Escaping The City.
Sometimes living in Los Angeles makes me paranoid. We don’t have any basic human staples here without importing or by way of aqueduct or pipeline so if/when the predictions of high ranking whistle blowers and conspiracy theorists come true and our infrastructure slowly gets pinched off leaving us to fend for ourselves or walk out of the city we’ll probably suffer a bit.
This is why I sometimes fantasize about escaping from the city now. I don’t fantasize of any place specific because if I knew of a place that fit my fantasies I would already be there.
Here is the problem: I like it here.
In my fantasies we would live off the land or trade with neighbors. We would focus on building interesting useful structures and farming equipment, there would be fires and music and feasts. Our families and friendships would be tight knit. I can visualize the end product of what we would build and I can almost get the satisfaction of what being connected to nature actually feels like before…
It comes crashing down by a few realizations.
Most towns are filled with garbage. The limited options are filled with Taco Bell and kids acting like the pop culture they see on the Internet. The world got too small. The magic that was once a sheltered small town is erased. In beautiful places that are filled with trees and lush landscapes the town goers are still head deep in their computers. We all now share the same information which just destroyed the beauty in embracing ones own culture. Everybody seems to just adapt to what they are told they need. *Actually bringing it back a little, this is a big reason why I like LA. Here, at least I have an inside picture on where the garbage comes from so that it can be ignored.
My fantasy of this out of city, living off the land scenario won’t exist until everything crashes, and even after that it will take time to be at peace with it. We’ve climbed so high as a society that the fall is going to hit hard.
So there’s the rub. It’s nothing more than a fantasy. The only solution I’ve come to is that I need to secure some land not too far, but just far enough. We need to start chipping away at making it livable. We need to store essentials there. Hopefully it will become nothing more than a great place for the family to escape to for enjoying life together in nature. Build, plant, eat, look at the stars and pretend that our digital world as we know it now, is behind us. Have faith.