The Fantastica Chronicles (Day 332)
Hello Everyone!
A brief introduction: I have been doing property caretaking (land stewardship) for many years (decades) and live a rather simple life with my dogs doing what most folks would consider to be an 'alternative minimalist lifestyle' but what I often just think of as a low-impact lifestyle where I get to homestead and spend the majority of my time alone with my dogs in the woods doing projects in the warmer months and taking some downtime during the colder months.
A little over three years ago I began sharing the adventures (misadventures) of my life via writing, videos, pictures and the occasional podcasts and although my intention was to simply share my life with some friends it undoubtedly grew into much more than that over the years and now I find myself doing what equates to a full-time job just 'sharing my life' which is not even all that glamorous or anything but hey folks seem to enjoy it so I just keep doing it!
The way that the Fantastica Chronicles came about is that I was living at another place when I started chronicling and sharing my days but eventually I wound up moving to a new place. The new place is a homestead named 'Fantastica' so I started with 'Day 1' upon my arrival here and just kept documenting my days much like I had done for the previous nine hundred and fifty-seven days at the last place that I lived.
I have mostly done that 'documenting' at Fantastica exclusively with words (and pictures) opting not to do the videos because as I learned at the last place, sharing videos over an intermittent and slow internet connection is horribly time consuming and what I often think of as an 'ulcer inducing' experience. All that said, I opted for simplicity with the documentation and have no real regrets for doing so.
The way that I look at it is that I give it all my best each day and while some stuff I write is better than others I think that for the most part I do a pretty good job at doing what I am doing which is simply 'sharing my life' as candidly as I possibly can and whatever folks get (or do not get) from it there is always the satisfaction of me doing what I set out to do... which is to simply share my life.
TL;DR: There is no tl;dr because you should have more patience and attention span than a gnat on a high wind.
The Fantastica Chronicles Day 332!
Unattainable Dreams, Delusional Hopes And Writing As A Vice.
This waking up at nine in the morning thing is really starting to get on my nerves and I am starting to think that perhaps deep down maybe I do not really want to wake up any earlier which in turn makes me wonder if it is just some subconscious effort to self-sabotage myself from actually enjoying that blissful time in the wee hours of the morning when everything outside is 'still' and not even the song birds are awake yet. Given that for the better part of a decade (hell maybe even more) that on average I only slept for six hours a day perhaps something has changed physiologically and now I am sleeping for eight hours instead. As much as that notion is appealing to me I do not quite believe it and am much more inclined to believe that it has much more to do with my current 'disinterest' in my own life.
When I look back over the last many years (which I can literally do because I documented it so well) I can see that I have given so many endeavors my very best efforts and not really gotten much out of it and my success to failure ratio is pretty damn slanted towards the latter. Hell the last place I lived I put my heart and soul into for nearly three years and in the end I got the proverbial rug jerked out from under me and I had to move with only the vaguest reasons given to me. To say that at this point I am 'hesitant' to uncork my passions and give a place my all would be one immense understatement.
The question that I sort of perpetually ask myself is: What is the point of building stuff, setting myself up for sustainability/independence if I am going to just have to tear it all down and start over again at some point at a new place. I have lost track of how many times that I have done that so far and mayhaps it has just left me scarred both mentally and emotionally to the point where I have to not only ask myself that question but also try to answer it without bullshitting myself 'that next time will be different'.
A few months back I had the realization that one way or another the only way to really break this cycle is to somehow be able to afford my own land and say fuck all this caretaking other folks' properties shit. Which is always more complicated than it sounds because people have their own rules, desires, dreams for a place and although I do not mind helping folks fulfill their 'ideas' (dreams) it always requires me either making my own dreams 'second class citizens' or put them aside altogether because they will somehow clash with other folks' vision, rules or whatever. In short it is difficult to ever actually be myself, say what I want to say, do what I want to do etcetera without somehow perhaps jeopardizing my ability to stay somewhere. Not that there is much of that going on where I currently live because I mostly just stay to myself in my little cabin and do my best to avoid what I not-so-affectionately think of as other folks' domestic lives. One thing that I learned a long time ago as a caretaker is to by all means necessary avoid folks' domestic stuff whether it is good, bad, beautiful or ugly... just stay the fuck out of it and maintain as much autonomy as humanly possible.
I got off on a tangent there but what I was getting at is that at least once in my life I want to inhabit a piece of land that I can say is actually mine or as close to being mine as possible given that I would undoubtedly have to pay taxes on it. My property caretaking journey has been an interesting one and along the way I have assuredly learned a hell of a lot but it would be nice to have a place that I could allow myself to form emotional attachments to and actually use my knowledge to create something truly wonderful for myself. Often in life I shy away from such thoughts because I have no illusions (delusions) that my socioeconomic status will ever afford me to have my own property but of late the idea creeps into my mind uninvited and ultimately I just feel like a big fucking failure for not being capable of overcoming that (and every other) financial obstacle. It is a deeply troubling train of thought and always leads me back to the same place over and over again which is that I am just not one of those folks destined for success in that regard.
Folks often say some horseshit like 'you have to work hard', 'you have to give it your all', 'you have to be positive' and a million other pseudo-enlightened things but what do you do when you have done all of those things repeatedly and you still do not have shit to show for your life besides a bunch of failures that lead you to the shocking realization that the only thing you truly succeed at is... fucking failing. The kind of self-image that emerges from all of that can easily lead to just giving up, saying 'why bother' and just succumbing to the inclination to quit trying and yet I just keep plugging the fuck along, I keep trying, I keep re-forging my self-image one mental hammer stroke at a time with a sort of relentless zeal that I might somehow alter the course of my own life. That saying about there being a fine line between 'bravery and stupidity' comes to mind and I think that along the way I quit being capable of discerning between the two at least in regards to my internal landscape.
Anyway, I had no idea all that was going to bubble to the surface when I started to write this and I was hoping to just sort of churn out some words about my day (which was rather uneventful) and make something nice for folks to read that perhaps did not involve too much existential stuff on my part. I was telling someone earlier today that anymore I just give the writing that I do each day 'minimal effort'. My exact words were "I decided some time back to only put into the writing the value I am getting from doing it." which these days comes out (on average) to like a whopping eighty cents an hour. I have not mentioned it in my posts for some time now but 'writing' is by far my worst vice and considering that it has been that way for the better part of three decades I am pretty damn dispassionate about it and although making any sort of 'return' on it is nice I would undoubtedly be doing it one way or another regardless of said return or the lack thereof.
Routinely sharing that writing is still rather new to me (only four years so far) and typing it all out instead of doing it in longhand is only something that I have done for that same four years but I have noticed quite the change along the way not just with my internal dialogue but also with how I express that internal dialogue and ultimately how I read it. Yeah I actually read what I write not only for editorial reasons but also because it gives me a good way to judge/gauge what the hell is going on in my mind. Externalizing internal dialogue may not be the best approach (especially given how moody I can be) but there is a certain satisfaction in taking what is in my head and getting it 'out of my head' so that I can give it some much needed examination and hey subjecting others to it can also be occasionally illuminating.
Well, this is going to be a mess to edit but I better wrap this up and get to it because it is already growing late here and I really just want to zone out for the evening and look forward to tomorrow being another day. I hope that everyone is doing well and has a nice day/night.
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