Today brings March 26th. In less than a week the sun will rise on my arbitrary start date of April 1st. My mind feels shattered. I feel numb, scared, but mostly confused. What will change on this day of fools? How will my life change? What rules will I set in place? Why did I decide to do this so many months, so many years back?
At Derrick Jensen’s talk in Portland last October, Derrick asked the crowd if they knew the name of the people who lived here before civilization. More than a few people responded that “no one lived here,” and that, “Willamette (as in the Willamette river that runs through Portland) means ‘the valley of sickness and death.’” I don’t remember the first time I heard this myth, but I can tell you that I never questioned it. In fact, I’ve even helped spread it. I never seemed to think twice about it, it simply made sense; white people do stupid things like move into mosquito infested valleys. But when Derrick asked, and I saw so many people respond with this claim, I really began to wonder just where the hell it came from.
Ragnar Benson has authored many books including; Do-It-Yourself Medicine, Eating Cheap, Live Off the Land in City and Country, Mantrapping, Modern Weapons Caching, Ragnar’s Guide to Interviews, Investigations and Interrogations, Ragnars Guide to the Underground Economy, Aquiring a New ID, and many more, all publsihed through the wack-job-military-nut publishing company Paladin Press. In my search for urban survival tips I found, ordered and read his books Ragnar’s Urban Survival: a Hard-Times Guide to Staying Alive in the City and Survival Poaching.
If you’ve traveled to another country or gone anywhere in the outdoors, you’ve probably heard of giardia. Supposedly Civilizations settlers brought this crap over from Europe or somewhere, since giardia seems to foster best in densely populated areas of domestic cows. Thanks to these assholes (the settlers, not the cows) this flagellated protozoan parasite known as Giardia lamblia, (AKA “the runs,” “the shits,” and my favorite; “Beaver Fever“), lives in almost every water source in the United States. It generally spreads by tricking someone into eating the poop of another infected creature… which leads me to think that giardia sounds like Mother Nature telling civilization to, and not in the figurative sense, “eat shit and die.”
REWILDinfo: study, teach and converse. This brand new site has two parts, the first part contains a forum for rewilders to talk about rewilding, the second part contains a wiki serving as a free online field guide to rewilding. Come start a conversation at the forum and add your knowledge to the field guide today! Please tell all your friends to check it out too.
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400words, the website and book, asks writers to tell their short-short non-fiction story in 400 words or less. The theme for the current issue revolves around “work.” My friend Lisa (a brilliant fucking writer) wrote a short story about working in a coffee shop (one of the ones we worked in together a time ago) and it got printed on their website a while back. She reccomended that I give it a shot, so I did. Low and behold, they put it up there! Read it here.
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Two years ago I moved to LA to work in the film industry. As you can see, it didn’t work out. LA chewed me up and spat me out… or Portland just couldn’t live without me. Either way, it was 3 months of hell. Here is a snippet of something I wrote back then…
