27 July 20XX
My Dear Lucilius:
So an unusual thing
happened today: The mail announced that it was slowing down.
Our post office, as
you may remember, is a two room affair on the main road in and out of
town which also serves as our local mini-mart and gas station (yes, I
concur that the prices are higher but every now and again one does
not wish to make the 20 to 40 mile round trip up the road and back
for a single item). It largely serves the local community here and
is in fact the only delivery in town. It has perhaps a hundred mail
boxes or so.
My mail load, as you
can imagine, has gone down over the years. Most bills are now done
on-line (is not almost everything these days) and I seldom get mail
of a personal sort: those that might send it are either dead, moved
on, or correspond via some other method. Therefore my visits to the
post office are once a week affairs at most, involving me walking the
half mile or so, pulling things out of my post office box, and then
meandering back home where I can safely sort the mail into my “save”
or “burn later” later piles.
This morning, when I
walked over, there was an official looking sort of letter taped on
the front door announcing that staring at the end of this month
(July), mail delivery was reduced at our location to once a week.
Stating that decreasing the amount of deliveries would increase the
economical nature of the mail (and save valuable fuel and emissions),
the letter ended with a rousing statement about how the postal
service would continue to be there to service the community in the
future.
Now, I am not
impacted a great deal of course – I do receive a few things once in
a while via the mail which are mostly seeds or occasionally books –
but these have just as often come via one of the major delivery
services (which, I predict, will immediately raise their rates as
well – supply and demand, of course). But with this cut off as a
timely sort of thing, my choices – and I suspect many of those like
me – will be changing our spending habits even a little bit more,
as well as our expectations.
When I returned
home, I re-sorted more of the items into my “burn later” pile.
I suspect with a decrease in mail, my fire-starter materials will
become more precious.
Your Obedient
Servant, Seneca
good reading keeps you on tenterhooks
ReplyDeleteDeborah - Well thank you very much! I have to admit even when I take a break from Seneca, I find he is still in my thoughts. Like most good characters, he is acquiring a life of his own that more and more is less and less of me and more of him.
ReplyDeleteI think you were the one that asked - if you now look under "Pages" you will find all of the articles (except this one at the moment) in a single place.
Thanks
ReplyDeleteI'm terribly late to the reading party, but I'd love to know where to start at the beginning. Link?
ReplyDeleteYou are quite welcome Deborah. Actually, it was a good reason to go back and review everything.
ReplyDeleteLeigh - Actually thanks to Deborah Harvey's promptings, I have created a link under "Pages" labeled The Collapse. Everything up to date should be there.
ReplyDeleteCannot getter first entry 'writing the collapse' to come up Very interesting though I would have expected the visitor to have scheduled Seneca for euthanasia rather than asking him to return to work
ReplyDeleteThe episode 'taxation' will not come up. Just mentioning. Could be here (wifi box borrowed from library.
ReplyDeleteApologies and Thank You Deborah. Both are now relinked.
ReplyDeleteAs to the first installment - My assumption is at any time before any actual serious collapse, the government would rather have someone being useful and producing taxes than dead and not. Perhaps they did not anticipate the economy going sideways as quickly as it did. Governments tend not to want to be seen as overbearing until they feel they have enough power to act without fear or repercussions.
Paper like plastic peanut butter jars. Today, something to burn or toss.
ReplyDeleteI've made paper in school (yeah I'm old, my teachers actually taught you stuff) it's quite the effort even for the crude stuff we made from dried grasses.
Feather sticks of evergreens works well, as a wood worker my hand plane gives me much Firestarter. Pinecones, hand fulls of dry grass, birch bark is amazing as it often burns when wet, with all the oils in it.
I've bemused my bride about my keeping glass jars and plastic jars like Peanut butter I mentioned. I remember from historical records the difficulty of keeping food from getting destroyed by pests, moisture (the bane of dehydrated jerky, grains, beans, even dried veggies) and such.
I had a shop teacher Challange us to make a functional screw top container. Our whole class went for it in various materials. Very limited success. The Teacher finally even let us use mason jars and simply make the screw lid. Much harder than you think. Math and machining.
I often think what our Sod home living forefathers in Kansas (or Wales) might have given for simple plastic sheeting to keep the dirt and mud (when it rained) out of their Sod home.
What wives would have given for a basket full of plastic peanut butter jars.
Michael, even in our current world, we in the First World dispose of many items which likely would have extended lifespans elsewhere.
DeleteI cannot imagine making a screw-top anything with industrialization - likely why it was never accomplished, I suppose.