Greetings. I am not Space Ghost, I am Brick. It’s Tuesday. I’ve been playing Super Metroid all day; it’s been a blast. This inagural installment of "Uh, What?" is brought to you by this article about "glamping":

http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-glamping19aug19,0,1779817.story?coll=la-home-center

"Glamping" is not when you are glomped by a mutant artichoke who can only go "Aaaaaaaaaaaaah", it’s "glamourous camping".

Glamourous. Camping.

Feel free to inform yourselves, and come on back for some good ol’ pondering behind the jump.

When I was smaller, (me saying when I was younger implies that I’ve "grown up", and that is far from the case) I did my fair share of camping thanks to various Cub and Boy Scout activities. My biggest problem besides the yearly "Klondike Derby" where we’d all flail around in freezing temperatures worse than South Park’s Pee Wee Hockey Team was the fact that I could never find a decent sleeping bag. Seriously. I must have had at least five different sleeping bags from when I was eight to fifteen or so- I finally stuck with a mummy bag that was perfect for me due to the fact that its zipper chewed up my left index finger the first time I used it. It was out for blood. It was the Six Demon Sleeping Bag, and I was its first victim. I finally killed it in a fire back in 1997 and burned down a church in the process. I can still hear the screams and smell the-

Whoops. A tangent of too much information reared its ugly head just then. Sorry.

Anyway, camping- it’s what people do one day when they decide to "rough it" or "get back to their roots". Thanks to the advent of modern technology, folks don’t really camp all that much anymore- sure, we talk about it with our friends ("And there can be s’mores! And a fire! Does anyone remember how to make a fire! Two sticks and a… yeah, I don’t know either, I’ll Google it. Oh, oh- I’ll save the lint from my laundry and we can use it as tinder and we can start a fire that way! We can tell scaaaaaary stories, I got this one about a guy named Machete Phil who had no-"… and then you never go camping), but I always figured that it was one of the last sacred, pure bonding activities you could do with a bunch of friends besides get drunk and play Mario Kart, play laser tag, or dare your buddy to eat a Solo cup full of Pixy Stix.

I was wrong.

I never would have thought that camping would get tricked out to "luxury" status. "Pimp My Campsite" is gonna be on MTV this fall, I swear. Now, if you’ve got a good bit of scratch, more power to you, spend spend spend, let’s get this economy booming once again says people with money to spend… but do you really need a frickin’ (See what I did there? I tried not to curse. I’m learning, I swear!) camp butler?

INSTEAD OF YOU MAKING THE S’MORES, THE S’MORES ARE MADE FOR YOU WHILE YOU WATCH.

That is not fun! That is worse than going to the supermarket and buying S’Mores Pop Tarts and taking them to a camping trip and going, "Ay yo, put these Pop Tarts in some foil and we got s’smores, yo!" Failing at catching fish (and getting drunk in the process) is one thing, but paying somebody to tell you where the good fish are and then having that mickie fickie gut and cook the damn fish for you is worse than cheating, it’s almost like going to your local Giant or Kroger or Fresh Fields or Super Fresh or Food Lion or whatever the hell your local supermarket is called, getting some fried whiting from the "Hot Foods" section and telling your friends, "Yeah, I went fishing. Then I fried them up. Tasty."

Yeesh.

There’s "kinda sorta roughing it" and then there’s "ain’t roughing it whatsoever". Now, I have nothing against the folks that do the luxury camping thing- it’s their money, they can do whatever they want with it. It’s the idea that people can be enabled by others to such a degree where an experience becomes completely transformed from its original intent. I mean, all I can think of is- what’s next? What are folks not gonna want to do next, and what can money buy them so folks can avoid doing it? There’s having fun, and then there’s buying artificial fun. There’s the experience, and then there’s paying someone for you to recreate said experience while you’re eight feet away only to tell folks, "Yeah, that’s cool stuff. You should try it sometime. I’ve… seen it?". The buying and selling of goods and whatnot can be fun and enjoyable (or put you in debt), but holy shipdoinkle… I don’t even want to speculate as to what else is out there that people are throwing their money at in order to "do".

So, there it is. Glamping. I never knew folks did it, but now I do… and so do you.

Oh, and if someone knows what "artisan mountain sage" soap is, please tell me…. ‘cuz I got no clue.

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