For some reason the hippie in me pours forth on Fridays. I just checked the calendar and see that it is Friday again, so...

Nomads at Last, Nomads Forever

A couple of really interesting pieces about digital nomads have appeared recently in The Economist. I have been rabbiting on extensively here, here, and here about Nomadism in the modern world. Surely some of you are tiring of it, but tough shit!

Every time I read something about nomads in contemporary society I recognize something from my past. I think back to the 1980s and 1900s, when the Grateful Dead circus was on the road and dead head nomads travelled about from town to town. I was in the travelling circus. I was the guy in the tie dye...

Fighting through the chaos and confusion, trying to remember what town we were in and what month it was, there was always a deep and satisfying comfort to be had in the movement, the moment, in the change. Frontiers have their charms!

At Home in the Parking Lot

In the parking lot, in the next town, were familiar faces of people whose names I never knew. It was a community that existed one-step removed from the explicit. But it was real nonetheless.

Surely, we were college-dead heads, more living out a Disney-esque fantasy than we were doing anything that could be considered properly nomadic. I know that. But it does not subtract from what actually happened. At least from what I can remember anyway.

Parking Lot Coffee Shop

The point is that all this talk about (seeming) strangers connected with others in transitory relationships of work and play, this is nothing new to humans. It might be new in terms of work arrangements, but not to play, and ritual.

I sit and write this next to 4 or 5 strangers in a coffee shop, all working alone together. It is the parking lot for work, and I am at home.

Have a great weekend-

The Butcher