Cold, inside and out

I'm lying in my tent staring up at all the snowflakes slowly frosting my rainfly writing this ramble in my head because it's well below freezing outside and I don't want to get up and start my day, and besides my crotchety old laptop probably wouldn't want to power on in temps this low anyway. My current cognitive state strikes me as odd, very. Why is my mind mired in such a crippling downward spiral of positive thinking right now? I should be depressed; how completely uncharacteristic of me—I seem to be experiencing a feeling of deep gratitude that I won this free zero-degree sleeping bag for Christmas, for instance, and that the forest I'm camping in isn't now burning itself down all around me (although I'd sure be a lot warmer if it was), and that my car throwing a rod and leaving me stranded fifteen miles from the nearest asphalt as winter prepared to get good and lit and repeatedly piss itself was apparently just a nightmare and not reality after all. I suppose I owe you one, universe, but you're sure making it hard for me to lie here wallowing in my preferred state of melancholy and existential dread, despite how fucking cold it is outside.

I remember the first piece of NFT art I ever came to possess. It's a Blender animation by julesquirin/thephil0s0pherst0ner called Hive Is Cold, and I bought it from a dCity auction back when dCity still ran art auctions and barely anyone was bidding. It features the Hive logo half-buried in snow as powder floats down on a 5-second loop. I'm thinking about it right now because in my imagination that is more or less what my world is going to look like if/when I ever emerge from my tent. I'd like to think I don't have a problem, but the fact that one year later there are now a total of 60 NFT artworks sitting on that account indicates that maybe I do, and maybe it has less to do with inclement weather and more to do with an inclination toward unthrifty and unhealthily spontaneous behavior. It's also hard to deny that I own 34 Hive Punks when the blockchain makes it clear that I in fact do, even though I swear I don't remember purchasing a single one of them. It's fine, though; I'll be surprised if these Punk thingies are a complete flop. I'm betting that Marky will wind up launching some sort of clever update that upgrades them to something more than mere mortal collectibles, and the next thing you know there'll be several thousand Hive Punks strutting around on the moon like they own the place. Sure, if they do end up being a flop I'll be out a bunch of Hive, but like I said I'll be surprised if that happens—and I do love me a good surprise, so that would actually be a win in my book. And if they're a success then yeah I'll miss out on that surprise, but it won't matter because I'll be rich enough to just go out and buy whatever surprises I want whenever I want them, so that would be a win too. Either way, I win.

And that's a really important point to understand, because nobody likes to lose. I was thinking about loss last night as I rode my Subaru over the river and through the woods looking for a place to call home for a few sleepy hours, because it would have been my dad's 66th birthday if melanoma hadn't taken the wheel and driven them both right off the road and into the grave together. That's the weird thing about cancer—when it wins, it also loses. So much for long-term thinking, eh melanoma? But considering the nature of my own species and how intentionally and enthusiastically destructive we humans are to our own host, it would be a bit hypocritical of me to bad-mouth cancer's philosophy of life when ours is identical. I think that's probably why I'm so drawn to melancholia and spontaneity—none of this shit matters in the end because the second we get that win we're working so hard for, we lose it all.

On that heartfelt endnote, I just realized I have something else to be uncharacteristically positive about and thankful for before I inevitably slip back into my dark but very warm and cozy comfort zone—there is still some beer left over from last night's self-medication session. A couple breakfast stouts will really hit the spot right now and help take the edge off the stress of winter camping in Colorado. See? Everything is going to be fine.