Tomorrow early morning (or tonight, depending on information I receive today), I will hit the road again. A bus ride will begin another month or so of moving around again, of many smaller trips, instead of one long journey.
During the years that I spend a significant fraction of my time away, returning home seems like a dream.
For the most part, I feel alienated. Not from people, but from the things I own. After a backpack is my "house" for a few months, my material possessions back home become unnecessary burdens, clutter.
My room seems to me like a bizarre collection of objects, only a small fraction of which are really tools for better living. My clothes seem frivolous, evidence of this period of mass production that allows people enough garb to each cushion the fall of a small and doomed aircraft. My books seem lame collections of others' experiences, greatly inferior to living in the present, making life an experiment, and feeling alive.
Even my collection of rocks and seeds look dead inside my walls, deserving instead to be outside and in circulation-- being weathered by the weather, growing, decomposing.
When I "try" an object-- hold it up to the light and ask "Should I chuck this?"-- I rationalize I need it, so-and-so gave it to me, etc. But I lose them all together now, and I won't be a bit sad. Maybe I should invite a group of able looters to my place and give them 20 seconds to work on it.
Before the year ends, I'll be free of the unnecessaries. Screw things. ¡Viva la tortuga!
