Atheism is not all I do. It’s sort of my curse that most things interest me. Used to be, EVERYTHING interested me, but I’ve gotten more conservative in my old age. The uncool part of the condition is that it’s been hard to focus on any one thing, and actually make a good living at it. The cool part is, it’s been (is being) a fun ride.
One of my things is adventuring. Doing stuff for the fun of it. I would actually like to make a living at it, and have been working, at a glacial pace, to develop a website — AdventYear — of “Outdoor Adventures for Fat Old People.”
What you’ll see is you click over there is a half-completed site (or maybe it’s one-tenth completed; I just know there’s still a LOT of stuff to do, and at this point, given recent time/money pressures, I’m not sure I’ll ever finish the thing). But there are a couple of adventures up, to show to potential sponsors/advertisers.
The idea behind the site is my supposition that there are a lot of fat old people — such as ME, for instance — who either had adventures in their youth, and miss them, or never got around to it but still want to. BUT that most adventure writing is aimed at young people, which means it focuses on the balls-out crazy stuff that someone like me … well, let’s just say I don’t want to waste one minute of my time by getting injured or killed.
But the point of the whole thing is that you’re never too old to have adventures, and that even the 55 to 75 demographic (my target audience) can still do fun stuff.
My intention is/was to have one great adventure a week for an entire year and write about it in an entertaining fashion, including pictures or video. It would be aimed at seniors in this way: All the safety and access caveats would be included, and each adventure would have clear visual keys attached (glyphs I would design) to the physical and mental impacts, the degree of difficulty, how scary it is, whether it includes bathrooms (!), handicapped access, etc. (You can see a sample of that info in the sidebar to A Midsummer Night’s Gleam.)
The kick-ass fun part of it is that I’d get to have all those adventures: Hot air ballooning! Water skiing! Wilderness camping! Parasailing! Skydiving! Whitewater rafting! Shithowdybygollydam! (Also kick-ass is that I’ve already experienced and written about many of the adventures, and would just have to do them again with an eye to this older audience.)
The hard work part is that in the midst of having these weekly adventures, I’d have to take notes, take pictures, write articles, contact advertisers, schedule future adventures, actually GET TO each coming adventure (they’d take place all over the United States), format and post adventures on the website … on and on. Whew. A lot of work for one fat, old man.
All of this in the midst of being an atheist blogger, getting into public speaking, writing another book and, oh yeah, holding down my day job in Mundania. And dammit, someday I want to have a big goofy dog again! (See? TOLD YA I have a hard time doing one thing.)
Anyway, thought you might find it interesting.
Oh, by the way? If I never get this thing finished, the lesson it’s all wrapped around is that you can DO this stuff, at practically any age. And that you should, you MUST.