Manifesto

September 26th, 2009 → 5:21 pm @ sailtotrail

8


We have been up all night my friends, and I, beneath twisted steel and braided nylon lines beating against the mast like our disdain for boredom, because like them we are blown against the status quo and find ourselves repeatedly glancing off at extreme angles. And like the wine in my glass pitching in sync with the sea below, we have been riding the waves between the limits of normalcy and sanity with demented thinking and a flurry of writing.

My heart is filled with an immense pride at feeling ourselves standing quite alone, like lighthouses facing the army of society encamped in mundanity. Alone with the celestial navigators of ships long since devoured by the sea, alone with the machete wielding expeditioners willing themselves further from civilization.

Let us leave good and common sense behind to hurl ourselves into the immense mouth and breast of the world! Let us feed our souls with the unknown, not from despair, but simply to enrich the unfathomable reservoirs of adventure.

The Adventurist Manifesto of SailToTrail.com

  1. We sing the love of adventure and exploration, the habit of energy and rashness.
  2. Society has up to now magnified pensive immobility, production and consumption. We want to exalt movement, simplicity, efficiency of motion, and maximum output derived from absolute and rigorously strict minimal input.

  3. Outfitters have up to now trumpeted ultra-specialization, a specific tool for every job, specific gear for every activity, and the invention and distinction of superfluous categories requiring an endless cycle of purchasing. We recognize the profit motive and declare that the time that would be spent amassing resources required to sustain such a lifestyle should instead be spent in play.
  4. The essential characteristics of our possessions are Efficiency, Portability (lightweight), Cross-Disciplinary, and Multi-Purpose.
  5. We declare that access to the splendor of the world has been granted by technology.
  6. We are on the extreme promontory of the centuries! What is the use of technology used only to procure more technology? Production and consumption died yesterday. We are already living in the absolute, since we have already created the tools to explore and live well simultaneously.
  7. We want to glorify immersive geographic and cultural experience and decry tourism and vacation as temporary respite.
  8. We want to demolish the propaganda of the “American dream”, ethnocentrism, and nationalism. Division is illusion.
  9. We remain confused by the great crowds subjugated by endless work, repressed by imaginary masters, and guided by manufactured fears as much as they remain confused by our freedom and ability to experience.
  10. We welcome converts.

Partially adapted from “The Futurist Manifesto” -F.T. Marinetti, 1909