Perennial Vacation Club

The yawning emptiness is easy to see from the bottom of a bag of potato chips. Salvation does not lie with one more burst of pleasure on the tongue. The engineered alchemy of an irresistible Pringle fades to black if the next one doesn’t show up pronto. The taste is ashen if you stop long enough to reflect, but the design precludes reflection, prevents it, makes our taste buds fear a near future without Pringles.

The admonition to ‘grow up’ can be lost on us, inspiring the opposite. We, I, a guy the square community doesn’t give a shit about, don’t want to grow up, if growing up means forsaking pleasure-seeking in exchange for selflessness, finding pleasure in new places beyond yourself. The complex carbohydrates of satisfaction: child-rearing, career-building, lawn-mowing. Such a trade appears repugnant—a classic now-for-later-but-really-never bait and switch. Be responsible now and enjoy the fruits at a time indeterminate.

Such a trade carries uncertainty. I have watched my parents make that trade. They might disagree, but I think it was a bad deal for them. A lifetime of sacrifice for an exhausted retirement. But that is what we see, thirty-somethings. Our neoliberal parents busted their asses; some of us went to fancy colleges that taught us how to best dissect their core beliefs over unbelievably dry Matzah stuffing and cranberry sauce at Thanksgiving. To chase our dreams. And now we—at least some of us—sit in a fugue state of pleasure-seeking, skiing and eating and fucking our way through life, rejecting our parents’ complex carbohydrate hobbies that would take over our lives like parasites. Better to leave ample acreage for fun. So much room for activities.

I can’t kid myself. I am making that slide. I use a suit and a graduate degree regularly. I have to comb my hair for work. To keep up appearances. I am becoming square, becoming concerned with what the square community thinks of me.  That transition has been acid reflux with bleeding-blisters uncomfortable. Most days I think about what a catastrophic mistake it was to abandon a life of pleasure seeking. Someone at a party recently told me I looked really pale. Beyond the shock of the oddness of the statement (it was apropos of nothing and I hadn’t met the person before), it made me cry, like most times I hung out with my dirtbag friends recently. Like I was betraying fundamental tenets of my non-religion. Ten years of life outside seem mighty distant once you become the pale king. It’s easy to look back fondly at the good years; hard to remember the rubs. Deceitful even. But looking at those who’ve stayed at the perennial vacation club after I decided to check out twists the ‘problem’ into a more complicated knot.

Where I am now feels bad. Like I got on a flight to Indianapolis instead of Anchorage, helplessly sailing off in the wrong direction. But those who did not board with me didn’t get on the flight to Anchorage either. They are, by and large, adrift like that Iranian guy who was stuck at Charles DeGaulle International for 30 years—no flights departing for anywhere. Psych for climbing ebbs as a lifetime of classics dulls the thrill of another 5.10. Energy for personal skiing gone after 150 days of work at the ski area each winter. Some continue on, true specimens, indefatigable for now.

But one by one I have seen them stumble. An injury finally tilts the mirror back at them; months on the couch make them wonder about life outside the skintrack. That glance in the mirror, like Narcissus, dissolves their global order—a tsunami of antipathy. Several friends have had full-blown crises.

I miss the perennial vacation club despite these cautionary tales. I play outside to feel whole. Recreation is not dessert in my emotional diet. It’s the whole damn meal. It’s trite to say and demonstrably wrong, but I don’t know what I would do without my life in the mountains. So start the lampooning: some privileged white guy says ‘skiing is my therapy.’ I go to real therapy too. It’s good. But it’s just another tool to make humans comfortable living inhuman lives. Being outside feels real and sustaining in a way I can’t imagine the other stuff ever will.

Sitting in my stupid, windowless box all day, getting paler and paler, it seems like there was no right choice. I kind of believe I might be one of the few who would never ultimately stumble; that just skiing until the wheels came off would’ve really sustained me. A lie that perhaps every office monkey whispers. Maybe my path is back there. But it’s statistically unlikely that a life on vacation club was going to work for me forever. Maybe it’s better to have left for now with only fond memories than wake up in 10, 15 years in a pool of my own malaise, stuck in the airport without a flight. Or is that just another lie to make the pot of water I’m sitting in feel a little less steamy? Maybe the problem is the moral judgment we impute to the problem.

The hobbies my parents ‘enjoyed’ don’t seem any more meritorious or moral than perfecting my turn. They just take a hell of a lot longer to master, and you can do them without an ACL. One ‘graduates’ from a life of selfish pleasure to a life of selfless pleasure. I don’t think that’s right. My parents’ hobbies were selfish too. Their careers and their child were just as much a canvas for their self-actualization as any tired ski metaphor you could imagine. And their lives with their precious hobbies taken away seem just as empty, just as unbelievably fragile. I won’t say a life of skiing is a moral choice. But neither is parenting, working, or lawn-mowing. We live in a vacuous age where freedom robs us of the necessity of creating meaning, where I think there are no clearly moral ways to live. Every path is wrong in some way. I feel morose about human prospects, but even if you don’t, it’s hard to deny that our lives will only become more immaterial and tepid the more power we accumulate over the world; the less we are beings in it.

That is perhaps why we crave outdoor intensity, to give definition and dimension to a life that increasingly feels unreal and abstract, to submit ourselves to forces beyond our control. A screaming baby in your arms probably feels pretty damn real too, a rollercoaster you can’t get off. Bar’s locked, bro.