do we really need a money system?

[hunter]

143. I'm happy with my apples, thank you. Sometimes a little ugly, but 100% organic.

My father-in-law turns them into apple sauce in pretty recycled jars with new lids and hand written labels. He also makes jams from our 100% organic grapes.

Sometimes I make ciders and wines too. I made a killer wine/cider last year. Tequila psycho quality plus vitamins and micro nutrients, minus the hangover. Too bad the yeasts and bacteria were wild and random and I'll never find them again. Maybe that should be my next Quixotic quest. I posted some great stuff here on DU while I was high on that, a few things in my journal. Probably about physics.

My wife and I trade other stuff for things we need. She gets paid much more than I do for her altruistic pursuits, but I quit work involving blood and death. I'm done with that, mentally I'm just too fragile. It's the women in my family who can suffer the "dead baby" days or the "scraping brains off the pavement" days and keep showing up for work. I can't. Hell, I couldn't even handle teaching in an urban public school where half my teen students were hungry, smelly, bad tempered and couldn't read. Creating a little oasis of safety for them was not easy. Maybe they learned some science in my class, but I'm not optimistic. I'm sure a number of them are dead now. A few of them got dead while they were in my roll books. Cross that one off.

I'm almost happy in my present state but I'm a little bit worried about the chemicals you are using in your orchard. I also don't care how "industrious" you are. Actually, I tend to think "industrious" is a vice, sort of like greed and gluttony.

My backstop condition is living in a broken car in a church parking lot, no crazy meds, been there, done that. Beyond that, starving to death as a crazy homeless guy living in a cardboard box covered with plastic sheeting I found in a dumpster is an option that doesn't worry me much. People die. I'll be one of 'em someday.

They now have meds for my kind of crazy, meds that used to be very expensive before they went generic. There were times when paying $390 a month to the "intellectual property" people on top of our crappy incredibly expensive and inadequate COBRA really, really, hurt. My "credit rating" is in the toilet with that and my wife's (successful) surgeries and chemotherapies.

But still, I'm fearless.