Worth checking out for a little bit of perspective.

The written word is a funny thing. I’ve been reading more than I sometimes do, and the mood of eloquent men is infectious. I’m coming now from a brief two weeks in the basin and range and am engrossed in the canonical letters of Hunter S Thompson’s formative years. His desperate, proud disdain for the quiet life is consuming my schemes and private thoughts. I’ve been susceptible to this; I’ve been in a vulnerable place. The desert resonates with dreamers, and only a wretched soul, too far lost to the linear parcours and stagnant inertia of 40 hours and a cold pint on Friday can wake to crisp frigid air and towering, scarlet, dawn-touched walls without starving for something else. But this is different. This transcends the romance of Desert Solitaire,that melancholy and naïve nostalgia for a time and place that I didn’t know. Thompson lets my daydreams find me manic and addled and unsettled. When it becomes too much I turn to those modernist expatriates to sooth my chaotic fervor with a cool and comforting depression, but the longing persists and I glance again towards what might be.

These men effect a new world view, in in substance and in form. McCarthy has me using “and” a lot, in print and in speech and in thought. And the deeper I reach into the private letters of HST I can’t help but confront that great question, if superficially, of whether we’ve been taking All This far too seriously or not nearly seriously enough. Is This some great existential comedy, to which we’ve ascribed all worth out of insecurity and fear, and extrapolated from these insipid constructs our values and the reactionary meaning that they imply? Is it some vapid curtain of distractions that we’ve knit for ourselves, that should be torn down and mocked with angst and disgust? Are we all just exonerated sinners, going about our lives under watchful, faded eyes on a highway billboard? If this is the case it seems that beyond simple creature comforts, that this life is a joke; something to be laughed at and to draw scorn when it receives undue respect or the notion that any truth beyond the calculus can exist.

On the other hand, this is all we have. Why not cast aside the discussion of value and meaning and accept that while here for this brief time, it is our responsibility, if to no one but ourselves, to experience and appreciate and create everything that we can. To acknowledge that cynicism is an ugly kind of narcissism and allow ourselves to be amazed by the spectacle unfolding before us. We have one go at This, and it seems a dreadful waste of time to sit brooding about meaning or cosmic intent, because, well, for one reason or another, here we are.

And so these are optimistic and pessimistic views of that basic observation: here we are. Ultimately I expect that whichever lens through which you choose to view the world the conclusions might be the same. That whether you’re lashing back against that societal corral which would have you at the feed lot into your 60’s, only to be dispatched to a home and quietly out of sight once you’ve fattened some coffer and been used up, or whether you’re hungry for the new and untasted. Whether you scoff at the effort of irrelevant improvement or prefer to pine for wild and untamed experiences, it seems as though the only option is to cut and run: because it doesn’t matter at all, or it’s the only thing that matters.

Of course none of this really makes any sense. We have to eat, and we like to be warm, and we owe it to ourselves and to our loved ones to plan on waking up again tomorrow. We need to work and to save and to understand that someday we won’t have the means to earn, and will want to be comfortable. And so we sin. We make sacrifices now for the benefit of our futures, and it’s hard to argue that that’s the wrong thing to do. So I’ll return, now, from those magical red cliffs and staggering starry nights to greet shirked duties and grimace, but the gypsy blood is stirring inside of me again.