intrepid wanderer comes to steemit

by way of @sterlinluxan and @dollarvigilante, I find myself on steemit in search of fame and fortune. or better yet, fortune without the fame.

I'm John Comeau, and I've been blogging since about 2002 or 2003, I forget which. shortly after Dialtone Internet got bought out, I quit the 9-to-5 life, or rather the 24/7-work-with-time-off-for-good-behavior life. I couldn't afford to quit, but my sanity couldn't afford to not quit. I've been seminomadic ever since. I started my blog at blogger.com, but they lost over a year of my posts so I switched to my own servers, a couple of VPSs I've had for years.

I call myself "intrepid wanderer" because I had an epiphany one day, I think it was while lost walking through San Diego, that I was the eponymous character in a Pynchon novel of that name. I've been seminomadic for years now. I almost always end up having a place to stay, but I like to pretend at least that I can survive anywhere with nothing more than I carry with me at all times.

I hate certain concepts that many people take for granted: "weeds" for example. there's no such thing as a weed. every plant has a use, if only for itself. our "primitive" ancestors knew all plants by name and value: edible, medicinal, and/or structural. I only know a few tens of plants, possibly a hundred or so, and hardly know all their uses. I mainly concern myself with the edible ones. I stay pretty healthy by walking and jogging, a lot, every day, so I have very little use for medicines. I find probiotics, like brine pickle juice and yogurt, to be excellent at fighting colds and the flu, and purified sugars to be my body's worst enemy.

another concept I hate is "waste" or "garbage". there is literally no such thing. everything is an output from one stage of existence and an input to another. what we call "garbage" is simply that which we don't want to deal with right now. and there's way too much of it. it might behoove humanity to stop producing so much stuff that quickly enters the "waste" stream until we come up with some better methods of dealing with it than hauling it off to an artificial mountain, or "Müllberg" as the Germans call it. and "shit": disgusting, right? but that's because we treat it as waste instead of a resource. Joseph Jenkins has already solved that problem but people still pretend that the best thing we can do is use precious drinking water to flush it out of our sight and let someone else deal with it.

I don't want to write a book here. not in one sitting anyway. I'll likely be back. nice to meet you -- jc