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The very fact that firewood is something only hobbyists and amateur craftsmen in the United States use for cooking and keeping warm, must say a lot to the world at large. It says a lot to me. Firewood was about the only fuel available when I was a kid except for coal. Coal and ice plants were a regular part of my childhood, but by the time I reached puberty, my family moved to this town and we've had electrical appliances and oil stoves ever since.
I've never actually owned an oil stove myself. By the time I was an adult with an individual place to live, using even a oil stove, much less a wood stove, was gone with the wind. I was too used to too little to provide what the Joneses had for my family. Being a grumpy cheapskate does not for a solid marriage make. I guess I found it acceptable to figure the world owes me a living. Not the other way around.
During all those years I was a homeless bum I hardly ever made campfires. Either to cook or heat up a can of beans or to stay warm at night. It just wasn't feasible to tote the stuff I needed for those activities around with me all day. I usually ate what I could beg during the day, and spread my sleeping bag on somebody else's property including government property where I could get run off if anybody knew I was there. It's just not politically expedient to build campfires under overpass bridges near small towns.
I didn't sneak around as much as I just plain hid from curious people who sometime got ideas about how bums sleeping out in the open make good targets for bullying. A campfire fairly well announces the presence of what's commonly thought of as disrespect-able people unless you're a Boy Scout with adult supervision. That's pretty much the whole point of being a homeless bum. It's the epitome of the practice of being without adult supervision.
Not having adult supervision seems tantamount to not being stuck with conventional ways of viewing the world. There doesn't seem to be any fun in bossing somebody around who won't be around long. Especially if they go along to get along knowing full well you gotta go home to your wife and family where you might not be the boss.
It only takes a starvation level diet and chronic fatigue to get me to be more reasonable. I found that out fairly soon after I decided to follow my own ideas about what to do and how to get by. People didn't know me for who I thought I was, but what they thought they would be like if they conducted their affairs like they think I do mine.
As I became more and more sure the other only saw themselves in me, the more secure I felt about giving them what they thought they needed in order to survive on my own terms. Not only was I not giving away anything valuable to me to satisfy them, but I couldn't give them anything that was valuable to anybody but themselves.
The problem with that is I didn't, and couldn't know what they thought was valuable to themselves. Like them, I only saw my own idea of myself in their behavior. I only saw what was valuable to me. This disconnect is a big deal in the way I've learned to cope with empty-handed-ness. I can't give up my idea of what's right for somebody else's idea of what's right, because we're both incommunicado.
We project, therefore we are. I cannot allow you to think I am is what you dream up as ideal if I were you. I cannot let your rules of conscience dictate my behavior. I would if I could. I just don't think it's possible for either of us. We don't do what we each do for the other's reasons. Now what? Have sex together to avoid boredom and ennui? It happens...
A friend came over last evening to visit. We talked about the surgery on my left eye I'm having early Friday morning. Although lots of older people take this operation to replace the cataracts in their eyes, it's not trivial surgery.
It's true that the procedure is done under mostly local anesthesia, but I get reminded each time I've had surgery that I could die. I could come out of the surgery blind in that eye. I'm hoping I'll come out of the surgery with the same success I achieved from the right eye surgery I got three weeks ago.
It is a bit worrisome, however, I've experienced a real sadness as a result of the procedure. It's my take that the reason I did was that nothing looks the same at all out of my right eye, but presently, I can shut my right eye and see the same world I've grown old with out of my left eye.
After this coming Friday, if the surgery is successful, my old brown colored world will be gone forever. My life, my current way of seeing the world will be forever changed. That will take some adjustment from an old man who likes to change less and less as ti-me goes by. ;-)
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