Prepping for Tuesday

[mousme]

Many, many years ago, my friend fearsclave turned me onto TEOTWAKI, or "The End of the World As We Know It" ("and I feel fiiiiine!"). At that time, he was concerned about Peak Oil and the collapse that would inevitably ensue. Being a lawyer, he was pretty convincing when talking about this stuff, and so I started to look into it myself, and that's when I found myself going down the rabbit hole of Doomsday Preppers.

I should specify that, right off the bat, I wasn't super impressed with the online community of Doomers. There was a lot of talk of guns, ammunition, bunkers, and storing canned goods for the future when the world would descend into a Mad Max-like chaos, and everyone would be actively trying to either kill or enslave everyone else, and only those with M4d L33t Sk1lls (people still talked like that on the internet back then, because this is well over 20 years ago and Gen Xers and older Millennials thought l33t sp34k was the pinnacle of human achievement) would be able to survive the impending apocalypse/collapse of civilization.

I was mostly off-put by how male dominated and man-centric the spaces were, and specifically how misogynistic most of these people were. In the forums there was approximately one active woman for every fifty active men (no idea how many women were just lurking, i.e. reading but not posting), and when women did post some mild objection to the dominant conversations about violence and brutality and death, all the men would jump with a truly astonishing level of glee to explain to them in various levels of detail how, as women, they would be brutally subjugated and/or raped by men with superior strength and/or firepower. Any suggestion about cooperation or community building was met with scoffing derision--pansy stuff. Everyone knew that if you talked about your preparations (your "prepping"), it meant that your home (or secret fortress, or whatever) would be the first to be attacked when society inevitably collapsed.

Needless to say, as a very newbie prepper, I found this new world in which I was going to be used as a slave/sex slave for post-apocalyptic warlords unappealing. However, a lot of the science-based information coming out in snippets made a lot of sense to me.

This is also when fearsclave put me onto the work of Sharon Astyk, who was herself a prepper and a science writer. She was living on a farm at the time with her husband and several kids (I can't recall if it was three or four, if it was four then her youngest was probably still very wee), and she was building up her family and community's resilience by growing and preserving her own food, raising goats, and living a frugal life that made her less dependent on things like unlimited electricity and hot water and the like, recognizing that modern amenities are luxuries rather than absolute necessities. All of her writing seemed like a revelation, and a confirmation that I wasn't crazy when I thought that prepping should realistically involve more than stocking up on guns, ammo, and canned beans. For instance, canned goods have an expiration date, and people need shelter and clothing and silly things like a way to brush their teeth and wash themselves and a myriad of other considerations.

Man cannot live by canned bean alone, after all.

Anyway, fast-forward to much later, because I don't need to rehash about 20 years' worth of my half-assed attempts at being a prepper. I was never any good at it long-term because I mostly didn't have the attention span for it and would often fail at the follow-through level. I did, over the years, develop some skills that are generally useful and would also be useful in a TEOTWAKI scenario, like knitting, basic sewing (which my mother taught me as a kid, so that's not a recent thing), some basic vegetable gardening skills, and cooking mostly from "scratch" (within reason).

I had lost track of Sharon because she abandoned her blog in the late aughts, but then I stumbled across her again in 2015 or so because she was writing about foster care. Her family had grown to 10 children (from a foster/adoption process), and she had to move off her farm and into town because it better suited her family's needs. It was really interesting to read about how she and her family adapted their lives without sacrificing their values for the most part.

By this point I had moved from Québec to Ontario, and I didn't have a garden or anything like that. Life had happened to me a whole lot at the time, and I had mostly given up on prepping. The only remnants of my previous ambitions were in the form of my very well-stocked, rotating pantry. I had enough staples and the like to get me through about three months without ever needing to go to a store (as long as I didn't mind living without perishable foods), which I thought was a pretty good accomplishment. However, I needed to move again in a hurry in 2017 because my landlady at the time lost her ever-loving mind (I wrote about it here at the time, as I recall), and having to move my entire pantry again was a bit of a scarring experience. I was determined to purchase a house by 2020, so in 2019 I decided to use up what was in my pantry so I wouldn't have to move it all again, and by December 2019 I had mostly accomplished that. Hooray!

Yes, yes, I know. The irony is SO THICK it practically killed me.

Anyway, in 2020 I was almost ready to buy a house, but I didn't quite have my ducks in a row until August, which is when the real estate market started losing its goddamned mind, and then never found it again. I will forever be bitter about this.

The pandemic drove home just how important prepping was. The only sliver of good news that I had in the early days was that I had a small stockpile of toilet paper and other cleaning supplies, so I wasn't caught short during the first couple of months when people cleared off the shelves. After that, though, "supply chain issues" became the buzzword du jour for about two years. Remember the supply chain problems, kids? They're locked in my memory alongside the memory of the poor EVER GIVEN that was stuck in the Suez Canal for six days in 2021 and effectively blocked all commercial traffic for that entire time. Something something metaphor, amirite?

Then KK moved in, and I explained to her that I wanted to slowly build up our resilience and start doing more prepping, and she was supportive of that. She's not an active prepper the way I am, but she was more than happy to enable me in my ways. 

These days, I have come to my own conclusions about what TEOTWAKI will look like, and I am firmly on the side of "slow collapse," meaning that I think we're in for a long, grinding descent punctuated by dire precipitating events that will cause periods of acute worsening, followed by more periods of slow, agonizing grind in which we are somehow still expected to go to work and pay rent and act as if the world isn't on fire all around us, metaphorically and literally.

There was a satirical Tumblr post several years ago about this, or maybe Twitter, that was captioned something like: "We'll be four horsemen deep into the apocalypse and still going to work."

Boss: "Why were you late for work?"
Employee: "A lake of fire swallowed the freeway."
Boss: "I feel like you're not considering how this affects the team."

So it's all very depressing, but I don't want to just lie down and die, you know? So I'm trying within my limited capacity to prepare my little household for collapse, and also eventually I'd like to extend that to my more immediate community. 

I saw someone on the internet (a woman, unsurprisingly) referring to this kind of prepping as "prepping for Tuesday," meaning that you're preparing for any number of relatively mundane scenarios that can impact your day-to-day life. This means a weather or climate emergency, or a small-scale infrastructure issue like your area losing power or access to clean running water, or larger-scale stuff like a pandemic that can wreck all of our incredibly delicate supply chains.

We live in a world that has been rendered inherently precarious by end-stage capitalism, where everything is run on either razor-thin margins or the most exploitative mechanisms ever. So the moment we have anything that affects front-line workers (pandemic, recession, housing or affordability crises), we can very quickly plummet into an otherwise fully avoidable crisis, especially those of us who are said front-line workers. The first affected in these situations are always the most vulnerable (the disabled, the poor, the unhoused, anyone living with financial instability of any kind).

I haven't been doing a stellar job of it so far, I must admit. I've been struggling for years with truly abysmal energy levels, new and interesting quasi-chronic pain (I messed up my back a few years ago and never fully came back from it), and ridiculous amounts of brain fog. All of it feels like excuses, but some days it's all I can do to drag myself to work and back, and it feels like I have nothing left to give to the rest of my life. It's all very frustrating.

Nevertheless, I persist. Ahem.

So here's a partial list of my current plans to try and mitigate the risks of ~whatever~ the future has in store for us. I say partial because I'm definitely going to forget things.

• Buy my own property, hopefully with enough acreage to be able to grow a fair bit of my own food and have small livestock of some kind.  It's a bit of a gamble at this point, because real estate is so expensive near me that even with the modest down payment I've scraped together, it's really not a given that I'll ever be able to buy a place.


• Eliminate what's left of my debt so that I'm not constantly caught in the grind of capitalism.


• Generally grow more of my own  food, regardless of whether I own a property. I have been doing a lot of reading on extending my gardening season, and even though I am an inexperienced gardener and climate change is likely going to ruin my limited understanding of my local growing/hardiness zone, I do have some experience growing vegetables. My own backyard is kind of small and full of dogs, but I got a plot in my community garden, and my goal is to put it to use.


• Set up an indoor garden for herbs and smaller fresh vegetables that I can harvest year-round. I also got myself a mushroom growing kit, which I am excited to try out!


• Learn about and use permaculture techniques to grow my food in a more sustainable way. This is a much more long-term plan.


• Sneakily start raising quail at home so I can get used to raising livestock even before we move, and just in case it turns out that we can't ever get out from under the thumb of our landlords, I will have a small source of meat and eggs for us. (If anyone asks you, I never told you about quail. The quail are a metaphor.)


• Stock up on PPE like masks, gloves, and a set-up for making hypochlorous acid (not to be confused with hydrochloric acid!). We're actually doing really well on this front, which is good, given that we're still in the middle of the Covid 19 pandemic and we're also teetering on the edge of an H5N1/bird flu pandemic. There's always room for improvement, but right now I'm pretty comfortable with our level of preparedness.


• Learn to make my own soap and other hygiene products.


• Learn to make alcohol at home, like wine or mead or other things. This one is mostly just for fun.


• Continue building up my pantry. I started rebuilding in 2020 (*cries a little*), and I'm back to where I can feed my household for about three months as long as we're not too picky about perishables.


• Build up water storage for emergencies. My goal is to have enough potable water stored to keep our household going for at least two weeks.


• Get back-up power sources in case we lose electricity for a protracted period of time. Right now we have a generator that can run the main appliances like fridge/freezers as long as we cycle everything carefully, but I'd like to investigate the possibility of solar panels or some other backup system that I can use without needing to modify the house (because it doesn't belong to me and landlords are a pain).


• Improve my own physical health and conditioning so that I can get around well by walking, running, or bicycling. Right now I can do all of that in a pinch, but my stamina is shot, and it's making everything I do that much harder--what the medical community likes to refer to as ADoL or "Activities of Daily Living."

I'm sure there's more that I'm forgetting, but you get the picture. We're staring down the barrel of multiple crises: pandemics, climate change, an abrupt slide into political fascism, and all that jazz. In light of the fact that everything appears to be going to hell in a handbasket, I at least want my handbasket to be somewhat comfortable while I travel.

I think I've nattered enough about this for one day. I'll probably come back to it another time on a more granular level, energy and attention span permitting.