Saturday, January 30, 2016

Day -89 : Living The Squeaky Sausage Life


Saturday, January 30, 2016
Miles to go: 2,663

Eleven days since my last post. Eighty nine more till I hit the trail. It seems like time is moving so slowly at certain levels but at others it's moving fast. A lot has happened in my life in the last eleven days. We were supposed to be moving today. We are not, instead I am writing a blog post. What happened? Life happened. Basically, the buyers backed out of the deal. After weeks and weeks of innumerable inspections they decided to not follow through. It doesn't make sense to me. It has been emotionally exhausting. I feel like I have been squeezed and pressed, like the meat that goes through a sausage grinder and then finds itself stuffed in a sausage casing. Trapped, surrounded by pork intestine, stifling and confined. I want to break free, break out, but I am being wadded and swaddled and stuffed into a tube.

The bizarre thing is that if I step back and look at life objectively, I shouldn't feel this way. We have a great house! We love where we live, we can afford it. It's more space than we need so our whole reason for selling is to get a smaller place with less overhead living expenses. It's funny to me that I feel the way I do when reality is so opposite. We have more physical space now then we'd have if we'd moved. I often don't understand my emotions, it has taken years to even recognize that I have them. Anyway, so there's that.

On the hiking track... Shelly and I have gotten our donation site up and available. Shelly has ALS. Shelly is my friend. I don't like seeing her slowly atrophy away and I feel powerless to do anything. The best that I can do is to give my readers an opportunity to help Shelly. I am planning to hike the entire Pacific Crest Trail from the Mexican Border to the Canadian border in a single season, tracing a continuous footpath the entire way, not skipping or flipping any of the sections. I plan on blogging here using my iPhone 6 on a daily basis. (Though some days I may not have coverage so posting them on the site might take a few days). I will be carrying a Spot Gen3 GPS Messenger that will be updating my position in almost real-time. I will have a map available so that my readers will be able to follow along. I will be inviting my fellow thru-hikers to post photos and videos to #ShellysPCT on Instagram so that Shelly can see the adventure and experience it vicariously through them. Click this to read more about Shelly's PCT.

Have you ever made the mistake of placing too much trust in a person? I have. It's especially difficult for me when a stranger invokes the name of someone that I trust implicitly. For some reason I get emotionally attached and attribute my trustworthy friend's character to the stranger. I just did that during these last eleven days. I feel ashamed and foolish. Why would I trust someone with whom I have no history and no indication that they are worthy of any trust? Yet I did. I trusted someone and they have basically called me a liar. They have made me second-guess my own thoughts. I think I am way too introspective and I put too much value in what others think and say about me. I don't admire much about Donald Trump, but one thing that I do is his ability to say what he thinks without any introspection or second-guessing. I find it's rather easy for people to say things about me and I immediately think, "Am I really that way? Did I really say that? Is that what I meant?" The reality is that I need to stop doing that and trust the people who know me best. Strangers don't know me at all, why should I trust that their observations about me are true or accurate? I won't! However, if my wife Kelli says something about me, it's a very reliable indicator that there is something that I need to pay attention to and think about. So then there's that.

Wow! I am YouTube. Ha, I have one video. I made it early one morning while I was out preparing for my 2,663 mile PCT hike. The lighting is horrible. The audio is annoying. The content is of questionable value. It describes pretty well the way I've felt the last few days. You can view it above.

2 comments:

  1. Wow scott, sounds like you're journey is taking another interesting turn. I'll keep you in my prayers. As far as the video...LOL I wouldn't last a week with that squeak! Do you know what it is?

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  2. The squeak... shoulder strap rubbing on the cross brace. Nothing a little Chapstick didn't cure. I hope I get to see you this summer in Packwood.

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