But if brevity is your thing and you don't have 45 minutes, no one lays it out better or simpler than Mark Twain:

“There were two 'Reigns of Terror,' if we would but remember it and consider it; the one wrought murder in hot passion, the other in heartless cold blood; the one lasted mere months, the other had lasted a thousand years; the one inflicted death upon ten thousand persons, the other upon a hundred millions; but our shudders are all for the 'horrors' of the minor Terror, the momentary Terror, so to speak; whereas, what is the horror of swift death by the axe, compared with lifelong death from hunger, cold, insult, cruelty, and heart-break? What is swift death by lightning compared with death by slow fire at the stake? A city cemetery could contain the coffins filled by that brief Terror which we have all been so diligently taught to shiver at and mourn over; but all France could hardly contain the coffins filled by that older and real Terror—that unspeakably bitter and awful Terror which none of us has been taught to see in its vastness or pity as it deserves.”

-Mark Twain "A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court"

#WeatherIsHappening #antiwork #ClimateCrisis #ClimateAnxiety #CollapseAware
#IWW #greencollargrunt #LateStageCapitalism #Sisyphean

The lockdown broke me. And the reason it broke me was because I got to experience my perfect day. And I got to experience it repeatedly:

At the time I had maybe $9000. My rent was $750 a month. I was unemployed (though heavily paid the #ADHDTax by not applying for unemployment). I had managed to secure some staples (especially flour. I've always been a baker, and when I saw the way the bread section looked at Market Basket I wandered over to the baking section and bought 20lbs of flour and figured I'd be able to keep myself fed and entertained for a bit.) So my emotional state was calm. We just needed to ride this thing out, I have food, I have money, there's nothing I can really do right now but chill the fuck out. And I did. I never do that.

I'd wake up in the morning and brew myself a pot of tea. As it steeped I'd fold up my bed and sit in the middle of the tatami my bed was on in my attic bedroom. I'd turn on my stereo I had scavenged and pick an album. I had just started exploring ambient music. This morning I pick Green by #HiroshiYoshimura. I pour myself a cup of tea and bask in the sun streaming through my skylight. As I blow across the tea I watch the ongoing drama at the bird feeder I had installed to the window a few weeks ago after a bout of hyper-fixation on bird watching. Three mourning doves have become regulars, and they are the dumbest birds I've ever seen. They are much too big for this feeder, and they are too dumb to take turns, so all three of them try to perch and end up shoving each other off and begin a perpetually cascading fountain of feather, coos, and struggle as they keep unseating each other. A pair of nuthatches watch, frustrated from the large tree just outside my window. I finish the album and still have tea left. The temperature is mild so I climb out our front window onto the roof with a blanket and a book and sit. I don't read much and instead watch folks walking up and down the middle of the street, commenting on this odd new liberty in our ongoing apocalypse. I decide I want to be a little closer to these conversations so I walk down to the front porch and set up my hammock. I make myself a grilled cheese and another pot of tea and sit in the hammock while I continue to people watch. My street had never been this interesting before... or maybe I've just never had time to observe it. Eventually I decide I should maybe move or something so I get my bike out and go for a ride. There are no cars. Cycling has never been this enjoyable before. I bike smack down the middle of Elm Street, my hand's behind my head as I stretch in the sun and look around at the new, slow pace life has taken on. I pedal lazily through the streets of Somerville and up the minuteman until I get to the meadows and do a little bit of languid trail riding. When I find a quiet spot I set up my hammock again and just rock and listen. As the temperature drops I make my way home. I make myself dinner and split a beer with my roommate while I watch him play Skyrim and we banter. Eventually he turns in and I make a pot of herbal tea and sit on the roof wrapped in a blanket and watch the neighborhood around me settle down for the evening. I hear people coughing, and I shiver. It's time to head inside.

I recognize this was a scary, awful time for so many people, as it was that for me as well. I was lucky that no one in my circle had contracted it, and I wasn't actively wrapped in anxiety or mourning over anyone I knew. That being said, I had never taken a vacation before in my life, and I think this was the closest I've ever been. There was nothing I could do in those days, nothing was expected of me, so I just... vibed. It was something I've never experienced before in my life, and I wish I could just have an hour like that each day. That shouldn't be too much to ask, but these days it's always just out of reach. I got to taste the good life, and slowly that's been taken away from me piece by piece as we "return to normal.

#WeatherIsHappening #ClimateCrisis #IWW #antiwork #ADHD #greencollargrunt #greenwashing #greenwash #LateStageCapitalism #Sisyphean

I'm in a spiral. I've known it for over a month. It's been happening for years. I don't know how I let it sneak up on me, but it's here, and I'm less equipped, poorer, and more isolated than I've ever been. I've joined the IWW, but I couldn't build any relationships in the branch that made me stick. After all, they are there because they feel overworked too. We're all too tired for meaningful socialization after our jobs and trying to change the world. I've made aggressive organizing pushes in past jobs, I've helped lots of other people realize their worth, that they didn't need to take the shit this job was handing them, and move on to better jobs (Shit, more than once when I've quit the entire store or department quit less than a month after departure. I'm good at tearing down the temple on my way out of bad jobs... but never fast enough for my own benefit). They were meant for and wanted the kind of work those better jobs did anyway. They trained for more. Me... I like the fucking work that keeps my boots on the ground and my hands dirty. I like maintenance, I like preservation, and I'm devoted to keeping useful things useful. I want nothing more, and nothing less.

I've hauled what was basically garbage by bike, I've raked human shit, I've farmed, I've cooked, I've served, I've driven, I've delivered, I've experience in disaster relief, wildland fire mitigation, public speaking, advocacy... Shit, I know what it means to do all kinds of work, most of it the kind that is utterly unappealing at it's surface, but because it was useful, and it served my community... I was glad to do it. But fuck me, absolutely none of it has paid the goddamn bills. It has all fed on my passion to be useful and fucking stole my time and I'm now I'm a husk. My life passes in an existential malaise and I help no one.

Fuck it. Maybe (though I'd be shocked if this is the case) you haven't really questioned the 9-5 (or whatever fucked combination of cobbled-together shifts you get if you are one of the many of my brothers and sisters in the service industry) but that shit was from the era where one income could support two adults + dependents. One person worked for an employer, one maintaining the home. We're not saying that's how it should be, but if we are to be getting the same deal now, 40 person-hours a week should be more than enough to support a family of four, whatever its configuration. If two of you are working adults, you should only need to work 20 hours a week each to support that lifestyle. And then think of all the time you'd have to live the kind of life you ACTUALLY want.

#WeatherIsHappening #ClimateCrisis #IWW #antiwork #ADHD #greencollargrunt #greenwashing #greenwash #LateStageCapitalism #Sisyphean

My new coworkers are nice enough, but this being an outdoor recreation bike shop, there's a lot of talk about the utter lack of snow during this sickly-warm winter... but purely from the "We can't ski/snowboard/ice fish" angle, not the "SWEET FUCKING SHIT ITS JANUARY IN MASSACHUSETTS AND WE DON'T HAVE ANY SNOW, WE ARE IN A DROUGHT, ITS ONLY GETTING WARMER, THE SHIP IS GOING DOWN!" angle my brain operates on. It's utterly maddening.

They are all at least a decade older than me, and try to tell me about long-term financial investments, swap stories about maintaining their rather new Tacomas, International adventures, talk about their apartments they don't have to share, and I'm getting paid $17 an hour and living in a cramped apartment with a galley kitchen with 3 other people. I just want to scream.

I like these dudes. I like working with them. And I have always only wanted to work with bikes and car alternatives. I'm very lucky to be where I am right now. But I'll be moving on in a few months when we move, and I have no idea where to go from here. Since the death of Metro Pedal Power every green-collar job I've had has let me down and I utterly despair of the possibility of finding a job that my ADHD-ass can handle for more than a year so I can get the health benefits to let me access the therapy I need to square living a life where my sanity depends on devoting 99% of my spoons to work that doesn't serve me or the world I want to live in?

#WeatherIsHappening #ClimateCrisis #IWW #antiwork #ADHD #greencollargrunt #greenwashing #greenwash #LateStageCapitalism #Sisyphean #WarOnCars

@wasted Yeah, the thinking laid out in this article is exactly what I think is the main enemy of us ever achieving meaningful change. We need massive shifts in the way we live our day-to-day lives, but #recycling and other #greenwashing techniques get rolled out to placate folks who "mean well" but are wholly unwilling to accept any aspect of their current lives and goals. Just put that bottle in the right bin, buy the right kind of car, and you've done your part.

Seeing as how I'm not hamstrung by word limits on this instance, I'll copy and paste your other responses and respond to them here, to try to consolidate this into a more parseable thread. Not sure if that's actually helpful, but hey, we're all learning the ropes.

"Also wrt compostable plastics, is that true of industrial / high-heat facilities? I was wondering about this recently, I use Bootstrap for my compost and often find myself tossing PLA containers in the bin."

I was only ever involved in transport, so I can't speak to this at all, aside from saying, in general, any #composting system has to maintain a #balance, and there's a limit to how far you can push one component or another. Prefacing the following statement with "I am a #greencollargrunt, and have no qualifications to make these statements, but if I had to put forth a theory:" Most of these #compostable plastics are "technically so," but there's so much of them being put into the system that they are out of balance. I think the ratio of actual biologic matter to plastic to effectively break down everything is huge, so... it doesn't take much. But of course the American public just wants to hear that they technically could compost it, and that's good enough for them. Just like with recycling.

"(Last reply lol my character limit is small) Can I boost this btw?"

Boost away. The main reason I started transitioning over here (actually not a twitter refugee!) was because it seemed like a platform that we could actually have conversations on. I am a recovering instagram junky, and I kept posting my photography and trying to talk about the problems I was seeing, and The most I got was "🔥 shot!" over and over again from folks trying to work the algorithm. I'm pretty sure everyone who is likely to see my stuff on this platform gets it already, but I am really hoping we'll be able to move past just talking in circles into actually DOING SOMETHING about this shit. Solutions exist, but we need to decide to start working on them instead of waiting for some politician or bug-fuck billionaire to suddenly find fixing these problems to be profitable.

Gonna sign off now, but have somne #bikesatwork porn. A few shots of the #trikes out on the job to atone for the previous trike pic I posted and neglected to alt-text.