Monday, April 17, 2006

Upon the Green Grass I Lie

What a wonderful day today. One that I will remember for a long time and hope to repeat in the upcoming days before the true heat of summer hits. I use such times to deprogram myself from the conventionalities of modern life. I get so lost in my thoughts.

I have been trying to go on a media fast these days. No radio, television, or internet news websites so I left my little walkman radio at home. So far, I have been successful other than one radio program that comes on at 9 p.m. in the evening. It is called The Golden Age of Radio. At least that program is rather innocuous as far as media goes playing old comedy skits from the 1940s. I find nothing of real relevance to my immediate life in the media so I shall not clutter up my mind by listening to or watching it any longer. I don’t want some other entity dictating what issues should be important to me or what I should be worrying about and why. If it is newsworthy then that news will find me by word of mouth or by direct experience.

Not much of note happened today on my day camping excursion other than seeing one lone turkey hen. I was lying quietly on my back upon my camp throw looking up at the sky and clouds through the overhead tree branches almost drifting off for a nap. Rosie was fast asleep at my feet. I heard a rustle in the underbrush and raised my head slowly. The turkey hen and I both froze. At this point, Rosie must have sensed the tension in the air and went tearing off after the hen. The hen went flying clumsily up into a nearby tree. Rosie thought it was her duty to sit at the base of the tree barking for a good half hour disturbing the solitude of my secret place. She finally grew bored of her guard duty and returned to lie at the foot of my camp throw. “Thank goodness!” I muttered under my breath as the silence of the woods returned.

During my hike and excursion today, my thoughts centered on the concept of money. I thought about how everything in life has some dollar value attached to it. The very land beneath my back as I lie there had some varying amount of green pieces of paper to signify what it is worth to us humans. The very society I live in is obsessed with obtaining and spending those little green pieces of paper. It is a necessary evil of my life that I must work for those pieces of paper as well. The older I get, the more I realize that those pieces of paper are more valuable to many others than actual human life. So many problems in this world of ours could be fixed if we didn’t attribute a dollar value to solving them. Alas, there will be no utopias in my time. I will spend most of the rest of my life scrambling to accumulate enough of those little pieces of paper to house and feed myself. The prospect is rather grim when I look at it that way. It reminds me of a surreal role playing video game as they are much the same way; always filled with tasks and quests to obtain a certain paltry amount of gold coins. Only the most dedicated and obsessed players get that expensive sword +3 of vampire slaying or that chest filled with rubies and diamonds.

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