The first trailer (and Wagenplatz) that I lived in was pretty standard as far as German Wagenplätze go. That is to say there was no grid electricity, we shat in compost toilets, peed outside, and used headlamps and 12-volt appliances (that is, those with solar panels did—the guest trailer I lived in didn’t have ‘em).

In my second trailer I found myself living in a luxury Wagenplatz deluxe. That is to say, with running water in the community’s bathroom trailer (though we still all carry water to our kitchens) and the grid electricity I had missed as a writer who is dependent on a laptop incapable of running on 12-volts. I still pee outside, but now I can listen to music, write using the laptop, and bask in the brightness of my chandelier’s 40-watt bulbs whenever the muse strikes me. Even in the dead of winter when there might not be enough sunlight to power even a couple hours of light.

Though my current home is set up so that I don’t actually need to turn on the chandelier to light it (I heart wall-hanging candle holders), I secretly long for the day that the coal and nuclear power plants shut down and we are left in the bright light of our sun and our bonfires and candles. As long as it continues to make sense in our culture to write on a laptop, I will probably be interested in having some source of electricity. But going without it for a few months can be a beautifully eye-opening experience, can help you realize just how little you really need.

Can you imagine living completely without electricity? Can you imagine running only lights and appliances that run on 12-volts? Can you imagine giving up your refrigerator and freezer? What would you miss most in a world without electricity?

What I have never missed—and still don’t have though the current electricity situation would allow it—is a refrigerator. We store our vegetables in a drawer (even in the presence of a fridge)—a dresser found in the trash I can only assume—and our grains in the bags they come in and in the glass containers I pick up from the flea market and the trash (I have a dried-foods-in-glass-containers fetish actually). Dairy I store on the floor near the door of my trailer in the winter (the coldest spot in the room), and in the summer I buy very small quantities that I know I will be able to eat before they go bad.

But refrigeration habits are culturally learned. Take the egg. In America people refrigerate eggs with a vengeance. I used to think that an egg left out on the counter was an egg I shouldn’t risk eating. But in Germany eggs aren’t even refrigerated at the grocery store, and though the only eggs I’ve ever eaten in Germany have come straight to my plate from the coop, the millions of other people who eat them seem to be doing just fine.

If I ate meat I might feel slightly differently on the refrigeration issue, but meat isn’t currently part of my diet. And should meat finds its way back into my belly—as I have always assumed it one day will—it will be in a manner that keeps a refrigerator out of my life (smoked, dried, bought often and eaten immediately) because it’s an appliance my conscience can no longer stomach.

Once in a while I have a little “miss you!” pang for some freezer space, but then I think of the coal power plant belching the black death into the sky, shrug, and go get a carrot out of the drawer. Besides, there are a handful of fridges and freezers in the trailers around me, and if push comes to shove, I could borrow some space in one of them without adding another appliance to our electric bill.

If the shit really hits the fan and, say, we run out of oil (or it’s just too expensive for normal people to buy) and the world (and electric grid) as we know it crashes around us, then I’ll happily toss my laptop out the window and get on with my life.

I know that at first I’ll miss a few things: the candles (as I curse myself for never having learned to make my own when I still had access to the internet), the washing machine (though in a collapse situation I doubt I’ll find it necessary to own and maintain as much clothing as I do now), the table saw (which would quickly be replaced by arm muscles the likes of which my body has never seen), and my stereo (the CDs will become mobiles and I’ll finally build that pedal powered record player I have plans for). Certain things will be missed, but I don’t think I’d mourn them for long.

But maybe, just maybe, we’ll all get our shit together before it comes to a collapse, and start redesigning Our Way of Life so that it is no longer at such odds with the habitat that keeps us alive. Maybe we’ll start making smart decisions about power use—cutting out the things that make our life easier but not better so that we can keep whatever we decide is the most important—and maybe pigs will sprout wings and cart us off to hell by the scruffs of our necks. You never do know, do you?

Cutting back on our personal electricity use can make a difference in its small way, but remember: it is industry that uses the most water, the most power, pretty much the most everything. So while we’re kicking our refrigerators to the curbs, let’s save a kick or seven for the industries whose practices need the biggest makeover of all.

How do you keep your power usage (and bills) down? How do you think we could convince corporations to do the same?

Photo (cc) flickr user CHINNY!

When I met the Beard, he was living in the guest trailer of the Wagenplatz where we now both live—a tiny three meter by the length of a bed, metal-sided number. There was a desk, a wood stove, and a shelf across the right-hand wall. He didn’t own a lot—he probably had less than those simple living folks’ prescribed 100 things completely by accident—and it was a cozy place to spend an evening. When you spend most of your time outside and it is summer, it doesn’t really matter how small your room is. But when there are two of you, and one of you owns a whole lot more than 100 things, well, you move out the guest trailer and into a seven-meter number you buy from a resident who is moving on.

Bit by bit my things traveled from Frankfurt to Mainz. I dragged two long rectangular office cabinets with sliding doors out of the trash, sanded them down, painted them blue, and stacked them one on top of the other so our clothes had places to live. That was my first trash renovation project, and my first time using any sort of power sander. When I think back to how frustrating I found the whole experience and how long it took me and then look around at my finished wagon ship, well, I have to chuckle at the expense of that old version of myself.

Shelves already hung on the wall housed my books, and soon a heavy wooden shelf joined them, partitioning off a writing area in one of the reincarnations of our floor plan. I carried a wooden desk (with one of those fancy tops that you can rig up at an angle for drafting) the 2 km home from the video store when I found it outside someone’s house, not willing to risk running home for a handcart and finding it gone. Neither of us owned any furniture, but bit by bit the trash provided everything we needed, from the blankets to the couch.

You can read about the first wagon I ever loved here.

When I last showed you finished pictures of the inside of my wagon, there was still something missing. That something was a table. Moved in though I was, I was still doing all my writing from my bed, and what that meant was that I was getting a lot more sleeping done than I was writing.

My original plan had been to mount a folding table on the wall so that I could fold it down and out of my way when I got a hankering for more space, but the trash had not been forthcoming with a piece of wood big enough to play the role of tabletop. I shrugged, figured something would turn up, concentrated on other projects, and in November, something finally did.

On a crisply cold, sunny morning I filled a handcart with old cans of paint and turpentine and wheeled it over to the university’s big trash corral. I stacked up my old paint cans in the designated spot for poisonous chemical crap, and then I took a look around. Seems there’s always something waiting for me there when I bring along junk that even I have declared useless. An offering the dumpster gods apparently appreciate.

There was a big wooden pallet that I took home to turn into kindling. There was a small Styrofoam barrel (with removable lid) that I took home to try out as a summer refrigerator. There was a wooden wine crate that I took home to use for storage or shelving. (You can read about my love of re-using old wooden wine crates here.) And there was a table. Cart full, I wheeled home. If I could whistle, I’m sure I would have.

She isn’t much to look at: a battered wooden tabletop set on top of thin gray metal legs. But it’s just the right size, and there’s no ugly table that a big enough piece of fabric can’t turn into the prom queen.

There you see her: my work space, my kitchen table, and home, most of the time, to piles of lots of little pieces of paper I don’t really know what to do with. (Eventually, I always find a place for them though. You like being organized? Get a wood stove, put it next to your desk, and you’ll never be bothered by too much paper clutter again. Heh.) Best part is, it’s not just the table that I found in the trash.

The picture frames above the table came from the Frankfurt Sperrmuell (German word for big trash that people leave outside their homes to be picked up by a special collection truck). The tablecloth was in the free shop in the house/venue at the front of our Wagenplatz. The teapot was in a Sperrmeull pile that I happened upon on my way home from the grocery store last spring.

The mug, the candle, and that fancy glass holder that the candle is in I found in the student housing trash across the street from where I live, as well as the trash can and what looks like a miniature sheepskin-lined sleeping bag (once the winter lining of a stroller, now the place where I keep my feet warm) that are under the table. Even the notebook where I’ve just jotted down a list of future Click Clack Gorilla posts came to me straight from the dumpster gods.

What have you found in the trash recently?

I’m looking for submissions for dumpster show and tell. Take a look in your local dumpster. Take a look around your place. Then take some pictures of your dumpster booty, and send ‘em to nicolettekyle (at) yahoo (dot) com with some words about where and how you found the stuff in the picture and what you’re going to do with it. And for safety’s sake, better put “dumpster find of the week” in the subject line.

Tell me a little bit about yourself if you’d like (I’ll keep things as anonymous or blatant as you indicate I should). Tell me about your first time diving, your favorite dumpster, or anything else that seems appropriate at the time. I’ll take your emails and your photos and turn them into a blog post that will show up here, one each Wednesday until one of us stops caring.

Submitting your photos and words to me indicates that you have legal rights to said pictures and words, and that you are giving me legal permission to post your pictures and quote your words on Click Clack Gorilla. If you don’t hear back from me within a week, it means the internet ate your mail and you should try again.

So in the words of the esteemed Dolly Freed: “It’s feasible. It’s easy. It can be done. It should be done. Do it.” Go dumpster diving and come home to your favorite gorillas to brag about it.

A couple of years ago Fish in the Water was visiting, and we embarked on a Wagenplatz photo project with portraits of Platz residents. Many photos were taken and much fun was had, but to date we still haven’t done anything with the project. At the time I posted a statement Fishie had written about the project here.

So, long story short, today I got an e-mail from a friend. “I saw you!” the e-mail said. I clicked on the link, and there we were, sitting in front of a trash can on a website called Punks I’d Like to Fuck. I snorted out loud when I saw where we’d been featured.

Before you get your panties in a bunch over whether or not this is PC, check out the website creator’s statement at the bottom of the website (theirs). I won’t reproduce it all here, but the gist is that the website is about someone taking control of her sexuality, accepting it, celebrating it, and at the same time, celebrating people that she thinks are purdy, both men and women alike.

I imagine that a site like this probably gets a lot of very controversial reactions, even though the photos on the site are of ladies and gents hanging out (read: not getting naked), even though it chooses to celebrate beauty in a way that I find much more healthy than the way of the mainstream fashion magazine.

“EACH AND EVERY BODY IS WORTH LOVING, EACH AND EVERY BODY DESERVES TO BE LOVED.” -PILF

How do you celebrate beauty?

The tulips are beginning to brave the world of air and light, and as I write this I’m sitting at my little table with the door open and the wood stove unlit. Every single year I am shocked that Spring has really come again. It is inevitable, and yet, after the long winter months, it seems as if warm sunlight and tank tops are part of an alternate universe I’d dreamed of once, but would never experience.

But today legs and arms and heads can be tentatively stuck out of doors. Today the sun is shining. And rumor has it that tomorrow it will be shining too.

Photo: A little bit of today. I’m dog sitting, and the sun is shining. What a good reason to take a long walk in Spring’s afterbirth.

Lookie, lookie! I’ve been featured on Angela Barton’s lovely blog “My Year Without Spending.” Every week she does a post called Thrifty Threads that showcases someone in an outfit they got second hand. This week I’m featured in an outfit that came from a flea market, a free box, the dumpster, and an abandoned house. Plus she says all sorts of really nice things about this blog. You can read the post here.

Oh, and don’t worry. All of those links are from me. I’ve decided against the ads we discussed on Thursday.

Ladies and gentleman of the jury, I present to you Exhibit A: cold hard proof that the Click Clack Gorilla does something besides lurk behind her computer writing blogs. Despite having recorded this demo cd almost a year ago, I have only now managed to defeat the demons that face me each time I sit down at the computer to attempt things that are not writing. Lucky for me and my impatience, PayPal actually makes selling things on the interweb pretty easy.

So here we are, me with cheap, diy country music, you with a few extra dollars in your pocket. Until the copyright folks catch up with us, you can call us Black Diamond Express Train to Hell. But once the band in England with the same name decides to sue us, we’ll argue for months over a new name in order to decide on something even longer and less memorable. Let’s all hope that that day isn’t already strolling briskly towards us.

The music you’ll find on the demo is country of the old-timey variety. I warble, and some other folks who I like very much play cajon, harmonica, dobro, guitar, bass, banjo, and mandolin. There are three old traditionals, and the rest are BDETH originals, which means you can expect to hear a good deal about whiskey, squatting, and sticking it to the man. Both cd and cassette come with a booklet full of lyrics and my wordy explanations of what the hell I was thinking at the time. Oh, and we did everything ourselves, from the recording (done in a basement practice room by a friend) to the booklets to the hand-stamped cds. DIY love and stuff.

Track list:
1. Two on the Road
2. Stranglers
3. St. James Infirmary
4. Crow’s Nest
5. By and By
6. Salt Creek
7. Whiskey Walz
8. Wayfaring Stranger

I tried to make ordering all snazzy with a fancy button with a drop down menu with prices for cds, cassettes, and location, but it didn’t work. In fact, after much clicking around on the PayPal website, it still doesn’t work. So it’s time for Plan C. Step one: look at the price list and decide what you want and where you are (prices include shipping):

CD Europe: 6.45 euro
CD America: 8.45 euro
Cassette Europe: 5.45 euro
Cassette America: 7.45 euro

Now, look over on the sidebar to your left. There you will see a picture of a blue wagon/trailer that looks like a shoe beneath the words “tip jar (donate!).” Click on this, fill in the amount for the bit of music you’d like and your area, and don’t forget to include your shipping address when closing the transaction. If you’re ordering multiples, let me know what it is you want. Otherwise I’ll be able to tell by the donation amount you fill in. If you live somewhere that I haven’t accounted for, then e-mail me (nicolettekyle (AT) yahoo (DOT) com), I’ll figure out the postage, and we’ll go from there.

People of Germany!

If you like what you hear or just want to meet the skin and bones behind the blog, Black Diamond will be playing a handful of shows in March, and a Germany-Holland tour is in the works for this June. Come for the whiskey and stay for the bar fights…

March 4: Mannheim // ASV – AGM Soli
March 5: Wiesbaden // Kulturpalast Hectic Society Fest with Pascow and others
March 11: Mainz // Haus Mainusch with Gunmob and Civil Victim
March 12: Wiesbaden // Kreativ Fabrik

May 13: Mainz // Not sure where but with Phoebe Kreutz (woo!)

June 18: Bingen // Open Air Fest Rochusberg
June 25: Ingelheim // Euro Folk Festival 7 pm

And if you happen to live in the vicinity of Mainz, you’ll find an article about us in the February STUZ. Yihaw. Peng peng. Etc.

Oh readers, dear, I have an important question for all of you. An advertising agency has contacted me about putting a few ads on Click Clack Gorilla. The money isn’t bad, and the ads would consist of linked keywords within the text. Aka sometimes words would be hyperlinks, and those hyperlinks would lead to websites who have paid for the mention. It doesn’t sound very intrusive, and yet, I hesitate.

What do you think? Would you be annoyed to see paid hyperlinks in Click Clack Gorilla text? Would I be?

This blog has never been about making money (though maybe in another five years I will finally have earned myself a ten dollar Amazon gift certificate through Amazon Associates, harheeharharhar), but about writing–keeping motivated to write more consistently, getting feedback from time to time, and having a real neat filing system for all the drafts. If it weren’t for Click Clack Gorilla my ship would have sunk beneath tiny bits of paper long ago.

And yet, getting some money for something I would be doing anyway sounds like a pretty sweet deal. And if an advertising agency is paying me, then I will never need to resort to hassling you all for cash when mamma needs a new pair of shoes. So what do you think? Do you have ads on your own site? (And has your experience been good or bad?) Would ads on Click Clack irritate? Or should I just stop biting my nails and do it already?

We rolled back into Germany after our two-month trip to America euphoric and cracked out. Someone, it seems, had stolen the entire night from us. When we’d left Newark, New Jersey, it had been late afternoon. When we arrived in Germany again just seven hours later, it was already late afternoon again.

So we cracked a few of what we’d been missing most—cheap, delicious German beers—and I went across the street to see if the trash had missed me. It had. So much in fact, that it had a little present waiting for me.

It is February 1st, and today the count down to spring begins in earnest because this morning I sawed up the last of the firewood, and when it’s gone, it damn well better be spring.

Nervous that the wood would run out before the cold weather did, I bought a few packs of mollies (i.e. pressed wood briquettes—they are the dark brown things on the bottom shelf there). Despite their mercifully long burn time and high burning temperature, however, grinding up trees and pressing the bits into briquettes in a factory is probably less efficient than just burning the trees in the first place. But at least they keep me off of the junk, I say. The junk being coal, that magical stone that burns long enough to keep a little wagon ship warm all through the night, so seductively easy to heat with, and the reason why mountain tops are being blown up and water supplies surrounding mines poisoned. The day I start buying coal I welcome you to come over and hit me over the head with a baseball bat.

But until that fine day arrives, I will gaze upon my dwindling supply of firewood with excitement rather than fear. Every block gone is another day closer to spring mornings, to breakfasts outside, to bare legs and bare feet and popsicles and lakes.

What does spring have in store for you?