Whatcha Gonna Do When the Well Runs Dry...?

The Baron asked me to put up a brief post explaining that he’s taken on a paying contract job and thus, PWBL: posting will be light…at least for a bit.

This job offer was sudden so he didn’t have time to plan ahead for your reading pleasure. While not a lengthy job, it’s quite intensive. So while he's quite delighted to have the work, he worries that y’all might wander away while he’s immersed. He figures maybe you’ll think he just walked off and left the gates untended.

That is not the case.

At first I’d planned simply to leave the explanation at that, just so y’all wouldn’t be concerned about his silence. But then, as often happens when one steps out the door into cyberspace, I happened across a dude who goes by the name mushroom (I don’t think he’s referring to cloud shapes, but one never knows). This mushroom fellow is the owner of a blog called Prudence for Dummies, a catchy nom de blog for sure. When I saw the title, I couldn’t resist taking a peek.

He doesn’t appear to post frequently; there is a recent one about knives, which is not a burning issue for me at the moment - kind of a guy thing, maybe? On the other hand, some of our friends and family think it ought to be a bigger concern for me than it is since my collection of carving implements are all rather dull. Definitely a failing in someone who considers herself a cook.

I digress…as usual. Let’s move on to the intriguing post mushroom wrote on St. Valentine’s Day, just when Egypt was hotting up. What made this post of interest is that his ideas parallel what the Baron talks about sometimes when he’s waxing apocalyptic.

Our dear Baron’s Apocalypse doesn’t have much sturm and drang, mostly he predicts a gradual slide into dignified squalor. Well, at any rate, I’m sure he will be dignified about it; the man certainly had plenty of practice what with his several decades as a landscape painter. ‘Twas the rural version of artist-starving-in-a-garret however; the rural version is a more refined type of squalor than the urban variety.

So for a little interim thought experiment, I present mushroom’s post, which he titled “Where To Be or Not To Be”. The title of my own riff on mushroom’s ideas reflect my own concern. I know where we'll be, but I wonder if we'll have a ready source of water if the grid goes down for a long time. To my thinking we need a hand-pump in addition to our deep well with the submersible pump which runs on electricity. Electric service is not a commodity that I trust to last indefinitely, thus I lust after one of those old fashioned pumps, the kind you can stick a bucket under.

The Baron, on the other hand, says if the grid goes down long-term, a lack of potable water won’t matter much when one considers all the other problems that will ensue. So on my good days, I don't worry about that shiny red pump handle.

By the way, notice that mushroom doesn’t consider the water problem:

Bill Bonner from the Daily Reckoning speculates on Black Swans and bad places to be during the revolution -- that would be anywhere in the general vicinity.

What strikes me about what he says is the unpredictability of it all. We never really see it coming, and even if we do, it never falls as we would expect it to. The very nature of these events make them nearly impossible to forecast. This tells me that we are neither as smart as we think we are nor are we nearly as much in control as we’d like to believe. Conspiracy theories will abound in times like these for people want somebody to be in control. They want to believe that all of the chaos is not random or mindless.

Unfortunately much of the time it mindless. Want to know a secret?

The experts have no idea what they are doing or what the consequences of their actions may be beyond next week. Not only is it true that There Ain’t No Such Thing As A Free Lunch, there ain’t no such thing as a sure thing (TANSTAAST) -- which is actually a better looking acronym anyway.

Are the financiers of the world bleeding us dry and trying to profit at our expense? Probably. That’s what they do for a living. They have stockholders -- including many of us, to satisfy. If their derivative schemes collapse the civilization, which is possible, their money is going to do them no good. If the big ball does fall, I’d rather be on a scrubby Ozark farm with a few chickens and a garden than to be the CEO of Goldman Sachs.

Sounds like a good idea, but is there a well on that scrubby farm?

Please feel free to post your notions, concerns, worries, and above all, your hopes, about what happens when/if the world goes sideways…this will be a perennial topic for the rest of the Boomers’ life-span.


Meanwhile, here’s where the title of the post originated, as this theme has been on my mind for a long time: