Are you leaving for the country?

Does the city bring you down, asks the long gone Karen Dalton.

I couldn’t help thinking that all the week. That feeling I got when I dropped into the Schoharie Valley at Central Bridge, roaring along at 67 MPH in the SuperDuty along Interstate 88.

It’s been only two weeks since I last spent time up here at Duck Pond. Really not that long, and I’m heading up to the Adirondacks in a week. Maybe it’s because I have been toying with my thoughts and values with Gemani AI or I’ve spent so much of my free time outside of work camping up in wilderness, but it’s just been hard being in the city, especially last weekend with the roaring lawn mowers, rumbling diesel pickups and backfiring Honda Civic ricers. It’s just so loud, as I watched the garbage sack get filled at home, I just was so happy to watch it burn. And the gas needle sinks down to damn quickly on the SuperDuty.

Maybe I should buy a house. My apartment at this point is so diapoloated and worn, I will do my best to plug leaks before the cold of winter and keep my heat low, still it’s tough. I have money but not enough to permanently live off-grid and retire, especially with the cost of health insurance but also land, equipment, and the essentially mandatory plastic wrapped crap I buy every week, literally to push into the fire after I eat whatever is in them. It was nice cooking over the fire, and I do try to minimize packaging, but still there is so much to burn – even though far less then the typical suburban house.

Swept up by the beauty of the land, the connection to the earth of the loggers and farmers, the hunters and fisherman, I can easily ignore the poverty and rural struggle, as I’m just a weekend tourist, packed up and heading back to he city for another work week. I choose not to have a permanent abode. I do have a legal dewelling I’ve rented month by month going on nineteen years nwo, but it’s not home. I’ve only bought a handful of things to supplement the hand me downs I got from my parents and grandparents when I moved out. Camp is about fun stuff, smoking dope, burning shit and drinking beers, it’s the opposite of the rural relatity of slinging cow shit and making do. I have my fancy new SuperDuty and I can spend my weekends looking at the wildflowers all weekend. A then back to the city.

AI perks me up when I’m feeling down about living in the city, not being able to legally burn trash, or make noise, own the guns I want, have cattle and other livestock and live the rural life. It reminds me I have a plan and goals, a dream I’m making piece by piece financially, while I live my simple life. Some day I’ll settle down, but for now it’s a life based on escape, one weekend at a time.