memememememememmemeee

Hello. My name is Joshua Lawrence Barkey. It says it right there on my United States Passport or my Canadian Citizenship Card, depending on who's asking. I was born a while ago, but if I give you my birthdate you can probably hack into my bank account and steal my identity or the money that's supposed to pay for Anya's education (Why would you do that?).

I am five-feet-ten inches and I weigh one hundred and forty pounds. That makes me thin - nearly skinny - but I don't mind because I'm comfortable with who I am (i think i am, i think i am).

Why is it that it is so easy to find fault with things like your inherent body structure - which you can't change - and so hard to be less of a self-centred fool, which is a pretty uncomplicated thing?

As I sit here stealing internet time from a motel in Whitecourt (seriously, the sign said "free internet") halfway through my final tree planting season, I can't seem to bring myself to write about anything but my Self. So many crazy experiences out planting, so many wild and unusual people, that it all forms some sort of big unfathomable swirling mind mess and the only thing semi-solid that I can seem to hook my shovel on is - me.

The me that is me is me. Hummmmmmmmmm. Nope, not working. Not a whole lot of clarity or oneness with anything. I am such a fluid entity you see - constantly reshaped, resculpted, redefined. Thinking about ME alters me. Thinking about thinking about ME alters me, until the question, "Who am I" blinks consistently, intermittenty on and off in my corneal spaces. For eight years I have been a planter of trees. This has pushed me away from all other of the gazillions of directions I could have gone, formed a part of me into a somewhat tough (yet only occasionally), physically minded person who - because of rapid transversalling from one world (civilization, suburbs) to another (mad jungle savagery of Canadian bush) has become something of a perpetual personality chameleon.

Seriously. If you knew me out planting and then were holding a seance which only managed to conjure up my non-planting self (Why would you do that?), you might not recognize me. In fact, you might think I was a... gasp... nother person.

So what happens when I stop planting, when there is nothing of the planting ME but the memories and the random sparks of planting me-ness? Whom do I become?

This question has leached its way through the skin at the base of my skull and has latched onto a major strand of that substancewhich flows as purple gunk through my neural processes. The current sucks me, inexorably, back to that. As I think through all the possible future directions I could take, I keep coming back to who I am right now, and how I got here.

Maybe that's what we're like, we... humans. Maybe we can't go venturing until we're sure our thatch is patched and our beams our sound. We need a hearth of self to strike out from, a sense that if things go wrong we can always retreat to a comfortable past. Tyler Durden, I suppose, wouldn't like that.

Is this boring you? Here's something different, then. Another Tyler - a french one who is in Mexico drinking milk directly from a cow's teat and has committed himself to hopping on a bus in Montreal wearing only a speedo and a cowboy hat and boots when he returns. There's a guy who knows whom he is. There's a real man - a chap who is so in touch with reality and with himself that they should give him a TV show to validate it. Oh - to be Tyler, covered in organic cow poo, drinking milk.

Since I can not be him, I'm going to drivel on until maybe I get this worked out a bit better. It is what's done, planting trees.