, and Canadian Dollars.

Things were looking to get ugly when the crowd turned to demand answers from a manager.  I decided we had enough beans for now and headed out.

I should have seen this one coming.  A note to our CSA/farming contacts in the west of the state confirmed that they are still willing to deal in BerkShares and even Champies.  Sounds like we have some conversions to do before the dollars in our bank account fall too much in comparison with those two local currencies.

Monday, July 6, 2009

One of those lessons for when you become a leader anywhere…just because you declare victory doesn’t mean that your enemies see it that way or are going away quickly.

The ruckus that cut off my last post here was in impromptu parade. A bunch of local folks were on the streets hooting, hollering, and waving New England flags — mostly on bikes. The SCULs were out in force, really sort of egging the rest on and helping too feed a carnival atmosphere. People set-up a big pot-luck banquet in Davis Square and an acoustic band provided music for dancing.

While Davis was partying, things weren’t going as well in Harvard Square.  The celebrations there came to a screeching halt when a convoy of Backwater folks (some say with regular Army and/or Guardsmen along as well) showed-up – maybe just passing through.  Things got pretty ugly before the mercs headed off to west along Mem. Drive.  The Harvard Lampoon building is now sporting an array of bullet-scars.

I think we’ll stay holed-up a little longer.

Sunday, July 5, 2009

Hey look, TV news is back.

I was never much for the local news even before the Halloween attacks, but one of our neighbors told us to tune in. Crank-up the bike-generator, and check-it out, there’s Governor Patrick having a news conference on the steps of the State House. More importantly, behind him are a bunch of Army folks and a newly shaven (his cheeks were pretty red) Colonel. Yeah, THAT Colonel…the one that’s been leading a leading running fights with the mercs for the past month.

After Deval finished his spiel, he handed-off the podium to one of the Army folks — looking the whole time like he was choking back some of my grandmother’s inedible tuna-noodle surprise. The Army guy, a general according to the network scroll, looked to be doing his best Morgan Freeman impression. And here’s where it got weird.

Major General Jebediah Carlson US Army (un-retired), announced that there was a “fundamental conflict” between serving and protecting the US Constitution and following the orders of of the current occupant of the White House in his role as Commander-in-Chief. He announced that Boston, and the surrounding six New England states, are no longer under the authority of the Federal Government as represented in Washington, DC. He made it clear that he will not require any of the National Guard or regular military folks still in the area to continue to serve. They are free to stand-down or to leave.

After this announcement, the TV camera was blocked for a moment by some out-of-focus pixel-cammo. When the TV guy got the camera up off the tripod and on his shoulder, it showed a swath of military folks, some in modern BDUs, some in the beat-up desert/urban cammo that the Colonel’s vets have been using, all standing at attention and saluting this General.

It was probably staged,,,I know that.  Still, the shot sent shivers down my spine eventhough I was pedalling away on the bike generator.

So now I guess this guy is in charge.  Is Patrick still governor then?  Is he part of a ruling council or something?  Are the Children of Liberty being invited into this semi-military junta?  Or are they behind the whole thing anyway?  Hell, what about the other governors and other states.  Carlson may claim to be speaking for all of New England, but how much does he really have command of…and for how long?

Wrapping this up, some sort of ruckus going on down the street…

Saturday, July 4, 2009

For your reading, the listing of grievances compiled by our Founding Fathers against King George III in the Declaration of Independence (the links are all mine):

Such has been the patient sufferance of these Colonies; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former Systems of Government. The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States. To prove this, let Facts be submitted to a candid world.

He has refused his Assent to Laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good.

He has forbidden his Governors to pass Laws of immediate and pressing importance, unless suspended in their operation till his Assent should be obtained; and when so suspended, he has utterly neglected to attend to them.

He has refused to pass other Laws for the accommodation of large districts of people, unless those people would relinquish the right of Representation in the Legislature, a right inestimable to them and formidable to tyrants only.

He has called together legislative bodies at places unusual, uncomfortable, and distant from the depository of their public Records, for the sole purpose of fatiguing them into compliance with his measures.

He has dissolved Representative Houses repeatedly, for opposing with manly firmness his invasions on the rights of the people.

He has refused for a long time, after such dissolutions, to cause others to be elected; whereby the Legislative powers, incapable of Annihilation, have returned to the People at large for their exercise; the State remaining in the mean time exposed to all the dangers of invasion from without, and convulsions within.

He has endeavoured to prevent the population of these States; for that purpose obstructing the Laws for Naturalization of Foreigners; refusing to pass others to encourage their migrations hither, and raising the conditions of new Appropriations of Lands.

He has obstructed the Administration of Justice, by refusing his Assent to Laws for establishing Judiciary powers.

He has made Judges dependent on his Will alone, for the tenure of their offices, and the amount and payment of their salaries.

He has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harrass our people, and eat out their substance.

He has kept among us, in times of peace, Standing Armies without the Consent of our legislatures.

He has affected to render the Military independent of and superior to the Civil power.

He has combined with others to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our constitution, and unacknowledged by our laws; giving his Assent to their Acts of pretended Legislation:

For Quartering large bodies of armed troops among us:

For protecting them, by a mock Trial, from punishment for any Murders which they should commit on the Inhabitants of these States:

For cutting off our Trade with all parts of the world:

For imposing Taxes on us without our Consent:

For depriving us in many cases, of the benefits of Trial by Jury:

For transporting us beyond Seas to be tried for pretended offences

For abolishing the free System of English Laws in a neighbouring Province, establishing therein an Arbitrary government, and enlarging its Boundaries so as to render it at once an example and fit instrument for introducing the same absolute rule into these Colonies:

For taking away our Charters, abolishing our most valuable Laws, and altering fundamentally the Forms of our Governments:

For suspending our own Legislatures, and declaring themselves invested with power to legislate for us in all cases whatsoever.

He has abdicated Government here, by declaring us out of his Protection and waging War against us.

He has plundered our seas, ravaged our Coasts, burnt our towns, and destroyed the lives of our people.

He is at this time transporting large Armies of foreign Mercenaries to compleat the works of death, desolation and tyranny, already begun with circumstances of Cruelty & perfidy scarcely paralleled in the most barbarous ages, and totally unworthy the Head of a civilized nation.

He has constrained our fellow Citizens taken Captive on the high Seas to bear Arms against their Country, to become the executioners of their friends and Brethren, or to fall themselves by their Hands.

He has excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavoured to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages, whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions.

In every stage of these Oppressions We have Petitioned for Redress in the most humble terms: Our repeated Petitions have been answered only by repeated injury. A Prince whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a Tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people.

Saturday, July 4, 2009

Holy mother fuck.

I don’t know how they could block the transmissions, but I’m willing to bet that they are doing it. So I’m going to tell you what’s going on here in Boston. This is going to be half-assed as hell, because I’m getting my information through Radio Free Boston and some TV news. We’re currently holed up in the basement, but I’m having to sit on Paul to stop him from running out with a shotgun to help.

We don’t have a shotgun. Thank God.

The Children of Liberty have Declared Independence. They have taken the Old State House where the Declaration of Independence is read from the balcony every Fourth of July and they are … reading the Declaration of Independence from the balcony. With one or two very tiny modifications — replacing King George with George Bush, replacing “Great Britain” with “illegal Bush White House”. And, of course, they are calling it “The United New England States of America.”

What’s terrifying is just how the list of grievances seems to have been written just for this particular tyrant, not for one two and a half centuries ago. Paul sprinted upstairs to get a copy of the text and he’s reading alongside, getting very angry.

(He has taken a moment from his ranting to point out, in very lawyerly fashion, that they’ve abbreviated the list of grievances and added a few new ones. But the original ones still remain remarkably relevant.)

There are fire fights as the Thugs try to get to the State House. But apparently, according to the radio anyway, the National Guard is holding them off. The uniformed soldiers are on our side. I’m hearing reports of a general who has come out of retirement, assumed command of the local troops and is directing things at a regional… should I say national? … level.

The Children of Liberty have just declared war. Holy shit.

Friday, July 3, 2009

I admit it, when I heard the Children of Liberty announce a General Strike for this week I didn’t think it would do much.  People need their paychecks and the Fed Powers-That-Be don’t need much from Boston that they are going to miss in a week.

But something is definitely going on.  The mercs have been pushing hard.  They’ve handed-off most of the static jobs (checkpoints, guarding facilities and people, show-the-flag patrols) to the National Guardsmen and instead are doing honest-to-God anti-insurgent raids.  I’ve read a enough of Gen. Petraeus’s Counter-Insurgency Manual to figure that this is one of the “sweep and hold” plans like they used in Iraq a few years ago.  Backwater sweeps; the Guardsmen hold.

OK, maybe I’m extrapolating from rumor on the street and announcements from the radio.  One of the Guard in Davis was a bit too loud in his theorizing while I was at the local food swap this morning.  But that’s what it look like from the cheap seats.

We’re hunkered down and hoping that when the sweeps come to our neighborhood they don’t break too much or kill too many.  I’ve got the rest of this manual to get read.

Thursday, July 2, 2008

We’ve gone to ground.

I was out this morning working the soup kitchen lines — with the food supplies dodgy at best, we’ve stopped being for homeless and started being some folks’ main supply of food. I’ve got plenty at home, because I have a fully stocked pantry and an Irish soul (so says Paul, anyway), but lots of people don’t know how to stock a pantry and they are hungry because there’s no food to be found.

Anyway, I had worked the early shift — as a mom, I’m one of the only ones willing to be on the line at 4:45 — and was walking home just after 10 when I heard some loud, flat POP POP POPOPOPOP noises.

My hindbrain kicked in while my fore-brain was still going, “Whaa?” and I dropped to the ground and rolled off into the bushes.

The guy ahead of me wasn’t quite so smart. He made a noise like a dog getting its tail pulled and sat down,  hard, his arm bleeding. Four or ten or fifty guys with black boots came barreling out of someone’s yard, shouting and stomping. They blew by him and never even looked down. There was more shouting and more POPs and I kept my head down and my body pressed hard against some rose bushes growing out of a fence.

For a minute or two there was silence and then I saw a guy in ratty fatigues and a bushy beard skin out of a small place between a garage and house and go sprinting, silently, down the street. There was some noise and some more of the Thugs came back my way.

One of them saw me, nudged me with his foot. (By which I mean to say, he kicked my leg, but not hard.) “Which way did he go?”

I didn’t have to pretend to be scared and so I pointed. The other direction, naturally, but I still pointed. The guy they had shot apparently wasn’t entirely out of it and he agreed with me.

The thugs moved out. I crawled over to the shot guy — his name was Mike, I learned — and tore his shirt into strips and did a half-assed bandage and helped him up. He said thanks and I offered to walk him to the hospital. He said he’d rather go home.

“Dude, you’ve been SHOT!” I revert to 1980s speak when under stress, apparently.

“I’m worried about being rounding up for a work crew,” he shrugged, looking very pale, almost waxy, and he was sweating with cold clammy skin. I was trying to hard to remember what to do to treat for shock that it took me a minute to figure out what he’d just said.

I dragged him onto a lawn and got his feet up in the air on a bird bath and covered him with one of April’s baby blankets that I had in my bag. While I did this, he told me that apparently for the past two days, the Thugs have been rounding up … well…. any able bodied male and putting them to work repairing the roads.

I thought about that as I knocked on the door of the lawn he was bleeding on. No answer. No answer next door, either, though I heard voices. I finally pulled a couple of beach towels off a wash line and covered Mike in them. I kept him talking, because I recalled dimly that that would help. He heard it from some folks who had heard it from some folks who had heard it…. you know. Anyway, he’d heard that they were rounding men up for work gangs.

I called his wife to come and get him and told her to bring blankets and hot water. She showed up without either, but I put him in the car and let her drive him home. I practically ran home.

I don’t know how true the work gang thing is. I know they are using prisoners, but this press gang thing sounds like a rumor to me.

What I do know is that fighting has finally come to my corner of Cambridge. And none of us are going out of the house until things settle down. I feel like it’s cowardly to ditch my position at the soup kitchen, but I’ve got a family to feed and they have to come first.