Ephipanies come in small packages

So I took my dog to the park so she could run around and burn off the cookies I'm not supposed to feed her. I take her to the park because they have fenced in area where she can play without me worrying about her running off. She's a bad dog sometimes. Anyway, I'm walking around this field and look down and laying there in the grass, for God knows what reason, is a hammer.

I'm not speaking metaphorically. It was an actual hammer. Just laying there.

I start wondering why a hammer is just laying there in the grass for no reason, imagining all sorts of scenarios that might have caused it to be there. Eventually I get around to having that folk song "If I had a hammer" stuck in my head.

If I had a hammer
I'd hammer in the morning
I'd hammer in the evening ... all over this land

Basically, if I had a hammer I would piss off the neighbors by hammering all the time.

That's not actually what the song is about, of course. It's a what if I had what I needed to accomplish something, then I'd actually do it. I start wondering what I'd do if I had a hammer. But then, now I actually do have a hammer. It's laying there in the grass right before me, for God knows what reason. I start to pick it up, but stop.

I realized that if I did have a hammer, I'd do nothing. There's nothing I want to do. I actually want to do — nothing. Not nothing as in the absence of something, but rather nothing in that it doesn't look anything like what could be misinterpreted as something. This doesn't make sense. Here, this is what I mean:

Winnebago + Laptop + WiFi + War Driving = That's me.

I want what Doonesbury creator Gary Trudeau described as "a lifestyle that doesn't require my presence". I mean, come on, why not? For the first time in history all the tech is there to make that happen, to be connected to the world without, you know, being connected to the world. Mobile phones give you a number that you can take with you. Email handles the correspondence. WiFi and ripping off people's broadband connections (commercial services are fine too) means that you never have to literally be plugged in anywhere. Decentralized business models aren't tied to any particular location. Your reading this wherever you are. The server's in San Antonio, I think. I'm writing from the boon docks of Kentucky. Most everything's outsourced to India anyway. The world's become nonlocal, why shouldn't I?

Winnebago and a laptop and I'm gone, a geeky nomad skipping from hotspot to hotspot, doing nothing in particular. Nothing, as in no-thing. Why? Well, for no other reason than I want to do everything and don't want to be tied down to any particular one thing.

So, I thought, if I had a hammer... I'd leave it right where I found it. And that's what I did.