Portable Josh

Monday, May 1, 2000

It’s the middle of the night and I guess I should be getting a good night’s sleep for my test. Anyway, I just had an interesting thought…

The power just went out at the co-op for, oh, about a minute, at most. There’s a light thunderstorm outside so there’s no surprise, really. Anyway, my alarm clock was reset and my first thought was, sheesh! Good thing I’m awake now or I would have slept right through work and who knows what else. But then I thought, no. I’ve got my cell phone set up with an alarm to wake me (several, in fact), and my laptop is, well, a laptop. I don’t actually need the power company for anything. Quite a concept — the powerless home. Or rather, the wall-socketless home.

It pleases me to think of this. I’ve got the cell phone to provide me with phone service without having a ground line (I never intend to get one — ever), and now I realize that I have the basic tools to operate without ground power, either, except for the occasional charge, which I can get at an coffee shop in town gratis.

So that’s it — Josh’s own brand of DistroPose. Except my DistroPose isn’t so much about distributed possessions as much as it’s about possessions not tied to the earth. Simple possessions. I’m not ready to reduce my life to a single trunk quite yet, but I think I’m building up to the point where I can have a home homebase and afford myself the freedom to travel with everything I need to get work done and do all of the other chores one would normally associate with staying at home.

Well, I guess I can’t feed the dog or play with the future kids or anything. But a boy’s gotta dream about something, right? Um…