Just reading a status by a Facebook friend where he talks with pride about his adventures waking up in strange beds and houses, being threatened by men with guns, handcuffed by cops, all sorts of exciting bad-boy mayhem.
And I kinda have to wonder … why go there? Why choose THAT path?
I mean, we live in a world where fantastic adventures are possible, adventures of growth and learning and accomplishment, and even real danger if you want it. You can stand on the floor of Yosemite Valley and look up at men and women climbing a vertical rock wall more than 4,000 feet high. You can BE one of them … and nobody will stop you. You can parachute out of planes from 2 miles in the sky. Scuba dive with whales. Raft the Grand Canyon. Work to be an ace skateboarder. Camp in the wilderness in grizzly country. Learn to throw knives and join the circus. Become a wildland firefighter. And NOBODY WILL STOP YOU. Nobody will even care, except to admire you when they see you doing it.
Why does it have to be shit that gets you in trouble?
To me it’s always looked like a serious failure of imagination — not just of individuals but of entire cultures. I have a sort-of friend in Los Angeles who’s been butting heads with cops and courts his whole adult life. His eyes glow when he talks about his neighbors calling the cops on him for revving his motorcycle after midnight, or a police helicopter circling over his house after a gun was fired into the air at 3 a.m. I hear stories from New York City people, practically on a daily basis, about their many arrests and fights and time in jail.
And damn, what a massive and fruitless waste of time. I mean, what the hell? Is that all there is for some people?
If you were standing in the middle of a 360 degree circle, and every degree marked off some wild adventure, maybe ONE degree would be the stuff that’s illegal. The rest might be every bit as exciting, every bit as fulfilling, but would contain no threat of arrest or imprisonment. Most of it costs less than drugs. And incidentally doesn’t involve stepping on the rights of the neighbors to enjoy a night of sleep uninterrupted by assholes.
I wish there was a class young men could go through — “How Not To Be A Dumb Fuck” — that would be at least partly about this.
Might be an interesting thing to include in this crowd-sourced, deliberately designed culture I’m thinking of.
I even know some guys — serious adventurers, all — who could teach it.