Preparedness

My Shaking

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Preparedness

I wrote about it earlier this summer but want to remind my California friends to download the MyShake app. I was pet sitting for friends in Pomona last Saturday week when, in the early hours of Sunday morning around 3:51 am, the app’s loud warning sound beeped simultaneously with a 4.5 earthquake that rattled the house. I was half awake but the alarm woke me up completely. The cat ran off and the two little dogs looked around, decided it wasn’t worth worrying about, and went back to sleep.

What I appreciated about the alarm was that it made me more conscious of what was going on. I could also instantly see where the earthquake happened and assess whether I needed to get up and check the gas line. I could also see reports from other people in the area confirming the dog’s opinions that this quake was not much to worry about. Even though I didn’t get an advanced warning, I think the alert made me better prepared to do something if it had been a stronger jolt.

Pumpkin Spice Apocalypse

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Preparedness
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When the memes hit.

In September, when the rest of the country begins chugging pumpkin spice lattes and preparing for Christian Girl Autumn we, here in Los Angeles, enter into a month when our mild Mediterranean climate becomes more like a desert. This past weekend the temperature hit 111ºF (43.8ºC) and our neighborhood had almost 48 hours without power. It didn’t cool down at night as it reliably does the rest of the year. And Kelly came down with COVID.

It was a trial run for how prepared we are for an earthquake and we did poorly. I was especially upset to observe my own crankiness. I think that crankiness could have been prevented with a few simple comforts such as a fan and better food. I know from camping and backpacking how looking forward to a meal can go a long way towards elevating your mood.

Two lessons from the weekend come to mind:

  • While Kelly kept the house reliably lit with solar charged LED lanterns, it would be nice to have some kind of battery backup at least so we could run a fan. Keeping the fridge going would be nice but a battery large enough to do that is prohibitively expensive. If any of you have recommendations please leave a comment.
  • As friend of the blog Johnny Sanphillippo discusses on a podcast appearance in early 2020, it’s better to rotate through bulk food than stockpile it. If you just stash it away odds are it will go bad or you won’t know how best to prepare it. Rotate through your food stocks and you’ll know what foods you like and save money while you’re at it.

The weekend had a Road Warrior vibe when it became obvious that many or our neighbors had evacuated to somewhere with power, either relatives houses or a hotel. It felt like a preview of future climate uncertainty and a sober reminder of the tasks we have to prepare. At least we have kind neighbors who are motivated to make sure we look out for everyone and we’re going to talk to our city council office about what happened.

Every Day Carry Revisited

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Preparedness
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Pocket dump from Reddit user ymxyh.

It’s been a long time since I reviewed the Everyday Carry (EDC) discourse (Kelly reviewed hers in 2011). A mostly male bastion of the “prepper” subculture, EDC’s highest expression is the “pocket dump,” a picture, posted to the internet, of all the things you carry with you. Pocket dumps range from mundane photos of leather wallets and keys to more provocative displays of handguns, mace and knives.

Pocket dump from reddit user ChromeOcelot.

They almost always consist of male coded dark wood background and black or leather objects.

My EDC

My current and very boring EDC also with dark objects and a dark wood background.

Other than the keys, eyeglasses and iPhone my EDC consists of two distinct objects:

1. Multitool
Since the days I did video work back in the 90s, I’ve always carried a Leatherman tool. My current life mainly revolves around being the onsite building manager of our 104 year old house, so I carry the Leatherman Rebar that I geekily wear on my belt with a leather box sheath (I’m not a fan of the canvas one it comes with). I probably use it once a day for something even if just to open a box. The pliers are particularly useful.

2. Field Sketchbook
I’ve tried the sketchbook thing before but this time around I’ve actually made a habit of it after a key insight I had about how to keep one going. Here’s that insight: notebooks and sketchbooks need to be private and are not for public consumption. In my case this is not because there’s anything in it that I wouldn’t want to share but that doing so would make my notes and sketches performative rather than useful. There is way too much notebook/sketchbook porn, especially on Instagram, my principle social media addiction these days.

In my case I use mine, mainly, for three things:

  • Note taking about books I’m reading, things that happened, stuff I need to remember to do, public transit times and general ideas.
  • To practice doing quick sketches.
  • To improve my cursive writing (more on that in another post).

Every few days I review my notes and take action, if needed. It really helps prevent me from reaching for my phone and falling into an internet hole.

One issue I’ve had is that my notebook doesn’t fit well in a pant pocket and we’re moving into the season where it’s too warm to wear my jacket. I may have to explore the idea of a smaller one for the summer months.

Our militarized lives
I was reminded of the whole world of EDC discourse via a discussion on an episode of a podcast called Nostalgia Trap. The host, David Parsons and his guest, Justin Rogers-Cooper noted how, in the United States, we tend not to feel physically safe and how this leads to things like EDC pocket dump posting.

I think some of this concern for physical safety is warranted and some is paranoia. Crime is not, of course, evenly distributed in this country and exposure to it has a lot to do with what class strata you occupy. As I’ve mentioned before, our recent trip to Japan gave me a taste for what it’s like to live in a place where you never worry about physical safety (except for earthquakes, which should be a concern of ours in California too). But, alas, we can’t have nice things in this country. Note that Japan’s strict knife rules make my multitool illegal to carry.

Everyday Memeing

I’ll conclude this EDC revisit with me, a geezer, attempting to interpret a meme about EDCs. I can only interpret some of it and I do so at the potential ridicule of my younger comrades. I think that the snarky implication here is that young women these days are Hegelian Trad Caths who embrace old school femininity (Lana Del Rey) while the boys are boring (iPhone) nihilists (cigarettes and E.M. Cioran).

I had to reverse image search some of this to discover that the set of books is a manga called Alice in Boarderland and I’m not sure what the chewing gum, Coke Light and baby deer are about. If you know please do fill me in. I include this meme just to emphasize the gendered factors in EDC discourse which you could just scratch the surface of in a book length discussion of the lack of pockets or strange, small symbolic pockets that exist in women’s clothing and a parallel discussion of purses vs. “man bags.” For the record my own EDC leans towards “girl’s pockets” if just for owning a copy of and occasionally attempting to tackle that infamous Hegel b0ok.

Feel free to drop your EDC into the comments.

Our Covid House Rules and Strategies

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Preparedness, Thoughtstylings
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I once had a wood shop teacher who was fond of saying, “always have a plan.” This sage advice lives in dialectical balance with Mike Tyson’s quote, “Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face.”

Working class people, “essential workers,” small business owners, health workers and the elderly have taken a lot of punches in the face during the Covid crisis and will take some more in coming months. People in the “Zoom” class such as us, have fared better. I’ve been struggling for a metaphor for our times this week and settled on the idea that we’re in for a multi-year version of the Fyre Festival. While I was working on this metaphor over the weekend Kelly let me know that a not very good Washington Post editorialist beat me to it. While the Fyre Festival analogy doesn’t work all that well, there’s a sense in which we’re all stuck on the beach waiting for Blink 182 to show up but knowing that they never will. And isn’t it pathetic that we’re waiting for Blink 182? Why can’t we have better music?

While, for now, we have our styrofoam packed cheese sandwiches and bottled water we probably shouldn’t expect Ja Rule and that entrepreneur dude to keep us fed. We’re going to have to improvise. And the virus guarantees that our lives will be consumed by a tricky ethical calculus that changes on an almost hourly basis. I felt the need this week to write down some game rules for the next few months. We’ve figured that Kelly may be in a risk group for this disease. And relatives that she is responsible for are also at risk. So here’s what we came up with as of ten minutes ago.

Minimizing trips to the grocery store
Many restaurant distribution companies have pivoted into home delivery. Johnnie at Granola Shotgun blogged about a Bay Area service he tried. We tried it this week via  The Chef’s Warehouse. It worked great. The food was delivered in two days. Quality was decent. Some things are available only in huge quantities but you could easily split stuff with friends and neighbors. If you’re in Los Angeles here’s a list of restaurant wholesalers now selling to the public. We also tried Vons’ parking lot pickup service. It worked okay but they were out of some items. And our local farmers market has a new app for pre-ordering produce that we’re going to try. Yesterday we ordered some takeout from a local restaurant we like and picked it up instead of using those parasitic delivery apps.

Seeing other people
We’ve decided that, for now, we’re not going to hang out with other people even if we’re all outside and everyone is wearing a mask. This is not just for our sake but to help stop the spread of this disease. For many of us the impact of Covid is out of sight and out of mind and it’s easy to think that it would be okay to start to go back to normal social practices. We’re just not there yet and I’m expecting another wave of infections. Travel is out of the question right now, in my opinion, and I don’t think it’s cool for city people like us to go out to the country and put people in rural areas at risk.

Building maintenance and construction projects
I’m attempting to follow the advice of my wood shop teacher and plan before running to go get supplies. When it comes time to get stuff for a few of the projects around the house that need to be attended to I’m going to patronize the sort of lumber yard that caters to high end professionals rather than big box stores. Generally these places are not as busy and you always get better service. This would be a good practice even if we weren’t in a pandemic.

Mental health
I’m trying to slow down and focus on details. I feel there’s a need to pay attention to the news but not get immersed in it. I’m attempting, not always successfully, to limit exposure to social media and news sources. I’ve been doing a few solo bee removal jobs and this has really lifted my spirits to be able to get outdoors and do something useful.

Community resiliency
We have a weekly Zoom call with our neighbors to check in, chat and see if anyone needs anything. Our church has a program to call and check in with people. Several months ago, after my volunteer work with the Bernie campaign ended, I joined the Democratic Socialists of America and have participated in book clubs and online organizing.


Masks
It’s sad that this has become so divisive. Wearing a mask is a common sense way to respect other people. There are many other cultures in this world (such as the Tuareg tribe of the Sahara desert and folks in many parts of Asia) where facial covering is an old practice and no big deal. While I have no evidence for this, I suspect that mask wearing coincides with cultures that have greater respect for elders. Here in the U.S. and, I’m looking at you Sweden, old people are disposable.

Areas for improvement
I’ve been bad about exercising. I’ve got Zoom fatigue. I want to see other people but know that we’re not there yet. I need to construct storage for bulk goods. The crisis has caused me to have a short temper that I have to be vigilant about. I feel like I’m really out of touch with the people who are risking their lives in low-paid work.

Non-conclusion conclusion
We’re lucky. We’re thankful to have a roof over our heads, a garden to tend and a backyard to enjoy. But I’m also trying to be realistic. Our comfort could end. A lot of people are suffering. Far worse things than Blink 182 could be slouching towards Bethlehem. But if I’m wrong and Blink 182 does show up and is less pathetic than I remember at least we’ll have a better bulk goods game and a few less weeds in the garden.

How to Store Bulk Goods

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Food, Preparedness
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Our present Covid conundrum has a lot of us thinking about bulk goods. Collectively, we’ve had our illusions about the reliability of our food system shattered. This shouldn’t come as a surprise. Our “efficient” market system turns out to be not so efficient when there’s a crisis. As David Harvey puts it in A Companion to Marx’s Capital,

By rationalizing the way in which space is organized, you can save on movement costs. So the whole space-time structure becomes an organizational question of how capitalism works. This was the big innovation that the Japanese introduced into the labor process in the 1970s with just-in-time production, the tight scheduling of flows of goods in space and time such that you had almost no inventory anywhere in the system. This was the innovation which gave the Japanese car industry its competitive advantage over all others during the 1980s, and the Japanese raked in the ephemeral form of relative surplus-value until everyone else caught up. The downside of this system is that it is vulnerable to disruption. If one link in the spatiotemporal chain is stopped by, for example, a strike, then everything has to close down because there is no inventory.

So what to do for our households and communities? Buy food in bulk and eat from it. Restock as you eat.

Need some tips on how to store food? Utah State University has you covered. I’d emphasize the importance of buying foods you like to eat. And watch out for pantry moths. UC Davis has a nice fact sheet on dealing with pantry pests.

Lastly, share resources and techniques with your neighbors. Knowing the folks on our block, thanks to our neighbor Jennie’s monthly happy hour parties, has been helpful. We check in via Zoom once a week, trade food and backyard fruit and run errands for folks in deep quarantine. We need not equate emergency preparedness with the sort of destructive individualism partly responsible for getting us into this mess.