I used to have this dream of living over a bar on the seedy side of a big city. Write all day, drink all night, generally live an unexamined barfly life.

Why not, right? In the cities, there is no such thing as closing time. Want a plate of eggs and hash browns at 3 in the morning? The little diner across the street will hook you up. Need sweatpants due to another unfortunate trouser mishap? In the city, there’s always a Wal-Mart, a Walgreens or a Big Jimmy’s Discount Everything within five blocks.

The constant hum of traffic. Thrashing knots of human bodies coming and going like ants. Sirens wailing around the clock, the occasional shriek from a dark alley, the inexorable thump of bass that seems to come from everywhere. Gunfire, car horns and the scream of rubber on pavement? Why, that’s the city lullaby, rocking you to sleep.

All I needed was one dusty window where I could sit and smoke and watch the neon-lit world go by. A liquor store, a smoke shop, the occasional city woman scrounged from a bar stool. I’m a man of simple needs — what more could I possibly want?

A shabby dream it was, but a dream nonetheless. And now, for no reason I can discern, it’s utterly useless to me.

These days, when I roam, I find myself drawn to rolling hills and green fields over high-rise buildings and angry crowded streets. Give me a forest, a pasture or a sprawling farmhouse a mile off the road and you can keep your mall, your traffic circle and your parking garage.

Suddenly it’s not the buzz of the city I crave but that of the wilderness. Who needs the madness of Main Street when you’ve got a fully populated barnyard?

Give me a little cabin in the woods, with some acres out back for a garden and some critters, and I’ll happily surrender access to the clubs, the stores and the all-night diners. It’s an idea that occurs to me every time it takes 20 minutes to back out of my driveway and another 20 minutes stopping at a dozen red lights within a mile from home.

It’s just strange, these daydreams. I thought I wanted to live over a bar, but now I’d settle for a place next to a little stream with maybe a Grange hall a few miles down the dirt road. Work sun to sun, sleep to the sounds of silence and shake my head over big-city news, like Los Angeles running out of water or New York running out of sense.

It’s next to impossible to get completely off the grid, but you can shake some of it off; shake it off and squirm away like an otter wriggling free of the fisherman’s net. The grid is slavery. The city owns you. You depend on it to provide the food you eat, the water you drink, the electric light that chases shadows away.

The city becomes your protector. Got a problem? Call 911. All that stands between your family and the savages are armed men in blue uniforms you trust with your life.

That’s within the kingdom. On the outside, if you dare exist there, you’ll have a few good neighbors to watch your back, a faithful dog and a shotgun leaning against the wall, just in case.

That’s my present idea of paradise, and it’s just strange how this happens, how priorities can utterly mutate, transforming from one thing into something completely different. A few years ago, I wanted to be Jack Kerouac, a city vagabond with a poet’s soul. Now I’d be content to be that white-haired fellow with the pitchfork who married a Gabor.

Keep Manhattan, man, just give me that countryside.

Or maybe this is just another phase that will pass as quickly as it emerged. Maybe come fall, I’ll have a powerful yen to move to a commune, to the biosphere or to a pineapple under the sea. Maybe I’ll shave my head, get some tats and join the circus.

Who knows, right? As soon as you think you’ve got a handle on yourself, a strange voice rises out of the foggy mid brain with fresh ideas and a completely new agenda. It’s hell when I’m trying to dress in the morning.

Do I wear the leisure suit and neck chain today? Or bib overalls and work boots?

Mark LaFlamme is a Sun Journal staff writer. You might find him living in a cave with a stack of Nietzsche books or answering emails at mlaflamme@sunjournal.com.

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