Everywhere I go I see it.

I'd like to make a movie of it. Start with a cutaway diagram of the Travco that slowly rotates in my head as it zooms into the gas tank in the rear and then follows the gas down the line toward the front to the right of the engine, drawn up into the fuel pump, pushed out and up, under the alternator to the top of the engine, through the fuel filter and into the carburetor where it mixes with air and dives down until it ignites with a spark.

This little movie runs on a loop in my head. It invades everything I do. I see it sitting at stoplights, a similar path of electricity out of the breaker, up the light pole and to the switch which sends it to the top lens, which happens to be red.

I see it doing the dishes. The water leaving the tower, flowing down increasingly narrower pipes, off the main street line and into my hot water tank where it sits until a flick of the faucet calls it up through more pipes and out onto my hands.

Everything flows like this. Every system around us, when it works, does something similar.

Right now the Travco does not work. I can see it in my head and yet I cannot make it work. It has to be the fuel pump. I have spark, I have compression, the missing ingredient in the basic trifecta of the internal combustion engines is fuel.

But seeing it and understanding it are different than actually solving the problem, making it work. This is basic difference between architects and builders. Builders have to solve problems in the real world that architects will never encounter.

Days pass. I continue to fail with the bus. The real world of by time constraints, pay checks that don't arrive, other commitments, weather. I work on other things. Hang wall panels, sand and apply finish. I do things I know I know how to do. More days pass. Still the bus doesn't start. I get sullen. My wife thinks I'm mad all the time. I'm not. I'm thinking about the engine, I can't get it out of my head. It reminds me of the first time I tried to write some code. It was fun, but it also was not.

Problem solving seems fun after the problem is solved. During the actual solving it's less fun. Food, sleep, these things seem unimportant when I have a problem that needs solving stuck in my head. I tend to get obsessed about things. Even when I don't want to. It's one of the reasons I don't do much programming anymore. I never let things go until I solve the problem to my satisfaction. Of course breaking a web server doesn't cost much relative to damaging an engine, so with the bus the stakes are much higher, the sullen thinking phase I pass through is correspondingly more sullen and requires more concentration.

I consult my friend Jimmy, double check with him that my plan is sane. He says it is and assures me that there's little chance I'll screw anything up. So I crawl back under the bus for another soaking of gasoline and, after much swearing and muscle cramping, somehow manage to get the new fuel pump properly seated under the eccentric on the camshaft and anchored into place. Then I replace all the fuel lines and filter for good measure. Everything from the fuel pump to the carburetor is now my doing.

I step back and get the gasoline soaked clothes off and take a shower. I want these ten minutes of thinking I fixed it to last, which turn out to be a good thing because when I get back in the bus and fire it up and... it still won't start. Damnit.

The is the most demoralizing thing I know of for anyone trying to DIY something. That moment when it should work, but it doesn't. Damnit. I go back to the internet and do some more searching. I message Jimmy again. On a whim I decided maybe I didn't crank it enough to get all the air out of the new lines. So I go back and instead of starter fluid in the carb I go straight gasoline, which, predictably, starts the engine. And then it dies when that gas is consumed. Goddammit.

I decide try one last time, with enough gasoline to possibly set the whole engine on fire. But that doesn't happen. Instead it starts and then it keeps running. This is when it would nice if life had a sound effects choir to ring out something triumphant. But there's nothing. Just me, sitting in the driver's seat enjoying the smell of gasoline and the roar of an engine that has neither exhaust manifolds nor muffler. And it's a damn fine roar. For now.

I tore the rear air conditioning unit off the back of the bus today. It joins the front unit in the growing pile of bus trash at the side of our house.

Afterward I stood back and looked at the Travco. All the clean lines and curves joined together again, no more air conditioning warts to interrupt the sliding smooth and unbroken swoop of white and blue. The big blue bus looked sleek and whole again.

I'll admit it gave me no small measure of satisfaction, thinking that perhaps, amidst the exponentially increasing insanity, I'd made some tiny thing right in the world. It was that same sort joy that comes from eating really dark chocolate. The aesthetic perfection of hundred percent dark chocolate.

I didn't really get a chance to savor this feeling because the universe hates smugness and soon after I had another thought, hmm, maybe I should check and see if it's going to rain any time soon... Oh, well, yes it is. For three days straight. Starting tomorrow. And I just opened a fourteen inch square hole in the roof of the bus. Genius.

I got a trash bag, some painter's tape, some duct tape, a dictionary of German swear words, and got to work.

I had some time up there on the roof of the bus to reflect on what I had done. More or less an incredibly impractical thing. In the service of what I think is my offbeat, but at times deeply felt sense of aesthetics, I had ripped out two at least partly functioning air conditioners.

Actually I should probably look up aesthetics in the dictionary and make sure that's what I'm acting in the service of. Or I should read Kant. But then it all gets very technical and is predicated on the belief that there is an absolute sense of "good" and "bad" to beauty and I don't know if it matters that much. Maybe dark chocolate metaphors are good enough. If the dark chocolate is good enough. Screw Kant.

Somewhere in a tangle of duct tape and torn plastic trash bags, I got to wondering what Kant would have made of a 1969 Travco. The engine would be new and presumably mind blowing, but Kant was probably familiar with Gypsies at least. The mobile home concept would be familiar. Probably frowned on, but familiar. But what would he make of tearing out an object of convenience and comfort because I think aesthetic integrity and beauty trump personal comfort?

I decided there was a high probability he would think I was an idiot to forego the comfort of air conditioning, which, from his point of view, would be like magic. The problem is I've never been able to get through more than a few pages of Critique of Judgment without being overcome with a desire to reach back through time and give the man a hug¹ and say, relax, it's all going to be okay.

Aesthetics have always seemed pretty simple to me. There is stuff in the world that makes you feel delight. So when you discover this beauty and delight in the world around you, you embrace it and do what you can in service of it². Like removing ugly air conditioners.

The designers of the Travco, to my mind, felt the same way, though they were doubtless bound by certain economic and marketplace constraints I don't have. Hence, warts on the roof if you must. But no one who's of a purely practical bent would ever have designed the large front sliding windows the way they are designed. They're wildly impractical, worse, they leak. But there they are. Pure aesthetics. They look like the person who designed them had discovered delight in their beauty. Little water coming in? Get a towel.

The marketplace does not value aesthetics though. The wonderful sweeping curves of the Travco's windows leaked badly enough that at some point (early '70s) the idea was abandoned altogether.

Aesthetics are a learning experience, a feedback loop of sorts, though the experience is better when it creates change in other direction -- adding in wildly impractical, but aesthetically delightful, sliding windows as it were.

Consider dark chocolate. I'd never really had any until I started dating my wife. I thought chocolate was something that skins a cheap candy bar full of nougat and indecipherable ingredients. The first time my wife gave me a bit of real chocolate was revelatory. The possibilities of life expanded, I had discovered more joy and beauty. Aesthetic progress you might say.

Aesthetics are a life long process, always in flux, that's part of what drives us all to want to know what's around the next corner, over the next hill. As naturalist and herbalist Juliette de Bairacli Levy writes, "I believe that this endless search for beauty in surroundings, in people and one's personal life, is the headstone of travel."

My own aesthetics are like yours I imagine, complicated and often contradictory, nothing so firmly delineated as to please Kant. But one thing I have figured out is that comfort is transitory and moreover, relative. Aesthetics are neither³.

Which is to say, removing the air conditioner might mean that I end up hot, sweating and unable to sleep, but this too, as they say, shall pass. I won't always be hot sweaty and unable to sleep. I will always have to look at the air conditioning wart that used to be on top of the bus. Comfort must be chased; beauty exists.

This is what I kept telling myself the next morning as I mopped up the floor where all the water had come pouring in after my duct tape and trash bag covering collapsed under the weight of accumulated rain water. Comfort is relative. Beauty just is.

For those of us from the relative north, one of the stranger sights in the tropics is the way everyone grabs a jacket the minute the temperature drops below 80 degrees. Even though I have been on the other side of it; living through a succession of New England winters with less and less pain each time. Still, I'll never forget the first night I spent in Goa. The sun went down, the temperature dropped to about 80 and the jackets came out. One person's balmy evening is another person's winter.

By the time I got to Seam Reap several months later I thought I had adjusted a bit. I had not. It was hot, hotter than anything I have experienced before or since. Hotter than Death Valley. I was traveling with Matt and Debi at the time and somehow we convinced ourselves that we didn't need air conditioning. To be honest I think it was Matt that convinced Debi and I. But he was right.

During the day we spent our time outside exploring Angkor Wat in the heat of the day, when the rest of the tourists were passing the time in air conditioned cafés). We went out in the heat of the day precisely because it was hot, because hardly any other tourists did. We had Angkor Wat to ourselves.

We could have returned home to a nice air conditioned room. But if you do that you never adapt. Our bodies are fantastically adaptable machines over the long run. You get used to the heat. This never happens if you retreat to air conditioning at every opportunity.

At night we would crank the ceiling fan to 11 and then, one after the other, take the coldest shower we could get, which was just below scalding because the water tank was in the sun all day, and then dive in our respective beds in hopes that we'd would fall asleep before the real sweating started.

What does this slightly masochistic experiment have to do with aesthetics? Nothing directly, but I came away with from that experience knowing that comfort is relative, both psychologically and physiologically. Seam Reap set my relative quite a few notches above where it had been previously and ever since then I have never really been hot. Sure, it gets moderately unpleasant to be out working in the heat of the day in the Georgia summer, but every time I catch myself about to complain I think, well, at least it's not as hot as Seam Reap.

If you're going to be spending a lot of time in the heat it makes more sense to push through a bit of discomfort until you start to adapt to it than it does to hide out in air conditioning all the time. Eventually, after a few years I suspect, you'll be pulling out the jacket when the thermometer dips below 80.

Adaptation may well be our greatest talent as a species. Air conditioning undercuts that.

So in the end it makes more sense to tear out aesthetically unpleasant air conditioning units than it does to keep them. Comfort is relative and transitory, aesthetics are not.

That said, up until now I've been making it sound like a binary choice -- air conditioning wart atop the bus or nothing. I am not the only one living in the Travco. And the one thing I put higher than aesthetics is never impose your will on someone else. Plus, I do like to have my dark chocolate and eat it too.

I would never subject my kids to Seam Reap without air conditioning. Not at their age anyway. Children are physiologically different, their bodies aren't as good at cooling themselves as adults are.

That's why I took the now useless 110V wire from the roof air conditioner, extended it with some new wire and rerouted it behind the closet and down to where the refrigerator used to be, where there is now plenty of room for a window air unit, which will serve as our new air conditioner and heater.

I can hear Kant breathing a sigh of relief. The magic is there if we need it. The beauty is there as well. Granted, I ripped out the generator, which means we'll never be able to run the air for long, but we should be able to run it enough to cool things off in the evening before bed (and we can run it as much as we like if there's shore power around).

If it does get so hot that no one in my family is happy, or god forbid, our dark chocolate starts to melt, we'll do what people with movable homes have done for millennia -- go somewhere else.

I just sold an old Oldsmobile 8-track cassette player on eBay for $86. Yes, I sold an antiquated music player that takes a format no one has manufactured in over three decades for $86.

I pulled it out of the bus. It's a stock item for a Cutlass Supreme from the late 1960s through early 1970s. I have no idea how it came to be in a 1969 Dodge Travco. What I do have an idea about is why I just sold it, as-is, could-be-working, could not be working, for $86.

In purely practical terms the current value of the 8-track is bewildering and when you first encounter it, you are thinking in practical terms.

Practical would be the brand new, reasonably high end car stereo that will replace the 8-track, which set me back a mere $45 on Amazon. It will play every digital music format you've ever heard of and dozens more you haven't. It's a knock off of a fancier name-brand model most likely made by the same slave laborers in the same factory. Capitalism¹.

But even I would be the first to admit it's also a complete piece of crap, made of cheap plastic and designed to be chucked in a rubbish bin the minute it starts to malfunction. In fact the advent of the car stereo wiring "harness" -- which eliminates any need to understand soldering and reduces the installation process to clicking little plastic pieces into place -- was designed to facilitated this kind disposability. Consumer capitalism.

The 8-track player on the other hand is not disposable in the same way. Nor is it installation-friendly. Whoever installs it will be soldering it in, or perhaps twisting and taping some wires, but either way there will most definitely not be any snapping of plastic. It will take time. Even after all the time it takes to repair it, it will take time to install it.

But there's the thing. If it does turn out to not be working, it can can be repaired by anyone with the patience to sit down, take it apart and figure out how it works.

This is the first part of why I think the 8-track still has so much value to this day. The world is increasingly disposable, not just by design, but by inherent complexity vs price. The cheap stereo is fixable too -- as anyone who's tinkered with a Raspberry Pi can tell you, it's not that hard to solder, though it does take some practice -- but it requires more specialized knowledge and (often) a circuit diagram of some sort. And because a new one is only $45 it's tough to come up with a convincing argument for fixing it.

There is a kind of satisfaction in taking something apart, wrapping your head around how it works and then putting it back together better than it was before. Sure, at this point you might have to fabricate some parts if they turn out the be broken, but with 3D printers that's well within the realm of possibility (and, should 3D printers not be around there are still plenty of lathes in metal shops all over the place).

What's more, no matter what the things is -- a clock, a wood burning stove, a vehicle, a radio, a turntable, even a house -- I guarantee there are people out there devoting their free time and energy to fixing it. These people have created forums and share knowledge, tips and tricks all over the internet, often you find people joining in who used to work in factories making the thing in question.

In the 8-track's case there is 8trackheaven.com, which does not appear to be maintained, but has another clue as to why people find value in older stuff:

When you say yes to 8-track you're generally saying no to the accepted wisdom of our hallowed consumer culture, decrying this religion of consumption as the worship of hollow, deceptive idols.... Commit an act of consumer disobedience with us and reject the unjust laws of a marketplace ruled by greed. Follow the way of the 8-track and reap the spiritual rewards that come with renewing and recycling instead of stepping in line with the cattle so captivated with the consumerist culture that ultimately benefits only landfill brokers.

I think this little manifesto-style rejection hints at something else in the appeal of restoration, something beyond the ability to repair things. I think that buying and restoring mechanical devices from earlier eras is also a way of traveling through time back to a world we may well have never personally known. There's an element of nostalgia, but nostalgia for something never experienced.

I have no memory of 1969 Dodge Travcos, but in recreating one I'm connecting back to an era I never got to experience. It's not nostalgia for that time, not really romanticism of it either. It's something different, tangibly different. That time is gone, but echoes of it remain in the objects that come down to us. And I think that the world's response to the Travco, the endless smiles and waves reflect that connection, that echo of the age that gave us the Travco.

That age had ideas about itself, about the objects that surrounded it, grew out of it. There is nothing like the Travco on the road now and that says as much about us now as it does about Travcos then. This often brings with it an implicit, or as in the 8-track manifesto, an explicit rejection of the perceived values of today in favor of either the values of the past or simply the value of stasis. The 8-track manifesto isn't nostalgic for 8-tracks necessarily, it's simply that 8-tracks become the stopping point of technological progression. They are good enough.

This is a big part of why I have the Travco. Not that it is the best RV ever built, but that it is good enough. It does not provide every comfort of home and in that sense it becomes a kind of critique of our modern conception of comfort. Do you really need two TVs in your RV?

More to the point the restoration is the embodiment of that rejection -- by existing it says, look, here is an era when no one thought it necessary to have two TVs in their RV. It becomes a kind of nostalgia for a set of values -- though you need to be careful about this since there are some really shitty values lurking back in the age of the Travco and 8-track -- but I don't know that nostalgia is quite the word. I'm not sure we have a word to describe the rejection and embracing.

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry writes in Wind, Sand and Stars, "To grasp the meaning of the world of today we use a language created to express the world of yesterday."

I thought of this line when I was struggling to find a word in the last paragraph, but then I thought that perhaps we do the same thing with object. That is, you could easily change it read: to grasp the meaning of the world of today we use objects that are expressions of the world of yesterday.

Perhaps this is me getting old, but the Travco makes more sense to me than any vehicle being made now. And I don't mean the technical, the engine complexity of now versus then, though that is certainly part of it, but there are less technical things too.

The way the engineers of the Travco looked at the world is reflected in what they built. The way the engineers who built the Honda maxivan I also currently own look at the world is reflected in their choices as well. And these are very markedly different ways of looking at the world. The engineers of the Honda assume me an idiot. They won't let me open the side doors when the vehicle is in drive. They made it howl with beeping should I shift out of park while the door is still open. They decided not to tell me what the oil pressure is, but instead angrily flash an inscrutable light when the oil pressure getting low.

These are minor things that irritate me not because of their actual function but because of what they say about how the designers of the Honda think about me and the rest of the world. It doesn't stop there either. The engineers of the Honda take a dim view of professional mechanics as well. Honda's own workers are not mechanics, they're certified technicians. The world of the Honda is exclusive, stratified, and specialized. It has no place for the mechanic of old and certainly now place for you and I².

I cannot make sense of a world where designers believe they are better at knowing what I am capable of than I am.

This is true of the disposable stereo as well. It has stickers all over it and warnings on the box about voiding the warranty if you unscrew a certain screw to access the inside (as if not having a warranty were some horrible thing). All technology has moved in this direction, much of it to the point of using obscure torx screws and other deliberate attempts to stymie tinkering.

Why? What is so horrible that could happen if I take a think apart? That I might break it? Well then I would have broken it. And learned something.

This is a world that I cannot make sense of, nor can, I suspect, the buyer of my 8-track.

I can make sense of the design world the creators of the Travco came from. It feels more like home to me. It is built to empower the owner, not stymie them. There are access panels everywhere. A lengthy guide tells me how to disassemble most of the core components in the vehicle. Even ones you can't reach without tearing out the walls -- the 12V electrical system is shown complete with schematics. The designers of the Travco felt I might want to -- indeed they knew I would have to -- get to the engine, so the built a massive, awkward access hatch that's half as large as the seats on either side of it.

It is, like all vehicles of its era, designed to be tinkered with. Because tinkering is the thing that makes us human. Or at least that's the message I get when I sit in the Travco tinkering with things. I notice how there's not just a vent at the back of the fridge, but a panel that opens to give access to the entire 2-way fridge internals. I also notice that in the original sales brochures the ease of repair is a central selling point. Not so long ago we liked to fix things ourselves.

The next line in Saint-Exupéry's book is, "The life of the past seems to us nearer our true natures, but only for the reason that it is nearer our language." Is the same true of objects? Are objects of the past nearer to us because they are nearer to our natures. Perhaps.

I don't know who bought the 8-track, but I do suspect that she's a bit like me -- she's looking for something to tinker with, something to take back in time to its original state, back in time to a world perhaps she never knew, but misses nonetheless. We are like Saint-Exupéry writes, "emigrants who have not founded our homeland", and I wish her the best of luck in trying to create it.