Picture if you will

Picture if you will, a serene and uninhabited wooded location with a river or lake, surrounded by wildflowers and grasses, with a beautiful cabin sitting majestically next to the water. A large cache of wood piled neatly and precisely next to the cabin, as a small light gray thread of smoke trickles from the chimney.

        This is what many believe to be the perfect scene, myself included.  It is believed to be the epitome of perfection. I have always been an outdoorsy person – to say the least – and a cabin in the deep woods next to a lake and in the mist of the animals and growth that are common in these locations gives me tremendous joy.

        There have been many memes and other pictures on the internet showing this exact scene, with the phrase “Live here free for one year.” Then the second shoe drops – Bum, Bum, Bummmmm, sang in the common suspense building tone that we all know and love – “but without internet” or “without football” or even “without bacon.”

        Would you do it?

        As if there was even a need to contemplate this question. The “YES!” would have left my lips before the question was even finished. The only way to make this better would be letting me live out the remainder of my life here, no matter what the thing we supposedly can’t live without is.

        I understand that in this day and age there are many who would forget to breathe if they didn’t have their handheld multi-function device.  Without constant contact with all the social media sources and the ability to show everyone how their life is progressing through the photos that they so wholeheartedly believe that everyone wants to see, they would simply die.

        For some reason beyond my comprehension, if you don’t post photos on Snapchat, Facebook, or Instagram, you actually do not exist. It also stands to reason that if no one likes or views the pictures you so painstakingly uploaded, you don’t exist either.

        Therefore this location, in my humble opinion, the most beautiful place in the world cannot exist. The only possible explanation for this picture is Photoshop, because we all know there can be no place on earth that wouldn’t allow internet; otherwise, how did we get the picture, HUH? HUH?

It’s not like there are such things as cameras that are not attached to our handheld lifelines, nor are there ways to get pictures on the web that you would have to live without, therefore this place cannot exist.

        Then there are those of you who, once again, I just do not understand - live for professional sports. Football, Baseball, Hockey, Soccer or whatever the sport of the season is.

For some reason you sports fans believe it to be simple, “If I don’t watch and support ‘MY TEAM’ the world will just stop spinning. Without sports, my life just wouldn’t be worth living.”

I am at a bigger loss here than with the internet – face in their phone 24/7 junkies. Sports are great to play or even watch when your child or other family is playing but to just watch a bunch of strangers play a game that they are getting paid millions of dollars to play and who wouldn’t give a rat’s ass if you watch or not just makes zero sense.

Not only do people believe that their team belongs to them, they will defend these strangers to the extent of brawling over a team name or player. Most of these people will defend their ‘Team’ over their own children, mothers, or other family members. It is so important that parties and great gatherings are held to honor these complete strangers.

Again, the thought of living in a location where there ‘team’ could not be watched and their lifeblood nourished would be worse than any torture that has been thought up. Nature, what is nature? Is that the grass that my team plays on? In that case, I could live there.

I’ve said it before and I will say it again, professional sports are like gay porn; I know it exists, I know some men like it, but I don’t want to know about it.

Back to the picture that I asked you to imagine at the beginning of this blog; remove the cabin and replace it with a tent and that is pretty close to how I spent the last week.

Every June my family makes a trek to Yellowstone and we spend a week in the great outdoors in just such a tranquil location. We camp just outside the park where there is little to no contact with other people.

We gather around a campfire and tell stories and laugh all the while having no contact with the outside world. There’s no internet, television or phones, just us; and at the end of the week, we all realize how quickly the time went by and how much fun we had.

"WAIT, WHAT?!? THE HELL YOU SAY?"

There’s no way that you can have fun without watching sports or having access to the internet to show everyone just how much fun you are really having. Without pictures, it didn’t happen and your stories just don’t make any sense.

Trust me. Google primitive camping and there will be pages of information about this imaginary and frightening thing that is called the great outdoors.

This is the greatest existence that I can imagine. I only wish I was able to spend the remainder of my days here without any access to the outside world. I can live without ever accessing any social media, or even believing that sports exist.

Neither of these things make my life better; if it doesn’t make me smarter, wealthier, or healthier then it isn’t worth my time. I gain none of these through the internet or sports and let’s face it, in most cases these things actually make a person thoughtless, poor and unhealthy.

As far as bacon, now that’s just stupid we all know that we can’t live without bacon, I mean its bacon. So we all know this can’t be a real question.

—SP