Yesterday afternoon, after I posted the California Water piece, a friend of mine, I’ll call her Mary, called from the Bay Area. She had moved there from Bloomington four years ago. My immediate question to her: “Well, are you ready to return?” She laughed, said she planned to leave there by the end of 2016 when her pension will have climbed from $15K to $75K. It was my turn to laugh, and then we commiserated on how “money” captures us, how crazy this world.

“The other day,” Mary told me, I was walking down the street” — this is San Francisco’s rough Tenderloin District, where she works in a law school — “and noticed a man smiling into the side mirror of a parked van. Just looking at his own face and smiling. ‘Oh wow,” I thought, ‘he likes himself.’ He kept looking, his face turning soft, eyes glazing over. ‘Wow, he really loves himself!’ Oops! Then she noticed that he was jacking off, in front of the mirror. Brazenly, in public.

What a metaphor for society now: people looking in mirrors (and screens) while jacking off (in their own private world) in public. Yeek.

“Welcome to the End Times,” I replied. And it certainly is the end times, of all that “California Dreamin” that brought us out there back in the late ’60s, early ’70s, when Uranus was conjuncting Pluto, Neptune was in Scorpio, and we were going to make peace, not war.

And here we are now: Uranus squaring Pluto, Neptune in the next water sign, Pisces, and these four decades have yielded, not peace, but ENDLESS WAR. We’re used to war. We don’t even know how many wars there are now, or who is fighting whom. War outside, war inside, while pretending to make love to ourselves with mirrors.

But wait, all is not lost! Indiana’s sudden disgusting national infamy this week over its clueless Republican governor’s ill-considered law to use “religion” to make discrimination legal, aroused an irate citizenry. Not just elsewhere, but even in this normally sleepy state! Really exciting, how all of a sudden we transformed our mind-controlled consumer identity back into our original identity as citizens who actually do care that each of us is viewed, and treated by others, with respect and dignity. Though of course it would have been better had the law not been passed at all, at least the “Fix” was real, and, even more important, the backlash showed what passions are simmering, just beneath the seemingly placid surface.

A quote comes to mind, one which I put down a couple of weeks ago and had yet to find a place for it:

Everybody struggling to figure out — are we in heaven, or hell?

Not sure where this came from, but it sure fits. Okay, back to California’s water, because there’s much more to think about here. Let’s do.

How Many People Will Have to Migrate Out of California When All the Water Disappears?

On the phone Mary asked, when we talked about the migrations that my late husband Jeff warned me about in a dream a few months ago, the obvious question: “Where are all those people going to go, because it’s not just California, it’s the entire southwest!” I agreed, as I’ve said here a number of times. Let’s see now, rough figuring: if there are approximately 40 million people in California and 20 million people in the rest of the Southwest, that’s 60 million people, approximately 1/5 of the 320 million people currently residing in the U.S. So where are they to go? Is that what the FEMA camps are for? The giant sports stadiums (think Katrina). Aha! Tiny house movement, just in time! On wheels! Oh wait! Maybe emigrate to China’s empty cities? Canada is notoriously hard to get into. Not sure about Mexico.

On the other hand, can, and will, this need for migration spur families to come back together again? Mary, for one, will. She and her daughter, a composting expert in northern California and now a young adult very aware of the perilous times we have entered, have decided that wherever they move, they will do so together. In my own family, my son Colin has moved to be near me in Bloomington, where he invented the Garden Tower and now heads up that project. We both hope son Sean will make the move from Massachusetts once his kids are out of school. One of my nieces is moving from Reno to Seattle with her baby boy and husband, to reinhabit the home where she grew up with her parents. The three generations are going to build a green house together and plan even more intensive food production in that suburban yard.

Meanwhile, in California, Nestle is still scarfing up California aquifer water.

Nestlé is draining California aquifers, from Sacramento alone taking 80 million gallons annually. Nestlé then sells the people’s water back to them at great profit under many dozen brand names.

Some farmers have gotten in the act:

California farmers begin selling water instead of crops as drought reaches critical stage

And I see today, this:

Californians Outraged As Oil Producers & Frackers Excluded From Emergency Water Restrictions

Yep, just urban folks in California have to restrict water usage by 25%. Which is ironic, since they are the ones that still don’t recognize what’s happening, or didn’t, until Governor Brown stood on that bare mountain field and announced the new statewide rules. Mary tells me that her neighbor, an educated man, has always watered his lawn with impunity. When she talked with him last week about the water shortage, he looked at her, puzzled. She was shocked. Another friend of mine, Colleen, also in the Bay Area, commented on my face book page that she had taken an hour to read through all the links I put up in yesterday’s post, and was truly stunned by the information. It was my turn to be shocked. Huh? And you live there?

What is this denial about? Mike Adams in —

Gov. Brown orders California to become a water police state as region begins reverting to uninhabitable desert

nailed it —

They live in artificial constructs called “cities” which depend entirely on external inputs in the form of water, food and electricity.

Though I could have done without the fear porn phrase “police state.” On the other hand, remember the FEMA camp reference, and most likely “snitches” will be the ones who keep their neighbors in line.

And speaking of police state language, how’s this for a headline:

California Drought Worsens: “May have to migrate people”

Now that’s truly weird. Not people decide on their own to migrate, but (officials?) “have to migrate people.” Very different meaning. Remember the FEMA camps. Busses heading out. Who’s on them? Who’s forced to get on them?

Okay, Ann, stop. STOP!

Oh, one more thing: speaking of water, already there’s talk about draining the Great Lakes for points south.

Lake Superior Water Headed to the Southwest

Clearly, we’re headed into a far different world. Let’s learn to love each other meanwhile, eh? Nothing less will do. Meanwhile, I keep on keepin’ on here, locally, doing via our Green Acres Garden and Ecovillage what needs to be done everywhere, in a decentralized fashion, creating community, first through shared visions, food, water, skills and chores — and possibly, in the future, shelter for refugees from points west.

Gov. Brown orders California to become a water police state as region begins reverting to uninhabitable desert