Best present I ever got was a stick.

I got my kid a gold painted stick for christmas one year.

Painted it myself.

As a good earnest political hippie, I lived collectively with several people for several years. (Vegeterian farmhouse, you get the idea). We even owned a dog as a group - and in her old age, when the collective had scattered, we continued to pay for that old dog's vet bills and food collectively, and assumed responsibility for her until she died 14 years later.

My wife and I continued to live collectively after we got married. And then, as Quinn's brother mentioned, it just got to be too much of a hassle. Personal space matters.

Now I'm pretty much living the nuclear family model, complete with personal space...but it's pretty obvious to me something was lost.

After the farmhouse, my wife and I also plotted with a group of friends to buy a piece of land collectively. We had learned about cohousing communities and liked what we saw. Cohousing offers people a chance to still have their own dwelling but there's also a large collective space for eating (if you want; houses also have kitchens) and socializing, and creating music, art, etc (think how cool it would be to share a pottery wheel, or a set of drums, or a big screen theatre, gardening stuff, home brew equipment...)

Trouble was: we didn't have the capital. And then the dream faded...

But when I think about the quality of life I witnessed in the cohousing communities I visited - where retired people interacted with huge packs of happy children, where music jams happened regularly, but where you could also retreat to your own space and not have to interact... well, I think it's a model we'd best start considering again.

In most places, cohousing is going to require city planners to take an enema in order to let them flourish. But maybe this is a local political battle worth taking on in these dark times.

I hear you Quinn, with or without the global meltdown, we're drowning in too much stuff, and not enough life.

I was reminded this week:

http://abcnews.go.com/WN/Story?id=6325558&page=1

Just imagine what you might do if a doctor said you have only two weeks left to live.

For 11-year-old Brenden Foster of Bothell, Wash., who was given that prognosis earlier this year after learning he was suffering from leukemia last December, the answer was probably not what you'd expect.

"I was coming back from one of my clinic appointments and I saw this big thing of homeless people and then I thought I should just get them something," Foster said. Foster, who devoted his final days to lifting others up, became bedridden; the kid who could once outrun any of his friends could no longer walk. Last week, Foster could hardly keep his eyes open, but he didn't waiver from his wish.

"'Tis the season to give," he said.

Foster lived long enough to see his dream come alive, before dying in his mother's arms Friday morning.

When I told him he was dying, he cried," his mother recalled. "And he said, 'When I get to heaven I'm going to ask God why it had to be so soon because I had so much more I wanted to do.'

The horrifying thing I find when I go back to the States is the lack of people in yards, on the street in suburbs, anywhere. Where are all the bikes, the miniature ice weasels in training, ripping off anything that might be of value - WD40? It's mine. Cassette? Sure, might be Ray Conniff or even worse (possible?), but it's a cassette. Swarms and hordes - well, one family had 16 kids, so that propped up our numbers to boot, and boy did they have to learn sharing. But even us. The trick behind good wheelies wasn't just good balance - it was also having a functioning bike - handlebars from this one, sprocket from that one. Presents would be laughably allocated to 1 person - like one year I "got" a trampoline. Sure, like if I ever tried to assert ownership rights, we didn't have the side-kick rule, we had the full on bludgeon rule, which being the youngest was a one-way trip to oblivion. Theft is ownership, I think they say. And it wasn't just for us - imagine trying to tell the neighborhood kids they couldn't use the trampoline - har har hardy har. A commune in those days. And we didn't have fences (except a few older people with no kids, such as the ones next door that didn't like my cat eating their squirrels and such - not that I recall it making a difference). And yes, a good 10-speed could be fine for taking a long moonlight ride on paved roads, but not through the woods, off dirt and wooden ramps, down into the creek. Later with cars there was something of ownership, but mechanics skills were freely given - digging into a carbuerator was easily worth blowing a Sunday afternoon.

These days much of what I look at is turned into marketing for advantage - not what Q refers to as the distraction, which unfortunately is what often works, but the crux of the biscuit, the apostrophe to quote Zappa. Most people don't understand innovation or a product as a whole, or they don't until after they've bought it and found it like the race car in pieces on the floor. I'm writing this on an 8-year-old laptop, because the laptop I bought a little over a year ago refused to even acknowledge so much as a BIOS prompt, for the 2nd time in its short existence, and the laptop I in panic picked to replace it - super AMD 64-bit processor to run my fancy animated simulations - started cracking its lid just from opening after 4 months and finally with a fan that was louder than my first car finally gave up the ghost recently. "That's a problem", the service guy said, "we can't guarantee mechanical failure". "A laptop that can't be closed and opened longer than 4 months," I exclaimed? And I must admit, I typically greet guarantees as something of a tease and a joke. Laptop #2 the local rep told me I had to return it to the store where I bought it in Asia. So much for buying an international brand. (I finally got the right person, and they DHL'd it to repairs and had it back in a week, so that weren't too bad). Laptop #3 they told me I might have it back in a month. And can't remove the harddrive because that would void the warranty. Lovely, can't back up my data and bring my business to a halt for a month because they have some fucked up rules and even more fucked up service and products?

Well, that's where the ice weasels come in. We've invested in a lot of cheap shit over the last 10 years. And it's served us kind of well enough. For fat times. But now we're going to cut the wheat from the chaff. And that's a good thing. In 2009, when someone says, "I'll sell you a good laptop", it better be one really proud motherfucking laptop. Because everyone's going to be counting their nickels, kicking the tires, taking it for a test ride, shopping around. There will be less "features or price" and more "features and price", and those features better work. Next year we won't have the money to just buy a new replacement to do what the other should have. And all throught that supply chain, that support chain, all the way back to those factories in China, the word is going down - "Get your shit together, tough times ahead". And the ones who don't understand, who just took some pieces of prefab from here and there and tossed them out on the market, thinking that was a "product", will feel the steel of the ice weasels, through the belly, through the forehead, left as scraps of meat and metal on the Great Gobi Desert. Because those factories have become like prairie dogs - cute in batches of 2 or 3, a pestilence when strewn across the prairie.

But the cry of "get your shit together" is hitting the States as well. Our value-add is marketing and delivery and service, and in good times we can all be snake-oil salesmen but in the worst of times has to actually match the product or service we're delivering - no more fine-print SLA's no one reads but actually line-by-line scrutiny.

And the ice weasels are coming for us as well - like the ones who thought they were miniature land barons just because they could scratch two mortgages together, the ones who overspent on cars they couldn't afford, commutes too far for expensive gas, and a variety of useless froo-froo that dots our existence.

And in a service economy where 80% of our hard-to-define details like "prompt", "well-done", "convenient", "satisfactory", "pleasantly", well, the ice-weasels will be merciless. "Plastic smile"? Slash. "Call back tomorrow"? Slash. "We'll see how it does? Slash.

Knew you'd appreciate it, Quinn.
Not the greatest music, but perhaps essential in understanding Nietzsche. And to think it lay unperformed for a century.
If you're thinking of buying NMP's two-CD set, you should know there's another -- slightly more comprehensive -- set available.
Also recorded in the early 1990s, it's put out by Concordia University, here in Montreal. It has since been re-released by Albany Records:
http://www.albanyrecords.com/Merchant2/merchant.mvc?
It's in two volumes, total price about $34. Given what a Nietzsche nut you are, you'll want both sets, to contrast and compare.
Nietzsche loved his pithy aphorisms, many of which really were profound.
Near the end of his life, with his mind virtually gone, he was visited by friends.
Seeking to stimulate him out of his torpor, they asked what he now thought of Schopenhauer.
He brightened. "Arthur Schopenhauer," he declared, "was born in Danzig."
He still knew to speak the truth.

I'm so glad to have found this post. Your own reflections on a more simple life really moved me.