To Bludgeon The USSR

 278th day sober. 

I got this stupid oscilloscope packed up as light and small as I dared, which still meant a big heavy package, to go to Australia and of course Ebay's shipping service can't handle it so I had to give Ken a lot of information so he can try a couple of shippers. When Ken didn't show up last night, or today, to pick it up I started worrying... 

I packed 8 things; a combination of finishing ones I'd "pre-packed" and packing some more, to make a good load for FedEx. I went and delivered those, picked up packing stuff on the way back, and then got to work on my phone. 

For some reason I saw my phone battery was down to one bar when I picked it up to take with me, and since I'm usually really good about keeping it charged I popped the back cover off and took the battery out, went around where the edge of the back cover had stuff like fine lint etc., on it and cleaned that up, and on the phone itself, then cleaned the contacts in the phone and on the battery and likewise the charger and charging port with contact cleaner. Then put it all back together and it charged up fine and I called Ken. Everything was fine, he just needs to email his shipper etc. Whew! 

While out on the bike (no zombies this time) I thought about what someone said on Reddit about how the American middle class was allowed to exist to "bludgeon the USSR" with. Now that the USSR is gone, the middle class is being allowed to wither. But in its heyday, the US had a real interest in allowing a lot of average Joes to live in individual houses with front and back yards and a car and all that. Here's what our systems gives our people, the US was saying. They don't have to live in commieblocks! 

Then I thought about how when I was a young adult starting out the game seemed to be all about making more money. Just make more money, and all of your problems will be solved. Capitalism really likes it when you strive all your life to make more money. You don't end up better off, yourself, but you sure end up doing your part and more for capitalism. 

I can see now that the real game is to work out how to not need money, and to save what money you have and manage it well. Back when Dr. Allison was paying me about $350 a month he said I "must be saving half of each pay check" which I was certainly not. But looking back, I easily could have been. I was in the Army Reserve then too, and that, I didn't realize, was a real cash cow. I got about $160 a month from it so that was almost a half-month's pay for my one weekend a month dressing in green and doing Army stuff. I could easily have saved up enough money to say F.U. to my awful job and found something better. The Army pay also included free college classes. 

Looking at it another way, the Army pay was just a bit more than my rent, so I could have used it to pay my rent and then been footloose and fancy free, doing any kind of cockamamie work I felt like. My early adult years would have been very different if I know that the real game is to save your money because striving to make more will almost always end in failure but saving what you *can* make is an almost guaranteed success. 

Capitalism, of course, hates it when you save-save-save your money. The hippies knew this, that the most they could do to fight capitalism would be to team up and live communally, eat rice and beans and lentils, mend their clothes instead of buying new, go back to simpler ways of doing things (who needs laundry soap, bath soap, shampoo, tooth paste(!) when you've got Doctor Bronner's?) 

The hippies were equal parts infuriating and fun, but at least in Hawaii there were some who walked the walk. There were people living in tree houses and in caves, and some friends of ours lived in some kind of weird little bomb shelter with lead shielding or something so a radio wouldn't work inside. A friend of my dad's built a ferro-cement boat and the family lived in it - and sometimes we lived in it when they were off on vacation - and that was their "FU" to the buy-a-suburban-house grind. 

The guy with the boat was Mr. Bethune. The boat he built was called the Sea Raven and besides building his own boat so he could raise his kids, Sean and Claudette, while only paying a slip fee. He was also good at saving money and "finding" things when it was convenient. According to my older sister he "found" a lot of money from my dad but I don't know enough to believe one way or the other. I wish I'd gotten to know the guy on an adult to adult level. His kids grew up and he ended up having a time-clock company in Honolulu and then he died. He didn't crash and burn like my parents, simply because he knew how to save money. 

But getting back to what capitalism loves and what makes capitalism tear its hair out, it's no accident that the SRO hotels and flophouses and rooming houses and residential hotels are gone now. It's not by some accidental falling-together of the pieces of the economy that these days, one must live rather well or be out on the street with no longer a grey area in-between. It's Marx 101. It's the reserve armies of labor and of the immiserated. You must work and consume like crazy and own at least one car and really bust your ass for capitalism or you must live in the street like a dog. 

A grey area in-between is dangerous to capitalism. Someone living happily in a little room that costs 5% or 10% of their income, with a shelf full of books and hobbies and friends, who gets around by bike  and has no use for credit cards is extremely dangerous to capitalism. He's showing an alternative is possible. So he must be stamped out.