The 2020-2021 vintage will have taught me at least one thing : the company of men, as well as the “cultural life”, are perfectly dispensable for me. On the other hand, being stuck between 4 walls was painful, and humanity has only seemed more hateful to me since. Survive in your Orwellian dystopia if it amuses you, frail little beings frightened by the prospect of your own death, but in fact you’ve already been scared to death for a long time. You will make your health dictatorship without me, a regime of exception and a state of emergency more or less, it’s not as if we were in a continuous vigipirate state since 1995… The beauty of a security policy is that if it works, we must continue, if it fails, we must go further. Disarmament, abandonment of the measures and return to the initial state are never foreseen, and “emergency” states end up becoming the new usual state, with always a little more surveillance at the end. Freedoms are only of interest to those who use them, not to those who serve. But you’ll still come whining that you weren’t warned of the abuses, and you’ll still show up at the polls thinking that this time it will be different. We have the leaders we deserve.

By extension, cities where humanity is crammed together like cattle, stepping on each other’s toes and agressing each other (while continuing to reproduce as if there weren’t already 8 billion of us), have become totally unbreathable to me. Too bad for museums, theatres, cinemas and restaurants. The only interest of a city is to have Asian grocery stores. But the main interest of the woods is not to find men or sanitary passes. And that’s the dream. 3 hours away by bike, I have the Côtes de Meuse and lots of forests to go and sleep away from the idiots. Even if it means sleeping in a tent in 2 °C weather. At least, at this temperature, there are no more mosquitoes.

The countryside, early in the morning, is magical. Sure, it pinches, you’re barely awake, but the silence of the dew in the grass and of the sun through the mist remind us that there was a world that was finally more human before the noise of machines and overpopulation. Too many humans create an inhuman society of human cattle where competition for space degenerates into permanent violence and individuals aspire to be more than file numbers and statistics, not understanding that this is the only way to manage their insane numbers.

I grew up in this area before the construction of the TGV high-speed train line. It was very quiet. Now it’s much less so : you can hear the high-speed trains passing through the plain 10 km from the line. They start at 5am and finish around 10:30 pm. At the risk of sounding like Marcel Pagnol, they ruined my hills. The price of putting Nancy or Metz at 1 h 30 from Paris and Strasbourg at 2 h, without having opened up this area, since it only benefits from the nuisances. Thanks guys.

Apart from that, the Meuse is a nice place. People obviously don’t understand what a weirdo in shorts, with a camera slung over his shoulder and a sleeping bag on the bike’s fork, is doing in their village out of the “tourist” season (the question of whether there is a tourist season in this remote area is still open), but they say hello anyway. And then the Meuse is pretty. There are wooded hills, sealed over the battlefields of 1914-18 (excellent forestry fertilizer, the poilu dead for nothing), and undulating open plains. The roads are lined with trees. Urbanization has not yet reached there. I pass wild boars and deer in the woods at nightfall. Sometimes they come and sniff me at night.

The tragedy is that the hunting season has resumed, and that these retarded hunters are not able to warn 48 hours in advance on a national website where and when they will hunt, because 2021 has not yet reached the homes of gun lovers. On Sunday morning, you may have to fold up quickly to avoid being shot in the legs. Once again, hell is brought to you by humans.