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+There's no temperature gauge. It broke several thousand desert miles ago. But you can smell it coming, whiffs of radiator fluid slip in the draft at the front of the engine doghouse. That's when you know, it's time to stop. It doesn't happen often. The 318 likes to run hot, but climbing mountains with a 12,000 pound RV on your back will eventually make any small block engine overheat.

+

+

+I start looking for a place to pull over. There's nothing. The left side of the road is a sheer cut of rock, quartzite, phyllite, limestone laid bare by dynamite. To the east as far as I can see the barren rocky foothills of the White Mountains bubble and scrape their way toward the desert floor, dust swept and brown. Dotted here and there are clumps of creosote and sagebrush, interrupted occasionally by splashes of yellow Rabbitbrush. It's a stark but beautiful landscape. Without a pullout. But it doesn't matter, we haven't seen another car in at least an hour of driving. We are on Highway 168 somewhere in Eastern California, between the Nevada ghost town where we camped last night, and the top of the White Mountains. So I stop right in the middle of the road.

+

+

+When the engine shuts off a silence descends. No wind. No birds. No talking. We—my wife, three children, and me—just listen to the quiet hissing of steam escaping the radiator cap, and then a gentle gurgle of coolant in the engine. It's October, but I'm glad I had the presence of mind to stop in the shade, the desert sun casts a harsh light on the road. After a minute my wife turns to the kids and says, "you want to walk around and see if we can find some fossils?" 

+

+

+As a child of the 70s, I've spent a fair share of time at the side of the road next to broken down vehicles. This is what vehicles of those days did. The 1967 VW fastback, which managed to get me home safely from the hospital after I was born, was replaced with a 1976 mustard yellow Volkswagen Dasher that routinely overheated near Yuma, AZ on its way from my childhood home in Los Angeles to my grandparents' home in Tucson. To this day my father curses that car. There was also a 1969 Ford F-150 pickup that was reliable until you stuck a camper on its back and tried to climb over the Sierra Nevada mountains. 

+

+

+I was no stranger to dealing with the sweat, the cursing, the money, and the occasional blood, required to keep old cars running. It used to be a necessity. These days it's a labor of love. But most people don't dive in as deep as we have. In June of 2016 my wife and I bought a 1969 Dodge Travco, a motorhome that, at the time, was just shy of its 50th birthday. My kids called it the bus. Which was apt. When you say motorhome most people picture something that looks nothing like our old Dodge. To call it an RV is to say a Stradivarius is a violin. The Travco is not an RV; it’s a 27 foot long fiberglass container of beauty and joy. It’s bright 1960s turquoise and white with sweeping curves and rounded windows. It is bold in a sea of beige modern RVs. The Travco was cool enough that it was once featured in Playboy magazine. Johnny Cash had one. So did James Dean and John Wayne.

+

+

+We bought it to make it our full time home. We were tired of the suburbs and we wanted our kids to see the United States, to have a better sense of the place they were born. I didn’t want them to read about the deserts and mountains and forests, I wanted them to be in them. And I wanted them to also know the frustration and the joy of continuing down the road by the sweat and effort of fixing things, if not themselves, then at least by me.. 

+

+

+[[break]]

+

+

+There aren't many Travcos left in the world, but in June of 2016, after a few months of haunting Craigslist I found one for sale in the mountains of North Carolina, in the sleepy college town of Mars Hill. A couple who restored vintage trailers found the bus somewhere in Tennessee and tried their hand at fixing it up. Then they changed their mind and put it up for sale.

+

+

+I could have picked up where they left off, but as I looked it over, I decided I wanted to gut it. I wanted to understand the Travco, to design and build out everything in it exactly the way we would need it. Wood, sealant, metal, fiberglass, and all the things RV interiors are made out of are static. They just sit there, which makes them relatively easy to restore. 

+

+

+I grew up around repair and restoration. My grandfather worked for the telephone company and had a shed full of tools behind his house in Tucson. When he retired he spent his weekends buying broken things at the swap meet and his weekdays fixing them to resell the next weekend. In the summer it was blazing hot in Grandpa’s shed, but my cousins and I didn't notice the heat. We were too excited watching him tear things apart—phones, televisions, radios, blenders—and breathe life back into them.

+

+

+My dad had a garage full of tools as well. I was playing with hammers and tape measures from the time I could walk, graduating to model airplanes in grade school. As I got older, I started using more tools, taking more things apart and trying to put them back together. I gravitated toward working with wood, which I found more forgiving than radios and blenders. I sketched bookshelves, tables, chairs, and then built them as best I could. I came out of childhood with a few carpentry skills, and more importantly, perhaps misguidedly, a belief that with the right tools and a good mentor, anything was fixable. 

+

+

+In his 2010 book Shop Class as Soul Craft, Matthew Crawford sees the need to be capable of repair as more than just a desire to fix things. He sees it as a desire to escape the feeling of dependence on stuff. The more I began to work on the bus the more I understood what he meant. Your stuff will never again fail you because you can repair it.

+

+

+Yet these days of high technology, products are often covered with stickers warning you that even undoing a screw will void the warranty or risk injury. Companies like John Deere have even argued that it is illegal for the owner of their machines to repair them. This is creating a world of passive consumption devoid of personal agency. Crawford calls the person who wants to fix their own stuff, the Spirited Man. This figure becomes the antidote to passive consumption. "Spiritedness, then," writes Crawford, "may be allied with a spirit of inquiry, through a desire to be master of one’s own stuff." The spirited man "hates the feeling of dependence, especially when it is a direct result of his not understanding something. So he goes home and starts taking the valve covers off his engine to investigate for himself. Maybe he has no idea what he is doing, but he trusts that whatever the problem is, he ought to be able to figure it out by his own efforts. Then again, maybe not—he may never get his valve train back together again. But he intends to go down swinging." 

+

+

+Since I first read Shop Class I have decided it’s better to go down swinging. It’s not just me either. I see this in the work of filmaker Van Neistat, who explicitly took the Spirited Man mantle and ran with it. But also in the thousand people without filmmaking skills who are quietly working in their yards, in their garages, at the side of the road. Shade tree mechanics. Tinkerers. Spirited men and women who want first and foremost to understand, to expand their understanding of the world around them, to know how to use the tools we toolmakers have created for ourselves. The spirited man or woman doesn’t want to be passively entertained, or coddled. They seek to take part as co-creators in the world. We’re not along for the ride, we’re here to stand at the helm, trim the sails and steer the ship.

+

+

+

+

+break

+

+

+

+

+When I set off in the bus, I had no idea how the engine worked or if I would be able to keep it running, but I intended to go down swinging. Standing there in the hills of North Carolina, looking over the bus for about an hour, I saw there was some obvious water damage. I knew I’d have to tear out walls and replace them with new wood. And I figured if I got got the walls off I might as well re-wire, re-plumb, and re-insulate the thing. I was unfazed. With the interior, I could see the finished result. 

+

+

+The engine I was blissfully ignorant about. It was hard to start, but once it got running it seemed good enough to my untrained ear. I handed over the money and climbed into the cockpit.

+

+

+That first drive was nerve wracking. According to the odometers of my past cars, I've driven near 250,000 miles. But driving a car is nothing like strapping yourself to a 27-foot long monstrosity in unknown condition and pointing it downhill. A prudent man would have done a test drive. A couple of hairpin turns had my palms sweating—I made a note to myself to buy my next vehicle in Kansas—but I finally managed to get her out on a four lane road where she felt more manageable. After I had been driving, tensely, for a couple of hours I pulled over at a rest area to take a break.

+

+

+The engine wasn't even off before two people came up to the bus to take pictures, ask about it: What year is it? Where did you get it. Then they asked the question I would come to realize everyone who loves old cars wanted to know: what engine is in it? 

+

+

+The Travco is driven by a Chrysler 318 LA, a 5.2L small-block V8 engine. The LA stands for lightweight A series engine. This is the same engine you'll find in most things Dodge made in 1969, from the Dart to the D100 truck. Larger engines like the 440 are more sought after in vintage racing circles, but the 318, as most enthusiasts call it, is the unsung hero of the muscle car era. Some people claim the cylinder bore size in my 318 is bigger than what you find in a Dart, which would give the bus's 318 more power. (I've done a little research, but still can’t confirm or deny this;  that said, on the side of a long mountain climb in the desert hills of Nevada for instance, it can feel like I have the power of a Dodge Dart, with 8000 extra pounds of weight on top.) Still, on that first drive with the Travco, when I stopped at that rest area to collect my wits, all I knew was it had a 318 Chystler engine. Beyond that I knew almost nothing about engines. I knew that the modern ones looked complex and intimidating and involved a lot of computer chips and automation via sensors. But I'm a former computer programmer; part of what I was after, when we decided to live in a vintage RV, was fewer computers. 

+

+

+[[break?]]

+

+

+The first year with the Travco, I spent most of my free time rebuilding the interior. For the bulk of 2016 it sat in our driveway, me inside, sweating through the southern summer, freezing through the winter. Our neighbors begin to give directions based on it: “we’re two houses after the big blue bus.” I gutted the interior down to the bare fiberglass walls. I rebuilt all the electrical, propane, and water systems before insulating it and sealing it back up. I kept everything low tech. There's only one computer chip in the bus. There's no backup cameras, no motorized awnings, no automated systems at all. I had to go out of my way to find a hot water heater with a non-electric pilot light system. I have to get out and light it by hand every time we reach camp—but the system will never fail. 

+

+

+A friend of mine joked that I had become like Captain Adama from Battlestar Gallactica, who famously wouldn’t let networked computers on his ship because they introduced a vulnerability he considered unacceptable. It wasn't that he was opposed to technology, his character commands a spaceship after all, it was a particular kind of technology, perhaps even a direction of technology, that Adama opposed. In his case networked technology opened the to door to murderous robots bent on destroying humanity. Our case is a little less dramatic. We just didn't want to have to have something break when we're far from the nearest place that could fix it.

+

+

+(No one is perfect though, and the bus does include one complex, fragile system: our solar panels and batteries. I think even Adama would approve of the solar panels; they have been our primary source of power for years. But he wouldn’t approve of the Bluetooth network the solar charge controller uses. That network is an unnecessary potential point of failure. Sure, it’s nice to be able to check our solar and battery status from my phone, but we don’t have to. To mitigate that vulnerability, I installed a shunt with a hardwired gauge. Should the Bluetooth fail, or, more likely, should I lose my phone, I can just look at the gauge. Like Adama, I am not opposed to technology. I’m opposed to unnecessary technology and single points of failure.)

+

+

+The comedian Mitch Hedburg had a joke about how an escalator can never break, it can only become stairs. In web design this is referred to as graceful degradation. How good your technology is depends on how elegantly it handles failures. (This is a design principle I bet even Adama could get behind.) A lot of modern design has taken exactly the opposite approach. In the name of convenience, complex systems are hidden behind deceptively simple user interfaces. But no matter how simple these things might seem when you use them, the complexity behind them is inherently fragile. 

+

+

+Sometimes inconvenience can even be a benefit. It has a way of forcing you off autopilot and getting you paying attention. With an engine as old as the Travco’s, I found out I need to pay attention. It's part of the cost of admission. 

+

+

+[[break]]

+

+

+Modern user interfaces have hidden this fact from you, but the first time you start your car every morning the engine is cold, which makes it hard to start. There are three important components in an internal combustion engine: air, fuel, and spark. The spark is a constant, but when your engine is cold it needs more fuel than air. A computer chip controls this mixture in modern cars, but in older, aspirated engines like the 318, the carburetor controls this mixture with a flap that opens and closes. In our 318 this flap is controlled by the driver via the choke cable—a steel wire attached to the carburetor flap at one end, and a knob on the dashboard at the other. Pull out the knob and the flap in the carburetor closes, limiting the air coming in, and allowing the cold engine to start up.

+

+

+Manual choke is archaic. But since ours was broken when we got it, I went even more archaic. Every time I start the engine I lift up the engine cover, unscrew the air filter, and close the carburetor flap with my finger. At first this was just expedient. Fixing the choke was on my list of things to do, but finding a long enough choke cable, with a period-correct Dodge dashboard knob took years of scouring eBay. By the time I found one I was simply used to doing it myself, literally by hand. The eBay choke cable has been sitting in a storage hatch under the back bed for more than a year.  

+

+

+The truth is, I like opening the engine, I like making sure everything looks right, I like watching it come to life. If something is wrong, I know right away. Once a wire came off the ignition coil and instead of wondering why the engine wasn't starting—which it wasn't—I was startled to watch electricity arcing out of the ignition coil. That's not right. But it was also very simple to fix. I found the wire and plugged it back in. The engine started right up.

+

+

+Every morning before we head out on the road, I open the engine cover and spend some time studying the 318, connecting with it. It's a ritual, somewhere between making coffee and invoking the gods, a small part of my morning that's dedicated to making sure the rest of our day goes smoothly. For a long time I really was looking over the engine before every drive;  these days I am often just spending time with it.

+

+

+Car enthusiasts often get this way. It might seem irrational to be attached to a particular set of nuts and bolts and cast iron, but it happens. Now, driving around the country, when I see broken down cars in someone's yard I don't see junk, I see failed relationships.

+

+

+—

+

+

+The bus is very much a relationship. The five of us moved in and hit the road on April 1, 2017. My wife said that if it didn't work out we’d just pass it off as a bad April Fools joke. It worked out. Though like any relationship, me and the bus have had some rocky moments.

+

+

+April 2nd, less than 100 miles from home, we had our first problem. I had just finished backing into a campsite at Raysville campground, still in Georgia, when I smelled a strange scent, something like burnt grapefruit. I laid down in dirt and slid myself under the engine. A thin, warm red liquid splashed on my forehead. Transmission fluid was leaking out of the bottom of the radiator. There are two transmission lines running into the bottom of the radiator where fluid is cooled before being sent back to the transmission.

+

+

+I didn't know exactly how to fix it, but I knew enough about engines to know that this wasn't too serious. As long as I kept the fluid level topped off, it wouldn’t be too much of a problem. I didn't want to disrupt our new life on the road by taking the bus in for repairs on our third day out. Instead I added a transmission fluid refill to my morning ritual.

+

+

+In the first three weeks, I went through a lot of transmission fluid. I topped it off every morning before we hit the road and every time we stopped for gas. Treating symptoms works for a while, but inevitably the underlying cause gets worse. We made it down to the South Carolina coast, and then swung south, through the windswept marshes of the Georgia coast, and then we headed inland, across the swampy pine flats of south Georgia and into the Florida panhandle.

+

+

+I put off dealing with the leak in part because State and National Parks frown on people working on their rigs in campgrounds. And we were heading to a friend's beach house on St. Georgia Island.. Friend’s houses are much more conducive to repairs. But the day we arrived the leak got dramatically worse. I pulled into the driveway with barely any transmission fluid left. At this point, I felt overwhelmed by the problem; it seemed like too big of a task. I wasn’t sure I wanted to go down so soon, swinging or not. Instead I spent an hour on the phone searching for a mechanic willing to work on such an old, huge vehicle. I finally found one who was game. A few days later, my wallet a bit lighter, the problem was solved. Still I had these lingering doubts: how spirited was I, taking my engine to a mechanic without even trying to fix it myself?

+

+

+We got back in the bus and on our way, tracing a route along the white sand beaches of the Gulf Coast, west through Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, into New Orleans where people cheered the bus from the sidewalks. For two months the bus ran perfectly. But as we headed into the June heat of Texas, the temperature gauge began to climb. And climb. All the way into the red. We took to driving in the early mornings, which helped, but something needed to be done. 

+

+

+We stopped to visit relatives in Dallas and had the radiator re-cored. That eliminated it as the source of the problem. (Again, those niggling doubts about taking it to mechanics, but even experienced mechanics rarely recore their own radiators). Not an hour outside of Dallas the temperature gauge shot right back up to the red. We stopped at another repair shop. They replaced the water pump and thermostat. We headed out of town early again, before it got too hot. That worked. Until it got hot. The temperature gauge climbed again. 

+

+

+Our temperature problem, and the brutal West Texas heat, was getting to us. I punted. In Amarillo we got a hotel for the night and I called my uncle. He listened to me for a while, and then told me to go get a temperature gun and take readings around the engine when it was running. That night, I paid way too much for a temperature gun at a local hardware store and we hit the road again early the next morning. Every half hour, I stopped, got out and took readings on the top and bottom of the engine. Everything was within the operating parameters. We drove on into the midday heat and watched the temperature gauge climb again, but the readings done with the gun remained fine. I called my uncle back. “If I were you,'' he said, “I'd pull the temperature sensor out of your engine and chuck it out in the desert somewhere." I hung up feeling that the main problem with the bus was me. I didn't know how to find the problems, let alone fix them. 

+

+

+The problem with spiritedness is that, in the beginning, desire far outstrips skills. I don’t know when my Uncle started working on cars, but he’s 35 years older than me. Thirty five years chasing the spirit of inquiry teaches you a lot. 

+

+

+I did the best I could with what I knew. I knew he was smarter than me so I took his advice. I unhooked the temperature gauge from the engine sensor. And everything was fine. I was happy to realize there was nothing wrong; I wasn't happy thinking about the thousands of dollars I'd spent trying to fix what turned out to be a faulty $15 sensor. How did my uncle know what to do without even being there? The learning curve felt insurmountably steep. 

+

+

+Two months later, near the end of a summer spent in cool pine forests in the Rocky Mountains, we decided to attempt a 10,000 foot pass near Ridgway Colorado. We'd managed to get to 9,600 feet before, and the one we were headed toward was not a steep climb as Rocky Mountain passes go. We started early, but we didn't get more than a mile into the climb before I smelled that familiar grapefruit smell of transmission fluid. I pulled over and crawled under the bus —and saw the transmission cooler line leaking again. 

+

+

+We turned around, limped back to Ridgway, and found a side street to park on. I got under the bus again. This time I knew what I was looking for, and sure enough, once I got the nut off the end of the transmission line I could see that the metal pipe, which flares out to wrap over metal fitting on the radiator, was not just cracked, but missing a whole chunk. Instead of forming a tight seal over the metal fitting, fluid was shooting out the side. The transmission cooler lines are fitted tightly along the side of the engine. There is no slack. I couldn't just cut them off, put in a new flare and reattach them. Even if I could have made it work they would have been nearly touching the exhaust, which would heat them far more than the transmission cooler ever cooled them.

+

+

+I was forced to reach out for help, again. I called around for a shop that had big enough bays to work on the bus and eventually found one in Montrose, 30 miles away down the mountain. I put the existing line back on as best I could and limped back to the Ridgway State Park campground. We started repacking,  and gathering up what we need for a few days of tent camping in a rental car. 

+

+

+That evening, I was sitting outside the laundry room in the campground, watching the famous golden light of the Rockies play across the Cimmarron Range, when a fellow camper came to do his laundry. He stuffed his laundry in the machine, and we started talking. The conversation came around to the bus, as most conversations I have in campgrounds do. After he asked about the engine, he asked me something no one else ever had, something that caught me off guard. Something that has haunted me since: "Do you turn your own wrenches?" I said I did as much as I could, but that sometimes I had to get professional help. "You have to turn your own wrenches," he said shaking his head. "You can't have a vehicle like that if you don't turn your own wrenches." 

+

+

+I realized that night, I couldn’t keep relying on mechanics. I needed to understand how the 318 worked from the inside out so that I could get in there with my own wrenches. Still, I took it to the mechanic one more time. We spent a couple weeks in a tent while the mechanics in Montrose tried to find new transmission cooler lines for the bus. Eventually they did and we were on our way again, but not for long. A couple weeks later, coming down western Utah, bound for Zion National Park, I stopped for gas and guess what I saw pooling under the bus? You can't have a vehicle like this if you don't turn your own wrenches. You'll go crazy or broke or both.

+

+

+It was a Sunday in Utah. We tried to find a mechanic, but nothing happens on a Sunday in Utah. So we pulled over on a back street, across from a mechanic's shop that was closed. I crawled under the bus and started poking around. This time the leak was from the back of the transmission line rather than the front. I unscrewed it and sure enough, the flare was cracked again. I knew what to do, but I didn't have the tools and the hardware stores weren't open. 

+

+

+I climbed out from under and sat down on the Travco’s step, wiping the grease from my hands. My wife was just asking me what we were going to do, when the rolling metal door of the shop across the street rattled and opened with a clang. A man about my age came walking over and asked if I needed help. I told him my problem. It turned out it was his shop. He didn't work Sundays, but he was there working on his own projects. Together we pulled off the transmission line, took it inside, cut off the cracked flare, and re-flared it. Then he showed me where the last mechanic had gone wrong. He'd overtightened the nut, crushing the metal on to the fitting until it cracked.. We tightened it. Gently. The mechanic wouldn't take any money. Help someone else out someday, he told me.

+

+

+[[break]]

+

+Sitting at the side of the road in Nevada, almost two years in with the Travco, I knew that engine overheating isn't really a thing that can be fixed. It's what happens when a small engine tries to climb a big hill. Eventually old cars will teach you so much, including patience.

+

+

+I go for a walk up the road, to see what's beyond the next curve. Maybe the road crests a ridge and drops into a cool, lush valley with a river running through it. The bend doesn't seem to end though. I keep walking but can never see more than the next few hundred yards, the road just keeps climbing. I give up and head back to the bus. My wife and kids are back from their explorations, ready to go. The engine has cooled some, so we clamor in and decide to make another push up the mountains. But now we're starting from zero. On this kind of incline, I give us a mile before we overheat again. (I won’t know exactly,  because the odometer is broken).  After about five minutes I spy a pull out. I haven't smelled radiator fluid yet, but I decided to take advantage of the ability to pull off the road. 

+

+

+My wife and I talk about turning back. There's a strange college back in the valley behind us called Deep Springs. They have a sign out front that says no phone and not to bother them, but something tells me they'd be okay with the bus. We could get a fresh start in the morning. It's been a long day of driving and the kids are tired and hot. 

+

+

+Then we hear an unmistakable sound that always makes me smile. A loud engine, with the unmistakable thump-thump heartbeat roar of a Harley Davidson, is rumbling up the hill. In a few minutes the bike appears and the rider pulls over. He asks if we're okay. We go through the usual talk about the bus. Then he tells us we're only about a mile from the top. Suddenly we're not quite so tired. The prospect of making it over the mountains feels possible again. We thank the rider and he continues on his way. We give the engine some more time to cool before we try again. 

+

+

+An hour later we’re back in the road, trying for the top. It's a long mile, we never get above twenty miles an hour, but after a little while we crest a ridge and  a spectacular view of the Owens Valley in California opens up below. I can see the Sierra Nevada mountains rising up out of the hazy valley. We are at the top. I have just a second to enjoy it before we pass a sign that says, "Caution, One Lane Road Ahead." The narrows as this bit of highway is called, comes up so fast we don't have time to plan for it. We're just in it. Thankfully, nothing comes the other way. I have no idea what happens if you meet another car coming the opposite way, especially one of the empty hay trucks that drive highway 168 at about 70 miles an hour. 

+

+

+Coming down the steep grade we stop to rest the brakes a few times. After about three hours of descending, we pull into a campground outside of Big Pine, California. It's empty this time of year and the road is full of ruts that have the bus lurching and creaking around. About 20 yards from the first campsite we hear a loud clang. My wife and I look at each other. I pull into the first campsite, and shut off the engine for the final time with a deep sense of relief.

+

+

+–

+

+

+The next morning we watched the sun come up on the high peaks of the Eastern Sierra Nevada mountains.  We had a leisurely breakfast and sipped our coffee well into the morning. We found a train museum up the road and thought we'd take the kids. 

+

+

+It was around 10 when I started up the engine and then made my customary walk around the bus to make sure all the windows and hatches and vents were closed and properly secured while the engine warmed up. Everything looked good until I came around to the driver's side where I noticed the rear wheels were oddly far back in the wheel well. But wheels don't just move around... that would mean the entire axle had moved. Oh shit. 

+

+

+I knelt down and peered under the frame. The rear axle, which supports about 5000 pounds, is held in place by two mounts, one to the front of the axle, one to the rear of the axle. These hold the leaf springs in place. The mounts are secured by four welded steel pins, one at each corner, which hold the axle mount to the chassis. On the driver's side, the forward axle mount, three of the four pins were gone. It was hanging by one pin and had swung down and backward, shifting the entire rear axle about six inches backward.

+

+

+If that pin gave out while we were moving, the axle would come free and most likely tear the back end of the bus off before dropping it on the ground. It was clear we weren't going anywhere. Suddenly all the things that had happened until now, all the leaking fluids, excess oil, even overheating, seemed pretty mild compared to this. Then I thought of something my uncle had said to me over and over, "it's really not that hard, it's all just nuts and bolts."

+

+

+Nuts and bolts aren't where most of the work is though. It's the problem solving that happens in your head. That skill takes years, even decades to develop. I am still early on this journey, but it is infectious when you hold something unknown in your head until you come up with a hypothesis about what might be wrong. This takes me many miles of driving, many miles of thinking.

+

+

+It also requires asking many questions of many people. I've met Travco salesmen who knew the original designer, mechanics who've worked on Travcos, and dozens of people who knew the 318 engine inside and out. All of them helped me in some way, even if it was just an encouraging word, a congratulations on keeping it on the road.

+

+

+As I sat there staring at the axle dangling by a single pin, I had no idea what to do. So I turned to my uncle, texting him a picture of the problem. A few minutes later my phone rang. My uncle happens to live about two hours from Big Pine, back over the state line in Nevada. Sit tight, he said. He was loading up some tools and would be there that afternoon. 

+

+

+We took the kids hiking down to a nearby river. I try as hard as I can to make sure that our adventures don't get in the way of letting our children be children. Making the bus "work" for us is as much about making sure they have space to run and play as it is turning wrenches. 

+

+

+Around three that afternoon my Uncle[a] pulled into our campsite with a truck full of floor lifts, jacks, and tools. He crawled under the bus with me. He didn't say anything, just lay there studying the situation. When he climbed back out he said, "I think we can fix that." We made a run to a hardware store in Bishop, about an hour up the road, where we bought some grade 8 steel bolts, which are strong enough to hold. We also went to the store  and grabbed some steaks and potatoes for dinner. The biggest lesson I've learned from my uncle is, "relax, and make sure you're having fun while you do this."

+

+

+That night after dinner, while we sat around the campfire, he told me the plan. We'd use two jacks, one to hold up the bus, should that last pin give out, and another to maneuver the axle mount back in place. Once it was close we'd use a flange alignment tool to line up the hole in the axle mount with the hole in the chassis. Then we'd slip in the grade 8 bolts. Once he laid out the plan it seemed simple enough, obvious even. But I never would have thought of it on my own. I'd never even heard of a flange alignment tool and I had no idea there were bolts strong enough to replace forged steel pins. No matter how spirited I wanted to be, I had a long way to go.

+

+

+The next morning we did exactly what my uncle said we’d do. It took the better part of the day, but when we were done the bus was good as new. My uncle didn’t like the sound of the engine though. Why don’t you bring it to my place, we’ll see what we can do about that noise. 

+

+

+We spent a few days exploring the area. The kids got to see the train museum. We swam in some hot springs. Then we made our way up to my uncle’s house and I began to learn how everything in the engine worked.

+

+

+This is, in part, what I love about living in the bus, part of why we keep doing it five years later. It's the people that keep me going. It's all the people I know, all the people I've met, the people who've helped, some professionals, most not. Because we haven't stopped needing to fix things in the bus. In the course of writing this article I had to rebuild the vacuum booster that powers our brakes system, replace a head gasket, several worn belts, a failed alternator, the voltage regulator, a fuel pump, and do all the routine maintenance like changing the spark plugs, wires, and oil.

+

+

+The bus will never not need fixing. But my relationship with it has changed. I no longer look at the engine in awe and mystery. I know what all the parts do. I don't know everything that can go wrong, and I don't always know what to do when it does, but I have the thing I've come to prize the most—the relationship with my fellow shade tree mechanics and car enthusiasts. They are what keeps me doing this. It isn't just me turning my own wrenches, it's everyone who turns their own wrenches. 

+

+

+

+

+

+

+

+

+

+

+

+

+

+

+

+

+

+

+

+

+

+

+[a]can you give us a physical description of him?
\ No newline at end of file
diff --git a/scratch.txt b/scratch.txt
index 4e637eb..37bbeb7 100644
--- a/scratch.txt
+++ b/scratch.txt
@@ -2,6 +2,66 @@ The energy of chaos is required to change the existing order.
 
 # Scratch
 
+Your power is proportional to your ability to relax.
+
+The primary tools that one needs in modern day culture are to know how to make things up, and how to figure things out. This is creativity in two of its forms. These are called imagination and problem-solving. —STEVEN SNYDER
+
+---
+
+In his 1870 essay What is Authority?, Bakunin wrote:
+
+Does it follow that I reject all authority? Far from me such a thought. In the matter of boots, I refer to the authority of the bootmaker; concerning houses, canals, or railroads, I consult that of the architect or the engineer. For such or such special knowledge I apply to such or such a savant. But I allow neither the bootmaker nor the architect nor savant to impose his authority upon me. I listen to them freely and with all the respect merited by their intelligence, their character, their knowledge, reserving always my incontestable right of criticism and censure. I do not content myself with consulting a single authority in any special branch; I consult several; I compare their opinions, and choose that which seems to me the soundest. But I recognise no infallible authority, even in special questions; consequently, whatever respect I may have for the honesty and the sincerity of such or such individual, I have no absolute faith in any person.
+
+---
+
+As Matthew Crawford observes in Shop Class as Soulcraft, “shared memories attach to the material souvenirs of our lives, and producing them is a kind of communion, with others and with the future.”
+
+
+## Collapse notes
+---
+Other Owen, and for good reason! But that’s an important part of what I was talking about. A market economy depends on the fundamental agreement that the seller will provide the buyer with a product worth buying. Now that corporations by and large no longer do this, the market is collapsing, and they have no idea what to do about it — since listening to consumers and providing them with what they need and want is nowhere in the modern corporate vocabulary.
+-JMG
+
+
+Making sense of the ideas of one great culture from within another great culture is notoriously hard. (It’s an interesting detail of history, for example, that the first two European scholars to study the I Ching both went incurably insane.)  Thus I don’t claim to be able to sound the depths of either of the two future cultures I’ve sketched out here; I was raised in a culture weighed down by the Faustian veneer, and I live in a region that mediates between western Europe and the North American heartland. (The ground under my feet is part of the same long-vanished continent as the western half of Britain.) Being who, when, and where I am, I’m poised unsteadily between two great cultures, the fading Faustian culture and the future American culture.  That’s part of the hand I was dealt when I was born.
+
+That awkward position, between the dissolving forms of the Faustian vision and the first stirrings of tamanous culture, seems to be becoming common among my American and Canadian readers, for what it’s worth.  (I haven’t yet seen it among my European readers, which comes as no surprise—again, each great culture is rooted in its own land.)  Here in North America, the Faustian veneer seems to be cracking very rapidly just now, outside those classes that have adopted Faustian thoughtways as the basis for their identity and their power. The widening gap between the Faustian managerial caste and the post-Faustian masses is among the major facts in American public life today, and it accounts for a great deal of the total incomprehension with which each side regards the other.
+
+One of the chief questions in my mind right now is how that gap will evolve in the years ahead. Most great cultures, once they leave their ages of reason, wind up their creative eras, and settle into stasis, can expect a long slow decline—in cases such as ancient Egypt and traditional China, this lasted for many centuries.  The surge toward infinity is so central to the Faustian ethos, however, that the total failure of the will to power that drives it may send the nations of the West down another, harsher route. We’ll talk about that in two weeks.
+-JMG
+
+---
+
+
+
+# Stories to Tell
+
+## On the Economy of Walden
+
+Walden is a curious book. Curious because what the world has chosen to remember about Thoreau is that he opted to go live in the woods for a time, renounce in some way the modern world and get fback to nature. But this isn't at all what Thoreau did. Forget the historical context (which is that Thoreau went into the woods to write another book, A week and concord and merrimack river, while at the same time processing his bother's death. Forget that because if you just come to book without any of that there is still no reason to walk away thinking you've read a book about a man who renounced the modern world. He does nothing of the sort, and most of the book isn't nature writing. The first and longest chapter is called Economy. 
+
+Thoreau's writing on nature and his own inner expereinces is just something you should read. Me telling you about it won't mean anything. It is experiential writing. 
+
+This is what struck me about Walden when I recently reread it: that it starts with something very practical, very bound up in 19th century Concord, very grounded you might say in the world of its day, and yet ends up in place that is very spiritual. It struck me because I have had exactly the same experience. 
+
+In getting in the bus I did not set out to step away from society. I have not stepped away from it at all. I am typing this using grid powered electricity, listen to the cacophony of helicopter rides while staring at the dense Florida branbles around our campsite, which, were I to bushwack through them, would lead me to the Walmart parking lot where I stocked up on steak, eggs and veggies not four hours ago. I am in Concord. And yet I am not. I understand now HD.
+
+And I also see both your flaws and mine. 20th-century French anthropologist René Girard's mimetic theory takes this idea of Thoreau's -- that we do not want things a vacuum, we want them because other people want them -- and reminds us that when you leave behind one certain mimetic process, you always enter into another one. You might not want a big fancy house, but you might want a really cool vintage RV, or a particular sailboat. Something will always fill that vacuum on desire and unless you're really on your toes -- and I certainly am not -- chances are that thing that fills it will again be something you don't actually a) need b) want, save because someone else has it.
+
+
+What one needs to do is question the forces which are pulling them. Mimetic desire runs deep, so deep that most of it is simply accepted as opposed to worked with. What I mean by this is that the majority of items we have and actions we undertake are not acquired or undertaken out of conscious wanting, but out of the general acceptance that they and that is what you do/get. People have 3-piece sofas, fridges, tons of cutlery and plates, nic-nacs, new cars, new phones etc. People go to school, have kids, get mortgages, take out loans, perform Christmas day etc. And all of this falls under the idea of 'It's just want you do.' In fact, perhaps that's a good place to finish up, as I've just found my new favorite slogan...
+
+is in many ways a restating of the standard arguments agains
+
+
+
+
+
+---
+
+"The best you can do in this moment, with whatever awareness and resources you can muster right now. Make the best spaghetti sauce you can with what you have and who you are, right now. Make this the best staff meeting you could possibly have, given the circumstances at the moment. While talking with your friend, your spouse, your mom, or your son, make it the very best conversation that you could be having. The best proposal, the best drive with my family, the best performance review, and the best nap."
+
+---
 
 The true warrior is not the one who is willing to kill. That doesn’t make a warrior. The true warrior is the one who is willing, if need be, to die - Charles Eisenstien
 
@@ -107,36 +167,93 @@ We can have much to do, deadlines and meals and kiddos and never ending tasks, b
 
 Gurdjieff notion that you should do a task by hand. if you have to dig a ditch you should do it and dig it by hand because there's an opportunity there for spiritual growth. if you're offloading it to a machine you're losing that opportunity for spiritual growth. if we offload tasks to machines we lose the opportunities that they have for spiritual growth and we may not fully understand the consequences of offloading things to technology because we'll never go through it to see what Spiritual Development we might have had if we had done it ourselves
 
-## Collapse notes
----
-Other Owen, and for good reason! But that’s an important part of what I was talking about. A market economy depends on the fundamental agreement that the seller will provide the buyer with a product worth buying. Now that corporations by and large no longer do this, the market is collapsing, and they have no idea what to do about it — since listening to consumers and providing them with what they need and want is nowhere in the modern corporate vocabulary.
--JMG
+## Have your own code
 
+Not a contractors code. Not any organizations code. Your own code that means something to you, that makes you take pride in your work.
 
-Making sense of the ideas of one great culture from within another great culture is notoriously hard. (It’s an interesting detail of history, for example, that the first two European scholars to study the I Ching both went incurably insane.)  Thus I don’t claim to be able to sound the depths of either of the two future cultures I’ve sketched out here; I was raised in a culture weighed down by the Faustian veneer, and I live in a region that mediates between western Europe and the North American heartland. (The ground under my feet is part of the same long-vanished continent as the western half of Britain.) Being who, when, and where I am, I’m poised unsteadily between two great cultures, the fading Faustian culture and the future American culture.  That’s part of the hand I was dealt when I was born.
+When you live in a small space you have to be organized. Everything needs a place. Even if that place is to just shove it in a messy cabinet and close the door quickly. Otherwise you space will be unbearable.
 
-That awkward position, between the dissolving forms of the Faustian vision and the first stirrings of tamanous culture, seems to be becoming common among my American and Canadian readers, for what it’s worth.  (I haven’t yet seen it among my European readers, which comes as no surprise—again, each great culture is rooted in its own land.)  Here in North America, the Faustian veneer seems to be cracking very rapidly just now, outside those classes that have adopted Faustian thoughtways as the basis for their identity and their power. The widening gap between the Faustian managerial caste and the post-Faustian masses is among the major facts in American public life today, and it accounts for a great deal of the total incomprehension with which each side regards the other.
 
-One of the chief questions in my mind right now is how that gap will evolve in the years ahead. Most great cultures, once they leave their ages of reason, wind up their creative eras, and settle into stasis, can expect a long slow decline—in cases such as ancient Egypt and traditional China, this lasted for many centuries.  The surge toward infinity is so central to the Faustian ethos, however, that the total failure of the will to power that drives it may send the nations of the West down another, harsher route. We’ll talk about that in two weeks.
--JMG
+## Fire Notes: Seeking the Sun
+
+People have forgotten how important the sun is. You can die from lack of sun. 
+
+## New Orleans
+
+After Galveston we headed north, bound for New Orleans. We broke up the drive with a stop at one of the gates of hell, located in Sea Rim, Texas. Sea Grim as we call it. Do not go there. Ever. For any reason. We had to abandon the bus there that night and retreat to a hotel. The next morning we went back, fired up the bus, and did not stop driving until we were safely over the state line in Louisiana -- successfully [escaping Texas](https://luxagraf.net/jrnl/2017/06/escaping-texas) again, but this was definitely our closest call yet.
+
+We regrouped for a day at a little state park on a small bayou outside Lake Charles, Louisiana. It was good to be back in the bayous, swamp cypress, and most of all, warm humid air. Never thought I'd miss it, but I did.
+
+<img src="images/2022/2022-12-06_132438_bayou.jpg" id="image-3243" class="picwide" />
+
+We met an Australian couple there who have been coming to the US nearly every year since the early 2000s, traveling around in an older RV. It's always humbling to meet someone from somewhere else who knows your country better than you do. We were headed in opposite directions unfortunately, but we were able to save them from Sea Rim at least. I look forward to our paths crossing again one day.
 
 ---
 
+The next day we continue on, taking the beat-up, pothole-strewn back roads through the sugar cane fields and flooded rice paddies, past where we once spent Mardi Gras, on down into New Orleans. We arrived a little too late to head into the city that day. We had to stave off our New Orleans cravings with a few crayfish sausages grilled over the fire that night.
 
+<img src="images/2022/2022-12-07_132438_driving-new-orleans.jpg" id="image-3242" class="picwide" />
 
-# Stories to Tell
+The next morning we headed over the river and into the city. 
 
+<img src="images/2022/2022-12-13_130726_new-orleans.jpg" id="image-3240" class="picwide" />
 
-## Have your own code
+There is something truly remarkable about New Orleans. Long time readers may have noticed that New Orleans is essentially the only city we visit. Chicago? Drove right by as fast as we could. Atlanta? We've been known to detour hundreds of miles to avoid it. We did stop in Columbia, SC, and regretted it. We have been to Milwaukee, but that's to visit friends, not because we love the city.
 
-Not a contractors code. Not any organizations code. Your own code that means something to you, that makes you take pride in your work.
+No, if we're going into a city it has to be a city that's alive the way a forest is alive, the way a seashore is alive: organically, miraculously, beautifully. Why waste your time on anything else? A good city should evoke the three transcendentals in you when you're in it: goodness, truth, and beauty. The only U.S. city where I have experienced those things every time I go is New Orleans.
 
-When you live in a small space you have to be organized. Everything needs a place. Even if that place is to just shove it in a messy cabinet and close the door quickly. Otherwise you space will be unbearable.
+If you were just looking at it on paper, New Orleans probably wouldn't jump out at you. It's insanely touristy. It's rough around the edges. It has a reputation for violence. And yet none of those things seem to affect the city or the people. It's a mystery, but it's not hard to see how living here you might come to think like Ignatius J Reilly when he rather famously says, "Leaving New Orleans frightened me considerably. Outside of the city limits the heart of darkness, the true wasteland begins."
 
+Picking apart what makes New Orleans great is likely as fruitless as trying to figure out how it got that way. Something about the collision of Afro-Caribbean culture, Acadian culture, French culture -- among others -- created something unlike anywhere else on earth. New Orleans is louder, more vibrant, and more alive than any other city in America and that, I think, is what keeps us coming back.
 
-## Fire Notes: Seeking the Sun
+Just as we took the girls out for a [birthday around Milwaukee](https://luxagraf.net/jrnl/2022/07/hello-milwaukee), we had promised Elliott a day out in New Orleans. It started with an early lunch at a Thai restaurant. 
+
+<img src="images/2022/2022-12-08_121233_new-orleans-birthday.jpg" id="image-3223" class="picwide" />
+
+Then we went to the thing the kids have been talking about ever since we where here in 2018: the New Orleans Children's Museum. Alas, a lot can change in four years. It turned out the Children's museum had moved locations and been "modernized". The kids still had fun, though they all agreed the old one was better. The new one offered a few of the same things, but everything was new and clean and looked like it had just come off the Ikea shelf. The old museum had a rather more homemade charm about it. 
+
+This is what passes for progress in modern America though -- taking good things, throwing them away, and replacing them with things that don't work as well and generally suck. In that sense I'm glad the kids are getting a gentle introduction to the future now. 
+
+And maybe I am reading to much into it, but I found it interesting that much of what was missing were what you might call blue collar stuff: the exhibit showcasing what an electrician does, the sample bayou farm, the signage about lap boarding, and the example working fishing boat. Among the new exhibits were a fake laboratory where the kids could pretend to be scientists and a purely mechanical farming setup that moved crops from harvest to ship without the presence of a single human. Again, maybe I'm overthinking it, but I felt the distinct presence of a specific agenda at work when I compared the old museum with the new. 
+
+All that said, at least the kids had fun. And the legendary (in our family) giant bubble maker was still there.
+
+<img src="images/2022/2022-12-08_140728_new-orleans-birthday.jpg" id="image-3231" class="picwide" />
+<img src="images/2022/2022-12-08_131634_new-orleans-birthday.jpg" id="image-3225" class="picwide" />
+<div class="cluster">
+    <span class="row-2">
+<img src="images/2022/2022-12-08_133650_new-orleans-birthday.jpg" id="image-3227" class="cluster pic66" />
+<img src="images/2022/2022-12-08_133242_new-orleans-birthday.jpg" id="image-3228" class="cluster pic66" />
+    </span>
+    <span class="row-2">
+<img src="images/2022/2022-12-08_134027_new-orleans-birthday.jpg" id="image-3229" class="cluster pic66" />
+<img src="images/2022/2022-12-08_134134_new-orleans-birthday.jpg" id="image-3230" class="cluster pic66" />
+    </span>
+</div>
+
+After a few hours playing with all the stuff, we decamped for the French Quarter to get crepes at our favorite stand in the French Market. This first pic is 2018, the next 2022:
+
+<img src="images/2018/2018-02-18_145959_new-orleans.jpg" id="image-1178" class="picwide" />
+<img src="images/2022/2022-12-08_164526_new-orleans-birthday.jpg" id="image-3235" class="picwide" />
+
+Aside from the jarring sight of my children getting older, I can't help but notice that we've shed even more vestiges of civilization... forks? Who needs forks?
+
+<img src="images/2022/2022-12-08_154738_new-orleans-birthday.jpg" id="image-3232" class="picwide" />
+
+That was supposed to be the end of our day. We planned to wander over to Jackson Square, maybe listen to some music and then head back to the bus. In Jackson Square though we came across some street performers doing some amazing athletic stuff -- standing flips, gymnastic-style flips without the padding, you have to stop and respect that. So we did. And that's when they said "we need a few volunteers from the audience". As soon as someone says that, I am volunteered. Not because I want to mind you, but because in any situation that requires a volunteer or random person to be selected, it's not random, it's me. Always. I think it's a kind of penance I have to pay for being very lucky in games of chance. Whatever the case, yes, I was selected. And I had fun dancing for a crowd with a bunch of other people who couldn't dance either.
+
+That's not the surprising part though. The surprising part is that Lilah volunteered -- legitimately volunteered. She and another girl got up and did a similarly impromptu choreographed dance. More surprising is that the street performers gave her and the other girl $20 to keep. Naturally, since this is the most money she has ever earned in about 30 minutes, Lilah is convinced street performers are the greatest thing ever and she is going to be one. And who knows, maybe they are. Their job is certainly a lot more fun than mine.
+
+By the time that was all over with though we were famished again. We headed over to the warehouse district to an Argentinean restaurant Corrinne had been wanting to try. A few arepas later we all felt much better. It was a long day in the city, but a good one. I still judge the success of our days by how quickly the kids fall asleep and I don't think anyone was up past 9 that night.
+
+We spent a full week in New Orleans, mostly exploring the city, though we did have one day of running errands. I even found a reputable Volvo mechanic and took the Volvo in to see about replacing the hose I fixed with some fuel line and other scraps back in Devil's Tower. He looked at what I'd done, leak tested it with some brake fluid, and told me he wouldn't touch it unless he had to. Good enough for me. It's held up well. I did pay to have him clear out all the sensor codes and warnings though so we'll know if something is going amiss from here on out.
+
+So often what we do in New Orleans is just wander around. It's a city that lends itself to wandering. We've got our favorite little spots in the French Quarter, some in the Garden District, some in the Marigny, some in the Treme. This time around though we decided to visit some of the museums we've never bothered with before. 
+
+The notable one was the Jazz museum. I mention is chiefly because I don't think I have ever been somewhere quite so disappointing. Now granted, Jazz is a big topic, spanning almost 100 years now, and even if you narrow it down to New Orleans... it's a lot for any museum to cover. That said, the Jazz museum was a massive letdown. I don't think the kids came out understanding any more about the history of Jazz than when they went in. They were more impressed with the tiny exhibit about the old Mint in the basement than they were with Jazz museum. 
+
+Oh well, we'll stick to just wandering around, listen to the jazz you hear all over the city. Maybe that's the thing, maybe you can't stick Jazz or any other part of New Orleans in a building and try to explain it. It is what it is. Maybe you have to come out here and wander around, discover your own version of the city, to really understand.  
 
-People have forgotten how important the sun is. You can die from lack of sun. 
 
 ## Galveston Sings
 
@@ -1504,6 +1621,11 @@ were the best of all my days
 
 # Essays
 
+## Do It Yourself
+
+It’s probably cheaper and easier to buy most things, but when I can I’d rather make things myself. What else are you going to do with your life if you aren’t making stuff? Watch TV? Stop buying stuff and hiring people for everything. Give yourself a chance to solve the problem first. Contrary to what it says on the label, professionals and experts aren’t necessary. They’ll do it faster and better than you will, but you’ll learn and improve every time you do it yourself.
+
+
 ## Safety Third
 
 If you land on luxagraf.net on an odd day of the month, you might notice the little tag line under the site title is "safety third". This comes from a sticker we saw on a pole outside the [Henry Miller Library](https://henrymiller.org) in [Big Sur California](). Whoever put it there had read their Miller because he would have agreed. Actually he would have probably ranked safety much lower. I often do.
@@ -1573,80 +1695,84 @@ There is no finish line. There is no winning, no losing.
 
 **Everything is a Practice.**
 
-A practice is the disciplined repetition of what you know in an effort to unlock those things you don't yet know. It is ever-accumulating, and never-ending. 
+A practice is the disciplined repetition of what you know with enough experimentation in that repetition to unlock those things you don't yet know. It is ever-accumulating, and never-ending. It is sometimes painful, but that is the way.
 
-Individual projects may come to an end, but the practices that made them possible do not. You may finishing writing a book, or reach the end of a run, or understand how to fix an engine, but there is no point where you've written enough, you've worked out enough, you've learned enough. The practices never end, which means you get to keep improving.
+Individual projects may come to an end, but the practices that made them possible do not. You may finish writing a book, or reach the end of a run, or understand how to fix an engine, but there is no point where you've written enough, you've worked out enough, you've learned enough. The practices never end, which means you get to keep improving.
 
 The practice leaves a path behind you to show you how far you have come and carves out a path ahead of you to show you where you can go.
 
-The practices of your life *are* your life. They form the path you follow, they are how you become what you want to become, they make you who you are and who the world wants you to be. You are not solely in charge of your practices or the path they form. The world[^1] gets a vote too. In the end that's part of the practice too -- adjusting to feedback from the world, your body, your life, your family, your friends. All of these things are part of the practice, all of them inform it.
+The practices of your life *are* your life. They form the path you follow, they are how you become what you want to become, they make you who you are and who the world wants you to be. You are not solely in charge of your practices or the path they form. The world gets a vote too. In the end that's part of the practice too -- adjusting to feedback from the world, your body, your life, your family, your friends. All of these things are part of the practice, all of them inform it.
 
-So how do you find *your* practice? I don't know what you need to do or where you ought to go, but I can offer some places to start, some questions to think about. 
+The practice also informs the experimentation that expands it.
 
-The Webster's 1913 dictionary definition of practice includes as examples "the practice of rising early; the practice of making regular entries of accounts; the practice of daily exercise." That's not a bad place to start: get up, get moving, and keep track of where your money is going. That can take you far. None of that is revolutionary, Ben Franklin is famous for saying roughly the same thing, and you can find similar quotes going back to the very edges of written history, but it's still a solid place to start. Get up and get going. 
+The trick is to follow your curiosity. That often forgotten part of you that society tries to get you to repress. That voice that says, what would happen if... This is the way. Follow it. Follow it knowing you will likely fail, knowing that you're probably doing it the wrong way, but you're going to try it anyway... you'd be surprised what works. I've fixed loose battery wires with a bit of nail, held hoses on with zip ties, and countless other things that should not have worked, but did, at least for a little while. There's plenty of failures along the way of course. Those people always telling you it can't be done -- whatever it might be -- are sometimes right, but wouldn't it be better to find out for yourself? 
 
-What I think gets lost in our time -- [the time of The Experts](https://luxagraf.net/essay/the-cavalry-isnt-coming) -- is that there's not a single path, not a set of practices that work for everyone. We've been conditioned to look for prescriptions that fit everyone and that's just not how life works. You and I are different. You have to experiment and find what works for you. It might be nearly the same as what works for me, but it also might be totally different. I know people who are very much on their path who work late at night and eat totally differently than me. You have to find your own way.
+Now there are reasonable limits to this... I wouldn't go trying to repair a $4,000 lens on your first attempt at lens repair. I wouldn't pick a rare, difficult to replace engine for your first rebuild. Learn to manage risk. When you know you're headed off the map to experiment, pick things to experiment on and situations to experiment in where you can keep the risk level low. Whether that means using something cheap, or doing it at low speed, or making sure the water is deep enough before you jump. Whatever the case, learn to manage risk so that your lessons learned aren't so painful -- financially, emotionally, physically --- that you forget what you learned and remember only the trauma of the learning.
 
-That said, I do have suggestion on where to start: start with touching your nose.
+In this process though you will become a better human being. You will get better at living. You will have less pain down the road. Your path will be smoother. You are building real world skills that you can use over and over. Every skill that you pick up transfers to other things too. Your practice will expand and keep growing.
 
-I know, that sounds stupid. If you're into making some kind of huge change in your life the last thing you want to hear is that you should start by touching your nose. What the hell is that going to do? The answer is: it's going to train your will.
+The experience you gain using a multimeter to untangle the rats nest of wires under the dash will come in handy when you need to figure out why the fridge suddenly stopped. That method of troubleshooting, following wires, testing voltages, making sure resisters are working, and so on, that method of inquiry you learned working under that dash transfers to other things. It's the same method of inquiry needed to figure out what's happening with anything electrical. There will be some differences between the fridge and the dash and the dishwasher and the vacuum, but the basic method is the same. From one small repair you gain an insight that makes countless future repairs that much easier. But only if you do it yourself.
 
-If you were out of shape, unable to do a single push up, but desiring to be able to knock out 100 push ups you wouldn't start with 50, you'd start with one. But even then, there is a high risk of failure because the effort it takes to get from zero push ups to ten is more than it takes to get from ten to 100. There's a very good chance that you're going to give up before you get to ten -- not because it's too hard, but because you aren't accustomed to forcing yourself to do things. You are not in control of your will.
+In this way everything you do is always building your skill set. You're always expanding your practice. This makes the path that much easier. You are that much more proficient at being human. The journey become easier, you are less reliant on others and you free up resources to focus on life's more interesting things. That way when the fridge dies at anchor in the San Blas, two days sail from the nearest repair shop, you don't worry. You fix the issues and get on with the dive you were planning to do that day. 
 
-It's not your fault. Unless you happen to have enlisted in the armed forces, practice a martial art, or have monastic religious training, you have very likely never even been taught that you can train your will, let alone how to do it. That's okay. 
-
-The good news is that, unlike the hypothetical arms in the push up example, the will is not weak. Your will is as strong as it was when you were a baby starting to crawl and you willed your entire body to do something it had never done before. If your will feels week it is because it's divided against itself. The power of the will comes from disciplined focus. When you can focus your will on a single thing, and only that thing, you can do remarkable things. 
-
-Getting to that point is the hard part. That is the practice of the will. This is where all practices start. This is the metapractice that enables all the other practices to come into being. The will, directed, is the thing that enable you to turn words into ideas, ideas into action, action into skills. The will is what opens up the path in front of you and enables you to move forward. 
-
-When you say "will" though most people think of some miserable thing where you grit your teeth and bear some suffering. That's not the will, that's you fighting your will. When your will is focused following it is effortless, in fact you can't not follow it, you are directing it after all.
-
-The problem is that most of your life you've been told to do things you didn't want to do. School is the primary culprit here for most of us, though there maybe other things in your life. Schooling in the United States is almost universally designed to damage the will and leave you unable to do much of anything save serve the will of others. This is why most of us leave school and get a job. We literally go out to serve another's will. Our will has been so damaged we think that the thing we fight against when we "grit our teeth" or "just do it" is our will. 
+Skills transfer in unexpected ways too. It isn't all just troubleshooting methods that transfer. The experience you gain struggling at terrible sketches of birds will come in handy when you start staring at the engine, trying to make sense of what's gone wrong -- you've trained your mind to pay attention to the little details of feathers, which is not so different than paying attention to the little details of how a machine is running or how the wind and weather are changing. It is all connected.
 
-That's not your will, that's your will divided. Our wills know a shit deal when they see one, even we don't. And they fight it. And we fight them. And we become convinced we're weak. 
+I should probably stop here and point out that I am a miserable hack with very few skills. I am not a repair expert or wunderkind of any sort. I can barely fix my way out of a paper bag. I am writing this not because I have mastered it on some long journey of experience, but because I have lived a couple of these examples and when thinking about it later, realized, oh, I made that connection because of this other things that I didn't see as related at the time, but then it turned out it was. 
 
-That makes for a ton of emotional baggage wrapped up in our divided will. That why every New Year's when we vow to hit the gym and do those push ups, we fail. Your will is the source of your emotions -- when your will succeeds in the world, you are happy, when it fails you are miserable. If you have a lot of miserably emotions locked up in your will and you try to focus it... it doesn't work. By the end of February it's been two months since you went to the gym.
+I am writing this because I have seen other people who can do this at a level I know I'll never get close to. I am writing this because you may be younger than me, you may have more time to learn. By the time you get to my age, you might be where I wish I was. Where I would be if I'd been paying more attention earlier on in life.
 
-That's why you start with touching your nose. This is a variation on what every religious training manual (and some of the better secular ones) I've read advices doing. Something silly. Something that doesn't matter. Something that you have no emotional attachment to. Something you will not fail to do because of years of damage to your will. Touching your nose is easy and has not emotional connotations. 
+I write not as an expert, but as a cautionary tale. Learn more than I did. Experiment more than I did. Expose yourself to more adversity than I did so that you learn to overcome it, not in theory, not by reading on the comfort of your couch, but in practice, at the side of the road, in the middle of nowhere, when it really counts.
 
-So do it. Right now. Wherever you are sitting, reading this. Use your left hand and touch your nose ten times, returning your hand to your side or lap each time. Do it now before you read any further.
+And now a little practice I wish I'd run across when I was much younger.
 
-Congratulations, you unified your will and succeeded. This is the beginning. This is how you train yourself to use your will deliberately. 
+---
 
-Now you need to do that every day. Write "touch your nose!" on a piece of note paper and put it somewhere you will see it every day, ideally multiple times a day, ideally somewhere other people won't bother you about it. Then every time you see it, touch your nose ten times with your left hand.
+How do you find *your* practice? I don't know what you need to do or where you ought to go, but I can offer some places to start, some questions to think about. 
 
-Congratulations. You have a new practice in your life. No, not touching your hose. The habit of doing something because you chose to do it. Not because some authority told you to or some unnoticed compulsion drove you to -- you chose to do this. You do it. You direct your will. 
+The Webster's 1913 dictionary definition of practice includes as examples, "the practice of rising early; the practice of making regular entries of accounts; the practice of daily exercise." That's not a bad place to start: get up, get moving, and keep track of where your money is going. That can take you far. None of that is revolutionary. Ben Franklin is famous for saying roughly the same thing. You can find similar quotes going back to the very edges of written history, but it's still a solid place to start. Get up and get going. 
 
-*Note: Some might object that I have told you to do this and therefore it is yet another example of you yielding your will to another. This isn't true. It doesn't have to be your idea to do something, you just have to choose to do it. That's your will, you are choosing what to do.*
+What I think gets lost in our time -- [the time of The Experts](https://luxagraf.net/essay/the-cavalry-isnt-coming) -- is that there's not a single path, not a set of practices that work for everyone. We've been conditioned to look for prescriptions that fit everyone and that's just not how life works. You and I are different. You have to experiment and find what works for you. It might be nearly the same as what works for me, but it also might be totally different. I know people who are very much on their path who are vegans and do their best work late at night. You have to find your own way.
 
+That said, I do have a suggestion on where to start: start with touching your nose.
 
+I know, that sounds stupid. If you're into making some kind of huge change in your life the last thing you want to hear is that you should start by touching your nose. What the hell is that going to do? The answer is: it's going to train your will.
 
+If you were out of shape, unable to do a single push up, but desiring to be able to knock out 100 push ups in two minutes you wouldn't start with 50, you'd start with one. But even then, there is a high risk of failure because the effort it takes to get from zero push ups to ten is more than it takes to get from ten to 100. There's a very good chance that you're going to give up before you get to ten -- not because it's too hard, but because you aren't accustomed to forcing yourself to do things. You are not in control of your will.
 
+It's not your fault. Unless you happen to have enlisted in the armed forces, practice a martial art, or have monastic religious training, you have very likely never even been taught that you can train your will, let alone how to do it. That's okay. 
 
-Some teeth-gritting must happen from time to time in all our lives, but once you develop your will sufficiently and begin to progress, most people find that there is little effort needed. 
+The good news is that, unlike the hypothetical arms in the push up example, the will is not weak. Your will is as strong as it was when you were a baby starting to crawl and you willed your entire body to do something it had never done before. If your will feels weak it is because it's divided against itself. The power of the will comes from disciplined focus. When you can focus your will on a single thing, and only that thing, you can do remarkable things. 
 
+Getting to that point is the hard part. That is the practice of the will. This is where all practices start. This is the metapractice that enables all the other practices to come into being. The will, directed, is the thing that enable you to turn words into ideas, ideas into action, action into skills. The will is what opens up the path in front of you and enables you to move forward. 
 
+When you say "will" though most people think of some miserable thing where you grit your teeth and bear some suffering. That's not the will, that's you fighting your will. When your will is focused following it is effortless, in fact you can't not follow it, you are directing it after all.
 
+The problem is that most of your life you've been told to do things you didn't want to do. School is the primary culprit here for most of us, though there maybe other things in your life. Schooling in the United States is almost universally designed to damage the will and leave you unable to do much of anything save serve the will of others. This is why most of us leave school and get a job. We literally go out to serve another's will. Our will has been so damaged we think that the thing we fight against when we "grit our teeth" or "just do it" is our will. 
 
+That's not your will, that's your will divided. Our wills know a bad deal when they see one, even if we don't. And so they fight it -- they fight school, they fight our pointless jobs, they fight our uninspired cities and all the rest. And we fight our will. And we become convinced that this struggle against ourselves is what it means to direct our will. We become convinced that we're weak. 
 
+That makes for a ton of emotional baggage wrapped up in our divided will. That why every New Year's when we vow to hit the gym and do those push ups, we fail. We spiral downward, further convinced we are weak.
 
-The problem isn't that your will is weak.
+This is compounded by the fact that your will is the source of most of your emotions -- when your will succeeds in the world, you are happy, when it fails you are miserable. If you have a lot of miserably emotions locked up in your will and you try to focus it... it doesn't work. By the end of February it's been two months since you went to the gym.
 
+That's why you start with touching your nose. This is a variation on what every religious training manual (and some of the better secular ones) I've read advices doing. Something silly. Something that doesn't matter. Something that you have no emotional attachment to. Something you will not fail to do because of years of damage to your will. Touching your nose is easy and has no emotional baggage for most people. 
 
-Just do it -- don't think about it, don't decide for yourself whether it's a good idea, and above all else don't wonder about what motives are behind what's being pushed at you. Unthinking, reflexive reactions to collective stimuli are exactly what every ruling elite wants to inculcate in its serfs. 
+So do it. Right now. Wherever you are sitting, reading this. Use your left hand and touch your nose ten times, returning your hand to your side or lap each time. Do it now before you read any further.
 
+Congratulations, you unified your will and succeeded. This is the beginning. This is how you train yourself to use your will deliberately. 
 
+Now you need to do that every day. Write "touch your nose!" on a piece of note paper and put it somewhere you will see it every day, ideally multiple times a day, ideally somewhere other people won't bother you about it. Then every time you see it, touch your nose ten times with your left hand.
 
+Congratulations. You have a new practice in your life. No, not touching your hose. The habit of doing something because you chose to do it. Not because some authority told you to or some unnoticed compulsion drove you to -- you chose to do this. You do it. You direct your will. 
 
-Even when you find some things that do, keep experimenting, you never know when you'll find some new practice you love that opens up new paths.
+That is the beginning of the practice.
 
 
 
 
-I don’t know exactly where this path leads (and I have no idea where yours might lead you), but I do know that there is a path out there for each of us. And I don’t think the path that’s being offered up by our society these days is very appealing. I think that’s part of the reason people read this site. Because you also probably don’t think we were put here on earth, as part of this grand dance of existence, to maximize our safety and security, to build wealth or amass petty power.
 
-I believe that we are here to give the gifts that we have built up inside us over millennia of our soul’s existence, that we are here to shepherd each other toward our gifts and give to the world those things that we have inside us.
 
+*Note: Some might object that I have told you to do this and therefore it is yet another example of you yielding your will to another. This isn't true. It doesn't have to be your idea to do something, you just have to choose to do it. That's your will, you are choosing what to do.*
 We are all in the process of maturation. Both as individuals and as a species. None of knows where this all goes, but I think we all know that the current stories don’t wash and it’s time for something new. I don’t know what that looks like for you, but for myself, for us out here, it looks like this. It looks like walks through primordial forests, long afternoons on windswept beaches, evenings around the fire.
 
 I believe that you’ll know when you are on the right path. You’ll feel it. Life will begin to feel like what it is, a gift, an adventure, a joy. You’ll feel connection, fulfillment, that deep sense of satisfaction at the end of the day that comes from knowing there is nothing else you would rather have done that day. That is the path. And if you manage to find it, don’t stray. Do the work. It isn’t always easy. It isn’t always beaches and campfires. Sometimes it’s engine repair and frustration and despair. But these moments are fleeting, they are the necessary growth, the twists and turns that reveal. Stay disciplined, stay focused, stay on the path. Let go of control and just walk the path. It will reveal itself slowly, only as much as you need to see, just keep on it, and see where it leads you. That’s adventure. That’s living.
@@ -1703,7 +1829,7 @@ Not in human terms anyway. Individual projects may come to an end, but the pract
 
 [^1]: This would be a good example of 
 
-## tk
+## No Cavalry -- what to do?
 
 
 
@@ -2422,3 +2548,20 @@ Interestingly though, what's true of a screen is also true of a book. After all
 
 A book's distraction from life is much less consuming than a computer screen. It is a single story. Its depth is limited. A book ends on the final page. The boundary of its world is well-defined. We known our way in, we find our way out just as easily.
 
+## Back to X11
+
+Earlier this year I upgraded my Lenovo laptop with a new, larger SSD. Video takes a staggering amount of disk space. In the process I decided to completely re-install everything. It had probably been at least five years since I've done that.
+
+Normally I would never say anything about this because really, the software you run is just a tool. If it works for you then that's all that matters. However, since I once disregarded this otherwise excellent advice and wrote about how [I use Arch Linux](https://luxagraf.net/src/why-i-switched-arch-linux) and [Sway](https://luxagraf.net/src/guide-to-switching-i3-to-sway), I feel somewhat obligated to follow up and report that I still love Arch, but I no longer run Sway or Wayland. 
+
+I went back to X.org. Sorry Wayland, but much as I love Sway, I did not love wrestling with MIDI controller drivers, JACK, video codecs and hardware acceleration and all the other elements of an audio/video workflow in Wayland. It can be done, but it's more work. I don't want to work at getting software to work. I'm too old for that shit. 
+
+I want to open a video and edit. I want to plug in a microphone and record. If it's any more complicated than that -- and it was for me in Wayland with the mics I own -- I will find something else. Again, I really don't care what my software stack is, so long as I can create what I want to create with it.
+
+So I went back to running Openbox with a Tint2 status bar. And you know what... I really like it.
+
+Wayland was smoother, less graphically glitchy, but meh, whatever. Ninety-five percent of the time I'm writing in Vim in a Urxvt window. I even started [browsing the web in the terminal](https://luxagraf.net/src/console-based-web-browsing-w3m) half the time. I need smooth scrolling and transitions like I need a hole in my head. 
+
+That said, I did take all of Sway's good ideas and try as best I could to replicate them in Openbox. So I still have the same keyboard shortcuts and honestly, aside from the fact that Tint2 has more icons than Waybar, and creating "desktops" isn't dynamic, I can't tell much difference. Even my battery life seems to have improved in X11, and that's why I switched to Wayland in the first place, was the better battery life I was getting. Apparently that's not true with this laptop (a Lenovo Flex 5, as opposed to the X270, which does get better battery life under Wayland).
+
+Anyway, there you have it. X11 for the win. At least for me. For now.