Story Break
Hoist The Black Sail
Hardcore hardwear
Would you trust your life to old-fashioned stuff?
Hey, the first stop on this bus ride is: What is your life worth, really?
This is a problem. Time Magazine published an article in 2008 saying that a random, international-standard human had a value of maybe $129,000, but that was for someone attractive who smelled good. Which leaves out backpackers.
But, also according to Time, the average value at that time was around $50,000, presumably if that person was sold for parts.
Closer to home, and more realistically, if you were chopped, sliced, ground, and sold as cat food, how much would you be worth then?
Doing some rough math, let’s say you weigh 150 pounds. (OK, old-style, fruity English measurements, but you’ll get past that in a sec if you don’t just sit there and keep scratching that scab.) So that’s 2400 ounces, and at 4 ounces per can, we get 600 cans.
Assuming half of that is waste, inedible (even for cats), or doesn’t taste good enough to eat (even to cats), then figure 300 cans worth of kitty chow. At a dollar a can, that gives you a retail value of $300, more if you are bigger and have a lot of that nice runny fat. (Which cats go absolutely ape over.)
So that’s your value to a cat, but this just brings us back to the fundamental and still-unanswered question: What is your life worth, really?
So, while it may be amusing to spend time looking under life’s tail, it could be more productive (and simpler) to just circle around and look at the problem from another perspective — by calculating how much you put into backpacking gear.
Say you make most of your own gear. That means your stuff is essentially worthless because it’s crap. I know it’s crap because I tried selling your stuff on eBay last year while you were on vacation and it all got returned as useless. Ruined my reputation too. Thanks for nothing.
So you have no value unless you acquire value from people who know how to make valuable things, which isn’t you. See where this is going?
OK, I understand. No, really. I don’t mind explaining this. In fact I like nothing better than explaining the obvious to idiots. Truly. It brings me great and lasting joy.
It goes like this. Your value as a person is really only the value of what you own. Since you have no life and only go backpacking every once in a while just to relieve the intense agony of having such a boring existence, and do nothing else except eat, sleep, watch TV, and do those things in the bathroom that none of us wants to imagine, not even once, it becomes trivial to assign a value to you.
Here’s the deal, here’s how to improve your worth — buy stuff. Lots of it. Max out.
When you buy, get two. If it comes painted, get the two-tone version. If it’s not painted, go for the rhinestones. If it’s plain and simple, then make sure it’s made of platinum. Or plutonium, which is even more expensive.
But you’re a backpacker, right? So what about your pack then? Platinum doesn’t work for packs, and you tried that whole do-it-yourself thing with sticks and rabbit hides, with predictably dismal results, as we’ve seen. So, what then?
Tweed.
Tweed, Babe. Right here, right now. English tweed. It’s even waterproof these days.
The perfect thing for you is a tweed pack, like Cherchbi’s Black Sail Rucksack. (https://bit.ly/2lEuXOK)
Who cares how good it is? It’s the price that counts. For you, only £565.00, or $899.49 in U.S. money, which makes it sound even better. (And a relative steal in 2019: only £445.00 or $546.64.)
Why? Because it’s like your worth suddenly goes up 63% and you only have to sit there and click away at the internet currency converter, and you can still eat chips with your other hand while you’re at it. So many things are so much better than sex, and this is way up there.
One click does it.
Does it make you feel good all over too? It does me.
Mmmm, tweed. Use a soft brush gently applied to remove loose dirt. Remove stains with water and mild soap. Fluff gently and let air-dry in a warm sunny spot while you sip herb tea and admire your new-found tweedy-nerd cleverness.
But it gets better, because you can skip the backpacking and just buy gear. That way you won’t ever find any stains, or have dust to brush off, and you can eat more chips, right there in front of your warm, comfy TV set.
No stains or dust means your personal worth as a human will stay right at its peak, and in fact will even continue to climb to ever newer heights as you buy more and more stuff, and keep shoving all of it into your closet. Where it will remain safe, forever.
So who said backpacking was nasty?
Probably some deadbeat creep without even a credit card.