Buyer Beware

Deciding to abandon a wandering life can be bewildering. I suppose that I am no longer a renter, having a new home to call my own. No more rent, no more lease agreements, no more landlords threatening or repairing things, no more new places to be. Just here. The change has come so suddenly.

It's a strange experience to go from owning very little to realizing that if I am going to make a commitment to this place that I will need certain things. In most cases, this means driving somewhere to pay for something; there aren't many dumpsters around here. So the credit card is definitely getting a workout. I guess in one way the timing couldn't be better since fewer people are spending there are more deals to be had. I probably shouldn't feel as bad as I do since spending a few hundred dollars on practical things isn't much compared with what most people spend. But I wish that I could just do everything myself or get everything all at once and never have to venture below bright fluorescent lights anymore. But there's always something new to buy. It's designed that way until it is no more.

Right now I'm wrestling with the purchase of a vehicle. Yes you heard correctly, a vehicle. Our current car is on its last legs and, realistically until the pumps run dry and we can grow our own food, having a car is a reluctant necessity outside of cities. But when I think of the purchase price, insurance, repairs, gasoline, vehicle inspection tests and all those other little incidentals it's definitely off-putting.

And if this is the big one and our recession will never end as I think it might, then surely prices are going to drop a lot further. Car prices are a strange thing to worry about at the end of the world. But our minds are still in this system and not wholly in the one that we are all going to build in the years to come.

Yesterday at the kitchen table, where most of the action in our house takes place (because it's near the fire), we joked about the uses of hummers in the years to come. One suggestion involved digging out a hill and moving one inside to make an earthship (or perhaps earthshit would be more appropriate given their propensity to defecate where they live) for chickens or ducks. Seriously though, a vehicle can make a good food dehydrator in the summer so there are potentially some uses.

So maybe buying a new vehicle is not so bad after all.