March 2026 – WildernessPunk

As most of the Bonemen head back into the wilds and wonders of New Mexico. A few things become obvious before we get more than barely started.

Air conditioning when driving through the desert is very useful especially when taking care of an elder and youngins. Oh well, I guess we must rough it old schoolish.
My boys, especially by older 6 foot 2 son is probably ready to have his own bed and not share one with his brother. The three of us together create a vortex of little, if no, sleep.
I am about to head out after packing, driving, and loading, for ten hours and then getting little sleep, into the warmest winter the Gila has suffered through in recorded history

…

Back and blasted.

Did four hours of switchbacks, hiked to the ruins, helped my youngest to learn to fish in the nuclear sun but I’m back and sitting in a room of my own. I’d prefer to read or write with a frosty, but I suppose I’ll need to gather the troops since none of us has had a real meal all day. I’m sorry but those centennial breakfasts don’t count.

Throughout it all I accepted a theme for the day.

Limited.

We all have limited time. Time for ourselves, times with our loved ones, hours spent with friends. The world has limited resources. But I was reaching beyond such obvious takes.

It started when I thought about the absence of Winter in the high country. At about 7000 feet in February, I shouldn’t be cursing myself for not wearing shorts. Is the environment running on borrowed years? Are the animals and nature I see here limited and will soon be forced to evolve, migrate, or perish.

But other things nagged at me as well. How much more time will my boys have with their grandfather, or me for that matter. How should we be spending our days before he flies back to greet the New England green spring?

I often gaze at my youngest. I still have a young child full of wonder who hasn’t dived into his sullen teenaged years. Am I getting the most out of my last chance to be a part of youth’s growth. This is the last year I’ll be picking a child up at an elementary school and see children dancing and laughing while I wait for him to run to the gate.

How should someone live their life? Should one focus on themselves for we all have just a short ride and if we don’t not many others will? Should we be striving to help those younger than ourselves, build memories, grow ideals and skills, and know they are loved?

I caught my father taking a picture of me teaching my youngest how to fish. Yeah, pretty cliché, but aren’t some of those cliches what people should be striving for? We all have a short window, a limited window, soon he may forget about such things and be flung into the world of teenager angst and drama, or worse yet, video games and social media.

Shit, I am being a downer.

I guess it comes back to what we should be doing with our limited time, resources, money, and everything else. What are the right answers? Ask ten people and you’ll get ten different replies. One person might think accumulating capital is the smartest thing he can do for his family while another thinks board game night was his best idea.

But what if you have no family? It could be the circles I run in, but the number of childless friends I have far outnumber people I know with families. In the end what are they fighting and striving for? With no one to hand their knowledge and property down to when they pass, I can’t help but thinking they are doing things like accumulating goods and sometimes property just to leave a big mess for their sister to sort through. I know striving to leave something for the next generation is a stereotype but if you aren’t doing it for that reason what other reason is there? In the end we all have limited time with limited resources and personally I would be sad to continue striving for no other reason than make a bigger mess for some friends or relatives to guiltily toss in their trunk or the dumpster.

So what is the answer? What should we be doing with our limited time? Fighting to make the world a better place for those who come after through politics or accumulating capital? Striving to teach the new generations humanity and a love for the life which remains on this planet? It certainly shouldn’t be to churn through the Earth in order to collect as many things as we can. For if that is the only reason to live we won’t have many more generations to pass things down to.

To live is to strive. We all travel our own road. Others can join us in our journey sometimes for a few hours there and here, sometimes for years and decades. Somehow we evolved into beings which can read these thoughts on a glowing rectangle miles away from where I sit looking out at a tree which will outlive me.

What are we competing for? To have the most stuff to fluff our ride. But if we are working too long we’ll enjoy less of that ride. Who is winning the guy relaxing, drinking tea while reading a used book on an old front porch or the man in a Tesla driving by him?

What are you going to do with the rest of your limited? Me I’m going to drive my father and my boys to the catwalk near Glenwood so they can take in more of the majesty of this world, but in three days from now who knows. Let’s all do what we can so families a hundred years from now still have a chance to live as well, and see the same plants and animals as we currently can. Maybe that should be everyone’s goal.

Dak is ordered to hunt down renegade clones. His main problem, he’s in love with one.

Looking back at my younger days I think I was sixteen when I first began to become enlightened enough to know most of what I was presented with was manipulation, lies, and undue sense of temporal importance. During college, my Anthropology degree exposed me to the swath of horrors the US and the rest of the more developed world inflicted on the underdeveloped countries. By the time I reached a Punk Rock crescendo in 1992, while publishing my underground Zine C.H.A.O.S (Collected Humans Against Outdated Systems), I was around twenty-five and I decided that many of the larger US corporations, and the government which was owned by them, were more evil than not.

Funny how they attempted to keep those things hidden back them.

Not anymore.

But what do you do when you live within an evil empire? Some things like funding Israel, invading Middle Eastern countries so we or they can oppress people, and the like, have always loomed over us. Things are no longer half hidden deals made by the elite behind closed doors, we live in an age where you can see how vile and dangerous our country has become on an hourly basis.

I’ve mentioned before that in an issue of C.H.A.O.S I predicted when the environment degrades to a level which effects profits and resources become scarcer, the rules would change. The government, and the money which controls it, will no longer bother playing nice. Instead of investing in green technology or funding schools instead of soldiers, they will lock themselves in their mega-mansions and refuse to change a game they are winning. The billionaires and their sick-o-phants have chosen to bleed every drop they can from the plants, animals, and peoples of this planet until it wastes away. Even then, the military will protect them so they can live off the corpse they created as long as they can.

This article is not about exposing the horrors of the ultra-rich, that’s already been done. Instead, I am asking myself and you… what do we do when we are living within a country set on the edge of becoming an actively evil empire, both without and within?

I mean this on a daily basis. What should you do now? What should you do tomorrow? What is it alright to do on a casual basis? Is it okay for me to post funny memes on Facebook or should I be trying every minute to fight back against the system which has threatened to do their best to transform the people they don’t arrest and kill, into little more than employed slaves staring at screens and hoping we can still afford food next month.

There is something to say for the “Don’t Let the Bastards Grind You Down,” contingent. “I not going to let them ruin my life,” is a worthy sentiment. Certainly, we should keep and cherish the moments we get to spend in nature, and with friends and family. We must remember what we’re fighting for and what normal is. Also maintaining a sense of humor, even through the worst of times, is a noble and powerful thing.

Yet we also must avoid ignoring the tragedy of our times and treat this as a, ‘New Normal.’ As the environment starts its death throes, and this is hurried along by data farms, all of us will have to define our own New Normal. Clinging on to our past assumptions and lifestyles like some half assed versions of the elite which are roasting us while they prepare their bunkers, doesn’t seem like a long term solution.

But is harping on it with daily memes to people who mostly agree with you doing any more? I get the need to make a statement about how much it sucks to see the world screwed over by assholes you wouldn’t let into your Dungeons and Dragon’s game, but is this any better than showing people food pics?

If I decided I wanted to do something to fight back and posting memes wasn’t the way, what would I do? Political action? Fight like tigers against a gerrymandered system to let in people who won’t grow the military but will let it remain at its ponderous size, while hiring more police, and still only using fractions of our wealth to provide for the people living on the edge? The poor get a bandaid while as the climate, health insurance, and economy grows worse there will just be more and more poor and homeless as AI erases jobs and tears through the environment.

Protest? Besides some cool drone shots on CNN have the two biggest protests in US history stopped us from killing people in Venezuela? Has voting kept someone who we 100% knew was evil out of the White House?

So what can we do?

How about everything we can. Spread the word. Make people think. Outside of your own bubble would be best. Don’t preach to the converted use guerilla tactics to spread ideas. We live in the information age but if people’s eyes are whitewashed by propaganda it doesn’t matter because they don’t have a chance to see reality. They need to have a chance to find it out themselves.

Perhaps Truth could be the new conspiracy theory. People can research unseen web sites and discover…oh wait. I didn’t know that was real. I never looked at it this way before. No one has ever told me about this.

Maybe stickers would do what algorithms can’t. Perhaps it is time to stop living and arguing online and through talking heads and instead, be in the same room and engage. That guy might be wearing a MAGA hat, but unless he’s more than a millionaire we’re all going to be swimming in the same flash flood in the next few years.

Personally, I give the US about one more year, maybe fourteen months.

Time to do two things. Fight for every inch you can and get ready for the real battle to come.