Bugged Out

Books and deuces.

Both of us are not feeling well. Some sort of gut bug, the symptoms of which you can imagine. It’s no fun to be tethered to a certain room in the house, but here we are, welcoming early June a few rungs below peak flourishing. Whenever I have the crud, I reach for the comfort of books. We are lucky to have two splendid bookstores a block apart downtown. Today we took a micro-adventure to one, Country Bookshelf, but had to leave in a pinch, if you get my drift, and each of us came home empty handed. The emptying, it turned out, continued further.

I wanted to buy at least a dozen reads, some classic, like A Farewell to Arms, some modern gems that I’ve already read, like The Bear, by Andrew Krivak (a favorite of mine), The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot, by Robert Macfarlane (walking being a topic of fascination), a recent addition to earth, A World Appears: A Journey into Consciousness, by the maestro Michael Pollan, and some collections of stories and novellas, by Irish writer Claire Keegan, who everyone who is someone keeps on talking about.

Then there were the cookbooks, especially the one about the regional cuisines of Spain (I leafed through it, and the photos made me depressed at the thought of American cuisine—styrofoam, plastic, sugar, guar gum, tertiary butylhydroquinone, propylene glycol, death) and then the accounts of travel, the colorful hardbacks put out by Patagonia, which involve adventure and nifty protagonists. I didn’t get to the Nature section, a bogus delineation I tend to avoid, preferring to read about more abstract matters, more literary stuff, like the works of Rebecca Solnit, or the great Four Seasons in Rome, by Anthony Doerr, where the prose is the star of the show. Nothing against mushrooms (Merlin Sheldrake), I just prefer to read about folks.

Honestly, I’m in a book drought. Summer is the season of action, and since our move from the prairie to Bozeman five weeks ago, I haven’t read a single book. Work has practically stolen my life, as it tends to do, and though I’m not complaining, I’m plum worn out most evenings. There is also my running affliction, which is the conviction that anything under twenty-five miles on the week amounts to terminal atrophy. Someday, maybe, I will learn how to quit mounting this donkey, and I’ll have an extra ten hours each week to read, only it is what one does that becomes memories, so maybe I am living right after all; keeping moving, keeping fit, keeping aspirational.

Due to our brief summers, there is pressure to light out, to go as far as possible in the adjacent wildernesses, to explore. Miss FPJ has never been to Glacier National Park, for instance. Since it is clogged with traffic and rubberneckers, I wouldn’t take her there at gun point, but there is a lot of country around the Park that one should see before it is too late. It is nothing like our region of the state, but bluer, greener, wetter. With so much to do, to experience, with the demands of work and training, how can I read?

Being as busy as I am is not desirable. Bit by bit, I can feel it breaking me, as if my life is a rogue ferris wheel spinning out of control, my blood pooling due to centrifugal forces. The mountains, with their cold lakes, their migrating elk, their dazzling and terrifying electrical storms, offer the reprieve I need. Immersion can backfire though, as being out there doesn’t exactly prepare the human psyche to return to the civilizational mess we’ve created, where constant noise and pollution and material excesses reign, but for more immersion.

In recent weeks, I’ve perforce had to work in the Yellowstone Club, a place of decimation and mansions and lugubrious empty streets, and this exposure to the ski chalets of history’s wealthiest people has made me feel sick and weary, not in the theoretical either, but in a dark night of the soul way, because theirs is a war with the planet and mine is a search for the reciprocal. It is a clash of values. For me, a fifty-thousand square foot house is not impressive, but oppressive. I’m not the only one. Every humble colleague of mine enters that place as if it is a zone of death and ruination defined by missing various facets of intelligence, imbalanced and gross, not the cachet of the uber wealthy, but something malignant, a hive mind of zombism that was formerly a paradise for wild animals. It is what it was that breaks the heart. I’m not so naive to expect a life without slights, yet it hurts all the same, even acceptance—especially acceptance.

The truth is that I need a book, because when I don’t have the proverbial pile, I squander precious life on this gizmo searching the bowels of the web for profound company, but such company, in my experience, is not web-based; it lives in books. If you are anything like me, then here and there you may find yourself online trying to find that which cannot be found, opening apps, scrolling, clicking links, asking AI how many atoms once belonging to mastodons and tyrannosauruses now belong to you.¹

My recommendation is to get off your can, go down to the local bookshop, and buy a fat stack. One of the marvels of modern life is that this is possible. For my grandparents, it would have been extremely rare; for their parents, nearly inconceivable. Bugged out and flushing to beat the band is no good for shopping, so my fat stack will have to wait for another day. Maybe, too, for another season.

1. This is straight from Claude:

“Bottom line

You probably carry somewhere around 50–100 million atoms that were once part of any given mastodon or T. rex — roughly a nanogram of mass. That’s not many by fraction (about 1 in every 100 trillion of your atoms), but it’s a huge absolute number.

Since there were perhaps ~50,000 T. rexes that ever lived and millions of mastodons, the atoms from the entire species now in your body number in the quadrillions to quintillions — a microgram or so of ancient megafauna, distributed throughout every cell of you.”

……

Say what you will about AI, I have some peculiar speculations like this mastodon/atom/ T. rex question, and it’s fun to ask a machine what’s up, even if it may be inaccurate. It’s only getting better. My apology to the wimps grousing about the arrival of the future, but it’s inevitable. Once upon a time, the printing press terrified a great many people. Now I’m wondering how many of my own atoms were once atoms in printing presses, in William Wallace’s hair……