live. work. dream.

Overheard at the Slab City Library: Champagne Living on a Beer Budget? … Hey, can I have that? … Serendipity in action.

Funny how I kicked off the new year that way – remembering the old adage momma would often cite. And funny that this 1969 guide by Mike and Marilyn Ferguson for How to Buy the Best for Less came to my attention while boondocking for free among both shiny monster RVs and deep rooted old buses.

As mother would also often question though, “Funny ha ha or funny peculiar”?

Either way, funnier yet are various applicable quotes I turned to throughout Champagne Tastes on a Beer Budget:

Happiness is being rich enough to ask the man to show you something cheaper.
~ Johnny Carson

We choose to live like vagrants here for a while because it is much cheaper than the alternative of paying for comfortable amenities, and richness is measured in many more ways than wealth. Others live on the slabs out of need, all rich in their own ways.

Necessity never made a good bargain.
~ Poor Richard’s Almanac

It’s all about give and take, I say. What are you willing to give up to get what you want? And if you want freedom, for free, you might need to go without quite a bit. As most do here in Slab City, USA.

Oh give me a home where the buffalo roam,
And I’ll show you a filthy house.
~Author Unknown

There seem to be many more people here this year. But you don’t see much of them, being rounded up in their safe little RV caravans as they are. Safety in numbers I suppose, among the regular miscreant vagrants, loving hippies, wandering loners and hobos.

Money, which represents the prose of life, and which is hardly spoken of in parlors without apology, is, in its effects and laws, as beautiful as roses.
~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

What’s that make me then? Well, I’m not quite smelling like roses these days. And I gave up a lot to enjoy the beauty within. Yes you must look past certain filth, but I’m not spending a dime (out of pocket), and am rich in personal freedom and fixed in perfect reality.

This entry was posted on Sunday, February 7th, 2010 at 2:31 pm and is filed under Live, Simple Living. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.