The new "Overview"

Following is the first draft to the "Overview" for Warming Up at the Ramada: A Hermit's Memoir and Other Essays. Not much has changed from the synopsis version, except that it's been shortened up a bit and revised to fit the completed work:

Overview

Although the idea for Warming Up at the Ramada came to me more than seven years ago, after so many anxious days and nights of writing and rewriting, I am proud to present my now completed work on the project. This is the work that has preoccupied my thoughts and provided me a sense of meaning and purpose for so many years.

The problem is—why this work has taken me so long, I believe—is that I had fallen so helplessly and hopelessly in love with the process of working it all out in my head, that to actually complete the work would have taken all the fun out of it for me. “The finest workers in stone are not steel or copper tools,” wrote Thoreau, “but the gentle touches of air and water working at their leisure with a liberal allowance of time.” So, I had often seen myself in this way, slowly chipping away at the formation of these essays—which had become a labor of love for me.

At heart a book of self-discovery, Warming Up at the Ramada: A Hermit’s Memoir and Other Essays focuses on the development of my ideas concerning what I believe it means to live responsibly in an unsustainable environment. Based on the premise that we are now living in an unsustainable environment because of our excessive consumption of resources, it suggests that the solution to the problem of man versus the environment will not come from government or technology but must come from individuals making better, more conservative, responsible choices regarding how they live. It also suggests more than a casual relationship between personal economics and global environmental concerns, and introduces a Personal Economic and Environmental Impact Theory, equating personal income with negative impact to the environment.

Written in the form of a series of essays, or brief autobiographical sketches, —I have worked by revising and expanding on my notes involving the deeply personal tragedy of losing my home and business, and subsequent experiment in essential living.

Respectively, the work is divided into two parts: The first part, “A Hermit’s Memoir,” is a narrative that deals with the emotional trauma that I suffered immediately following the collapse of my business, LifeWorks Publishing, the experience of living in a rustic, little wooden shack in the orchard behind my sister’s house near Palm Desert, California; my subsequent experiment in simple living, and the broader implications of my living out of a little travel trailer in the backwoods of Oregon. The second part, “Relative Notes and Journals: A Collection of Miniature Essays and Dialogues on Consumerism and Environmental Sustainability Issues,” offers some additional reflections on the subject matter of the book as a whole.