A Precariat Checks In

Before 9/11/2001, I had a fairly "normal" life, working as an electrical contractor, owning my own business and dreaming of building a better world. My wife didn't "get me" nor did she choose to support the innovative things I wanted to try out using music, computing, alternative energy and the Internet to "earn a living" in a rapidly changing world. I can't say that I blame her for not trusting me, but I can say that the things I foresaw back then were accurate.

When she divorced me, she didn't know that she was releasing me into the new social class - The Precariat. Losing faith in a system is one thing. Losing faith in a person is something else.

Maybe I can be restored in society and in my family. Only time will tell. As a homeless person, I gained a whole lot of insight into what cities, homes, cars and systems in general have become in the "modern" world. Being literally out in the cold teaches one to become warm on the inside. Not that I wasn't warm, friendly and accepting back when I had the comforts of income, property, and a place in a community. But now I realize that those things are not secure for anyone unless they truly believe in them. Faith is before and after all the very basis of value in every realm from the physical to the spiritual. Trust in the unseen is worth more to the precariat than anything that can be seen, heard, touched or even felt.

As stated by my friend and fellow precariat, Paul of Tarsus:

"So we fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen, since what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal."  [II Corinthians 4:18]

I have seen dozens of preachers and "professional" clergy who likely couldn't stand to be without a home, car, income or wife for a week, let alone for ten years as I have. It's OK for those who call themselves Christians to judge me, dismiss me, call me a 'bum', ignore me, insult me to my face or even shoot at me. It happens all the time. But I have never been so treated by anyone who was, in society's terms, "worse off" than me.

I have lost faith in the capitalist system and the institutions (including most churches) of the industrialized world. But I haven't lost faith in the Human Spirit to overcome the tyranny of complacent conformity to the contrivances of this unraveling world.

Thanks for reading.

Potentialism

I think it was Maharishi Mehesh Yogi who said that transcendental meditation granted entry into the whole realm of possibility. I'm sure it was Jesus who said "With God, all things are possible to them who believe." I want to believe, but I also want to see. I have no trouble imagining all sorts of things for myself, but it's getting very boring and unfruitful. What we all need is an environment that allows us to play with "reality" - testing limits, making changes, constructing objects, manipulating substances - altering the physical world: Earth.

Whenever I see some smart ass with a Backhoe or track hoe, I get a little jealous. I have seen landscapes that I could really develop if I had that much earth-moving power at my call. Having sworn off all types of wealth, my poverty now contains my potential as if it were a steel trap. I have a lot of things: shovel heads with no handles, a nice metal yard rake, a grubbing hoe, a fork-spade with three of its four teeth left, a length of soft barge rope, and some garden hose tipped by my prize possession - a brass cone nozzle. My work would be formally called something like Terra-forming with hydrological excavation if I were a capitalized business man. But I'm a starving artist, instead.

When I read - i think it was Life Comes From Life by A. C. Bhaktividanti Prahuphada, it inspired me to divest myself of all possessions. I don't regret having done so those many years ago, but taking it too far can be discouraging sometimes. My belief and commitment to voluntary simplicity hasn't fundamentally changed in thirty years, but my circumstances caused me to vier way off course. It's all coming full circle now and the bewilderment of my wasted years are now offset in a renewed hope and a more viable doctrine for the day-to-day life of a potentially influential pauper named Charley.

I'm connecting now with abstractions in a class = potential. Now a 56-year-old man with no estate that can be represented, no college degrees, no credit, no bank account, no income, no car, etc. but still claiming to have potential must seem a bit incredulous. I do have an Internet connection, a fairly nice bike, and a credit union account with a few USD in it. Not much stuff. And I have a few friends. Quite an asset! Some of these confirm my remaining potential. It's a start!

Just believing that you are potentially reading this helps more than anything. Yeah, you. You know who you are.

/Join #crowd

Text-based relationships aren't really that difficult. That's how I first came to know Jesus. The technologies are changing but the metrics are the same. Knowing who to trust when all you know about them is what you read is the reciprocal of knowing what to type into a text box. Trust me.

The web's largest congregation of free and open source software developers still resides on freenode. The network has been there for years as it evolved from #linpeople and #openprojects on EFnet in the mid '90s into LinPeople, then OPN - the Open Projects Network and since '02 has been known as freenode^w:freenode. The same channels, same personalities, same languages, all still there. Most of the Linux, BSD, Mozilla, Apache, and all kinds of other open code was either developed, improved, supported and discussed there all along. It's a comfy "place" for me and the irc protocol is just fine. Twitter, facebook, and the other premiums will grab the headlines, but irc.freenode.net is still the real-time core that makes all this other fluff workable.

I'm on #ozonefarm as yeoman

If you don't have an IRC client installed, just use freenode's webchat service.

Radical inclusion

It looks like some experimental collaboration may be starting up soon. I'd like to catch the wave. learn more