Apathy (Miles hiked: 900) (Day: probably 80 something...I don't care)

“I used to care…but things have changed.”
-Bob Dylan



Maybe it was the 95 degree heat.

Maybe it was the little black flies that had been eating me alive for the past few days because I had no bug spray.

Or maybe it was the fact that two members of my hiking group had decided to quit hiking the trail in the past 48 hours.

Updated group photo:

I'm not exactly sure why I stopped caring, but regardless, when I walked into Waynesboro, VA last week, I just didn’t give a **** about anything.

I dropped off my pack at the free hiker hostel and I walked a few blocks away in search of food. I saw the following sign on the door of The Ming Garden Chinese Buffet that was clearly directed at me:

I paid no attention to this sign. I knew I smelled bad, but I just didn’t give a ****.

I ate seven plates of bad Chinese food in the next 40 minutes. I was full, but I had no intention of leaving yet. Instead, I got a plate of salad, brought it back to my table, and stared at it for the next half hour. The waitress eventually brought my check and stopped filling my glass of water, but her subtle hints that it was time for me to leave weren’t going to work. I was enjoying the air conditioning, I had nowhere to go, and I just didn’t give a ****.

Three hours later I was still sitting there at the buffet. I had resorted to filling up my own glass of water every twenty minutes or so in the bathroom sink. I also discovered that while the waitress would not collect the used buffet plates from my table every time I finished a plate of salad, she would begrudgingly pick them up and take them to the kitchen if I placed them on the floor.

The manager eventually walked by, groaned, and said something in Chinese to the rest of the staff while he pointed at me. It was clear that they all hated me, but instead of caring, I decided to stop eating salad and go back to eating bad Chinese food. (After all, it had been three hours since my last meal and I was starting to feel hungry again.)

Four plates later, I left the buffet feeling like I had definitely got my $7 worth and headed back to the hostel.

The hostel did not have a washing machine, but I did manage to find an old bathrobe that may or may not have been laundered in the past 2 years. It definitely smelled, but I definitely didn’t give a ****.

Forty-five minutes later, I was reading a book and washing all my dirty hiker clothes at a Laundromat while wearing nothing but a borrowed, foul-smelling bathrobe. (Lebowski would have been proud.)

On my way back to the hostel, I bought a half gallon of cheap chocolate chip cookie dough ice cream at the Kroger. I ate most of it right out box in front of several amused hikers at the hostel before I passed out on the floor in a food coma.

Most of the other hikers slept in the free cots that the hostel provided. I heard the next day that the cots weren’t very comfortable and I pretended to act concerned when some old guy was complaining that his back hurt because of the cheap cot, but honestly…