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| Image stolen from Jack's Urban Eats |
The urge hits me to hit the road.
Last week I went out with a woman about whom I guess I'll say three things. 1) She's very neurotic and somewhat unbelievably insecure but I wish to ameliorate this unkind comment by also noting that she has a very sweet and giving disposition. 2) Her insecurity encompasses her figure (as is unfortunately the case for many women) yet her figure is really very nice, just about perfect for her petite body type. 3) Worn out by the unrelentingly passive-aggressive neglect of her young daughter by all their family, she seriously considers a move to Kauai to live in a tent (apparently they have year-round tents there) and, at 50, start over.
Those thoughts (and many more) snapped through when I thought about hitting the road, or perhaps it was the other way around, because though I've never been to Hawaii, outside passing through the airport, I know I could never live there or on any island. I like knowing that the road that starts outside my door goes ever on. I wouldn't like knowing it just wraps around a short coastline to end up back where it started.
Fortunately, Sunya and I are hitting the road, next week. A week from today we will be packing, and a week from tomorrow, driving; driving over and across the mountains and on into the arid plain, to land on and colonize a desert planet. A city will then be born; and though there may never be found a more wretched hive of scum and villainy, it will be Home.
And it will be an experiment, as always. A lab assignment (or series thereof) in the continuing class of life. There are many parts to that, and Burning Man tends to compress many of them in space and time. One part that the event obviously comprehends is that there are many forms of openness when it comes to relationships. I am still trying to learn what and what does not fit me. Sunya and I do not define ourselves as polyamorous -- she never did, and my experience highlighted limitations that I have in handling it properly. I don't know that we're swingers -- the term as I understand it doesn't appeal to me much, while for her part I guess that depends on definitions, on the one hand, and on the other what's happening in the moment. So forget definitions and terms. It all boils down to love and trust. Do as you will; do no harm. Doing no harm by definition includes being truthful as well as caring. Given all that, let's just take each moment, each interaction, each sight and sound and taste, and have a good and possibly even educational time of it. Which idea is, to this recovering introvert, sometimes rather intimidating.
Maybe that is why I am combining this subject with a vague desire to just hit the road. Or maybe I am simply seeing that my development as a social being is gaining traction on a highway that will go on, and on, and just keep going on, with no need to stop or take the exit, though I know not where it leads.
7 comments:
I don't understand "this thing that you do," but then I don't have to.
Hope your time at Burning Man is everything that you wish for and more. :)
“It's a dangerous business, Frodo, going out your door. You step onto the road, and if you don't keep your feet, there's no knowing where you might be swept off to.”
I hope this will be the burniest man ever.
"Recovering" introvert? What's wrong with us introverts? :p
I am nearly always of a mind to hit the road for a few days. I think in my case its just the desire for being alone for awhile. Right now the only alone time I get for any extended period is when I drive to work.
If I could get out into the Mojave for a few days, wander west to the central coast and then up Highway 1, I'd be far more human.
Indeed, Sledpress! What IS wrong with being an introvert? Good question.
Nothing wrong with it at all! But it's odd: Though I spent decades covering up how painfully shy I was, had very few close friends, practically never opened up to meet people, and still feel very awkward in many specific social situations, I am finding that the usual hallmarks of introversion just don't apply to me so much anymore. I really like meeting new people now, and talking to them, and have zero problem with crowds and mobs. If there is one definition of an introvert, though, then I still am one: I do not gain enough energy from personal interaction to make up for the energy it costs me. I still need my solitary recharge time. I don't like it, though. I don't get much out of being alone.
Deserts are wonderful. But I've grown so fond of the carnival we make of the Black Rock Desert in August I'm afraid it may have tainted my appreciation of the emptiness. Never the less, some year I want to be sufficiently unemployed to go from there and just head east, or south, and wander in the wilderness.
I live on an island I can drive to. It is just about perfect, other than being 100 miles from a Dollar Store.
Introverts do like meeting people. They simply process it all differently, and tend not to talk until they feel they have something to say, etc.
Introversion is NOT the same as shyness.
The basic hallmark of introversion is what you said about not gaining your energy from interactions with people, but instead finding it draining. You, as with me, need to go elsewhere to recharge.
Moar nearly naked pictures, please!
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