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I’m really sad to have to miss the 14th annual FRESH Book Festival this weekend, because of a respiratory flu. But my symptoms are not that terrible, and I’m taking the opportunity to enjoy my garage studio she-shed, psychedelic-60s-inspired GlampPartment space. (See pix here.)

It’s a sensory paradise. Outside are lots of homemade wind chimes made out of old junk. It’s a breezy day today so I’m getting quite the concert. And the “shadow art” on the floor and walls never fails to disappoint.

My landscaping business vehicle, Ms. Carty Cartwell, doubles as a vehicle for carrying my stuff to the book fair, Earth Day, or other events. So usually I would be getting her all decorated with her little green-flowered ruffle valance and loading her up with books and tablecloth and stuff and heading on over to the festival.

But instead, I am doing some little cosmetic touches to my studio backdrop and other things around here. Which is enjoyable as well!

BTW although I’m not physically at the festival, I am offering a Festival special on the 12 remaining print copies of my book DEEP GREEN.

Not only is my book a practical, concise manual for radically reducing one’s eco-footprint while still living richly; it’s also a guide to slashing household expenses so we can take back our time & energy, and become more physically and emotionally resilient, less vulnerable to whatever life throws at us.

The usual price of the book is $15 plus tax. This weekend the last remaining copies are $10, sales tax included. Locals you can pick up your copy at my house; non-locals I will mail it to you, postage and handling is $5.

For various reasons, including cost and eco-footprint, I am transitioning to exclusively e-books, so this really is a limited offer!

CashApp $jennynazak to claim your signed copy with individually hand-colored lettering on the cover!

The announcement of a buy nothing day on February 28 has been very widely distributed, is appearing in various places.

(A lot of people are very very much on board, but some of us make an exception for buying essentials from local businesses.)

Most of us in these circles are already taking this approach to our spending, 365-24-7 (with only very occasional exceptions*), and have been for years, whether out of necessity or because we love the lifestyle or both. But for what it’s worth! #Solidarity

•  One of my rare exceptions used to be going to McDonald’s. Once a month or every two months. I would get two filet o fish, my favorite sandwich since childhood. And an m&m flurry. But something a little while back, I don’t remember what it was, made me decide that I could do without going there again and not feel too deprived.

I’m really glad to not have a car and not need to buy gas, although, if I ride the bus (which I do on occasion instead of walking or cycling to my destinations), that will count as gas so I can refrain from riding the bus on the 28th.

And, with regard to my landscaping work, I’m glad to have chosen an area of landscaping that is conducive to only using handtools.

BTW regarding gasoline in particular — we learned in one of my Permaculture classes that when we buy gasoline, almost immediately 85 or $.90 of our dollar goes right out of the community.

Then again, our local taxi drivers perform an essential service, as do the neighborhood guys with the push-mower who makes their livelihood mowing yards. So it’s not like our gasoline boycotts are going to be perfect. Which is OK. Even just a sharp drop in consumption is a drop!

Electricity use is a great thing to minimize also, as part of a boycott. Energy goes into everything. As we learned in Permaculture class — we learned the phrase embodied energy. Everything we buy or do, energy goes into. It is possible to use very localized energy. Such as dried deadwood for cooking and lighting if one has access to an outdoor space for such.

**Disclaimer from Heather Cox Richardson, whose name has appeared on some of these posters.
https://www.facebook.com/share/19ap4hdX6K/?mibextid=WC7FNe
“Hi Folks: Just a reminder that I am not involved with the protests that are appearing with my name on them. I don’t know the people involved, and have not taken a position either for or against the protests. This is the only page that represents me. When I support events, you will hear it directly from me, and I will never ask for money or try to sell you anything.”

(Including the date in the title of this post to distinguish from other posts I suspect I may have made using this same title.)

A lot of us might want to kid ourselves into thinking we are on the “winning side” just because what we do is validated by social norms, and/or financial compensation.

A lot of us might get sucked into believing we have made bad life choices just because what we do is not validated by social norms and/or financial compensation.

Societal change is very much an inside job. And although it may be hard to shift deep-seated beliefs we have taken on, the alternative approaches are even harder.

Success and failure are in the eyes of the person characterizing them.

Success and failure always have collective benefits and implications.

Failure is just success waiting to happen. “Mistakes are just knowledge waiting to happen.” (The latter is a quote I heard on a home renovation show I saw a few times; the celebrity is a young woman who builds houses out of old scraps and discarded windows etc. If I can find her name I will add it here. She’s so bright and positive.)

Anything that fails can be tweaked. Keep your eye on the goal or intention, and do the next thing. In Japanese it’s referred to as kaizen. A process of continuous ongoing improvement. (This term has also been adopted by the English-language worlds in business and industry.)

Any success, no matter how small and specific, can be reverse-engineered for replication and wider application.

This post was prompted by a widespread limiting belief in the Permaculture and Collapse communities, that community is just too hard to do.

It’s not. And there are successes. As one example, a colleague of mine has lived in long-term collegial partnership in a home on a Permaculture education farm. Obviously their partnership is working and durable. The success could be reverse engineered. What is causing it to work? What makes things work in the long run.

I have the same example regarding my two long-term housemates. They have worked out really well and our assets not only to our shared home but also to our community. Now, in today’s world, these living arrangements often have a natural ending point, for example, if someone Hass to leave to go take care of a relative or for some other life change. But I can generalize some of the conditions that have led to the success, when it’s time to have to search for new housemates.

I don’t have any ironclad rules offhand, but one thing that seems to work is to be very clear upfront about what the intentions of this household are, and make sure that we have sufficient alignment even when not all fellow residents share the same goals.

For example, this house and I have a hardcore goal of extreme thriftiness, and aspiring to 100% landfill diversion. Not everybody who lives here feels as strongly as I do, but it’s possible for us to have sufficient alignment that it works.

Your successes are our successes. Your “failures” are an illusion. Failures are just something that didn’t get tweaked yet toward the optimum. Keep going! And share what works. Also share what doesn’t work. It’s an ongoing group task for all of us.

Not letting kids read books that capture their interest has huge consequences.

I grew up in a mostly very strict family but our parents somehow gave us this huge pocket of laissez-faire freedom when it came to checking out library books. It’s almost as if they thought it would benefit us to read any kind of ideas and we would develop critical thinking skills!!

There were important things that the adults in my life didn’t necessarily feel comfortable talking with me about. Or have the tools to do so. But since I could find out the information I needed from Books & Magazines, I ended up being able to navigate the world.

PS. You know what’s super enticing and makes people want to read? Especially teenagers I imagine. Declaring some book “forbidden”!

Economic resistance can take many forms! Including very tiny seemingly very tiny stuff.

Here, cutting a scrap of stretchy fabric from a pair of old tights into stretchy ties that can be used for various purposes. In the kitchen, and other rooms, and out in the garden etc. I even use them to tie bamboo poles together to make trellises and little outdoor rooms. Various kinds of stretchy fabric are suitable. Old T-shirts etc. If using outdoors, you can choose greens and browns that blend in well with the landscape.

No one should ever have to buy any kind of twist ties for any reason. Not to mention which, a lot of us probably have a bunch of unused twist ties in a random kitchen drawer somewhere. (I don’t, because I have actively refrained from buying them, as well as from buying plastic bags and things like that.)

Football napkin in the pic is a cute little Super Bowl day souvenir that my sweet friend Catina Johnson brought me the other day (with a delicious boxed meal!).

oops it looks like a technology glitch vaporized a bunch of my post. Well the gist is that little things like this help train us that we really don’t have to buy very much. My favorite way to buy things is used, or only from my friends and neighbors, and from Black & indigenous businesses.

PPS. I still have the pair of old tights, I just cut the upper part off and now they are a set of sleeves which I can put on on a cold morning. When it’s cool enough to need sleeves but not so cool that you need a whole jacket. The tights are nice thick fleecy tights, they just never did actually fit me the way they were designed to be used. So I turned them into sleeves ha ha!

For those who may not be familiar with the idea of a garment known as sleeves, I took some pictures to try to show what I mean. I think i picked this concept up in Austin from a super elegant supermodel-looking artist I know from back in the RV park in south Austin — check out her art The Art of Flip Solomon!

Final picture is me downtown and ready to attend Cinematique board meeting, as you can notice I have added one of my favorite warm scarves to this outfit. So, portable sleeves and a scarf for optimum warmth and didn’t need a jacket over my sleeveless T-shirt.

PS. Sewing machines can be awesome, but really I have found my best friend to be a simple needle and thread. I do have my grandmother’s old treadle machine which is foot powered and awesome but I simply can’t keep it tuned even though I was able to find a scanned instruction manual on the Internet. Needle and thread remains my best friend and a core part of any bug-out bag.

And:

There could be lots of reasons why it’s desirable to not need a jacket. First, you may not have a jacket, and jackets are not the easiest thing to sew. Also, you may just like your shirt as part of your outfit and not want to cover it up with a jacket. And also, if you are walking or cycling, it can be easier to have a less bulky outfit.

Scarves are very easy to make even if one is not good at sewing or knitting or crocheting. Even the clunkiest, uneven sewing stitches can make a pretty darn good serviceable scarf. And sleeves, when it comes right down to it it’s just a couple tubes of fabric stitched together.

Now, I don’t want to discourage anyone from making a jacket. That can be a very fun adventure. Although, there are many available in thrift shops. But if you want to make your own jacket, you can learn how by disassembling a shirt or jacket from a thrift shop and then cutting your own fabric to make your own version of the garment.

One of my favorite dresses was made this way. I disassembled a very elegant seven-panel dress from the thrift shop, and then based on it I sewed a five-panel dress made of T-shirt fabric.

Love this! This is a fancy version of what I made in a one bedroom apartment to make it into a two bedroom apartment.

(Photo of really cute modular room within a room, meant for a kid to enjoy. The kid in me absolutely loves it and could totally live there. Post that I shared from a group called “homemade haven: recipes, decor, diy and garden ideas”).

Mine was made out of bookcases and folding screens & other stuff scrounged from curbside, cobbled together w some re-claimed screws and other scavenged hardware, pieces of lumber — all scrounged from the urban abundant beneficence of the curbside goddess.

The roommate got the “real” bedroom, and I got an adorable corner of the living room which was surprisingly fun and pleasant, but then again I just love tiny cute spaces where I can find most of my stuff without looking too hard lol.

BTW the “real” bedroom had to be walked through in order to access the bathroom, which created stressful situations at times. However, pee jars exist. So do nearby public restrooms in a pinch.

As another benefit of creating the creative extra bedroom, I enjoyed the economic benefits of not having to pay 70% of my income as rent, which I had been doing at times for some years. So I got to continue being an artist and ecosocial educator and activist (which is and was a key part of my deepest calling; and furthermore is, low pay notwithstanding, an essential function of society) and get by on just some occasional housecleaning gigs and other misc gigs instead of having to get a “real” (=soul-sucking) job.

Resistance takes many forms, one of them can be 24-7-365 economic resistance. That’s my favorite. It doesn’t mean we can perfectly boycott anything, but we can get really darn close.

Also, I do support actual boycott, strike days, buy nothing days, etc. It’s just that I think it might be most effective if a lot of us are having “buy almost nothing weeks” and “buy almost nothing months” etc. Adding up to years of buying almost nothing except from local businesses, Black businesses, indigenous businesses, etc. Which I think a lot of us on this space are doing already! And I’m so happy to be on this path of adventure and resistance with you all.

On a different level, I know from various training that “what we resist persists.” So, while it is convenient to use the phrase economic resistance, I actually prefer to think of it as re-empowerment of ourselves. Taking back our economic agency, and choosing to define what we think is cool and worthy of spending our money and energy on. And re-opening the long-shut doors to our true deepest creativity and humanity. As opposed to being puppets of social norms and fake status.