archived autumn, started end of the road i

6 files changed, 323 insertions, 7 deletions

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+
+
+
+Someone stopped by the bus the other day to talk about it. I answered his questions, but then as he was getting ready to go he said, "hey, thanks for keeping it going, I love knowing these things are out there, still running." He was the second person in as many months to say that to me.
+
+That evening I was at the grocery store and there was an early 1970s Ford Bronco at the gas pump. Maybe it was late 60s. I'm not a huge fan of Broncos. I'll probably never own one, but it was my kind of car -- well used with plenty of patina in the finish. It had been around and I thought, you know, I too am glad it's still running. 
+
+Thanks for keeping it going. What is *it* though? I don't think that statement is about the car. Or rather, it's about more than just the car, it's about what the car represents: the past. Thanks for keeping this tiny thread of the past alive in the present. That thread becomes a path back. Thanks for the way back, the way home, thanks for keeping these things going, because in doing so, the memories we have of them also keep going. 
+
+---
+
+Some call this love of old things nostalgia. Usually this is a way of dismissing it without confronting it. That doesn't washed with me. First of all, nostalgia is only a bad thing when you're over invested a particular view of the world. There's nothing wrong with nostalgia, it's a valid thing to feel. This all actually in the history of the word. 
+
+The word nostalgia did not always have the modern meaning, "wistful yearning for the past." The original meaning cut much deeper. Nostalgia used to mean a feeling of "pain, grief, and distress." This particular version of pain, grief, and distress was that which came to you from trying to "reach some place, escape, return, get home." 
+
+Pain at the loss of home. Grief for something you cannot return to. A desire to escape.
+
+Wouldn't do to have a word that so neatly encapsulates a very common feeling about the modern world. Best water it down to "a wistful yearning." No, you don't really feel pain, that's wistfulness. Here, take a [soma](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soma_(Brave_New_World)), have a new car. 
+
+The [word nostalgia comes from two Greek words](https://www.etymonline.com/word/nostalgia), *algos*, which gives us the pain, grief, distress, and *Nostos* the reaching for some place or returning home. 
+
+*Nostos* is the part that interests me. Returning home. It has an Old English cognate, *genesen*, which means "to recover." There's also the Gothic *ganisan*, which means "to heal," which is getting much closer to what I think is actually at work here. This is the thread I think of when I see the Bronco, or a cast iron skillet, or an old wood plane, or an old appliances that still works, or old clothes not made of plastic. The feelings evoked by all these things are not a wistful yearning for another time, they're a feeling of pain at the loss of beautiful things that had meaning and value. It's a distress born of realizing that we need to recover those elements of the past that were better than what we have today. Not nostalgically better in our mind's eye, but tangibly, demonstrably better, obviously so to anyone who has used both the things from the past and those made today.
+
+It's not nostalgia in its modern definition. There's no yearning. It's more serious than that. Or if we're yearning for anything, we're yearning to heal the present. There's a book I've never read because I think all you need to know is in the title. It's by Neil Postman and it's called *Building a Bridge to the 18th Century: How the Past Can Improve Our Future*. I assume the text covers the details. I also assume that on those I'd probably differ, but the idea that the way to a better future is through the past, strikes me as about right. Thanks for keeping it going, thanks for pointing the way. 
+
+---
+
+I didn't say anything to the Bronco. There was no one around. Maybe the steel and iron understand, I think they do, but talking to a car in an empty parking lot attracts attention. Besides, it's the person who's maintaining that connection that matters. It's their struggle to keep that thing working that is healing the present, building those bridges through the past into the future.
+
+All those people laboring to keep those bits of the past working in the present, that's what matters. Without them the objects are just rust and decay. Someone has to maintain them, recover them, repair them. This is the bond to the past, recognizing that kindred spirit in the person behind the car. 
+
+In a culture that prizes the new and chucks the old without a thought, those of us who appreciate the old, the time-tested, the well-worn are anachronisms. We're out of pace with the world and it can be lonely to be left behind by your culture[^1]. It helps to know there are others out there like yourself. The things, the cars, the trucks, the buses, they're talismans perhaps, so we anachronists will know each other when we see each other.
+
+Those who keep things going understand them, understand where they came from, why they work the way the work, and what that means. You have too, otherwise you'll never be able to keep whatever it is working.
+
+This process is a way of communing with the past. If that sounds too hippy for you, don't worry, that communication with the past often goes like this, "what #$%@ idiot wired this together with electrical tape" or words to that effect. We know what it's like to bang our heads against a problem for weeks. We know the pain of seeing that white smoke coming out the valve cover vent. We understand the sense of victory when it starts up and purrs after hours of work. 
+
+This used to be a more common experience. One there would be little reason to even talk about. Most things prior to about 1995 were made with the implicit understanding that they would at some point in the future need to be repaired. This was an understood part of the design process, even if the designer assumed the repair person would be a "professional".
+
+Go back a bit further and not only are notions of future repair part of the design process, there's no assumption about professionals. The assumption was that the owner would be doing basic maintenance and fixing things themselves. Read any car manual -- not the repair manual, but the in-the-glove-box owner's manual -- and you'll find the manufacturers' assumed owners would change the oil, repair the brakes, and perform other basic maintenance.
+
+Somewhere in the last 30 years, this culture of repair was lost.
+
+No. Lost is the wrong word. I believe it was a concerted effort to destroy not just the ability to repair things, but the culture of repair, the idea that repairing things is something you could and should do. 
+
+Today we live in a world where even professional mechanics can't repair some vehicles. It's so bad that Massachusetts passed a law requiring vehicle manufacturers to allow third-party repair and the United States federal government initially suggested that car makers not comply. Even when they backed off that stance, the primary effect of the law is that car makers like Kia and Subaru decided to disabled reporting systems completely for Massachusetts drivers. The logic, if you can call it that, seems to be "if we have to give it to you, we'll just not have it, then we *can't* give it to you."
+
+This is why, in 2069, no one is ever going to see a 2024 Subaru at the gas station and say, "hey, thanks for keeping it going." The 2024 Subaru is going end up in a landfill with every other car made since around 2012[^2].
+
+This is where the claim that we're all just nostalgic for some lost past falls apart. Most of us don't wants to go back to the past, today is pretty great. What I think many people want are tools and skills from the past. That is, we want stuff that works, stuff that's made to last, and stuff we can fix with our hands and a few simple tools.
+
+Once you get past aesthetics (the Bronco of 1970 looks better than the Bronco of 2024), past the fact that it's much easier to repair, you get to the part that matters: the Bronco of 1970 responds to individual human agency. Anyone, with the right manuals, mentors, and patience can figure out how it works, what's wrong with it, and, with a few simple tools, you can make it work again. That is empowering in a way that the 2024 Bronco will never be. That is an object that respects the toolmaking origins of humanity.
+
+That is what I think people mean when they say thanks. Thanks for doing the work, thanks for the reminder that it can be done, thanks for keeping it going.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+There are a multitude of reasons this is stupid, but at the same time in some ways I think it is good. I think it is the end of the line. I think people are starting to realize that yes, corporations are playing them for fools. This happens across the board too. Try upgrading your Apple laptop or replacing the cells of your LED light or rebalancing the spinner in your washer. There's no way you're keeping any of those going. They are landfill bound.
+
+You can throw up your hands and say who cares, I don't want to fix those things anyway. Sure. That's fair. Right now. But one thing you learn as you get older is that the world doesn't care what you want to do. Sometimes you get to do what you want to do, you go buy the project car, drag it home, and restore it in your shop. Sometimes though, the project car breaks down at the side of the road and you get to fix it in the rain and mud whether you want to or not.
+
+I think this true on a broader scale as well. There will be no alternative. No one knows when that's going to be, but increasingly, I think we all feel it coming. The world as we know it is going away, and we have a front-row seat to the change. The question is, what are we going to do? 
+
+The past hundred years have been unlike anything in human history. Today you can buy things made in China for a $1 at your local hardware store. But the global trade that's made our world possible is falling apart. We aren't going to keep getting endless replacements doodads, and most of the things that surround us now can't be repaired. 
+
+This is where I believe the anachronists can guide us into a saner future -- by going through the past. 
+
+In the past things had to be repairable because replacing them would have been either too expensive or outright impossible. This is the world we will return to, but you don't have to wait for it to be forced on you. You can start now. You can get ahead of the curve. Repair is something you can learn to do right now and it has benefits *right now*, even if global trade remains a stable thing for decades to come. 
+
+I happen to think we are a mere high profile act of piracy away from the death of international trade as we know it, but even if I am wrong, there's no harm in learning to repair something. There's nothing you or I can do about the fate the seas, but the next time the blender breaks we could have a crack at fixing it before we throw it away. And if you can repair it, then you might never need another, which saves money.  
+
+The thing about repair is that it tends to lead you in other interesting directions. Suppose you step back from the blender for a minute and consider the actually task -- grinding things finely. That's a task that was solved long before electric blenders came along. So if the blender repair doesn't work out, hey, maybe you can learn to do without a blender by gaining skills with a chef knife or mortar and pestle.
+
+Similarly, working on the bus has made me eye the bicycles we carry around. If I can replace a head gasket, push rods, and valves surely I can figure out how to fix a derailleur[^3]. 
+
+This kind of thinking will start to cascade through your life as you start fixing things. Not because fixing things is easy, but because it's hard. I don't want to replace another head gasket, maybe we should rethink the way we're traveling, could we perhaps travel by bike? Fixing things will teach you to step back and consider the actual problem. This might actually be the primary useful skill I've learn from repairing things.
+
+Which is not to say that repairing things isn't 
+
+Learning skills -- whatever they may be -- is an investment in the future. Your future. Our future. If not you, then who? Skills build a future in which you're a little less dependant on the fragile, global systems and a little more capable as a human being.  
+
+I think of all skills this way. I've spent the last year teaching myself to cook over open flame, especially using a dutch oven. It did it partly because open flame is the way all cooking was done until about 100 years ago. There's that connection to the past, which I like, but also, if we happen to run out of propane, or don't have the electricity to [run the waffle iron](https://luxagraf.net/essay/tools/waffle-world), it really doesn't matter. If I can start a fire I can cook most anything.
+
+Every withdrawal you can make from the fragile systems that surround us removes that dependency and empowers you.
+
+Except here's the thing, 
+
+[^1]: I have heard people say this anyway. Personally I find being left behind by my culture an immense relief. One less thing to worry about. Carry on culture, I won't miss you.
+[^2]: I have heard of some efforts to replace the non-repairable elements of newer vehicles with salvaged parts from older vehicles, or ways to bypass system requirements that won't let a car start if the taillight is out and other ridiculous hurdles, but for the most part I believe most post-2012 vehicles will be abandoned.
+[^3]: No disrespect to bike mechanics. Bikes are less complex than engines, but no easier in my experience.
diff --git a/essays/temp.txt b/essays/temp.txt
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+++ b/essays/temp.txt
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+Someone stopped by the bus the other day to talk about it. I answered his questions, and then, as he was getting ready to go, he said, "hey, thanks for keeping it going, I love knowing these things are out there, still running." He was the second person in as many months to say that to me.
+
+That evening I was at the grocery store and there was an early 1970s Ford Bronco at the gas pump. Maybe it was late 60s. I'm not a huge fan of Broncos. I'll probably never own one, but it was my kind of car -- well used with plenty of patina in the finish. It had been around and I thought, you know, I too am glad it's out there, still running. Thanks for keeping it going. 
+
+What is *it* though? I don't think that statement is about the car. Or rather, it's about more than just the car, it's about what the car represents: the past. Thanks for keeping this tiny thread of the past alive in the present. That thread becomes a way back, a way home for some. Thanks for keeping these things going, because in doing so, the memories we have of them also keep going. 
+
+---
+
+Some might call this nostalgia. Usually as a way of dismissing it. That doesn't wash with me. Why is nostalgia a bad thing? First, there's nothing wrong with nostalgia. It's a valid thing to feel. It even used to be a more serious thing. 
+
+It's in the history of the word. The word nostalgia did not always have the modern meaning, "wistful yearning for the past." The original meaning cut much deeper. Nostalgia used to mean a feeling of "pain, grief, and distress." This particular version of pain, grief, and distress was that which came to you from trying to "reach some place, escape, return, get home." 
+
+Pain at the loss of home. Grief for something you cannot return to. A desire to escape.
+
+Wouldn't do to have a word that so neatly encapsulates a very common feeling about the modern world. Best water it down to "a wistful yearning." No, you don't really feel pain, that's wistfulness. Here, take a [soma](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soma_(Brave_New_World)), have a new car. 
+
+The [word nostalgia comes from two Greek words](https://www.etymonline.com/word/nostalgia), *algos*, which gives us the pain, grief, distress, and *Nostos* the reaching for some place or returning home. 
+
+*Nostos* is the part that interests me. Returning home. It has an Old English cognate, *genesen*, which means "to recover." There's also the Gothic *ganisan*, which means "to heal," which is getting much closer to what I think is actually at work here. This is the thread I think of when I see the Bronco, or a cast iron skillet, or an old wood plane, or an old appliances that still works, or old clothes not made of plastic. The feelings evoked by all these things are not a wistful yearning for another time, they're a feeling of pain at the loss of beautiful things that had meaning and value. It's a distress born of realizing that we need to recover those elements of the past that were better than what we have today. Not nostalgically better in our mind's eye, but tangibly, demonstrably better, obviously so to anyone who has used both the things from the past and those made today.
+
+It's not nostalgia in its modern definition. There's no yearning. It's more serious than that. Or if we're yearning for anything, we're yearning to heal the present. There's a book I've never read because I think all you need to know is in the title. It's by Neil Postman and it's called *Building a Bridge to the 18th Century: How the Past Can Improve Our Future*. I assume the text covers the details. I also assume that on those I'd probably differ, but the idea that the way to a better future is through the past, strikes me as about right. Thanks for keeping it going, thanks for pointing the way. 
+
+---
+
+I didn't say anything to the Bronco. There was no one around. Maybe the steel and iron understand, I think they do, but talking to a car in an empty parking lot attracts attention. Besides, it's the person who's maintaining that connection that matters. It's their struggle to keep that thing working that is healing the present, building those bridges through the past into the future.
+
+All those people laboring to keep those bits of the past working in the present, that's what matters. Without them the objects are just rust and decay. Someone has to maintain them, recover them, repair them. This is the bond to the past, recognizing that kindred spirit in the person behind the car. 
+
+In a culture that prizes the new and chucks the old without a thought, those of us who appreciate the old, the time-tested, the well-worn are anachronisms. We're out of pace with the world and it can be lonely to be left behind by your culture[^1]. It helps to know there are others out there like yourself. The things, the cars, the trucks, the buses, they're talismans perhaps, so we anachronists will know each other when we see each other.
+
+Those who keep things going understand them, understand where they came from, why they work the way the work, and what that means. You have too, otherwise you'll never be able to keep whatever it is working.
+
+This process is a way of communing with the past. If that sounds too hippy for you, don't worry, that communication with the past often goes like this, "what #$%@ idiot wired this together with electrical tape" or words to that effect. We know what it's like to bang our heads against a problem for weeks. We know the pain of seeing that white smoke coming out the valve cover vent. We understand the sense of victory when it starts up and purrs after hours of work. 
+
+This used to be a more common experience. One there would be little reason to even talk about. Most things prior to about 1995 were made with the implicit understanding that they would at some point in the future need to be repaired. This was an understood part of the design process, even if the designer assumed the repair person would be a "professional".
+
+Go back a bit further and not only are notions of future repair part of the design process, there's no assumption about professionals. The assumption was that the owner would be doing basic maintenance and fixing things themselves. Read any car manual -- not the repair manual, but the in-the-glove-box owner's manual -- and you'll find the manufacturers' assumed owners would change the oil, repair the brakes, and perform other basic maintenance.
+
+Somewhere in the last 30 years, this culture of repair was lost.
+
+No. Lost is the wrong word. I believe it was a concerted effort to destroy not just the ability to repair things, but the culture of repair, the idea that repairing things is something you could and should do. 
+
+Today we live in a world where even professional mechanics can't repair some vehicles. It's so bad that Massachusetts passed a law requiring vehicle manufacturers to allow third-party repair and the United States federal government initially suggested that car makers not comply. Even when they backed off that stance, the primary effect of the law is that car makers like Kia and Subaru decided to disabled reporting systems completely for Massachusetts drivers. The logic, if you can call it that, seems to be "if we have to give it to you, we'll just not have it, then we *can't* give it to you."
+
+This is why, in 2069, no one is ever going to see a 2024 Subaru at the gas station and say, "hey, thanks for keeping it going." The 2024 Subaru is going end up in a landfill with every other car made since around 2012[^2].
+
+This is where the claim that we're all just nostalgic for some lost past falls apart. Most of us don't wants to go back to the past, today is pretty great. What I think many people want are tools and skills from the past. That is, we want stuff that works, stuff that's made to last, and stuff we can fix with our hands and a few simple tools.
+
+Once you get past aesthetics (the Bronco of 1970 looks better than the Bronco of 2024), past the fact that it's much easier to repair, you get to the part that matters: the Bronco of 1970 responds to individual human agency. Anyone, with the right manuals, mentors, and patience can figure out how it works, what's wrong with it, and, with a few simple tools, you can make it work again. That is empowering in a way that the 2024 Bronco will never be. That is an object that respects the toolmaking origins of humanity.
+
+That is what I think people mean when they say thanks. Thanks for doing the work, thanks for the reminder that it can be done, thanks for keeping it going.
diff --git a/jrnl/2024-10-09_autumn.txt b/jrnl/2024-10-09_autumn.txt
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..2b6d4e8
--- /dev/null
+++ b/jrnl/2024-10-09_autumn.txt
@@ -0,0 +1,40 @@
+Every year for the past couple of years, when September rolls around we start getting ready to hit the road, packing away the paddle boards, washing the bus, and burning through the last of the firewood. Sometime around the middle of the month we [say goodbye to friends](https://luxagraf.net/jrnl/2022/09/goodbye-big-waters) and [head for the plains](https://luxagraf.net/jrnl/2023/09/ready-to-start). 
+
+The drive out of the trees always feels good to me, the long vistas of the midwest are like drawing a breath after being under water. It's some small recapitulation of humanity's movement out of the forest, on to the prairie. As William Least Heat Moon points out in PrairyErth, it was leaving the trees that made us human. In some way we are all children of the prairie and plain.
+
+This year we did none of those things. This year we stayed put. We stayed in the trees. Evolutionary recapitulation be damned. We watched the chlorophyll fade from the world, leaving behind impossibly yellow birch and iridescent orange sugar maples, brilliant against the unchanging pines overhead, swirling colors of leaves littering the green carpet of moss below, until the forest in the morning was like walking inside a stained glass window. 
+
+<img src="images/2024/2024-10-09_144228_memorial-park-oct.jpg" id="image-4021" class="picwide" />
+
+This year we left the paddle boards out and enjoyed one of the warmest, driest autumns anyone in these parts can remember. It wasn't until early October that the evenings took on a chill enough to keep us on the shoreline, and the mornings turned a softer purple as the sun swung south.
+
+<img src="images/2024/2024-09-01_173218_around-washburn.jpg" id="image-4027" class="picwide" />
+<img src="images/2024/DSC00969.jpg" id="image-4028" class="picwide" />
+<img src="images/2024/2024-10-12_071116_memorial-park-oct.jpg" id="image-4017" class="picwide" />
+
+The familiar turned foreign. Gaps in understand were filled in. Paths we've walked daily became new and golden. 
+
+<img src="images/2024/2024-10-11_095400_memorial-park-oct.jpg" id="image-4023" class="picwide" />
+<img src="images/2024/2024-10-12_080159_memorial-park-oct.jpg" id="image-4025" class="picwide" />
+<img src="images/2024/2024-10-10_085525_memorial-park-oct.jpg" id="image-4022" class="picwide" />
+
+When I was younger, living in southern California, I had to go and find Autumn. I would try every year to make the long drive up 395 to the Sierra foothills, where a smattering of aspens and cottonwood trees that grow in the washes would turn various shades of amber and apricot.
+
+<img src="images/2024/sierras-fall-colors-1995.jpg" id="image-4029" class="picwide" />
+
+There are no mountains like that here, but this area beats the Sierra foothills for fall colors, and that's part of why we're here -- to see new things. We move around to explore the world, discovering what we do not know and getting to know it in some fashion. This manifests in all sorts of things, from the mundane (I can give you street by street directions around a surprising number of places) to the more profound experiences and friendships we've formed around the world.
+
+Sometimes it also means not moving. There are certain things that must be experienced first hand. Can you really know Georgia if you haven't spent a summer there without air conditioning? Can you really know Charleston if you haven't been there for a hurricane? Can you really know New England without passing a fall? Can you really know northern Wisconsin without spending the winter?
+
+You cannot.
+
+You also cannot pass a northern Wisconsin winter in an RV. Or at least it isn't much fun. I know someone who did it and he suggested we rent a cabin. So we did. Like most in the area, the campground where we spend our summers closes October 15 (which last year saw the first snow storm, this year it was 55 and sunny). 
+
+This year we said goodbye to our fellow travelers and friends, and drove the bus over to the cabin, unloaded the very least amount of stuff we could, and moved it to the storage area where it will spend the winter.
+
+Not much changed really. We're still in the woods. We still have to fill propane. We still have to dump the holding tank system. There's a few extra feet of counter space, a bedroom with a door, just one though, the other is a loft, open to the rest of the house, not unlike the back of the bus. We're on a property that's roughly the size of Memorial Park. The paths have changed, but they look much the same. The trees look about the same and the sunrise hasn't changed much either.
+
+<img src="images/2024/2024-10-16_103021_yellow-cabin.jpg" id="image-4026" class="picwide" />
+<img src="images/2024/2024-10-12_070645_memorial-park-oct.jpg" id="image-4024" class="picwide" />
+
+We'll be here until the campground opens again next spring. We'll be here watching the world change, waiting on the snow, and getting to know a northern Wisconsin winter.
diff --git a/jrnl/2024-10-23_end-of-the-road.txt b/jrnl/2024-10-23_end-of-the-road.txt
new file mode 100644
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@@ -0,0 +1,21 @@
+For a long time I had the idea that I would write a book about this trip and call it The End of the Road. 
+
+It was a vague idea, I didn't take it to seriously, but it seems to me we are, culturally at a kind of end of the road as a place of adventure. I has the idea that if you start with the road when it was a trail (Journals of Lewis and Clark), to when it was dirt road (Laura Ingalls Wilder all the way through to the Air Conditioned Nightmare), to when the highways appeared highway (London, Kerouac), to avoiding the highway, back to the two lane (Blue Highways, et al), and then finally I could close it out with a tale of life on the road being so easy you can bring your wife and kids. The end of the road.
+
+I never wrote the book. I never will. I realized I am too American to write such a book. The kind of sweeping generalizations I've sketched out sound good if you don't bother to think about them at all. When you scratch the surface though, you start to think, wait a minute, this doesn't sound right to me. This is does no square with my experience.
+
+I was watching an old episode of Anthony Bourdain's television show the other day in which he goes the high desert of California to hang out with the musician Josh Homme. In it Homme says something I thought was perhaps the most road-worthy thing I've heard: "Here we are at the end of the road... which, it turns out, isn't a bad place, it's just where they stopped building road."
+
+This prosaic statement feels apropos for our own end of the road moment. A few weeks ago we packed the bus away and have no plans to travel in it again. We bought and have been building out a school bus, which will replace the Travco for us. The bus finally got too small, it was time for something else and we all felt it.
+
+The end of the road for the Travco isn't a bad place, it's just where we stopped living in it. (No, I don't know what we're going to do with it, most likely we'll sell it. I have no time frame for that, but if you're interested, email me.)
+
+We left the bus with hardly anything. The clothes we needed for the winter. Cast iron skillets. Kitchen knives. Pillows. Camera. Notebooks. It was kind of a larger scale version of that thing they tell you to do to see if you should get rid of your stuff: put it in a box and seal it up and if you haven't opened it in six months you don't need it. We left almost everything in the bus and as we've needed it, we've gone to get it, but honestly we haven't needed much.
+
+We had originally planned to leave here this fall in the school bus, which I have been working to build out as a comfortable home since we bought it back in April. Unfortunately Lyme disease derailed that plan a little, which is part of the reason we rented the cabin (the other being that we wanted to experience a Wisconsin winter).
+
+We settled into the cabin pretty easily. The kids took the upstairs loft area for themselves, there's a big open area below and then a bedroom and bathroom down the hall. In that sense it's very similar to the bus, mostly one big open space.
+
+These cabins are quite popular in the summer, but relatively few people come around in the fall. The first weekend we moved in there were some people in the other cabins around us, but that traffic tapered off quickly and we pretty much have the place to ourselves. We have the same lake access and slightly better views of Long island and the tip of Madeline Island rather than Ashland.
+
+It's very quiet here. I can hear the road sometimes when I'm around the cabin, but down by the lake there's nothing but the lapping of water on the shore. The dog and I go down to lake shore and watch the sunrise in the mornings. Although sunrise is quickly receding to later and later in the morning. Soon we will be walking to the lake shore in the dark if we keep getting up at 6AM.
diff --git a/pages.txt b/pages.txt
index c41a985..d6efbe5 100644
--- a/pages.txt
+++ b/pages.txt
@@ -185,7 +185,13 @@ I have two newsletters:
 
 There's also an [RSS feed](https://luxagraf.net/feed.xml) if you prefer.
 
-<hr />
+
+
+
+
+<img src="images/2019/2017-06-16_094935_trinidad-and-around.jpg" id="image-1840" class="picfull" />
+
+
 
 ### Particulars
 
@@ -195,11 +201,11 @@ The big blue bus gets its [own about page](https://luxagraf.net/1969-dodge-travc
 
 #### About me.
 
-I'm a freelance writer. I like writing about life on the road, engines, cooking, birds, and my personal, somewhat eccentric, ideas about life and how to live it. Unfortunately I have thus far not figured out how to pay the bills writing about just those topics. 
+I'm a writer. I like writing about life on the road, engines, cooking, birds, and my personal, somewhat eccentric, ideas about life and how to live it. I also write novels for my kids.
 
-To pay the bills I mostly end up writing about technology. Over the years I've written extensively for *Wired* (where I've even been on staff for some years), *Budget Travel*, *Consumer Digest*, *Ars Technica*, *GQ*, *Epicurious*, *Longshot Magazine*, and other magazines, newspapers, and websites. 
+To pay the bills I am the operations manager of the Wired Gear Team. 
 
-I used to have a section in here about editors because I would not be nearly as good a writer if it weren't for the editors I've worked with. To keep things shorter, I'm reducing it to just say thanks to my wife Corrinne, who gets first pass at everything I do (whether she wants it or not), William Brandon, Laura Solomon, Michael Calore, Jeffery Van Camp, Nathan Mattisse, Leander Kahney, Alexis Madrigal, Evan Hansen, Gavin Clarke, Ashley Vance, Jason Kehe, John Gravois. 
+Thanks to all the editors I've worked with, who have improved my writing immensely -- Corrinne, William Brandon, Laura Solomon, Michael Calore, Jeffery Van Camp, Adrienne So, Nathan Mattisse, Leander Kahney, Alexis Madrigal, Evan Hansen, Gavin Clarke, Ashley Vance, Jason Kehe, John Gravois. 
 
 And extra special thanks to Maria Streshinsky, Executive Editor at Wired Magazine, and Adam Davies, my one and only formal writing teacher. 
 
@@ -207,7 +213,7 @@ And extra special thanks to Maria Streshinsky, Executive Editor at Wired Magazin
 
 I get emails about stuff. What &#95;&#95;&#95;&#95;&#95; do you use to &#95;&#95;&#95;&#95;&#95;&#95;. A lot of this is my fault, I have written a lot of product reviews for *Wired*. People believe I am a stuff expert. Here's a secret about product reviewers: we hate stuff. There's nothing we love more than sending stuff back to the people who made it. And thankfully everything I've ever tested went either to back to the company that made it or to Wired's end of the year charity auction. Still, because people email me to find out which stuff I actually buy, I wrote a [whole page about the stuff I use](/technology). 
 
-The essential stuff I use every day to create luxagraf include, a mechanical pencil (a Pentel P209, .9mm lead), notebook, [Sony A7RII](https://electronics.sony.com/imaging/interchangeable-lens-cameras/full-frame/p/ilce7rm2-b) camera, andi a Nikon 50mm f/1.4 lens. I use [Darktable](http://www.darktable.org/) to [edit digital images](/essay/craft/darktable-getting-started) and [Vim](http://www.vim.org/) for writing.
+The essential stuff I use every day to create luxagraf include, a pen, pencil, notebook, and camera. I use [Darktable](http://www.darktable.org/) to [edit digital images](/essay/craft/darktable-getting-started) and [Vim](http://www.vim.org/) for typing.
 
 The Luxagraf website is created by hand, with a lot of tools loosely joined. Most of these tools are free software that you too can use and modify as you see fit. Without these amazing tools I wouldn't be able to do this -- many thanks to the people who created and maintain them.
 
@@ -259,7 +265,6 @@ We've traveled several different ways and eventually settled on what I call the
 Having our house parked nearby allows us to spend more time in places we wouldn't otherwise get to see, and in some cases to get closer to the local people. Not only does it keep you out of the tourist traps like hotels, it gives you a place to invite people into. You aren't just invading people's place in the world, you have a way to let them invade yours. It's been my experience that this creates an entirely different dynamic and relationship (not universally for the better, but often enough). 
 
 Having your home with you gives other people a reason to approach you, which gets conversations started and has led up to many, many friendships along the way.
-
 # Contact Information
 
 url: /contact
diff --git a/scratch.txt b/scratch.txt
index 0793a62..f1811b0 100644
--- a/scratch.txt
+++ b/scratch.txt
@@ -6,9 +6,109 @@ The energy of chaos is required to change the existing order.
 
 every essay needs a story to hang it on. And an audio/visual podcast of it. 
 
-# Scratch
 
+dry leaves whispered, 
+
+the slow exhale of the earth, 
+
+The end of the road in this sense as a way of ending the myth that Americans have been telling themselves for a very long time, despite the reality that it has never been true. America was never been uncharted wilderness. It was wilder to be sure, but it was not uncharted and not uninhabited wilderness. Similarly, the road as an ideal of endless freedom that Kerouac made so famous, if it ever existed, certainly hasn't been the case in my life time.
+
+The long shadows and cold honey sunlight of winter afternoons that begin fade at three, turning to a blue-pink twilight over the lake before darkness descends at five.
+
+The sky engulfed by tides of rippled gloom,
+The sun's scarce rays, approaching frosts --Pushkin
+
+Familiar scenes morphed from green to yellow to red to brown to white.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+This is the book I might actually one day write: that this land is slowly generating it's own new form of people, culture, and eventually, a new great civilization as Spengler would call it.
+
+When I was in high school I read Oswald Spengler (whose name I ran across while reading Henry Miller), and while I was too young to fully understand everything Spengler talked about one thing jumped out at me: Spengler wrote that specific "great" cultures are bound to specific regions of the world. This struck me as both obvious and underappreciated, but at cultural and individual levels. I am the way I am because I grew up in Southern California and the same was that all Americans are american because they grew up on this soil.
+
+The corollary to this for Spengler is that the big civilizations, no matter how much they spread, never really manage to transplant themselves successfully to other lands. European culture came to America, but fast forward a few decades and America was no longer part of European culture (save a very small group of people living in American metropolises who continue to ape the European culture of their ancestors). Thus the home ground of, to use Spengler's term, Faustian culture is Europe.
+
+The culture of America's home ground is TBD, but one thing that I think is apparent when you trace a thread like the history of American's encounters with the road, and by road let's say, the unknown, is distinctly different than anywhere else, Europe included.
+
+There is something happening to Americans, generation by generation, the land is turning us into something very different than the Europe, Africa, and Asia that our relatives left behind. Something happens to people here that is individual. It happens collectively, to everyone, but it happens differently to everyone, individually.
+
+In a great many Native American cultures this process was well understood and nurtured. In fact the primary religious experience of many of these cultures emphasized this, in which the individual left the culture to go out and meet, in the cliched parlance of white observers, their spirit animal. But it's much deeper than that, this is a religion in which the core relationship is one between the individual and an equally unique and individualized spiritual power. 
+
+I first connected this to Spengler after watching some Ute dancers at a rodeo in Colorado many years ago. There were some organized dance, I even got pulled into one, but most of the time, there was music, a beat of drums, and every person did their own dance. I thought what a contrast that was to something like line dancing or perhaps a European folk dance, both of which are much more oriented around the group, with the individual merging into the group. 
+
+There was still a group in the Ute dancing, but the individual did not merge into it.
+
+I'm not big on predictions, but I suspect this is the future of culture in America. That this element that the Native Americans knew and worked with is not something they invented, it's something the land gave to them.
+
+The question that will color the next 500 years is how do you make a culture, a collective, that keeps the primacy of the individual at its core? You and I aren't going to figure that out. Neither are our children or grandchildren. It took 1,000 years or more for Faustian culture to come to pass. We here in America are still living in the hinterlands of the Faustian empire as it collapses. We have a long way to go before whatever is coming, comes. But it is interesting to see hints and glimpse of what might come in the world around us.
+
+I think that's what I've come to like most about traveling around the United States for so many years, is seeing all the different ways in which people are wrestling with these questions and all the different answers they have come up with. There are as many answers as there are people. 
+
+
+
+
+I am less comfortable with  than I would need to be to write a book like that. But even beyond that, one thing I learned from living on the road is that there is no 
+
+I also think that those generalizations make you miss an important point -- the individual experience of the road. Who cares what Jack Kerouac found in life? Who cares what tk found? Who cares what I found? You need to find you.
+https://www.ecosophia.net/america-and-russia-tamanous-and-sobornost/
+
+Tamanous—that’s pronounced “tah-MAN-oh-oose,” by the way—is the guardian spirit of the individual, and also his luck and his destiny. 
+
+
+
+
+
+
+We didn't have long to settle into the cabin. A week later the kids and I flew out to California to visit my parents, trading the last of fall for some warmth and extra sunshine. 
+
+It's always strange to return to where you grew up, especially in this case since it has changed so dramatically it's nothing like it was when I grew up. The thing I notice most when I return is the traffic. Not the dead stop, freeway-as-parking-lot traffic, though there is that, but the insane number of cars in general, even when they're all going along without "traffic." So. Many. People.
+
+We've spent the majority of the past eight years in the wilderness and small towns. What we think of as cities -- Pensacola, Kill Devil Hills, Ashland -- most people think of as small towns. When I go to a city like the sprawling metropolis of southern California I am acutely aware of how far behind I have left such places. I feel out of place. Displaced.
+
+Joan Didion, probably California's most famous self-appointed spokesperson (as any self-respecting California spokesperson would be), wrote that "California is a place where the boom mentality and a sense of Chekhovian loss meet in uneasy suspension; in which the mind is troubled by some buried but ineradicable suspicion that things had better work here, because here, beneath that immense bleached sky, is where we ran out of continent."
+
+Perhaps Joan. 
+
+Or perhaps you're overthinking it.
+
+I think of California as an exercise in fluid dynamics, particularly the behavior of cataclysmic outflows from Ice Age glaciers (which probably triggered the Younger Dryas cooling period[^1]). When too much water comes rushing into a canyon, the ice it's carrying gets stuck and forms a temporary dam. If the sidewalls don't give, then the flood water actually reverses course and rushes back the way it came, often with equally devastating effects as the initial rush of water. It is a strange and counter-intuitive thing. You can [watch a small scale example here](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VbaNY0uCx4s&t=0s).
+
+California is the is temporary ice dam on which the entire history of western civilization piled up and then reversed course. California isn't where we ran out of continent. California is where we ran out of civilization and all our ideas were forced back the way they came, which is why, whatever happens in California today, happens everywhere else in the coming weeks, months, and years.
+
+Or at least it did. Until, perhaps now. We shall see.
+
+So what is left after all of western civilization recedes? Traffic. 
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+[^1]: The cataclysmic flood *theory* is just that.
+
+
+
+# Scratch
 
+6:00-6:30 Wake up, cold rinse, body weight workout.
+6:30-7:00 Take the out, watch the sunrise (this time of year anyway), take photos, watch birds (depending on time of year).
+7:00-8:00 Family breakfast (at least 30g protein), hang out of with the kids (who help make breakfast).
+8:00-9:00 Make something. Usually means writing something. Today I wrote this. Yesterday I wrote something for work. The day before I worked on a novel. Sometimes I just write in my journal. There's no pattern to this, though I prefer to write with a pen and paper and avoid the screen. Often, if we're near civilization, I go to the coffee shop for an espresso during this time.
+9:00-10:00 If I can swing it, I keep writing. Depends on work. Sometimes I have administrative things that need to get done in the morning. But the days when I can get two, or even three, hours of writing in in the morning are the best days.
+10:00-12:00 Depending on the day I try to spend this time either doing something with the kids, reading a book, exploring wherever we are, going for a walk. Once a week I have a meeting during this time so that day I just try to get as much work done as I can.
+12:00-1:00 Somewhere in here I eat. I don't generally care much about lunch so I don't eat very much. This is why I try to get 40-50 grams of protein for breakfast, so I don't have to eat much lunch.
+1:00-4:00 Write. 
 
 # Stories to Tell