srf0638
6d ago
Endurance sports, travel (usually involving a modestly challenging journey by bike/moto/car rather than flying to a city and doing something there), reading, wrenching on and occasionally riding/driving motos/cars respectively, working interesting jobs that tend to be rough on relationships anyway, a few very close male friends that I talk to regularly and see a few times a year, the occasional hooker.
I'm not saying it's perfect, or that most people should do what I do, but all things considered I have it pretty good.
srf0638
13d ago
Not by me, my personal acquaintances (not that any of them are exclusively soloists, but all of them go alone from time to time--if nothing else, it's tough to match schedules with your buddies as an adult), the other respondent in this subthread, or Colin Fletcher, whom a reasonable man might consider an authority in these matters.
More importantly, who cares? It's your time, your money, public land (or private land where you have permission to pass, or private land and you're being sneaky enough that you have a reasonable expectation of not getting turned around, etc.). As long as you're not bothering anyone else or tearing the place up, do whatever the hell you want. No International Federation of Outdoor Recreation is going to helicopter in and write you a ticket for failure to comply with the true spirit of hiking as determined in the twelve-point statement of the Lausanne Conference of 1889.
Thinking about it some more, it makes a lot of sense that a guy who's scared to go into the woods alone (or pretending to be, for the lulz) would ask this. Another commenter seems to imply that you're American but this attitude sounds very European or possibly Australian to me. (Aside: no, I don't know why a vocal subpopulation of Australians on the Internet are like this, you'd think a frontier nation settled by convicts would have a stronger instinct to live freely, but there it is.). It's not for me to tell you how to live, but I hope I've made the point that there are other ways.
srf0638
14d ago
"If you judge safety to be the paramount consideration in life you should never, under any circumstances, go on long hikes alone. Don’t take short hikes alone, either – or, for that matter, go anywhere alone. And avoid at all costs such foolhardy activities as driving, falling in love, or inhaling air that is almost certainly riddled with deadly germs. Wear wool next to the skin. Insure every good and chattel you possess against every conceivable contingency the future might bring, even if the premiums half-cripple the present. Never cross an intersection against a red light, even when you can see all roads are clear for miles. And never, of course, explore the guts of an idea that seems as if it might threaten one of your more cherished beliefs. In your wisdom you will probably live to be a ripe old age. But you may discover, just before you die, that you have been dead for a long, long time."
(Colin Fletcher, The Complete Walker)
srf0638
14d ago
I live in the western US and work in the woods, and while I guess "shoulds" are ultimately hard to argue this post reads as massively cucked safetyist nannyism.
srf0638
19d ago
Separately, I just started Samuel Chamberlain's My Confession: Recollections of a Rogue and while I don't have any definite textual evidence yet I am extremely confident that George Macdonald Fraser must have read it and lifted a good deal of the style and possibly some more or less intact episodes for the Flashman books. Flash does run into the Glanton gang at one point, Fraser was never one to shy away from primary sources, and the voice will be strikingly familiar to Flashman readers.
srf0638
19d ago
Recently read Robert Shankland's 1954 biography of Stephen T. Mather, written apparently quite straight in what I can only describe as a jaunty Wodehousian style. This has inspired several reflections:
-1954 was of course 30-odd years into Wodehouse's career as a bestselling author (modulo the whole German radio broadcasts episode), meaning that Shankland, in writing a piece of serious if perhaps hagiographic biography, presumably knew he sounded a bit like Wodehouse and chose to write like that anyway.
-One naturally considers Wodehouse's style as a parody of the dominant straight middle-highbrow style of the time. Indeed, Wodehouse occasionally steps outside this to parody the genuinely avant-garde (the occasional modern poet character) or popular crime fiction (various episodes of jewel theft and so on.).
-At the same time, virtually everything Wodehouse ever wrote and said was in more or less the same distinctive voice--is it really a parody if you're just like that naturally, so to speak?
-This also inspires the speculation that Wodehouse's style read as relatively colorless New Yorker prose to the audiences of its day. Imagine sitting down to Psmith in the City or Right Ho, Jeeves and having it read like Atul Gawande's longform medical pieces or something. It's enough to give a guy vertigo.
-At the same time, one can see cheeky flashes of Wodehouse from time to time in A. J. Liebling, who was after all a New Yorker fixture, and perhaps even John McPhee. Was Raymond Chandler a pioneering modernist with his works of hard-boiled fiction? Maybe--but he also went to Dulwich within two years, I think, of Wodehouse.
There's probably a coherent essay lurking in all this but I can't put my finger on it.
srf0638
26d ago
biceps, triceps, pectoral muscles, and lats.
You really just gonna skip delts like that, damn.
Thinking about it, I don't know if I've ever looked in a mirror and thought I wanted bigger pecs. But I've definitely wanted bigger shoulders. A guy could go quite a ways with just supine-grip chins (on a fat bar, for forearms) and ohp variants.
Yeah, it's been my impression for quite a while that strip clubs and such in the west are much more about you and your boys than they are about you and the girls. Good posts.
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