An Inconvenienced Truth
Eight years ago, I was residing in the urban sprawl – and I do mean sprawl – of Colorado Springs, Colorado. Each day I would awake in my condo, go through my morning constitutional (for want of more accurate or gruesomely descriptive terms), and then hop into my little S-10 pickup and drive up Cheyenne Mountain to my job at NORAD, that vast underground labyrinth of caves and shock-absorbed builds designed to withstand the blasts of Eisenhower-era Russian nuclear technology. With the firepower the superpowers employed by the time I got there, we might as well have been working under an umbrella.
Life was convenient then. Gas was cheap, and my commute was relatively short. Each morning I would stop at the 7-Eleven for a large coffee and the local paper, then off to work. I won’t bore you with a description of my workday, because then you’d know that it was spent doing very little work. As little as possible as seldom as possible, that is my motto. Moderation in all things that require work is another.
But I digress. Suffice it to say, conveniences abounded. Every other corner had a 7-Eleven, Circle K or Kwik-Way to shop for forgotten items. Fast food restaurants multiplied and tangled like coat-hangers on fertility drugs and you couldn’t swing a teenager by the nose-ring without hitting a mall.
I was, in every sense, the consummate Urban Weenie, the world at my fingertips along with the cellphone for ordering pizza or Chinese food to be delivered to my doorstep after another hard working day of not working.
It has been said that September 11, 2001 was a day that changed American lives forever. Well, mine changed the day before, on September 10, when I arrived in Appomattox to take up residence on a 22-acre farm in the middle of nowhere. Well, actually it was the middle of the place where the people from the middle of nowhere go to get away from it all.
Suddenly, my convenient life was no longer all that convenient. If I ran out of cigarettes, there was no quick 3-block jaunt to the Loaf ‘N Jug for a pack of Marlboro Lights. Instead, was a ten-mile trek over bumpy gravel roads and through a river. A quick trip to the liquor store for a six-pack was out of the question as well. As good as it tastes, a 20-mile round trip for a lousy six-pack of Yuengling Dark?
So I quit smoking and learned how to make my own beer. My wife taught me to do the latter and we all know that quitting smoking is easy, I’ve done it hundreds of times.
As if the sudden deprivation of the everyday conveniences to which I had become accustomed weren’t enough, there was the matter of my new job. No worries about a commute there - they flew me several thousand miles there and several thousand miles back. The bad news was that my workday went from 8 hours to 4 months.
And, if I thought that having to drive ten miles to the store was inconvenient, how about constantly having to track the time so as not to miss the motor launch that shows up every two-to-three hours or so every day and evening to take me to shore where I can then walk or grab a taxi or bus to the shopping district where I may or may not be able to communicate with anybody as, hey, this is Europe…or maybe it’s Guam…or even Diego Garcia. Well, if it’s Diego Garcia, no problem. The British own that, and there isn’t anything to buy or anyplace to buy it. The place is a rock. A British rock, with chickens that they won’t even let you kick.
It was tough to give up those conveniences at first, but after a while you get used to it. You realize you didn’t need it that badly. You even realize that it’s possible to become over-saturated with conveniences.
But that doesn’t mean that if you are coming out to visit you can’t, you know, bring out an extra Slurpee with you. If it’s on the way, I mean.
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