Reason #27 to Live Nebulously

I can admit my objection to this might be driven more by irrational fear than a well-thought out indictment. Something like this could really benefit people living in isolated areas. But on the other hand, people have been living in isolated areas for thousands of years and doing just fine, and the stripping down of humanity, the perpetuation of the increasingly LESS interpersonal lives we've started leading in just the last twenty, is present and impossible to ignore, at least for me. I just don't want to interact with machines any more than I already do, and I'm pretty sure I still wouldn't, even if I lived out in the boonies (living nebulously, ironically enough...;-). I'd crave a chat with the delivery guy, or the mail person, even just once or twice a month, and would find it disheartening - to say the very least - to watch a drone hover over my yard and drop supplies down to me, to sign for it with my friggin' thumb print, then watch it disappear past the horizon, and keep watching long after I could no longer hear it.

What's more, as is usually the case with drone technology in the private sector, there are privacy issues at play here. And though it is true that I use several of the company's numerous products on a daily basis - from Gmail to Google Chrome to Google Earth to Google Keep...to this very blog site, come to think of it - it seems like Google has so many fingers in everything, so many irons in the fire, before long it could grow into something much larger than a mere 'company'...

That is, if it hasn't already started to happen.  It would seem Google is well on its way to becoming the 21st century's first major monopoly, only with far more power and influence over - and knowledge of - our daily lives than Ma Bell could ever have imagined.


CLICK: Google drones tested in Queensland

Maine's 'North Pond Hermit' pretty much sums it all up

Below is a link to an article from the September issue of GQ about a man who lived as a hermit in the woods of central Maine for twenty-seven years. Chris Knight disappeared in 1986 at the age of twenty, and reportedly had no contact with the outside world until April 2013 when technology - in the way of a newly installed motion detector alarm system - finally led to his being caught raiding a lake camp for supplies, as he had been doing for nearly three decades. Over the years, he either unnerved or angered local residents, particularly the victims of his late night raids, and, perhaps unavoidably, was turned into the stuff of legend around campfires. Without knowing, or trying, or giving a shit, Chris Knight became the North Pond Hermit, a real person violating the law by habitually breaking into cabins, but also a larger-than-life presence in and around the woods.

I've always found these kind of stories fascinating. The lives of the likes of Tim Treadwell and Chris McCandless inspire a siren song in me. They get me thinking long thoughts about what it takes to actually commit to something so drastic - a little bit of madness, a little bit of courage, a whole lot of sheer will, I'd say, to actually disappear so completely your loved ones stop searching for you and your very identity becomes nebulous. Knight's story - unique in that, unlike McCandless and Treadwell, he survived - has me thinking about living nebulously, what it really means to me, and how committed I might be to taking my quest for solitude and soul searching beyond a mere road trip, making it a permanent lifestyle.

The answer: not too much. Assuming that the story is true (and I have no reason to doubt it, other than sometimes hoax happens), I simply don't have what it takes to do what Knight did. That siren song - of solitude, of peace, of a life that is wholly introspective and free of the covetous trappings and broad emotional pendulum swing of modern life - is there, and resonant, but its volume always gets turned down by a pressing need for physical comfort, for a sense of stability, and somewhat by the need (in recent years anyway) for companionship and connection with other people. I am not the loner I liked to pretend I was at twenty.

And the point of the article by journalist Michael Finkel (also assuming Finkel neither put words in Knight's mouth, nor took them out) seems to be that Knight had no siren song driving him. He was a true hermit, simply wandering into the woods, neither seeking out, nor discovering along the way, any grand insight. He didn't journal about existence while he was out there, or take pictures, or sketch, or write poetry, or his manifesto, had no interest whatsoever in leaving a record of his time in the woods and didn't care if anyone learned his story. It would seem he just wanted to be left the fuck alone, and was assuming he'd die in the wilderness, and we are only talking about him now because he was caught.

But whatever deep-seeded impulse drove him into the woods and kept him there for thirty years, enduring hunger and boredom and unimaginable physical hardship in the winter, there is a line in the article that really catches my attention, something Knight said as Finkel was interviewing him, not about his time in the woods, but the civilization he has been forced back into the last year and a half: "I don't think I'm going to fit in. It's too loud. Too colorful. The lack of aesthetics. The crudeness. The inanities. The trivia."

It's too loud. Too colorful. The lack of aesthetics. The crudeness. The inanities. The trivia.

About what drives me toward a nebulous life, even if only on the highway for a few months, nothing else needs to be said, really. The North Pond Hermit got it right the first time.

Without knowing, or trying, or giving a shit.

"The Strange & Curious Tale of the Last True Hermit"

Reason #26 to Live Nebulously

I am a complete and total bigot...against androids

Viewed from a distance, the story below is pretty amazing, and I know there's a very fine line between a healthy skepticism of technology run amok, and a Hollywood-caliber paranoia over a perceived threat that isn't necessarily an eventuality. Moreover, forty years in this life has taught me that in the end, you can get used to just about anything.

But I'm sorry, I don't like the thought of androids in our midst; maybe it's close-minded of me, maybe in the end I'll be one of those who gets passed by, or shipped off to a 'reservation' to live with the new savages in an increasingly mechanized and computerized world.  But 'C-3PO', and all that he implies, is entertaining only on the big screen. I don't want to spend any time with him, nor come to rely on him in any scenario that involves face time. And I think the message of another sci-fi movie, 2001's 'A.I', should never be dismissed as mere Hollywood fantasy, as it would seem sometimes we are being hurled toward that eventuality.

Right now, amazing as it may be, I just don't want to see this frigging thing standing at my hotel door, nor do I ever want to have to reach down and grab my toiletries out of its head, or, beholden to a host of human etiquette it could not possibly care about, feel the impulse to lean forward and shout 'Thank you!', like an ugly American abroad. In fact, I'd much prefer to walk down to the lobby and get the items myself, so this concept is perverse on a couple of levels: not only might it be the start of the mechanization/computerization of our species, but also, for able-bodied individuals at least, it's certainly the perpetuation of a trend that's been going for at least three or four decades and has really taken root in the service-based society of the last twenty years: the notion, and expectation, that everything must be done for us, even things that don't need to be, or shouldn't be.

CLICK: Robot butlers to staff hotels, other facilities...

Reason #25 to Live Nebulously

He seems like a nice guy, and he's obviously talented...and one might be moved to consider what he has done a technological innovation, but the longer I watch this story, the more skeeved out I get. This might very well be the start of something that shouldn't ever start.

CNN: Man 'hears' colors, claims he's a cyborg

On Roads While On the Road...

One of the biggest allures of this extended road trip will be...well, the roads themselves. No joke. I've always been fascinated by roadways, Interstates, state highways, country trunks, service drives and 7th Avenues alike; not just their construction and the equipment with which they are constructed (a rite of passage for every little boy and, I'd wager, more than a few little girls...), but also how they intersect, and where, what they cross over, and go under, how many miles they go, and with how many lanes. I enjoy thinking about the thought that must have gone into putting it all together, the careful considerations involved in the creation of an efficient system, which, when you consider the level of traffic burdening it these days and how smoothly it continues to function (for the most part), it can surely be argued our roadway system is. Once on a vacation when I was a kid, my dad said of our Interstates, "If the Russians ever invaded, we'd be done for. They'd have no problem getting everywhere."

And as I posted on this page more than a year ago, I've always been fascinated - as well as a little tripped out (in a pleasant way) - by the concept of direction. North, south, east, west...each point of the compass evokes a different emotional and psychological response in me, each has its own complement of memories and expectations.

When I was a kid, I loved globes and maps, and I still do. But that old Rand McNally road atlas doesn't hold a candle to the likes of MapQuest or Google Earth, or any form of GPS navigation. These things breathe new life into the process of traveling long distances to places I've never or rarely been. Rand McNally never bothered with many of the little details that seem standard issue with GPS. I like knowing that the overpass I'm racing under for just a fraction of a second is actually 275th Avenue, for instance. Or that the little shoestring running diagonally off to the southwest is Everett Road, or that the little body of water I catch a glimpse of through the trees as I shoot past at 75 miles per hour is Holcomb Lake, or Tanner's Pond, or whatever. Do I need to know these things? Not at all. Will I remember any of them ten years from now? Probably not. But in the moment, for the moment, they help complete the picture; they aid in familiarizing myself with a new region.

Plus, I will never be reduced to angry tears trying to fold up my GPS.

For a long time, I thought I was a lone dweeb when it came to all this roadway business, but have found there are others, many others in fact, a whole community of highway fans out there, building websites devoted solely to cataloging the roadways in their areas and posting pictures of certain routes, in various states of construction. They are called (er, call themselves...) 'roadgeeks'...and to be honest, I don't know if I feel better or worse for this fact.

At least, there was a thriving community online at one time.  A lot of the sites I've found are old, as in c.2002-style old. Some haven't been updated since the mid 2000s, and some, of course, are simply dead links through a search engine - "Error 404 File Not Found".  But those that have survived, even if they've grown moldy, offer pictures and interesting stats, and in some cases the history of certain stretches, which I find particularly interesting. Like names provided me by GPS, I like knowing when roads came to be, what determined their routes, why they may have been changed or re-routed over the years. In my own adopted hometown, I'm anxious to learn about a re-route of Highway 53 known as 'the by-pass'. Lamentably, information about its construction is hard to come by. Again, I don't know why I want to know; it's not going to affect my life one way or another to ever know. I just want to.

I guess I do believe highway history completes a chapter in the story of our development as a nation and society that should never be overlooked. It could be said our roads are almost as intimately connected to our evolution as a species as are our modes of transportation.

JULY 2010 - There's not much to this pic on the surface, just a state highway (63) running southward through a pastoral stretch of north-central Wisconsin. But look a little closer and consider: everything you see here, from the grade down the little hill, to the roads and driveways intersecting along the way, to the the placement of the signs, the power lines, even the painting of the yellow and white lines that keep cars in the correct lanes and tell us when it's safe to pass...none of it happens by accident. It is part of a carefully thought-out (hopefully!) and on-going process that helps to ensure safe and convenient travel for our ever-restless species. If I ran for the highest office in the land, I would so be the 'Infrastructure President'. 

;-)