Tin Shack

A tin shack by the side of the road is still a house. If it’s equipped with a toilet, stove, refrigerator, bed, television, and computer, and the roof doesn’t leak, the person who lives in it, though poor by U.S. standards, is still richer than the wealthiest pharaohs of antiquity.

If money is what’s corrupting our society, then we need less, not more of it.

If gasoline becomes all but unaffordable, the solution is to drive less. Be grateful for the car. Be still, and listen to the silence.

Refuse to live in this world of violence and the hysterical, fear-driven pursuit of stuff. If we did that, we might rediscover what it means to be human.

In the tin shack by the side of the road, surrounded by palm trees and oleander and beautiful cacti, I sit and listen to the swamp cooler hum. A swamp cooler is a simple thing, kind of like a toilet tank. Water flows from a garden hose into the reservoir, and a float on a stick shuts it off when the tank is full. Turn on the juice and the water gets pumped up through tiny brass pipes and drips onto the pads on four sides, and the fan blows the water-cooled air down into the shack through a hole in the ceiling. Simple and cheap, it’s the poor person’s air conditioning.

The wind’s come up tonight and the palms are swaying. There’s no moon so far and it’s very, very dark and silent. In San Francisco the lights were on all the time. You can’t see the stars. There are a lot of crazy people on the streets, and they’re mostly unpleasant to deal with. Crazy is not a pretty sight.

I think about the horrendous murders being done in the Middle East and elsewhere by a government which claims to represent me, but I don’t remember signing anything. Such thoughts make my mind turn red.

I wonder how long we can go on being this crazy. There's nothing I can do about it except deliberately, methodically go sane.