Pandemic Diary #10
Home in the Florida Desert
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Winter 2020 to the Present
DEFCON 4 was upon us. Either stay where we were and slowly make our way into bankruptcy, change to another heretofore unknown occupation, or sell our meager property assets, pay off all our business obligations, and run.
I previously wrote that we were in a somewhat more advantageous position of not being totally locked into one place. After a nominally nomadic existence for decades the prospect of moving on was daunting but not devastating.
My wife and I came from small families and over the years they got smaller through the normal modes of attrition. We had no family in the Ozarks and only a very few left in Florida. What immediate kin was scattered across the land in the same manner countless other people found themselves. There were some very dear collateral relatives but they were not close in a geographic sense. The anchors that tied most people to a place had long since come undone. Now the Plague had washed away the familial vessels that remained.
As I have discussed before that the amount of displacement which went on in society, the dislocations, and the internal transitions is not much discussed.1 The masters of society are not interested pointing a finger at themselves possibly stirring up the masses with unpleasant data that proves the elites are not looking out for the little people in their charge. And OMG could it be that the vampires in the corporate jets drifting overhead planned it that way.
For the zephyrs of the world living in the clouds the realities on the ground are not a concern. If, for instance, the people are refugees and must move that is their problem. According to the elites sources of the Covid Plague and the subsequent ongoing pressures are the result of the natural process of disease, regardless how it came about. So the population on Earth is required to adapt. For most folks this is not something they signed up for.
However people might envision the process of an economically driven forced evacuation created a different reality. For us the central processes of packing an disposing thirty plus years of equipment and possessions was traumatic. Yet it was something that was being experienced by a very large group working in isolation from others due to the restrictions of the Plague Management bureaucracy in the media and government.
As for our experience if not for the help of my sister-n-law and niece helping us do the actual packing the whole chaotic mess would have had a more serious effect on my own sanity. The circumstances of our property transfer were on a tight timetable. Anyone who has had to sort, pack, and move in a confined time window knows the type of panic involved. But it got done. Maybe not very thoughtfully but done it got.
We had a studio full of specialized silversmith tools that we wanted to get in the hands of people who would use them. We contacted as many as possible and dispersed our tools to several artists. Then storage lockers and auctions became the focus of our life as we divested our possessions eventually making a few trips to Florida preparing the way.
Having been a UK style non-dom resident living and working all across the Sunshine State since the late 1980's we were in some ways more familiar with it than many native Floridians. But actually living in one place instead of getting on our camels and moving with the caravan then pitching our tents in the Florida sands was another reality altogether. Like the nomadic Tuareg the itinerant master artists known as inadan2 who make beautiful artifacts to sell and trade, we had trekked across the sands of Florida working and making a living with our hands then following the dusty trail to the next market town.
Somewhat like the rainy Otindag dunefields of Northern China soaked by monsoons, the Central Florida Ridge gets more than fifty three inches of rain per year as this narrow feature paints itself up the map in the center of the Florida peninsula. It presents weathered sands, cactus, palm trees, long needle southern pines, on the ancient desert-like dunes. Regal impressionistic live oaks covered with Spanish Moss coexist along side formidable weapon-like Hedge Cactus protecting their territory with medieval spiked clubs in vast pastures inhabited by psychedelic cows and hallucinogenic sunsets. Scores of out of context lakes punctuate its evocative beauty born out of contradictions that are not for everybody’s sensibilities.
We both fell in love with this part of the world when we would "base" out of this area. Like many artists in our situation we started using the term "base" to place our living situation. To the simple question, "Where do you live?" the answer, "Well at times we "base" out of the Ozarks and at other times we "base" out of Florida." Over the years it devolved into "We mostly "base" in Central Florida but at other times we work out of other places."
This sort of off-hand response became normal to me. Yet in hindsight I now understand the strange looks and equally befuddled follow up questions. "You do what?" and the odd reactions like, "Where do you sleep at night?" enters into the interrogation at some point.
Sadly the peculiar questions seemed to be baked into our cake. For the public there is a novelty attached to someone who is not tied to a single place. This fascination can become a fear after due course of consideration wherein a person begins to see dark forces at work.
In the mind of some folks the question arises: Where does this person work? Who does he work for? Is he a vagrant, transient thief, or some sort of gypsy? The mind of the average householder is full of dim crannies where awful event and sketchy people lurk. Someone without an established address leaves the door open for all sorts of unsavory speculations.
If the imagined specter of “no permanent address” doesn't set the wheels of possibilities turning add into the conversation something like the description of your profession. To the question "What do you do?" and I answer, I am an artist or a silversmith, or even and author, and watch their brain circuitry heat up and begin to overload with cognitive dissonance.
In the struggle to reestablish a grounded life the burden of many years on the road takes on a new set of unfamiliar challenges putting ones belief in a new road of popular perceptions to the test. At this point I am still writing my book and adding insights to the narrative while the new realities of life are working at cross purposes to my understanding. I was always trying to stay positive but my conflicting life conditions did not make it easy. Or so I thought at the time.
I wrote the preface for the book in February 2021 which somewhat covered the period in our life prior to the onset of the Plague and set the stage for later events. I include a summery of it below.
Preface
THE OTHER ROAD AHEAD
Beginning about 1981 my wife and I started a life as professional art fair artists working in a one thousand square foot studio we built beside our home in the Ozarks. Our livelihood was gleaned from selling at art festivals and similar events across a broad swath of America from Minnesota to south Florida and from Texas to Virginia....
For over four decades we traveled the country looking at the world through a windshield living the nomadic life. For me it was a contemplative time while daydreaming and imagining what is embedded in the landscape of America and what universal concepts tie the scenery to the ideas that have formed how I understand what I see....
With my wife by my side we fought our way through storms, drought, economic collapse, riots, grave illness, and the life of an artist. Never a great economic success but the compensation came in other ways. We had a "freedom of the mind" that is in very short supply today....
However, my interest is not just about the intellect and antiquity it is also about finding mystic treasures in familiar places and unappreciated goodness in our everyday life. I began this project around 2015 and soon found that developing lengthy observations between travel and studio work was unlikely....
I had used inspirational daily reading books for decades so the idea came to me that I should write relevant bytes that were full of impact and inspiration all in as few characters as possible. This would allow the reader to absorb the material in the precious free time of a busy day. The selections in this book are not always agreeable. They will at times challenge conventional thinking. They may be delightful, perplexing, mystical, and occasionally humorous. The goal is to enable new thoughts in the reader opening other roads to explore.
…The illustration in this book are all original pen and ink drawing accomplished by my wife Ann. They are not meant to mimic any single meditation but are to render a wrap around context that places the book in the timeless world of ideas...
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As I finished my book I realized that illustrations would be crucial. Knowing that Annie was very good at drawing I proposed to her the project of illustrating my book with pen and ink drawing of various symbolic themes pertaining to renewal and eternal values. After some initial reluctance on her part she embraced the challenge and created the thirteen drawings that exemplify the themes in the book. This in turn opened up a new outlet for her boundless font of creativity.3 Ultimately in the general layout of the book neither the chronology nor the artwork specifically follow any standard analytical pattern. Rather the book has an elliptical lawlessness which allow the reader to ponder or dream themselves into an intuitive relation to the text.
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By Spring of 2022 the traumatic events of the last few year seemed to be slipping down the memory hole. The "Black Swan" event to take down President Trump had succeeded. The panic to sell the global vaccination narrative was realized and the takeover of the domestic civil liberties apparatus in the name of public health was now a fait accompli. The first round of the “Great Reset” went off flawlessly.
Let's all forget that we have been bamboozled. For instance: COVID what COVID? Did someone say pandemic? Was I just dreaming? Something about a bio-weapon being loosed on the population so an untested "vaccine" could be deployed to stop the Plague, yet there is no scientific evidence that the miracle drug did anything except cause a lot of unforeseen side effects and kill not a few innocent people. No that didn't happen. It was all fake news and conspiracy theories, swamp gas and weather balloons, and mass hysteria associated with UFOs and a Russian unicorn invasion.
Yet for my wife and I and millions of other "little people" the question was, "Now what?" In our new circumstances a studio for drawings was possible but a workshop for silversmithing was out of the question as we suspected. My oil painting would not fit in the tiny compound where we lived. No studio space was a big hurdle but no descent storage area impacted my artwork to the point of making it unworkable. To the outsider oil painting seems simple but the actual work of painting is a commitment of not only time and effort but space. Consequently, painting on any scale for me was a no go for now. That left writing and digital illustrating for a website as a creative outlet.
The economic fallout of the Plague is accurately calculated only in the dark dungeons of the World Economic Fund banking interests amid the skeletons of past collapses and other apparatus of monetary witchcraft. But some information about the bomb crater we are living in has oozed out into the corporate media. According to a 11-15-2023 Yahoo Finance report,4 Americans have (as RFKj so eloquently said) had their lives strip mined by global corporate interests just as I have been reporting in my last nine episodes of Pandemic Diary.
The Federal Reserve, along with Bloomberg calculations, identified a rapid drawdown of…savings, particularly stark among the lower-income groups. While all income groups have experienced a decrease in real-term cash balances from the peak in 2021, the disparity is noteworthy. The wealthiest one-fifth of households still have cash savings approximately 8% above their pre-COVID levels. In stark contrast, the poorest two-fifths have witnessed an 8% decrease, and the next 40% — broadly representing the middle class — have seen their cash savings fall below pre-pandemic levels.
This situation indicates a dwindling financial buffer for the majority of U.S. consumers. Their spending has been a driving force in keeping the economy active and averting a widely anticipated recession. But as these households’ financial reserves deplete, concerns about an impending economic downturn are resurfacing. The Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco predicts that the aggregate stock of excess savings will likely be exhausted in the current quarter.
While my life has changed here in the ancient dunefields of Florida5 I am reminded that many artists and others in the creative business have been sorely effected and for the most part they are ignored by their fellow citizens. I have met people who have a similar story and artists who have no one to talk to about it because the greater society is being told to forget the past. New distractions like senseless wars, economic stagnation, and the business of survival have replaced memory in our lust to forget.
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Another great narrative about life in the here and now.
Your are correct it is a slice of life. I think it is a bit long but it is the last in that series so instead of breaking it up into 2 or 3 parts I cooked it down. It makes a transition piece that does not end the story but leaves the stage without a tragic finale.