Camping Revamping

I don't know why I've gone all rhymey with the titles of my blog posts.  I guess you'll just have to find a way to cope with it all.

There is a huge problem facing humanity that I don't believe anyone is addressing.  It is a scourge of society that is destabilising communities, destroying families, welcoming criminals with an 'open-door' policy, and, well, pissing me off to be honest.  The pressing crisis that needs tackling is the popularity of camping.      

Every man and his sleeping bag are going camping these days, and they feel the need to tell everyone else about how edgy and hip and on-trend they are.  I'm all for visiting nature, but can't it be done in a day?  People talk to me all the time about their camping shenanigans - at length - as if they have somehow seen a vague flicker of interest flash across my face when they talk of missing tent pegs, burnt marshmellow and mosquitoes attacking their eyeballs. 

There is nothing remotely fun-sounding about toasting marshmellows.  Gooey marshmellows are just gross, and they are even grosser when they are toasted. Thanks, but I don't care for marshmellows at the best of times, although if Cadbury go bankrupt and there are no other decent lollies left in the whole world, I'll just grab a bag of mini marshmellows from Woolies, and eat them while watching a DVD while sitting on a sofa in my house that has a roof and air-conditioning.  Sans campfire. 

During these momentously uninteresting camping conversations, I scan their little faces, searching for some telltale twitch or slip-up that will alert me to the fact that they are lying when they say they love camping and that they have, instead, just recently escaped from some weirdo Church of Scientology type facility that specialises in mind control and other coercive techniques to force them to accept the basic values and beliefs of spending the night in the bush.

Benjamin Franklin or someone went to a bloody great effort to discover electricity for you; most probably because he was sick to death of undertaking scientific experiments and writing Declarations of Independence by flickering oil lamps.  You should not take his work for granted.  If Bob Brown and his cohorts have their way with us with their retarded green policies we'll be living in caves in ten years anyway, so make the most of your houses, fools.

A lot of the stories I hear from camping people (italics used to denote derision) of their off-civilisation ventures sound remarkably civilised.  For example, using a car engine to heat the kettle and toaster, and sleeping in a five-bedroom McMansion tent with 25,000 tent poles.  I imagine they were up most of the night laying beige carpet and installing the rangehood near the kettle.

I completely condone fancy pants camping; it sounds much more like my cup of tea, albeit infested with dirty, swamp gnats.  Although it poses the question: why not just stay in your fucking house in the first place?