Live from Colorado

The blatant lack of posts this past few days has been a result of me being out camping in Rocky Mountain National Park. It has been really breath taking in the most cliché of ways, and I have smelled about as ripe as a the armpits of the world's fattest man. Its been a great trip, and I have more of it to go.

The last couple of days Kate and I have gone on some hikes up the sides of mountains (much harder than I thought it would be) and the most amazing parts have not been the scenic mountain top views, but instead the moments when a trail runs deep into pine forest. Sound seems to be swallowed up by the trunks and light is slowed to a trickle everywhere. Hiking through these moments of natural quiet, the solitude strikes my deep in the chest and has an incredible knack for stopping my train of thought dead cold.

One of the biggest adjustments to all of this has been the infrequency of internet connectivity. I am so use to having a world of instant feedback at my finger tips where I can put a little bit of myself out there and have it acted on, reacted to, or simply left to drift in the static. My twitter feed (something that is predicated on instant feedback), Facebook, and Google+ all remain silent to me. Yes, even this blog, where I escape to write about nothing in the most indirect way possible is something that is delayed constantly. Up the mountain, swallowed up by the trees I am unconnected and, strangely, it feels ok.

I have gotten very use to killing time in such an efficient manner online, as most people have. I can jump between news websites and YouTube videos for hours, producing nothing and consuming nothing of substance. Sometimes I wonder, if I were convert all the hours I have spent idly online, what kinds of things I could have accomplished? But when these thoughts do come, I get cold inside and run for Penny Arcade to cheer my wasted soul.

You have to imagine a mind use to being over stimulated by heaps of nothing suddenly coming face to face with a wall of trees. A single track path cutting the way through is dwarfed by the enormity of the forest all around it, and instead of nervous mental energy seeking a stead hit of the internet, it is stopped dead. The world is somehow tactile again instead of digitized. My news fix is achieved through a $15 dollar radio with a signal interrupted every time a moose sneezes. And believe me, its been strange observing the stories I have been most invested in not at a constant stream, but in bursts at the beginning and the end of each day,

Maybe there's some moral I should extrapolate from all of this. Something about how I should learn to cut back at my digital life and embrace this corporeal existence in all its ephemeral glory. Maybe. But what I take away from all of this is really that I saw a moose when I woke up this morning. It was a big ass moose.