I know how crazy this is. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve looked at what I am doing at a given moment or how I am living and said to myself “Chris, what in the world are you doing?” and each time I say it I get further and further away from the perspective of the “normal” life I was expected to live from the suburban Massachusetts background I grew up in. So, why am I doing it? I don’t concern myself so much with what it is I’m doing as I do with why I am doing it. A few years ago, during one of my regrouping stages I found myself telling the farm I was working for at the time that I had to miss the next few days of work because of a “family” emergency. I left the coast of Maine and headed south, but when I reached Boston I did not stop to see any family I kept driving. All night I drove through New York City, Trenton, Philadelphia, all the way in to Maryland. I didn’t question what I was doing. I simply accepted that it was something I had to do. During the weeks prior to this decision. I watched my country become gripped with fear as normal everyday people where being gunned down randomly by an unknown assasin. So there I was driving down the freeway in Maryland in the morning hours before dawn looking for a white van parked in rest areas or anywhere suspicious. I spent the remainder of the night lying in my sleeping bag on the ground in the tall grass along the freeway a few hundred feet away from a white van parked on the shoulder of an on-ramp. After first light, I determined the van was empty and abandoned. Before I left Maine, I had mapped out the locations of all the previous shootings and tried to anticipate where the next one might take place. From shopping mall to shopping mall, I spent the next day working my way through the area of Maryland’s interstate 81, 270 and 70. I had a friend of a friend who was a police detective in Baltimore and I made arrangements to have a casual bite to eat with him that evening never letting on as to the real reason I was in the area. After dinner, I sat in his living room and we both watched on the news relieved to discover that the sniper and his accomplice had been arrested in a rest area on interstate 70. I drove through the night and made it back to Maine by morning and went to work never telling anyone where I had gone. I don’t know how you live with the all the atrocities of the day in age we live in, nor do I judge anyone in anyway. All I know is that I will not live with them and if this means I have to sleep under bridges or in the woods along the roadside until I figure what the heck else to do about them then that is what I’m going to do because doing whatever it is I need to do is not the objective. It is the indirect result of caring for the one most important thing I have in this world, my heart, my spirit. Though I may look like a failure in the eyes of my family and the friends I grew up with, I know the only way I could ever feel like a failure is if I were stop caring about how I live in respect to how it affects the world around me. Though I am sorry that you may all be ashamed of me or have simply forgotten about me, I am not sorry for why I have chosen to live this way even if I never have anything to show for it.






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