Occupation of Independence

The Labor Day weekend is a good time to think about 'work'. Lately I have felt a desire for a project of some kind. Don't most people need a project to be happy ? Channel-surfing-with-gasoline is not my idea of a "project." Nor is looking at pretty scenery. Laugh if you will, but I am going to look into applying for campground host jobs for next year. Perhaps it will help to apply in person this year, while I am still in the area. Many, if not most, retirees give some thought to volunteer work. I did too. Perhaps I gave up too quickly. Most of the volunteer jobs, that I know of, are rather petty tasks that should be done by a teenager or a minimum wage employee, if the organization in question could actually afford a minimum wage employee. Worse yet, there is some (paid) officious 'volunteer coordinator' who sits in her cubicle and dreams up rigid and arbitrary schedules for the volunteers, complete with pages and pages of guidelines, application

Although I've never felt much of a need to read Sigmund Freud, his "Civilization and its Discontents" was interesting. In it, Freud mentioned that some people had described a powerful "oceanic" feeling; but he had never experienced it. Perhaps Dr. Freud never had the experience of camping in drab, ugly, and half-dead forests in the summer -- to escape the heat -- and then busting out into the open in September. An oceanic feeling can be very powerful indeed. Better yet, this feeling can be used for a practical purpose: it helps to kee p an outdoorsy lifestyle interesting, long after the tourist phase is over. Recently this oceanic feeling provided a real phantasmagoria for me: breaking out into the sagebrush hills seemed like heading out to sea on a sailboat. Perhaps this was helped by reading Jack London's "South Sea Tales." (Gutenberg.org)  I even listened to some Jimmy Buffett songs for the first time in a long while. For instance, as you

Yes, 'sagebrush sea' is a bit of a cliché. But it's a good one. Strunk & White do not approve of burying readers under too many metaphors. Indeed, we have all been readers on the receiving end of a writer who was a metaphor drunk. And yet, how can writers suppress themselves when something wonderful has put them into an expansive mood? At such times, the mind naturally seeks out analogies with other good things. Every year I spend my canonical fourteen - days visiting my favorite mountain biking area, near Gunnison, CO. The topography, geology, altitude, town, and BLM management philosophy are responsible for making it a success. And every year I praise decomposed granite as geology's greatest hit. To make it even better, I ride downhill on singletracks, and then 'recharge the gravitational battery' by riding uphill on the roads, to complete the loop. Falling into one of those generous and expansive moods, I can't avoid comparing this experience to

Let no one confuse a retro-grouch with a human fossil. This retro-grouch made a giant leap forward when I bravely submitted to my first demonstration of Facebook. The fellow who gave the tutorial was quite good at giving demonstrations. Actually, I was impressed with Facebook as a platform. It seemed useful for certain types of groups. It seemed well integrated with other platforms on the internet. So then, if I was so impressed with it, why haven't I opened up an account? Two things are stopping me. 1. Won't I lose control of ad-blocking on Facebook? Please don't tell me that ads are not too obtrusive, so far. On an internet browser such as Firefox, you can use a free ad-blocking program that works 98% of the time. I am suspicious that most of the bandwagon towards smartphones and Facebook is ultimately motivated by the desire to get people addicted to a platform first, and then bury them under ads that they can't do anything about. 2. Thoreau's classic wise-crac