In another fit of sorting possessions, I’ve been going through my old journal notebooks. I have a big container full of them, some stuff from waay back (1980′s) and then a continuous (and often haphazard) series of them from about 1990 to the present. It is fascinating personal archaeology. The main thing that stands out is how little I seem to change, at least from what I write. My philosophical musings and personal angstings from 15 and more years ago are remarkably the same as entries in my most recent journals. I tend to forget what I wrote, but go over similiar territory in later entries. Some of it is quite prescient about things that would later come about in my life, and in the world too. For example this entry from July 23, 2000, when I was living by myself in a 2 bedroom apartment in Reno, working for a high-flying company:
“The ideal house should be a shack. A tiny but well-built cottage. And this size house could be so desirable that large houses don’t even sell anymore except to uncool outcast fat cats. Or are used by larger groups of people.”
So you see part of the genesis of what emerged full blown in my deciding in 2006 to build and live in a cob hut.
And a foreseeing of what is now emerging as a real trend in not only mini-house popularity (they are all OVER the media these days) but a new conventional wisdom in appropriate and desirable house size. All it took was a comprehensive economic collapse. It’s not just the collapse though, it is that *everything* had gotten so ridiculous and bloated and untenable. Disgust sets in at a certain point, even among the grotesque.
Going further back to December 1994, this rumination on housing that presages my eventual involvement in cohousing and community in Portland:
“The separate-unit apartment or single-family house is the physical living arrangement programmed into all of us by our culture. Unfortunately it also leads to and contributes to isolation when it is not coupled with a strong community/neighborhood bond. That’s a problem: we’ve shucked the traditional community but kept the physical housing pattern that went with it. Today there are many new models of intentional community, like cohousing and communal households. In the future these will no doubt become very common. People yearn for communal ties, shared purpose, people to live with. Sheer economics will also be a driving factor.”
I often wrote of what has always to me seemed the impending collapse of the world-as-we-know-it. I never put a precise date on it, just knew it was inevitable at least within our lifetime. This cheery perception/prognostication from November 1997:
” ‘America’ is over. Long live America. America is splintering. It has been slowly cracking at the seams for 50 years and it will be rent asunder on many and diverse fault lines in the next quarter century.”
I’m afraid I’ll stand by that, and all that it implies, but I wasn’t all doomy, continuing:
“I love America. America is the greatest. I hate America. America embodies all that is wrong and wretched in the human spirit. But the shards of the broken America are also like the seeds of a ripened grain, which will fall back into the rich soil and sprout anew.”
