Contents Subject to Change, As Needed

It's time to end this drought. Therefor, I'm here to relax the muscles and wet the ground with a diarrhetic torrent of mental sewage.

Externally, I continue to thrive in Chicago at a price. Enjoying my ever-accelerating thrift store empire and the deluge of must-haves that wash ashore has grown old. You can only possess so many antique gas masks and sets of custom tailored prosthetic legs before you decide that the sight of one more copy of Iococca by Lee Iococca is going to set off a chain of events that you refuse to be responsible for. This is amplified by the process of shedding such priceless garbage. Getting rid of a home filling amount of other people's trash that you once imbued with monetary value really makes you think. All of the hours of my life spent on this bit of junk and that, for I prefer to convert straight from units of time to objects of detritus exchanged for such time. That movie cost me ten minutes of my life and then another ninety-eight because it sucked.

I had a dream some time ago where I was living in a Morton shed on a small plot of land surrounded by trees. In the rear section of the shed, I had erected a humble kitchen and living area topped with a sleeping loft. The rest of the space was taken up with tools and workspace where I welded sculpture, repaired machinery, spat in the face of science and whatever else a Mad Engineer would find himself up to. It was beautiful. I'm not entirely sure how much of this was the original dream and how much of it has been romanticized in the following weeks. Since the initial dream, I've really fleshed things out in my daydreams. Wind generators made from old steel barrels and the biggest electric motors I can find, rewound to accommodate the added magnetic poles. An enormous wood burning oven/kiln/furnace/forge made from clay bricks hand formed from the nearby creek bed, complete with spinning chimney cover to capture the escaping heat and return it back into the system in the form of just enough electricity to power a thermostat and an automatic flue. A small grove of bamboo out back as quickly replenishing fuel? Okay, so there are some things that I still have to work out. It's become my "five year plan". As a person who finds "five year plans" repulsive, I can now understand their purpose, I guess.

Internally, the city has become a wasteland. Where I saw potential and untapped resources only months earlier, I now see uselessness and worthless cretins. There are still gems among the wreckage, but only in the form of people. I am not a city boy by nature and I think I've leveled up in Urbanity significantly since I got here, but it's soon going to really detract from the rest of my experience points. However, quitting cold turkey is not an option either. Not because I find myself addicted to city life, but because the concept of land ownership has become such a perverted and protected notion in these fine United States.

All of this in mind, I have been confronted with a decision that I have to make. Not a simple this or that decision, mind you, but an open ended, nigh rhetorical self-imposed question as to just what in the hell I'm going to do about this. I pride myself as a decisive person, but this isn't the sort of thing you can just proclaim. So, I plan. A plan is really no more than a fluid decision and my fluid decision is to leave this city, diddle around the country side for a month and arrive in a different, smaller city. The former being Chicago, IL and the latter being Eugene, OR. If you're reading this, I hope I spend some time with you on my way.