I often find it hard to be honest with the world around me. While it seems so easy for words to pour on out on the blog, I often are so much more guarded on social media and in person. I am often afraid of being seen as too much of ahayseed or a hillbilly, too conservative or too wild.
The other day in the office meeting, it was mentioned I wanted to be an off-gridder eventually, having that cabin in the wilderness, something simple rustic and more like a hunting cabin than a modern-plastic filled residence. But somehow I had to be so defensive, noting that off-grid houses don’t have to be simple or backwards.
It’s well known I live in a completely dumpy apartment in suburbs, and I don’t own a television or have internet at home beyond my phone – which at this point – at least in my imagination is not that much of a limitation. I’m more then willing to admit that publicly, but the off-grid idea seems too backwards to defend publicly in places beyond the blog where I control all parts of the content and formatting.
I keep telling myself I will get into the dating game, try to meet some nice girls, but I always find myself shying away, despite getting books out of the library on how to be a good dater. I use excuses like I’m busy, I’m up ni the wilderness this weekend, I don’t want to get tied down. But it’s mostly pure fear, the fear of rejection. I know I should brush it off – it’s the American way to write off loses, to throw away and declare bankruptcy. After all, our President is the king of bankruptcy and stiffing his creditors. Garbage dumps everywhere I waiting for your effulence, so just walk away, if the girl doesn’t want you, a million other exist. But I’m scared of commitment.
Maybe I’m just unsure about everything these days, lacking in confidence in my beliefs. Or maybe my ideas are very shallow and all that is worthwhile in this world is plastic and chemical – a series of monthly fees and canned entertainment on the television and internet produced by actors.
You burn plastic, you knuckle-dragging hillbilly, criminal who hates mother earth.
Says the people in the plastic houses with their recycling bins packed full of plastic trash, soon enough to be hauled away in the smoke-bleaching diesel trucks, smashing it in with the tin cans, junk mail, and glass wine bottles. Soon enough to be deposited at the smelly old material recycling facility, with much of the plastics to be only temporarily diverted from the landfill as there is little market for oversees for waste plastics.
Honestly, I don’t care that much as I watch that plastic bottle melt and get all distorted into werid shapes as the bright yellow flames and thickly black smoke floats off into the atmosphere. It’s reality. That said, I don’t exactly enjoy the pollution or smoke, and I do what many recycles don’t do – I try to avoid plastics and packaging to the extent I can. I buy in bulk and shun packaged food as much as possible in favor of basic raw ingredients. Yes, there is inevitably is plastic mulk jugs, yougurt containers and Styrofoam egg containers, and those lightweight plastic bags, but they hardly are what the typical suburban consumer produces.
Outlaw maybe, but then again many backwoods people operate the fringe of legality, mostly living out of the shadow of the law and peering neighbors. But there is so few of such people, that despite all the worries of dioxin and plasticizers, it doesn’t really add up to much and doesn’t impact anyone else. The cowboys and farmers, the rural residents and cabin dwellers. The men of the forest. The letters on the paper board box, charred and blackened and turned back to ash and brown off on the wind.
Now I get not everybody can be a backwoods hillbilly, doing things the old backwards ways frowned upon by urban society, as it cranks out it effulence and makes it’s ego fill full of wokeness. So proud to be washing out those plastic containers, and carefully sorting them out from the other discards on the short or longer trip to the city dump, and growing piles of shit that surround all our cities and rise over the countryside. Still it doesn’t mean I think they’re right.
