The Endless Bummer

Marina Burini at Harry Gesner's Joint, The Way to Live

There is a goal here, the goal being to live within walking distance of salt water.  Comfortably.  It is a worthy goal for someone like me, but the environmental ramifications are frankly worrying. Should I  be yet another body crowding the edge of land and sea, spilling my waste so immediately into that system?  Still, it's the goal.


More than anything else, I've inherited ease.  The ease with which I live my life is about as easy as you can get.  Top 1% of easiness.  Ease, ease, ease.  And I am always pondering the possibility of more ease.  In fact not a day goes by that I don't fixate, for at least a few private moments, on the opportunity to live in an easier place, doing easier things.  It strikes me that I am wasting this great inheritance, this gift passed on from my forebears, by indulging in the extra amounts of small discomforts I insist on enduring.  I think to myself  oh, well, if I lived over there, I'd have it even easier!  And truthfully, there is no small amount of guilt that comes along with this.  It can be a big responsibility this ease, one might argue.  Few people get the chance to live this sort of life, a life of quiet facility, and here I am squandering it.  It could be so much easier!  And wouldn't that make me happier?  And wouldn't that happiness then translate into a beneficial equanimous energy I perspire into the world?  Perhaps I'm doing the world a disfavor by needlessly stressing myself out.