Billy DeCarlo, Project: Pioneer Podcast

Project: Pioneer is the live weekly reality journal of a couple and their small dog as they leave their ‘normal’ life in a luxury apartment for a new semi-off grid life in a small recreational vehicle. We cover prepping, politics, spirituality, afterlife, RV life, and personal finance. Half of all subscription/donation money goes to The National Alliance to End Homelessness, the other half pays for expenses. You can listen to the audio podcast version of this journal at Substack, Apple, Spotify, PocketCasts and others.

Listen to the audio above for our new theme music, Stormy Blues by Arne Bang Huseby. Please share this post!

Don’t despair—prepare.

The nights are restless here in pioneer-land. Giavana, Pia, and I jostle for position in our dark, warm, cozy-blanketed sleep cave, waking often to check that we’re all there together, especially after a nightmare. We all three have them, about every night. After a moment to give thanks we’re all still there, we nuzzle and fall back into (hopefully, good) dreams. Morning always comes, however, and with it a new day we’ll use to prepare. We can’t tell the future, but sometimes we can be pretty sure. This is one of those times.

We started this pioneer RV life over a year ago. We sold our house and all our ridiculous unnecessary suburban crap because we wanted options, should the worst occur. We turned our neglected household closet, basement, garage, and attic clutter into money, and used some of that money on our new pioneer life.

And, here we are, on the cusp of so many unpleasant possibilities over the horizon. Climate. Political takeover. War. Economic catastrophe. It’s all but being promised. We’d hoped we’d be wrong back then. Heck, if good somehow triumphs over evil, we can always buy another house and more unnecessary crap. Now we see so many people looking to start down this same path. Welcome!

Hopefully, the guidance we’ve provided over the past year will help some. I outlined much of what we bought back in Post #12 Riders On The Storm, Prepper/Personal Safety Edition. See that one for links to basic prepping goodies. Mistakes are expensive, both financially and health-wise. So, let’s focus on those two in this journal entry.

We spent a good part of the weekend inventorying our prepper gear and supplies. It sounds like a downer exercise but in reality it was kind of uplifting to see all the things we have available to solve so many scary problems. It feels good to know you have solutions ready to go. It means less stress. The process also reveals exposures.

Let’s cover medical and financial here. Maybe next we’ll cover energy and food/water. As stated above, I’ve already covered weapons and personal safety.

Medical

Note: We are not medical professionals and this does not constitute medical advise. Consult with your medical team, and you do you.

We had bought a few comprehensive medical kits over the past few years (see link in prior post). They have to be viewed like food is—stuff that can expire. Keep in mind, often expired stuff is better than no stuff. The dates are merely suggestions, as I always remind Giavana as she’s carefully eying the food in our refrigerator. She does not concur.

Seriously though, expired medicine can hurt you, so it has to be tossed. It’s also not as effective as fresh stuff, not a good thing if you’re hurt or sick. So, job one was to toss and replace those items in the kits, which we did (pain reliever pills, etc).

Looking through the kits revealed gaps in our preparedness. They were comprehensive for basic, utility first-aid needs, far more than your standard “home first aid kit.” But, again, looking ahead, there’s a big problem looming. If the promises made are fulfilled, we may have a hospital/urgent care/emergency room catastrophe looming. Care will compromised. Waits may be very, very long. Facilities may close, so there may not be availability nearby. In an emergency situation, seconds and minutes count.

Here’s why. If the ACA is repealed, millions will be thrown off their healthcare plans, including the free preventative care they get. Health problems will fester, until they become emergencies. People without insurance tend to go to the ER for everything, because the ER can’t refuse them (yet) for lack of insurance. We’re also seeing comments from the incoming administration that they’ll make cuts to Medicaid, veteran benefits, and Medicare. That should exacerbate the problem by orders of magnitude. Not to mention, in a climate disaster, help doesn’t come quickly and significant injuries are quite easy to come by.

In times of despair, people turn to alcohol and drugs, leading to more ER trips for them and the people they injure out of violence, car accidents, and other mistakes.

We feel we need more of a pioneer emergency room. To accomplish that, we added the items below. I’ll provide the Amazon link (Black Friday sales are starting!), but of course they’re available elsewhere. We also keep The Survival Medicine Handbook handy at all times. It’s an incredible layman’s guide to field medicine.

Liquid stitches (i.e. crazy glue for skin). Yes, this one says it’s for pets. If you read the comments, it seems lots of humans use it in emergencies.

Compression Battle Dressing. Awesome to make it easy to do that one very important thing—put direct pressure on a profusely bleeding wound.

Emergency Laceration Closures. Like stitches, but no needle and thread required.

Quick Clot. Get bleeding wounds to clot faster.

CPR Masks. Good for avoiding infection or disease if you have to give CPR.

Broken Tooth Repair. This isn’t denture stuff, it’s very strong epoxy for fixing teeth.

Iodine Tablets. These are useful in case of nuclear accidents and radiation exposure.

Tourniquets. Essential. Most of those on the market are crap that will break.

N95 Masks. Always remember those early days of COVID. It won’t be our last pandemic.

We’re thinking an AED/defibrillator would also be good, but haven’t purchased one yet.

Check into getting certified in CPR and basic emergency care at adult classes at your local community college or other place. It could save your life or that of someone you love!

Money

Note: This is not financial advice, merely my own musings for entertainment and informational purposes. Remember, your situation is likely very different from ours. Good decisions we make for ourselves could well be catastrophic for someone else.

It seems we have a shadow President (and/or first lady?), as Elonia Musk is ever-present by Trump’s side, joining in national security calls with world leaders, apparently has had our enemy Putin on speed dial for the past year in preparation.

Musk can’t be president because he’s an immigrant, in fact an illegal immigrant at one point. So, he did the next best thing—he bought one with his massive social media propaganda network and huge campaign contributions. He did it because he knows Trump is dumb, and can be easily manipulated. Now we have two immigrants, Musk and Ramasamy, in charge of dismantling our government. I thought MAGA hated immigrants? Now they’re in charge? Oh, the irony.

I’ve been warning for a long time that if Trump is elected, he’ll be dispensed of at some point in lieu of a real evangelical Christian like Mike Johnson (or in this case, a much smarter wannabe dictator like Musk). They will dispense with that pesky rule about no immigrants being the leader.

Musk is pitching to be in charge of “government efficiency,” and has said we’ll undergo severe budget cutting (see: services working Americans, veterans, elderly, etc rely on). He concurs that this, combined with Trump’s mass deportation plan, would cause a market-crashing economic “storm.” Musk warned us to be ready for “two years of pain.”

Basically, every major economist and financial publication who have analyzed these plans (including the tariffs Trump promises) have said we’re in for massive unemployment and inflation. Do you think people like Trump and Musk will feel that pain? Or, will they use techniques like shorting, insider trading, and market timing to further enrich themselves while the rest of us suffer?

Warren Buffett, regarded as the most brilliant investor of our lifetimes, probably ever, just sold hundreds of millions of stocks and went to cash. He’s probably seeing the same thing on the horizon, and looking to follow the old successful adage of “buy low, sell high.” Thanks to Biden and Harris, our stock market is currently at record highs.

Buffett can afford to sell hundreds of millions. It’s a fraction of his wealth, and this was likely in his Berkshire Hathaway hedge fund anyway. People who went to all cash in 1999 (Dot-Com Bust) and 2008 (Financial Crisis/Great Recession) paid a heavy price, most never recovered, and missed the spectacular rebounds that followed those crashes.

Goldman Sachs made headlines recently by forecasting a 3% nominal return from the S&P 500 (i.e. “stock market”). That’s about zero—no return, when factoring in inflation. This happened previously in the 2000s, labeled the “lost decade” and a good example of a period where bonds outperform stocks. Vanguard also predicts US stocks to return between 3-5%, with developed international forecast at 7-9%.

The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017, which was a massive tax cut for the wealthy (amid a few crumbs for the working class, and cost us an additional $4 trillion in debt) will likely remain in place, along with additional cuts for the wealthy (estimated to cost us another $4-5 trillion in debt).

Trump and Musk are talking about moving to crypto, an imaginary currency. It’s no coincidence Musk wants his new government agency to be called, “Department of Government Efficiency,” which as an acronym is DOGE, a type of bitcoin. He knows this, he thinks he’s smarter than everyone else. In reality, he’s just a rich (illegal) immigrant born with a silver (platinum?) spoon in his mouth that takes credit for the successes of the smart people he hires.

Trump now wants to fire our military leadership and replace them with his “Generals like Hitler had.” I hate to be hysterical, but I see no other way to see this other than they plan to burn our government and democracy to the ground, and remake it in their image. For good. He has just nominated someone to be our Attorney General, the leader of our Justice Department, who was being investigated for sex trafficking young girls and has been arrested multiple times.

So, what to do? Well, first off, interest rates have been dropping (thanks, Joe and Kamala!) but are now expected to rise again under Trump. Work hard to pay off any debt, other than maybe a mortgage at less than 3%. Save. Make sure you have a very healthy emergency fund (one good thing about high interest rates!). Follow the advice in Kiss Your Money Hello! (and Financial Stress Goodbye) and the new follow-on book Plan Your Money Path: Create Your Own Financial Plan.

Whenever unexpectedly high inflation is expected to raise its head, inflation-protected Treasury bonds and bond funds become popular. They’re like buying insurance against high inflation. Vanguard always seems to place a healthy helping of these into their target date funds as they come close to their target year. Be aware though, if our government defaults on its bonds for the first time ever, these could become worthless.

The tariffs are going to jack the price of anything that comes from overseas (which is like, everything) so consider any major purchases on those types of goods now. But not by going into further debt! Ask yourself if you really need it. Buckle down a bit to those non-discretionary, essential budget items until the smoke clears, if ever.

There’s even talk of the dollar collapsing, ugh. That’s a tough one. We’re talking total economic and/or societal SHTF (stuff-hits-the-fan) collapse. We have diversified to hold some small denomination precious metal coins to use for trading/bartering. Your $3,000 Costco gold or platinum bars won’t work for that (but they might be useful in buying your way out of the country on the down-low, as it has worked in Ukraine and other places in emergency situations).

Remember, in those situations, it’s best to have what you need and not have to barter at all, because it could get you killed (why would someone pay you if they’re stronger or have better weaponry? There will be no law.) Other items that will be popular to trade are medical supplies (see above!), food, water, ammunition, services, and information.

We’re looking at placing some savings in banks in bordering countries, and even investments (seems those rich folks are always stashing theirs in Bahamian and other outside-the-US accounts). When Trump’s hero Viktor Orban recently took over Hungary’s democracy and turned it to a dictatorship, he seized the people’s accounts. In recent years, Vanguard has been putting a greater emphasis on developed-country international stock ETFs like VXUS. You see that in all their target date funds now. Perhaps this is why—they may have seen it coming too.

That diversity is a good thing regardless, as you’re getting ownership in great companies like Nestle Foods, European pharma, Honda, Toyota, Subaru, etc. We’ll have to circle back as we learn more on these topics and make decisions.

Have a look at how much of your investments in taxable brokerage accounts, 401k or other employer plans, HSAs, Roth, 529 plans is in stocks versus bonds or cash. Is it in line with your natural level of risk tolerance and your timeline for needing to use that money? If you need help, find a truly fiduciary advice-only advisor at adviceonlynetwork.com.

Next up, we’ll take you through our thinking about whether we should leave the country, move to a deeper blue state, go on the move with our pioneer covered wagon RV, or simply hunker down where we’re at. Stay tuned!

“When a clown moves into a palace, he doesn't become a king. The palace becomes a circus.”—Turkish proverb

“The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters.”―Antonio Gramsci, Italian Philosopher

"God helps those who help themselves,"—Ancient Greek Phrase

This pioneer journey continues…

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Project: Pioneer is the live weekly reality journal of a couple and their small dog as they leave their ‘normal’ life in a luxury apartment for a new semi-off grid life in a small recreational vehicle. We cover prepping, politics, spirituality, afterlife, RV life, and personal finance. Half of all subscription/donation money goes to The National Alliance to End Homelessness, the other half pays for expenses. You can listen to the audio podcast version of this journal at Substack, Apple, Spotify, PocketCasts and others.

Listen to the audio above for our new theme music, Stormy Blues by Arne Bang Huseby. Please share this post!

Trigger warning: Much of this post is dark, but so is reality. It’s also about how you can survive, and how you can fight back. So, it’s important.

They say, “Breathe, relax, it will be OK.”

They say, “It’s only four years, we survived the first one.”

None of that is really true. Welcome to your new country, Wurstuvus. Trumpistan. People bought into a narrative about inflation, prison sex changes, eating pets, and tampons even though the first two were a direct result of the previous Trump’s administration and the latter two were just a made-up thing. The border was a big issue, but Trump blocked the solution and Biden had essentially closed it. The misogyny is simply too deep in this country. We’re too uneducated and ignorant to accept a woman leader, no matter how much better that’s turned out in the rest of the developed world.

Remember, 54% of American adults have a 6th grade reading level—that of an 11-year old. That’s Trump’s base in a nutshell; naïve people who are easily manipulated, prone to “entertainment” in lieu of boring factual information. This is why for so long, Republicans have fought hard against education. Add the ultra-wealthy, who want more damn tax cuts, and the evangelical right who want that theocracy. That’s your winning recipe.

The problem has been, for a long time, greed. The massive redistribution of wealth from lower and middle class families to the wealthiest. The massive and growing income inequality since Reagan’s 1980s. You’ve been getting screwed by the wealthy, by corporate welfare, all along. It was never the immigrants. And now, you’ve put them in charge, perhaps forever.

Forgive me, I may have missed the part where the raping, murdering caravans of illegal immigrants crossed the border and voted six times each? I thought there was all this voter fraud in America? Wut? Possibly, you were lied to, Trumpsters? Maybe the immigrants were busy eating the pets.

Giavana and I were hoping against hope, but in reality we’ve been preparing for this for over a year, as you know if you’ve been reading this journal. I tried to be optimistic in the last post, but my base instincts shouted deception. I let myself think America is better than this.

In that moment, I may have given false hope, so I feel bad, but for over a year I’ve been trying to help prepare others, as we’ve been preparing ourselves. We feel so bad for the young people, as we’ve had a lifetime of the best of America. We had it all here—a rip-roaring economy, best in the world, and we’ve thrown it away.

We had a candidate with clear, economist-blessed policies to help working people:

* Buy a home ($25,000 down payment assistance)

* Start a business ($50,000)

* Lower prices for rent/food/healthcare/everything by building more housing and stopping price gouging

* Pay child costs ($6,000)

* Pass gun safety laws to stop school shootings

The people instead chose the criminal serial liar billionaire who had only fully followed through on one promise last time—to cut taxes for other billionaires.

We’ve reached the evolutionary tipping point of ignorance over education. The uneducated racist ignorant white male now rules over all of us. This is the dawn of a new era of anti-intellectualism, those times when the dictators, ignorant populace, and/or evangelically religious folks feel threatened and start killing off the educated. That never ends well. It happened during Franco’s dictatorship in Spain in the 1930s-1970s, in dictator Pol Pot’s Cambodia in the 1970s, in the Dark Ages after the fall of the Roman Empire, and it’s happened a few times historically in Russia, China, and many other countries.

This is going to suck, but the delicious part will be watching these ignorant hateful b******s come to realize exactly what they voted for, and seeing them suffer along with the rest of us. Bubba and Mrs. Bubba are about to get body slammed by what they voted for. They’ll realize the pain of “owning the libs,” who all along were fighting for policies to make their lives better. Here’s how that will play out:

* He will immediately push through his tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations.

* That will result in a massive new spike in debt, and massive decrease in tax revenue.

* He will claim this is an emergency, and use it to justify massive cuts to services working people rely on, veteran’s disability benefits, Medicaid, and more. Robin Hood in reverse, like the Reagan raid on the Social Security fund to fund tax cuts for the wealthy.

Put a pin in our incredible economic numbers a the end of the Biden/Harris administration: 2.2% inflation, full employment, stock market/401ks at record highs, gas under $3/gallon, mortgages at 6%. He’ll take credit for that, before it changes drastically, then blame someone else.

OK. This isn’t going to be just some melodramatic sky-is-falling post. We’ll take a practical look at what might be ahead, and what to do about it—how Giavana and I will prepare for what’s coming.

First, Kamala did everything right. God bless that woman. We could have had it all, they also say. In a good and decent world, this should have been a blowout win for her, as I had dared to hope. Instead, for the first time, we’ve elected a lifelong con man, rapist, twice-impeached, convicted criminal to be our leader. Yes, just like those s-hole third-world countries he’s always talked about. Remember, Hitler went to prison, before being elected again, and we know the rest of the story. To set the table for Trump, we eliminated any and all guardrails and ways to hold him accountable for past or future crimes in any way.

What could go wrong, right? He’s got the corrupt Supreme Court, big majority in the Senate, and the House of Representatives at his disposal. As well as anyone else with any kind of power who doesn’t want to end up as an example, hanging from the wall.

There’s no evidence of any fraud. Sure, Russia intervened with bomb threats to polling places, a years-long social media campaign, using its assets inside our country to influence. Bottom line is, this is who we are here in the United States. This country IS that hateful, horrible Madison Square Garden rally. We elected a cruel, racist, misogynist, corrupt, indecent man because the majority of our population see themselves in him.

You know those folks, by now. They’re easily identifiable by the red hats, flags, yard signs, nasty attitude. The bullies from school that have had all that pent up anger from not being able to hit or bully (other than their poor spouses, who now must suck it up per VP JD Vance, as no-fault divorces will be banned). They were enraged when a Black man was elected, and in their eyes became the boss of them. Further enraged when he was re-elected. Then along came the messiah figure, the daddy racist that gave them permission to be open and act on their feelings.

We are a country of entitled folks who for too long have been told and believed we’re this virtuous icon of the world, but in the end we’ve never risen above that basest instinct to hate and mistreat people simply because they’re different in some way. I’ve written about the illusion of America’s greatness before. In my last post, I wrote the shocking reality that Hitler himself was inspired in his evil by our genocide against Native Americans and treatment/isolation of the “other.”

The rest of the world are often complimentary of us, perhaps out of fear of that massive nuclear arsenal, but secretly aren’t big fans of the Ugly American, the entitled, drunken, obnoxious tourists that invade their lands. They look to us in pity over our allowing our children to be mowed down at their desks with military assault rifles, allowing faceless, greedy corporations to wield such power to screw us for basic human dignities like health care, allowing our people (especially children) to starve as the richest nation in the history of the world, while supposedly charitable “churches” are allowed to run mega-billion tax-free organizations.

Based on bond market activity since the election, they’re now skeptical we’ll be able to pay back our debt. This will result in higher interest rates for mortgage and car loans, and inflation. Just when Biden and Harris had that fixed, too. Watch what happens to this wonderful economy.

Make no mistake—I love my country and I love all of us who are better than all that. Perhaps this is the fulfillment of the prophesy that technology and social media as the catalyst of our demise. I’ve mused about that plenty of times as well.

Ok. Let’s look ahead to what may come. This is not hysteria or click-baiting. This is simply taking what has been promised, and what the effect on us may be. Sure, at different points there were promises not to do some of this, but those came along with frequent winking, nodding, and signaling they would. Let’s not forget these are folks, particularly Trump, that lie as they breathe. This is what I think we can expect, perhaps there will be some way found to prevent it, but I can’t see one, short of civil war.

Ukraine: Trump has made clear he’ll let Putin have Ukraine, and most of the Russian asset Republican party has been openly advocating for dropping our support and letting Russia have its way. As when we allowed Hitler to have Poland, this will enable Putin to plan and begin his march across Europe to rebuild the Soviet Union.

NATO: Trump’s long dream has been to kneecap the strongest military alliance in history. NATO is the primary reason we haven’t been speaking Russian for a few generations already. This also plays into the Ukraine scenario, as when Poland and other NATO members get invaded and invoke Article 5, we’ll ignore their pleas for help. It’s a shame as they came to our side immediately after we invoked it after 9/11 (we are the only ever beneficiary of Article 5). It’s kind of like when Trump abandoned the Kurds in Afghanistan, after they fought and died for us, when he surrendered to the Taliban.

Affordable Care Act/Obamacare: It’s another of Trump’s dreams to destroy this, and it will be gone. Millions of Americans suddenly without healthcare, at least not healthcare they can afford. Back to the days of uninsured people going to the emergency room at every turn, jacking up costs and reducing care for everyone else. Biden and Harris’ caps on drug prices will all disappear, meaning a huge burden on households, but great profits and executive bonuses for big pharma.

Inflation: Trump has promised to go wild with tariffs, which will be a cost to us, the consumers here in the US. The idea is to make imported stuff so expensive we just buy American stuff. The problems is we don’t make much stuff here anymore, and it will take years and years to be able to. The real purpose of this is to allow Trump to use these as an extortion cudgel, handing out exceptions in return for favors/gifts, as he did with Apple in his last administration. The other countries, of course, will retaliate with tariffs on our stuff, which will crater our economy since nobody else will be buying our stuff around the world. This tactic bankrupted family farmers in Trump’s last administration, requiring a very expensive taxpayer funded bailout. Barron’s, The Economist, The Wall Street Journal, and a slew of Nobel Prize winning economists have said this will result in financial and economic disaster for us.

Public Education: The promise is to eliminate it, meaning private pay-as-you-go education only. This has been disastrous and expensive when it’s been attempted before. It also allows your kids to be force-fed whatever curriculum is mandated, such as hard-core evangelical fundamental Christianity, and love of leader/state. They won’t be learning about their bodies and other cultures and so forth. Trump’s donor friend Betsy DeVos is going to make big bank on this one, and I’m sure he’ll get his cut.

Medicine: The promise is to put RFK Jr, or another anti-science lunatic like the Attorney General of Florida in charge. Both are anti-vax wingnuts. Get ready for the rapid spread of disease and pandemic, as Florida has experienced. Leprosy, anyone? Smallpox? Measles? After they make reproductive freedom illegal nationwide, we’ll see an even larger tidal wave of women dying.

Society: We’ll see the demonization and closetization of anyone other, as was the way back in the “good old days” that are the template and goal for all of this. Think “Mayberry RFD” where nary a person of color or LGBTQ+ was to be seen. Bullying will run rampant on our poor kids. Suicides will rise, and these folks won’t mind, like when Reagan laughed at the gay folks dying from AIDS. Social media will be highly monitored and regulated.

SS/Medicare/Medicaid/Disability/Unemployment/Veteran’s Benefits: These have been referred to by the right as “entitlements” and “socialism” for quite some time, a clear indication of attitude by the silver-spoon trust-fund baby set. Musk has said we’d have to go through some pain, and it’s likely this is what he was referring to, and more. Trump has often shown his disdain for veterans, a group he despises as he’ll never gain the respect and admiration he sees them receiving.

Legal: Justices Thomas and Alito will retire, to be replaced with two very young, very motivated evangelical Christians. I wouldn’t be surprised if they packed the court by adding more than nine. Get ready for more of the massive corruption we saw in 2017-2020, all at taxpayer expense. This represents a complete breakdown of the rule of law, because any case against a corrupt Republican can simply be pushed to the Supreme Court to be disappeared.

Financial: The self-proclaimed King of Debt added another $7 trillion last time. He loves spending our money. The next big tax cut for his billionaire friends will add about the same. We’ll pay that—our kids, grandkids, great-grandkids, if the country lasts that long, which is doubtful. They want to put our nation’s wealth into crypto, a dangerous, risky, imaginary currency backed by nothing. Russia, Iran, and North Korea would love that. Ca-Ching! Thank you very much. The climate impact would be huge—it requires a ton of energy and how do you transact when the lights go out?

Immigrants: After they get done rounding them up and deporting them, they’ll quickly realize these hard-working folks were holding up the bottom of our economy—keeping grocery stores stocked with fruit and vegetables, working in hospitality, as home aides/helpers, and other jobs our entitled folks don’t want to do or feel are beneath them. Our economy will be devastated, more inflation and product shortages.

Elections: Please. I’m sure we’ll have ones similar to Russia, in other words, just for show.

National Security: We can look forward to our critical agencies being led by people simply because they’re donors, golf club members, or syncophants. People with no actual experience or interest in, say, our health. People in many cases who despise those agencies and want them disbanded. People who will have security clearance and access to our nation’s most valuable intelligence but aren’t trustworthy and would never get them otherwise. This will cost lives.

Climate: Trump promises to drill, drill, drill. Says climate change is a hoax. This will exacerbate the very expensive and deadly nightmares we’ve been living, and speed up our eventual extermination.

Guns: My favorite part will be when they come for the guns. I can’t wait to see the look on all those MAGA bubba faces. No, you won’t shoot your way out. They will come with drones and military tactical vehicles and gear. I don’t care if you used cash at Cabelas. There’s plenty of camera footage with excellent AI-driven facial recognition. Yeah, they’ll pry your guns from your cold, dead hands. Meanwhile, school shootings will continue, as this group are firmly in the pocket of the NRA. We just have to get over it, Trump said.

Project 2025: Now we’ll see the truth about those lies of “Who? What?” Trump’s folks didn’t spend all that time building this dystopian vision of the future for nothing. This thing is a cornucopia of evil crap, too much to detail here. Read details here.

Oh, did you really think Trump was serious when he was talking about eliminating income tax, no taxes on tips, and no taxes on Social Security? Bless your heart!

It’s very sad what we lost. All those economist-endorsed plans to help working families start businesses, buy homes, get prices down, fight corporate gouging now up in smoke. Instead, the people elected the actual cause of all that—greedy, corrupt billionaires and their corporations. We feel bad for the youngsters that would have benefited from all these programs.

Over time, if things get real bad, pockets of commune-type communities of like minded people who provide security and barter and share goods and services with each other may form. More people will adopt isolation through homesteading. We’ll see more homes with multiple generations under roof, like back in the Great Depression, due to financial and security necessity. Hey, just like the immigrants live!

Some wise country (Mexico?) is going to realize there's a sudden huge populace of educated, decent, hard working people with some money who would jump at a package deal for a visa, job, and help with money/investment transfers, perhaps some land. Maybe 40 acres and a mule, but for real this time.

Ok, what about us? Giavana, Pia, and I just returned from our trip. It got off to a rough start as we had to rush home from a wedding on Saturday night as we got an alert that our area was on fire, due to the severe drought conditions. We took some unreplaceable stuff to storage and some of it with us, in case it happened again while we were gone.

It was nice to be away for a few days, even though we had to run that gamut of emotions as we got all excited on Tuesday night, settled in, and witnessed this profound disaster. We had a few days of nice breakfasts and jacuzzi tub baths. After staying up all night for the Tuesday debacle, we canceled our appointments and plans on Wednesday and hunkered down in the hotel room together, blinds closed to the dreary weather outside, but not escaping our dreary mood inside. It gave us a chance to talk and plan. We already adjusted our finances in accordance with this new reality, to provide some level of protection. There will be more to do along those lines.

We’ll spend this weekend carefully inventorying all our prepper gear and making trips to stock up on N95 masks, alcohol (not that kind), gloves, ammunition and other self-defense items and medical supplies. We may look to beef up our solar config on Black Friday and add a water purification system (our final exposure gap, other than possibly ham radio skills). We need a hard cap for Henrik the pickup truck to add additional storage and security to contents.

We’ll be stockpiling our prescriptions and attending to any planned medical items like checkups. In the first Trump administration, we kept thanking our lucky stars he had no crises to deal with. That was a blessing. Then COVID hit, and as expected, he screwed it up massively. Hundreds of thousands of Americans died unnecessarily. We likely won’t be as lucky this time around.

We won’t be buying any property in this country, that’s for sure. So, that log cabin dream is off the table, unfortunately. We may relocate our White House RV to a blue state, to have a better sense of security and community around us, for now. We’re tidying up the last loose ends on the second citizenship, although relocating anywhere in Europe might be going from the frying pan into the fire as Putin’s bombs begin to fly. We may buy a small fix-up property in a small town somewhere in Europe, to have shelter to flee to. We have trained ourselves to live minimally over this pioneer time. It’s our backup plan, for now.

I see tons of posts on social media about going to Canada or some other country. It’s not that easy. First, most countries don’t want us. They see it as the equivalent of soiling our own home and then moving into someone else’s, rather than cleaning it up. That Ugly American thing plays a part, as well. Most have tightened up policies against accepting us dirty immigrant refugees (oh, the irony!). By staying here in the US, we can leverage our pioneer RV mobility, and be able to leave for safer ground on a moment’s notice. We can (for now) keep our weapons to protect and defend ourselves. We may look to rent a piece of land to put the White House on for some privacy and space.

We were able to go home though, since there won’t be the post-election violence we worried about, because the bad guys won and good gal lost. This will be a slow-motion coup, the end of democracy, so we’ll have time to adapt, hopefully.

And, we’ll continue the fight, aligning with indivisible.org (please do as well!). It’s going to get ugly. I’m sure anarchists and a resistance movement are already forming up across the country. I’m looking forward to getting back to my Buddhism reading and finding a big, fat fantasy sci-fi novel to get lost in when I need a break from reality here in Trump’s Mordor. We’ll stay tuned to the news, but not as much, as it will likely be too much. We remember the non-stop drama from last time. We’ll do that for as long as we have non-state sanctioned news, anyway.

We watched Kamala walk onto that stage and say goodbye on Wednesday afternoon. It felt like the end of everything good, the end of the United States of America as we knew it. It felt like the dawn of the darkness, the new era of Trumpistan. She did an amazing job, almost perfect, but in the end, it didn’t make a difference. This is who the United States of America is. None of those other factors mattered. We now have a leader who lusts for dictatorship, with full immunity from any crimes he may care to commit in pursuit of that goal. He will bleed us of our wealth and resources, as dictators are wont to do.

The bottom line is that a lifelong con man, rapist, twice-impeached, convicted criminal is not going to be the one to solve your problems. They will only get worse. We will reap what we have sown, unfortunately. The pain will be slow, and non-stop for us here in America.

“We have met the enemy and he is us.”—American Navy Commodore Oliver Hazard Perry

This pioneer journey continues…

Hey, it took me a few hours to write this journal post for you. Can you spend a few seconds and post it on your socials or forward to others? If so, thank you!

Free subscribers get a free copy of my book of short stories, Rambles and Daydreams. Paid subscribers will get all three books in the noir crime trilogy, Vigilante Angels. I no longer do paid-only posts, because it felt gross to leave people behind, especially those who can’t afford it.

If you read my ramblings, I’ll leave it to your conscience. If you get any value from my writing, consider a donation or subscription, which is priced at a few dollars, the minimum allowed. Half of all money goes to The National Alliance to End Homelessness, the other half pays for expenses.

You can also support me by becoming a paid subscriber below, leaving a small one-time tip at the button below, or by buying my novels at wildlakellc.com, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, or other fine book outlets in paperback, eBook, or audio.

Intro music is Stormy Blues by Arne Bang Huseby.

When you buy something using the retail links in our stories we may get a teeny tiny commission, but it never affects your price or our judgement in linking to products we use and believe in. It helps pay for the costs in providing this (hopefully) entertaining content.

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit billydecarlo.substack.com/subscribe

Project: Pioneer is the live weekly reality journal of a couple and their small dog as they leave their ‘normal’ life in a luxury apartment for a new semi-off grid life in a small recreational vehicle. We cover prepping, politics, spirituality, afterlife, RV life, and personal finance. Half of all subscription/donation money goes to The National Alliance to End Homelessness, the other half pays for expenses. You can listen to the audio podcast version of this journal at Substack, Apple, Spotify, PocketCasts and others.

Listen to the audio above for our new theme music, Stormy Blues by Arne Bang Huseby. Please share this post!

Well, here we are together, all of us, on the precipice of a major historical moment. There have been so many, good and bad, that we’ve learned about in school. We’ve watched so many movies and read so many books about good versus evil, and we’re at that moment when we’re about to learn which will triumph.

Here we are. For real. Right now. In real life.

Remember that Will Smith movie, Independence Day (1996) when everyone banded together at the end to defeat the alien invasion on the 4th of July? (Chris Farley voice…) Yeah, that was awesome. This feels like that. But, you have to wonder, who watches those movies their whole lives, or learns the history of Hitler, Mussolini, Franco, and other real, actual evil bad guys, and decides to go with Team Evil? Sure, there will always be some, for whatever reason. They just might be…evil. But 40% of the population of the greatest country ever? At a time when we’re at peak prosperity and breaking records economically?

Four hundred historians just stated that “…the nation stands at an unprecedented historical as well as political crossroads. On the outcome of this election, no less than the election of 1860, hangs the fate of both the spirt and the letter of the Constitution.”

Frank Zappa saw this coming way back in 1986, with that Moral Majority Jerry Falwell movement.

“The biggest threat to America today is not communism, it’s moving America toward a fascist theocracy, and everything that’s happened during the Regan administration is steering us right down that pipe.”—Frank Zappa

Thinking… Oh, wait a minute! I think I understand. Those 40% supporting Team Evil are in the upside-down. They’re seeing this as good versus evil, an alien invasion threatening humanity. I’ve been hearing about those evil caravans of raping murdering illegal aliens for years now, since 2015 in fact, almost ten years! They must be using canes and walkers to be taking that long, geez. I thought my 88-year old mother was slow, but this is, like, ridic. Where dey at?

It can’t be the other ones that are arriving, now down to a trickle, because they’re going right to work on the type of jobs Trump and his friends have always dangled, begging them to come—construction, hotel maids, field workers. It can’t be those folks, because they commit far, far fewer crimes than your average white citizen dudes. They ain’t evil at all. Maybe it’s some kind of Trojan horse thing? Sounds pretty conspiratorial to me. Maybe on the next full moon they’ll turn into evil zombies and do that long-promised raping and murdering?

It’s the same confusing conundrum with the economy. I went through that in the last post. Restaurants, airports, entertainment venues all mobbed, every economic indicator through the roof, the world’s best inflation and covid recovery. Yet, you hear people say they’re voting a certain way “due to the economy.” Toward the major contributor, ironically. The guy who screwed it all up and left that mess (and an additional $7 trillion in debt) in the first place.

At first it was obvious Trump didn’t know how tariffs worked. But after he bankrupted so many family farms last time using them (requiring an expensive taxpayer bailout), we can safely assume he’s flat-out lying to the cult. His tariffs make no sense, until you realize they give him a tool to extort every business in America for waivers (as he gave Apple last time). Major conservative publications like The Economist, Barron's, and Wall Street Journal are telling us he will destroy the economy and jack inflation way back up with these crazy policies. Trump himself and Musk are telling you to get ready for some "hard times" and saying they'll have to "crash the stock market." You have one candidate promising to do good things for his fellow billionaires, and the other with a whole website full of policies to help people just like you and us. Like I said, the upside-down.

As I always say folks, if you’re not a wealthy, straight, white, male, evangelical Christian, you ain’t in the club. You bein’ used. Played by the playa.

We become vulnerable to that type of predatory con man when we have such a huge populace that doesn’t understand the fundamentals of our government, immigration, asylum, elections, economics, taxes, inflation, and so on. They become “marks,” easy to convince that the good guys are the bad guys. Easy to convince to not believe their lying eyes and ears. That’s how cults and dictatorships work.

1. Target the uneducated and bigoted.

2. Create a scary boogieman (Look over there! Immigrants tryina take ya jab and rape ya ol’ lady!)

3. Fear creates hatred. Stoke that fire! Jews will not replace us!

4. Convince them you're the only one who can fix it.

5. Convince them you're the only source of info to trust.

6. Take full control. Shut down all other sources of information.

7. Take the guns so there's no dissent, then take the money.

Of course, that’s the strategy for the folks on the low end of the totem pole. This is why Trump said, “I love the uneducated!” There are also plenty of rich people on board, though. They know the deal, they’re not stupid (well, some are…). They’re in it for that spot on the oligarch roster. Putin achieved loyalty quickly by sending anyone with wealth and power who dared dissent off to a Siberian work camp, then seizing their assets and sharing them among the ones who had been loyal. That recipe quickly locked in his team, both out of loyalty and fear, a very strong and lasting combination. This is what Trump is trying to emulate.

Back to Hitler. Sure, pure evil dude. Where did he get all those sick ideas? Well, actually, right here in the good (?) old USA. He was inspired by our campaign of genocide against Native Americans, and used it to go after Jews. He was inspired by our great “control” of minorities through Jim Crow laws, police brutality, and racial segregation. Pretty sad, amirite? We’re better than that. Let’s prove it this Tuesday. Let’s not go back.

So, here we are, sigh. History doesn’t repeat itself, but it rhymes. Last time things were this bad, civil war busted out and over 850,000 men, women, and children died on our soil, by our own hand. Four hundred thousand were imprisoned, our citizens, in our country. Countless were maimed for life. It seems the pump is being primed for a sequel—the language and tactics being used already are open and clear.

There are people with machetes already showing up at polling places to intimidate voters. Mass disenfranchisement is happening, aided by the very much corrupt Supreme Court. Ballots are already being burned in postal and drop boxes. They want an evangelical, fundamental, strict, severe White Christian homeland, and they want it bad. This might be their last, best chance, so they’re all in, no matter what it takes. With the Supreme Court compromised, they’ll likely never have this chance again.

Therefore and forthwith, as promised, Giavana, Pia, and I are gonzo. We leave our beloved USA on Monday, intending to return but carrying our papers and our essentials in case we don’t, at least right away. We aren’t those frogs boiling in the pot. Not that we think thermonuclear war will break out on Tuesday, we just don’t want to be around for even the minor violence that will likely occur. We’re overdue for a getaway, and thought the perspective of watching this world-critical election go down from another country would be pretty cool.

That said, don’t forget we’re double-agents here in hillbilly Trumpland. They could be on to us, and that could easily get ugly if my inner demons are summoned from their long slumber. We might be staking out our new home and exactly what asylum entails in another country. We’ll be finishing the details of that second citizenship we’ve been working on. There’s been a ton of stress, of course. It’s at the point that Giavana and I are watching serial-killer documentaries to relax. Now it’s time to take a well-deserved break.

My prediction? Hey, I’m an optimist. I think she’ll win. Big. We can’t be that evil (right?). That hopeful opinion and $7 will buy you a Starbucks, maybe. I might be dreaming, trying to stay sane (too late?). I think a volatile period of lawsuits, violence, and dirty tricks that make 2020 look like child’s play will follow. The “little secret” Trump and Speaker Johnson have been hinted at is to manipulate the elector system, as spelled out here. If that succeeds, essentially the USA and democracy here are done, sorry.

Hopefully, on January 20th, President Harris is sworn in, and we can get back to normal, maybe get a break until history and human nature get around to rhyming again. That said, we’re still left with that 40% in dire need of cult deprogramming, a corrupt Supreme Court, and other problems. I think she’ll straighten things out, along with our help. Here’s a great short video on how to prepare for post-election violence, from a prepper’s perspective. Because, there may well be violence no matter who wins. Prepare. These may be our last, true days of innocence. Almost 250 years, what a ride!

We started this pioneer journey over a year ago, and this was a major reason why. We saw it coming waaaay back then, and here we are, at the crux of world-changing history. Our first ever post in August 2023 listed, among other reasons for taking on this pioneer life:

“The climate, planet, and democracy seem to be crumbling around us. Half our freedom-loving democracy has joined a cult—fanatics for a guy who openly lusts after fascist, authoritarian leaders and yearns to be one.“—Me

Not that we can hide forever. If Trump wins, he’ll award Ukraine to Putin (as he promised), after which Putin will take Poland and begin his march across eastern Europe to rebuild the USSR, as he has openly dreamed. This, of course, would begin World War III, with so many unstable countries and leaders now armed to the teeth with nuclear weapons, just one of which is capable of ending life here on Earth.

That sucks.

But, we go knowing we’ve done all we can. We have phone banked, written letters/postcards, tried to deprogram cult members online and in person, started up our own local organization here in our critical state. We go with good conscience, and hope to God good triumphs over evil once more. This pitch to you is my last effort to help the cause.

Have you done all you can? You can make a difference in these last few days, even from home! Please help fight this horrible authoritarian fascist any way you can at moveon.org, swingleft.org, or indivisible.org. Talk to anyone in your life to make sure they’ve voted or have a plan to on Tuesday—early! Inform them about provisional ballots and their rights. Let’s not have to answer to our kids and grandkids when they ask how much of the horror of their lives could have been avoided if we’d done more in this very moment. Like, today.

“Shall we expect some transatlantic military giant to step the ocean and crush us at a blow? Never! All the armies of Europe, Asia, and Africa combined, with all the treasure of the earth (our own excepted) in their military chest, with a Bonaparte for a commander, could not by force take a drink from the Ohio or make a track on the Blue Ridge in a trial of a thousand years. At what point then is the approach of danger to be expected? I answer. If it ever reach us it must spring up amongst us; it cannot come from abroad. If destruction be our lot we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen we must live through all time or die by suicide.”—Abraham Lincoln, Lyceum Address

“The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature”—Abraham Lincoln, Inaugural Address

"When fascism comes to America it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross."—Sinclair Lewis

"Women's productive purpose and industry form the backbone of Gilead, even as men determine how each woman can best serve Gilead's goals"—Margaret Atwood, Handmaid’s Tale

This pioneer journey continues…

Hey, it took me a few hours to write this journal post for you. Can you spend a few seconds and post it on your socials or forward to others? If so, thank you!

Free subscribers get a free copy of my book of short stories, Rambles and Daydreams. Paid subscribers will get all three books in the noir crime trilogy, Vigilante Angels. I no longer do paid-only posts, because it felt gross to leave people behind, especially those who can’t afford it.

If you read my ramblings, I’ll leave it to your conscience. If you get any value from my writing, consider a donation or subscription, which is priced at a few dollars, the minimum allowed. Half of all money goes to The National Alliance to End Homelessness, the other half pays for expenses.

You can also support me by becoming a paid subscriber below, leaving a small one-time tip at the button below, or by buying my novels at wildlakellc.com, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, or other fine book outlets in paperback, eBook, or audio.

Intro music is Stormy Blues by Arne Bang Huseby.

When you buy something using the retail links in our stories we may get a teeny tiny commission, but it never affects your price or our judgement in linking to products we use and believe in. It helps pay for the costs in providing this (hopefully) entertaining content.

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit billydecarlo.substack.com/subscribe

The spiral of time seems to be winding more quickly, day by day; a vortex pulling us toward whatever inevitability we’ll experience very soon. Things are busy here in pioneer-land—we’re preparing. Not just for the new world we may find ourselves in, but for winter in our small covered wagon.

Project: Pioneer is the live weekly reality journal of a couple and their small dog as they leave their ‘normal’ life in a luxury apartment for a new semi-off grid life in a small recreational vehicle. We cover prepping, politics, spirituality, afterlife, RV life, and personal finance. Half of all subscription/donation money goes to The National Alliance to End Homelessness, the other half pays for expenses. You can listen to the audio podcast version of this journal at Substack, Apple, Spotify, PocketCasts and others.

I wrote last week’s post from the hotel, prior to checkout. It fired out into the interweb as we flew over this beautiful country, blissfully disconnected. We arrived home in the morning, to an absolutely mobbed airport full of vacationers (in October?) and business travelers, same as the one we had left just a few hours before. We spent too much time going from restaurant to diner trying to find someplace to eat. All were crammed to the max. On the radio, we heard report after report of just stunning economic and stock market performance. Then we heard voters being surveyed, some complaining about “Bidenomics” and the “bad economy.”

We had to hustle, it was moving day, and it was just brutal scurrying around, packing up the woodland camp and relocating to our new winter location, then setting up. We’re a team, and we got it done. In the week since, we’ve tightened up, made further progress on putting in the foamboard insulation, heated water hose, and connecting up the water lines. Remember my past procrastination on hooking up the sewer and water? Bah. This time, I jumped right in. It’s done.

To be honest, it’s a bit rough adjusting to our new location. We’re more packed in than we were down in the woods, out of necessity. The covered wagon RVs band together to protect one another from the wind and other elements. We have two neighbors with multiple yappy dogs, so it feels like we live inside a pet store. It’s easy to get mad at those people, until we remember the pure joy and comfort Pia brings to us, especially when we’re having a hard time. I was outside working on the foamboard yesterday and the one woman stopped by. She told me she ended up with the four yappers when her ex didn’t follow up on his promise to take them during their divorce. She’d recently lost her job. So, again, more reminders to give people a little grace, you never know what they’re going through in life. As it gets colder, windows will close, furnaces will be running, and that noise all fades into the background.

You might remember my ongoing drama last year with the neighbor I called Elmer. We almost came to blows at one point. Last winter, his wife rammed their vehicle into the support beam holding up the steel roof over us, almost bringing it down and narrowly missing our huge propane tank. They’ve bought a house and left the pioneer life. I wish them good luck and good health.

Luckily, the weather has been amazing fall splendor, albeit cold at night and in the early morning. We have our extra-large propane tank out front and that’s hooked up too. After all that, I got to have some fun. I unboxed and set up our new solar system—admittedly a starter system with two 200-watt rigid panels and around 5,000 amp hours of energy storage. It’s enough to run our rig for a few days, even without solar recharging, which will add to that. It’s fully expandable, so now that we have a comfort zone, we’ll be adding panels and power banks as we see deals too good to pass up (hello, Black Friday!). We finally feel good about our solar game.

As well, we picked up a great deal on a LiFe4PO (lithium iron phosphate) battery with 230 amp hours to replace the old-school AGM battery on the tongue of our wagon. I haven’t hooked that up yet, as I’m sorting through the options as far as a converter that can properly charge and maintain it. Fun pioneer/prepping learning projects! We’ll likely add to this as well, with additional batteries to run in series or parallel. Bring on the winter, Trump apocalypse, alien landings, climate chaos, whatever!

Giavana, Pia, and I have also been busy looking at remote cabins and land. That’s a really fun and uplifting project. Of course, we can’t bite on anything until we find out if this country will turn to Trumpistan or not. That won’t be resolved on November 5, it will take until Jan 20th, inauguration day, to feel safe. Even then, it could be the start of the threatened/promised civil war. This is not conjecture, people with the ability to move on such an idea are actually proposing it, seeding the idea in the cult members, to get them to ruin or possibly end their lives for Trump like the poor b******s that did back on Jan 6, 2021. It’s sad to watch the lemmings thrust themselves over the cliff, but from a purely Darwinian perspective, perhaps it’s the true and necessary cleansing of our species in order to survive.

Back to the vortex I mentioned at the beginning of this journal post. Everything is happening so fast! In the midst of all this, we’re working hard on the election. Phone banking, online deprogramming attempts, and more. We have to travel next weekend for a wedding. We come back, and head out of the country on election day, our work complete for now, to watch it all unfold in safety, far away from the stress of it all. Those should certainly mean some interesting upcoming posts!

In the meantime, please help fight this horrible authoritarian fascist any way you can at moveon.org, swingleft.org, or indivisible.org. Let’s not be having to answer to our kids and grandkids when they ask how much of the horror of their lives could have been avoided if we’d done more to elect Kamala Harris in this very moment. Like, today.

"At the end of the day, we must go forward with hope and not backward by fear and division."—Jesse Jackson

"Hope is being able to see that there is light despite all of the darkness."—Desmond Tutu

"We must accept finite disappointment, but never lose infinite hope."—Martin Luther King, Jr.

"Let your hopes, not your hurts, shape your future."—Robert H. Schuller

"Hope is like peace. It is not a gift from God. It is a gift only we can give one another."—Elie Wiesel

This pioneer journey continues…

Hey, it took me a few hours to write this journal post for you. Can you spend a few seconds and post it on your socials or forward to others? If so, thank you!

Free subscribers get a free copy of my book of short stories, Rambles and Daydreams. Paid subscribers will get all three books in the noir crime trilogy, Vigilante Angels. I no longer do paid-only posts, because it felt gross to leave people behind, especially those who can’t afford it.

If you read my ramblings, I’ll leave it to your conscience. If you get any value from my writing, consider a donation or subscription, which is priced at a few dollars, the minimum allowed. Half of all money goes to The National Alliance to End Homelessness, the other half pays for expenses.

You can also support me by becoming a paid subscriber below, leaving a small one-time tip at the button below, or by buying my novels at wildlakellc.com, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, or other fine book outlets in paperback, eBook, or audio.

When you buy something using the retail links in our stories we may get a teeny tiny commission, but it never affects your price or our judgement in linking to products we use and believe in. It helps pay for the costs in providing this (hopefully) entertaining content.

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit billydecarlo.substack.com/subscribe

Giavana, Pia, and I are on another getaway, down south this time. There is some degree of guilt, being away this close to the election. Fear not, however. The work doesn’t stop. I’m down in the trenches more lately, online, fighting hard in the various social locations to help deprogram cult members. My goal is to at least help them see how wrong everything they’re being told is, to sow doubt in their chosen one, to show his rapid decline and lust to see them ruin their lives in his perceived glory. Maybe I’ll get some to reconsider, and at least stay home.

Project: Pioneer is the live weekly reality journal of a couple and their small dog as they leave their ‘normal’ life in a luxury apartment for a new semi-off grid life in a small recreational vehicle. We cover prepping, politics, spirituality, afterlife, RV life, and personal finance. Half of all subscription/donation money goes to The National Alliance to End Homelessness, the other half pays for expenses. You can listen to the audio podcast version of this journal at Substack, Apple, Spotify, PocketCasts and others.

Giavana has finished her angel work at this location. We’re enjoying the warmth and a chance to relax for a few extra days, over the weekend. We strolled the downtown main drag, lined with bar after bar blaring live music already at 10am, last night’s drunken puke still not dried on the sidewalks and the partiers already hard at it first thing in the morning. In another time, I’d have been right there with them. That past life pulls for a moment as we walk hand-in-hand. The live music was always my enabler.

Giavana knows, she lived it. She chides me, “We can go in and sit to listen to the band, and you can have a drink.” She used to do things like that early in our life together, and I quickly learned (the hard way) it wasn’t a gesture of kindness—it was a test. I failed the first few before catching on.

Back in the day, we’d wake up after a night of drunken debauchery and compare notes. Often, someone would say, “We did a lot of damage last night.” It was meant rhetorically, but was often true. The damage was always to budgets, relationships, health, reputation. When I’m in an party-to-excess environment like this, it’s not a temptation. It’s a sickening reminder of what I was, what that life was like, and a comfort that it is no more.

I’m still living the nightmare of my big mistake earlier this year. It burns at my core every time I’m forced to think about it. I’m still paying the price for that one mistake, that one-in-a-million chance coincidence that led to all this. I f’d around and found out. I left myself open, a rare thing, and I’m paying the price. I used to write about it here, keeping those post paywalled and semi-private, but couldn’t get past the idea I was pimping out my pain.

When I get hurt that bad, I’m done, whether it’s a relationship or friendship or anything. When I’m hurt like that, even when it’s somewhat my fault, I can’t ever go back. So, it’s easy to keep walking, not take the bait, mostly as well because life is good this way, this non-alcohol sober life is better. Instead of a long day of drinking, likely a bad end to an otherwise good day after passing though the euphoric stage, to waking up sick on an otherwise beautiful day, I feel good 24/7 now. I feel more Christlike, and that’s the goal at this (final) stage of the game.

We visited some historic sites yesterday. There were markers to commemorate the early women’s rights/suffrage movement, well over a hundred years ago. As well, the civil rights movement and all those who fought and died for it. And finally, those countless Americans and others around the world who died fighting fascism and authoritarianism, fighting for basic human freedoms. And yet, here we are, again, all those basic principals threatened by one wannabe dictator.

A third to a half of the country is buying it, too. That’s still very hard to wrap your head around, after all we’ve been through in this world. We never seem to learn, or some seem so ignorant they’re just incapable of learning, of remembering. They fall for the con every time, you can tell by the outlandish spending on merch they don’t seem to be able to afford, otherwise. On a positive note, here we are in hard-core Trumpland, a few weeks before the election, and I don’t believe we’ve seen one Trump hat or shirt or anything. Maybe they’re finally sick of the whining, sick of the drama, sick of the non-stop hate, fear-mongering, and vitriol.

President Kennedy was moving to end the Cold War with the USSR and the Vietnam war when he was assassinated in 1963. That may well have had something to do with it. The military-industrial complex doesn’t play well with enemies of war. As a Democrat, he was a friend of the civil rights movement. Had he lived, he likely would have been reelected, and much of the anti-war and race-related turmoil that comprised the 1960s may not have happened. We would have been on the path to a more peaceful country and world. The focus would have been on space and science, rather than hatred and killing one another for profit.

Hubert Humphrey came close to beating Nixon in 1968. He made mistakes, like not going to Michigan, which cost him the election. He had vowed to end the Vietnam war. Instead, Nixon won, the war raged on for another seven years, and another 22,000 brave American troops died for nothing. As well, we received the typical generous helpings of Republican corruption, scandal, and ruinous economies. That included his thoroughly corrupt vice-president Spiro Agnew, who resigned in disgrace.

In 2000, Al Gore did beat George W Bush, however the by-then corrupt Supreme Court had other ideas, stopping the recount and turning the win over to Bush. If Gore had won, 9/11 may not have happened, saving over 3,000 innocent lives on our own soil. The outgoing Clinton administration warned GW about Al Qaeda, which he promptly ignored. GW dismantled the CIA unit focused on Al Qaeda. Since Saddam Hussein hadn’t threatened Gore’s father, and the evil Cheney-Rumsfeld tandem wouldn’t be in positions of power, we’d not have gone to war in Iraq, saving over 5,000 US service members and hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians (not to mention billions of taxpayer dollars).

Gore would have been less likely to believe the false Israeli intelligence fed to us about yellowcake and WMD, as he was by far a more intelligent man than the dim bulb GW was. We probably wouldn’t be enduring the countless deaths and billions spent on climate disasters, as Gore championed and knew full well what the effects of ignoring the damage we were doing to our climate would have. We would not have an even more corrupt Supreme Court—no justices Alito and Roberts.

If Hillary Clinton had listened to Michael Moore and gone to Michigan, she likely would have beat Trump. Our world-wide pandemic response team would have been in place to detect the threat of COVID-19 earlier and mitigate it. Hundreds of thousands of lives on our soil saved, trillions of tax dollars would have been saved. There would be no Trump $7 trillion debt, including $4 trillion for the tax breaks for his rich friends. The Supreme Court is saved by the appointment of 3-4 non-corrupt justices. No ripping children away from their parents, imprisoning them in horrific conditions, and inspiring a new generation for terrorists lusting to make us, you and me and our loved ones, pay for that.

On a happier note, it’s hard to imagine the hellscape we’d be in if Biden hadn’t won in 2020. Thank you, Joe! But we can, and it’s looming in front of us with all the dystopian promises we’re hearing from a sweaty, exhausted, cornered, and desperate Trump.

Of course, that’s all high-level revisionist history. A lot would depend on control of Congress and other factors.

We return to our White House RV pioneer home today, with a very busy schedule. We’re going to check out another remote cabin, and then have to pack up and depart for our winter home. We have to work on this election.

In the meantime, please help fight this any way you can at moveon.org, swingleft.org, or indivisible.org. Let’s not be having to answer to our kids and grandkids when they ask how much of the horror of their lives could have been avoided if we’d done more to elect Kamala Harris in this very moment. Like, today.

“The key to understanding why many Germans supported him lies in the Nazis’ rejection of a rational, factual world.”―Benjamin Carter Hett, The Death of Democracy: Hitler's Rise to Power and the Downfall of the Weimar Republic

“The real question is: who has the responsibility to uphold human rights? The answer to that is: everyone.”―Madeleine K. Albright, Fascism: A Warning

“We can either have democracy in this country or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we cannot have both.”— Justice Louis D. Brandeis

“It is forbidden to kill; therefore all murderers are punished—unless they kill in large numbers and to the sound of trumpets.”—Voltaire

“Fascism should more appropriately be called Corporatism because it is a merger of state and corporate power”—Benito Mussolini

“We want to live by each other's happiness, not by each other's misery. We don't want to hate and despise one another. In this world there is room for everyone, and the good earth is rich and can provide for everyone. The way of life can be free and beautiful, but we have lost the way.”—Charlie Chaplin

This pioneer journey continues…

Hey, it took me a few hours to write this journal post for you. Can you spend a few seconds and post it on your socials or forward to others? If so, thank you!

Free subscribers get a free copy of my book of short stories, Rambles and Daydreams. Paid subscribers will get all three books in the noir crime trilogy, Vigilante Angels. I no longer do paid-only posts, because it felt gross to leave people behind, especially those who can’t afford it.

If you read my ramblings, I’ll leave it to your conscience. If you get any value from my writing, consider a donation or subscription, which is priced at a few dollars, the minimum allowed. Half of all money goes to The National Alliance to End Homelessness, the other half pays for expenses.

You can also support me by becoming a paid subscriber below, leaving a small one-time tip at the button below, or by buying my novels at wildlakellc.com, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, or other fine book outlets in paperback, eBook, or audio.

When you buy something using the retail links in our stories we may get a teeny tiny commission, but it never affects your price or our judgement in linking to products we use and believe in. It helps pay for the costs in providing this (hopefully) entertaining content.

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit billydecarlo.substack.com/subscribe

It’s the last hurrah here in summer/fall pioneer-land. Most of the other settlers are winterizing their covered wagons and wrapping them for the winter. They’re mostly weekenders, so they have a cozy home to go back to and hibernate. Some will snowbird, heading to warmer climates for the cold season. Lucky! I’m guessing that’s not Florida—not the Sarasota area anyway. The very few full-time stationary folks like us are waiting for the others to wrap up their business so we can prepare to relocate next weekend.

Project: Pioneer is the live weekly reality journal of a couple and their small dog as they leave their ‘normal’ life in a luxury apartment for a new semi-off grid life in a small recreational vehicle. We cover prepping, politics, spirituality, afterlife, RV life, and personal finance. Half of all subscription/donation money goes to The National Alliance to End Homelessness, the other half pays for expenses. You can listen to the audio podcast version of this journal at Substack, Apple, Spotify, PocketCasts and others.

Out in the woods around us, there were lots of tall fires crackling last night, burning off the last of the wood in the piles. Voices rise along with the blood-alcohol level through the trees, folks relaxing after a long day of battening down the hatches. The world turns, the seasons come and go, the wheel of time carries us forward until it’s time for us to get off.

I was at a high-school football game in the unusual cold Friday night. The Northern Lights were quite evident and beautiful, and everyone marveled, phones up like a Taylor Swift concert. I heard no one express concern, and wondered if anyone else had the same ominous feeling I did. The Northern Lights shouldn’t be visible here, certainly not so often, certainly not a regular visitor. It’s not a good thing, it’s a harbinger of chaos and likely death. I’ve written about that. Those lights are pretty, and ominous. I had a lot of wifi, cellular, and GPS trouble on the trip. It’s affecting us. A Bluetooth water dispenser turned on by itself a few times, spewing water onto the floor. It’s happening.

Perhaps another reason for this ominous feeling lately is that the election looms so close. There’s plenty of reason to be optimistic—the polls (if you can believe them) are close but in the right direction. Giavana and I have been working hard for Harris and the down-ballot Democratic ticket. Harris-Walz yard signs are popping up like mushrooms.

Yet, Trump looms, as a purely evil man who will stop at nothing to have his way, to have this country, to stay out of prison. He seems to have given up on trying to win the actual election, and pivoted to grifting as much money as he can milk from it and taking every measure to prepare his cult for violence in his name (his favorite thing, after money and flattery). There are no other real explanations for his planned events at Coachella in California and Madison Square Garden in NYC. He’s more aggressively and openly spewing his hate speech. Those aren’t exactly contested swing states. Or, perhaps he knows the fix is in and he’ll win through the many un-democratic moves being made by his minions in the state election boards.

He’s selling photo ops for $25,000 and “VIP Experience” seating for $5,000 each. If violence breaks out by bringing his herd of sheep into very liberal territory, he’ll have a huge opportunity to capitalize on that as a rally for yet more violence, perhaps the civil war he’ll need to take power after he loses the election. He’s got the lunatic richest man on the planet on his side now, also displaying erratic and questionably sane behavior (when he’s not showing off fake robots and robo-taxis). He’s asking why nobody has tried to kill Harris—something that would land any of us regular folks in jail or at least a visit from the Secret Service. F. Scott Fitzgerald was right. The rich aren’t like you and me.

DeSantis in Florida and Trump are calling for networks to lose their broadcast licenses for airing ads and content in opposition to their views. It’s the most fundamental anti-American First Amendment thing possible, but it’s also clear they no longer support or believe in the US Constitution. They want something else. Trump is now calling not just for illegal immigrants to be removed, but anyone who doesn’t have the “look” he considers to be the master race, quintessential American, i.e White European.

The situation in the Middle East also feels ominous. Netanyahu seems to be dragging us toward war, like Israel did with their false intelligence to get us to invade Iraq, kill so many innocent civilians, and over 5,000 of our own brave warriors. Like Trump, he lusts to keep himself in power and out of prison, no matter how many innocent people must die. Ukraine as well, with top Republicans like Speaker Johnson openly saying they “no longer have an appetite to help Ukraine.” They’re welcoming Russia to do what Hitler did, and without our opposition, this time it will work. We will have our world carved into just a few dictatorships, and it will happen fast if Trump wins. Or, we’ll have a devastating war where many of us will die.

Lastly, the massive destruction of the hurricanes in “safe” idyllic mountaintop places like Asheville, NC. These ever more powerful weather events are ominous. They're coming to you, it's a matter of time. It won't be on TV breaking news, it will be in your home. Prepare. Read my prior posts to learn how.

Back to us here in pioneer land, our solar gear is in and ready to be picked up on Monday, which we look forward to. It’s a big exposure finally closed. We’ve got capacity to store a ton of energy, and pull more when needed through several 200 watt panels. It’s a tidy solution to the problem, leaving the only long-term off-grid survival item left as some kind of water collection and purification system. That might depend where we land after everything plays out between now and late January. After we move to our winter location next week, we’ll be inventorying and organizing all of our prepper gear.

That aside, we can’t wait until it’s over. We dream of no more political commercials, and a life without all this stress, without the stain of Trump, finally. We’ll still have the problem of a large percentage of our population among us who worship a despicable person like that. Hopefully, Giavana, Pia and I are busy finding an isolated place to build our cabin to live out our days in peace and beauty. I’d like to have more time to read the many books and emails around my hobbies and interests that are piled up high. I’d like to have time to just…do nothing some days. I’d like to have a place where Giavana and I can dress up on occasion and go out for a great dinner and fun night out. It all feels like a dream, one we dare not put too much stock in—yet. Maybe it will happen, maybe we’ll have earned it after these recent very hard years in this world.

That’s the ticket, I’ve just convinced myself. Less ominous, more optimism! Soon, we’ll know. In the meantime, please help fight this any way you can at moveon.org, swingleft.org, or indivisible.org.

"I am confident that, in the end, common sense and justice will prevail. I'm an optimist, brought up on the belief that if you wait to the end of the story, you get to see the good people live happily ever after."—Cat Stevens

“How wonderful it is that nobody need wait a single moment before starting to improve the world.”―Anne Frank

“Optimism doesn’t mean that you are blind to the reality of the situation. It means that you remain motivated to seek a solution to whatever problems arise.”—The Dalai Lama

This pioneer journey continues…

Hey, it took me a few hours to write this journal post for you. Can you spend a few seconds and post it on your socials or forward to others? If so, thank you!

Free subscribers get a free copy of my book of short stories, Rambles and Daydreams. Paid subscribers will get all three books in the noir crime trilogy, Vigilante Angels. I no longer do paid-only posts, because it felt gross to leave people behind, especially those who can’t afford it.

If you read my ramblings, I’ll leave it to your conscience. If you get any value from my writing, consider a donation or subscription, which is priced at a few dollars, the minimum allowed. Half of all money goes to The National Alliance to End Homelessness, the other half pays for expenses.

You can also support me by becoming a paid subscriber below, leaving a small one-time tip at the button below, or by buying my novels at wildlakellc.com, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, or other fine book outlets in paperback, eBook, or audio.

When you buy something using the retail links in our stories we may get a teeny tiny commission, but it never affects your price or our judgement in linking to products we use and believe in. It helps pay for the costs in providing this (hopefully) entertaining content.

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit billydecarlo.substack.com/subscribe

Our recent posts have been topical, so let’s use this one to catch you all up on what’s going on with our journey and here in pioneer-land for Giavana, Pia, and me. Follow ups on prepping, racism, politics, and personal finance.

Project: Pioneer is the live weekly reality journal of a couple and their small dog as they leave their ‘normal’ life in a luxury apartment for a new semi-off grid life in a small recreational vehicle. We cover prepping, politics, spirituality, afterlife, RV life, and personal finance. Half of all subscription/donation money goes to The National Alliance to End Homelessness, the other half pays for expenses. You can listen to the audio podcast version of this journal at Substack, Apple, Spotify, PocketCasts and others.

First up, for you personal finance preppers, Plan Your Money Path, the long awaited book by my fellow Wild Lake author is now available in eBook, paperback, and hardcover (audiobook coming soon). It’s at wildlakellc.com and all the major online stores. Give your loved ones the gift of financial freedom this holiday season!

As I write this pioneer journal post from the White House RV on Saturday, our neighbors are busy around us bustling about to break camp for the season, winterizing their rigs. The air is full of smoke as they use up the last of their firewood. A few idiots are burning their trash, the plasticine smell a dead giveaway. We’re surrounded by windows and the beauty of the changing leaves, some already taking flight from the trees in the shifting breeze. Our mountain backdrop is slowly phasing from shades of green to red gold hues. It’s a very nice Saturday afternoon, and we won free tickets to a show tonight in a small coffee-house listening room near us. I’m really looking forward to it. They have a fall event going on down by the camp office, with lots of vendor tables and basket raffles. A bunch of kids just came around trick-or-treating. I wasn’t prepared for that, we never get them, so I had to bust out a stash of full-size Hershey bars. Those little eyes were quite wide at the bounty! What a wonderful day, what a wonderful world, if we can pull together to keep it.

I was thinking more about my late friend Damon, who I wrote about in the last post. He’s an example of my concept of this existence as an incubator or proving ground. If you run with that, and start paying attention to the people around you, you can see that some are more developed in that way. They seem to operate at a higher level of consciousness, or awareness, of life. We might call it intelligence, but I feel like it’s something quite more. Damon was like that—very philosophical on another plane of reality. They exude empathy and all the traits we should aspire to—what all the religious texts say to aspire to. I think those are the well-formed, shaped souls that are likely now ready to pass on to a more perfect existence after this primordial, violent stew we’re in here. Maybe if there’s a sudden end to this experiment, those of us who are at least trying hard will get a pass.

On the prepping front, we’ve seen plenty of evidence of the things I (and many others) have been warning about. You don’t have to be in Florida or Louisiana to be wiped out or killed by a hurricane. It just happened to plenty of inland folks in inland Georgia, Tennessee, and western (inland!) North Carolina. Northeasters already know they aren’t safe, after the devastation of Sandy. Tornadoes are appearing out of nowhere, wiping out homes and entire towns. There’s another month of hurricane season. Two more are already queued up. Winter is coming. Recently I talked about the potential devastating power of the increasingly large solar flares, coronal mass ejections (CME), and resulting electromagnetic pulses (EMPs) here on Earth. This week there was a massive 9x solar flare combination, but nobody paid attention other than, “Ooooh, Helen! We might see the Northern Lights!”

As so many people just learned, when disaster happens, help doesn’t arrive for a while. You should be able to live off-grid for at least 72 hours, completely self-sufficient in terms of food, water, energy for heat/air, shelter, medical, security, and more. Are you? Envision none of that, no internet, GPS signals, unable to travel the roads, no communications, no medical help, for three days straight. Can you make it? If you’re not ready, see my other posts on prepping.

Our big exposure gap, as I’ve discussed, has been solar. I’ve been getting lost in the expense, nuances, and many doohickeys needed to do a proper RV solar install. I was worried about what happens if we have to bail suddenly, low-profile, and can’t take the RV with us. What if we sell the RV? Will we have to buy a whole new setup if we build our cabin? Then I saw this Jackery system on sale for Amazon Prime Days and grabbed it, along with their solar panel. I love how it’s expandable, and we’ll be adding on more batteries and panels as we go. It can power our future cabin. This will do for now. It’s inexpensive and well made. A renewable source of energy! Yay! That’s one major stressor off our plate. I’ll still be a little stressed until it arrives and is in place.

Speaking of stress, Giavana and I have taken to taking mini-vacations as a remedy. We took our field trip to look at cabins and bigger RVs. We recently did a weekend trip to a beautiful resort on a big lake. It was wonderful—the pool and outdoor spa were open, it was nice and warm, great restaurant for a nice dinner. Best of all, Giavana got to do the one thing she enjoys but can’t in this pioneer RV life—take a nice long hot bath. That’s the thing about living this inexpensive life ($700/month for our site, utilities included). We can afford to do that whenever we want. We have another queued up for later this month, and we’re still planning on spending November election week outside the country.

We’re moving to our winter site toward the end of this month as well. That will involve breaking camp, re-organizing everything, and setting up in winter mode at our new location. Ugh. We’re already thinking of warm weather winter escapes, if we still live here, if democracy survives Nov 5, Jan 5, Jan 20. In the meantime, we’re working hard on that project as well. This morning we had our own little letter writing party to registered Democrats and Independents who might need a nudge. We’re phone banking and running our own local group of very involved patriots. One month to go, and the lies are mounting from the right and on the propaganda network they use to reach most of the country. The one that had to pay almost a billion dollars last time for their lies about voting machines. The dog whistles for violence continue, and now the richest man on the planet is embracing a violent, dangerous new movement called Dark MAGA. People like him envision a world under their control—just a few kings and rulers to divide up the planet and subject us all to their will. That’s the plan. Trump is simply their useful idiot, because he has a cult.

If you have these discussions with any of the folks on the other side, don’t waste your breath arguing policy points. I’ve gotten tired of that, it doesn’t work. I go with these short points:

“We can argue policy until the cows come home. But you can’t escape that Trump has been a lifelong con artist. He’s left a long trail back to the 1970s in documented court cases, of screwing over families just like yours.”

Or, “I’m a veteran. My son and son-in-law are disabled Marine combat veterans. I will never vote for someone who has openly disrespected the biggest heroes among us, our war dead and injured. Trump has always and continues to do it, which proves who he is. Sorry, you can’t tell me you support someone like that and say you’re a patriot in the same breath.” I make that clear to my fellow veterans.

Or, to any non-Caucasians, “Trump has a long history of discriminating and hating on people just like you. He hates people who look you, your kids, your grandkids. You are not in the club. You are being used.”

I’m hoping you’re engaged down the stretch. Give a few bucks if you can at https://secure.actblue.com. Get involved with some great local peers at swingleft.org or indivisible.org. Send out pre-printed letters from home, with a personal note, at votefwd.org. There’s still time to make a difference. Ask all your democracy-loving friends, neighbors, coworkers, relatives to check at vote.gov to ensure they’re registered, and remind them if they have a problem at the polling place, they can request a provisional ballot.

We, the People, recognize that we have responsibilities as well as rights; that our destinies are bound together; that a freedom which only asks what's in it for me, a freedom without a commitment to others, a freedom without love or charity or duty or patriotism, is unworthy of our founding ideals, and those who died in their defense. —Barack Obama

Patriotism is when love of your own people comes first; nationalism, when hate for people other than your own comes first. —Charles de Gaulle

This pioneer journey continues…

Hey, it took me a few hours to write this journal post for you. Can you spend a few seconds and post it on your socials or forward to others? If so, thank you!

Free subscribers get a free copy of my book of short stories, Rambles and Daydreams. Paid subscribers will get all three books in the noir crime trilogy, Vigilante Angels. I no longer do paid-only posts, because it felt gross to leave people behind, especially those who can’t afford it.

If you read my ramblings, I’ll leave it to your conscience. If you get any value from my writing, consider a donation or subscription, which is priced at a few dollars, the minimum allowed. Half of all money goes to The National Alliance to End Homelessness, the other half pays for expenses.

You can also support me by becoming a paid subscriber below, leaving a small one-time tip at the button below, or by buying my novels at wildlakellc.com, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, or other fine book outlets in paperback, eBook, or audio.

When you buy something using the retail links in our stories we may get a teeny tiny commission, but it never affects your price or our judgement in linking to products we use and believe in. It helps pay for the costs in providing this (hopefully) entertaining content.

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit billydecarlo.substack.com/subscribe

There’s been a lot made lately of Kamala Harris’ racial identity. This whole horrible chapter in our American history is driven by racism. Actually, throughout history around the world, it’s almost always been about racism. Black Like Me was one of the most impactful books I read back in high school. It’s the story of a white journalist, John Howard Griffin, who used dermatologist treatments and other tactics to change his appearance from Caucasian to Black back in the 1950s segregated South. He wanted to see what it was like to be Black. I did something like that as well, unintentionally, and here’s what I learned.

Project: Pioneer is the live weekly reality journal of a couple and their small dog as they leave their ‘normal’ life in a luxury apartment for a new semi-off grid life in a small recreational vehicle. We cover prepping, politics, spirituality, afterlife, RV life, and personal finance. Half of all subscription/donation money goes to The National Alliance to End Homelessness, the other half pays for expenses. You can listen to the audio podcast version of this journal at Substack, Apple, Spotify, PocketCasts and others.

Back in the early 1980s, I traveled the South with a Black dude I’ll call Damon (which I also did in Farawayer). He was one of a kind—a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma. We were both fresh out of ungraceful exits from our military service, lost and broke young men trying to find our way through life. Damon was part Marvin Gaye, part Malcolm X, part Muhammad Ali—a poet, a politician, a philosopher, an artist, a lover, a radical, a fighter. Highly intelligent, yet not highly educated. He could never understand why he was treated differently than White folks.

When we hitchhiked, traveled, and lived in the South, whenever I was with him, I was as good as Black to everyone else. My long hair didn’t favor me with that same ignorant redneck demographic, on top of being in the company of someone who looked like Damon.

A pickup came toward us and slowed down as the driver and passenger windows rolled down. A huge confederate flag adorned the hood. Two fat, short-bearded rednecks leered out the windows at us, wearing T-shirts with the sleeves cut off. “Nigger, nigger, nigger!” they shouted. “A nigger and a nigger-lover!”—Farawayer

Those days were an unintentional perfect case study in racism. We were the same age, same height/weight, same background as high school grads and veterans, both pretty well spoken. However, time after time we applied for the exact same jobs—low level stuff like maintenance man, store clerk, warehouseman, and I’d get the job and he wouldn’t—except when we applied together. In those cases, neither of us did. To them, I was as Black as he was. I was proud of it, but in my case it wasn’t a permanent condition. I was lucky.

I snapped in my exhaustion and state of despair, and dropped my pack, running after the truck. “Let’s go then, you fat f***s. Man up!” I shouted. The truck slid to a stop and the lone working white backup light blinked on, like an ogre suddenly waking. Damon ran up beside me and threw his bag to the curb.—Farawayer

Time and again we’d enter stores to grab some groceries. I’d hide my hair up under my Stetson, but Damon couldn’t hide his Blackness. We’d go our separate ways once inside, to get the things we needed, and I’d always watch as the inevitable would happen—the store clerk or security person would begin to follow him around the store. Sometimes, they’d make an accusation. A cop car couldn’t pass us walking on the roads without stopping to “investigate.” We had no car, most of the time, at least not one that worked. It broke his good heart, and he’d be down the rest of the day over it.

“Damn, Levi. Get ready for Ali mode. Better hope these white boys fight like Jerry Quarry. You still undefeated?” Damon asked.“I’ll let you know in a few minutes, brother.” We had both been on the base boxing team a few years back. “You know the drill,” I said. “Same as always. They’re out of shape. Make them move and wear them down.”—Farawayer

I was born in Newark, NJ and started school there. I learned at that young age, with lots of Black kids in my kindergarten class, that color doesn’t matter. Good and bad come in every color, shape, and religion. We moved to a suburban White neighborhood, and I missed the diversity. Everyone was the same color.

“Rope-a-dope again,” Damon said as the two fat men flung the truck doors open and waddled toward us. Damon took his stance and called out to them as they approached with their fists up. “Just like Muhammad Ali, I'm gonna sting you like a bee, son.”—Farawayer

In my youth, I often heard the adults talking about “the Blacks,” and how they just wanted handouts, welfare, didn’t want to work. How casually they threw around the n-word! Sometimes, it would be in the presence of Hispanics, who would then get crapped on too, as soon as they were out of earshot.

In my travels with Damon later in life, I saw the truth. You have to work twice, three times as hard to get work. Then you have to work even harder so you don’t get fired. Folks who are born on second base as a white person, especially a male (perhaps third base in that case) don’t realize it, especially since they have their own (comparatively mild) struggles. They’ve never spent time as a Black person like John Howard Griffin and I did. They’ve never lived around Black or Brown people. Or any other Other, hence the fear, hence the hatred of anyone different from them. There’s a section in my book about when I had nowhere to go, nowhere to live, and a gay friend of a friend took me in, so I got to experience that side of hate as well. Same drill. I called him Barry in the book, and he died a horrific death from AIDS while still a young man. He didn’t deserve it.

We fear what is different, and the unknown. Our mind isn’t familiar enough to have protections. We yearn to be surrounded with familiarity, for comfort, hence the utopian straight White suburbia Trumpland covets. Everyone else back into the shadows. The only Black people many of them they see are things like the BLM protests, and it scares them to death, although ironically Jan 6, far worse, does not. It’s a wonder Black people don’t assume every White person they encounter is a school shooter or serial killer, because they’re always White. Perhaps they do. They’re human. It’s a human condition, but we’re (allegedly) smarter than that, when we’re using our brains to overcome emotion.

On a Sunday, when we were out walking, we saw people streaming into a Black neighborhood Baptist church. “Let’s go,” I said on a whim. We entered and found a place toward the front, as most of the pews were full. We were directly in front of the full band, with electric guitars and a big worn-out drum set. The musicians counted in and began playing fast and beautiful religious songs as sweat rolled down their faces.

The crowd jumped to their feet and danced and hugged one another, arms raised above their heads, growing into a fervor. It was nothing like I’d seen at the Village of Prayer. It wasn’t fake or devotional to one living man. Instead, it was a joyous celebration of life, and of Jesus. The preacher danced to the center of the altar and motioned the band to slow, then began a passionate sermon about loving one another, helping one another. He mentioned John 4:20.

“Whoever claims to love God yet hates a brother or sister is a liar. For whoever does not love their brother and sister, whom they have seen, cannot love God, whom they have not seen.”

There was no begging for money, or Old Testament threats and admonishment. No forced discomfort and servitude by ordering the flock to kneel, stand, sit, kneel again. It was pure and real devotion. It was pure love of God and neighbor. During the praying times of the service, I bowed my head and asked for answers, asked for guidance. The second sermon focused on family, and the proverbs he quoted seemed to answer my questions.—Farawayer

The above passage from Farawayer speaks to something that has always amazed me. These people, who have been lynched, raped, beaten, enslaved, mistreated, hated on through generations and still, still persist in their faith and joy of life. In my times with Damon’s family and other families, I’ve only seen joy, hope, and faith. My skin color represented the bane of their existence, yet they lovingly accepted me. It’s just incredible to behold, and inspirational. And on the flip side, why is it the hateful always seem so unhappy?

Damon passed away recently. I went to see him toward the end. Same Damon, flirting with the nurses, holding court with the little strength he had left. His body was a shell of the man I knew, but his mind was all there. He rhapsodized about blues music, Gil-Scott Heron lyrics, injustice, regaled me with tales of our adventures together—all properly exaggerated per his style. We talked about those days, and these days. “You remember, Billy. Back then I told you, this s**t ain’t never gon’ change.” He was right, unfortunately. He wanted coffee from the hospital cafeteria but I secretly went to Starbucks instead, to his great pleasure. I lingered until I couldn’t stay any longer, and we wiped away tears as we said goodbye. We both knew it was the last time, at least in this life. I miss him every single day. He was legendary.

When I fight for Kamala, I’m fighting for Damon, and I’m fighting for his daughter and his family, all good people I came to know due to the fortune of being his friend. I’m fighting for Barry and the LGBTQ+ community. I’m fighting against Trump and every hateful, horrible, ignorant racist MAGA out there. As I move into this 4th quarter my time here on Earth, one of the things I look forward to most in the afterlife is a reunion with my old friend, and to hear his laugh again. We have a lot of catching up to do, and I can’t wait.

On a lighter closing note, this is one of my favorite Saturday Night Live skits from back in the day. Eddie Murphy in White Like Me. Damon and I watched it many times together.

I have a dream that one day down in Alabama … little black boys and black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls as sisters and brothers. ... With this faith, we will be able to hew out of the mountain of despair a stone of hope. With this faith, we will be able to transform the jangling discords of our Nation into a beautiful symphony of brotherhood. With this faith, we will be able to work together; to pray together; to struggle together; to go to jail together; to stand up for freedom together, knowing that we will be free one day.—Martin Luther King Jr., Baptist minister, civil rights leader, 1963

This pioneer journey continues…

Hey, it took me a few hours to write this journal post for you. Can you spend a few seconds and post it on your socials or forward to others? If so, thank you!

Free subscribers get a free copy of my book of short stories, Rambles and Daydreams. Paid subscribers will get all three books in the noir crime trilogy, Vigilante Angels. I no longer do paid-only posts, because it felt gross to leave people behind, especially those who can’t afford it.

If you read my ramblings, I’ll leave it to your conscience. If you get any value from my writing, consider a donation or subscription, which is priced at a few dollars, the minimum allowed. Half of all money goes to The National Alliance to End Homelessness, the other half pays for expenses.

You can also support me by becoming a paid subscriber below, leaving a small one-time tip at the button below, or by buying my novels at wildlakellc.com, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, or other fine book outlets in paperback, eBook, or audio.

When you buy something using the retail links in our stories we may get a teeny tiny commission, but it never affects your price or our judgement in linking to products we use and believe in. It helps pay for the costs in providing this (hopefully) entertaining content.

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit billydecarlo.substack.com/subscribe

Giavana, Pia and I went on a nice field trip to investigate some of our choices in the big decisions we have ahead in this pioneer life. This time in history, for the country, the world, and for us, is both exciting and scary. We like to plan, to prepare (as preppers), and have options. Of course, if the God of Chaos asteroid hits us in five years (on Friday the 13th, 2029!), there won’t be many options. You never know, right? Prepare.

Project: Pioneer is the live weekly reality journal of a couple and their small dog as they leave their ‘normal’ life in a luxury apartment for a new semi-off grid life in a small recreational vehicle. We cover prepping, politics, spirituality, afterlife, RV life, and personal finance. Half of all subscription/donation money goes to The National Alliance to End Homelessness, the other half pays for expenses. You can listen to the audio podcast version of this journal at Substack, Apple, Spotify, PocketCasts and others.

We took a road trip to look at some RVs and visit some cabin builders. Here are our choices, as they currently stand. Of course, how the election and fate of democracy turn out will factor in heavily, as far as location and timing.

If we decide to continue as full-time semi-stationary RVers for the long haul, we’d likely upgrade our rig again. We looked at models that are the next step up from our current White House, and it’s a huge difference. The two we’d decide between both have cozy fireplaces and dedicated workspaces. We spend most of our time in our workspaces, and they’re not all that comfortable or spacious. We’d have to upgrade Henrik, our pickup truck, as it’s currently right on the edge of towing capacity for White House.

If we decide to become mobile full-time RVers, for example snowbirding each winter or exploring the beauty of this country while it lasts, we may decide to switch from travel trailer to motorized (Class A) luxury. We could sell the gas guzzling Henrik (oh, poor Henrik!) and tow Giavana’s pocket rocket behind us. We still have some nearby family obligations that keep us from doing this, so it’s unlikely at this time, at least the traveling the country part.

If we decide to put down roots and build that dream cabin, we’d have to get started on the long path to finding a site and working out the details for utilities, construction, etc. The builders are currently scheduling out into late spring of next year. We’d want something robust, as climate-proof as possible, prepped out to be off-grid sufficient for a long duration, and highly secure. It would be exciting to design.

Nothing will happen in the short term. We’re moving away to our winter site next month, to button up for the winter and work on these plans. Right now, the focus is the election. So much is at stake—really everything. Our freedom, the climate, world security, the economy, our happiness. We have our plans to vote early and spend the election week out of the country, as we’re overdue for a trip. I’m starting to feel maybe I should be helping people who can’t drive get to the polls on election day though, to make every difference right up until the end.

The momentum in the election is exciting, and as promised, the violence is ratcheting up. Two attempts at Trump’s life so far, and they’re b******g because nobody is shooting at Kamala. Let’s not forget there were forty-two assassination attempts on Hitler. I wonder why that was. We don’t need violence, we don’t need him as a further martyr. We need to get past this ugly point in our history, and move forward, as Harris promises.

Please engage and help down the stretch. You can do a lot from home, and not have to expose your identity or use your phone. Head to swingleft.org, indivisible.org, or votefwd.org to make a difference and help in the swing states, even if you don’t live in one. Or, this video below may be the reality we and our families will have to live in. We need your help, the world needs your help. We’re faced with such blatant and unfathomable evil, it’s incredulous this election is even close. And, scary. Please take five minutes of your time for the below video.

When fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross. —James Waterman Wise

Hitler lied shamelessly about himself and about his enemies. He convinced millions of men and women that he cared for them deeply when, in fact, he would have willingly sacrificed them all. His murderous ambition, avowed racism, and utter immorality were given the thinnest mask, and yet millions of Germans were drawn to Hitler precisely because he seemed authentic. They screamed, “Sieg Heil” with happiness in their hearts, because they thought they were creating a better world. —Madeleine K. Albright, Fascism: A Warning

Fascists use patriotism and religion to manipulate dumb people. Fascist propaganda works best on the dumbest of the dumb. They don’t know when they’re being lied to. — Oliver Markus Malloy, American Fascism: A German Writer’s Urgent Warning To America

This pioneer journey continues…

Hey, it took me a few hours to write this journal post for you. Can you spend a few seconds and post it on your socials or forward to others? If so, thank you!

Free subscribers get a free copy of my book of short stories, Rambles and Daydreams. Paid subscribers will get all three books in the noir crime trilogy, Vigilante Angels. I no longer do paid-only posts, because it felt gross to leave people behind, especially those who can’t afford it.

If you read my ramblings, I’ll leave it to your conscience. If you get any value from my writing, consider a donation or subscription, which is priced at a few dollars, the minimum allowed. Half of all money goes to The National Alliance to End Homelessness, the other half pays for expenses.

You can also support me by becoming a paid subscriber below, leaving a small one-time tip at the button below, or by buying my novels at wildlakellc.com, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, or other fine book outlets in paperback, eBook, or audio.

When you buy something using the retail links in our stories we may get a teeny tiny commission, but it never affects your price or our judgement in linking to products we use and believe in. It helps pay for the costs in providing this (hopefully) entertaining content.

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit billydecarlo.substack.com/subscribe

It’s Monday, and I bet you wish it was still the weekend. Nobody says with their last breath, “I should have worked more.” We work longer and harder than we need to. There are plenty of reasons for that, and I talk about them often, usually in passing. Many of you don’t even need to go to that job you dislike, trust me. Let’s focus on your money in this post, so you can have an easier, less stressful life. I’ll show you how, without much expense or effort.

Project: Pioneer is the live weekly reality journal of a couple and their small dog as they leave their ‘normal’ life in a luxury apartment for a new semi-off grid life in a small recreational vehicle. We cover prepping, politics, spirituality, afterlife, RV life, and personal finance. Half of all subscription/donation money goes to The National Alliance to End Homelessness, the other half pays for expenses. You can listen to the audio podcast version of this journal at Substack, Apple, Spotify, PocketCasts and others.

It was my daughter on the phone. She sounded tentative. “We’d like to come out with the kids this weekend, if that’s OK.” She quickly added, “But I don’t want to cause you to get all crazy and stressed.”

Wut?? It really hurt to hear that. My daughter is blunt, thank God. Words like that, spoken with love and the best of intent, can be impactful and a wake-up call. I’ve always been Type-A with a bold, italic, capitalized A. Military boot camp was the exact wrong thing for that condition, it further burned that acute sense of impatience and detail into my psyche. It’s made me a bag of stress for most of my life, to the detriment of others. Giavana knows. My kids know. Mama knows. Finally, I know.

I was that guy—each vacation had a carefully researched and curated itinerary for my squadron of young cadets to march along to. “Hurry, we can get to the Funny Falls ride in approximately five minutes, just prior to what the guidebook says is peak lowest wait time, let’s hustle!” Thankfully, they made it through all that, no doubt with emotional scars. They’re patient with their kids. I taught them the wrong way first hand, after all. Yeah, that’s it. That was my plan, alrighty. In my defense, I wanted them to experience everything I never got to, but I was too young and immature to realize it wasn’t fun that way.

The drugs and alcohol were likely a subconscious way to reign it in, or at least deal with myself. What I went through in the post-military years, the basis for Farawayer, those traumatic events, made things worse. No wonder I was a wreck as a parent. Quitting it all, trying to be in a mindful, Buddhist, Christlike frame each day has helped, but there’s still work to do. We are all products of our DNA and life experiences.

I’ve been stressed lately because I put myself behind the eight-ball on some projects, and if you read this journal, you know I have a bunch of them. Some are survival related, so that’s kind of important. Saturday was a day of unexpected pop-up obstacles, so I didn’t get much done. Sunday morning Giavana and I went to our usual awesome breakfast spot. I was trying to hustle on the way home, annoyed at a mo-mo driving slowly in front of me. “Let’s gooooo!” I hissed in my mind, death grip on the steering wheel. I had work to do.

We went through my favorite part of that drive—a stretch of country road where the pretty old trees have grown on both sides and stretched together overhead to form a sort of natural canopy tunnel. I always slow down there, and this time, extra. Took a beat. Reset. Deep breath. Mindful. Blessings counted. I noticed Giavana had been silent. We’re symbiotic at this point, living in this tight pioneer covered wagon side by side. I knew she sensed my earlier stress.

We exited the tunnel and I threw my hands up and said, “Geez, the day is half shot and I haven’t gotten a thing done!” in an exaggerated and comical tone. I knew it was what she was waiting for me to say, and we had a good laugh together. Stress—gone. Dude, it’s a Sunday. Chill. We arrived back at the White House RV and decided to take a nice walk through the woods. Anything else could wait, this is too important. Giavana suggested it—she knows.

Too many of us spend our lives this way. It’s how the system programs us, to get the most from us. Work harder, or you’ll be next on the layoff list. Oh, you didn’t get laid off? Work harder to take up the slack for those who are gone, or you’re next. Hunger games, work harder than your teammate so you’re next on the list to move up, and not get laid off. Hopefully, it’s them. Isn’t that sick? Yes, it makes us sick. Very sick. Our lifespans are shorter than the rest of the developed world.

I don’t do it out of financial need, I do it out of DNA and habit. That’s a whole other problem. But yeah, families out there are trying to pay the bills, put food on the table. We’re bombarded with stuff designed to make us want more, borrow more, keep up with the Jones’, and that makes it all worse. The sad thing is, none of this is necessary. I don’t care how bad you think things are, there are pretty simple ways to fix it, and get on the path to financial happiness.

Most people are in better shape than they think—they just need to get organized and have a plan. And yeah, most of the “remedies” you hear about on ads are scams. There’s no miracle way to magically make IRS or credit card debt disappear, or jack your credit score up overnight, or get that timeshare contract disappeared. There are real ways to accomplish all that. I know because I’ve seen countless people do it in real life. It’s a form of prepping, as well. Financial freedom gives you real freedom.

The reason most of us don’t make progress in cleaning up our finances is that they’re mired in the muck of everything else we have going on. We’re forced to work longer, harder. We’re bombarded with distractions cleverly designed to take our attention. In the little available free time we have, the last thing we want to do is work the unpleasant task of trying to make sense of numbers and our finances. We defer. The system gives us little time, hence it never gets done, hence we continue borrowing and spending, which the system likes very much. It’s a vortex, but you can escape it. If you do it right, it doesn’t take a lot of time.

Maybe you don’t like to read, or feel like you don’t have time to read (see: above). You can listen, right? Do you drive, or go for walks, walk your pet, eat lunch, do household cleaning or other mindless stuff on autopilot when you could be listen-learning? How about as you’re drifting off to sleep (use the sleep timer so it doesn’t go on to long without you…). Find time. Fight back. Free yourself and your family.

* I think the best book (audio, eBook, paperback) on this subject is Kiss Your Money Hello! (and Financial Stress Goodbye). It’s concise, funny, and covers all the bases, from paying down debt to investing wisely. Next best is I Will Teach You to Be Rich (but skip the credit card advice!).

* Have a plan. I don’t see how folks can go through life without a good money roadmap. The problem is they’re used as bait by sketchy investment advisors and insurance people to get you to buy their very expensive services and products. Finally, there are just a few true high-fidelity consumer facing tools you can trust, rather than the dumbed-down stuff you find all over the internet. I highly recommend pralanaretirementcalculator.com. There’s an upcoming guidebook on using it called Plan Your Money Path, in both Kickstarter (with lots of free helpful giveaways) and preorder at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, etc. Pralana will be coming out soon in a new online version. Stay tuned at that website.

* Get a good, low-touch app that will monitor your cash flow while you sleep, without much effort, and let you know where your money is going. That’s a first step to stopping waste and reigning it in. We use and love Simplifi, but there are others that are popular, like Monarch Money. YNAB is good, but a bit more complicated. Use the basic features for a tool like Simplifi, don’t go down in the rabbit hole until you’re familiar. Connect your spending accounts (checking and hopefully just one credit card!) and let it do its thing. It will auto-categorize most of your expenses. You can spend a minute touching up anything else, like Costco runs, that might have multiple spending categories, but you don’t even have to in order to just get a high level, “Are we spending more than we’re making?” answer. Credit cards obfuscate that, out of design. Debt is slavery.

Anyway, after the call with my daughter, I was so excited about them coming the next day I immediately started to make a list of stuff I had to get done to prepare. I kept it my secret, and made sure to go about my tasks at a gentle pace. Whatever doesn’t get done, doesn’t get done. Tomorrow’s another day, if we’re lucky. As for the visit, I covered that in my last post, and it was a dream.

I’ll be OK. We’ll be OK. We’re hustling right now because there’s so much going on. We’re phone banking and organizing for democracy, working hard on this election. You should be too! I’m selling my business. Hopefully, when the smoke clears in a few months, everything calms down and we can go about life. I’m looking forward to being fully retired, not semi-retired as I am now, still running a business. I’ll still write, I’ll always write. I’d like more time to catch up on my leisure reading, and watch more soccer and motorcycle racing. Do the whole Twilight Zone series from start to finish. More time to travel, or just relax on a weekend and do nothing, if I’m capable of it by that time.

“Every other day, every other dayEvery other day of the week is fine, yeahBut whenever Monday comes, but whenever Monday comesYou can find me cryin' all of the time” ― Monday, Monday; Mamas and Papas

This pioneer journey continues…

Hey, it took me a few hours to write this journal post for you. Can you spend a few seconds and post it on your socials or forward to others? If so, thank you!

Free subscribers get a free copy of my book of short stories, Rambles and Daydreams. Paid subscribers will get all three books in the noir crime trilogy, Vigilante Angels. I no longer do paid-only posts, because it felt gross to leave people behind, especially those who can’t afford it.

If you read my ramblings, I’ll leave it to your conscience. If you get any value from my writing, consider a donation or subscription, which is priced at a few dollars, the minimum allowed. Half of all money goes to The National Alliance to End Homelessness, the other half pays for expenses.

You can also support me by becoming a paid subscriber below, leaving a small one-time tip at the button below, or by buying my novels at wildlakellc.com, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, or other fine book outlets in paperback, eBook, or audio.

When you buy something using the retail links in our stories we may get a teeny tiny commission, but it never affects your price or our judgement in linking to products we use and believe in. It helps pay for the costs in providing this (hopefully) entertaining content.

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit billydecarlo.substack.com/subscribe