I used to harbor revulsion for people who’d complain about it being too hot in the summer and too cold in the winter. In the summer, they’d cry: “I need air conditioning!” And I’d reply, “Why condition the air?  Condition yourself to the heat and you’ll be alright.”   In the winter, they’d bewail: “I’m freezing my ass off!”  And then I’d think, even if I didn’t always blurt: “Just another thing you’ll no longer need to wipe.”  Besides, given the obesity of Americans today, freezing one’s ass off , for many, would constitute a significant uplift in their health.

I’m more tolerant now:  I understand others’ intolerance for what they perceive as nature’s ‘extremes’ even if I don’t share their attitudes.  It’s all about comfort for them, all about creaturing into a softly warm covey of  white-noised, undisturbed mellowness in all affairs during the larger sentencing period of their lives.  At some point in lovemaking, I crave that covey, too.  At some point.  But given my rather sparse historical participation in that particular arena, it’s anything but a repetitively patterned aspect of my mindset.  Typically, my cast-into-the-world, life-in-the-streets odyssey mentality seeks anything but comfort as I roam under the sun, slide as a shadow under the moon, and tour the world feeling ever-born and dangerously indecisive.  I’ve always been so bent.  The difference now is that I leave “the others” alone.

I often just ache with my own insatiable need to do battle in the universe.  I like to turn over stones, get just far enough out of the range of poisonous snakes so they can’t strike, take one less step by leaping, acknowledge only death as life’s safekeeping, and yet keep it remotely a safekeeping I abhor.  In some ways, I see myself as the embodiment of worldly fluxes, novel infusions of strangeness, and never-before-been-done’s that come knocking at the forest door.  But the energy that is me, in me,  I also acknowledge a process tamer, an ordering principle proselytizing for lesser entropy, and a plower of such highways that are abandoned now even by highwaymen.   So be it then: Let me plow the star-traced highways and make it more of a creature comfort for those who follow to roll on down them.  But I disdain the traffic, so don’t expect me to stick around.  Today’s an adventure and tomorrow’s a discovery unfathomed.