Internet Asceticism, more Manhood.

I’m taking my second crack at going offline.

That song was stuck in my head while in Joshua Tree over the weekend.  For no particular reason, I don’t think.  It’s not apropos.  I’ve had Cash on my mind a lot lately.

I went to Joshua Tree with a group of poets from the university, camped for a couple nights.  Did a lot of hiking, a little wood-chopping.  Also chopped my foot, which I did, thankfully, while everyone was away.  And yet I confess it to you–something to think about.  I still have all my toes.  I rolled and took two hits from a cigarette rolled in a leaf, just something I felt I ought to do, since it was on hand.  What happened was, during my hiking, I found tobacco dropped by one of the poets who’d already left.  And I had some dry leaf around for tinder.  So, kinda had to.  Only two hits, though, as it was horrendous.

I love being out there.  I love being outside.  Coming back home and tying myself to the computer for work was a shock, and not one I like on any level.  Being out there with folks who didn’t know me…it’s always interesting, because I have a very obvious personality that I’ve cultivated–the hat, the garb–and none of it is false, but it’s not something I think about often, though it’s there ostensibly by choice, and this is quite the run-on, and the new folks are always the vocal ones about how I act, thus revealing me to myself.  If I wasn’t already the person I portray myself as, I am becoming him.  He’s quiet, and for a reason.  I forget that on the internet.  You have to talk to say something, if that makes any sense.  And I guess I rarely have that much to say, though I talk often enough.  So I’m signing off again.  No Twitter, no Facebook.  I’ve shut off comments on most of my posts, though that’s because of the infuriating amount of spam I get in a day.

On the cusp of my twenty-fifth year.  Maybe by the end of it I’ll be more comfortable thinking of myself as a man, an adult.  I’m already comfortable being a writer and being myself, but those are both internal efforts, and I want to do more for the world at large.  Around the campfire I told a few stories of myself, and one of the poets asked about my parents, what they do.  Father a firefighter and mother virtually in charge of a sheriff’s department.  Uncle war veteran, grandmother bastion of strength reaching back to the Great Depression.  She told me I didn’t have much of a choice, then, but to try to become some sort of mythic hero, in this case a cowboy.  Whether I believe that or not, I don’t know.  But it sure plucked some strings.