Earthship disaster

Here's where I peer clearly into the not-so-distant past at the earthship disaster. E and I walked onto the scene like Bambi v. Godzilla. We were Bambi. However, there is no bad guy here, although I used to think so. No Godzilla, just a pathetically dysfunctional situation involving a retro-romantic vision of sustainable living, and a couple of libertarian yahoos. That would be us.

To begin with, E and I committed sin numero uno: we made assumptions. I know! Looking back, having recently removed my retro-romantic lenses, it's easy to see where and when things began to go awry. But at that time, I was so psyched to leap into a new living situation that seemed to provide a lot of solutions to the problems of modern life as I saw it. So ready, that when E and I took our first step inside the first earthship we visited, we basically decided right there on the spot that we would like to build one and live in it.

And we figured, why not build and live right there in that very community? The people were cool, at least the ones we'd met so far, and since it was legal to build alternative housing there (at least to build an earthship), it would save us the hassle of looking for an appropriate piece of land where the building codes allowed for alternative building. We'd done a bit of research and knew that could be a major obstacle.

papier-mache mermaid

E and I created this little ocean-girl together while waiting for the permit to begin building our earthship. You can tell, because we each made one of her arms and they're different from each other. She stands about three feet tall and is mostly papier-mache, finished with metal paints. She's got a PVC core filled halfway up with cement, to lend her ballast on the open sea. The rock was shaped out of wire and stuffed with newspaper, then layered with paper.

pears downstairs

While E and our friend Jonathan were recording tracks upstairs in the earthship, I was overcome with appreciation for these curvaceous beauties sitting on the kitchen counter, just minding their own beeswax. Are pears a reason to believe in a higher power? I think so.