PEOPLE AND THINGS

I've always had an attraction to "things" that in some ways 
surpasses that to people. I guess it has played out to a large 
extent in how I'm now living my life: Surrounded by lots of obscure 
objects, and hardly any people. Hmm, if only there was a way that 
things would give you money... running a museum? No, probably not - 
how many small, obscure, museums look convincingly profitable?

Anyway, to me people are largely all the same. Sure "everyone's 
different; their own precious, unique, individual", but for 
practical purposes we're all close enough that it hardly makes any 
difference. If you're looking for the specific differences, eg. in 
someone to befriend or fall in love with, you've got problems then 
too because people are always changing, both physically and 
mentally. It's all to do with their environment too - find a 
wonderful person a short time after their environment has changed 
(maybe just by your own presence in it) and they might just be at 
the beginning of a significant corresponding change in themselves. 
Sooner or later they'll be different, and perhaps in a way that you 
no linger like. Marriage only ever worked due to the social 
pressure against divorce, forcing people to change themselves to 
match their partner even in ways they don't at all like. Now the 
pressure has dropped and people are going through more cycles of 
marriage than you can count. Maybe they'll eventually wise up and 
give up on it altegether - or maybe that only makes sense to people 
like me who don't really care.

Things on the other hand, and here I'm mainly thinking of 
manufacured goods (though including hand-made items of course), 
don't change on their own. They are designed with great effort to 
hold up against usage and their environment without degrading or 
requiring repair, all without a life of their own to sustain 
themselves. They are little miricules of precicion and ingenuity 
unmatched, in their own way, by nature.

They don't succeed completely of course. They have defects, 
degrade, some even still get treated to the luxury of repair or 
maintenance. But this in fact makes them as unique as people - 
changed from their standard form in countless ways that may be 
either obvious or undetectable. But they can be held in that state, 
changed only as desired, by the caring hands of their owner. That 
owner can then marvel at their miraculous design, as well as at the 
changes that time has nevertheless brought upon them. It is a 
facination, a love, that can be kept so long as the owner has the 
ability to preserve it.


To some degree I do dream of being left alone with the things of 
the world, untroubled by the demands of other people. I take a 
vague interest in the world of the "survivalist", only to the 
extent of having a causual browse around parts of their usually 
extensive websites, and making a point of watching the rare TV 
documentaries covering the survivalists themselves that come on ABC 
or SBS. In the latter, perhaps the most common question to come 
from a skeptical journalist during their interview will be 
something along the lines of "so if everyone except you gets wiped 
out in the disaster, would you want to survive alone in the 
world?". The answer varies, usually they expect to still have at 
least a few people around, and the nature of the foreseen disaster 
is usually inspecific enough that you can't really tell whether 
that would be a reasonable assumption or not. They're usually a 
family or a couple themselves as well.

For me though, that's the greatest attraction to building a bunker 
and kitting it up so that I could huddle down there for months 
alongside mountains of canned food and an AK-47. Short of a 
disaster on a scale that could really wipe the whole surface of the 
Earth (probably some form of cosmic collision in that case - not 
nuclear war, the biggest atomic bomb ever built was already blown 
up by the Russians in the 60s don't forget), there's likely to be 
plenty of "things" left behind, and even my own collection 
including so much digital media would keep me fairly occupied. I'd 
just be left alone to play with them and survive off the resources 
left behind by society, no longer continuously indebted to it in a 
way that forces me to interact just to maintain my way of life.

Sure nobody to talk to - but with this Phlog I'm already doing a 
lot more talking to potentially nobody than I was doing before to 
real people. Nobody to have sex with either, but I'm no better off 
in that regard as things stand now. The practical problems of 
survival would be significant as well, but they're the sort of 
things I like to solve on my own, and would like to do anyway if I 
wasn't spending all of my time trying to improve my business. For 
the same reason I haven't got the time or money to build a bunker 
(if one would even be needed out here in the middle of nowhere) or 
really do anything serious about "prepping". Odds are very much 
against such a bad disaster happening anyway. But if it were to 
happen, it would seem such a shame to miss my chance by being 
killed along with everyone else.

- The Free Thinker.