Parallel Economies

1/ A community of Interest

Religious, ethnic, cultural or subcutural, some element that defines "us" versus "them". Something that either unites a group of people or differentiates a subgroup from the main stream. In some clear way there must be an identifiable community of Others.

2/ A diversity of Skills and Services

Specialists and talented individuals are necessary to make this work. Cooperative labour is not enough to sustain a parallel economy. There must (for a large enough community) be Other plumbers and tailors and lawn services and butchers. Even on a small scale, hobby businesses catering for the specific needs of Others.

3/ A commitment to the idea of community

It is not enough to be an Other, one must actively participate in both Otherish activities and main stream activities as an Other. Even if one passes at main stream events, not wearing distinctive symbols or dress, awareness of one's Otherness will influence your participation.

4/ Self and mutual identification

You must not only think of yourself as an Other, you must be able to see faces in a crowd and pick out the Others from the common throng. Either through distinctive symbols or through familiarity.

5/ A locus or central place(s)

Be it a Temple, or Coffee Shop or Bar or Market, there must be places Others gather and can exchange information, recommendations, gossip and news.

6/ Cash and kind: payment; barter; community effort; favours and obligations.

Even without participation in the Black Economy, Others offer discounts, trade in kind, barter and non-commercial exchange of goods, services and labour to other members of their community. This reduces the tax burden on the community, and preferentially targets Others money and energy into the Other economy and away from the businesses of the main stream.

7/ Rejection of the other.

With a dollar in your hand, as an Other you will make the effort to cross the raod to spend it in the shop of an Other in preference to a supermarket or fats food chain. You will preference an Other tradesman or professional over those outside the community.

Give me liberty, er, bacon.

I used to have a rule against eating anything smarter than my elected representative. Then I moved to Toowoomba and decided bacon was more important than a dumb rule.

Io Pan, Hail Eris

I am a strange thing.

I was raised Atheist by lapsed (walked away fast) Catholics.

In my mid teens I encountered Discordianism, through the Illuminati Trilogy, and it spoke to me. I also encountered Wicca, but in a hide bound bookish form that celebrated Midsummer in the depths of the Southern Winter.

A few years later I was firmly Discordian, and while ignoring a great many gods, found myself looking to Eris as the Feminine and Pan as the Masculine aspects of the Numinous. At that time my (now ex-)wife and I encountered a slightly more open form of Wicca that had just begun to celebrate seasons we experienced, not those marked on a Glastonbury souvenir calendar. The coven was also in transition to circling with the sun, not with the directions in books.

So I find myself Wiccan, henotheistically Erisian and seeing the Masculine energy in the figure or thought form of Pan in his aspect as practical joking god of shepherds and ordinary men. I try very hard to see the Gods as mental tools to assist in making the Numinous accessible on a human scale, however they refuse to be so constrained and overflow, at times inconveniently, into my life.

A bit of my past

My parents were born the same day in 1939, my Mother in Aylesham, Kent, England and my Father in Newhaven, Edinburgh, Scotland. They met as children, relatives of my father lived in the same street as my Mother, and my Father's family would fruit pick in Kent in summer as a sort of working holiday.

They didn't like each other much. As a teen I was able to ply many of my Mother's childhood friends in Acacia Ridge (aka Little Aylesham) with drink and ask them questions. No-one knew how they came to be married (there was strong drink involved) and not one of their friends could work out why or how they stayed together. My Mother was a strange child, and to use the words of one old friend "always a bit of a space cadet".

In their teens and early 20s my Parents ran with the Teddy Boys. My father and his younger brother Mac had a reputation as hard men and had spent some time as smugglers. My uncle remained outside the law throughout most of his life mostly as a moderately successful somewhat violent petty criminal. I suspect my parents' decision to take up the opportunity to become assisted immigrants to Australia had a certain amount to do with fallout from my Father's less salubrious activities.

In Australia they lived in an assortment of cheap inner city Brisbane properties before settling down at Whynot St in West End for a couple of years. It was at this time I was born at Brisbane's Mater Hospital. A year later they bought a house block and hard a weatherboard house built on the Lettuce Farm Estate at Eight Mile Plains. They moved in, in exasperation, to an unfinished house, which took my Father some years to get around to finishing the ceilings in some rooms.

The part of Eight Mile Plains they lived in was hived off to form the core of Underwood in the 70s.

Many adventures and 14 years later they built a house on 10 acres at Eagleby. Allowing my Father to fully indulge his love for Clydesdales.

They lived there nearly 20 years before moving to a smaller house on a suburban block nearby where they lived their remaining few years.

My Mother was a professional machinist, in both the industrial and sartorial senses at various times. So much of my childhood was spent in the daily care of her Mother and Father (who had Huntingtons Disease). After Jake died, Ellen lived with my parents for most of the next 20 years, she kept my Mother from driving me nuts, and got alone well with my Father, her least annoying son-in-law. My Mother and I didn't get along, so my Grandmother was the safe sane presence in my childhood.

My Father was a horse trader, figuratively and at times literally. He was a legendary figure in the Queensland construction industry, in the 60s as The Black Pom, later working in various aspects of the concrete industry. We once picnicked on the bank of the Logan River. During the afternoon dozens of boats stopped as people recognized him, many tying up and joining us. Enough people and boats that the Police arrived to see what was happening. Walking down the street in Brisbane CBD he would have people come up and greet him, builders and businessmen, bikers and politicians, police and street thugs.

Linkies:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aylesham
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newhaven,_Edinburgh
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acacia%20Ridge
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teddy_Boy
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eight_Mile_Plains,_Queensland
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Underwood,_Queensland
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eagleby,_Queensland

Shallow History

Shallow history, it is the Best Best Friend of Creation science, the Young Earth, and the absurdity that is Baby Jesus as the bizarrely anachronistic fourth wheel of the Trinity.

Understanding Histories vast sweep and then pushing the timeline back back back into prehistory and geological time makes Zombie Jesus Mad.