Not the sucrose we ordered (a review, sort of, JM Greer’s, Not the Future We Ordered)

(4 pm. – promoted by ek hornbeck)

(I apologize up front for putting this review in a serial format, but I am cacked-out, to the max.  It’s a wonder I’m here.)

First, lemme say that John Michael Greer is one gol’ darned level-headed son of a gun.  I’ve been reading his blog for years now and no one can cast a cold eye on everything you hold dear and move on with equanimity as he does.  Rock solid, he is.  Everyone has a “trick pony,” so to speak, and I do wonder how he trained his.

Anyway, he’s written another book, “not the future we ordered” on the topic of peak oil, and how we screwed things up, and moreover how unprepared we are for the consequences.  If you are accustomed to his blog, there are no huge surprises, because his writing style remains quite steady, and I would add “soothing,” to someone like me, who gets a bit emotional about these topics.

My personal peak oil revelation (and here’s where it’s “all about me”) began with Bush v. Gore.  I was writing my dissertation in experimental psychology when it all broke loose, when, by Jon Schwarz’s insight,  you can cut open the insider of DC insiders and out steps James Baker III to attend the lectern of troublemaking.  And so it was.  

I was a busy bee then, working from 1000 h – 2000 h, making a pittance, except for the NIDA grant I scored, which raised my grad salary from $8,000 to $15,000/ yr, as I had usually done in the years previously, taking only 45 to 60 min daily reading the NYT over coffee at around 3 pm daily, in order to “stay on top of things,” and in the evenings having an intellectually stimulating time with the logician dudes from computer science and the femmes in Biology.  Boy, do smart-assed wenchy-wenches love to swing in dive-bars.  Whoop de doo.  I felt quite at home.  It was its own kind of bliss.

Once the crisis began, I’d watch the tube often until noon and then work until midnight.  I also had two girlfriends.  Shame on me.  (of course, I confessed.  I always confess, to honest people.)

I was in the middle of moving on, from one mentor to the next.  And what I mean is this: the best piece of advice I had ever received from Allen Gardner, and that is saying a lot, since he was brimful with wisdom, was, Never Work for an Institution!  Always work for a Person!   And so it was.  Just as I was drawn into Allen’s circle, by sheer strength of personality and argument, so was I drawn into Timberlake’s, then Dallman’s.  I will never regret following Allen’s advice on that.  I bow deeply to them all; Allen was correct.

I can put it another way that a poetry teacher, a quite respectable poet to my mind said, ” obey your hunch!”

Now, I have a new hunch, and new mentors.