After we graduated from college I went back to my hometown to find a job.
- My best friend Carl had other ideas, though.
He didn’t want to get a job at all, he wanted to move out to the middle of nowhere and live off the land. I thought it was admirable, to try to leave society behind and live a life of solitude, but it certainly wasn’t an attractive lifestyle to me. Some years passed, and I stayed in contact with Carl. He asked me to come visit him last winter, and stay for a couple weeks in his hand-built log cabin. It sounded like a fun idea at the time. I live in the deep south, and work for an air conditioning manufacturer. I’m not an HVAC tech and to be perfectly honest I don’t know the first thing about air conditioners. I work in accounting, so what I do is calculate payroll and expenses for the HVAC company execs. The only thing I know about an air conditioner is how to work the thermostat. Carl had no air conditioning, of course, because he had no electricity! He truly lived off the land, and in the depths of winter the only source of heating he had was the brick fireplace. That was truly magnificent, I must admit, because he didn’t buy bricks, he made his own bricks out of clay, and used them to build the fireplace. We needed a lot of firewood to keep the fireplace blazing, which meant I had to spend a couple hours a day chopping wood. Never again!