Last night I was standing in the line at Walmart in Albany while this chubby lady was unpacking her cart of soda, sugary drinks and the supplies to make a Thanksgiving dinner for her family, with I think it was $160 of the $270. I looked at all the plastic wrappers, bottles, and cans soon enough to added to the giant pile of garbage across the the Thruway from there, and had to think a bit more about poverty, food, and life.
I myself was bitching about the $90 I would be spending to restock my pantry and replace yet another smoke detector that failed in my apartment from the dust, steam and smoke that are in part due to keeping the heat so low and many defects the building has including the blocked bathroom vent and failing foundation. Issues my landlord should fix but I don’t want to bother him. And just how expensive eating good healthy food really is. But I eat mostly poor people’s food, I don’t buy fancy woke labels or processed ingredients in so much organic food, instead putting together my own meals by using basic food science to make meals that are nutrious and delicious.
I try to be frugal as much as possible. I want to save so I can retire early and buy that off grid homestead without vinyl siding and asphalt shingles. Where I can live up in the hills, like so many of the rural poor with my garden, hogs and goats, burn my trash and compost. Have some junk and clutter not be buying suburban shit every day. Have money for ATVs and guns and a nice truck but not a beautiful farmstead or cabin like you see in the magazines and books but instead something slightly rundown and real that might smell a bit like manure and burn plastics at times, where nobody would look werid at a hung out deer or goat for butchering or a tractor being worked on in the driveway.
I know there are few homesteads that look like the curated pictures in the books and the internet, the manure piles and broke down equipment just out of the frame. And it’s not that the poor are all noble savages. Though I’m convinced that many of the rural poor do live vastly more sustainably then the woke suburbanite with their blue bin, solar panels and electric car. But it’s also hard to know how much money anyone has – some real run down homesteads may not be actually that poor but instead are real, their owners frugal and spending on what is important rather than passing by motorists sense of beauty.
Truth is that I’m tired of lies of suburbia, all the plastic wrappers and stories of recycling, organic foods and green living. Those who raise their own food and live closer to the land can’t be that bad all things said and done. And it’s not like I can see their bank account and if their raising goats and heating with wood to live a more natural life or because their truly down on their lives financially.
