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 ^{(it's beta!)}

Where Everett Ruess said “I have always been unsatisfied with life as most people live it. Always I want to live more intensely and richly. Why muck and conceal one's true longings and loves, when by speaking of them one might find someone to understand them, and by acting on them one might discover oneself.” in the interbellum years, like-minded youngsters of today say “Fuck this, I'm leaving!”.

Now call me a romantic, but I feel a lot of that spirit has been lost in our high-speed internet connection, cell-phone friendship, digital wasteland days.

That's not to say that I too am prone to go “Fuck this, I'm leaving!”, as such is the extent of the message that most people nowadays will care to grasp. This manifesto is for those few that need more that the bare message; those few who instead of settling with merely scratching the surface will never strain from digging deeper to find true meaning. Whoever, wherever and whenever they are.

I am bursting at the seams with dreams of wild adventures, far-off locations, foreign tongues and sounds; the catharsis of losing myself in the stream of life only to wash up on the shores with a voice that can proudly proclaim “I lived.”

Once upon a time I thought I had it figured out: happiness is permanence. These days, nothing seems more contrived than that. How can happiness occur if everything is indefinitely the same? Now I believe there can only be found happiness in infinitely small events. Happiness is the moment when you reach the top of a hill, right after the last step up and right before the first of the descent. You pause too long to take it in, and it's gone; there's no use in sticking around other than maybe a view that prompts a quest for new wild destinations.

There is so little keeping me here and now, it's nothing more than a rubber band tied around my waist; no matter how I try to pull away, I always get thrown back. Maybe one day soon my rubber band will snap after a long and exhaustive tug-of-war... After which I can let myself be flung across the all, unrestrained.

Till that day arrives I'll be silently marching along to the beat of everyday, brooding my inevitable escape.