How Much Weight to Carry.

First, I want to apologize that so many of these recent posts have concerned backpacking. You probably don’t wake up in the morning and think to yourself, “Gee, I wonder what outdoorsy minutia Jamie will bitch about today” or maybe you do, I don’t pretend to know what goes on in your head.

This stuff just happens to be on my mind today because I have less than a month until my Awesome Super-Fun Grand Canyon Adventure and I still have a lot of preparing to do. I will not bore you with all of the details, but I am trying to figure out how to make the trip with a pretty minimal carry weight (I want a base pack weight closer to ten pounds than fifteen, and a total weight of less than 25 pounds) but still with enough of the things that I will need to be able to enjoy the trip (I am neither an ascetic nor a masochist after all), so things like backpacks and shelters are just on my mind a lot at the moment.

All that being said, I think that I might totally dork out tonight and just spread all of my stuff out on the floor of my bedroom, weigh it all again, stare at all of it and think. This is something that I enjoy doing sometimes and I think that tonight this will be a real winner of an activity. Does it sound ungodly boring? You bet it does! Is all of this backpacking and hiking and jogging and blogging-so-much and writing-a-whole-lot actually just my way of trying to deal with the fact that I am not very good at being single and have been kind of lonely lately? You bet’cha.

But that doesn’t mean that it can’t be fun, right? Or, maybe I am framing this discussion wrong. See, it isn’t that I am lonely and so took up these hobbies, but rather that it never really occurred to me to do any of this stuff before, and – as luck would have it – I like doing these things, and clearly have the time. Do I like them as much as having a partner in my life and reliable access to physical contact and intimacy? Certainly not, but we are all just trying to make our way through the world, you know? And so we do what we need to do to make the days a little better.

I’m realizing right now that this post is sort of starting to sound like a depressing Cure song or something; that really isn’t the intent. I’m just thinking with the keyboard I guess. It’s a form of therapy for me and it allows you some fun internet voyeurism of the sort that doesn’t require you to immediately delete your browsing history (You know what I’m talking about. Yeah you do), so it works for both of us I guess.

Anyway, unless you would like to come over and provide me with some reliable access to physical contact and intimacy, then I think that I will probably just have a nice quiet evening weighing backpacking gear on my little scale and such.

Oh, and just to be clear, I was innocently joking about the physical contact, not propositioning the internet en mass. Unless you’re into that kind of thing, in which case I was totally serious.

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