Tag: Attitudes

WildernessPunk Attitude

I’ll admit it. WildernessPunk has been a bit glum of late. I could go into why being gloomy and doomy is quite appropriate for our current slice of the moment, but I’ll save such things for a different time. Instead, I’d like to look back on WildernessPunk. In a few days it will be the 6th anniversary of WildernessPunk, and since I might, very appropriately, be celebrating off the grid on that actual day, I feel it would be okay to jump the gun a little bit and talk about WildernessPunk now.

WildernessPunk began on August 1st 2016. The first posts were written in the forests and deserts of the west and at times in hotel rooms. I was homeless, living out of a backpack, with just my bicycle and borrowed laptop to keep me company. My life was a wild ride of freedom and wonder mixed with challenges, sadness, and anger.

Most of us can look back at our former selves and often cringe at the horrible situations we allowed ourselves to get into. At that time my life had exploded as I had finally broken the hold a narcissistic leech had on my life. Unfortunately, this newfound freedom came at the cost of not seeing my young boys, losing my employment, my ride, and everything else I owned. I had managed to grab my backpack, but little else.

WildernessPunk at that time had been part journal, part philosophy, and obviously fueled in some degree by anger. I also had the goal of somehow raising enough cash and trade through creative internet use to fund living in the woods. It was an exciting time and part of me still misses the adventure. Although sleeping in a torn-up tent in the woods, with two rat chewed blankets when the temperature is below freezing might not be as fun as it sounds.

Flash forward a while, after embracing a bit of Lokiness, I managed to get most of my things back, achieved a divorce, and relocated to Tucson. It didn’t take long for my life to improve. I reconnected with my lost love, jump started my RPG games, and began the slow and dangerous journey toward seeing my boys again.

As my life changed, I knew I needed to change WildernessPunk too. There is a big difference between riding my bike 10 miles to a hidden encampment and sleeping next to the most wonderful woman I have ever met.

So WildernessPunk became less of a journal focusing on my attempt to live between the worlds of technology and wilderness. It changed its focus to how one could remain true to these ideals and goals while living in an urban setting. My hope was not to shame or depress people, but instead to help give them the tools to create a lifestyle which would help lower their Negative Environmental Impact.

I also sought to dig into the real facts which involved mankind’s interaction with its environment. I wished to help dispel falsehoods and shine the light on things which may have escaped our notice.

Then two things happened.

  1. After years of enduring caustic venom, having police called on me when I had committed no crime, and driving 1000 miles a weekend, I managed to get full custody of my boys.
  2. Covid hit the world.

While other writers were finishing novels and starting new projects, my writing slowed down as I took up home schooling and caring for my kids 24/7 during lockdown.

Perhaps another change came over me as well. I was profoundly in love and living the best years of my life. Patton Oswald said something similar too, “It is hard to be grumpy when the butterflies of happiness are dancing through your heart.”

While I was living my own ups and downs during this time, and it was mostly ups, my country and much of the world was getting kicked square in the nuts.

45 and the religious right are doing everything they could to remove human rights, promote racism, and increase poverty. But the USA wasn’t the only country embracing totalitarianism and fascist beliefs. Like scared children who are just smart enough to foresee their upcoming grim future, some people need Big Brother to tell them what to do. Whether it is a Sky Daddy or a cult leader, there are humans who, in their heart of hearts, want someone to tell them what they should be doing.

And then they want to tell you what to do and how to live.

We need to face it, some people are worried about the health of our planet and issues like world poverty, overpopulation, and extinction, while others are more interested in censoring books, banning lifestyles different from their own, and promoting the validity of ancient myths. This is a strange dichotomy to put it mildly. I might observe it is more than a bit odd that the group which believes they will live eternally is more concerned with the here and now, while the group which thinks their lights will one day extinguish are trying to protect the Earth’s tomorrows.

So what should we be doing? What should our attitudes be in 2022?

Let’s dive into the painfully obvious. We’ll call them the Fantastic Five.

  • Organized religions are doing more harm than good and need to be weakened and dismantled at every opportunity.

You would have burned me alive for being an atheist a few centuries ago, so fuck you, your time has come.

  • We need to do everything in our power to protect the 12% of the natural environment which is left on the globe.

Humans have grabbed up 88% of the Earth. That’s enough for one species. We need to have a chance for there to still be some biodiversity left before the fossil fuels wells run dry and we won’t have the power to destroy everything with the ease we have now.

  • The number one priority in every country should be to have their largest line item be renewable energy.

We fought wars in the Middle East for over a decade. We wasted enough money blowing people up to put solar panels on every building in the USA. We would have never needed a drop of Middle Eastern oil ever again and maybe those fascist countries would have to rethink their crimes against their own people when their purses went dry. Cut the military budget by 5% a year and use this money for renewable energy research. I think Captain Obvious just called and wants to talk to the President.

  • We need to rethink what is virtuous

Is the mother driving her kid to a dozen activities a week a great mom or a selfish environmental criminal? Does raking your lawn make you a responsible neighbor or are your destroying the natural habitat for animals, while doing your part to waste resources, and contribute to global warming? Are you into nature because your drove 120 miles on Sunday to take a great hike or are you 100 times worse to the environment than the guy who played video games on his television?

  • Remember it isn’t the other guy. Every choice we make either helps, hurts, or really freaking hurts this world.

No one in the USA is really an environmentalist except the homeless. Consume less. Quit buying crap, and focus your capital on education and projects which help you save money and the environment at the same time.

Do you agree? Do you think I’m crazy? Perhaps you believe I’m overreacting. But as the gas prices rise, you’ll have a choice, you can either go broke trying to live in the paradigm of the past or you can create your own.

Good luck.

Alex Bone

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On a totally different note, you can grab some of my Cyberpunk fiction here.

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WildernessPunk Attitudes

Confusion abounds and confounds.

Strange to think how different my life was twelve months ago. Last year, I lived in an apartment away from my children through no choice of mine. Now I’m not only with them, but it appears I will be rescuing them. It’s just up to me to figure out how.

Like many times in life, it comes down to choices, hard choices, but perhaps good ones, especially for a man who claims to embrace chaos. Still change is painful and uprooting can suck. Strange to think throughout my entire life, even as a child, I had never resided anywhere longer than the Pine house where they live. Hell, I’ve remained in the mountain paradise of Flagstaff for seventeen years.

 

Flag

 

Yes, Flagstaff is a paradise of sorts, with its ripping downtown scene, perfect summers, and it location close to hundreds of exciting places to explore. In many ways, the latter is the most important to me. When one lives in Flag, you can work all day and still get to Colorado, Utah, New Mexico, and even Nevada in time to set up and camp before dinner. Yet paradise has its costs and boy howdy, does it cost a lot to live in Flagtown.

So… it becomes a strange conundrum. In order to live in this wild and wilderness zone, you have to be part of the rat race you escaped from to be here. Not that I’ve been a big part of the rat race for the last year, but as if the town senses I’ve been riding on its back without paying my America Scream dues, it’s trying to buck me off.

Perhaps this won’t happen, but would it be bad if it did?

I suppose there are several schools in life when it comes to where you live. Some folks like to stay in one place. They want to keep the friends and contacts they have collected over the years. I think this grows truer as we age. Not only are the friends we’ve known for so long more precious, but our ability to make new ones diminishes.

Younger folks can move to a new place and gather new friends quickly, Others young and old wish to experience and explore the world as much as they can. Still, what people wish to discover and explore can be quite different. Some seek, cities, culture and people, while for others exploring could mean seeing new vistas and environments.

As mentioned above, this latter idea of exploring new environments and places is what made Flagstaff so wonderful for me. Yet, could it be time to do more than explore remote spaces. Perhaps it’s time I try my hand at living more in the wilds full time?

However, with most loving parents, much of my reality circles around my small children. I need to do right by them, but what’s right?

I contemplate such issues and concerns from my camp chair nestled in the forests of the Apache Nation in the White Mountains of Arizona. I’ll (Oh so luckily) be here a few more days. A river with a water crest covered island is just a few hundred yards below me. Animals and wild horses travel at ease through the mighty trees.

 

River

 

But this place is not my primary goal. What I am setting out to do is enter the half abandoned desert town of Glenwood New Mexico. Not much on the way of jobs or anything else there, but compared to the college, wealthy second home town of Flagstaff, the rent will be perhaps less than half. Could this be the ideal writer’s retreat? The almost ghost town clinging to the White Water River where it spills out of the Gila Mountain Wilderness?

I suppose I’ll find out, but for now it’s time to get my kids going and make a picnic to take down to our river wonderland.

 

***

 

The river is warmer than expected and my older son learned he could wade over the slick rocks, at least a little, without parental aid.

I seem to be slipping back into journal mode a bit here, which was never the primary goal of WildernessPunk. WildernessPunk is not something just meant to be mine, but rather an exploration of the topic of how nature integrates or could integrate into the lives of people so involved in a world controlled by technology.

 

island

 

Thirty years ago, many people did lead lives based on technology. Whether you worked for a phone company or build cars in a factory, some level of the current high tech helped you make your cash. Now, however, almost everyone has large parts of their days revolve around tech of some kind. Some people spend hours each week on Facebook and such things. Others have hundreds of movies to indulge in just a click away, if they don’t feel like searching through their 700 channels. Most of us are never apart from the unending internet, with our hand held computers we decided to call smart phones. Children will all grow up considering this is a normal and acceptable manner in which to live, but is it—says the man typing on a laptop in the middle of the forest.

 

Writer's chair

 

Still my point is not to bash on tech as much to somehow mesh it with wilderness in a positive way. Can technology save our wildernesses, instead of being used for more effective ways of destroying it as has happened for the last five thousand years.

I think one of the things which will need to occur is a change in attitude. I often see the same type of people who would fight to preserve a section of forest be the first to complain about the idea of bio-engineering animals or changing the DNA to improve crops. Saving the world will require sacrifices.  Some might be ethical, others will involve comfort and convenience, but they will all involve a change in attitude.

It’s easy to become so spoiled with our current level of auspicious grandeur, that we come to think of all the things we have as normal, even though our grandparents could only maybe do 1% of the things our children do when they lived their youth.

Just think about your day. Go through the whole thing and don’t ignore the small tasks or other things we take so for granted we barely consider them. Now compare your day and what you do to someone living in 1880. I’m sure those people back then considered themselves normal and progressive, but if you raised your children in a manner completely acceptable in those times, Child Protective Services would probably end up stealing them from you.

Wake up:

Our World                                                                              1880s

Turn on lights                                                                           No

Work the oven or microwave                                               No

Eat food transported a long distance                                   No

Watch the news on Television                                               No

Brush Teeth                                                                                No

Shower                                                                                        No

Deodorant                                                                                   No

Check your cell phone texts                                                    No

Drive to work                                                                              No

Work in a temperature controlled Environment                 No

Check Emails                                                                                No

Check Voice Messages                                                                 No

Go to a grocery store where 10,000 types of food are available            No

Eat any type of meal you wish                                                   No

Choose from hundreds of books and movies                          No

Set your climate control to whatever you wish                      No

 

Okay, I think you get the point.

So why is it, what was normal and appropriate in 1880 would probably get your kids stolen, make you unemployable, or at the very least the weirdest person everyone knew, if you lived like that now? Still, think about for a moment and wrap your head around who had a lower impact on the environment?

I would, off the top of my head, guess 1880 guy or gal would have about 1 100th the Negative Environmental Impact everyone you know is making each year. Yet, if I was most people’s neighbor and I was living 1880 style, I’d probably get the cops called on me. If I was renting a place, I’d be kicked out within weeks.

So we all want to protect the environment, but if we saw someone doing 100 times better at the job than us, we would most likely think of him as some sort of homeless loser long before saluting his impressive effort.

Again, it might be time to reevaluate our thought processes if we want this world to live. Are we going to keep congratulating ourselves for recycling and buying a low energy dishwasher or are we really going to try to step up and make some tough choices? I’m not expecting 1880, but if you are giving maybe 3% just admit, fuck, I’m part of this big problem. Sure, I don’t expect you to throw your cell phone into the fire, but how about we try to make that 3% more like 26%?

 

Boney II

 

You can grab some of my fiction here, which I promise has nothing to do with this.