It takes no great stretch of the imagination to describe me as a codger. I fit the definition of the word perfectly, I'm old, I'm eccentric, and I'm grumpy. The one thing alone I wish to point out here is that I AM an old man. I say this proudly for a simple reason, not everyone reaches my age. Our world, you see, does not readily indulge the weak, the careless, or the foolish. WE indulge them, to our own suffering and dismay.
Yes, surely, dullards, the lazy, and the incompetent can be found, and usually in great numbers, in cities. City life, for me, has all the appeal of a barrel full of urts and osts. One thing always trying to eat the other before being eaten itself. That is no way to live, and I stubbornly refuse such an existence. The more plentiful opportunities for employment, entertainment, ready made meals, and clothes, and housing, and other such basic Gorean needs are alluring yes, but those things are simply not a strong enough bait to lure me into that particular barrel.
It is needless to say, but it is true and I enjoy saying it, that I do not like cities. I am not fond of city people, or city ways. I do not like what they call progress. I call it decline. Trading one's freedom for various denominations of metallic discs is ridiculous. To live a life run on a time table like a passenger caravan traveling between towns is foolhardy. Whoever came up with the idea of working hours to be tabulated by the spinning hands of a chronometer should at the least be flogged, if not outright scourged and salted!
I prefer to do my living, the working, the sleeping, and the eating, according to the one true time keeper, the Tor tu Gor. Lar Torvis, and Lar Torvis alone sets the pace of our lives, the seasons of our work, the ahns of our labor and our sleep. The best use that I have found for a chronometer iss that of a navigational aid, followed by its occasional use as a gambling stake.
I am bitterly opposed to the notion of some ledger of ahns, tallied up and approved by some menial accountant, to be exchanged for paltry coinage, being used to determine my worth on any particular day of the hand. The chronometer did not invent us, we invented it. It is ours, we own it, it does not own us. I would no sooner accept the demands of a time piece than those of some bathhouse slave.
Likewise, neither am I impressed with other of our contrivances such as energy bulbs, those cold and lifeless glowing beacons derived from the profound powers of our species' intellect. The ability to produce such a thing I admire, the thing itself I do not.
I greatly prefer a living fire, the warmth it gives, the play of shadows and light in the alluring writhing dance of its existence, its scent and sound. Also high atop my ever growing list of despicable items is the fire maker, that infuriating sleen oil fed, thumb driven, sparking wheel and wick contraption which many Goreans now commonly carry about their person. It is my earnest opinion that any adult, male or female, free or not, who lacks the mental wherewithal to produce fire with dry tinder, stone and steel, has not been mindful of the basic needs for life and therefore deserves neither warmth, nor light, nor hot meals.
Another thing with a reason for being which escapes me entirely is the electric sleeping mat, a self warming or cooling mat and blanket with a timer and thermostat, a ludicrous thing entirely. I will stick with the time tested reliability of fur. If I want warm furs I send amari to them before entering them myself, if I want warmer sleeping I have her add on another. If I want cooler sleeping I simply kick off the unwanted layer of fur, and if it's still too warm I push her out on the floor. What simpler arrangement could there be?
Energy bulbs, fire makers, and electric sleeping mats, bah, the stuff of nonsense! People who depend upon such things are unlikely, in my experience, and thankfully in my opinion, to ever naturally reach the prerequisite age of codgerdom.
