Happy days ahead!

We're headed for some seriously ugly shit. Saying this makes one unpopular, or at least makes people who don't or can't think ahead squirm.

We have a mostly useless hopey-changey President who is rapidly moving further to the right, regardless of how much the hate mongers and big money manipulators scream he's a socialist.

A guy who put the people who inflated the real estate bubble and broke our system and scammed trillions for the banking and finance industry in charge of fixing it.

We have a government about to start running the money printing presses full time, priming the pump for inflation while ignoring basic infrastructure and cutting taxes.

We have a growing population of people with their heads up their wrinkly middle aged pink assholes denying anything not right out of the John Birch Society instruction manual.

We have a new state Governor and GOP majority determined to destroy future possibilities of rail travel and dedicated to keeping the road building companies backing them rich. Just like the good old Tommy Thompson days, when he made his pals filthy rich.

We have a new Senator who is, as far as I can tell, a moron flat earther totally unprepared for the job thrust into it by idiots with Fox News and bibles as guiding lights.
And we have a goofy climate change happening, the price of oil is starting to zoom back up, and we're still in two wars and itching to start a third with Mexico or Iran or ______?
And don't bullshit me by saying we're out of Iraq. We're still there. Shit, we're still keeping troops all over the world in places we bombed the shit out of. German, Japan, many more.

We're on the edge of a big, messy and slow moving train wreck, where reality meets obtuse fantasy, that fantasy being we're exceptional as a nation, when all we had were a lot of resources that we've sucked a good way down to not much.
So, aside from fucking off here on the Internet, Sweetie and I have actually started to do something about it.

We've started growing more food, and have been stocking up about six month's worth of basics, and are making sure we use all the dental and health insurance benefits we need. Because I really don't think we're going to have much of that by the end of next year.

We've also built that ugly ass motor home into a fairly nice bug out vehicle, with only a few repairs left to do. So even if we hit the financial iceberg, we have life boat of sorts. We've picked up a little honda motorcycle that gets about 98 mpg that fits on the back of the motorhome, and I've bought some new tools, a gas and an electric chainsaw and we're rebuilding the generator from the motorhome as a back up power source.

We've been using our costco membership to buy a stock of dried and canned goods, bought a few rifles for small game and deer hunting, and I've been making sauerkraut and canning salsa and bought a hundred pounds of potatoes from a potato farm, and we've got a pile of squash in the basement from the garden. We've also been making things like pumpkin butter from leftover uncarved Halloween pumpkins. Stuff that would have been thrown out.

The way prices have been going up, and with added world demand all over for more meat products, there's no way the price of the long term storage food is going to go down, so we're ahead even if I turn out to be just another wrong Annie Apocalypse or Debbie Doom. Or come across that way to people who don't want to listen.

I guess thinking ahead like this does not come under the category of happy thoughts, for sure, but I sure as hell don't want to be hungry and homeless any time soon. I really suggest any of you reading this who can think your way past the business as usual mode start considering where and what you could do when the rest of the global financial chickens come home to roost. You're going to need to find a new normal, and soon, and build up your tribe. Because as far as I can tell, it's where you're going to find the resources you need. You sure as hell aren't going to get them from the broken government, filled with people who think the unemployed are losers and that the biggest threat we face is voter fraud or illegal immigrants or the scary LBGT agenda.

More often than not, my pals and circle of humans I interact with just shrug when I talk about this stuff. Or they run away. Too bad, because I'd rather be acting to make a future, even if it has some tense aspects than freaking out and reacting when things get rough. And they're getting rougher every day.

But it's not all bad. If I feel neglected and untouched, or even like having a thrill, the government has said they'd be glad to hold me. Wearing sanitary blue gloves at the airport when they check the junk in my trunk before I get on one of those soon to be extinct flying sardine cans.