The Practical Dilettante

On my quest to resurrect little used books and expose myself to some new authors, the next book on the list is:

Everybody Knows This is Nowhere. John McFetridge

It’s another Toronto book. That was an accident, I swear. It may just be that the obscure authors that don’t circulate are all Canadian. Could have something to do with promotion, publishing and the like. So far the books have been fairly good, so I’m not sure why… oh… Danielle Steel keeps selling so well and these just sit there (as a completely random example). [I have another post in the offing titled, "Life's too short for Danielle Steel"].

So, the new book is crime fiction, which I’m not really all that chuffed about, but it is one of the most popular genres in the library, so I’m expanding my horizons. I guess. This one at least looks like it is more on the crime end, and less on the forensic, grisly and gruesome details end of things. It also has several mentions of humour in the reviews. Anyone in my TO readers want to join me on this one?

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The last four years have been an opportunity for me to explore my gratitude for the work that is done in the world on my behalf. I was finishing off the buttons on a pair of pajamas for my daughter last evening, and I was thinking about what an ‘economically’ unviable activity it was. In fact, nearly everything I do with my days is economically unviable, according to the strictest definition. I have over the years acquired a set of skills that I can trade for about… oh… $50 to $100 an hour, depending on how thoroughly I’m willing to sell out. Yet I insist upon filling my hours with activities like feeding chickens, growing plants, knitting socks, sewing clothes, painting with the kids, and, most recently, working at the public library. None of these are lucrative activities for the ‘getting of money’. Perhaps I am trying to fulfill Virginia Woolf’s admonition in Three Guineas:

…you must earn enough to be independent of any other human being and to buy that modicum of health, leisure, knowledge and so on that is needed for the full development of body and mind. But no more. Not a penny more.

… when you have made enough to live on by your profession you must refuse to sell your brain for the sake of money. That is you must cease to practise your profession, or practise it for the sake of research and experiment; or, if you are an artist, for the sake of the art; or give the knowledge acquired professionally to those who need it for nothing. But directly the mulberry tree begins to make you circle, break off. Pelt the tree with laughter.

I’m not yet ready to pelt the tree with laughter, but I’m working on it. One of the driving forces behind my own frugal approach to the world is to minimize the number of my hours I need to sell to other people to support my own life. I’ll trade them. I will cut down trees in exchange for babysitting. I’ll provide vegetables in exchange for acupuncture treatments. I’ll do things that are community building, life enhancing, humanity affirming, and loving.

The main question that has consumed the last four years of my life, however, is about resources, effort, energy, hours, and entitlement. I can’t quite frame the query… but it has to do with breaking down the magical nature of money to determine exactly how much value I’m getting in exchange. Since I have attempted to grow broccoli three times, for example, I’m much more willing to pay $2.50 for a head of it. “What a bargain!” I shout in the produce aisle. “Wow! Did you know you can get organic fair-trade bananas and they’re only an extra $0.10 a pound?” Wow! Somebody planted this, weeded and tended it, harvested it, packed it in boxes, put them on a boat, unloaded them, put them in trucks, sent the trucks to the supermarket, stacked them again, maintained the electronic checkouts and inventory, works at the cash register until 10 pm, works overnight to make sure the shelves are stocked the next day… Holy cow. I can’t believe that bananas are only $1 a pound. (I’m not very popular in the produce aisle, but I’m sure that the gratitude is finding its way into the world.)

I was at a party a few weeks ago, and I held up my foot in the middle of a conversation about the costs of things and said, “See this sock? These socks took me 40 hours to knit. Any way you slice it, that’s a $300 pair of socks.”

And somebody said, “Oh. I probably won’t complain about $25 the next time I see hand-knit socks, then.” Nope. Not once you’ve done it yourself. I find it much easier to value somebody else’s work when I grok the difficulty, time, and effort involved. So, just for tonight: Thank you, world. For making the fabric, and the buttons, and the thread, and the sewing machine, and the electricity, and growing the cotton, and mining the iron ore that went into the sewing machine that made these pajamas:

(Also thanks to my friend that gave me the fabric at the baby shower for the child who is now 10. Look! I made pajamas with the fabric! His sister is thrilled. His brother has a matching pair with the blue doggie fabric. And I am grateful. If slow.)

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That’s the only possible explanation. I had to park my van on the plastic on the south side of the greenhouse while I trundled 12 loads of concrete blocks down from the back of the property to place along the edge… y’know. In place of the van that I’m going to need for getting to work this afternoon. [Edit: Here are pictures, now that the camera can talk to the computer again.]

Then I came into the house and discovered that the gate on the back deck was swinging free because it had shifted the iron chair that has been sitting on it for the last 10 months. With a vengeance, is all I can say. (And while I was sitting here writing this wee post, the queen sized futon mattress that I put out for large garbage pick up blew out into the middle of the road. When we get wind, we get WIND!)

To place this in context, two weeks ago, I was swimming in the river. Technically. It wasn’t going to win any awards.
[Edit: I said there were photos!]

(The guy is one of the ‘real’ librarians. The mad one.)

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Alex Steffen on Worldchanging had this to say recently (in the middle of a much longer piece on the need for sustainability to focus on resilient, complex, urban solutions)
“See, I’m more and more convinced that the idea we as individuals, or little pocket communities, or small towns can lead the way to sustainability on our own is sort of delusional and unworthy of ourselves. Certainly the idea that some people can disconnect and live happy transition lives while society crashes around them betrays a profound misreading of history: all those other un-transitioned people aren’t going to just go away and leave us to our straw-bale buildings and arugula patches.“ [Emphasis added]

That last sentence there… it keeps me up nights. Because unlike the original author, I have no faith that “society” isn’t going to just keep on going the way it goes until the crash happens. I am desperate for livable communities, for walkability, for green spaces, for urban centres that function. I would have loved to live in a city in which I could actually afford a place to live, food, and transportation, in one of those funky, vibrant communities that urban planners describe. But where I could actually afford to live on a single professional salary while my husband finished school was down the road from a flop-house, across from a factory, and six doors up from a chemical plant. In the end, it turned out to be a decent neighbourhood; the only trouble we ever had with the flop-houses involved worrying about their residents. But I was bleeding to death financially. I looked for work and housing a walking distance apart for 10 years and finally gave up. I moved to another part of the world, I bought a house in the country, and I started growing my own food. I started growing a little more and selling some of it. I’m starting to teach other people how to grow some of their own, and I’m working on developing a much larger repertoire of foodstuffs to grow. I know that this isn’t the solution to all our woes, but it what I need to do to keep myself sane. And here is why:

I don’t know how to drag the community around me kicking and screaming to a more sustainable way of life.

Coaxing hasn’t worked. Education hasn’t worked. Lobbying, protest, political action… none of it has worked. The government we have has no incentives to do anything about this, ever. It is a slow motion disaster, and there is always something moving faster that will grab our attention. We can’t do anything today because there was a budget cutback and more jobs were lost. There was a housing crisis. My federal government is more interested in opening up the Arctic for oil exploration than doing anything at all to mitigate the impacts of the oil we’ve already burned. My neighbours want to drive their ATV’s and leave all the lights in their houses on and floodlight their front doors, and everybody feels the need drive around to get the kids to 14 types of lessons, and not the ones offered in their neighbourhood, because there are more exclusive ones in the neighbourhood across town. If I wait for this urban utopia to come to fruition, I’ll be bitter, and then I’ll be dead. (because of getting old, not because I’ll kill myself)

But I have a vested interest in the future of the city, because I don’t want to ever have to defend my nice little homestead from hungry people. Let me be very clear: I do not look forward to the apocalypse. I like the internet. I like democratic freedom. I like reading ideas that were written by somebody other than the Guy Next Door (friendly as he is). But that doesn’t mean that I don’t want to be prepared if it happens in my lifetime. Of course, I’m not sure what “prepared” looks like, because when it comes up in conversation, at the back of my head, I’m always calculating 1) how many people live within a gas-tank of my house, and 2) how many of them might figure out that I have food, and 3) frankly, whether I would actually be able to convince most urbanites that a flock of laying hens and a milk cow are much, much more valuable alive than dead. Really. People who just spent 20 years denying climate change, denying the possibility of peak oil, and denying any personal responsibility for anything that happens around them do not seem likely to respond to reason.

So, I need to do this, and urban reformers need to rebuild the city. We need to have walkable greenspaces with funky neighbourhood-villages in the middle of a public transit system, and we need to rebuild our local foodsheds, re-learn how to farm without poisoning the water and air, and re-learn to respect the work of the hands as much as the work of the mind. We need universities and radical breakaway co-housing retreats. We need diversity. And we need it yesterday. Let’s go.

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