I Painted My Door Orange, Just Like I Promised
Kindling a new light (DN 4.ZX)
I begin by apologizing to loyal readers, and to all those who eagerly await the next installments of The Distributed Nation. It is taking longer than any of us would like. All the notes are there; it’s just taking time to write the installments. The primary explanation is simple: I have to make money elsewhere, which diverts some of my time.
The Distributed Nation isn’t a LARP; we are creating something that has never existed before—a new kind of diasporized polity. We must succeed. Thus, I will redouble my efforts to lay out the rest of the blueprint as fast as I can.
This means that I must not allow the perfect to be the enemy of the good. I am going to start pumping out posts as quickly as time will allow. The next few will be a bit less polished than usual, as I wrap up the straggler notes for this chapter. Then, the rubber will really meet the road in Chapter 5.
Back in April (goodness, has it been that long already?), I posted Chapter 4.8: Is Color Being Drained from the World? It was among my most popular pieces for the simple reason that it touched something we’ve all been feeling.
Totalitarianism feels gray. I saw it with my own eyes in 1991. Even the beautiful royal palaces of St. Petersburg (then Leningrad) could not overcome the slight grayish pall that seemed to hang in the air.
Then, in 2020, we all got a small glimpse with the world’s descent into…what should we call it? Coviditarianism? Not as unfree as the USSR, but definitely a glimpse. When a so-called “free” country wants to oppress you, they can simply declare (or create?) an emergency, and that’s that. The years 2020–2022 definitely felt gray.
As such, it is not surprising that when we see actual color being drained from the world—from cars, clothes, buildings, movies, advertisements, and more—we have a visceral reaction.
That reaction was reflected in the comments, and in my original Substack Note on the subject, much of which is chronicled in
’ July 26th edition of The Scroll.In the course of those comments,
said (emphasis added),Italy, like many countries, has many beautiful cities, towns and villages with gorgeous pastel colored houses that bring a smile and also of stone but with wonderful colored accents such as doors - windows -balconies. After WWII the ugliest apartment complexes were built - just cement lumps. Interestingly that is where most of the crime is.
To which I replied:
Maybe we could start a trend of colorful doors…
And I decided then and there to do exactly that.
We begin with the fact that my house is sided in a color that wants to be sage green, but is in fact just a sad gray, like a neglected battleship. The door is painted a tragic green to match. Not a rich, deep, foresty green, but a green with the grayish pallor of decay.
It was also very badly painted by some previous owner:
So I set to work painting it a happier color:
I did the trim in a rich cinnamon (left over from when we painted my wife’s office).
Note that I also painted the star. I’d like to do the lanterns too. Perhaps next spring!
Now doesn’t that look better?
Here’s the whole thing, as of this morning:
It sure does pop! And neighbors have commented that it really does brighten things up to see it. Color works.
As an aside…
A few weeks later, as a kind of birthday present for my wife, I built that wall planter for lavender (which she loves), using some leftover bricks from when we redid our walkway. While I was building it, my neighbor (retired army) drove by and said that it looked like I was setting up “fighting positions.” So, unbeknownst to me, he bought some fighting gnomes and added them to the finished product.
Kudos to my wife for liking the gnomes and leaving them among her beloved lavender. (She’s so chill. Plus, if these ever became fighting positions for real, she’d be right there behind them.)
So there you have it. Ninety percent of the people who chimed in on the color-drain trend want to see more color return to the world. But if we want to see such things happen, then we must make them happen. And so I did just that.
Painting your front door a vibrant color may seem like a small gesture, but it says a lot. It says something about you as an individual. It’s an act of defiance against the creeping grayness. And if a lot of us do it, it becomes an even bigger statement.
Being a beacon starts with little things like this. Will this become a thing that we—freeholders, Terrans, or whatever we end up calling ourselves—start doing? I don’t know. Our culture will grow organically.
But if we do, It won’t just be raging against the dying of the light…
It will be kindling a whole new light.
My husband told me Technocracy Gray was an actual colour. Looks like it’s making a comeback!
The door looks great. My door is an attractive bright blue/green with orange frame against a rock wall, the front is blue/green with orange window frames. Getting to where it could use a touch up. Looking forward to the incoming posts!