In my late teens and twenties I worked mostly manual labor jobs, indoors and outside. I worked in warehouses, in shipping facilities, in a mail delivery room, a foundry, tearing siding off houses, as a bartender, roofing flat-roofs, on a lake crew for a boat business. None of it was particularly skilled work, at least not at the entry level, and I did not stick around long in the foundry or on the flat-roofs to become a master of that work.
It was not until I was around thirty that I decided I wanted to learn how to remodel and build houses. I started during the early housing bubble, 2003-4, building townhomes. I then went to work with a small remodeling company, working on older homes in the Twin Cities. I was lucky, as that was one of the last remodeling companies that still had a bunch of old-timers on staff, who taught me just about every aspect of remodeling and building. The crew I worked on, we specialized in tearing the roof off a house and adding a second story. I had some offers to remodel some basements, so I went out on my own after two years, and have been self-employed in the trade most of the time since, except for several years during the Great Recession, and during Covid.
After 20+ years in that trade I consider myself something of a craftsman and an artist. A client of mine recently called me both.
I don’t watch much tv or videos, but occasionally I will watch artists and craftsman at their trade, on youtube. Last year I watched several videos on medieval book binding, bought some materials, made a couple dozen notebooks and my very first (and so far only) printed book of poems.
Book Binding and Garden Starts
Shortly after the New Year I got word back from John Michael Greer that he was impressed by my poem about the work of the Octagon Society, Order of Spiritual Alchemy. When I asked him if he knew of anyone who would publish it, he said the only poetry published these days is The Current Thing. He suggested self publishing.
As available remodeling work is more rare over the winter, I will take it up again soon. I also intend to make a Brazilian Ipe smoking pipe, and some hats, because the hat I wear all the time is full of glue and paint and it is falling apart, and it is hard to come by hats that are not mass produced crap. Also, I intend to grow tobacco next year and I need something to smoke it with.
I’ll be watching some videos on sugar mapling too this winter, as I have set the intention to tap about 50 trees nearby, next spring, as a logistics experiment for potentially tapping the 500 mature maples on the property.
I probably won’t build a traditional Japanese sword by traditional (ancient) means, or a Japanese Long Bow, or a pair of leather shoes, but after watching these three videos, I want to do it all.
(not very popular notes, as you can see, which is probably just as much the algorithm)
wrote about this recently, in relation to public spaces. Beauty and craftsmanship in the age of machines is not a lost art, but very rare.We tell a story about ourselves with the things we choose to build, and the built environment we choose to inhabit. We communicate our respect for ourselves, and for others, by the reality of our stuff. Who are we? What’s the significance of our lives? What do we deserve?
John Michael Greer wrote a novel about a future “America”, that restored relative prosperity by looking to the craftsmanship of the past:
The year is 2065. Decades ago, the United States of America fell apart after four brutal years of civil war, and the fragments coalesced into new nations divided by economic and political rivalries.
Most of the post-US America is wracked by poverty and civil strife, with high-tech skyscrapers rising above crowded, starving slums.
But one of the new nations, the Lakeland Republic of the upper Midwest, has gone its own way, isolated from the rest by closed frontiers and trade embargoes.
Now Peter Carr, an emissary from the newly elected administration in the Atlantic Republic, boards a train to cross the recently reopened border into Lakeland territory, on a mission that could decide the fate of his nation.
Ahead of him lies a cascade of experiences that will challenge his most basic assumptions about economics, politics, and the direction history is moving.
Alone among the post-United States republics of North America, the Lakeland Republic has achieved prosperity and internal peace, and it’s done so by modelling it’s future on the past...
In the Atlantic Republic there are vast slums, and everyone including people like Carr, wear cheap plastic clothes. In the Lakeland Republic, everyone wears hand made clothing and footwear, from high quality natural materials. There aren’t a lot of personal vehicles anywhere in former America, but you can get anywhere in Lakeland Republic by trolley, and they make their own high-quality, comfortable, beautiful trolleys, and lay their own track. As example.
Cheap Chinese Crap From Sea to Shining Sea
I’m planning on fazing out of remodeling, mostly, only doing occasional work that I like doing1. Lumber for building, is produced industrially like any mono-crop, and about as healthy for a house as industrial corn and soybeans are for your body. The lumber now is junk compared to what it was even twenty years ago, and what was available 20 years ago was absolute junk compared to what is in your average 100 year old house, the bones of which might be 1000-1500 years old or more (Douglas Fir, compared to modern Southern Yellow Pine.)
Manufactured flooring has replaced high-quality oak and maple flooring, off-gassing who knows what into a house. A lot of decks are surfaced with PVC or Composite boards, so cutting the material contributes considerably to the micro-plastics problem; there really is no way to corral the saw dust, and most guys doing the installing don’t care. Most bathroom vanities and bedroom furniture are composite boards, glued together sawdust, or cheap pine. Even some “high end” cabinets might have a fine wood face, but the box and shelves are cheap composite. I have seen the interior of some expensive cabinets that instead of cabinet grade plywood, everything is cheap composite with an even cheaper, paper thin veneer easily stained or scratched, no real repairing any damage.
I had a nickel-cadmium battery powered drill for about eight years, same batteries, drill was still in good shape. If I get two years out of a lithium ion battery or the drill, I would probably think it a miracle.
Anyone older than 30 probably knows, it has been the constant crapification of almost everything, all our lives. The freezer in my parent’s basement, knock on wood, was there before I was born. You are unlikely to get more than a decade out of a new one. An old friend of mine built his house, and then filled it with all new appliances. Ten years later every appliance in the house died, over a three month period. Planned obsolescence was a thing, now everything is just crap, and will break down before long anyhow, they don’t have to plan it.
Brass door hardware from 120 years ago still works, you are lucky to get a decade out of the best “hardware” off the shelf. Same with light fixtures, even if modern ones still work, they never look antique but rather just shabby. Antique brass can be made to look better than new.
Off-shoring, Consolidation and mass immigration: the betrayal of the American people
Anyone remember when Hillary Clinton, as a Senator, fought for “Favored Nation” trading status for China? Off-shoring was already a thing, before the Clinton’s came to national power, but they worked together to sell out blue collar Middle Class, to their eternal shame. It is not like it was just the Clintons, that was a broad bipartisan, or rather, uniparty affair, ongoing for 50+ years, it only accelerated during the Clinton years. Now instead of offshoring, the same sort of kleptocrats are flooding the country with H1B ‘Jeets, and other assorted illegal manual laborers (and no shortage of cartel.)
It was Richard Nixon’s Agricultural Secretary, Earl Butz, who made famous two phrases, “Fence row to fence row” and “get big or get out.” The move from local food production to global commodity crops is something of an Original Sin, and the ill health of the land, waters and the people can be traced to such thinking. Good for “Health Care” financials, though.
Of course you can go all the way back to the original luddites, followers of the fictitious Ned Ludd, original industrial monkeywrencher. The luddites were fighting the industrialization of textiles and the making of clothing, which had forever been the work of local artisans.
Small communities were hollowed out, most people huddled into cities, many small towns died and now a lot of cities, having been hollowed out by off-shoring and an ever increasing state-dependent class, have become increasingly degenerate, unsafe and dirty.
When I lived in Minneapolis, one of my closest friends was in charge of the computer system at one of the nation’s largest banks. He called me a luddite once, as a pejorative, and I said, wtf are you talking about, I probably have a million words on-line. I have maintained several blogs, I have written books on a computer. Am I a luddite because I like to garden, I gather wild berries to make homebrew, I don’t jump on every new tech fad like it’s the greatest thing to ever happen?
I might have retorted too, well, you are a sex addict. He would later leave his wife and three young children, for his philandering ways. Enough of us shamed him sufficient to convince him to go back to the family. He left the bank and started a very successful tech business, and then decided he was bisexual and left his family. Which is more or less how I compare people now, who call me luddite, who think every tech advancement is some great advancement for humanity. Sort of how I think about all our tech overlords.
Some of us have some idea what has been taken from us. The same sort who have taken so much, mean to take everything. A lot more people know that, than they know what was taken. I talk to old-timers around here, about the old supper-clubs and dance halls, how the whole community would make a regular thing of it. It wasn’t that long ago. Community organizations and churches did for free, most of what government and NGO’s make worse, for ever more money. Now practically everyone it seems is polluted by Netflix/Disney etc streaming services gaming, wallowing at home in their chronic illness getting worse.
The more high tech everybody else gets, the more analog I become. The more tv programming people watch, the more I read old poetry. The more cheap shit people buy, the more I want to make my own stuff.
Though I suspect, the more AI turns out everything, the more people are going to hunger for what is authentically human. Though a lot of people are going to get lost in AI, for sure, nothing stopping that, except maybe the collapse of the AI industry, which is looking increasingly like the bubble to end all bubbles.
I would like to live near a small town that produces a lot of it’s own food, clothing and assorted essentials, that has a vibrant class of creators, where housing is more natural and plentiful, where the hunting and fishing is good, where there is a lot of music played by a lot of different people who bring the community together on the regular. Where no one is on government handouts, but are taken care of by the community in times of need. Where there is an expectation, take care of yourself, take care of your business, don’t expect anyone else to take care of it for you, or to take care of you. Make your own way for your family, learn as much as you can, become an expert/craftsman at whatever it is you do.
That seems like the foundation of a real Republic, to me. I would very much like to live in the Lakeland Republic of Greer’s Retrotopia. But we don’t have a republic, we don’t really have a democracy, we are all prey to an empire increasingly global, each of us as nothing but numbers, to the denizens of that global class of bureaucrats and billionaires, who would sooner replace us with illiterate foreigners, than make life in America better for Americans.
Maybe I will sometime make a little foundry, and start making long swords.
Phasing out of remodeling in part, because most of my clients are Boomers living on the lake, and a lot of them are aging out. And, remodeling is the first thing that slows down, anytime people are feeling uncertain about money. That said, I am busier this year than last.
You make me nostalgic for the old house my ex bought back in the early 90's. Just a simple 1910 or so 2-storey frame house, and even though it was less luxurious than some of the big Victorians in the neigborhood, it was still made of stuff that is now unobtainable. The reason he bought it were its bones made of Southern Yellow Pine. That house is going to last him a lifetime, and possibly many succeeding lifetimes.
I suspect a rebellion against AI will occur at some point. Especially as there are so many things AI cannot do. In fact even now, early adopters of certain AI systems are having to hire humans back. I know I will never lose my job to AI. AI would never be able to figure out the hieroglyphics of my co-worker's handwriting complete with misspellings and weird contractions. It would never figure out that the salesperson really wanted in corners rather than out corners and hit the wrong button. Humans are intuitive, AI is literal and even stupider and will lie if it can't figure something out.
And, while there are knitting machines, no knitting machine can, like me, make a personalized Icelandic Lopi sweater that (sans moths) will last for a lifetime...Keep on crafting! They say people who craft keep their mental acuity. Perhaps that is one reason I always saw my maternal grandparents with some kind of craft in hand everynight as they watched TV or listened to radio...
I think of all the small ways that people are cut off from seeing the steady degradation of the world around them. My house was built in 1979 but the 2x4s I saw in it when renovating the bathroom look like the rarest, most valuable lumber in the world next to what I'm buying today at Home Depot. But no one works on their own home anymore so they don't see the change. People are told to use the same time value of money calculations that a corporation does when deciding whether to hire out a renovation or to do it themselves, and so they hire it out. And so they don't learn anything, they don't understand their own home, and they don't understand time or tradition and what is lost when calculations are merely financial.