Permanent Agriculture

I disappointed a client the other day. We met at Starbucks. Apparently 3 weeks had gone by since our last meeting. Let me just say, first of all, I haven’t received a dime from this client for the 20 hours I had already spent on this project this round. Which is fine, I know she’s good for it, but seriously, you can’t expect V.I.P. service if you haven’t shovelled anything out of your pocket. Since the last meeting with her I have had a crazy couple weeks. A die-hard 2 day trip to Los Angeles where I put in a 10 hour work day the first day, and had to leave my best friend, Jennay, for 6 hours to fend for herself the second day with the bums and forgotten veterans in the slums of the jewelry district.

I felt so bad leaving her down there. I say “down there” because I was stuck in a conference room with no windows some 10 floors up. The only thing that kept me sane was the morning surf sessions some 45 minutes (1 1/2 hours with traffic) out of the way in San Clemente. Poor Jennay, she had to take a Zoloft to keep from hyperventilating. Ok I’m exaggerating but she did wait at the bottom of the six elevators for me to come down to only disappoint herself each and every time it wasn’t me. I did make it worse by texting her “I’m almost done!” a half a dozen times. I asked her “Why do you torture yourself like that?” Seemed like it was something to keep her entertained except when it got old and I kept her waiting.

Anyways, I am getting off topic. So, Permanent Agriculture. I was supposed to be meeting with this client, but since I had not finished the work she had expected, she decided to leave and “left it up to me” to get the work done on my schedule. I decided to stick around and get a couple templates done so my travel time wasn’t waisted. Here beside be happened to be an old acquaintance. He’s an interesting character. A seemingly “happy with himself worry free it’s going to be alright” character who seems to always have a few hard things going on  his life. Days before had been jumped by a couple highschool kids at a bus stop. Faint remains of dual black bruises still lingered around his eyes. He had to go to the emergency room and now has over $20,000 in medical bills. His car is broken and he’s borrowing a friends old suburban to drive to work in some 40 miles down the coast daily. Apparently, he would be spending the night in that suburban too. His biggest worry was having to give the suburban back and losing his job. Smart and nice guy but can’t seem to get his life together. But otherwise a happy fellow.

A part of me wishes to help him in some way, but the other side of me is telling me not to get involved. I had told him about my bus and how it is a mobile office, but if things got really bad, I could live out of it temporarily. We kind of talked about how it’s good to be prepared as our current country’s infrastructure of how we sustain ourselves is actually very unstable. We purchase most our fresh food from the grocery store. Some people shop daily, I usually shop once a week, but never really have food on the shelves for sustaining a healthy diet much longer than that. We looked it up on YouTube and found a couple of videos about how people grew food forests in the middle of the desert. Sounds pretty awesome yeah! Starbucks was closing so we both had to leave. He walked me to my car at the edge of the parking lot and pointed behind some bushes where we were standing.

He said “Need some garlic? I have garlic and tomatoes growing right behind this fence”.

I said “Really? Are you serious?”

He said “Yea!”

I so wanted to say “prove it” and I wanted to see it for myself but unsure about where it was going and feeling a little uncomfortable it being late and dark, I decided it probably wasn’t the smartest thing for me to continue this conversation so I left it with a “That’s pretty cool!”.

Regardless whether he really has hidden veggies growing at the edge of the parking lot, it has spiked my interest in the concept. I’ve looked into it twice so I must be somewhat interested. I will let you know if it goes anywhere.