Wasted Toils

Written August 20th, 2026

Sage Flat Campground, Big Pine Creek, California

I forgot to bring a book on this weeklong trip to the mountains. Perhaps I subconsciously wanted to face some shit. Or maybe I was just rushed in leaving the house. But either way, after 4 days of camping alone, I was running out of decent food. I also needed to charge the battery, having also failed to bring my solar panels. It was time for a trip into town.

Please don't ask why this image is so crappy.

I whizzed up the 395 to the next town up: Bishop, California. New ground. I had never been to this stretch of California before. The Eastern Sierras. (Coincidentally, the shape of the itinerary did somewhat resemble the move of a bishop on the chessboard. But I digress.) The speed limit dropped to 45 and I disengaged cruise control and coasted to the first stoplight. Like so many other rural towns, the less-than-interstate highway turns into the main drag in Bishop, so I drove gingerly enough to read the  shop signs and see what was on offer. Full-service massage parlor- wow, I wonder what that means. Superbloom Cafe, noted. Oh, now that’s unexpected- a bookstore!

My primary motive for the trip to town was actually to get cash to pay the camping fee at the US Forest Service campground that only took Federal Reserve Notes slipped into envelopes that were subsequently slipped into a dropbox that was checked by an attendant who came by in an offroad golf cart once a day. But I saw the outdoor store first. I didn’t even really need anything at the outdoor store, but in these country mountain towns, it’s like stopping into an embassy in foreign land. I remembered that my stove was fucked up- blowing all the propane out the mini pressure release nostrils and freezing the manifold. It meant that I could only use my backpacking stove, which couldn't simmer, so my cooking had been limited to adding boiling water to ____. After a few minutes of waiting for the shopkeeper to notice me near the counter, I flagged him down. I asked if he carried the part, and he did not, but still obliged a chat about what could be wrong. No, I did not need a bag, sir.

One hundred and forty-eight dollars poorer, and two lamps and one coupler valve richer, I walked out carrying my meager winnings by hand and under armpit. The heat gave me second and third thoughts about my brief fantasy of moving to this gorgeous town. This town that was more than a days drive away from the inflationary economics of San Francisco. This town that had a vacation bible camp and a full service massage parlor. This town with a heat that will drive a man to smoke a cigarette just to make the air seem cold.

But I wouldn’t buy a pack today. I stopped for a cappuccino instead. After taking the first sip of non-instant coffee in a few days, I apologetically asked for the bathroom key. The barista had to explain the directions twice, and when I finally made the second left on my right, I checked to see if anyone was watching me bring my coffee in the bathroom with me. Entering a public bathroom with an open container is objectively degenerate behavior, which I noted to myself under my breath as I used my elbow to lock the door, “Probably a fuckin health code violation in more liberal counties than this.”

After disabusing the toilet of its dignity, I looked up and noticed a large framed poster of The Dude on the wall. Sometimes there’s a man. I wouldn’t say a hero, because …. what’s a hero? But he’s The Dude, of his time and place. After paying my respects, I grabbed my two-sips-deep-and-still-hot cappuccino, returned the bathroom key unnoticed and slinked off like a coyote who had just stolen a bit of meat. 

Now 20 pounds lighter, I set off to find the bookstore on foot, backtracking past the outdoor store and the coffee shop, hoping no locals would notice my wildly inefficient route-finding. The bookstore’s selection was erratic and oblong, with three rows of mystery and three rows of everything else. I found the two shelves of Classic Literature and figured I couldn’t go wrong reading something from the Penguin Classics in black, white and orange. I ossilated  between Mark Twain and Tony Morrison. I had never read either. Actually wait, didn’t I read some Tony Morrison in high school. That settled it, I would pop my Twain cherry.

Anyway, as I was saying, I forgot to bring a book on this trip. After I came back from town, I sat down by the creek and starting “Roughing It”. Twain and his brother were just setting out on a weeks-long trip out west via stagecoach, and he made a remark that slapped me in the face:

“We jumped onto the stage, the driver cracked his whip, and we bowled away and left “the States” behind us. It was superb summer morning, and all the landscape was brilliant with sunshine. There was a freshness and breeziness, too, and an exhilarating sense of emancipation from all sorts of cares and responsibilities, that almost made us feel that the years we had spend in the close, hot city, toiling and slaving, had been wasted and thrown away.” (P. 54) 

I know this feeling all too well. The truth of it haunts me on Wednesday nights. It’s nearly everyone’s dream to escape the rat race at some point, and I applaud the rare few who have the courage to actually make the leap. But why have we built a world from which we yearn to escape? It may seem naive to say, but what if we could update our society to be less of a rat race in the first place? Who really wants to win first place in the rat race? What the actual fuck are we doing all this for? If society is making people miserable, why are we all continuing to go along with it? Could we create our own micro-societies that are actually designed to serve our needs, our dreams and our desires?

(And sorry, I know it didn’t seem like I was going to get on a stump, but I tricked you, fair and square. You’re almost done with the damn article, so just hear me out.)

The cynical concept of “the real world” is NOT the default state of nature. The wilderness is more “real” and has existed for literally 8 billion times as long as the human-contrived world-within a world called the human city. “The real world” is a social fiction that exists because enough people believe it to be true. When enough people inhabit that worldview, their behaviors align to it and together they perpetuate things being shaped in that image. If I could bastardized the Clinton-era phase, I would shout from the rooftops, “It’s the WORLDVIEW stupid!” The fiction of “the real world” points to a worldview run amok.

We could spend a book defining the values and qualities of “the real world” of western post-modernity, or scientific materialism but I will spare you the intellectual masterbation. You know what I mean. SO, let's run the logic.

WHEREAS, The cynical idea of “the real world” is the worldview-induced juggernaut that is resulting in wonton consumerism.

WHEREAS, physical over-consumption of resources is causing the suicidal destruction of our basic life-support systems.

WHEREAS, This worldview and operating system has been created by humans, and is perpetuated by humans.

WHEREAS, we are these humans.

THEREFORE, the doctor reccommends we stop participating in a death cult.

"I’m sold!" You say!  How much does it cost? Where do I sign? What are the next steps? Well, fellow traveler, the taste of the bitter medicine only costs one year of eyerolls from your Aunt Genevieve in Connecticut and a 6 month adjustment period where you learn to source your wellbeing internally rather than from endless external products, services, experiences, people, flights of fancy and get-rich-quick courses.

But in all seriousness, this is all that I have really and truly learned for myself in forty-one years: to seek happiness and satisfaction from external sources NEVER WORKS (be it a romantic partner, worldly success, notoriety, or a hallucinogenic drug). Furthermore, the pursuit-of-happiness-from-a-box only teases me with the bait of a brief pleasure, and leaves a hangover that starts the cycle over again the next day.

What I have learned, and continue to remind myself, is that if I stay quiet, and don’t move my body long enough, and I allow whatever shitty or enticing feelings to come and go, that after an unreasonable amount of time, an amount of time that weeds out the weekend warriors, but is not so long as to be unattainable, after a weeks worth of stumbling and boredom and pain and frustration, there is a joy to be discovered. There is a peace, a stillness, a satisfaction that was always already there, that feels like home, feels like childhood returning to my bones.

And that direct-to-consumer, self-to-table, hyperlocal joy is the closest thing I have found to something capable of ending humanity’s 200-year fool’s errand. Deliver us, dear lord Baby Jesus, from Hedonia to Eudamonia. Amen.