Not too long ago, I was in Dave's camp down on the Cumberland and was just amazed at what he'd been able to accomplish with his site using dumpster items and less money than I spend on a weekend going to a Saturday matinée with the wife. Granted, it hasn't been that long ago since I was poor - and I mean dirt-poor - but over the past decade I've grown fat and soft on a dual income that provides a comfortable existence for my wife and me. Understand here that I'm certainly not bragging, nor am I complaining too loudly, either - and I would be remiss if I did not point out that it sure as hell isn't my earnings that boost us beyond poverty level, although they contribute a teeny skosh toward elevating us into what I used to envision as "the good life." But after touring Dave's camp, I embarked upon what I would consider a rowboat trip of a soul search. Surely an ongoing process, I figure I'm currently in the discovery stage at the moment, since I didn't jump directly onto the cruise ship express all the way to dispossession of all material goods and a return to abject poverty. Having taken that trip that for most of my adult life, I really didn't have a whole lot of desire to revisit that very bleak and exceptionally dreary landscape. Instead, I began to reassess what was important to me in my life, and began comparing what I have today with what I had some years ago, what I wanted back then, and what I thought would bring me satisfaction and happiness, should I ever be able to break free from the shackles of stupid decisions, drug addictions and the subsequent abject poverty that typically follows. I'm reading a great book by Juliet Schor, The Overspent American. Schor has done her homework here, no doubt about it, and this snippet in her intro really struck a chord in me:

There is accumulating evidence that Americans are growing uneasy with the new consumerism. Surveys show that many believe materialism is ruining the country, perverting our values, and damaging our children. We yearn for what we see as a simpler time, when people cared less about money and more about each other. In a recent book, the Princeton sociologist Robert Wuthnow argues that we are ambivalent about money. On the one hand, we want it, are strongly committed to success and achievement(it has been said that it is how America keeps score), and believe in hard work. At the same time, we hold the contradictory view that money is profane, polluted, even evil. Talking about how much we have, or make, is taboo. Doing something for money seems dirty in a sway that doing it for love, personal fulfillment or social commitment is not. Yet our discomfort with money and materialism is hard to pin down, in part because consumerism as a way of life is so ingrained it's hard to recognize within us and around us. It is, in the now-famous words of George Orwell, 'the air that we breathe." Like air, it's everywhere, we're dependent on it, and perhaps most important, until it's really dirty, it cannot be seen. We experience consumer society as something natural. But it's not. As a growing number of historians have shown, the culture we live in today was created. Consumer capitalism did not triumph without opposition, but triumph it did. One measure is that by the 1990s, college students reportedly relate far more to commercials and advertising culture than they do to history, literature, or probably anything else. As James Twitchell of the University of Florida argues, 'adcult" now is our culture.

I've never had more money in my life than I do right now. I've never had better credit, more possessions, more wealth, than I do right now. And yet, I'm uneasy; almost paranoid about it all. Every day my "new" lifestyle is contrasted against the backdrop of my work. It is often very hard to reconcile. It is why my Shell gas card often has $600 a month in charges on it and my petty cash expenses far exceed what I'm able to get reimbursed. I remember clearly what it was like to watch others spend while I sat enviously by; watching others eat a "meal deal" while I could barely afford a candy bar. In the circle of peeps I hung with, I usually shared everything I had with others like me because I knew that when I was out of cigarettes or food, someone I had helped would return the favor, even if it was a rollup or a cup of bad menudo. When I'm on the street today, those recollections- along with those old values - resurface. Most of the folks I work with will give you the shirt off their back if you need it more than they do. They are some of the most generous, giving individuals I've ever had the pleasure of knowing. I don't know, I guess what I'm trying to say here is that in achieving financial success over the past decade, in buying homes, cars, boats, motorcycles and just about anything else I'd ever dreamed I'd one day like to buy for myself if I was to ever become "successful," I'd somehow forgotten that wealth is both relative and subjective. Some of my brothers and sisters on the street feel richer than Bill Gates when they have a full can of Bugler tobacco and a meal with ice in their drinking water. Meanwhile, I'm stressing over whether to add an extra premium channel package to an already overpriced cable bill and pissed because I still don't feel like there's a damned thing on TV worth the price I'm paying for cable or satellite. When I hit what all the drug and alcohol counselors consider "my bottom," I was living in a handmade teepee in the mountains of the Sierra Nevada. My first housing after that stretch of homelessness was a two-room cook's cabin on a cattle ranch in Meadow Valley, CA. Rent there was $200 a month and I paid most of it by having sex with the my lady landlord, who happened to live in the main ranch house. Not exactly male-hooking, but I suppose you could - in its most generic, low-grade application - consider me to be a very pathetic gigolo at the time. We both got what we wanted out of the trysts and life during that time was just so much more simple, laid back, stressless than it is today. No other bills to concern myself with, no responsibilities to others, no demands for my time beyond what I wanted those demands to be. Make no mistake here, I don't mean to romanticize and that old life was far from being even good, let alone ideal. I would no more return to that existence today than I would pick up a crack pipe or a syringe full of heroin. My point here is merely that there was a small portion of that existence that, when contrasted with my current existence, forces me to reexamine how I can lighten the load on my psyche in relation to personal possessions and what is truly important to me. Most of those personal possessions don't mean shit, while the relationships, friendships, and things I've been able to do for others moves up the chain of significance. I won't be giving up my apartment, my motorcycle, my computer or my cable anytime soon - I worked very hard to overcome huge damned obstacles and I've definitely earned some privileges. But I am rethinking how I want to finish the remainder of my life on planet earth and an unquenchable thirst for mo money and mo things doesn't seem to fit well into my plan. Too many others with nothing at all for me to wallow in my own self indulgence...