I really enjoy debating with people. I realise that many times I probably won’t change their minds, but I like putting out my side of the story, and pointing out why I believe the things that I do. My opponents may at times have far better researched facts or be set in their ways, but it is so much fun to say it how I see it.
I’m not one to like to be pushed around. I don’t like seeing people disagreeing with me. I wish I could push them over to see the world the way I do based on my own personal experiences. While granted I doubt I will ever change any body’s mind, it’s just so much fun to argue.
They say our country is as strong as it is based on the amount and quality of free speech there is out there. More speech and more voices is always improving the quality of the debate. Yet I sometimes wonder when too much can start to crowd out the debate. Or when I dilute down my best ideas by combining them with too many others.
Lately it seems like I’ve be coming to many a fork in the road. It seems like they come much too quickly and frequently, and I often do not know which one to take. Do you go left or right? Which is the right way to go and which is wrong?
It’s frequently not clear. If there where signs to direct you along the way, the signs have long since disappeared. They’ve been stolen, because others didn’t want you to follow in their path. They wanted you to make up your own decisions, and find your own way.
Not that I ever was much of a fan of road signs. I’ve never been one to follow the directions of others, and often when I see one sign pointing to good and bad, I choose the bad road, just to see what’s down there. The good road, after all wouldn’t let me check out how well my hubs worked.
I sit tonight under the stars on the tailgate of my pickup, deep in the woods in Southern Schoharie County. Tall pine trees tower over me as I look at a sky that has finally cleared out and the stars are shining brightly down on me. A nice big campfire provides light, as does my overhead florescent lamp powered by my truck when I turn it on to write.
I yehaw at the moon with my cowboy hat on, drinking yet another Corona. I listen to yet another top-40 country music song, inter-spaced with some obnoxious religious right talk on another station that seems so powerful out here. I cook myself a meal on the old gas stove made of eggs, hash, potato chips, and lots of Corona. I’m in heaven it seems.
I just love being alone, playing cowboy out in the woods around the fire. I’m increasingly drunk, but at the same time I am so much at ease, so peaceful in a kind of redneck-y kind of way. I love my pickup truck and I love the woods. I’m just not sure how I could ever live without such a free life.
The greatest Christmas gift is something that lasts forever. It’s not something whose wrapper you chuck in that 55 gallon drum and celebrate by breathing in that thick black toxic plastic smoke. That is far from happiness. It has to be something far greater then material stuff.
To me it is Patridge Run. Every Christmas morning I go out to that place, going for a nice long walk in the snow, and ride around on snow covered roads with my 4×4 truck and my dog on my side. This is a place of true greatness, of natural happiness far more then what one consumer gift might be. It’s about being natural.
The gift of Christmas is also about being with your family and eating together. It might be a factory farm turkey, or it might be something more natural like venison if your lucky enough at your hunt. The important thing is to be together, to reflect, to be truly part of our earth. The gift is about love.
It’s also the candlelight service and church. It’s about the hope that such a service instills upon us, as a baby more then 2000 years who was born to help us forever cope without weaknesses. A baby not unlike you and I, a king no richer then the typical person on the street.
Christmas should forever last in our minds. It should not be about trash preserved forever in a landfill or toxic smoke produced by our consumerism. We all like stuff, but we should try to dig deeper then plastic bags, and go back out in the same nature that created all of us including Jesus Christ.
