DIY Skills

officially fall by the time that podcast. It is legally fall. When I have my first pumpkin spice black coffee of the year and it's cool outside. That's because you're a monster. That's because I'm a happy man who is enjoying a fault beverage. On this episode today, we have, of course Garrison Garrison. Hello, I Garrison, are you doing I'm doing fine great. We also have my friends be in a Lane b E Lane you you you are on the show recently to talk about terrorism a year ago. Yeah,

everything before yesterday is a year ago. And uh and now you're on to talk about surviving yeah, yeah, like crafty surviving punk. Yeah, I know, we we brought made it this far. You on because you were like two of the most useful skill filled people that I know. You're both wilderness survival instructors primitive skill instructors for a while, and you have a small farm in a town that I won't name, and you do all sorts of cool ship like storing food and making arrows and other things

that are alleged. And what I like about that is that, you know, we talk about like collapse and things falling apart, there's this kind of like I don't know, almost like mimetic obsession with like I want to get out into the woods and away from the city, and that's the only way to survive, and like the reality of the situations, that's a terrible way to survive. There's nobody in the wood.

There's nobody in the woods, and it's you know, there's there are there are a small chunk of the human race that is capable with with just themselves of like surviving in the middle of nowhere with nobody. But there's even among that population, there's a small fraction who are capable of doing that and not shooting themselves after a long enough period of time, and you wouldn't want to meet that person generally. Well, and I think the other the other thing about that is like the sort of

fetishization of of you know, individualists. Survival skills is based on this idea that what people when people were like living off the land, that they were doing it by themselves alone, which is community. There's very few people that survived alone for a long time, and even of the people that had the skills, like even I she wandered out of the woods after I think eight years of

being by himself and was finally like fuck it. He was the last of a indigenous group in California, where everyone else in his tribe had been basically withen genocided and him and like the last like five people went off and hid for very good reason um. And then after disease and stuff, then it was just him and he spent I forget how many years by himself, and after a while he finally was like fuck it, being by myself is not worth it, and he came out.

And it was just after the turn of the century, and so he ended up being adopted by a bunch of anthropologists and spending the rest of his time in

San Francisco. It's actually where we get most of a lot of like the anthropological knowledge of how to make arrows, because he was very much like, I'm the last of my group, so I will actually show people how to do flint napping and how I make arrows and how I hunt and yeah, and that's but I mean, and that's there's kind of the point there that like, with all of those skills, being one of that very small number of people who could you dropped that guy alone

with nothing in the woods and he'll figure it out. He didn't want to do that because it's miserable. Yeah. Uh. He in fact went into San Francisco and was like, well, white people wiped out my entire I go make friends with these anthropologists that live with them and teach them what I know. Yeah. Again, a lot of the folks who are kind of reaching out online being like, hey, I don't have a lot in the way of money.

I'm never gonna be able to move to the woods and buy a farm or something, well you don't, you

don't really need to. And like if shi it really does hit the fan where you live, there's probably parks unless it's Detroit UM, in which case there's abandoned Walmart's like you can make it work like there's it's so so this is an episode about kind of the skills that you can acquire and build for not a lot of money, more or less wherever you live that will help you build resiliency UM, but also build resiliency is part of a community, as opposed to living in the

woods with a knife, sleeping under mud. There's a great short story that y'all turned me onto by Cory Doctor in a book of short stories called Radicalize that was was it just called The Mask of the Red Death? I mean that's that's yeah. The original Mask of the Red Death is set obviously during UM. I'm sure everybody read it in high school, like right. It's is set during the Bubonic plague with these rich people who like decided to just hold up in party to escape the

plague and they all die of the plague. And Doctors is a bunch of like libertarians, survivalist crypto bros who build a fortress in the desert in order to survive the end of days. And it turns out that like a bunch of bad stuff happens like there's disease in in in civil conflict, but like people figure it out and all of the crypto bros die shooting themselves to

death because the water system. It's obvious from the start what's going on, and everybody who comes along to help them, they start shooting at you will just wait until you're dead because you're shooting yourself because your water is bad. I think we all have, we all have elements of some libertarian tendencies in US, which you know, it's not bad to learn self reliance, and it's certainly not not even bad to want to like live outside of the city.

But in a lot of ways living in a living in an urban environment surrounded by a community, depending on the situation, can be even more resilient because like, yeah, an isolated farmstead there's benefits to but also it's really easy to surround and just shoot people who were living on their farm in the middle of nowhere. If ship really does hit the fan, it happens all the time. It happened in like Al Salvador and ship when they

had their economic crash. So I don't know, where do you want to Where do you guys want to start? I know you had a couple of different things that you want that I want to talk about, Like preserving food is a big one, and then I mean making stuff and doing things is kind of they're sort of different.

Where would you like to actually start with that? I think we can start with kind of the d I Y element, branching off of our original discussion on primitive skills, and then in like parts two, we can go born to like food and like like like foraging, um and preservation and stuff. Cool. I mean, so d I why um?

I guess now there's a lot of stuff about like there's I don't know, there's all this stuff of like survival skills and all this stuff, and both of us kind of came into the idea of making stuff and doing things by being punks, um, and it's kind of yeah, having no money, but also just their d I Y like do it yourself was a very like kind of

nineties punk thing that came into the mainstream. Like I actually was pulling out some of my old books and I think it's funny to see the like progression because I have you know, the really lovely like food not lawns that goes into a whole pile of really fantastic things that came out that I don't know, the first food not lawns House I saw at the town as in was in like two thousand five or six, but

this book came out in two thousand and six. But this was this entire movement of like making community and doing and like how to do stuff yourself on your front lawn. Yeah, and then of from eleven the bus d i Y Guide to Life that includes everything from like how to do worm composting to how to make your own makeup and like finance House and that's that's like the magazine. Yes, So it's kind of interesting because it definitely like was the thing that I watched come

into the mainstream. But you know, it started as a lot of punks trying to figure out how to do

things because they had no money. And but also different from a lot of you know, like woodworking or craft books that really are you know by these seven thousand dollars worth of tools and now you too can learn, Yes, And there's also there's also an ethos behind it, right that like before I was, I came at it first and foremost through being like a bike punk in the in the late nineties, early two thousands being a bike punk and the idea of like the d I y

ethos was less about the grid is going to collapse and like everything is going to fall apart and you're gonna need to survive by the skin of your teeth.

And it was a lot more you know, at the tail end of the nineties and like the sort of golden era of neoliberal capitalism and office space and that whole cultural moment, the idea that life was alienated and shitty and it felt better to know how to do things that you needed in your day to day life for yourself, using stuff you had made yourself or gotten

from your community members. Um. Yeah, resiliency is less about knowing you have a pile of dried food in the house and know more about looking at fresh food and knowing, I know how to make that last the winter. Yeah. And it's been interesting to see the way that like as that has gotten kind of mainstreamed into like, you know,

the the what is it primitive. There's a bunch of different like Primitive x y Z YouTube channels that get lots of show and ship and as that all gets mainstreamed, there's this idea of like expert teath that creeps back into it, and d I Y was like firmly committed to the idea that everybody could learn stuff and listening to somebody who said they were an expert was a trap.

And a lot of that was coming out of like the seventies when there was all of the like you know, CULTI lifestyle ship that was like, hey, look we're going to teach you how to change your life, and yeah, we're gonna we're gonna buy up all this land and Antelope, Oregon, and so d I Y was emphatically not that. It was like, there's skills, and you can learn skills, and the internet doesn't really exist yet or not really, so you can read books about it and you can have

skill share because there wasn't Twitter. We also all had a lot more time on our hands and like each other more. But there's also expertise was something that was handy to have, you know, like if I needed to rebuild my wheel on my bike and respoke, it wanted someone who knew how to do it. And so it's good to have a people who had really intense, deep

knowledge of skills. But the idea that you would ask someone like I need to change my bike tire two because I popped it with everyone would have been kind of like really really like everyone should know how to do basic stuff and it's and it's okay. Like the whole you know, Jack of All Trades was is as a desirable goal, like it's okay to dabble in a million little things and be kind of mediocre but have

a sort of baseline understanding of a bunch of stuff. Now, you know, there's places that I kind of think that we went too far, but also, you know, before the American Healthcare Act, we all definitely did a lot of at home medcare that we should not have. But there's also a lot of low stakes places that I think people have gotten away from just practicing and trying all sorts of crafty stuff as an ethos that is actually really good and there's no harm to learning things like that.

You're not going to afford anything, and the only thing that's going to happen is you will have more skills and more to offer the people around. There's this idea under capitalism that we should all specialize because that is like the most profit generating thing to do is just specialize anything that makes you the most money, but it's like, not only is it like not the best in a dangerous situation to only know how to do one thing that makes you money, but it's like it's not particularly

good for your soul either. And there's also lots of different behavioral psychology, like group analysis of if you present people with a situation that they feel unprepared for and there's a person that they identify as an expert in a group who they can defer to pretty much every time, the group that's like, oh, we'll defer to this one expert because they know everything and we'll just do whatever

they say ends up making worse decisions. Then if you have a group where everybody feels like, oh, well, I like I can at least get a handle on what's going on and we can all talk through it and like make make calls, deferring to experts doesn't necessarily help you. Know that, there's obviously cases we've mentioned medical care already

where like there's actually knowledge is very important. Skill sets are very important, But the idea that there's people who are just like yeah, inherently more knowledgeable of things that you couldn't possibly understand is so where where do you recommend Like people start with like, like, you've got a bunch of books right now, and obviously, if you can

afford books, that's a good call or libraries. A lot of these books on a preserving food and like growing stuff on your law, and but even if you don't have a law and you can still like there's certain like one thing that strikes me because we've been canning and pickling a bunch lately, is you know, different vegetables and fruits and whatnot are cheaper at different points in

the year. And even if you live in an apartment in the inner city and will never have more than a garden box at best, you can buy food when it's cheap and preserve it um and not only save yourself a little bit of money, but you can like also, uh, you'll you'll understand every time you encounter preserved food, and like a grocery store, you'll be looking at a thing that you know where it comes from. It's not just like a mystery jar of preserved food that was made

by some process of science. So I don't know, I'm interested in Like where you guys someone coming in having only uh specialized in whatever it is allowed them to pay the rent. Where where where's your where's your recommended start point for people? UM, I think it's picking something that is low stakes that you enjoy. Like, honestly, one of my friends, UM, her entry in to doing d I Y stuff was, you know, she had lots of makeup and everything, and she was like, I'm going to

make body scrubs? How do I do that? And you know, looked up how to make body scrubs, how to make you know, a lot of it is, oh, getting salt and grinding up rosemary that she found in someone's front yard and putting it together, you know, But just something simple that you enjoy, that you would love to be able to, you know, have a little bit more say over because it's most basic. A lot of the d I Y stuff is you can make something very specific

to what you like. So for myself, actually, one of the first things I ever started doing was in high school just altering clothing. I had an old I had an old thirty dollar junk practice uh like kids sewing machine and just the cheapest one that Sears used to sell, and could definitely just take that and start putting scenes in an altar clothing and like this shirt is now a T shirt. It was long sleep before and that also ties in with you know, d I I just

to sound like old punks for a minute. That d I I definitely also came out of things like the riot girl scene in a big way, and like the attention to like body awareness and like moving away from body negativity and the recognition that as a general rule, off the rack clothes are not and certainly twenty years ago were extra not actually designed to fit most people's bodies, and it was hard to find clothes that fit you right.

And yeah, so like sewing was a big one. Um bikes because we were broke and didn't have cars, so figuring out how to fix bikes and you know, everything that mechanically happens on a bike is right there and you can see it happen, and it maybe requires a screwdriver and then eventually maybe some other tools. But there's

lots of free resources. A lot most cities I've spent any amount of time and you can find like you can find like a community bike shop where if you have to pay anything, it's very minimal, and a lot of cases are just sort of like show up and you know there's space to use. Yeah, when um, like, I know in Santa Cruz there was the bike Church.

In Portland there's the bike Farm, and yeah, in Philly there was also a bike church because it turns out the basements of churches are There were a couple of spots like that in Dallas, and it's uh yeah, And I think it is like this mix of, like with the body script stuff, like what is something that appeals to you that you you're interested in, and also what is with the bike stuff, what is something that's like just doggedly practical, Like you get a bike, you need

a bike to get around, you should probably know how to fix it on it. I think the reason I say you should pick saying that appeals to you especially is because a big thing with d I Y was that you're doing it yourself. And there are so many skills that are valuable to learn from other people. It is wonderful to craft in community. It is wonderful to work with other people in community. It's wonderful to teach

skills and gain them. But also I've seen this growing idea with the as specialization for so many things, especially services comes in that people are always like, oh wow, knitting. I've always wanted to learn I need to take a class in that, or I need to And it's really important, I think, for people to realize that you can learn things. We are very good at learning things, and you don't necessarily need a teacher for more complex things you do.

But starting with something that you really like and that you find really interesting, you've already thought about it. So when you start with you know, for my friends, starting with making bath salts and face masks and stuff, it was something she had already been thinking about quite a bit and thinking about stuff. So when she started looking at recipes to mix and looking on the internet and looking at ingredients, it was saying she already cared about.

So it's easier to learn something that you are interested in, and it's easier to learn something that you want to do. But we are all capable of learning for ourselves, not every single thing, but especially just for craft projects. And so starting with that so that you can pick up a book, or you can read an article, or you can watch a YouTube video and you don't need to take some like hundred and fifty dollar a weekend class

before you can. It's you know, a big part of the resiliency building like something you may scoff like when you're thinking about survivalism and talking about like making bath scrubs, But a lot of the skills you would learn putting that together are useful in making like a salve or making like a soap, making soap things that you actually need.

Like when I was traveling, I lived on the road, like out of a car and out of backpacks for off and on all over the world for years, and I would make my own medicated because we would get would get cuts and scrapes and rashes, and we were poor as ship and often there weren't doctors where we were. So I learned how to use things like plantain and comfrey and yarrow and like bees wax and stuff in order to make medicated sabs and it it was something

that interested me. But like there's also a lot of like there's there's a number of roots into learning that sort of thing. And if you're learning how to make again something as simple as like a face scrub, learning where to find that information for free learning some of

the basic techniques in order to do that. That learning how to learn is is applicable in a wider variety of skill sets, and it I think it's so important to focus on what are you what are you interested in first, as as opposed to just being like okay at first. Now I have to learn how to like splint a broken arm, because like ship is gonna hit the fans, like, well, maybe focus on something that's more exciting to you first, and and and and build time

in your life to learn things. That's an enjoyable process. One of the first things I did, like years ago, was I learned to so specifically to make a cause play because you know, so I would just I would make me and my whole family to an outfits for comic Con. So every year I would, I would sew us whole whole new things. But then not only taught me sewing, it taught me how to do like like vacuum forming, to molding, how to use like a heat gun,

how to use like all these other types of tools. Um, how do you like molding and castings, Like all of these types of things. I learned just wanting to make silly costumes. But now they're like, you know, useful in a lot a lot a lot of other ways. And that can be that can be expensive at the high end when you're like vacuum forming and stuff your storm trooper armor. But the cheapest side of that thing again, you can get a basic hand sewing kit for like

five dollars from a Walmart. And there's also maker to your Ship, and there's maker spaces and like YouTube will do the teaching. You don't have to pay for a teacher. The Taliban learned how to fly helicopters on YouTube. You can learn how to fix your pants. And then I think also you mentioned specialization before. It's come up a couple of times um, and there is you know, the

idea of specialization. The rationale behind specialization is, oh, well, you'll be better at it because that's what you do all the time. But that cuts both ways because if you only do one thing all the time, then as you know, whatever the maximum threshold of your abilities is that's required of you, that becomes your baseline, like whatever in your day to day life, whatever it is that you're being asked to do, that's what you feel capable of.

And on the flip side, there's with with the d I Y approach, with like teaching yourself ship learning interesting ship. It's also practical and important and useful to be like this is a thing that I'm gonna do on a

regular basis so I'll get better at it. But also it's not you know, there was you know, the whole idea of there's what you do and then there's your job, and that these need not be the same thing because you want to be able to think think through things in a way that's not the way you're supposed to process things to make your boss happy. That it is not just what you do when you clock in. You

are more than your career. More than your career and in your skill set need not be purely extracted, as you know, not just like Okay, I have to go do the thing in order to make money and then

everything else's consumption. Like you can you can transition, like we're but and this is not a societal level solution because we talk a lot about like, well, yeah, you're not gonna you're not gonna make small personal changes to fix climate change, but changing your own particular attitude on how you approach the world from one that is I I produce and that I consume to to when we're you're thinking more about resiliency and what do I know how to do and what can I learn how to do?

UM is helpful in a variety of ways on the note of you know, the transferability of skills and recognizing that you already do things on a day to day basis that requires specialized knowledge and require skill sets. UM. One of the things that I try and trot out at every possible opportunity. I worked with somebody in one of those volunteer bike shop spaces down New Orleans years ago, UM, and the whole purpose of that particular space was to make the skill set of bike repair more accessible to

a population that relied on likes to get places. And one of the folks I worked there with was like a very fami lady and was great because we would have young girls come into the shop and be like, my bike doesn't work. Somebody fixed my bike. My bike doesn't work. I don't know how to fix a bike. And she was the one who would just be like, your tires flat and they're like, yeah, I don't know

how to fix it. Can you fix it? And she'd be like, well, you're wearing press on nails, right, And I'd be like yeah, I'm like cool, how do you put on your press on nails, and they'd walked through the steps of like, well, you stand your nails, and then you put the glue on your nails, and then you hold the press on nails on your fingernails for a little while and let them set, and then you're good to go. And it's like, great, you've just described

exactly how you patch a bike inner two. So now we just need to get the bike inner two out, and here's the part that corresponds to your nail, and here's the part of the corresponse, like here's the glue and here's the you know, it's the same process. We just have to get the bike inner two out and

then back in again. But you already know how to do the part where you make the bike to work again, and that does hit on another important like you know, apocalypse or whatever survival point where again all of our like fiction and movies focuses on like knowing how to

use a gun or like being a woodsman. One of the most useful skills, maybe the most useful skill you can have in any disaster situation, is being able to teach people, like like knowing how to understand figure out what people know and how to get them the additional information they need in order to be more resilient and competent, because you're always better in a community of people who know to handle their ship than alone. And it builds

on itself too. You know, we both come from different backgrounds, but as we've been together and with the different trainings that we've had in just light, the projects that we take on have become more and more complex. So you know, where I used to like to practice gardening and stuff and doing a little bit of woodworking and things, and now you know, we're doing various construction projects that we're kind of self taught, and we have some various home

depot books on how to do them. But it's it doesn't feel nearly as intimidating because we've done steps to go to it, and because it's not an all or nothing, you don't have to suddenly be like I'm going to d I why my entire life. Like I definitely get that way sometimes where I'm like, I want to one day have everything in my house be made by someone that I know or myself. And it's really lovely to know crafts people or to you know, make do sit down at a pottery wheel and make your own bowls

or whatever. But a lot of it is about practicing stuff when it's not an emergency so that when you later on have need or you have the ability, you have the time, like you can do a bunch of

different things. So you know, we refloored. The room that we're in right now a process, but we didn't get there from nothing, And we've both done lots of different construction and measuring and other things in little bits just for fun, for work for other stuff beforehand, And a lot of these projects are things that are fun to

do as a one off as a project. I've done, you know, embroidery with my kids just for fun, not because they need to suddenly embroider all of their clothing or they have to sew everything, but it's because it's a fun thing to do on a rainy day. Or you know, try fixing a book, not because there's no ability to go on Amazon and order another book. But hey, look, I just we didn't add one thing to the landfill ways and we don't have to fix all of the

stuff we have. It's a one time craft. But then later on when stuff's falling apart or when we have supply chain issues, or when stuff's not there, it's handy to know, like, oh, you know what, Like we're having water rationing right now, because during the one of the droughts I grew up in California, we had water rationing and it was my mom hauled out of the basement my grandmother's old ringer machine and we were doing the laundry and that because it could conserved a hell of

a lot of water and you could use the same water for load after load. It's good to just have those things just kind of on hand that you've tried, because when an emergency hits, you don't want to be trying to search the internet are looking for something because you've never done it before and now it's necessary. And it's it's again to the point of like how the

how collapse really looks versus how it's often pictured. You're not trying to replicate when you're when you're doing your own laundry that way, you're not trying to replace civilization. You're patching a hole, like and and that's a lot

of building resiliency is knowing that you have. It's like it's being able to fix a bike tire, it's patching a hole and I do want to acknowledge that like this is a little bit more outside of the dead center of mainstream in you know, the United States and some other like wealthy industrialized countries, and it's not like it has never stopped being the way most people in the world. Kind of one story to tell from these people.

I was billeted with an Iraq. These these guys were like pulling people out of air strike craters every day, and we wanted to watch TV one nine. We were in like a bombed out mosque that isis had been using and they had a refrigerator that worked in a TV that isis had cut the chords with. And this guy just started pulling chords out of the fridge in about five minutes, had the TV working, had like hooked it, lashed everything together. It was like he wasn't a TV

repairment or refridge. He just knew how electricity and ship worked and was able to figure out like, Okay, I can just put all this ship together. We're good to go. And and just also to loop background to the whole,

like survival mentality a little bit. One of the things that like people that we've worked with, people who like have been in emergency situations that require you know, complex skill sets and things of One of the big things is to have a role that you are competent in that you are ready to fulfill, so you don't have to figure out your first step. You can get moving. You can figure out your first step. So, for example, in the you know, the supply chain issues that hit

at the start of COVID and are recurring. Um the idea of like oh there's no way to like there's no laundry stap. Say okay, well we've got borax and these others and some making soda borax, right, we can we can make our own laundry detergent in a pinch and it'll work well enough. Cool. Don't have to have that be the thing that stresses us out and like adds to our like paralysis. Yeah, and get A huge part of is even how you approach to the problem. It's not freaking out like oh my god, there's no

laundry soap. Hell am I going to clean the clothes. It's being like, oh, there's no laundry soap, I'm gonna go online because we still have that and try to figure out either other things that can make laundry soap

that there are and like it's it's accepting. Like you talk about like wanting to be competent in a role, you don't have to know what that is from the start, as long as like the starting point isn't I'm going to be the medic I'm going to be this, I'm gonna be the food or it's like no, I'm going to start learning how to do things I don't know how to do, and over a period of time, if I am dedicated that I will figure out the thing

that I want to get most competent at. Yeah, because I mean none of none of what we've been talking about in terms of the various crafts and projects that we've undertaken are things that are like our primary function in the world. It's just like, well, at some point it seemed like it was worth doing, and so we did some of it, and then we kept doing it now and there's always pretty good at literally if anything we've talked about, there's the you're, I don't know, bougie

hipster version of like doing it expensively. Even with like woodworking, there could be a dirt cheap I built a table for almost nothing when I was younger, because it was like, well, I found this would that the city chopped down, and I bought sand paper and stain for fifteen dollars and then I got like a fucking base for my Ikea and I had a functional table and I figured it

out using YouTube. And it's you know, not as good a table as I could have made if I had ten or thousands of dollars in woodworking tools, but I had a table for years because of it um And it's it's accepting the because I think people do get

freaked out. There's such an emphasis on like having the gear, getting the equipment, stockpiling things, and like, really stockpiling competency is better because yeah, and I think the Amazon wish list ability to just be like, oh I want this specific thing, I can in three seconds look it up online and find the exact thing that I want definitely pushes in the opposite direction and makes people, well, a little less resilient in that capacity because there's less of

that idea that you can just have stuff. And I would just say, if people want to get started with it, it's really pick something low stakes, pick something simple, because you build the abilities, you build the ability to learn and um I had to explained to me once that it's like a hangar. Every skill you get X as a hangar, and having really basic simple things is actually super necessary because even even the like hardcore primitive skills.

I have some amazing books that I bought when I was eighteen, and I remember I had them and I looked through and I read it and I was like, this is like reading magic. I understand absolutely none of it. And after a few years of doing things, not even necessarily traditional skills, but just things practicing stuff, picking stuff, there was so much more framework that I had that I looked through it and suddenly there was stuff concepts that I could hang all of these incredible skills on.

And we're like, oh, that never made sense to me.

I understand it now because I've done simpler things and starting with thing that doesn't seem like overwhelming to learn something simple and something something low stakes, something that if you utterly mess it up, if you have ah, what are the like like the regrets the like craft epiccraft fails that it's okay, it's not a big deal because failing is part of learning, and so pick things that it's okay to fail at as your as your projects and and don't as many of us did in the

late nineties and early two thousand's when we didn't have health insurance of any description, you know, experiment on ourselves and our friends with herbs because we didn't have healthcare, access to doctors. Avoid doing that is not low stakes. Yeah, and I'm about to go do and surgery on my own infected wound now that you've told me this, and I'm really excited. Excited I got I got an exact deal.

I got some vodka. At least we're good to go. No, the key is really hot glue same as surgical stitches. I have similar not hot, because then it sterilizes the wound doesn't stick to anything. This is how I know you are not a crafter. Is hot glue does not anything. You just you squirt it in there, You get it in there real good, and then you cover it with with superglue. I do have a grand that has plug in the world. I would put superglue in first. I do have a grandpa that has used superglue so many

times to glue his body back together. It's actually what it was made for. Ye, that's very funny. It's effective at that anyway, here's armatical advice. Yeah, don't do any of the things that were just said. But if you do want to learn how to do suits, you you can find guides where people do it on chicken and which is how if you're an e m T you learn how to do it. And it's that's a that is a skill you can build for very little money. That's useful and you don't have to start on your

friends bodies. And I will put in a plug for like, wilderness first aid courses are not cheap and there are some real good ones out there, and as a as like a baseline that is a real handy and helps you think about things creatively because wilderness first aid unlike an ambulance driver. An ambulance driver is driving in a box with all the tools they need, and wilderness first

aid the assumption is don't have a box. You don't have and so you have to work it out probably you know, uh, some plantain or something or some the right fucking kind of SAP. There's like ship you can use and which we will not proceed to attempt to lift off here and provide medical advice. Don't go to a doctor, no use pine needles, make your own needle t don't cure your COVID. Find a bee hive and

start sucking. Any other sources are any other sources making stuff and doing things from way back in the day. Definitely recommend that one UM country know how like there's some a lot of old craft books actually, UM the entire back collection of the Mother Earth magazine skills stuff like I have definitely made any studying magazine, not Emma Goldman's Anarchists newspaper, but I've definitely made solar powered dehydrators out of cardboard boxes and saran rap from the from

Mother Earth magazine stuff And it's absolutely fantastic. The just old school guide books UM, and but also anything that's listened as like d I Y guides that have stuff that you would like to make and like to do are great. The library is great. Use the library. Research librarians at the library are great. And if you're like, I'm trying to learn how to do this thing, can

you help me find books on it? Research librarians at the library they have doctorates in how to help you do that, and that's they just sit at desks all day waiting for me and that's that. And what you'll learn from them about how to answer those questions for yourself is also useful in their long run. Well, go out and make a reflux. Still is that legal? Well no,

not in most places, but it's easy. You just need a box inside of a box, and you pour old beer in the center box and that's like saran wrap. On topic,