She was in the Lair, looking up at the perpetually-unfinished cabinet over the sink, at the working supply of bulk food I keep up there…Barley, corn flour, beans, beans, rice, oatmeal…

…Potatoes, onions, sugar, dry milk…

Trader Joe’s House Blend Dark Roast Coffee!!! (Whole bean only, if you please.)

Because to me, food is just fuel. I enjoy eating good food, just like I enjoy wearing nice clothes, but I won’t go out of my way to do it.  A nice quiche is a wonderful thing, but a fried egg is easier. Stew up some potatoes, onions, beans and barley, maybe with a little chicken or rabbit, and you’ve got several simple meals that stick nicely to the ribs. Any hermit can do it. Food is easy.

Coffee, on the other hand, is important.

I know a perfectly intelligent person who disagrees. He doesn’t drink coffee at all, if you can imagine it. Couldn’t care less about it, and probably wouldn’t know the difference between the finest fresh roasted Arabica and Folgers Instant. But he could deliver a disquisition about Imperial Japanese proof markings on Arisaka rifles that would cause Douglas MacArthur to nod off. He knows details concerning Mosin Nagant variations that maybe – maybe! – as many as a hundred other people on the planet give a damn about. And unless you can quietly escape or hit him in time with the tranquilizer darts we always try to keep handy, he will tell you about them. Forgotten weapons, to him, are important.

And the point is, my friend has labored for nearly as long as I’ve known him, which turns a decade this year, to make all that esoteric knowledge pay him a living. He has worked temp jobs and eaten Ramen three times a day, and I’ve never seen it make him so much as frown – because he’s doing what’s important to him and he has the comforts he cares about as compensation. He told me just this week that with his various income streams he’s finally getting into the neighborhood of minimum wage. And as far as I can tell, my friend is a happy man.

I also live a life few other people would consider worthwhile. I live with dirt, wear patched rags, eat plain, monotonous food and endure a certain amount of what some might consider hardship and risk – and I do it with a smile, most days. Why? Because with all that I buy the one thing I must have for joy of life, which is freedom from the niggling demands for compliant acts of fealty – backed by the very real threat of force – that drove me to near-madness when I was Mr. Suburban Man.

Yeah, I’m weird. I’m not Solzhenitsyn or Anne Frank, I haven’t been oppressed any more harshly than you are every damn day. Petty insults you shrug off or don’t even bother to notice drove me damn near to paranoid delusions. Maybe I’m just delicate. But the more I thought about it, the more I decided I couldn’t think of a price I wouldn’t pay if only there was a way out of that. And this is the way I found, and it has not been without cost or compromise.

And it’s also not without comforts. And sometimes, as Landlady laughed at my shelf and pointed out, the addition of one absurd little luxury can counteract the otherwise grinding effect of eating ‘brown’ food every damn day. As long as it’s chosen correctly, and as long as you can get it – for which I thank Landlady, who brings it up for me, it helps me stay a happy man.