Sunday Musings
A vacation
There were no pictures of monkeys musing, so I went with the garden gnome which, in my opinion, is almost as unsettling as pictures of clowns.
It’s cold outside, at least by California standards. It’s in the 40s, and I was contemplating a vacation.
Not the usual vacation, mind you, where a person decides to go visit a place that they always wanted to see, and they spend weeks looking into lodging, airplane or car costs, off-season discounts, and all the other minutia that goes into planning such an endeavor only to find out upon arrival in this “pristine” location that hundreds of others wanted to visit that same spot, and they wanted to do it on the same day that you did.
The lodging is substandard because of staff shortages, the “free breakfast” is just reconstituted breakfast burritos and some sort of liquid masquerading as coffee. The buffet is overrun by people who, apparently, spent the weeks leading up to their trip starving themselves to make room for the prodigious amounts of food they pile on their plates. The whole thing, within minutes, looks like it was attacked by mad dogs.
The tours of the relevant sites that you had such high hopes for were either cancelled or overcrowded, and the “beautiful untouched wilderness” looked like an abandoned trash dump.
Your vacation ends with you being overtired because the item of furniture in your room that was labeled “bed” was more like a slab of stone than the cloud soft item you had been promised. You are cranky, dirty, and waiting for the magical moment when you arrive back at your own house, sleep in your own bed, and eat your own breakfast.
No, that’s not the type of vacation I want at all.
The vacation I want is to set aside some time and, rather than go anywhere, just stay home, go about my business, do what I always do, and look at the world through the eyes of the blind.
I want to see a crowded, warm café and not see a hotbed of disease and infection.
I want to go to a bar and not think about what will happen.
I want to celebrate birthdays and holidays with family and friends and not wonder whether it will be the last time I see them.
I want to have faith that things will work out.
I want to believe.
That’s the vacation I want.
Sounds idyllic. That's one of the reasons I have an RV. It's not a perfect solution but I get to avoid hotels, stupid humans (for the most part) and restaurants.
The downside is that no real vacation is cheap anymore, even with an RV. Doing a stay at home vacation is okay to a point but I've always been one to seek out new horizons to investigate. And you're right, once I get there, I'm usually disappointed in some fashion or another, about some aspect of it all.
I experienced this on our recent around the country tour. The national parks by themselves were not disappointing. It was the humans that were there destroying everything around them that I found sadly disappointing (to put it mildly). Yosemite was the worst of them at the time. Although I'm sure that I would have felt the same about Yellowstone had we been there during the summer crush. The same for The Grand Canyon.
I am coming around to this way of thinking from some parts of the human sphere, that the planet could do a lot better for itself with a few less humans on it mucking things up everywhere they go. Avoiding these stupid humans is impossible now, so daily caution is advised.
Maybe that's how some of us could look at all of this now. As visitors from some other solar system. They have likely put out travel warnings on their government and social media platforms advising all sightseers who might want to see the planet earth, to be warned about any interaction with dominant species running around there. Doing so could be hazardous to one's health.
I, too, long for such a holiday.
Alas, I am unable to not know what I know, so remain chronically bereft.
For some time this morning, however, I was able to quiet down the perpetual pandemic/collapse turmoil in my mind and simply enjoy swimming in the warm gentle ocean away from shore ~ toward the horizon where there were no noisy machines, no computers and no other humans.
But eventually I had to turn around and swim toward shore where the perpetual destructive chaos of humans awaited.
But also you, Michael and Terrance and those who are awake and care.
Mahalo