Walden, But Good

When I moved to a log cabin in the woods, I was very inspired by Henry David Thoreau and his book Walden. So I decided to write my own book, Walden, But Good.

Some might say that living in a cabin by yourself is a recipe for going mad. To them I say: “I am God!”

I am kidding, of course. I did not descend into madness because I had funny neighbors to talk to, and ran lots of errands, and also hosted a weekly online painting show to prevent madness. Sometimes I went to an open mic at a kava bar-slash-pinball arcade owned by Orthodox Jewish hippies.

I am also joking about my book being good, and Thoreau’s being bad. Walden is actually quite good, and also? Thoreau is pretty cool.

Thoreau was a crank. He was anti-capitalist, and a huge whiner, just like me. As I drive around to my errands and listen to Walden on audiobook, I project onto him that he probably annoyed a lot of his professional peers in the writing world.

He was an abolitionist. He lived in urban Massachusetts among educated, liberal Northerners. He noticed their hypocrisies: they thought they were morally superior (saintly even!) compared to their slave-owning peers in the South. But meanwhile they were all paying taxes to and working within the system of the very nation that allowed slavery and waged imperialist war with Mexico.

Thoreau was pathologically anti-authoritarian. He graduated from Harvard, but refused the diploma on principle because he didn’t want to pay for the physical diploma. He refused to pay taxes (see: aforementioned slavery and imperialism contentions) and went to jail. He worked at a school and quit almost immediately to make a point about the use of corporal punishment. He was always doing a protest and telling everyone they were lousy hypocrites.

So, pissed at the world, he did the ultimate protest and went to the woods, planted a buncha beans, and wrote all day.

I imagine his peers must have been split – some supportive of his antics, and some finding him self-righteous and annoying. Again, this is a quality I share – being self-righteous and annoying. So I feel reassured reading about a guy who was kind of a pain in the ass about the things he cared about. Perhaps we share some same early childhood trauma that causes people to call out hypocrisy and injustice, while everyone else is like: “Jesus Christ, I’m just trying to put food on the table. Chill out.”

The woods I moved to were just over an hour outside of New York City, but they were pretty conservative. There were signs all over the place: “Trump,” “Women for Trump” and “Fuck Biden” (with the letters in “Fuck” made out of guns). I wondered if I should put up a sign myself to let drivers know there were safe people (i.e. not Trump-loving, ammo stockpiling, QAnon types) around, but I found myself worrying that someone would smash my windows or something. So I decided to put up a banner of the 1981 Irish Hunger Strikers. That way, I knew my politics, but no one else knew what it meant.

What does it mean to put up a banner for the 1981 Irish Hunger Strikers you bought on Etsy in your window? Well, if you’re not aware, the British were occupying forces in Ireland. Maybe you could say the dynamic was like police and Black people in the U.S. The British were heavy-handed and violent, but the media instead portrayed the Irish as lazy, violent and deserving of abuse to get them to straighten up. So a bunch of men did a nonviolent hunger protest to get international attention. Some of them died of hunger. Seventeen years, later a peace agreement was signed.

So, anyone driving by with really good eyesight and a college degree might go, “Oh, this person likes peace and nonviolent protest against imperialism, but also is empathetic to violent protest when necessary.” So basically … no one knew what it meant.

Where Thoreau was isn’t even all that remote. His cabin was kind of on a walking path, so sometimes people would walk by after fishing or whatever, and they’d be like, “Hey, whatcha doin’?” and he’d be like, “Oh, I’m this writer from the big city, but I want to live in the woods for awhile,” and they’d be like, “OK, cool.”

Same thing happened to me. I’d be working on my jerry-rigged fence, which was always collapsing and in need of repair. Or tending to my yard, which was impossibly rocky and full of weeds. I gave up trying to do anything fancy and just planted clovers. Neighbors would walk by, puzzled by my appearance. They didn’t understand why this young, childless single woman was in their conservative mountain town. “Oh, I do some showbiz stuff here and there, but it’s kinda slow now, so I’m mostly painting and writing and watching people’s dogs.” Sometimes they would find some work of mine online and then they’d be excited to talk to me. “You’re so funny!” “I know,” I’d say.

I wrote Walden, But Good in monthly installments, because I heard that’s how Charles Dickens wrote his books. You would get Chapter 5 of A Tale of Two Cities in the mail (from a guy on a horse, I guess) and you’d be like, “Alright!”

I wrote and printed and stapled little books together and mailed them to people who had subscribed to my Patreon because they liked my appearance on a podcast or saw me do comedy somewhere. I worried they were too personal, and thus not funny. My standup was almost always impersonal –– silly, absurd, not revealing any information about myself. I wanted to think I wasn’t so emotionally needy that I’d be happy writing funny stories alone in the woods, but the truth is I like the immediate feedback of laughter in a room, knowing exactly what parts pop and what to lean into.

I started coming into the city more to do live comedy. I had stopped for most of prime Covid times, because I didn’t want to get sick in crowded rooms. Things were different now. When I left, everyone was shaking hands. When I came back, everyone was doing fist bumps. There were so many new, younger comedians who didn’t hide away at all during the worst of Covid. In fact, that’s when they started comedy. Even though I had chosen to hide from the disease, I didn’t judge these kids, because I would probably have done the same if I had spent all of my high school or college years in Zoom classrooms.

I was very excited by these younger comedians. They were coming up in a time when TV was dying. Could it be they actually liked doing stand-up, and weren’t just doing it as a means to become character actors?! Unthinkable for someone from my generation. How punk rock!

Sometimes my friends from the city came to visit, and they’d be shocked:

“Your house is made of logs?

“Yes, well, it’s a log cabin.”

“Right, I just didn’t know it was actually gonna be made of logs.”

Then we’d swim around and goof off and watch fireworks neighbors set off.

Everyone always wants to know: “Did you have to caulk the logs?”

No. I didn’t have to caulk the logs. I lucked out with good caulking! My problem was that my logs were rotten on the outside of the house. My neighbor told me to break off a crumbling piece of my house and bring it to Benjamin Moore so they could mix paint to match the color. I’d plug up the ugly rotten parts with wood filler, like icing a cake, and slap some paint on top. Good as new!

Eventually I ran out of money, but luckily got an offer on the house and quickly sold it to a gay flight attendant from the city. I made a profit and felt accomplished. Me, a real house-flipper like you see on HGTV.

Back in the city, I was happy to return to stand-up, refreshed, more comfortable to get personal and political, and having greater faith that people will “get it,” even if they’re politically opposed to my views. Because that’s what I found. I’ve met a ton of liberals in the city who aren’t anywhere as liberal as they say they are. And I’ve met conservatives in the woods with some of the most insane bumper stickers known to man who are actually probably anarchists.

Soon after Thoreau’s Walden was published, the Civil War broke out in America over slavery, the very issue Thoreau had been so torn up about. Some people say we’re on the verge of another one now. Personally, I think we’re already in it, but it’s too long and drawn-out for people to notice. Guerrilla attacks on politicians and CEOs every month or two, instead of two armies in different outfits in forts and trenches. I don’t see us getting to that Ken Burns: Civil War level, but anything’s possible.