Luxagraf: Topographical Writings

Nothing is Finished, Nothing is Perfect

If you zoom out far enough pretty much everything looks absurd. It's a handy way to reduce stress. Worried about the future? Think about how you would explain your worries to an alien visitor. You'd have to start the very beginning, explain the entire structure of life on earth and how you fit into it. By the end I'd be willing to bet you'll feel a little better. That maybe it isn't a big of a deal as you think.

Perspective can be the salve to thy sores, to paraphrase Milton.

I've been thinking about perspective and about what the Japanese call Wabi-Sabi a lot lately. Wabi-Sabi has a many different aspects to it, many of which are deeply entwined in Japanese culture in ways that an outsider like me is unlikely to ever fully appreciate, but the description I encountered, which has stuck with me is the idea that Wabi-Sabi means "nothing lasts, nothing is finished, and nothing is perfect."¹

A dozen years ago this week I was at an Iraqi restaurant in Paris. It was a tiny place near the cross roads of two very forgettable avenues, an unassuming door, a small menu board of the kind you see dozens of on nearly every block. I have no recollection of what drew us in, maybe just hunger. There were only four tables, a low ceiling, rock walls and heavy wooden chair and tables. The only people in it were the owner and his wife. To this day I would call it as the best meal of my life. The next morning I was due to get on a plain at Charles De Gaulle and disappear into the Indian subcontinent. I recorded nothing of the day in my journal, nothing of the meal even, though I remember every detail. There is an entry on this site that mentions it, but I haven't reread it because I have realized it doesn't matter what I thought.

Whatever I might have thought about that night at the time -- and I did have the sense that it was an important moment in my life even at the time -- I lacked the perspective to understand it then.

That was the beginning of the journey, that meal is where, for me anyway, a trajectory began that is still taking shape, there was something in that meal, something about eating such amazing food from a country that the country I came from was about to invade and attempt to destroy, something about stumbling through my terrible French, my even worse Arabic and somehow still managing to convey that the food was amazing, that the wine was the best I've ever had.

That meal that night was not an awakening so much as a realization that it is possible to duck the politics of the world, to side step the divisions created by the power brokers, the would-be malignant overlords and connect as human beings do, as they always have, by eating together, by talking, by drinking, by walking together down the street, by being human, because life is joy and wonder and love and food and drink and walking. Everything else is just the static background noise of existence.

All the beliefs, all that religions, all the politics, all the attempts to divide are doomed to fail because they fly in the face of the fundamental truth that everyone knows, no matter how hard we sometimes seek to avoid it -- that the universe is incalculably immense, goes on forever and we are so small in it as to hardly be of it at all and yet here we are, able to look around, to appreciate the lap of the sea on the shore, the clatter of palm fronds, the whistle of wind in pines, the soft rain, the driving storm, the inhospitable mountains that welcome us home anyway. I don't know why we're here and neither do you, let's have a meal, maybe a drink if you like and we'll be friends.

from Richard R. Powell's book Wabi Sabi Simple. ↩

Halloween

Every Halloween I complain about how hot it is. I don't actually recall this, but my wife does and reviewing some pictures from the last four years reveal that jackets have not been worn on Halloween in recent times. Photos from 2002, however, show plenty of jackets in evidence. Something to think about. This is why the kids carved pumpkins in their underwear.

"They're just so pretty I want to hug them"

I suspect this mis-memory of cold Halloweens is because I grew up in the Los Angeles area and always desperately wanted it to be cold for Halloween, but of course it never was. I finally get somewhere that it does actually get cold sometimes and I project Halloween into that world.

Unsurprisingly, for my wife anyway, it was hot on Halloween again this year.

That did not stop our peacock, mouse and shirtless-peacock-owl-creature from taking the streets by storm.

Two weeks later though it's dipping down to the mid 30s at night and I still haven't turned on the heat¹. Our house is so well insulated that as long as it hits 70 during the day we're fine without heat. We do some baking, make all day soups and roasts that heat the house while they cook. The way your grandmother used to.

We won't have heat in the bus so we may as well toughen up a bit while we can. And we do, until the first cloudy day that doesn't crest the 60 degree mark. I give in and call the gas company, but it's five days before they can come out. We warm up using a borrowed space heater.

Then a couple days later it's back to hot. The Salvation Army bell ringer is dripping sweating standing five feet from the air conditioned interior of Bells Grocery and I seriously consider calling the gas company to say, "forget it". Cold feels more like a novelty around here with every passing year. Sometimes I think we should revel in it, make sure we have strong memories of it. But of course we have a house to sell and not everyone thinks the way I do -- so on it goes.

Since the only gas in our house is the heater it's cheaper to shut it down for the 9 months we don't need it then it is to pay the "base" charge and taxes for 9 months. ↩

Useless Stuff

Work on the bus progresses. The cab area (helm? cockpit?) has walls now, which means there's no more steel ribs, fiberglass or bare wires showing.

Look Ma, no bare walls.

In fact, the only thing left to do is hook up the systems (water, propane), rebuild the bathroom door and lay the floor. Well, and recover the seats, but I won't be doing that so it doesn't really count from my point of view.

Ready to go.

Parallel to restoring the bus we've also been clearing out our house and getting it ready to sell. Thankfully we've taken good care of the house itself, all it really needed was some touch up paint and yard work. Clearing out our stuff though, that's been very, very challenging.

Normally when you move you just shove all that stuff you don't really acknowledge that you've been dragging around for years without using into a box and truck it on to the next place you'll live where you can happily shove it in the back of a new closet.

When you're moving into a 1969 Dodge Travco with four other people and less than 100 square feet of usable space that's not an option.

Still need to recover the seats, but it's coming together.

In that case you have to actually dig in and deal with all that stuff that's always been easier not to deal with. You have to do something with it. You have to take a good hard look at it and you have to face the facts on the ground of your life so to speak, rather than the life you wish you had, which, for me anyway, is the source of most of my stuff.

"Well, I might learn to play the banjo one day."

"You've had eight years and you haven't yet."

"I did learn how to tune it though. Plus I'll have more time soon."

"Probably not. Plus, you don't even really like banjo music."

"That's not true. There's that Grant Lee Buffalo song with the banjo intro. And Don Chambers, he plays banjo a lot. Plus I loved waking up to Adam Musick playing the banjo downstairs back when we lived above Southern Bitch."

"So... you have not one, but two banjos and a broken mandolin because they remind you of a few notes of music you like and some experiences you enjoyed seventeen years ago?"

"Hmm. When you put it like that..."

"Probably you can hang on to your love of the music and the experiences even without the banjos. You could even write it all down somewhere so that you have a copy of your memories. That way you can keep what you love, get the cruft out of your life and make room for something new."

And so it goes for hundreds of objects, almost none of which actually turned out have any real value to me.

As George Carlin used to say in a bit about stuff, "have you ever noticed that other people's stuff is shit; and your shit is stuff?" When you strip away the "well I might need/use it someday" logic of accumulating useless stuff, you realize that your life is filled up with shit.

Don't get me wrong. We do have a storage unit, but we deliberately got the smallest unit available. We have a few family heirlooms to store, some books that might be useful one day and a handful of other stuff (I may not have learned the banjo, but you'll have a hell of a time prying my guitars from my cold dead fingers), but for the most part the stuff has been shed.

We have resold and donated 20 years worth of accumulated stuff over the last year or so. We've donated so much stuff that I know everyone at the local thrift shop by name, including the former mayor of Athens who started volunteering there the first day I made a major stuff drop off. Even now, months later she gets excited every time I show up with more stuff, which, now that we're getting near the end, happens at least once a week. Sometimes two or three times a day.

It's not like we were hoarders or anything. Neither Corrinne nor I had ever, prior to buying our house, lived in any one location for much more than a year. That kind of constant movement tends to make you stay relatively light on stuff. We did spend seven years at this address though, and we do have three kids, but believe it or not, the kids' stuff isn't the bulk of what we've gotten rid of. It's our stuff. And for the life of me I can't figure out how it all got in my life.

What I do know is that it has started to feel really good not to have it. Things are really clean. I almost never have to look for anything anymore because there's a) much less to lose b) much less stuff to hide the thing I'm looking for.

I know there are whole books written about this subject, one in particular that's very popular right now, but until you actually start doing it, you really have no idea how transformative it can really be to free yourself of stuff. It can change the entire way you look at the world, but that's a topic for another day.

One thing I dislike about all these books and websites about shedding stuff though is that that they treat the process as if you'll achieve some state of zen when you're done, which, uh, yeah, not so much. It's not that dramatic. I guess the zen angle is the best alternative is to admitting you made some mistakes since that's not a popular idea these days. Saying "no regrets" is so common it's a cliche. Our culture seems to think history, both personal and cultural, is a process of endless progress -- from cave to stuffless zen present -- which means regrets and mistakes need to swept under the proverbial rug.

But looking at your past and saying you have no regrets is crazy. It means you're either, a) perfect or b) incapable of recognizing (and therefore learning) from your mistakes. Neither of which are good things.

Admitting mistakes is admitting that not all forward movement in time is in fact progress, some of it might consist of dead ends and blind alleys full of unused banjos and broken mandolins. Some of it might even be regress. Some of our stuff might be shit. Still, getting rid of stuff is nothing so much as not just admitting, but directly confronting, your mistakes. And then dumping it all at the thrift store.

Which is of course bullshit. All of it, the progress, the lack of mistakes, the stuff. The shit. All of it, bullshit.

I got regrets; lordy do I have some regrets. Particularly when it comes to stuff I have purchased. I didn't buy the aforementioned banjos, but I did buy some dumb shit over the years. Books I could have checked out for free, electronic gadgets I never needed and barely used, kitchen crap no one needs. I really should have known better. I do know better. And still I succumbed.

I make mistakes. I got regrets. I got too much stuff that turned out to be shit. But now it's all gone. Now I have catharsis and perhaps even a tad of personal insight, though that could just be more bullshit, hard to say for sure.

At first it didn't bother me that much to get rid of my mistakes because hey, we have eBay and you can make some decent cash for the strangest stuff. Like old 8 track players. Or sleeping bags you never used. But at some point I stopped being amazed by how much money I was able to get on eBay and started thinking more about how much I had spent on shit in the first place. How much money I had spent on stuff which at the time seemed like a good idea, but turned out to mean next to nothing to me and was probably (deep down) motivated by some weird subconscious set of culturally handed down ideals I'm not about to try and parse out.

What I do know if that all of it was a waste. It was all a bunch of shit. And I regret it. Not because I want the money back, but because I can never get the life energy that went into getting the money back. I'd like to have that back, or to have at least channeled it into something that would have paid more dividends in the future, which is to say now.

Which is not to say that I'm not grateful that I can at least get something for it. Thanks eBay. Plenty of stuff though -- typically the most expensive, most digital stuff -- is pretty much worthless. The $1200 TV from 2009? Sold for $40. IPod I bought for almost $400 just before I went traveling in 2006? Selling for less than the price of shipping it it to the buyer. So yeah, I have regrets. I also have a new appreciation for buying last year's model used.

I ended up keeping the iPod. It's my new talisman to protect me from myself. It also does a fine job of playing music. Oddly enough for an Apple product, it still works after all these years. Even the battery is still good, though I put an extra 12V plug in the cab area of the bus just in case.

It seems fitting to launch a new trip, just over ten years after the last one, with an artifact or two shared between them. And it sounds just as good as it ever did. Better even since I have some nicer headphones now. And yeah, I've played that Grant Lee Buffalo song with the banjo intro a time or two to reminisce. Every time I catch myself thinking, I should really learn to play the banjo....

Equinox

One of our motivations for living in the bus is to spend more time outside -- outside in general, but even moreso, outside in nature. To become more aware of the rhythms and patterns of life that haven't had human will imposed on them. To be aware of the cycles around us.

Paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould writes about time having two components, time's arrow and time's cycle.

Time's arrow is linear time, what we would call history, a way of looking at the past as a series of non-repeating events. Time's cycle on the other hand is circular time, "fundamental states... immanent in time, always present and never changing", as he puts it in Time's Arrow, Time's Cycle

Time's arrow is all around us every day, it is the proverbial water to a fish, we exist so immersed in a world that views time as an arrow that we don't even realize that's something we think, however, subconsciously.

Time's cycle though, that doesn't get much press in our world. If you want the space to exist in time's cycle for a while you'll have to carve it yourself. I'm convinced this is why our forefathers recognized and celebrated time's cycle where they saw it. It's easy to live in time's arrow, but it's only at certain points on the arrow can you see the cycle happening as well. This why there have always been harvest festivals, planting festivals, hunting festivals, lunar festivals, seasonal festivals and so on. Nearly every culture prior to ours had them, and in more of the world than not, they're still celebrated today.

I have a thing for solar cycles I guess. I was born a few hours before the winter solstice. My wife and I were married on the summer solstice. My son was born a few hours before the winter solstice. None of that was planned. It's all synchronicity. Coincidence some would say. That's the word for the the curious cycle-denying component of our culture. Not only do we ignore the cycle, we seem to want to deny it entirely.

Alternately, you could contemplate the possibility that synchronicities like that are not coincidence. That they have pattern to them, that the pattern might mean something or have something to say to you, even if it only turns out to be, "hey I exist too".

Another pattern I've noticed in my existence so far is that whenever there's a proposed dualism there's also a third possibility half-hidden in the combination of the two. Time's looping arrow that repeats though cycles but is a bit different each time.

There's an equinox every autumn, but it looks a bit different each time.

Cloudland Canyon

I have a terrible habit of never going to obvious places that are right around me. For example I lived within 100 miles or so of Death Valley for 26 years and never once went. Then I moved thousands of miles across the country and finally arranged a trip to Death Valley. Same with Catalina Island, which was always a mere 26 miles away. Until it wasn't. And then I went.

I've been joking for some time that Savannah GA is going to be my new Death Valley, which I suppose would make Cloudland Canyon my new Catalina Island. Except that it appears I'm getting better about these things. Maybe. I wouldn't say I got myself to Cloudland Canyon, but events did conspire such that I ended up in Cloudland Canyon before we left Georgia. Progress.

No, we didn't take the bus. It was a family reunion for some of Corrinne's family so cabins were rented and we were offered a room in one of them, which is just as well because the campground was a bit dismal -- little more than a gravel parking lot really. The canyon, however, is well worth going for, particularly if you get up before dawn and head down to the Bear Creek overlook to watch the sunrise.

As is our usual pace we took the back roads, not hurrying, winding through the mountains, stopping for a picnic lunch at another state park that was mostly a shrine to the Army Corp of Engineers. I have mixed feelings about The Corp. They're largely responsible for the mess that is the Mississippi River Valley today and their hubris is possibly unmatched even today. Still. At least they didn't waste their time building gadgets.

Could they have stopped for a minute to study the ecology of a place before they attempted to "improve" it? Sure, but at least they tried to make the world a better place (even if their vision differs from mine). At least they left behind a place my kids can eat turkey sandwiches and chocolate cookies.

Oh, and a reservoir. The Corp did love them some dams. But not for lakes mind you. Lakes are frivolous. Reservoirs are eminently practical and serious. Like the Army Corp of Engineers.

Eventually we made it to Cloudland Canyon. Not without things getting interesting though. To add modicum of adventure the air conditioning broke just after lunch. I turned on the WD50 air con, but because it's never-winter here in Georgia, we were all quite warm by the time we got there. Fortunately the solution was already there waiting for us -- hammocks.

We didn't hike all the way down into the canyon, but we did manage to go a little ways. Apparently it just wasn't enough for Elliott who decided hiking up out of a canyon wasn't hard enough so he picked up a large rock and carried it all the way up.

We've taken the girls camping before, but they were too young to remember. And I don't think we ever did the important stuff, like making campfires and roasting marshmellows for s'mores. That oversight has since been corrected.

Now the question is, will I make it to Savannah before we leave or will I have to wait for a return visit to make it to the coast?

Autumn Bus Update

Autumn comes in a series of hints and whispers. Darkness comes steadily earlier. The available time between putting the kids to bed and too-dark-to-work grows ever shorter. The loss of light would be worth it were the heat and humidity dropping a bit, but they haven't yet. For now I get by on the words of friends in more northerly climes, who have already started mentioning a crispness to the air.

Here the heat remains constant, the humidity never leaves. The bus feels like an oven by mid afternoon.

Fresh coat of wax. Compare to when we got it.

The good news is that the bus also gets closer to done in a series of hints and whispers. Bare walls disappear behind two layers of insulation, then finished birch panels. The ceiling is in and, to judge from bus visitors so far, it's the high water mark of what I've done.

The bead board ceiling.

There are new cabinets as well, partly because additional storage is nice when you're cramming five people into less than 100 square feet of livable space, and partly because neither the ceiling panels nor the wood on the walls is capable of bending to the degree necessary to follow the original curve of the Travco.

The new cabinets I built.

I'm not the only one to hide that curve behind a cabinet. Travcos up until 1968 had a plastic channel to hide it (which did double duty hiding some air conditioning ducting as well) and then in 1969 Travco started adding cabinets as well¹. I mimicked the latter as best I could.

There is still much to do, even if we do plan to leave before it's completely finished. We need a floor and couch at the bare minimum, though I'd like to have the propane and sewage system working as well. Oh and then there's a cab area, which I really haven't touched.

Did I mention the brakes stopped working a couple weeks back? The Travco's brake fluid reservoir is incredibly inconvenient and difficult to access. There's a hole a few inches back from the accelerator pedal that's just wide enough for a four-year-old's hand. It's way to small for mine. Too small for my channel lock pliers too. I was lazy and posted something in the Travco Facebook group asking if anyone had any tricks for getting the reservoir open and someone responded that I wasn't trying hard enough. I mulled that over for a while. Then the day before I need to move it I felt like I wanted it pretty bad so I got a new pair of needle nose channel locks and sure enough, I hadn't been trying hard enough.

Sometimes it's good to have internet strangers call you on your bullshit. The reservoir was, predictably, empty. So now we get to bleed the brakes, which is good. I like to know that things like brakes are properly done.

The far more difficult project that I'd likewise been avoiding for some time was getting the generator out of the back compartment. Unlike the brake fluid reservoir, getting the generator out turned out to be much harder than I anticipated.

Everyone wants to know why I want to get rid of a perfectly functional Onan² generator. Here's a link to fellow nomad Randy Vining reading a poem that nicely summarizes why I don't like generators. Suffice to say that most of my worst camping memories involve someone else's generator ruining the otherwise wonderful sounds of nature. In my view the advent of reasonably cheap solar completely eliminates any need for a generator.

Still, the generator in the bus was perfectly good and I didn't want to just throw it away. There are plenty of people who want one. A few weeks ago I saw someone post in the aforementioned Travco Facebook group looking for a generator for a 1972 Travco. I noticed he was only about five or six hours away in North Carolina so I messaged him and told him he could have the generator if he helped me get it out.

He agreed and a week later he drove down from NC with a neighbor to help out. After a quick run to get some tools I needed to finally get the last bolt off of the thing, the three of use tried lifting it out and quickly realized that there was no way that way happening. I called around to see if any local mechanics had an engine lift we could use, but no one did. This was somewhat complicated by the fact that the brakes had gone out earlier in the day and I didn't really want to drive further than I absolutely had to. Then I remembered that a local equipment rental place around the corner probably had some kind of lift. It was only three blocks a way and didn't involve any major hills. So I hopped in, fired her up and we took off just as a torrential rainstorm hit.

Around block two the bus sputtered and died. Out of gas. Blocking a fairly major intersection. I rolled it back as far it would go. The rain was coming down in sheets. I had no choice but to leave it there at the side of the road. I hopped in Nathan's car and he gave me and the meager two gallon gas can a ride to the gas station and back. I stood in the pouring rain with a makeshift funnel fashioned from a plastic water bottle, pouring gasoline in the tank. I was soaked through with water and gasoline long before I finally got it running again. Like my 1969 Ford, 2 gallons of gas is not enough to get the Travco started. Note to self, get two real steel 5 gallon gas cans and mount them on the bumper.

I finally made it to Barron's rentals and we somehow convinced the otherwise unoccupied warehouse employees to help us lift the generator out with a forklift. I took six of us in all, gently lifting, nudging and balancing the massive generator on a single forklift tine and slowly easing it out. In the end though it worked. We got it out of the bus and into the back of Nathan's Land Cruiser where it disappeared off to a new life in a 1972 Travco somewhere back in North Carolina.

I cleaned out the 50 odd years worth of motor oil and fluids and cut some leftover marine grade plywood the fit the bottom of the generator compartment so it would be a little less exposed to the elements (the wood covers a few holes and with a coat of sealant should last several decades). With the generator gone and the compartment cleared up there's finally room to start moving some of the kids' toys out of the house, which helps get the house cleaned up and more presentable for sale.

One things leads to another and it's all accelerating. It takes a long time to line up dominoes, but so far it's working and the few that we've managed to tip over have all fallen in place.

In the mean time there is much work to be done and miles to go before we sleep.

Why didn't our have said cabinets originally? No idea. In fact ours is the only Travco that I've seen built this particular way. ↩
The makers of the Onan generator is a company called Cummings. So far as I can tell the name has nothing to do with the minor, but intriguing, biblical character and practitioner of the withdrawal method of birth control (or masturbator depending of which interpretation your favor). ↩

Change of Ideas (The Worst)

We've postponed our departure three times now. Our original plan was to leave town in March. Then when March sailed right by and the bus wasn't done yet, and the house was in no condition to sell. So we moved things back to June. Then June came and went. It's about to be September, which puts us probably into October. I'm tempted to say that this time I'm reasonably confident we'll do it, but I've said that before. b

The open road is calling...

Some of the delays are a result of things beyond my control, notably clients that didn't pay on time (a perpetual problem for anyone who works for themselves), which meant I couldn't buy things I needed to restore the bus. But there were plenty of things that were in my control.

I have a very particular vision of how the bus is going to look. I want it to be perfect. I want it to be The Best. But that old saying that "perfect is the enemy of good enough" turns out to be very true. I started out needing to have everything perfect, but that's cost us at least a month of time on the road.

I'm about done with perfect. I just want to go.

I've been thinking about an old post on Moxie Marlinspike's blog about something he calls "The Worst." To understand the rest of what I'm going to say you need to follow that link and read it, but here's a brief quote to illustrate the difference between The Best and The Worst:

The basic premise of the worst is that both ideas and material possessions should be tools that serve us, rather than things we live in service to. When that relationship with material possessions is inverted, such that we end up living in service to them, the result is consumerism. When that relationship with ideas is inverted, the result is ideology or religion.

I'm not cutting corners on the bus. I still plan to adhere to my original vision. To me The Worst doesn't mean half-ass, it means being okay with incomplete, it means figuring it out as you go, perfecting things based on actual experience. I've started to incorporate that idea of having the bus be in service to us rather than me in service to it more. We're ready to go and the bus isn't done. And that's okay. We'll figure out the rest as we go. That's part of the adventure.

Currently there's no floor, no water tank, no propane, no solar power, and all the seats still need to be recovered. Of those though only two will likely get done before we leave. We'll recover the seats and we'll put in a floor. Everything else can be done as we go.

Everything has costs. In this case it's money and time. If you have to have a water tank before you leave it's going to cost you money, which in turn is going to cost you time. Or you could grab a huge water jug for $5 from Home Depot and make do until you can get a proper water tank. In some cases not only does embracing "good enough for now" get you on the road faster, it can also save you money.

A lot of the expense of a water tank is the shipping. The tank we want is only about $400, but it costs another $250 to ship it to us. If you're willing to hit the road without a water tank you can drive to the water tank production facility and pick it up yourself. This is also true of awnings, windows and paint jobs, all of which we long ago decided we'd do as we go.

Because if you have to have everything perfect you're never going to go.

And deep down I suspect that my need for perfect is a kind of excuse to not go. A way of avoiding all the fear that comes with leaving. Fear that if it's not perfect it won't work. Fear that something will go wrong. Whatever. Something will go wrong anyway. And you know what? A lot of times it's the things that go wrong that turn out to be the most fun. Maybe not at the time, but later.

It's impossible to overcome that fear of discomfort. It's natural. You can't "get past it"; you have to learn to live with it.

It helps that, at this point in the evolution of our culture, I think those of us in the privileged position of being able to do this in the first place could all use a bit of discomfort. Countless people all over the world are living in situations that make our worst moments seem like the petty, insignificant discomforts they are. It helps to put things in perspective, and no matter how you frame it, we're incredibly lucky to be in the position we're in. We didn't even earn most of the privilege we enjoy in this country. Our comfort and possibilities are largely accidents of birth.

Even in comparison to our very recent ancestors we have it easy. My great grandmother raised eight children alone in a one bedroom 800 square foot house with no air conditioning in Tucson AZ. My wife's mother picked cotton from the time she was a little girl.

We are soft. We don't even know what discomfort is, let alone the host of horrors visited upon innocent people all over the world every day.

We are incredibly thankful to be able to embrace whatever discomfort we might encounter. To chose to be uncomfortable is a luxury, perhaps the greatest luxury. I'm pretty sure my great grandmother would have taken a 4000 ft home with central air if someone had given it to her, and I suspect my mother-in-law would just as soon have not spent her childhood picking cotton. They weren't choosing discomfort, it was just life. I'm less sure that either would have exchanged the experience though.

There's a line in that piece I linked to earlier, "the best moments of my life, I never want to live again." I have feeling my great grandmother would agree. It goes on say:

The best means waiting, planning, researching, and saving until one can acquire the perfect equipment for a given task. Partisans of the best will probably never end up accidentally riding a freight train 1000 miles in the wrong direction, or making a new life-long friend while panhandling after losing everything in Transnistria, or surreptitiously living under a desk in an office long after their internship has run out — simply because optimizing for the best probably does not leave enough room for those mistakes. Even if the most stalwart advocates of the worst would never actually recommend choosing to put oneself in those situations intentionally, they probably wouldn't give them up either.

If you have the luxury of being able to embrace discomfort, take it. Forget perfect and just go, even if "go" is purely metaphorical. You'll figure it out along the way.

What Are You Going to Do?

We've started telling people about our plans to live full time in the blue bus.

Home sweet home.

After the eyebrows come down and the puzzled frowns flatten out, the questions come. Most of them revolve around some form of, but, but but... what will you do without a house? What will you do when that thing breaks down? What will you do when...

Rather than answer everyone individually I thought I'd answer all those questions here, as best I can: I don't know.

And I'm not particularly worried about it. I don't know what we'll do without a house, because we have a house. It's just somewhat smaller than the average American dwelling and comes with an engine.

And when it breaks I suspect we'll stop by the side of the road and spend some time sweating, swearing, scratching our heads, failing, asking more experienced people questions, failing some more, sweating some more, and maybe even end up taking a near bath in gasoline. And then we might even have to walk somewhere and find someone smarter and more experienced to help us. Then, eventually, we'll probably get it running again.

Then again it could totally break down into an unfixable hunk of fiberglass and metal that has to towed to the nearest scrapyard. It could burst into flames at a stoplight. It could drop a transmission trying to downshift its way up a hill. A million things could go wrong.

But a million things can always go wrong, the only thing you get worrying about them is an anxiety attack. I find it more useful to carry a reasonable amount of tools and deal with things as they come. In my experience so far the future is seldom as grim as our fears¹.

What if though? That's the action-killing nag at the back of all our minds. I have it too. You don't think I worry about these things? I do. I know of a Travco that really did burst into flames at a stoplight. It is what it is though. It's not going to stop me from going on this trip. Because you know what? I know of hundreds of Travcos that haven't burst into flames. That one is scary, but it's only one.

A whole lot of houses burst into flames too, yet most of us don't sit around worrying about that. Instead we do what practical things we can, unplug appliances when we're not using them, install new breakers, keep an eye on the candles and so on, and get on with our lives. In the end we manage to ignore the fact that seven people a day die in house fires and just live.

It all comes back to comfort, the ultimate comfort, the little lie we tell ourselves: if I just stay where I am, physically, metaphysically, metaphorically, then I will be safe. It's a nice fiction that helps get all that potential anxiety out of the way, but it's still a fiction.

My problem with that logic is that clinging to a life of "security" at the expense of living the way you want will fail you twice. Not only are you missing out on the life you want to have, but even the security you think you're getting in exchange for foregoing that life turns out to be an illusion. The extra irony is that there's never been a safer time to be alive, yet we're all worried about the lion that might be lurking in the grass. Old habits die hard.

Jon Krakauer's Into the Wild quotes a letter Christopher McCandless wrote to a friend in which he says:

nothing is more damaging to the adventurous spirit within a man than a secure future. The very basic core of a man's living spirit is his passion for adventure. The joy of life comes from our encounters with new experiences and hence there is no greater joy than to have an endlessly changing horizon, for each day to have a new and different sun.

Travel is certainly not the only way to have an endlessly changing horizon, at least metaphorically speaking. I'm not suggesting that everyone should sell their house and travel. But I am suggesting that it might be a good time to stop and take a close look at your life and make sure that fear isn't holding you back from what you want. For me deciding to travel is easy, but I still have plenty of useless fear about other stuff. I was terrified to have kids. I probably never would have had them if it weren't for my wife assuring me that we could do it. And we did. And it was the best thing I've ever done. Not a single one of my fears turned out to be accurate.

Traveling isn't the only way to live, but it is one way. And for us it's one that's the most immediate and exciting right now. We may not have a house, we may not have much stuff, we may break down, we may get stuck, we may be uncomfortable. That's okay. I believe we'll make it. Somewhere anyway.

There are exceptions. Global warming looks to be every bit as grim as we imagine. War, violence in general, also very grim. ↩

Engine

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.

I'm never short of help.

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.

Back From Somewhere

My kids love to do new things. At least they think they do. They're really good at getting excited about things. Like most kids (I imagine), they get excited about things even when I know they have only a dim inkling of what those things might actually entail. The idea, the anticipation, is often more exciting in fact than the actual thing.

I went to get some coffee the other morning and noticed that the Jittery Joe's roaster was hosting a skate contest the following Saturday. Skating and surfing more or less defined my existence (along with punk rock) from junior high through, well, now.

I try not to steer my kids in any particular direction. I try to expose them to as many different things as possible and see where they're drawn. But secretly I really hope they end up liking a few of the things I did when I was a kid, like skate boarding. So I mentioned the skate contest the night before and showed them a bit of the old Bones Brigade video. They were entertained for a few minutes and then they wanted to move on to something else.

I figured the actual skate contest would be the same way: take it in for an hour or so and then slowly interest would wane and we'd all head home. That's about how it generally goes when we take them to any sort of organized event.

This time, however, I was wrong. They could not get enough of the skating. Neither the intense afternoon sun beating down on the concrete slab of parking lot nor the humidity left over from morning rains deterred them. We were there all afternoon, over four hours of skating, pulled pork and the occasional train rolling by. They never stopped loving it.

Pulled pork sandwiches never hurt.

And neither did I. I haven't skated in years. Over a decade. And even before that most I did was use my old board to go get cigarettes from the gas station down the street. But skating culture, along with surfing culture and punk culture are things that were a huge part of me and that has never never gone away, even if I mostly watch from afar these days.

I still feel more at home among skaters, surfers and punks than anywhere else.

Since having kids though I've accidentally drifted away from that culture. There are practical considerations. It's hard to get out to shows, the beach is a really long way away and I no longer have a skateboard. Instead I find myself at the sort of "kid friendly" affairs I swore I would never go to. And you know what, I was right, those things suck. And they aren't very kid friendly either. But we're remarkably adaptable creatures. Do something enough and it starts to feel normal, no matter how uncomfortable it might be.

I spent so much time not fitting in at kids birthday parties and "kid friendly" events around town I forgot that there was actually people with whom I did fit in. I'd forgotten that I had a people.

The Shredder Joes contest was a nice reminder that there are still sane, friendly, open people out there in the world among whom I feel at home.

On the drive home Corrinne turned to me and said "I know it's been 18 years, but I felt more at home there than I do at any of these hipster family bullshit events we go to." I'd been thinking a similar thing, but I'd been wondering why.

Why did the kids want to spend four hours watching skaters and can't be bothered with a petting zoo for more than five minutes?

I have a few theories, but the one that's most appealing is pretty simple: because the world of skating doesn't have rules. There are the basics rules of taking turns and accommodating the people around you, but for the most part you are expected to do whatever you want to do. The petting zoos and the kid friendly events are full of waiting in line and doing as you're told.

Another part of it is the welcoming nature of people in skate/surf/punk scene. That's not to say there aren't assholes in any group of people. There absolutely are, especially surfers who can be real territorial, but exceptions aside, generally, if you have the humility to start at the bottom, you'll be accepted eventually. It's even easier if you're a kid, I've seen some of the scariest looking heavily tattooed Hawaiian surfers move aside with a smile for some kid just learning¹. The thing about learning a skill like surfing or skating is that you never forget that it is learned, and that tends to create sympathy for those who are just starting out.

Another thing that I think makes the skate/surf/punk scene different is that it's built around practice and failure. Watching skating is watching failure after failure until that time when you stick it and suddenly all that failure is gone. People comfortable with failure typically have less to prove. It was always my experience that skaters, surfers and punks were really only trying to prove something when they're skating, surfing or playing. Hipster parent events are one big gathering of uptight people with something to prove and nowhere to prove it. The difference between the two is palpable.

It could also be that those scenes are full of people who, by necessity, have mastered their fears. To a degree anyway. You can only get so far in skating if you're afraid of getting hurt. I know this because I was always too afraid of getting hurt to be any good². Anyone willing to drop in on a backyard ramp or empty pool has necessarily mastered at least some of their fear. Fear closes you up, it feeds on itself.

Whatever it is that makes these things different my kids seem to pick up on it.

The skate show was also the single most diverse event I've ever been to in Athens. With one exception, there was not a single woman skating. That was disappointing, but when we got home I pulled up some videos of Vanessa Torres, Elissa Steamer and Peggy Oki, along with some great home videos of girls skating on YouTube to balance things out.

The best part of the day for me though was on the way home when Olivia asked if she could have a skateboard for her birthday. Absolutely.

Whereas, while still friendly, they did not hesitate to cut me or my friend Andy out of any wave they wanted. ↩
Put me in the water and my fear disappears, but concrete? That shit hurts. And I could never get past that enough to get any better. ↩