Romantic Notions and Jackalopes and the Hunt for Trees

I don’t really know what I don’t know. That seems to be the problem.

‘Trial and Error’, they say.

More like, ‘Think-it’s-perfect-97-times before you find out you missed the boat entirely. All 97 times’. And maybe you’re an idiot but you don’t really think that could possibly be true.

Is that the same thing as Trial and Error? How do you know when the Trial part is over? I don’t know.

See?

I bought a big old fat book to learn how to build my raft so I can float down the Missouri River. It’s oh-so romantic to float the Mississippi instead with a notion to be another Huckleberry Finn or whatever, but actually sounds like a giant logistical pain in the ass. Plus a bunch of people have already done it. And they said it was a giant pain in the ass. Plus I need a super cool name like Huckleberry before I departed anyway. So the Missouri it is.

But I live in a desert. And there aren’t really any trees to speak of. And I don’t know anything about water, really, having been around so little of it, and if I fell off the raft when I was pooping, I’d thrash around and drown myself just trying to get away from the poop. Maybe I didn’t think this through. But maybe I did.

Maybe you can never really be prepared for giant adventures. You just ‘do your best and forget the rest’. Thanks Tony Horton.

Otherwise it’s Analysis to Paralysis. Think far enough ahead about all the possible issues and problems and your brain turns to goo. You abandon the whole project because you can only play chess with yourself for so long before somebody loses.

Like when I tried to be a hat-maker and make huge, ridiculous, beautiful, fabulous hats full of frills and feathers for the Kentucky Derby but ultimately the Queen might not want one and my spirits would be crushed so why bother being a hat maker anyway. Or when I built a business model to discreetly deliver marijuana to the politicians who were railing against legalization, except the dispensaries turned out to deliver for free.

Like pizza.

Come home from Legislative Hearings and order pizza and marijuana for dinner and hope the marijuana delivery guy shows up first so you’re really hungry when the pizza guy gets there. And then settle in to watch Reefer Madness. Oh, those politicians.

Well I didn’t find any trees, so that could be a potential roadblock. I’ll need to head up the mountain. Can’t haul the logs anywhere with my mid-sized SUV, so I’ll have to build a base camp and just start making rafts up there, I suppose.

Confused folks will stumble upon my 97 rafts piled up all over a mountainside fifty years from now, and it will be the ‘Great Raft Mystery’ and historians will be confounded and somebody will write cowboy poetry about it and read it aloud at rodeos and stuff.

Until then, my 97 rafts will make a great home for marmots. And snakes. And jackalopes. And lizards and rabbits and spiders and maybe a poky old desert tortoise.

So I guess I do know something after all.  I know that the Trial part ends at 97 rafts. And I also know there’s no better place to start than at the beginning.

So I guess I’ll open that book and order myself some pizza.