Under Different Skies

This is great country for old men. That's why I've got to get out. There's not much time left. How long before entropy sucks out the last of the supernova of youth? How long before swagger turns to hobble?

Ten to fifteen years.

I did my time in the boredom mines, I got my kick in the butt seven months before vesting for a pension. I staggered blindly into a hundred and some $k in a 401k and a marginal income from Social Security and a little stipend from an old job.

Now I want to ramble. I bitch about what's happened to the spirit of the land, it's time to put my feet where my mouth is. Wait, did I say that right? It's time to live up to it. 

I'm free. All that solitary living just paid off: I owe nobody what I do next. I answer to no one but myself. 

I'm bored here. I don't approve of this place any more. 

Most of all, I want to live again; to step into space, to walk barefoot out onto the road. I want to walk under different skies. To take risks. To be free. To travel with an eye to my next place to be. Not as tourist, as somebody there. To ask: "What's here? What if I stay?"

To not waste the rest of my time in comfortable oblivion.

And, well, to make that yankee dollar work. 

South America.There's not so much to buy down there. Out of the consumer culture. A different way to live. Being poor isn't a social crime. And there are my old friends the Incas.

Two concepts:

Psychological entropy is the process where each change leaves less energy for the next. 

I've been lucky; I still have the juice to turn the engine over, if I'm willing to hit the ignition.

Subjective Time is the formula by which each objective unit of time is measured against the number of those units lived. They calculate that it seems to increase at the square root of your age. To a baby two minutes old  a minute is half his life and seems that way. Remember when an hour in school seemed never to end? Now I live on fast forward.

Now or never. But it takes preparation, to organize and offload a lifetime. What to leave behind? When you're never coming back? 

And do you really want to give it up, all the comfort, the familiarity, the life you've built out what you earned and desired, to go tilting windmills in some alien place?

It would be so easy to stay. Such a relief.

Such a betrayal, such a cowardice, such a question never answered.

Look. I have this rent controlled place, been there nigh unto seventeen years. First time I saw it I said, "I'm staying here until I die. Or leave California." Go, you can't come back.

Ecuador. That's what I'm thinking. To start out. I've been there, I liked it. I liked the people, the land. Then try Peru, where all the ruins are. A little edgier. Maybe when I get too old to fuck with fate, France; if my money's still good. 

Those are different skies. Different people. Different mountains, jungles, coasts. Different sense of time. When I look into their eyes I won't be able to see the back of their skull. 

To leave behind all of this money. This Babylonian opulence. The freeways, the new, big cars; the clean restrooms. This Best Western south of Portland with two double beds, an HDTV, immaculate porcelain, fresh paint. 

Remember that hotel room in Pillaro, in the Andes? No heat? Just a stack of thick woolen blankets. No electricity; a candle. You bed down when the sun sets. Which place brings better sleep?

Remember getting back to the states, sick, open sores festering from a bull's horn and bug bites? The relief of clean streets and rich people who think they are poor. 

Well, that was an adventure. This is life. Fuck J. Alfred Prufrock. Fuck the peach. I'm getting out of here.

...and maybe - at the very end - if anyone's left - maybe come back to die. 

And maybe bloody not.



"Under different skies" - the phrase seems to trace back to James George Frazer, in The Golden Bough, 1922.