As 2025 fades away so quickly…

It was a year of pure madness and paranoia of myself and others. A victim of the confusing times we live in, where maleaase and fear dominated all aspects of life as spent many hours reading and listening to Edward Abbey and Hunter S. Thompson as I smoked pot by many a campfire, and rode back and forth to that hideously ugly suburban state office building next to one of many former city garbage dumps. It was really stupid to fear my truck so much, to delay and cut back both my summer vacation and my autumn road trip just because I feared my truck would melt down and fall apart in wilderness.

Eighteen years came and went in my career and in my apartment. The strong economy, my frugal living and investing started to pay off on paper but I still don’t have that off-grid cabin, goats, hogs, or a burn barrel out back though I did spend a lot of time in wilderness and burned up a lot of debris, pallets and wood from the forest. Been since last winter when I recycled any plastic but I dumped most of my food scraps in my parents compost and I’ve been collecting cans all summer. I feared every creak and gone of my now rusty pickup, though it still seems hard to imagine a life after Big Red. I scaled my plans back because I lived in fear, that breakdown in wilderness or somewhere in West Virigina that never happened, though I did enjoy getting back to the North Country and the Adirondacks for the first time in years. Spending that weekend up in Plattsburgh sure was memorable.

Reading and E-books became a bigger and bigger part of my life as I learned to fully exploit the free resources the public library offers. Spent many an evening over at Five Rivers reading and thinking, laying back and watching as it got dark out. Those summer days come and gone much too quickly, replaced with long dark nights spent going to bed early and reading under the heated blanket, trying to stay warm in my diaploated apartment. While moisture issues have meant the paint has always pealed, after 18 years of no paint and minimal maintance, it’s really coming off in big flakes this year. Like usual, the most memorable places I went to where new to me, but I alway was too afraid to try too much change. Didn’t want to get too far out, break something on my big jacked pickup, which continued to serve me reliably all year.

So much of the year was dominated by extreme confusion in my mind, and general indirection. Maybe because there was no obvious answers and much emptiness in world. Maybe it was the lessons learned in 2024, the reinforcement of the fact that there was no easy answers and all the options were bad. With nothing better to do, I just push forwarded, with vague notions of the future, though even on that front I didn’t give it a whole lot of thought. Maybe it was best I deleted the Zillow app off my phone. There are a lot of options out there, but the ones I actually like are much too far away. And New York State sucks even if it pays the bills and let’s me save and invest to a better future. And all I got was more wokeness pushed upon me. You don’t like the status quo, or how everything is fucked up? Try going woke.