Have Laptop, Will Vagrant - Day 7(!)

Day 7(!)*
Some of you might be thinking: was Chuck really working on his work days, or was he “working”?

First of all, I never “work.” I might “diet,” and I might “listen,” and I might “care,” but I never “work.” I WORK. It’s one of my things.

Since this was a Wednesday, I had an 8-hour workday ahead of me. Since I would be really working, it made sense to really work in a fake “town,” so I went back to Seaside or, as it will be called in the future, Gaetzgate. Or, more likely, Gaetzwho?town.

Seaside has a beautiful beach. People always say, in this mobile age, all you need is your laptop and you can work on a beach. This is stupid. There isn’t a contrast setting strong enough to make a laptop screen readable on a sunny beach, you’d need a 175-foot extension cord for when your battery craps out after 37 minutes and the keyboard is specifically designed to collect sand and hide it away in the cracks.

Even if all that were surmountable, I don’t know how to use my phone as a hot spot and the bathroom is further away than the nearest electrical outlet, so I have no choice but to serve my corporate overlord (of whom I am very fond) from a less exotic setting.

Still, not so bad, right?

Fig. A: Have laptop, will vagrant.

You can see I’ve set up my mobile office in the shade of a storefront portico in one of the buildings that ring the town square/actually semi-circle. My workspace is in front of an art gallery. Lucky for me it’s off-season, so no one comes out to ask why a hobo is working on a laptop in front of their store.
 
It is a WARM day, the kind of day that you might imagine when, up to your ass in snow, you plan a trip to the Gulf Coast during which you will be sorely disappointed. But THIS day wasn’t disappointing. THIS day was beautiful and warm.

When lunch time rolled around, I took a stroll around the town semi-circle, and let me tell you, it’s something.

Fig. B: This is the Post Office.


Fig. C: This is the town semi-circle, from the ground.

Fig. D: This is the town semi-circle from a helicopter I rented.


Fig. E: And this….. brace yourself….. is a public bathroom.
(It’s a video - that triangle is not really in the bathroom.)


This public bathroom is the nicest that I’ve ever been in, and I’ve been to The Biltmore. (I actually haven’t, but I hear the bathrooms are nice.) They could charge $1,000/month to rent this bathroom out as an apartment and no one would complain. Standing in this bathroom I felt like I needed a robe, ascot and pipe. If this bathroom were a car it would be a Bentley and it would be driven by a chauffeur named Bentley.

And that bathroom wasn’t even the highlight of my day!

During this trip, sunset became the tail that wagged the dog that is my day. Whatever I needed to get done in a day or a night, it all needed to work around the three minutes (I timed it) it takes for the giant red orb to sink into the deep blue sea.

Today I was finished work around 5 p.m., so I departed the art gallery front door portico and walked across Rt. 30A to the sea side of Seaside. At the Shrimp Shack, I bought a couple beers (to beat the 5:30 p.m. end to happy hour) and found a seat among a line of chairs facing the Gulf.

Fig. F: OK. This is good.

In The Stoic Challenge, author William Irvine advocates that we regularly engage in “last-time meditations.” No matter what activity you are doing, reflect on the fact that there will be a last time that you do it (and this could be it). There will be a last time you pour a cup of coffee, a last time you cut the grass, a last time you kiss your spouse. “These last-time meditations may sound depressing,” Irvine writes, “but they have the power to infuse everyday occurrences with meaning.”

A sunset contains more drama than cutting the grass and it occurs every single day, so it’s a little easier to see the meaning in the event. As the sun’s bottom edge touched the horizon, blushing redder by the second, I thought about the Joni Mitchell lyric, “Don’t it always seem to go that you don’t know what you’ve got til it’s gone…”

And three minutes later, it was gone.
[Warning: this video takes three minutes]

Next: a change of plans…



* Moment of Truthiness: I’m already back from my walkabout. In fact, it occurred LAST year about this time. I was going to post about it after the trip, but I sort of ran out of steam. So now I’m going to pretend I’m posting about my walkabout real-time, just like a reality show pretends to be reality.

Take the whole trip! I’ll even cover the gas!

TravelChuckSeaside Florida, Matt Gaetz, Hobos, Vagrancy, "Working", Sunset, Gulf sunsetComment