Welcome Back Rant

As my last post indicated, I tried moving my blog to Wordpress. I got it in my head that I was going to build a more robust site with "how-to" pages and other resources, but it turned out it was just too much work. I have little interest in taking on more commitments, especially ones that are technology-dependent. I also got sidetracked by Facebook for awhile, but I got sick of people posting about the mundane things in their ordinary lives. No offense to them, I'm just not interested. I suppose my life is plenty mundane, or at least odd and incomprehensible, to most of them.

Blogger gives me a release, without the complication of building a resource, and without the distraction and even greater complication of Facebook.

So I guess I'm back, and though I do try to avoid all-out rants, today I think is going to be a rough one.

Why today? I'm at work and wholly depressed, which isn't a big surprise if you've read anything I've written over the years. I have a high-paying job with wonderful benefits that contributes to a cleaner, greener world, my peers respect me, my work environment is low-stress and my employer is generous.

And I hate my job. I hate it in the way that a lover of fine dining might hate giving up juicy steaks, fine wines, crisp fruits, tender vegetables, crusty breads and silken desserts for the futuristic meal-in-a-pill. It isn't that it tastes bad, or that it lacks nutrition (assuming humans could actually achieve this), but rather that it tastes like nothing and leaves the soul malnourished. I feel like a suburban drone, passing the days not by the rhythms of nature but by the wholly artificial ticking of the clock. I feel unstimulated. Unmoved. Unmotivated. Pointless. Wasteful. Sad.

I have to get out.

My coworkers praise my work, my work ethic, and my good-natured personality. But I'm just going through the motions. My body is here earning money to pay everyone else to provide my "living," but my heart roams the forested mountains in search of something real.

I watched a movie called The New World last night. It was a little slow as it was more a love story than anything, but it put me in a mood. It reminded me (as if I needed reminding) just how f*ed up white people and Western society are and always have been. If I came ashore in America in 1607 I would join the Indians and never look back. They had it made. The mere fact that they managed to live on this continent for 14,000 years and not destroy it, and we managed to take it to the brink in just a few centuries speaks volumes.

I despise money and the clock and the calendar. I despise the Western social hierarchy, the greed and the gluttony and the backstabbing. I hate fashion and gadgets and everything that Pottery Barn represents. I hate that we're not only willing, but eager to trade timeless, unspoiled wilderness for a metaphorical minute of suburbia. I hate annual performance reviews and standardized tests. I hate car culture and television and processed industrial calories that pass as food. I hate human stupidity and I hate being part of the whole f*ed up system. I hate religion, especially the "big three."

All I want is to live deliberately. All I want is to hunt and gather and grow my own food, to build my own home, to laugh with friends, to breathe clean air and drink clean water, to walk among ancient forests and to wonder and ponder over the midnight stars. I don't need "stuff" beyond what I can make from what the forest provides. I don't need "culture" or "entertainment." I don't even need to own land. I just need to live with the land, and after I die let someone else walk in my footsteps. That's all. You know, the way most humans have lived for three million years. Is that so much ask? Really? I don't want fame and fortune, I have no interest in keeping up with the Jones', and you can keep your plastic suburban fantasy. I want to extricate myself from it entirely. If I don't do something soon I will go mad.

I've thought about going back to school and becoming a biologist, but even scientists often irk me. As Ian Malcom said in Jurassic Park, "what you call discovery, I call the rape of the natural world." I'm not at all comfortable with poking and prodding nature merely to see "what makes it tick." Some things, I think, are best left to the realm of the mysterious. I don't need to know what's happening on a cellular level inside of Clostridium botulinum, or even that it exists. Is it not enough to know that cooking certain foods keeps one from getting sick? Is it not enough to gain wisdom from observing and interacting with the natural world, rather than gain information by dissecting it under a microscope?

Why must I "get a job?" I'm not lazy, not at all. I love work. A few weeks ago I spent an entire day felling, limbing, bucking and splitting firewood in the forest using nothing but a double ax, an antique bucking saw and a maul. I used no fossil fuels except to drive my truck up in the mountains because I don't have and anyway wouldn't be allowed to use a horse drawn cart on modern roads. And anyway if it weren't for the "advancements" of society I wouldn't even need the cart or to cut down trees. Natives had small fires burning twigs and dung that kept them quite warm with no need even for harvesting firewood as we know it. Talk about efficiency!

That said, I'm not opposed to learning a trade. I need to work with my hands more. I need to walk and interact with things that are real, like wood and wildlife, not plastic and suburban cube-zombies.

When the weekend comes and I'm in the Rockies, I feel alive and happy and deeply interested. When the weekdays come I feel dead and numb, like my spirit is broken. Work is an endless procession of pointless days doing pointless work to live a life I don't want in the first place. How do I get out?

How do I get out?