I hate camping
Posted: Sun Oct 05, 2014 4:46 pm
It is difficult for me to narrow down the reasons for my intense dislike of camping. Let me try for you on this beautiful October evening. Do you mind? Oh thank you.
We must of course begin with the filth. Sitting around your fumy garbage and sticking to rancid socks and yellowed hair-matted t-shirts, you cook lukewam hotdogs that sat in the sun like Moses for 4 days. Metallic beans wrapped up in that wrinkled tin tube for quite some time now - and don't deny it because all of you know the taste of "canned".
Itching in old wool sweaters of argyle or holiday bears, you swat away the legions of biting insects... the deerflies and the mosquitoes trying to take a drink stabbing with their tiny beaks, the yellowjackets carrying off various hams.
To me, it really starts with the preparation - days of packing, planning, shopping - all horrible activities themselves and worthy of separate essays. All to sit and sip tired old aluminum Hamms sloshing around in warm, ice-melted coolers with the various meats from a week ago, turning weird and green, floating with disgusting flecks breeding who-knows-what.
The Bus
An unsafe soup can from 1969, an era of optional safety, in this era of total detachment. It takes a certain amount of stupidity to put oneself in this situation.
There is no telling what is going to break, like a random jack-in-th-box. You pray it's not along THIS road, sea surf crashing 1000' down.
Will it make it? Will it fall apart after battle like so many startships Enterprise? Blues Mobile, falling apart after the "mission from God".
But all the shit - it all fits, somehow with a prayer against airborne axes etc. down the crowded roads filled with distracted idiots. Pray for no nails or screws on the way either, or a loose chicken. I almost hit a chicken on my bicycle the other day, true story.
Mice in a bus are no fun. No, they like to wake you up rustling in the dead silence of a wild night with crispy rustling in your cabinets, shitting their tiny turds everywhere for you to find later, smeared with e-bola or whatever the hell else. Chewing through your stuff, they leave a waste of excrement, ruined goods, and bad sleeping. They are a big reason just to stay home.
The Weather
It never snows on christmas, except for suckers. Camping either involves rain, lightning, high winds, freezing temperatures, or a combination. Waking up at 2 am to take a leak in the 35 deg. rain sucks. It's horrible really, tracking mud and the feces of who the hell knows what back into your warm fetid bag, wet and wide awake, chuckling to yourself at how horrible it all is.
Camping in the snow is for idiots, nothing good could ever come of it, wet pantsbottoms, hypothermia, eventual cannibalism etc.
Look at the damned Donner Party - right at a lake full of trout too. Bet they were having a great camp, "enjoying the wilderness" you betcha. Perfect example, nature is a horrible she-bitch full of disregard and maybe even disgust. Nature may be lovely as you fall off a cliff or lie infested in a tent swimming with parasites. Unfortunately for us, Nature requires unconditional love and surrender.
But the rain will wash it all away, and even your skin sometimes with its unceasing drops, icy and turning you into a cadaver, shivering your pale bony hands deathlike from the lack of sun.
Shitting
Horrible, like an ape you squat, looking around like a nervous dog - vulnerable and straining, burning from the painful brew of last night's chili, pulsing into the ground and almost filling the hole you dug in the hard basalt earth, quickly quickly man you gotta go.
Disregard for Nature
Trash in trees, along roads, everywhere else, from sea to sea. Shot up TVs on mountain peaks. It breaks your heart if you have one.
Smells
Most things smell horrible in nature, decay and rot surrounds you at every camp. Mushrooms an old basement, or the really bad stinks of maggoty meat somewhere out in the bushes. Sweating through and stinking streaked rings of filth into your last clean clothes you are forced to accept a world of men without showers, what a fetid age it must have been...an age of old and rotten cheese everywhere. Fire leaves a streak of smoke-stink on everything as well, coating everything with a funeral pyre ash. And it will burn you, leaving pocked old scars full of fluid for a long time.
Going home
On the last rancid day, as the rain pours, you must gather up all your muddied crap and fit it into a filthy and smelly vehicle, steamy with the stench of smoked old feet, praying the car will start and make it down all those hills and home. You are exhausted, infected, smelling of death, sleep deprived, sickly, and wet, on your guard for the next moron on a blind curve or deer or whatever the hell else decides to jump out at you. Then the sad suburbs roll by, tire marts, traffic interstate a million cars................................................
Sincerely,
-Bob
We must of course begin with the filth. Sitting around your fumy garbage and sticking to rancid socks and yellowed hair-matted t-shirts, you cook lukewam hotdogs that sat in the sun like Moses for 4 days. Metallic beans wrapped up in that wrinkled tin tube for quite some time now - and don't deny it because all of you know the taste of "canned".
Itching in old wool sweaters of argyle or holiday bears, you swat away the legions of biting insects... the deerflies and the mosquitoes trying to take a drink stabbing with their tiny beaks, the yellowjackets carrying off various hams.
To me, it really starts with the preparation - days of packing, planning, shopping - all horrible activities themselves and worthy of separate essays. All to sit and sip tired old aluminum Hamms sloshing around in warm, ice-melted coolers with the various meats from a week ago, turning weird and green, floating with disgusting flecks breeding who-knows-what.
The Bus
An unsafe soup can from 1969, an era of optional safety, in this era of total detachment. It takes a certain amount of stupidity to put oneself in this situation.
There is no telling what is going to break, like a random jack-in-th-box. You pray it's not along THIS road, sea surf crashing 1000' down.
Will it make it? Will it fall apart after battle like so many startships Enterprise? Blues Mobile, falling apart after the "mission from God".
But all the shit - it all fits, somehow with a prayer against airborne axes etc. down the crowded roads filled with distracted idiots. Pray for no nails or screws on the way either, or a loose chicken. I almost hit a chicken on my bicycle the other day, true story.
Mice in a bus are no fun. No, they like to wake you up rustling in the dead silence of a wild night with crispy rustling in your cabinets, shitting their tiny turds everywhere for you to find later, smeared with e-bola or whatever the hell else. Chewing through your stuff, they leave a waste of excrement, ruined goods, and bad sleeping. They are a big reason just to stay home.
The Weather
It never snows on christmas, except for suckers. Camping either involves rain, lightning, high winds, freezing temperatures, or a combination. Waking up at 2 am to take a leak in the 35 deg. rain sucks. It's horrible really, tracking mud and the feces of who the hell knows what back into your warm fetid bag, wet and wide awake, chuckling to yourself at how horrible it all is.
Camping in the snow is for idiots, nothing good could ever come of it, wet pantsbottoms, hypothermia, eventual cannibalism etc.
Look at the damned Donner Party - right at a lake full of trout too. Bet they were having a great camp, "enjoying the wilderness" you betcha. Perfect example, nature is a horrible she-bitch full of disregard and maybe even disgust. Nature may be lovely as you fall off a cliff or lie infested in a tent swimming with parasites. Unfortunately for us, Nature requires unconditional love and surrender.
But the rain will wash it all away, and even your skin sometimes with its unceasing drops, icy and turning you into a cadaver, shivering your pale bony hands deathlike from the lack of sun.
Shitting
Horrible, like an ape you squat, looking around like a nervous dog - vulnerable and straining, burning from the painful brew of last night's chili, pulsing into the ground and almost filling the hole you dug in the hard basalt earth, quickly quickly man you gotta go.
Disregard for Nature
Trash in trees, along roads, everywhere else, from sea to sea. Shot up TVs on mountain peaks. It breaks your heart if you have one.
Smells
Most things smell horrible in nature, decay and rot surrounds you at every camp. Mushrooms an old basement, or the really bad stinks of maggoty meat somewhere out in the bushes. Sweating through and stinking streaked rings of filth into your last clean clothes you are forced to accept a world of men without showers, what a fetid age it must have been...an age of old and rotten cheese everywhere. Fire leaves a streak of smoke-stink on everything as well, coating everything with a funeral pyre ash. And it will burn you, leaving pocked old scars full of fluid for a long time.
Going home
On the last rancid day, as the rain pours, you must gather up all your muddied crap and fit it into a filthy and smelly vehicle, steamy with the stench of smoked old feet, praying the car will start and make it down all those hills and home. You are exhausted, infected, smelling of death, sleep deprived, sickly, and wet, on your guard for the next moron on a blind curve or deer or whatever the hell else decides to jump out at you. Then the sad suburbs roll by, tire marts, traffic interstate a million cars................................................
Sincerely,
-Bob