Getting Lost/ Kate Upton’s Rack

Once Upton a time there was a girl named Kate with a giant rack. She married a professional baseball player who won a Cy Young award ate age 39 and is sure to have a healthy hog on him. They have a child now. She lets the child play with her giant rack. She lets her husband play with her giant rack. She lets the neighbors and their kids play with her giant rack. Everybody is playing with Kate Upton’s giant rack.

I have no idea what I’m typing right now. It’s a struggle to write today but on the bright side, Kate Upton has a giant rack. I googled her. Just her name. The rack didn’t need to be included, it comes with the search. But I did google her, and the first thing that comes up under the “People also ask” section is: “Is Kate Upton still a thing?”

Now, I don’t know about you, but this made me laugh for ten consecutive minutes. Something about asking if a person is still a thing and that being the most common thing typed into Google about them is hilarious to me.

Anyways I ran today. I went to McKinney Falls State park which was underwhelming to say the least but heavens to Betsy if the weather wasn’t absolutely perfect than I’ll be shot out of a cannon and called a bomb. I went there to walk and possibly write. I also made a goal for myself to explore somewhere new at least once a week for the next 10 weeks so I made sure to accomplish that.

I ended up running. I had a lot of energy so I ran. And I ran. And I ran. It was the only way to quiet my mind. I had to focus on not stepping sideways on a rock or tripping over a tree root and it became awfully peaceful for me. Usually I want to stop running whenever I’m running but I was honestly afraid to not be running today. So I ran and I ran until my feet hurt pretty bad.

I ran about six miles, which is interesting. I’m in pretty good shape but I never run that far. Even when I started walking the last mile or so back to where I parked I kind of wished I was running. The scenery was all the same. Bare trees, dumb rocks. Stupid grass here and there.

I have to make fun of nature sometimes, too. I call everyone else dumb so it’s only fair. I definitely have an increasing affinity for nature and it’s hard to resist the urge to just disconnect from modern society entirely. I think about it all the time. I like getting lost in the valleys and the mountains.

I tried to get lost today but the trails were too well marked so I made it back with general ease. I don’t know exactly why I try to get lost sometimes. On occasion I have this desire to find the most desolate trail and walk until I see no people and then keep walking and force myself to find my way back on my own.

I suppose it’s a combination of things. There’s obviously a rush of not knowing where the hell you are and not having any help to get you back to where you started. I guess it could be that it forces me to think about what’s in front of me and nothing else. It’s probably that, mostly.

There’s also an indescribable sense of freedom out there. Freedom from all the nonsense that we stress ourselves out about. I don’t have to worry about anything when I’m lost. Eventually I have to worry about getting back to society, but even that isn’t much of a worry because I usually don’t even want to go back. I just want to be lost in the woods.

It feels different. Now that we all have phones with a GPS in them, we’re almost never lost. A lot of us can’t even drive anywhere without plugging the destination into our phone. We have a general fear of not knowing where we’re going, even though that’s at the center of life itself. We don’t know where this journey will take us. We try to plan it out. We try to steer it in a given direction, but we don’t know. We don’t know where we’ll end up so maybe we should stop trying to force it. Let it take you for a ride every once in a while. The destination you’ve concocted in your head probably isn’t that great anyway. Most of us spend our lives trying to get somewhere and then we get there and feel entirely underwhelmed. So why not? Why not get lost once in a while?

I learn more about myself when I’m lost than I ever will when I’m found. Lost but continuing on. That’s where anything I’ve done that’s worth a shit has come from. I don’t know where I’m going half the time but I know if I just keep going then maybe the answer will reveal itself.

If it doesn’t, something will. I’ll have to face something that goes “oh no, this isn’t the way my friend,” and then I’ll know. I’ll know something. I’ll be that much closer to knowing where to go because I just found out where not to go. But I never would have found it out if I didn’t go anywhere to begin with; if I stayed home; if I didn’t drive around the country alone; if I did what people wanted me to do…

I feel bad for people who have such strong voices in their life trying to tell them what they should do, where they should go, and what they should become. It’s too common amongst parents especially to try and guide their child’s life into some vision of what they wished they had done themselves. Parenting styles are so controlling now. We don’t let kids get lost. We don’t even give them the space to lose themselves. Everything has to be tracked. It sucks.

Anyways, I’m a little lost right now but that’s no problem at all. Maybe you’re lost too and later I’ll find you somewhere new.

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