Exit strategy: when I grow up

Agricultural towers, like this one shown at verticalfarm.com, are likely to be the wave of the future and my wave goodbye to economic shackles.

It’s so easy to get caught up in your life and to think that you can’t have more or don’t deserve more. It’s as if after college our dreams get thrown on the chopping block, and all that is pure falls with the axe. But then there’s those crisp moments, that grab your entire essence and shake you back into who you’ve always dreamt to be.

Yesterday, I swung. I danced with an angel. Imbedded in the Charleston’s thrash and the twirl of Big Band was the thought, pure and simple, life is fun.

Somehow, I lost track of this resplendent maxim. I spent so much time trying to grapple for my place in the world, invaded by thoughts like, “I need to make myself into someone. I need to be something that matters.” I forgot the thing that matters most is living life lucidly.

I don’t know what happened this weekend, but the stars aligned. I went for a 16-mile run on Saturday and then it’s like the Mary Poppins effect exploded. I saw an owl swoop overhead at twilight, my girlfriend made me dal that could stop interstellar traffic, swing opened up my world and shining through was an exit strategy.

The exit strategy:

Job –> Land –> Agriculture tower –> Solar Panels –> Internet –> Quit Job

Taking a quick backtrack, pretty much since the outset of college, I’ve harbored pipe dreams of some rando-CIA agent coming my way and saying, “We’ve been tracing your movements for a while Mr. Bert and you exhibit all the qualities that this agency has been looking for. Pack your things. You leave for Beijing Monday.”

Well, no fucking rando agent is on his way for a chit chat, and even if he was, having clandestine fire-fights isn’t going to change the fact that this country kind of blows ass right now. Multinational Corporations own everything under the sun including our politicians, our food supply, and a fucking mega-chunk of our sovereignty. So, the point is, because our nation is in such a pitiful state, even if a CIA agent showed up on my doorstep and wanted me to eliminate national security risks in crazy-dangerous corners of the world, I couldn’t engage in super exciting gun fights without feeling like I was backing a country lacking dignity, conviction, or a worthwhile identity. Ergo the importance of an exit strategy.

I need to sock away funds to build my very own Agricultural tower to start growing local food, and maybe if I was a true Stevie-Green-Thumb, I could even turn a profit on the side. And then, I could buy solar panels to go completely off the grid. I could cut down my work to cover just enough to pay for taxes, internet and world travel. Ohh it’s so good to dream.

Power Up: Check out this Dick. He’s a professor at Columbia University in New York and he’s got the right idea. Yes, Dickson Despommier’s envisioning vertical farms in urban landscapes. His vision bears all the bells and whistles, but even in its austere form the idea of building up is glorious.

Carbon Offset – The Get Out of Jail Free Card?

In a phrase, “glorious slacking.” Yes, my driving mileage is crazy out of whack with what it should be, and no I don’t feel bad about it. YET.

Last weekend, my girlfriend and I took a bite out of the Big Apple. The salty and mealy portions of my tongue did backflips during their first encounters with Borscht, Blinztes and Knishes. Yes, Jewish delights were the mainstay of the voyage, but there were other goodies and moments of glory that made soaring by my carbon budget worth it. (By the way, if you think you have what it takes to turn down the temptations of New York just read Ileana’s post, I guarantee you won’t after that.)

But the thing is, even with my car spewing CO₂ - the most pervasive of greenhouse gases and the gas whose annual emissions has risen 80 percent from 1970 to 2004 – I don’t have to feel just that bad yet. Manmade wonder-bundles, a.k.a. carbon offsets, may just be the get out of jail free card I need, for my eco-slacking. But, I have some homework to do first.

Terrapass supplies carbon offsets as commodities to firms and individuals who are interested in negating their carbon emissions. Revenue generated, by the firms or individuals who buy offsets, funds renewable energy projects to go in place of fossil fuel projects.

See, my tummy gets all tied up in knots when it comes to the concept of buying something to offset the carbon I’ve already unloaded. I’m thinking that if I produce a jätte-ton (jätte = Swedish equivalent for helluh) of carbon, than how can I just buy an offset to make the carbon that I produced go away? It’s not like I’m purchasing a giant plant monster to come hoove up the carbon and convert it into oxygen.

Clearly not, but supposedly if I pay for the carbon I’ve emitted, the money that I spend goes toward funding renewable energy projects in other parts of the globe. So like, if I continue my Fat Cat spending and dole out emissions like it were cool, my money will go toward renewable energy projects that will be put in place of fossil fuel projects.

But what if those renewable energy projects weren’t going to be built in the first place? Now we just have extra resources and labor hours getting thrown into projects that spawn from the guilt of Carbon Fat Cats.

Obviously, I am missing something very important here. As soon as I get to the bottom of this, I will enlighten yee loyal readers. Stay posted.

Also, Food Stamps update coming soon.

It’s the power of play

The vast unscripted

And the sunlit day

That gets our spirits lifted

It crashes upon us, washes and dons us:

Beings belonging in beauty.

It was next to Captain Bull, Saturday, where my girlfriend and I opened the floodgates and were swept into beautiful oblivion. Gaia granted us an afternoon of warm sunny splendor, so we trekked to Manassas National Battlefield Park, where we would shed the shiz kopf winter’s been dealing us.

Using unrivaled dexterity, most likely acquired from youtube workout exercises, Ileana Vink dekes, dodges, and ducks amid the bramble of branches blocking a tiny wooden bridge at Stone Bridge Loop Trail, Manassas National Battlefield Park.

If you’re anything like me, and trust me you probably are, because people are more similar than they ever lead onto, than you forget about how stimulating it is to be outside. You forget how the sound of grass, plasticity of mud, and warmth of the sun rockets you into old memories, which launch you into new memories, and all of it sends your life whirling into motion.

Nature provides this crazy automatic recharge. It re-energizes people who are spending too much time being forced into focusing.

There’s a spankin’ brilliant passage in Richard Louv’s book “Last Child in the Woods” that talks about how too much directed-attention (time spent where your forced into focusing on something, like being on the computer, watching tv, slaving away at work, or perishing in the classroom) leads to “directed-attention fatigue.”

The best cure to this fatigue is finding an environment where attention is automatic and not forced – an environment strong on fascination. The cool thing is, “the fascination factor associated with nature is restorative and it helps relieve people from directed-attention fatigue.”

Power Up: The ground hog did not see his shadow, so perhaps spring is upon us.

Back to the Dumpsters! I’m feelin’ Marty McFLY

Disclaimer: For liability’s sake what you are about to read is entirely fiction. Every word of it. The pictures were photoshopped and are replete with falsehood.

So, my food stamp benefits got slashed at the start of this month and I think it’s mainly because my benefits case worker has an unhealthy fondness of jacking with the computer system that calculates my food stamp eligibility. Coming down from $200 a month, my benefits went to $16 for two days, $18 for a couple of hours, and now they're sitting at $109 a month. However, I may have a juicy update soon as my friend Erin Lee has been working her heart out to get us back to the full $200, we have grown so merrily accustomed to.

Anyway, the food-cramped roller coaster ride of last week has got me thinking, “there’s no way in hell that I’m going to compromise my savings or my standard of living.” I guess you could say that the die-hard econ major/uncompromising wretch is coming alive in me, ‘cause today, with the help of Erin Lee and her boyfriend Travis, I put ponder into practice. We went dumpster diving in the back of a place that for anonymity’s sake I will not reveal (but let’s just say it rhymes with Raider Rose) to supplement our lackluster transfer payments from the government.

It was FUN!!! In 11 minutes flat we pilfered enough grainy sustenance to not have to worry about the bottom plank of the food pyramid for the next month or two. The thing is, today was so fricking glorious. There were like 10 bags of bread and pies that were dated to go bad within the next few days, double bagged and loaded into shopping carts behind the grocery establishment. It was as if “Raider Rose” understood that the food was still good for the taking and wanted to make it as easy as possible for the tramp, hoodlum, vagabond, or fervent AmeriCorps volunteer to plunder.

Erin Lee examines part of the loot retrieved after a night of successful dumpstering. Bagels, pies, whole grain bread, muffins, naan, plum tomatoes in dented cans, and even quality hand soap were among the items claimed that evening.

So grocer-that-will-not-be named, hats off to you, you marvelous oasis in a litigious desert. You are a wondrous outlier in a country that is so overburdened by laws, that enough food to feed the entire state of California gets thrown out every day. Today was the best ever because we took a fraction out of the California-sized foodwaste problem.

In rapid closing, I hate and love laws. Because of laws black markets exist and people go to jail for non-intrusive behavior like dealing drugs. (I mean why people can stomach paying their tax dollars to support inmates who’d simply peddled a substance that people can say no to on their own volition, is beyond me.) And because of laws, inmates cannot manufacture the goods that we need to support the backbone of a sustainable economy, which is really unfortunate because they could be a labor input at no cost. Yes, and because of laws corporations can give any amount of money they deem necessary to buy our citizens’ politicians. Laws kind of suck. But because of laws, those black markets exist for the unscrupulous to meander in; adventures are born and fun is to be had. If laws didn’t exist, we couldn’t break them, and then where would all the fun be?

Eat food. Break laws. Dance a little.

Make dumpster diving “safe”

Get some hydrogen peroxide. It is used to clean bacteria off of food, but it is better than an anti-bacterial because instead of drying onto the food like a bleach solution or a soap solution, the hydrogen peroxide will kill the bacteria and then dissolve.

Plug up your sink. Add water and hydrogen peroxide. Put 6-8 Tbs. of hydrogen peroxide per gallon of water. Completely submerge your produce in the water/hydrogen peroxide solution.

Be selective with your dumpstered items. Use common sense. Don’t eat any items that have holes in the bags. Don’t eat anything that looks questionable. Don’t ever trust meat. Be ridiculously careful with items that are not in safe containers. Don’t eat any items in bags that have contaminated items or questionable items.

Your freezer is your friend. The good thing about acquiring food that “goes bad” the next day is that if you put it in your freezer, it will stop your food from ever reaching the next day. This way you can save the items you’ve just pilfered.

Don’t share your dumpstered food with friends unless they're cool with it. Not everybody is enamored with eating out of the dumpster. You should never pawn off dumpstered food as normal food. It’s a total food waste faux paux, so don’t do it. Plus it’s irresponsible.

Job hunting: a whore-able endeavor

I’m staring down the Himalayas, except the boring, unscenic version. Reaching my Everest involves punching down keys on my Gateway laptop for hours on end, hunting down leads for environmental positions that I have yet to find out exist. It’s a crazy thing, feigning to pretend that I have faintest idea of what I want to do in my life, and it’s even loonier trying to convince someone that I’m the perfect candidate for a position they’re offering, especially because I’ll probably know next to nothing about that position. Yet, this seems a very normal thing. Successful people do it all the time. High school…college…interviews…job…marriage…kids…blah

My girlfriend assures me the need to find that perfect something is an American notion. That in other countries life isn’t so career-centric and people focus on other things. Like in Greece life is all about the food. And in Spain it’s all about the nap before nightlife. I think she’s right, and I think that’s why being successful is so confusing.

In America, you can earn your way to fortunes, but to do so, you give up your family and friends. And in America of late, you can earn your way to subsistence living, but you also give up your family and friends. So many people in this country vie for the façade of honorable work and a decent lifestyle, because it’s so much better than feeling meaningless. But often it’s impossible to decipher true meaning in work and to distinguish the difference between what is honorable and what is just a mirage.

When I interviewed to be Editor for the College of DuPage student newspaper, I envisioned limitless possibilities: articles written in prose, headlines littered with alliteration and rhyming, stories about couch surfers, eccentrics, world travelers, arts stories on the front page and feature leads in news stories. But what I got with the position was, “People read the paper for news…these headlines are horrible…our readership is the college faculty…” I became my adviser’s marionette, because I was weak, because I needed her recommendation, and because I needed the tuition stipend and the $3/hour salary to get me out of student loans.

I can’t help but feel that my COD experience is the American job scene in a nutshell. Our financial obligations to either loans, kids, or just even getting by pin us into a position we cannot afford to leave.

Yet, I’m job hunting now, despite all of that. I know that I’d have to be a fucking moron to willfully seek out those conditions, but the truth is I’m a product of a Walt Disney childhood. I, much like the vast majority of Americans, as brilliantly explained in a Freakonomics Podcast about a no-lose lottery, seek that chance to find happily-ever-after. So even if my odds are one-in-a-million of finding a good green job out there that isn’t meaningless, and it pays me enough money to climb Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, it’s worth searching for that shot at happily-ever-after.

So today is for all of us out there who are working toward happily-ever-after. It can be hard as all-getup, but I’d like to mention that I’m proud of the brave souls out there that are inching closer.

Also, if you’re out of debt and thinking about climbing back into it for Grad school…DON’T. Grad school degrees today are a dime a dozen, and unfortunately they cost dozens upon dozens upon dozens upon dozens upon dozens of dimes to pay back. But if you’re out of debt, holy shit go back to school because you’ve got the one-in-a-million chance, maybe even the one-in-a-hundred-thousand chance, of finding a good job out there.

‘Food Game’ halted until food stamp crisis averted

Life seemed to coming up roses. At 10:30 am, I spoke over the phone with a very nice and friendly Giant Customer Service Representative, Dee who told me she would aid me in my quest to trace the carbon footprint of foods that I purchased. All I had to do was supply Dee with the barcodes on these foods. Then she would trace their points of origin, their package and processing points, and I would be well on my way to successfully maneuvering through “Food Game.”

But it was in the checkout line of Giant at 12:15 p.m. where fate spun in an entirely different direction. Apparently, the Commonwealth of Virginia decided to launch their own version of “Food Game” by screwing the bejesus out of low income earners, like myself. Without any emails, phone calls or notifications whatsoever from Arlington’s Department of Human Services, I discovered my food stamp benefits were slashed when I tried to checkout. I found out later that day from DHS that instead of the $200 I usually receive at the start of each month, I now only qualify for $18.

The reason being, I didn’t initially report my AmeriCorps stipend as income. And, under a statute, that a caseworker other my own, Mr. Marcom, sited, AmeriCorps stipends should be reported as income. With that income correctly reported, he told me that I only qualify for $18 each month. “Fair,” you say. “You didn’t report your income accurately and you shouldn’t get food stamps.” Yet fulltime AmeriCorps volunteers last year received the full benefit. Also, to make things suckier and weirder, my heart goes out to my fellow AmeriCorps member, who I will not name for anonymity’s sake, who’s benefit was slashed from $200 to $33 this month. (A different, AmeriCorps member still gets a benefit of $200, so I’m going to have to learn his game and do that. We are all about as equally poor, and we all make the exact same stipend, so it is interesting that we qualify for $200, $18 and $33.)

Anyway, food stamp complaining aside, I was extremely eager to start Food Game today. I noticed how my mindset started to change within the grocery store, in response to my new imposed restrictions. Today, walking down the aisles of Giant, I found myself shopping for only one input items: bananas, peas, black beans, whole grain rice, mushrooms, honey, apples, so that I could more easily trace their origins - because foods that have multiple inputs, often have multiple origins. And I found myself searching for items that were only distributed by Foodhold U.S.A. , LLC of Landover Maryland (the Giant brand distributer), so that Dee could inform me to where these products hailed from.

Peas, oats and salt are three of a myriad of products that work their way through the Foodhold U.S.A. LLC distribution site in Landover, Maryland. Foodhold is the distributor for the Giant brand.



I’m sorry to conclude that I must put “Food Game” on halt, until I get to the bottom of this food stamps issue. I must say of our motherland, first she supplies tear gas to the Tunisian loyal police, then she supports the evils in Egypt, and now she strips her AmeriCorps compatriots of their necessary means of sustenance. (Okay a little dramatic about the food stamps, but definitely pissed about our pathetic diplomacy, and irked that I can’t start “Food Game”)

Hmmpfff, yar, geez

Power Up: My very caring and beautiful girlfriend took me into her home tonight and fed me organic chicken to cheer me up. She also supplied me with a local sweet potato, turnip and buffalo jerky. When reality bites, there is nothing more glorious than having someone to punch it’s teeth out.