Adaptive Curmudgeon

Dead Man Dance put words on a mental state which heretofore has remained ill defined.

“Tired but not sleepy, hungry but vaguely nauseous. What is it that hippies talk about? Chi? Biorythm? I think mine is gone.”

It’s a feeling that we’ve all had. I get it when I’m overworked and especially if I’ve been on the road a lot. I try to call it “strung out from the road” but that makes me sound like a crappy Bob Seger song. Kudos to Dead Man Dance for an apt description.

Note: I don’t necessarily get fried from many miles of merely driving. Under the right circumstances like the road. A good machine under my control and an excellent road is the closest thing I’ll ever get to wings! (This is also why hippies and busybodies will never fully shove all Americans into buses and light rail. When you’re in a bus you’re cargo. When you’re piloting a vehicle you’re the captain of your own ship, shaping your destiny, seeing the world as a million generations before the internal combustion engine could only dream. To have abilities akin to the Gods and throw them away for a commuter bus pass is more or less a surrender of the soul.) The limiting factors are time away from home, erratic schedules, shitty food, and excess work… it’s a deadly combination and it’ll strike more completely when you’re sitting on your ass begging for a packet of peanuts on a plane as when you’re blasting a motorcycle solo through a lonely Wyoming windstorm.

I fly. Not in the good way, with dragons wings, LSD, or my own bushplane. I fly in the bad way, on commercial airlines.

Commercial flight is a relentless circular firing squad that starts with TSA fondling my balls and ends when I’m infuriated and hollow; slumped across the car rental counter discovering my reservation has vanished and now I’ll have time to wait for my lost luggage because the last car was rented to someone who fled the terminal five minutes ago. The degree and complexity of many little annoyances is awe inspiring. It takes work to devolve transport into something so deeply unpleasant.

I once liked flying. (Anything that has engines the size of a Japanese apartment is pretty cool.) Oh to be so young and impervious again. Over time commercial flight went from mildly inconvenient to insufferable. I it wasn’t any particular indignity that made the difference. It was the aggregation of them.

Also, it was me. I changed. I came to believe that free citizens simply shouldn’t be treated in certain ways. Further, I began to think that my submission to a system’s mistreatment reflected as poorly on me as the system.

My last straw was the “perv scan”. I’m not particularly worried about somebody seeing my naked ass but I am very worried about Americans being trained to walk through machines. Are people who, like trained poodles, jump through hoops on order… diminished? I think they are.

“[A] long train of abuses and usurpations”. It’s of a kind if very minor in degree. I don’t want to go overboard. TSA is nothing like the real and horrible oppression that is the lot of so many. Nor is shuffling citizens through a reverse orgasmitron a bullet to the head or starvation in the Gulag.

What it is, however, is training. You train people to eat shit before you serve it.

So I cut way back on commercial air flight. For a few years I cut it to zero. (Good for me!) It made a difference. I was pleased to have avoided one of the modern world’s annoyances.

Alas air travel is a natural monopoly. (My truck can’t drive to Norway or cross six time zones in a day.) I backslid. Here I am; eating shit. Again. Dammit!

I wondered the last time I was so royally pissed off with flight. Turns out I blogged about it in 2010; “I’m in the clutches of that great Kafkaesque clusterfuck called air travel. Nothing can save me.”

Same shit, different day.

An open letter to an airport; you know who you are.

I can forgive the TSA’s attempt to rape me. I hope you enjoyed it, you damn perverts.

I can forgive the airline that canceled my flight in anticipation of weather rather than because of it. I can forgive canceling my flight a day before the weather that didn’t happen. I can forgive not contacting me when I could easily have made adjustments in advance. I can forgive causing me to leaving my comfortable home many hours in advance for the privilege of watching my life, like sands through an hourglass, pour out on the concourse’s shitty tiled floor. I can forgive seats ideally sized for 8 year old female gymnasts, half ounce packets of pretzels, and generally turning the magic of flight from a golden adventure into a Kafkaesque nightmare.

However, there is no forgiveness in my heart for the airport lounge. Charging stranded innocents $11 for the booze they desperately need to keep from committing mayhem upon a vast system of integrated failure is simply wrong. It’s wrong written in neon on the face of humanity. It’s shitty on a galactic scale. Eleven bucks for a single mediocre drink is a sin against nature, an abomination before God, and a violation of civilizing norms. The sooner divine retribution sweeps their poisonous fangs from the neck of society the better. I don’t hope they die in a fire. I fervently dream of it. When it happens I will dance on their grave and sing songs about it. I’ll pay good money for an obelisk and erect it at their corporate front door. I’ll carve “Fuck them” on it’s base and hire street urchins to urinate hourly on their fiscal bottom line while commissioning an opera to commemorate how truly repulsive I found my tab.

Trust me on this, nothing good comes from being assholes. It’s good to make a profit, it’s evil to bleed a prisoner. I don’t know what will be the agent of karmic correction but I’m hoping it’s ugly and spectacular; possibly involving venereal disease, brimstone, and radioactive tapeworms.

As always, thanks for listening.

A.C.

It’s the turning of the yearly cycle. I (like many folks) use this time for post-game mental debriefings. If I don’t learn what lessons the prior year granted me I might get the same lesson again; good and hard. Is that not sufficient motivation?

You’re thinking I’m going to offer some Zen based koan? Deep thoughtful wisdom? Of course not. Are you new here? Rather I’ve reluctantly admitted that a limited subset of material goods (things I like to keep at arms length) significantly helped keep 2013 from going critical and melting me into the ground. I offer them to you. Either you’ll gain from my questionable wisdom or think I’m a chump with too much money and too little sense. Remember these are observations of an overworked, harried, homesteader (with a day job too), who lives in the middle of nowhere… your mileage may vary.

• My modified electric heated chicken watering bucket is worth it’s weight in gold. Is this device a revelation that improves my spiritual development and allows me to more fully experience life? Yes!
• Installing a second hand air conditioner in my office was a truckload of win. A machine that makes me more productive and less bitchy all summer long. How is that not magic? I should have installed one, regardless of budget, the day I built the office.
• A riding lawn mower with the unique feature called “starts every time” was a wise investment. I prefer my antique tractor in ways that I’ve articulated in thousands of words. Alas, we can’t always enjoy the journey. When you’re in a rush, Chinese made crap from a box store is a handy shortcut.
• The judicious use of Roundup is an epic force multiplier! Brush saws, grazing, fire, and mowers are better, simpler, more manly, and spiritually superior. However, when your time is booked enough for two people, do the math, spray carefully, and enjoy the fruits of chemistry’s dark arts.
• This isn’t a new concept but it bears notice. Mrs. Curmudgeon has nicknamed my truck “the big red security blanket”. Indeed it functions as such. I love all my vehicles as one loves all their children but 2013 was a year when cash dropped on a good truck yielded dividends by reducing the “shit I’ve got to deal with” list.
• Cheap electric boot warmer are priceless. I haven’t seen the positive side of the Fahrenheit scale in weeks. Warm boots on a cold morning keep nihilism at bay.

Time to mention some things that money can’t buy:

• I had wood stacked a year ahead. 2013 mugged me and left me bleeding in an alley. In the summer I just couldn’t find the time to cut enough for winter. My righteous “bank” from 2012 was waiting for me with several tons of sympathy and patience. It’s keeping me warm right now.
• I’m getting better at ignoring a shaggy lawn. A valuable survival skill. I generally desire a nicely mowed lawn but rarely attain it; I struggle to let go. (Once again Mrs. Curmudgeon leads the way. I don’t think she even knows we have a lawn. I could strip mine it and so long as the driveway is clear she’d be happy.)
• I’m getting better at ignoring sagging fences too. The “lose a few chickens but shave many hours off my work schedule” balance has not benefited the birds.

Now for some materialistic mistakes:

• Working too damn hard. I expected a recession delivered upside the head like a baseball bat. Why the economy isn’t a crater still eludes me. At any rate I’ve always worked hard but the last several years I’ve been really giving it my all. Has it paid off? Well yes and no. I’m not broke or living in a cardboard box but I’m not sure all that tremendous dedication and earnest effort moved the needle either for the better or worse. In the benefit of hindsight I know that 2013 beat me like a rented mule. I need to rein that in before I’m a skeleton.
• Overcoming impossible odds, sometimes you can’t do it. I had an unspecified job that was too huge. There was no way in hell I was going to get it done on my own and no way I could hire it done. I invested in equipment to increase my productivity. I turned one man on weekends into a human machine. I did more than one might expect. Alas, I’m just one man and you can’t move the world. The job didn’t get done. I don’t regret the expense and maybe I’ll finish the job in 2014. In hindsight I’d probably have been better off ignoring it and letting entropy have it’s way. Who am I to stand alone against the odds?
• My motorcycle; I scarcely rode it. Every year, the combined forces of all humanity have a secret meeting where they arrange things such that every time I want to ride my motorcycle there’s an “issue”. Every single stinking day of summer there’s a new obligation or twist or “just this time can you carry X” or “give a ride to Z”. I own a bike. All I need is a tank of gas… and time. I bleed at the time lost from riding. Summer 2013 is gone and won’t come back. I blew it. I swear I’m going to have to fake my own death and sneak away in the middle of the night just to get a few peaceful summer miles but if that’s what it takes I ought to do it.

Well there you have it. Notice that (aside from the truck and the mower) I didn’t get most of my biggest “wins” from big ticket items? Spiffy electric buckets, stacked wood, and a jug of Roundup mattered as much as anything. I wonder what other materialistic shortcuts I’m missing? Frankly 2013, while being a fine year, wore me out and who knows if ten cumulative hours with a frozen chicken waterer would have been the straw that broke the camel’s back? I hope 2014 takes it easier on me but at least I’m learning.