Every time I go to Siberia I can sense my diminishing capacity to withstand the world as it is and always will be; harsh, raw, deadly and indifferent. Each year my advancing age offers less feign resistance to these facts, less vain protest to the truth of degradation and entropy, and death and dissolution and an end to all this energetic and animated activity, promise and hope which is life. The desert will not support this fiction I was raised to believe, and which I teach myself and others daily from the safe confines of the social sanctuary. Out here there is no such lie. Out here there is nothing of peace. Out here death stalks the inferno wastes. Out here I venture into the sandy sea with a timer running against my quickening heartbeat, and a promise of a quick end should I just take a few footsteps more than I did. And so, I hide beneath this bridge. I cower in the hot shade mere feet from the killing inferno daylight. And I sit on the sand and look out across fifty miles of deadly lands where I am not only not welcome, but incapable of being received. For the desert does not care for me. The desert cares for none. The desert is incapable of caring beyond the mute smothering embrace of death. Gamble if I will and I will lose. But, I know from my time here that I must always lose. It's only a matter of time, and of filling the moments between with some distraction worthy of fooling ourselves there's something more.
And yet I persist. I push on to The Good Life.
My name is Kurt Bell.
You can learn more about The Good Life in my book Going Alone.
Be safe... But not too safe.
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