0208blog

Float Downstream

I wish I was the kind of person who could just back away from the daily grind of the grid and find my balance and my place, hike around every corner of the world and not look back, leaving my earthly cares and material ways behind, depending on my wiles to survive, maybe eating wild strawberries and edible mushrooms, sleeping on a mattress of pine needles, making my camp fires with a flint and stone, fly fishing for hours and being entertained by the sweet melodies of the crickets and the birds as if they are talking directly to me, taking morning baths in the ice cold waters and then just watching the river flow, kayaking down the roaring Colorado, marveling at the mighty Himalayas and navigating the mysterious Amazon, sight the rarest and nearly extinct raptor, riding a camel through the sun baked Sahara and hiking and then skiing down the Matterhorn and the Alps and writing about all of my adventures in a journal and creating a video that I would sell for $10 million to Netflix and use the proceeds to buy a Maserati, a home in Vermont, a condo on the upper east side and a bungalow and two yachts in West Palm Beach, furnishing them all with the best furnishings money can buy along with season tickets to the Yankees, regular visits with front row seats at sold-out Broadway hits and having meals at uber expensive restaurants with menus that don’t tell you how much the food costs and being utterly unconcerned with the bottom line because money would mean nothing, having unlimited amounts of it and all the while feeling in the best physical shape of my life.

A pandemic and quarantine will do this to you, taking your brain to strange places that have no connection with reality. Mind trips are about the only places you can go when the world is trapped in the latest plague and it’s all for free, just waiting for you.

When the world seems so unsettled, unpredictable, uncertain or worse, I can count on the moon and the planets and the twinkling stars and I remember thinking many times throughout my life, in good times and bad, that the same big silver moon and the same stars have been in the heavens since the first one-celled creatures came about, though I wouldn’t think those creatures could understand the permanence and symbolism of the moon and the stars. The instant I am pondering the galaxies or the crescent or full moon or the distant red planet, some one in Thailand or Bolivia or Afghanistan is having the same thoughts and somehow it binds us all together, this dependable universality.

It’s the same with the sounds of the ocean and the pounding surf or the wind roaring through the trees, they have always been there and that consistency provides a feeling of peace in the middle of chaos that surpasses all languages and that anyone can understand. It only asks to be heard, nothing more, no work at all. Animals are in the same basic category, they eat when hungry, drink when dry, mate when it’s time, sleep when they’re tired, die when it’s over. No guidebooks needed, no degrees required, no nothing, just awareness.

So that’s about it, the moon, the stars, animals and the ocean are the only things I can rely upon. That and conspiracy theories, but that’s another story.

I’ve always envied people who could hike and camp outdoors for days on end, sleeping under a tent, being undeterred by the cold or the heat, cooking on a wood fire, drinking water from a stream and listening to the sounds of the forest, seemingly have found inner peace. I know there are people out there like that and I’ve met a few and they seem like aliens. Not me. I like short hikes and sprawling vistas but all in moderation so that I can drive away in my car without blisters on my heels and be able to go to a restaurant for a meal and a few beers and then back home to the warmth of my house and my familiar bed and not waking up to the cold morning, drenched in sweat from the night of turning and tossing is a sleeping bag on a thoroughly uncomfortable air mattress and not itching all over my body from the assault of the giant mosquitoes, a dependable bathroom rather than a midnight walk in the woods to the outhouse and who knows what is lurking there. That’s what I want. And maybe one day I will reach my goal of becoming a lumberjack.

May the bluebird of happiness fly up your nose, may you stay forever young, don’t eat the yellow snow and never get bitten by spiders multiple times in hopes of becoming Spiderman.

And always keep in mind that 50 to 400 people suddenly danced wildly for days and many died in the dancing plague of 1518 in Strasbourg, Alsace, in the Holy Roman Empire. And finally, always tell Shirley how you feel. Surely.