It is a certain kind of pick-up truck that is a dickhead: the extra-large, immaculately clean, not-a-single-scratch-on-the-frame pick-up truck. A “working man’s truck” that has never touched a day’s worth of work. These are the pick-up trucks that roar behind me at high speed, flirting a side-swipe, and zoom off as I hack my lungs in a dark glittering plume of leaded exhaust. They love intimidating cyclists.
But how they betray themselves when they bully us! Their intimidation of cyclists tells me they fear cyclists. And we cyclists are scary! Our bare-muscled determination threatens their masculinity-defined-by-consumption. Not one of them would or could do what we do – haul a bulky load of meager possessions up and down mountains by the muscle of our own legs for hundreds of miles, along busy roads with no shoulder, not knowing where to sleep, not knowing the exact route to go, and relying on the grace of strangers to point the way. It is easier to be a dickhead driving a truck. What a bunch of fuckin’ dickheads.
I don’t own a car, have never owned a car, and am hoping that I will never need to own a car. It is a “vow” – that is, a sacred, mysterious, and absurdly banal promise. I know how to drive a car and I have borrowed people’s cars occasionally (and helped some people pay for theirs) but I, personally, will never own a car. If I owned a car, I would entrap myself into unnecessary obligations and responsibilities. When it comes to being a dutiful human, I am very selective with what responsibilities to shoulder.
Maybe I should frame it this way: Supporting public transportation is one of my responsibilities. Supporting cycling culture and making it more accessible/safer throughout our society is one of my responsibilities. Practicing radical forms of “carpooling” and “ridesharing” is one of my responsibilities. Slowing down, feeling the physical weight of what I carry, admiring the earth with my whole body, witnessing the overlooked plants and animals – this is a responsibility too.
There is one question I most often receive during my travels: “What do you do, Dandylionheartedness?”
I am a monky. That is, I am something like a monk. I am not part of any order or religious sect, nor have I taken on any traditional vows (actually, what ideals I do have, I break frequently). I’m too crass to be a monk, judgmental, more arrogant than I want to be yet satisfyingly disobedient.
But! What makes me a monky is my foolish commitment to my ideals. It is an experiment of sorts – I am asking a question: what if I lived as closely to my values as possible? Impossible, I know. But I must make an effort. Living into a society fairer and more ecologically sustainable should be seen as a duty rather than some crazy, romantic dream.
But here’s some good news: There are many monkys living this question right now. We are fragmented, lost, struggling, disgusted with the machinations of society, existing along the fringes and edges of acceptable life-paths. We daydream about sleeping outside, we’re excited by the prospect of living out of our cars, we prefer friendships over possessions, we’re okay with having very little money, we quit jobs faster than we could quit ourselves. We are not shamans or spiritualists but our compass seems pointed toward mysteries which escape speech. As one of my monky friends would say, We are full of shit and have no idea what we are doing. And we are so completely in awe that we cannot imagine living any other way.
We are practical idealists. Don’t give us theoretical fantasies about goodness – we want the immediate, physical truth. We want embodied practice. We are cynical idealists too, jaded by lofty too-good-to-be-real quick fixes. Humans may have jaded us but we still live in the hope of humanity.
“The population of the affluent world is nourished on a steady diet of brutal mythology and hallucination, kept at a constant pitch of high tension by a life that is intrinsically violent in that it forces [a lot of people] to submit to an existence which is humanly intolerable. . . The problem of violence, then, is not the problem of a few rioters and rebels, but the problem of a whole structure which is outwardly ordered and respectable, and inwardly ridden by psychopathic obsessions and delusions.”
-Thomas Merton
Thomas Merton, a great American monk of the 20th century, declared that ours is a time for monastics. The world today, especially the affluent world, needs more monastics. He doesn’t mean the kind of conventional monk who merely exchange the values, concepts and rites of one kind of society for another. Merton is speaking about people, regardless of their spiritual or religious affinities, to thrust themselves into an apparently irrational abyss that counters the dominant and violent culture. Yes, our society needs more monastics, more people willing to live in seemingly irrational hope. It is not enough to merely mouth our platitudes (Words cheapen my thoughts. This blog is not ideal but I’m messy and so here we are delighting in words. I fucking love words). We must live it.
**
Here’s a secret: We do not practice asceticism. We practice eating miracles.
Here’s another secret: Not owning a car has limited my job opportunities, limited me socially in certain ways, made moving around much slower, complicated my errands, and limits my access to certain parts of this parceled land. And I think my life has been made richer because of it. I never would’ve guessed I’d be cycling across the states. Faith is knowing you can eat the miracle.
Here’s a confession: I don’t mean to call certain truckers dickheads. They ain’t dickheads. They’re just acting like dickheads.
Here’s a secret secret: Humans are space monkeys floating on a big space rock. Are you not amazed? As @postcrunk has tweeted:
“Our biggest mistake is pretending all of this is normal and not accepting the beautiful insane surreal tragedy of earthbound existence”
Like fr tho, WTF am I doing really???