Why Whitman, and why a cabin?

Post #1 contains lines from Whitman's justifiably immortal "Song of Myself," from Leaves of Grass.  Those lines may sum up how I position myself toward this weird world: supermarkets, clogged roads, billboards, cell-phone natterers, et al.  I'm not sure it's always an enviable position, either.  It's observational, not always participatory.  I often find myself on the outside looking in and wondering how I got here.  

God knows I don't want to turn this into a series of gripe sessions, but perhaps it's inevitable to ask the David Byrne question when you turn 40, as I have: "How did I get here?"  Most of the time I conclude that I got here because I wanted to be here, somehow.  Maybe I didn't expect to be here, but...here I am.  In that Whitman bit is contained bemusement and a discomfiting amount of detachment; I worry that I am detached from my own life.  

But if the unexamined life is not worth living, I should rest easy; I examine.

Now why the cabin picture on the right?  It's not where I live but a place where I once stayed.  A house with a front porch was never a house I lived in, yet the picture remains.  It's a state of mind, a place to sit outside, perhaps sip on a beverage, and be a "third party" to everything or nothing.

Which puts me in mind of Masters' "Petit, the Poet," and its narrator's lament at the failure of poetry (or of poetry as he learned to write it) to do justice to the world.  Petit strikes me as a third party who has let the world pass him by while trying to do justice to it.  That's the rhetorical swamp I find myself in these days.  Let me try to dig myself out...