The sugar shakes

“Goddammit we’re still out of cookies.” We dance around each other in the casita kitchenette making lunch. “I hadn’t thought about it all day. Why did you remind me?”

This was a scene which played out the other day, nearly came to blood, and made me feel guilty. Nobody needs cookies. But hell if I didn’t feel entitled to one due to the totally normal day of hard work I was enduring. It reminded me of having some caffeine after lunch, just to get through the last couple hours of work. Or a cigarette to get through Thanksgiving.

What is supposed to happen? Are we just supposed to practice self-abnegation forever as part of being human? Sure I already have chronic issues I link to almost every vice I’ve mentioned (well, not the cookies, yet), but is there not an emotional well-being aspect that they address? Is the mental salve worth the physical harm?

Farming

On the eleventh, we arrived in Northern New Mexico and spent a night in the colonial-looking Santa Fe before landing just outside Española where we settled in at an orchard for a workstay. We spend most of our mornings and early afternoons picking apples or grapes. Or collecting the many hundreds of apples that have fallen and begun to rot, and escorting them to the compost pile. Sometimes we start or plant starts. It’s not the hardest work I’ve ever done, but I destroy my dinner and sleep like the dead.

And I have an inordinate fixation on cookies. Certainly during the rooted years preceding this I had my affinity for snacks, but it was very easy to ignore those urges with so many other distractions — both options for recreation and domestic requirements — available to me. I didn’t feel guilty about indulging, either, probably because the money was still coming in. No guilt in squandering the replenishing resources.

Lifestyle creep

I think back on my first long term travel experience, and how little I dedicated to comforts like sweets. Let’s ignore the heavy drinking and chain smoking: I never ate lunch and only rarely snacked, for example, on a long bus ride when a vendor jumped on with arepas and other baked goods to which I was unaccustomed and felt compelled to sample. It was such a silly era of self-deprivation that for several months after returning to the states and “settling” I had no bed. I could have, quite inexpensively, but for a while elected not to because it seemed superfluous. Needless pampering. I look back on this as a particularly stupid time in my life.

“Polish comes from the cities; wisdom from the desert.”

 — Dune

One day while harvesting wine grapes I was listening to Dan Carlin’s Hardcore History episode “Old School Toughness” wherein he shares an anecdote about the Mongols, who, having conquered most of the known world, settled into administration. Whereupon they established the policy of exiling their warriors to the steppes after leaves of half a year in the cities: where they would soften. They could only be in the cities for so much time or the comforts would dull their edge. An army can’t have this!

Is this what happened to me? Eight years of increasingly comfortable software development salaries leaving me unable to pick just as many clothes as would fit in a suitcase for six months as I had once done? In need of quotidian gift in the thinking of Agent Cooper in order to survive. It was during this time that I developed my caffeine addiction. I always justified it to myself as a treat, knowing I was in reality merely desperate to avoid withdrawal after relenting to weakness and “treating” myself two days in a row.

“There is nothing in the desert; no man needs nothing.”

 — Lawrence of Arabia

The Land of Enchantment is poorly named, but suitably nicknamed. The high deserts of the southernmost stretch of the Rocky Mountains are a kind of beauty one assumes must have inspired the great Abrahamic religions. The skies seem endless, the stars innumerable and practically within reach. Ancient and recent stories are easily read in the land, unlike the forests and prairies to which I’m most accustomed in the Great Lakes region and Pacific Northwest, which quickly obscure geological and anthropological evidence. It feels like the oldest region in the states: ancient dwellings are carved into cliff faces all across the state, as in Bandelier, the Puye Cliffs, Chaco, and further north in Mesa Verde.

The desert is not a place of abundance. It is a place of scarcity. But it is also a place of mystery and wonder. For, as has been said, in the desert one will find what is in oneself. Settled into the normal yuppie life I focused so much on creature comforts, luxuries, and passing fancies that when I was ready to abandon that life — or even to simply move it across town — I found myself drowning in stuff. There was a period in this era where I sought to understand myself. I was seeking some sort of enlightenment. To know myself I explored my values through philosophy, poetry and religion. I was scared by the apparent vapidity. I turned a blind eye to this and instead accepted a comfortable life. Now, living out of a car, I have no option but to face what I fear most in myself.

Self-abnegation

Is asceticism the answer? Or periods of deprivation, or living the hard life? I just now extracted another goathead bur from my waistband. The desert makes its intentions toward me clear everyday, as the clouds rumble and threaten to strike me down in a flashing, brilliant discharge, the sun fries my flesh, the pokey plants stab me, and the venomous fauna threaten me.

How do we maintain our edge, our bite? Do we need to? Do we need the wisdom of the desert? Do I need the wisdom of the desert? Did I waste all my meditations through the manic’s inebriation and the bachelor’s lust? In clouds of smoke and throbbing dance hall bass? Perhaps I’ve found wisdom in rejecting hard-line approaches to life, in seeking, or appreciating, moderation. But what can I do about this feeling of emptiness I have that seems sated only by the reflected emptiness of vast, uncaring landscapes?

Perhaps more cookies are the answer.