jrnl: added fort pickens post in final form

1 files changed, 847 insertions, 597 deletions

diff --git a/scratch.txt b/scratch.txt
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--- a/scratch.txt
+++ b/scratch.txt
@@ -59,8 +59,6 @@ One of the chief questions in my mind right now is how that gap will evolve in t
 
 
 
-# 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. 
@@ -197,34 +195,286 @@ When you live in a small space you have to be organized. Everything needs a plac
 
 People have forgotten how important the sun is. You can die from lack of sun. 
 
-## Cold Christmas Walk
+## cuts from wired piece
 
-After a week at Grayton we moved down the coastline to our favorite place in the Florida panhandle: St George Island. This is the wildest, least developed area I know of in the Florida panhandle. We've visited St. George more than any other spot and we never tire of it. We'd spend more time here if we could, but it's not a big campground and everyone wants to be here.
 
-This is where we holed up for the cold front that swept across the United States around Christmas. Even down here the panhandle, where the clear tropical waters still looked inviting, the temperature dipped into the low 20s. I had to put on socks for a week and regular readers know how I feel about socks.
+[[SEE COMMENT: 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.
 
-The problem with cold is that it tends to keep me indoors -- I have to fight a tendency to sit around in the bus that doesn't exist when the weather is warm. To avoid falling into the trap of inaction I forced myself out on a long walk in the cold. There's a trail leading right out of the campground here to a point that sticks out into the Apalachicola Bay. It's a wide sandy trail through a slash pine forest. I've been quite sure what species "slash" pines are. The name comes from the turpentine making process, which involves slashing the tree to collect the sap, but there are several species capable of making turpentine. 
+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." 
 
-Whatever the case the tall pines are popular with Bald Eagles. I saw four in the five miles I walked. Along with seemingly every yellow rumped warbler in America. I mostly stopped birdwatching while I was here, mostly because every little bird I saw flitting in the bushes turned out to be a yellow rumped warbler. Florida in winter is just yellow rumpled warblers all the way down.
+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.]]
+[[Could cut or trim Crawford from above, and then move this paragraph here?: 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 ]]
 
-Despite the cold and the wind I saw a suprising amount of wildlife out and about, even a little yellow rat snake that came out to grab a bit of sunshine and maybe a bite to eat before the freezing cold of Christmas Eve set in. 
 
-Gap point, as the end of the trail is called, was a windy, wild place when I was out there on Christmas eve. I had the place to myself, save for the occasional circling eagle.
 
-While I'm not fan of the cold, if it *has* to be cold, Christmas is the time to do it I suppose. It does feel right for the world to be cold on Christmas. Maybe even snow. But that didn't happen. We had a good holiday anyway.
 
-## cuts from wired piece
 
 
-[[SEE COMMENT: 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." 
+# Stories to Tell
 
-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.]]
-[[Could cut or trim Crawford from above, and then move this paragraph here?: 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 ]]
+## Pickens original
+Just before new year's, Corrinne and the kids rejoined me at Big Lagoon. We had a quiet new year's around the fire, and then the next day we headed out to the Fort Pickens portion of Gulf Islands National Seashore. 
+
+<img src="images/2023/2023-01-07_124906_fort-pickens.jpg" id="image-3292" class="picwide" />
+
+If St. George is the [best spot in the panhandle](https://luxagraf.net/jrnl/2022/12/christmas-cold), Fort Pickens is a close second. The beach that is. The park has a not so great vibe, but we mostly avoided that by not really doing anything other than going to the beach. The beach is a short walk from the campground, maybe 100 yards, but somehow in that 100 yards you leave all of humanity behind.
+
+No matter how full the campground is -- and it was close to full the whole time we were there -- there's never more than a couple people, if that, on the beach. Where does everyone go? It's something I've never understood, but I'll take it. 
+
+<img src="images/2023/2023-01-02_144135_fort-pickens.jpg" id="image-3283" class="picwide" />
+<img src="images/2023/2023-01-02_150639_fort-pickens.jpg" id="image-3284" class="picwide" />
+
+After a couple of cloudy, but still warm days, which we spent playing soccer on the beach and attempting to make parachutes, we hit a stretch of the kind of warm, sunny days you dream of when you come to Florida in January. For a solid week it was like winter didn't exist. We swam, played, and laid around the beach, relaxing. It really was one perfect day after another. 
+
+<img src="images/2023/2023-01-03_171004_fort-pickens.jpg" id="image-3288" class="picwide" />
+<img src="images/2023/2023-01-03_065400_fort-pickens.jpg" id="image-3286" class="picwide" />
+
+The only flaw was the people running Fort Pickens. This was the topic of nearly every conversation I had with fellow campers or overheard. It was mind blowing honestly. We've been all over this country, stayed in 100s of campgrounds, including this one years ago, and never encountered anything like this. As one woman put it, "it's like everyone here is out to get you."
+
+That sums it up well. Fort Pickens is the most uptight place we've ever been. If you go digging through reviews you can read stories of crazy experiences people have had. Camp hosts measuring rigs to ensure they're under the site limit (even if they fit in the site), camp hosts telling people they've done something wrong and then flexing their muscles to the other camp hosts, showing off their power. Wild stuff, utterly ridiculous sorts of things I never knew people did after high school. 
+
+For reasons I can't explain, we were left alone. But some friends of our came down to visit and they ran afoul of the Fort Pickens gestapo. Their kids climbed up in a tree to read. Heaven forbid. The camp host came over and said, "I'd rather you didn't climb the tree, there could be nesting birds." Now, set aside for a moment the fact that our friend is a botanist with the U.S. Forest Service, in addition to an avid birder, and is well aware, as anyone who knows anything about birds or seasons, that no songbirds are nesting down here right now. What irked me (I was not there to respond) was that "I'd rather you didn't" bit. You're a camp host. I don't give a damn what you'd rather I do.
+
+<img src="images/2023/2023-01-04_170306_fort-pickens.jpg" id="image-3291" class="picwide" />
+<img src="images/2023/2023-01-12_142906_fort-pickens.jpg" id="image-3293" class="picwide caption" />
+
+As you might expect from a place where people feel the need to flout their petty powers, there are more rules here than anywhere else we've ever been. Also as you might expect, the condition of things at Fort Pickens is abysmal. There are bathrooms here so moldy they need to be condemned. But again, this is what you'd expect right? The more concerned leaders are with meaningless minutia, the more they can avoid looking at the crumbling big picture, and the more they hire the kinds of people who yell at children and don't do their job cleaning the bathrooms. 
+
+Now, lest you think we had a horrible time, bear in mind that I was lying on a mostly deserted white sand beach in the warmth of a 75 degree January day idly thinking about these things. There are worse problems than this for sure. Still, reflecting on what was happening back in the campground I realized Fort Pickens is a great lesson in what happens when leaders fail.
+
+I find leadership fascinating. When I was younger people used to tell me I'd make a good leader. I still have no idea why. At the time I barely had any idea what a leader did, let alone whether I'd be any good at it. As believer in the sanctity of individual freedom, I was pretty sure I didn't want to be a leader because that would involve telling other people what to do, thus infringing on their liberties. Not for me.
+
+It wasn't until I was much older that I realized my understanding of leadership was essentially a Marine Corp drill sergeant screaming at people. And that *is* a form of leadership. But it was developed for a singular purpose: turning a huge swath of young humanity from all kinds of backgrounds into United State Marines. In six weeks. By all accounts it works. To make Marines. It's a poor way to run a campground though.
+
+When you yank that sort of blunt, thoughtless leadership out of the Marines and put it in real life all you really reveal is something about yourself -- that you have no power. Your power is proportional to your ability to relax. If you can't relax about something harmless, whether against the "rules" or no, then you have no power. You cannot make your own decisions, which means you have no agency. That means you have no control. When you have no control you seek to exert control over others because it makes you feel more in control. But you aren't. This is elemental psychology. We all know this when we see it in others, but we're alarmingly blind to it in ourselves.
+
+Chances are the camp host's boss is a bad leader. And that person's boss is a bad leader. And so on up the chain. That's a reason for the situation as it is, but that's no excuse. We all know better than to be that guy, and yet we all do it in little ways, exerting our power over other people so we feel in control. That's the opposite of control.
+
+What's strange to me, what worries me, quite frankly, is that no one challenges the situation at Fort Pickens. Including me. Surely the grown men and women working in the campground at Fort Pickens must realize their powerlessness, at least intuitively. Why do none of the rest of us say, *hey, man, what are you doing? Why did tell that kid to get out of tree? With all the problems of childhood these days, do we need to add climbing a tree to the list? And really, is that why you were put here on earth, to keep kids out of trees?*
+
+I'm guessing even this guy would say no, that's not his life's mission. I hope anyway. I hope he's not so far gone that he really does enjoy yelling at children. I plan to ask him if he ever tells my kids to get out of a tree. Not to be rude, but because I want to understand. I want to understand how he got to where he is. My guess is, where he is isn't a very happy place. And yet he lives in one of the most beautiful beaches in the country.
+
+<img src="images/2023/2023-01-03_062727_fort-pickens.jpg" id="image-3285" class="picwide" />
+
+My point here isn't that Fort Pickens sucks. I mean, it kinda does. But the larger point is that we as a culture are headed to dark places when we get this obsessed with pointless power and blindly enforcing rules, with no idea why, the *just doing my job* logic prevails well outside this campground. This is the same thinking that underpinned the rise of all the horrible despots of the 20th century. All of them got where they got with the backing of legions of people who said the four most dangerous words in the English language: I'm just following orders.
+
+It's not just that people are following orders. That's bad, but even worse, people find a way out of their own powerlessness through the tiny bit of power they get by enforcing orders. That's the danger. What starts as a perceived necessity ends in a perverse pleasure. One people don't like to let go of.
+
+I'm not sure how Fort Pickens got this way. Perhaps the superintendent is a bad leader. Perhaps he is taking over from a bad leader. Perhaps the land itself is tainted. Battles were fought here. Geronimo was imprisoned. The past leaves a mark on the land, colors the character of the people who live on it. 
+
+I know, I know. More travel, less philosophy. Why bother saying any of this? Because I believe that if we don't start questioning the people who are just following orders. Not to be rude or mean. Not because we think we're better, but because it's how we snap each other out of our trances. I don't see when I'm being this way. My family confronts me. I snap out of it. If we don't do this for each other, if we don't call each other out, we'll never snap out of it. And if we don't snap out of it, well, we already know how that ends.
+
+## Fort Pickens Final
+
+Just before new year's, Corrinne and the kids rejoined me at Big Lagoon. We had a quiet new year's around the fire, and then the next day we headed out to the Fort Pickens portion of Gulf Islands National Seashore. 
+
+<img src="images/2023/2023-01-07_124906_fort-pickens.jpg" id="image-3292" class="picwide" />
+
+If St. George is the [best spot in the panhandle](https://luxagraf.net/jrnl/2022/12/christmas-cold), Fort Pickens is a close second. The beach that is. The park has a not so great vibe, but we mostly avoided that by not really doing anything other than going to the beach. The beach is a short walk from the campground, maybe 100 yards, but somehow in that 100 yards you leave all of humanity behind.
+
+No matter how full the campground is -- and it was close to full the whole time we were there -- there's never more than a couple people, if that, on the beach. Where does everyone go? It's something I've never understood, but I'll take it. 
+
+<img src="images/2023/2023-01-02_144135_fort-pickens.jpg" id="image-3283" class="picwide" />
+<img src="images/2023/2023-01-02_150639_fort-pickens.jpg" id="image-3284" class="picwide" />
+
+After a couple of cloudy, but still warm days, which we spent playing soccer on the beach and attempting to make parachutes, we hit a stretch of the kind of warm, sunny days you dream of when you come to Florida in January. For a solid week it was like winter didn't exist. We swam, played, and laid around the beach, relaxing. It really was one perfect day after another. 
+
+<img src="images/2023/2023-01-03_171004_fort-pickens.jpg" id="image-3288" class="picwide" />
+<img src="images/2023/2023-01-03_065400_fort-pickens.jpg" id="image-3286" class="picwide" />
+
+The only flaw was the people running Fort Pickens. This was the topic of nearly every conversation I had with fellow campers or overheard. It was mind blowing honestly. We've been all over this country, stayed in 100s of campgrounds, including this one years ago, and never encountered anything like this. Fort Pickens is the most uptight place we've ever been. If you go digging through reviews you can read stories of crazy experiences people have had. Camp hosts measuring rigs to ensure they're under the site limit (even if they fit in the site), camp hosts telling people they've done something wrong and then flexing their muscles to the other camp hosts, showing off their power. Wild stuff, utterly ridiculous sorts of things I never knew people did after high school. 
+
+I'll confess the first time I read that stuff I thought to myself, boy, these reviewers really like to complain. Plus I know every park has to deal with plenty of problematic people. But then, the more park staff I met the more I found myself thinking, wait, why was that person so rude? My general default reaction in those kinds of situations is to think, *gosh, that person must be having a bad day, they must not be [on their path](https://luxagraf.net/jrnl/2022/01/path), that's too bad*. Still, that's just one person, I generally go on my way without another thought. But then it was two people. And then three. And then there comes a point where you realize it's not the reviewers, it's not you. It really is just totally bonkers here. As one woman put it, "it's like everyone here is watching you from behind a dune, waiting for you to do something wrong."
+
+<img src="images/2023/2023-01-04_170306_fort-pickens.jpg" id="image-3291" class="picwide" />
+<img src="images/2023/2023-01-12_142906_fort-pickens.jpg" id="image-3293" class="picwide caption" />
+
+It's no way to live. For the people working here that is. For reasons I can't explain, we were mostly left alone, but it was still a strange place. And it wasn't just camp hosts, it was systemic. From the moment you arrive here there is none of the usual "welcome to your national parks!" enthusiasm we have found at every other park. Here everyone makes you feel as if you are a burden the staff has to bear. You also get the feeling they see everyone as someone who's out to screw them over somehow. At least that's how you feel. The sooner they can catch you doing something wrong, the sooner they have a reason to get rid of you. 
+
+Still has a great beach though.
+
+<img src="images/2023/2023-01-03_062727_fort-pickens.jpg" id="image-3285" class="picwide" />
+
+I'm not sure how Fort Pickens got this way, it certainly wasn't this way when we were here in 2017 and 2018. Perhaps the new superintendent is a bad leader. Perhaps the land itself is tainted. Battles were fought here. Geronimo was imprisoned. The past leaves a mark on the land, colors the character of the people who live on it. Sometimes places are like that, you just have to ignore it and carry on, which is what we did. We're just passing through, though we will be back again next month, and the month after that, so we'll see. If all else fails we'll just spend more time on the deserted beaches.
+
+Part of the reason we didn't pay much attention to the shenanigans of For Pickens is that we had company. Some friends of ours from Wisconsin came down to visit, spending a week with us at Fort Pickens. The kids got to reunite most of the pack they ran around in all summer in Washburn and the adults got to spend the days in relative peace on the beach. 
+
+<img src="images/2023/2023-01-11_145419_fort-pickens.jpg" id="image-3294" class="picwide" />
+
+One of the things I think people don't understand about traveling the way we do is how quickly you can become very close friends with people. These friendships often, in my experience, prove more durable and long lasting than any other. The crucible of shared experience is in my opinion far better than shared time. I am still in touch with people I traveled with 20 years ago and feel like I know them far better than some people I've lived nearby for those same decades. The same is true for children, as far as I can tell. 
+
+<img src="images/2023/2023-01-14_131258_fort-pickens.jpg" id="image-3295" class="picwide" />
+<img src="images/2023/2023-01-14_133400_fort-pickens.jpg" id="image-3296" class="picwide" />
+
+The difference is that our kids have been doing this for more of their life than I have, which has given them an ability to form friendships quickly. That's a skill I wish I had. I know some of that is just being a kid, but even then, the process has never come easy for me. Luckily, in the this case, the apples fell far enough away from the tree that I don't have to worry.
+
+## Pickens new 
+Just before new year's, Corrinne and the kids rejoined me at Big Lagoon. We had a quiet new year's around the fire, and then the next day we headed out to the Fort Pickens portion of Gulf Islands National Seashore. 
+
+<img src="images/2023/2023-01-07_124906_fort-pickens.jpg" id="image-3292" class="picwide" />
+
+If St. George is the [best spot in the panhandle](https://luxagraf.net/jrnl/2022/12/christmas-cold), Fort Pickens is a close second. The beach that is. The park has a not so great vibe, but we mostly avoided that by not really doing anything other than going to the beach. The beach is a short walk from the campground, maybe 100 yards, but somehow in that 100 yards you leave all of humanity behind.
+
+No matter how full the campground is -- and it was close to full the whole time we were there -- there's never more than a couple people, if that, on the beach. Where does everyone go? It's something I've never understood, but I'll take it. 
+
+<img src="images/2023/2023-01-02_144135_fort-pickens.jpg" id="image-3283" class="picwide" />
+<img src="images/2023/2023-01-02_150639_fort-pickens.jpg" id="image-3284" class="picwide" />
+
+After a couple of cloudy, but still warm days, which we spent playing soccer on the beach and attempting to make parachutes, we hit a stretch of the kind of warm, sunny days you dream of when you come to Florida in January. For a solid week it was like winter didn't exist. We swam, played, and laid around the beach, relaxing. It really was one perfect day after another. 
+
+<img src="images/2023/2023-01-03_171004_fort-pickens.jpg" id="image-3288" class="picwide" />
+<img src="images/2023/2023-01-03_065400_fort-pickens.jpg" id="image-3286" class="picwide" />
+
+The only flaw was the people running Fort Pickens. This was the topic of nearly every conversation I had with fellow campers or overheard. It was mind blowing honestly. We've been all over this country, stayed in 100s of campgrounds, including this one years ago, and never encountered anything like this. As one woman put it, "it's like everyone here watching you from behind a dune, waiting for you to do something wrong."
+
+That sums it up well. Fort Pickens is the most uptight place we've ever been. If you go digging through reviews you can read stories of crazy experiences people have had. Camp hosts measuring rigs to ensure they're under the site limit (even if they fit in the site), camp hosts telling people they've done something wrong and then flexing their muscles to the other camp hosts, showing off their power. Wild stuff, utterly ridiculous sorts of things I never knew people did after high school. 
+
+For reasons I can't explain, we were left alone. But some friends of our came down to visit and they ran afoul of the Fort Pickens dune hiders. They found something wrong with our friends. Their kids climbed up in a tree to read. Heaven forbid. The camp host came over and said, "I'd rather you didn't climb the tree, there could be nesting birds." Now, set aside for a moment the fact that our friend is a botanist with the U.S. Forest Service, in addition to an avid birder, and is well aware, as anyone who knows anything about birds or seasons, that no songbirds are nesting down here right now. What irked me (and I was not there to respond) was that "I'd rather you didn't" bit. You're a camp host. I don't give a damn what you'd rather I do or don't do.
+
+As you might expect from a place where people feel the need to flout their petty powers, there are more rules here than anywhere else we've ever been. Also as you might expect, the condition of things at Fort Pickens is abysmal. There are bathrooms here so moldy they need to be condemned. But again, this is what you'd expect right? The more concerned leaders are with meaningless minutia, the more they can avoid looking at the crumbling big picture, and the more they hire the kinds of people who yell at children and don't do their job cleaning the bathrooms. 
+
+It wasn't just camp hosts though, it was systemic. From the moment you arrived there was none of the usual "welcome to your national parks!" enthusiasm we have found at every other park. Here everyone made you feel as if you were a burden the staff had to bear. And chances are you were out to screw them. The sooner they could catch you doing something wrong, the sooner they'd have a reason to get rid of you. I saw it in the office where you checked in, the attitude of the people at the entrance gate (where we weren't even so much as offered a map, luckily we knew where to go, but if you didn't, too bad for you). I saw it in the way people were told which was to park their cars. I saw it in the way no one told the tent campers that the bathrooms were going to be shut down all day. I saw everywhere, all the time. One bad camp host would not be worth writing about. Fort Pickens is study in leadership failure.
+
+<img src="images/2023/2023-01-04_170306_fort-pickens.jpg" id="image-3291" class="picwide" />
+<img src="images/2023/2023-01-12_142906_fort-pickens.jpg" id="image-3293" class="picwide caption" />
+
+Now, lest you think we had a horrible time, bear in mind that I was lying on a mostly deserted white sand beach in the warmth of a 75 degree January day idly thinking about these things. The good news at Fort Pickens is that it's easy to avoid the staff. 
+
+But I find leadership fascinating. When I was younger people used to tell me I'd make a good leader. I still have no idea why. At the time I barely had any idea what a leader did, let alone whether I'd be any good at it. As believer in the sanctity of individual freedom, I was pretty sure I didn't want to be a leader because that would involve telling other people what to do, thus infringing on their liberties. Not for me.
+
+It wasn't until I was much older that I realized my understanding of leadership was essentially a Marine Corp drill sergeant screaming at people. And that *is* a form of leadership. But it was developed for a singular purpose: turning a huge swath of young humanity from all kinds of backgrounds into United State Marines. In six weeks. By all accounts it works. To make Marines. It's a poor way to run a campground though.
+
+When you yank that sort of blunt, thoughtless leadership out of the Marines and put it in real life all you really reveal is something about yourself -- that you have no power. Your power is proportional to your ability to relax. If you can't relax about something harmless, whether against the "rules" or no, then you have no power. You cannot make your own decisions, which means you have no agency. That means you have no control. When you have no control you seek to exert control over others because it makes you feel more in control. But you aren't. This is elemental psychology. We all know this when we see it in others, but we're alarmingly blind to it in ourselves.
+
+That's doubly true when everyone around us is doing the same thing. Once the leader normalizes this behavior it is very tough to transcend it.
+
+The camp host's boss is a bad leader. And that person's boss is a bad leader. And so on up the chain. That's a reason for the situation as it is, but that's no excuse. We all know better than to be that guy, and yet we all do it in little ways, exerting our power over other people so we feel in control. That's the opposite of control.
 
 
+What's strange to me, what worries me, quite frankly, is that no one challenges the situation at Fort Pickens. Including me. Surely the grown men and women working in the campground at Fort Pickens must realize their powerlessness, at least intuitively. Why do none of the rest of us say, *hey, man, what are you doing? Why did tell that kid to get out of tree? With all the problems of childhood these days, do we need to add climbing a tree to the list? And really, is that why you were put here on earth, to keep kids out of trees?*
 
+I'm guessing even this guy would say no, that's not his life's mission. I hope anyway. I hope he's not so far gone that he really does enjoy yelling at children. I plan to ask him if he ever tells my kids to get out of a tree. Not to be rude, but because I want to understand. I want to understand how he got to where he is. My guess is, where he is isn't a very happy place. And yet he lives in one of the most beautiful beaches in the country.
+
+<img src="images/2023/2023-01-03_062727_fort-pickens.jpg" id="image-3285" class="picwide" />
+
+My point here isn't that Fort Pickens sucks. I mean, it kinda does. But the larger point is that we as a culture are headed to dark places when we get this obsessed with pointless power and blindly enforcing rules, with no idea why, the *just doing my job* logic prevails well outside this campground. This is the same thinking that underpinned the rise of all the horrible despots of the 20th century. All of them got where they got with the backing of legions of people who said the four most dangerous words in the English language: I'm just following orders.
+
+It's not just that people are following orders. That's bad, but even worse, people find a way out of their own powerlessness through the tiny bit of power they get by enforcing orders. That's the danger. What starts as a perceived necessity ends in a perverse pleasure. One people don't like to let go of.
+
+I'm not sure how Fort Pickens got this way. Perhaps the superintendent is a bad leader. Perhaps he is taking over from a bad leader. Perhaps the land itself is tainted. Battles were fought here. Geronimo was imprisoned. The past leaves a mark on the land, colors the character of the people who live on it. 
+
+I know, I know. More travel, less philosophy. Why bother saying any of this? Because I believe that if we don't start questioning the people who are just following orders. Not to be rude or mean. Not because we think we're better, but because it's how we snap each other out of our trances. I don't see when I'm being this way. My family confronts me. I snap out of it. If we don't do this for each other, if we don't call each other out, we'll never snap out of it. And if we don't snap out of it, well, we already know how that ends.
+
+The solution I think is to make sure the people around you feel comfortable confronting you. I know I don't see when I'm behaving this way. I'm not behaving this way, damnit. I'm right. It's fine when I do it. But then my family confronts me. I snap out of it. That's the only way to save ourselves from ourselves -- with help from others.
+
+<img src="images/2023/2023-01-03_062727_fort-pickens.jpg" id="image-3285" class="picwide" />
+
+I'm not sure how Fort Pickens got this way. Perhaps the superintendent is a bad leader. Perhaps he is taking over from a bad leader. Perhaps the land itself is tainted. Battles were fought here. Geronimo was imprisoned. The past leaves a mark on the land, colors the character of the people who live on it. Whatever the reason, my hope is that someday soon the right person will ask the right question and another right person will snap out of it. They'll look aroudn the way you do when someone calls you out and think, *wait, what was I thinking? I'm sorry...*
+
+If we don't do this for each other, if we don't call each other out, we'll never snap out of it. 
+
+
+
+## Fort Pickens
+
+Just before new year's, Corrinne and the kids rejoined me at Big Lagoon. We had a quiet new year's around the fire, and then the next day we headed out to the Fort Pickens portion of Gulf Islands National Seashore. 
+
+<img src="images/2023/2023-01-07_124906_fort-pickens.jpg" id="image-3292" class="picwide" />
+
+If St. George is the [best spot in the panhandle](https://luxagraf.net/jrnl/2022/12/christmas-cold), Fort Pickens is a close second. The beach that is. The park has a not so great vibe, but we mostly avoided that by not really doing anything other than going to the beach. The beach is a short walk from the campground, maybe 100 yards, but somehow in that 100 yards you leave all of humanity behind.
+
+No matter how full the campground is -- and it was close to full the whole time we were there -- there's never more than a couple people, if that, on the beach. Where does everyone go? It's something I've never understood, but I'll take it. 
+
+<img src="images/2023/2023-01-02_144135_fort-pickens.jpg" id="image-3283" class="picwide" />
+<img src="images/2023/2023-01-02_150639_fort-pickens.jpg" id="image-3284" class="picwide" />
+
+After a couple of cloudy, but still warm days, which we spent playing soccer on the beach and attempting to make parachutes, we hit a stretch of the kind of warm, sunny days you dream of when you come to Florida in January. For a solid week it was like winter didn't exist. We swam, played, and laid around the beach, relaxing. It really was one perfect day after another. 
+
+<img src="images/2023/2023-01-03_171004_fort-pickens.jpg" id="image-3288" class="picwide" />
+<img src="images/2023/2023-01-03_065400_fort-pickens.jpg" id="image-3286" class="picwide" />
+
+The only flaw was the people running Fort Pickens. This was the topic of nearly every conversation I had with fellow campers or overheard. It was mind blowing honestly. We've been all over this country, stayed in 100s of campgrounds, including this one years ago, and never encountered anything like this. As one woman put it, "it's like everyone here is out to get you."
+
+That sums it up well. Fort Pickens is the most uptight place we've ever been. If you go digging through reviews you can read stories of crazy experiences people have had. Camp hosts measuring rigs to ensure they're under the site limit (even if they fit in the site), camp hosts telling people they've done something wrong and then flexing their muscles to the other camp hosts, showing off their power. Wild stuff, utterly ridiculous sorts of things I never knew people did after high school. 
+
+For reasons I can't explain, we were left alone, but it got me thinking. Whenever I see a lot of rules and people being very, well, ruley. I always think, the leadership here as failed. Good leaders don't need rules. They set a tone, they make sure the people under them understand the mission and they give those people the autonomy to make decisions on their own. None of that was happening here. This was a strict set of rules that will be enforced or else and the culture that comes from living that way, e.g. high fives when you "bust" someone sort thing.
+
+<img src="images/2023/2023-01-04_170306_fort-pickens.jpg" id="image-3291" class="picwide" />
+<img src="images/2023/2023-01-12_142906_fort-pickens.jpg" id="image-3293" class="picwide caption" />
+
+Now, lest you think we had a horrible time because of some overbearing camp hosts, bear in mind that I was lying on a mostly deserted white sand beach in the warmth of a 75 degree January day idly thinking about these things. And I didn't even think about them for more than an afternoon. But I find leadership fascinating. When I was younger people used to tell me I'd make a good leader. I still have no idea why. At the time I barely had any idea what a leader did, let alone whether I'd be any good at it. As believer in the sanctity of individual freedom, I was pretty sure I didn't want to be a leader because that would involve telling other people what to do, thus infringing on their liberties. Not for me.
+
+It wasn't until I was much older that I realized my understanding of leadership was essentially a Marine Corp drill sergeant screaming at people. And that *is* a form of leadership. But it was developed for a singular purpose: turning a huge swath of young humanity from all kinds of backgrounds into United State Marines. In six weeks. By all accounts it works. To make Marines. It's a poor way to run a campground though.
+
+When you yank that sort of blunt, thoughtless leadership out of the Marines and put it in real life all you really reveal is something about yourself -- that you have no power. Your power is proportional to your ability to relax. If you can't relax about something harmless, whether against the "rules" or no, then you have no power. You cannot make your own decisions, which means you have no agency. That means you have no control. When you have no control you seek to exert control over others because it makes you feel more in control. But you aren't. This is elemental psychology. We all know this when we see it in others, but we're alarmingly blind to it in ourselves.
+
+Chances are the camp host's boss is a bad leader. And that person's boss is a bad leader. And so on up the chain. That's a reason for the situation as it is, but that's no excuse. We all know better than to be that guy, and yet we all do it in little ways, exerting our power over other people so we feel in control. That's the opposite of control.
+
+The solution I think is to make sure the people around you feel comfortable confronting you. I know I don't see when I'm behaving this way. I'm not behaving this way, damnit. I'm right. It's fine when I do it. But then my family confronts me. I snap out of it. That's the only way to save ourselves from ourselves -- with help from others.
+
+<img src="images/2023/2023-01-03_062727_fort-pickens.jpg" id="image-3285" class="picwide" />
+
+I'm not sure how Fort Pickens got this way. Perhaps the superintendent is a bad leader. Perhaps he is taking over from a bad leader. Perhaps the land itself is tainted. Battles were fought here. Geronimo was imprisoned. The past leaves a mark on the land, colors the character of the people who live on it. Whatever the reason, my hope is that someday soon the right person will ask the right question and another right person will snap out of it. They'll look aroudn the way you do when someone calls you out and think, *wait, what was I thinking? I'm sorry...*
+
+If we don't do this for each other, if we don't call each other out, we'll never snap out of it. 
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+But some friends of our came down to visit and they ran afoul of the Fort Pickens gestapo. Their kids climbed up in a tree to read. Heaven forbid. The camp host came over and said, "I'd rather you didn't climb the tree, there could be nesting birds." Now, set aside for a moment the fact that our friend is a botanist with the U.S. Forest Service, in addition to an avid birder, and is well aware, as anyone who knows anything about birds or seasons, that no songbirds are nesting down here right now. What irked me (I was not there to respond) was that "I'd rather you didn't" bit. You're a camp host. I don't give a damn what you'd rather I do.
+
+<img src="images/2023/2023-01-04_170306_fort-pickens.jpg" id="image-3291" class="picwide" />
+<img src="images/2023/2023-01-12_142906_fort-pickens.jpg" id="image-3293" class="picwide caption" />
+
+As you might expect from a place where people feel the need to flout their petty powers, there are more rules here than anywhere else we've ever been. Also as you might expect, the condition of things at Fort Pickens is abysmal. There are bathrooms here so moldy they need to be condemned. But again, this is what you'd expect right? The more concerned leaders are with meaningless minutia, the more they can avoid looking at the crumbling big picture, and the more they hire the kinds of people who yell at children and don't do their job cleaning the bathrooms. 
+
+Now, lest you think we had a horrible time, bear in mind that I was lying on a mostly deserted white sand beach in the warmth of a 75 degree January day idly thinking about these things. There are worse problems than this for sure. Still, reflecting on what was happening back in the campground I realized Fort Pickens is a great lesson in what happens when leaders fail.
+
+I find leadership fascinating. When I was younger people used to tell me I'd make a good leader. I still have no idea why. At the time I barely had any idea what a leader did, let alone whether I'd be any good at it. As believer in the sanctity of individual freedom, I was pretty sure I didn't want to be a leader because that would involve telling other people what to do, thus infringing on their liberties. Not for me.
+
+It wasn't until I was much older that I realized my understanding of leadership was essentially a Marine Corp drill sergeant screaming at people. And that *is* a form of leadership. But it was developed for a singular purpose: turning a huge swath of young humanity from all kinds of backgrounds into United State Marines. In six weeks. By all accounts it works. To make Marines. It's a poor way to run a campground though.
+
+When you yank that sort of blunt, thoughtless leadership out of the Marines and put it in real life all you really reveal is something about yourself -- that you have no power. Your power is proportional to your ability to relax. If you can't relax about something harmless, whether against the "rules" or no, then you have no power. You cannot make your own decisions, which means you have no agency. That means you have no control. When you have no control you seek to exert control over others because it makes you feel more in control. But you aren't. This is elemental psychology. We all know this when we see it in others, but we're alarmingly blind to it in ourselves.
+
+Chances are the camp host's boss is a bad leader. And that person's boss is a bad leader. And so on up the chain. That's a reason for the situation as it is, but that's no excuse. We all know better than to be that guy, and yet we all do it in little ways, exerting our power over other people so we feel in control. That's the opposite of control.
+
+What's strange to me, what worries me, quite frankly, is that no one challenges the situation at Fort Pickens. Including me. Surely the grown men and women working in the campground at Fort Pickens must realize their powerlessness, at least intuitively. Why do none of the rest of us say, *hey, man, what are you doing? Why did tell that kid to get out of tree? With all the problems of childhood these days, do we need to add climbing a tree to the list? And really, is that why you were put here on earth, to keep kids out of trees?*
+
+I'm guessing even this guy would say no, that's not his life's mission. I hope anyway. I hope he's not so far gone that he really does enjoy yelling at children. I plan to ask him if he ever tells my kids to get out of a tree. Not to be rude, but because I want to understand. I want to understand how he got to where he is. My guess is, where he is isn't a very happy place. And yet he lives in one of the most beautiful beaches in the country.
+
+<img src="images/2023/2023-01-03_062727_fort-pickens.jpg" id="image-3285" class="picwide" />
+
+My point here isn't that Fort Pickens sucks. I mean, it kinda does. But the larger point is that we as a culture are headed to dark places when we get this obsessed with pointless power and blindly enforcing rules, with no idea why, the *just doing my job* logic prevails well outside this campground. This is the same thinking that underpinned the rise of all the horrible despots of the 20th century. All of them got where they got with the backing of legions of people who said the four most dangerous words in the English language: I'm just following orders.
+
+It's not just that people are following orders. That's bad, but even worse, people find a way out of their own powerlessness through the tiny bit of power they get by enforcing orders. That's the danger. What starts as a perceived necessity ends in a perverse pleasure. One people don't like to let go of.
+
+I'm not sure how Fort Pickens got this way. Perhaps the superintendent is a bad leader. Perhaps he is taking over from a bad leader. Perhaps the land itself is tainted. Battles were fought here. Geronimo was imprisoned. The past leaves a mark on the land, colors the character of the people who live on it. 
+
+I know, I know. More travel, less philosophy. Why bother saying any of this? Because I believe that if we don't start questioning the people who are just following orders. Not to be rude or mean. Not because we think we're better, but because it's how we snap each other out of our trances. I don't see when I'm being this way. My family confronts me. I snap out of it. If we don't do this for each other, if we don't call each other out, we'll never snap out of it. And if we don't snap out of it, well, we already know how that ends.
+
+
+# jrnl
+## Cold Christmas Walk
+
+After a week at Grayton we moved down the coastline to our favorite place in the Florida panhandle: St George Island. This is the wildest, least developed area I know of in the Florida panhandle. We've visited St. George more than any other spot and we never tire of it. We'd spend more time here if we could, but it's not a big campground and everyone wants to be here.
+
+This is where we holed up for the cold front that swept across the United States around Christmas. Even down here the panhandle, where the clear tropical waters still looked inviting, the temperature dipped into the low 20s. I had to put on socks for a week and regular readers know how I feel about socks.
+
+The problem with cold is that it tends to keep me indoors -- I have to fight a tendency to sit around in the bus that doesn't exist when the weather is warm. To avoid falling into the trap of inaction I forced myself out on a long walk in the cold. There's a trail leading right out of the campground here to a point that sticks out into the Apalachicola Bay. It's a wide sandy trail through a slash pine forest. I've been quite sure what species "slash" pines are. The name comes from the turpentine making process, which involves slashing the tree to collect the sap, but there are several species capable of making turpentine. 
+
+Whatever the case the tall pines are popular with Bald Eagles. I saw four in the five miles I walked. Along with seemingly every yellow rumped warbler in America. I mostly stopped birdwatching while I was here, mostly because every little bird I saw flitting in the bushes turned out to be a yellow rumped warbler. Florida in winter is just yellow rumpled warblers all the way down.
+
+Despite the cold and the wind I saw a suprising amount of wildlife out and about, even a little yellow rat snake that came out to grab a bit of sunshine and maybe a bite to eat before the freezing cold of Christmas Eve set in. 
+
+Gap point, as the end of the trail is called, was a windy, wild place when I was out there on Christmas eve. I had the place to myself, save for the occasional circling eagle.
+
+While I'm not fan of the cold, if it *has* to be cold, Christmas is the time to do it I suppose. It does feel right for the world to be cold on Christmas. Maybe even snow. But that didn't happen. We had a good holiday anyway.
 
 ## Birthday in Grayton Beach
 
@@ -1113,1220 +1363,1220 @@ One of the interesting things about living the way we do is that we're subjected
 Despite the gas pumps, it seems safe to say that, living as we do in the bus, we are subjected to very little advertising. This is something I generally spend absolutely zero time thinking about until we come into major American city—something we try to avoid doing -- and I am awestruck by how much advertising there is -- it absolutely saturates the environment.
 
 
-# Birds
+# essays
 
-## Carolina Wren
-I have so many Carolina wren stories it's hard to know where to start. 
+## Do It Yourself
 
-If you're ever in the eastern woods and you hear a bird singing and you think *that's beautiful, what bird is that?* there's a good chance it's a Carolina wren. 
+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.
 
-These little gregarious, brown, slightly hook-billed birds are champion singers and, insatiably curious. According to my kids we've had about ten birds come in the bus in five years of traveling.  Nine of them have been Carolina wrens[^1]. Several of them have ended up having to be rescued by hand.
 
-<img src="images/2022/wreninhand.jpg" id="image-2792" class="picwide" />
+## Safety Third
 
-Before that they used to come in our house in Athens from time to time. This one would sit on the corner of the roof singing every morning for years. 
+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](https://images.luxagraf.net/2017/2017-11-28_161158_monterey_picwide.jpg). Miller no doubt would have agreed. He might have ranked safety even lower in his decision calculus. I often do.
 
-<img src="images/2022/bird-feeder_2015-01-10_112302_01.jpg" id="image-2774" class="picwide" />
+The sticker and its motto became something of a family joke. Whenever we did something other people might have frowned on, someone would shout, "Safety third!" and we'd go do whatever it was.
 
-Well, it seemed like the same bird, but who knows. Birds do have individual songs, especially Carolina wrens, so if I had been paying attention I might know if it really was the same bird, but I didn't pay that much attention back then. Life before the road tended to run together, I lacked focus and attention. Which isn't to say the days don't sometimes run together on the road, or that I live in a state of constantly heightened awareness, just that there are more markers by which to measure on the timeline of our travels.
+Over time I began to feel less jokey about it. I've come to see our culture's obsession with safety as one of the key axes on which our world is turning, and I don't like where it's leading us. It's not a place I want to go, it's not a place I want my kids to go. I think safety first is the reason we had a worldwide panic over Covid, it's the reason so many young adults are meek and unable to handle the world, it's the reason our leaders are failing us, and it's a big part of the reason so many people are dissatisfied with their lives. 
 
-To tell the truth I didn't pay much attention to Carolina wrens until we started to travel. They were so ubiquitous I found them overwhelming. I've always thought of wrens as the more solitary creatures of the desert southwest, where canyon wrens are a familiar sound in the red rock country of Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado. But they're a familiar sound you usually hear by itself, not a chorus like you get with the Carolina wrens.
+It's also a big part of the reason we came to [depend on "experts."](https://luxagraf.net/essay/the-cavalry-isnt-coming)
 
-It wasn't until they started flying in the bus that I really started pay attention to the Carolina wren. 
+Before I get too deep though, let me just say that, if safety is at one end of the spectrum and careless idiocy is at the other, in rejecting an obsession with safety I am not suggesting the antidote is careless idiocy. 
 
-[^1]: Regardless of the actual number, only one has not been a wren, that much I know. It was a chickadee. For whatever reason, all these happened on the east coast. Perhaps western birds are more wild?
+Removing safety from your decision calculus completely would not be a wise choice. Likewise making it the top of your decision calculus is not a wise choice. As with most things, there is a third option: thinking for yourself. You can find a balance point between paranoid and being reckless, and also recognize that other people will find different balance points and that's okay. 
 
-- tree swallow
-- black capped chickadee
-- cedar waxwing
-- kingbird
-- that hawk on the ground
-- willet
-- gold crowned kinglet
-- blackthroated green warbler
+This is what I mean when I say safety third. Not that you should be reckless, but that you should demote that desire for safety.
 
+Safety third. For me this simple slogan stands in opposition to one of the dominant narratives of our time: safety first. Safety is one of the primary obsessions of our age. Our lives are littered with the tools of safety -- rules, warning labels, helmets, straps, leashes, railings, walls, disinfectants, goggles, and so on. 
 
 
-## Quotes
 
-Almost every article you'll ever find on attention will at some point repeat Simone Weil's statement that "Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.
+Safety is largely illusory anyway.
 
-"It seems to me that we all look at nature too much, and live with her too little." -Oscar Wilde, De Profundis
+Oscar Wilde once said “Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else’s opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation”
 
-The average person spends 87% of their time indoors and another 6% in enclosed vehicles https://indoor.lbl.gov/sites/all/files/lbnl-47713.pdf
 
+for what it really is and it has made me afraid.
 
 
-# Notes 
-## rules
 
-   1. Stop buying stuff you don't need
-   2. Pay off all your credit cards
-   3. Get rid of all the stuff that doesn't fit in your house/apartment (storage lockers, etc.)
-   4. Get rid of all the stuff that doesn't fit on the first floor of your house (attic, garage, etc.)
-   5. Get rid of all the stuff that doesn't fit in one room of your house
-   6. Get rid of all the stuff that doesn't fit in a suitcase
-   7. Get rid of all the stuff that doesn't fit in a backpack
-   8. Get rid of the backpack
+I should probably make it part of [my code](/code).
 
-## beauty
 
-I used to think I traveled to learn about different cultures or broaden my perspective.
 
-And those are certainly nice ancillary benefits to travel. But I’ve realized that the real reason that I travel is for the brief glimpses of beauty. Whether it’s playing soccer with kids on the beach in Mozambique or spotting my first Orca in New Zealand, my travels have provided me with these perfect moments that will hang in my memory forever. No price tag can be assigned to them, no photo can capture them – but those moments are waiting out there and every time I travel I seem to stumble into a few. That’s why I keep doing it. That’s why I’m in love with it.
 
-http://www.bootsnall.com/articles/10-02/how-i-travel-steve-bramucci.html
+Philosopher and writer [Charles Eisenstein](https://charleseisenstein.org/) astutely [points out](https://charleseisenstein.substack.com/p/pandemania-part-5), "safety mania and death phobia are signs of a disconnection from purpose and passion. **If you have nothing more important than your own life, then preserving life is left as the only purpose.**" (emphasis mine)
 
-## estuary time
 
-In nature, an estuary is the wide mouth of a river into which the tides flow, an area where the fresh water of the river and the salt water of the sea mix together. “In an estuary,” Lopez observes, “nature creates a set of organisms which are not from one side or the other, but completely different. In the same way, people who live on the Tijuana border have this kind of estuarian time. It’s not a Mexican time. It’s not an American time. It’s a different time. 
+Whatever one’s opinion of the response to the disease, what is undeniable is that so many people of influence took for granted that safety must always trump social relations and that the human being is not the center of a web of loyalties and commitments but is rather a physical fact needing technical management. Nothing, it was revealed to us, is worth risking life for—nothing. If other occasions for risk remain, this is evidently only because administration has not yet found the means to quash them. It was revealed that no danger is greater than death. It was revealed that life is sheer matter and not something else, for example, the capacity for love.
+https://www.frontporchrepublic.com/2022/06/atoms-and-the-void-review-of-interventions-2020/
+The obsession with safety is bound up in a fear of death.
 
-from geography of time, robert levine p206 note: [[rn The Geography of Time]]
+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
 
-## Storms
 
-The night I was born there was a huge storm. At least if my parents are to be believed. My mother still claims that the storm, and a broken window in her hospital room are the reason she can down with ppnemona the next day. All I know is that I have always loved storms, not just sitting and listening to them -- though I like that too -- but getting out in the them, or just before them, when the lightening is still a ways off, flashing the horizen and the dark thunderheads have obscured the light of day, the wind is starting to pick up, it's as if the world were waking up, finally coming alivve with something massive and important to say, you can literally feel it in the air, electricity and ozone are a potent mix, they smell something like freedome to me.
 
-A good storm is my favorite time to get out in nature -- camping, hiking the high country or swimming in the ocean. I've been surfing as hurricanes approached, swam in Mexico while lighten struck the sea in front of me and I still love to be out on the shore when storms arrive. 
 
-I've been thinking about storms. It's the time of year to do that here in the American South. More than stormms though, I've been thinking about what 
+Because our civilizational answer to “Why are we here?” has unraveled, many of us individually have trouble answering that question too, for the individual story draws from the collective.
 
+OK, I realize I may have risen to too high an altitude for the practical purpose of preventing the next bout of pandemania. So I will end with this: We can reduce our general susceptibility to fear-mongering by reducing the levels of fear current in society. A society ridden with fear will acquiesce to any policy that promises them safety. How do we reduce ambient levels of fear? There is no single answer. Besides, each one of us already knows how.
 
-I'm not a huge fan of torrential downpours. Snow is fun for the first three days. Torandos are so far outside anything I've experienced they remain unfathomable to me. I've been through two relatively minor hurricanes and I'm not sure I'd enjoy the full frontal assault, but a good thunderstorm is beautiful thing.
+https://charleseisenstein.substack.com/p/pandemania-part-5
 
-It's one of the things I love about the American south. Nearly every afternoon in the summer you can count on some sort of storm. Sometimes it rains, sometimes it's just lightening and thunder off in the distance, but the sky nearly always delivers around here. Occassionally it over delivers and destroys the roof of your porch, but that's how life goes, you have to accept of bad with your good, it's inevitable. And hey, now we can grow full sun plants on the porch.
 
+I think this goes to the heart of our existence... why are we here? Are we here, as the technomedia landscape would have it, to be passively entertained and coddled from birth to death? Or are we here for something more? I don't know about you, but I don't think we're just along for the ride. We’re here to stand at the helm, trim the sails and steer the ship.
 
-## recognize what is lost
+I think rejecting the world of passivity, of getting off our butts and taking matters into our own hands, of asking our neighbors and like-minded strangers how to fix things, how to build things, what's working and what isn't. All of this is on the path to rebuilding a life of value and meaning. 
 
-To recognize that what has been lost is a part of what remains, however, still leaves questions of scale and character. How large an absence are we talking about? Where do we see it's effects? What is the complete inventory of the missing? The answers to these questions not only shape the way we measure the world around us, but also help reveal the character of nature itself--including human nature.
 
-## manifesto:
+Greek Proverb which says, “A society grows great when the old people plant trees, even when they know they will never get to enjoy their shade.”
 
-walk
-take the stairs
-turn of the air conditioning
-Light a fire in the fireplace
-That which is old and useful has proven itself (like cast iron)
-That which is very old may contain wisdom.
-That which is very old may be utter bollocks.
-everything you know is wrong. including this.
-You are responsible for what you put into the world.
 
-"A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, and die gallantly. Specialization is for insects."
+---
 
-Note: I have never designed a building, butchered a hog, comforted the dying or died gallantly
+## Everything is a Practice
 
+There is no finish line. There is no winning, no losing.
 
-## Travel Cheaper
+**Everything is a Practice.**
 
-Ways to reduce travel spending:
-    * better planning means more boondocking and less money on camping 
-    * change of diet from mexico means less on food
-        - no more sausage for breakfast
-        - more tortillas, less bread for lunches
-            + bread is special occassions
-        - use oat/rice flour from bulk bins for pancakes
-        - shop mexican markets, asian markets
-        - go meatless twice a week
-        - drop organic/grass fed, eat less of it
-    * having propane fridge would mean less trips for ice, longer away from money spending opportunities
-    * doing bucket laundry to get by, with full laundry once a month would do the same (again, fewer money spending opportunities)
-    * no more lenses, amazon orders, ever.
-    * use local libraries
-    * have corrinne get meds down here.
-    * start with forays into mexico, but gradually reverse—here becomes our home base with forays into the states
-    
-    * how much less? Don't know but I think we could do 
-        - $1200/month groceries
-        - $500/month camping (if we go over, better hole up and boondock)
-        - $400/month gas (if we're headed over, better hole up)
-        - $500/month repairs and incidentals
-    * So at reliable $3000 a month we can get by pretty much anywhere
-        - Need the ability to take a serious breakdown and keep going, what does that look like?
-        - maybe $5000- $8000 savings for repairs
+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.
 
-## Systems
+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.
 
-Complex systems are inherently fragile. The optimization that makes the system "easy" to use, also generally eliminates the redundancies and graceful degadation that makes a system resilient.
-## Midlife
+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.
 
-I think there are two major tasks to be undertaken in the middle of your life, one is coming to terms with the reduced possibilities of the future, letting go of the ones you are sure aren't happening to focus on the one's that could still happen. I will never make the U.S Olympic rowing team and rather than have that missed goal rattling around somewhere in the back of my mind going, I have to address it. Rather than sitting around mumbling about how I could have been a contender I have to accept that no I could not, I tried and literally could not, and let that go so that other goals become more feasible.
+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.
 
-The other major task in midlife is to recognize the ciclical nature of, well, nature.
+The practice also informs the experimentation that expands it.
 
+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? 
 
+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.
 
-## No Reason At All
+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.
 
-"It's fun to do something for no reason at all because freedom is the foundation of all human delight... freedom of the will, the capacity to choose and act and attend for no other reason than that we happen to want to." 
+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.
 
-## Margins
+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. 
 
-You learn to live your life on the margin, that strange zone between what is known and what is not. There are some answers here, but not many, and you have to make that place your home.
+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.
 
-The margins are where you want to be though, this is where everything happens, it's where life is, where growth is. Go deep in the forest and everything gets soft and quiet, but come out to the edge and you'll find the berries and the birds and the deer and all the rest of life—inhabiting the margins. In ecology this is sometimes called a liminal zone. It's where life is in transition and biodiversity is greatest. It's where the action is and it's where you want to be.
+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. 
 
-I've learned that the future will get here at the same steady pace as it always does whether you worry about it or not. 
+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.
 
-There's a third principle I'm still meditating on, but my suspicion is that the first principle of not changing the environment around you, extends well beyond you and your immediate environment to encompass, well, everything. The ripple effects of any action are significant and we spend very little time considering them, and this is troubling.
+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.
 
-The less you alter the environment of you, the less you need to alter the environment of your home. The less you need alter the environment of your home, the less you need to alter your neighborhood, and so on. I suspect that this cascades in positive ways far beyond just turning off the air conditioning. At the same times, I suspect it cascades in negative ways as well, which is why I am still thinking on it.
+And now a little practice I wish I'd run across when I was much younger.
 
-I saw, and still see, living in the bus as a first step in a transition away from life as a "consumer". In the bus we consumed much less, that's good, but I've come to think that it's not good enough. I think I can (and should) go much farther than that. What that looks like is still taking shape, but one thing we all have right now is plenty of time to sit and think.
+---
 
+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. 
 
-## Sustainable vs regenerative
+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. 
 
+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.
 
-sustainability is about keeping things as the are, regeneration is about making things better than they are.
+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. 
 
+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. 
 
-## Close 
+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. 
 
-Y'all are going to be very close.
+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.
 
-That's what an inspector said to me once when we were selling our house and I told him what we were doing after it sold. That comment stuck in my head the whole time we traveled because he was right. Spend twenty-four hours a day every day with someone and you will be close. And we are.
+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. 
 
+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. 
 
-I want to be tested in ways I can't imagine and try to be ok no matter what happens.
+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.
 
-I looked forward to disasters, I looked forward to having to get out of tough situations. 
+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. 
 
-Now, mind you, "ok" doesn't mean happy as a clam, totally unaffected, no bad feelings ever. On the contrary, it means letting go of the reigns, opening myself up to the unknown and trusting that I had the ability to see myself through it. That's basically welcoming a whole heap of tough stuff to happen to ya. And it has. And I'm ok. Heck, I'm more than ok. I'm better than before. This whole endeavor, from the word go, has done nothing but affirmed my suspicions that we are stronger and more malleable than we ever give ourselves credit for. And no matter what, we will adjust and find a way to be ok. ⁣
+That is the beginning of the practice.
 
-Cycles. Loops. Close them where you find them. For example, heres an energy loop: sun, plants, animals, waste, plants animals, waste. Find yourself in that. For example, the sun helps plants grow, hogs eat some of those plants, hog get slaughtered and made into bacon, I eat the bacon, I crap out the bacon into a composting toilet that eventually becomes soil for the plants that grow so the hogs can eat them... this is a minimally wasteful loop. I don't want to call it closed because there are variables (water, sunlight, not having a plague of locusts decend on your plants, etc), but it is robust on scale that swings from robust to totally batshit crazy, which would be the cycle that puts bacon in a package you buy from the store.
 
-## Alt Medicine
 
-A while back someone at work mentioned wanting to write about how there is little to no regulation in the realm of "alternative" medicine and its rife with scams. I volunteered to write a rebuttal, because I'm glad alternative medicine is not regulated. I did not elaborate and I forgot all about it until someone brought it up again, this time specifically asking why I was glad there were no regulations.
 
-I will likely never write a rebuttal because for one thing it would be publishable as anything other than Op/Ed. I am not scientist by training and, lack credentials, not allowed into the debate on equal footing. 
 
-I don't hold this against science as a method of inquire, but I do very much hold it against scientists, who have become a modern priesthood controlling public discourse, just as the Catholic church did through the middle ages, the high priests of Set did in ancient Egypt, and so on through any other culture you want to cite. 
 
-There is always a priesthood setting the limits of acceptable discourse, what matters is how that priesthood (and the culture more broadly) handles dissent. How much room is there for discourse outside the acceptable? We're very fortunate to live in a culture where for the most part there are no limits placed on dissenters. I can write this, publish it where anyone can read it, and there are (currently) no consequences. I will not be burned at the stake, exiled or any number of horrible things visited on those with "unacceptable" ideas in various cultures throughout the ages. There is some risk of publishing these opinions and having them come back to haunt me at some point in the future of course, but ultimately all I am advocating for is that we continue to not punish, or censor people who hold opinions, beliefs, customs, what have you, that are considered unacceptable to the current priesthood.
+*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.
 
-## Present
+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.
 
-How do I make this while still being present. Here. Right now. In this bus, on this night, feeling this feeling?
 
-This turns out to be a very difficult problem to solve. 
 
-Writing inherently pulls you out of the moment. It has to all reflective thinking is, well reflecting on something rather than something. So there's that. But I accept that. I've been writing for so long now I've long ago forgotten what it would be like not to always be compising things in my head. There may be some negative consequences to this habit, but for me, it was what it is and I am okay with it.
 
-I am less okay with the performative aspects of creating things based your experiences. This enters a peculiar gray zone in which one must be very careful. For me, it is fine if the desire to write about something drives me to go to a place that I might not otherwise have gone to. For example I doubt I would ever have gone to tk, except I wanted to write about it. But wanting to write about it is a kind of wanting to go.
 
-The danger lies in pulling yourself out of the experience of being there by performing for the imagined audience. I try to avoid this. It works for some people. Some people are able to think about getting a great image while still enjoying themselves. I am not. I have to lose myself in those moments or whatever I try to produce from them suffers. 
+What do you care about?
 
-Which is to say I almost universally miss the great shot because I am too busy watching whatever it might be unfold. 
+Who do you want to be?
 
+What matters most to you?
 
-Things need edges, edges are a kind of contract with things. The book ends when you close it. Begins when you open it. In between there is no contract. Or not much of one?
 
-I think we have our edges wrong. Things that should have softer, indistinct edges, like our homes, have hard edges that divide us from the world. Things that should have hard, distinct edges, like tools for communicating, have no edge at all, the loops are always running, never closing off.
 
-Adding edges to the loops closes them.
+What are the most important things in your life?
 
-----
 
-Solutions I have seen work, and that I am experiementing with: 
 
-All communication happens in loops, you say something, there is a response, you respond to that response and so on. This is the communication loop. How long is the loop? I find that the longer the loop is, the better the thing I am able to produce. So where instagram has loops measured in minutes, maybe hours, maybe at the most days, I find that loop overwhelming and short. The most I can do there is put something out, I can't and don't partake in the loops there.
+Who are the most important people in your life and what do they need from you?
 
-A website I control is an infinite loop potentially. Or rather I have to create the loops, I have to set the pace. And I generally do not do well at that.
 
 
 
-Consolidate data on a schedule, publish one thing on a schedule.
 
 
-## Step Back, Detach, Ask Better Questions
-The consumer education system has conditioned you to think in terms of products, you need to step back in ask bigger questions to find more interesting and sustainable answers. For example, the question, *should I buy this camera?* has no good answer without first asking *how to I create photos that make me happy?* It may be that some particular camera really does help in that quest, but more likely, it doesn't. More likely what you need to learn is technique and acquire skills like composition and reading light.
 
 
-##From Ben Falk's book:
 
-•	104 nuclear reactors in 31 states, operated by 30 different companies. Every single one “temporarily” storing high-level waste that will be lethal for 10,000 to 24,000 years
 
-•	40,000 to 80,000 (exact number unknown) chemical factories producing or processing materials with multiple “compounds known to be carcinogenic and/or mutagenic”
+Your higher self is the part of you that continues from one incarnation to the next, that was around long before you were born and will still be aroung long after your current body dies. While you’re alive, unless you’re engaged in very intensive spiritual practices, your higher self is basically asleep and dreaming, and your life is its dream. The great secret of the higher self is that it’s you — the real you — and the personality you think you are right now is like the personalities you sometimes have in your dreams at night. When your current body dies, you’ll wake up out of the dream and say, “Wow, that was interesting,” and then go on to other things.
 
-•	More than 40 weapons-testing facilities and 70,000 nuclear bombs and missiles
+David BTL, nope. The mess that is your psyche is exactly what it should be: the raw materials you have to work with, the pieces of the kit you need to assemble. It just looks screwed up because you’re beginning to glimpse what it can become once you fit all the pieces together where they belong.
 
-•	104,000,000 cubic meters of high-level radioactive waste from weapons-testing activities alone
+[^1]: The world in this case consisting of both material and other realities.
 
-•	925 operating uranium mines
 
-•	20 to 30 times the average historical background rates of mercury in rain
 
-•	2,200 square miles of excavated valleys and leveled mountains in Appalachia alone
 
-•	478,562 active natural gas mines in the United States in 2008, with 1,800 expected to be drilled in the Marcellus Shale of Pennsylvania alone in 2010
 
-•	18,433,779,281 cubic feet of trash per year, or 100,000 acres of trash one-foot deep per year, or about 250 square miles, with trash 400 feet deep
 
 
+The One True Dictionary defines practice as:
 
-## Novelty and place
+    > Frequently repeated or customary action; habitual
+      performance; a succession of acts of a similar kind;
+      usage; habit; custom; as, 
 
-It's one Barry Lopez spends some time on in *Artic Dreams*, noting that for natives of the Arctic Circle, "land does... what architecture sometimes does for us. It provides a sense of place, of scale, of history." Architecture has never done much for me, but I've been known to try constructing a cathedral of words to describe simple things, the way a blade of grass bends in the wind.
 
-Lopez's thought jumped out at me because I catch myself telling stories the wrong way these days. More and more I notice how much of the stories I tell are not what happened, but where it happened. I have developed a need to locate the past in space as well as time. I have to watch out for this because I've noticed many people find it annoying. I can watch their minds wander as I talk. I lose them.
+The three examples happen to all be practices I pursue
 
-You gain a sense of place by merging into it, however briefly, in way that can only be done by giving up familiarity. Novelty sharpens the experience of place. Perhaps because we evolved to be wary of the novel, to be on edge in experiencing the unfamiliar. All that grass doesn't matter, that one part where it's novel, that one part where there are no shadows when there should be shadows. That's a lion. Novelty is bad in that sense. 
+Not in human terms anyway. Individual projects may come to an end, but the practices that made them possible do not. Most things worth doing do not have a stopping point. There is no point where you've written enough, you've worked out enough. Everything is a practice. Embrace it. The practice is never done, which means you get to keep improving.
 
-Now the evolutionary threat is largely gone though novelty becomes useful. It a grindstone sharpening your experience of place until it comes to the foreground. You notice what was not there yesterday. It's not a lion anymore, but still you notice.
+[^1]: This would be a good example of 
 
-## Maps
+## No Cavalry -- what to do?
 
-“Some for one purpose and some for another liketh, loveth, getteth, and useth Mappes, Chartes, & Geographicall Globes.”—John Dee, 
 
-source: https://www.theguardian.com/travel/2019/oct/20/the-perfect-combination-of-art-and-science-mourning-the-end-of-paper-maps
 
 
-## Immersing yourself
+Once you accept that there is no cavalry coming, or perhaps more conservatively, that you don't need a cavalry to come, or, at the very least make the decision that you want to life your life in such a way that you don't *want* to need a cavalry, the question arises: what then do I do? How do I get from where I am, to that state of mental, physical, and spiritual security? 
 
-In his book, <cite>Written in the West</cite> Wim Wenders talks about improving photography by completely immersing yourself in what you see, "no longer needing to interpret, just looking." I find that it's not just photography that can be enhanced this way, but all of life. All you need to do is let go and look. Let go of any agenda and just walk (or sit) and watch the world around you. The world is endlessly fascinating. Even the parts you don't like, like Texas. Step back from the  things you want, the things you think you need, the things you think you should do, and a new range of possibilities opens up. 
+Another way to put this would be: How do I begin to take responsibility for and become accountable for myself, my family, my world?
 
-## travel with kids
+I have no idea. Which is to say that I know what I am doing for those things, but I don't know what you should do -- that's for you to figure out. If I told you what to do you'd just be dependant on me, no better off than being dependant on the cavalry. 
 
-"As with any thing, the needs of small people are different, and the same, as big people.  They thrive on novelty, on the right amount of ease and challenge, and struggle with boredom.  They find it hard to regulate when hungry or tired.  These needs are simply scaled down.  Adults, especially adults who have been around a bit, like to see what is between two mountains by viewing it from all sides.  Little people and their minds are content with seeing the two mountains via their emissaries, the little rocks which have fallen off into the valley in between.  Little people almost do well getting outside and having an adventure, again, today, but once things proceed much beyond a few miles the wants of the little become subservient to those of the big.
+No one can tell you how to get on the path to self-dependency because no one other than you knows what your path to self-dependency looks like. You have to find it. And you'll know when you have. Find it is the fun part. Don't worry if it takes a while. It took me the better part of two decades. But I know people who figured it out much quicker.
 
-Which reminds us that adventure, especially in the internet age, is always found in the mind anyway.  There is nothing more adventurous than trying, really trying, the impossible task of understanding another person.  Is this task more weighty with progeny than with a spouse?  Your answer tells everything.
+So I am not going to prescribe some recipe for how you can take responsibility for your world, but I am going to tell you something that might help you figure out your own path: you first have to reclaim your time. One of the things that keeps us dependant on the cavalry is our perceived lack of time to do anything about it. How are you going to learn how to rebuild your leaf blower motor when you work 9-5 and spend an hour on each side of that commuting? From 8-6 you have no time for leaf blowers. Throw in breakfast and dinner and suddenly from 7-7 you have no time for anything else.
 
-Understanding the two of them at home is simply easier, if by easier I mostly mean more predictable.  With answers readily accessible.  Beyond that, after deciding have we the adults sufficient energy, sufficient motivation, sufficient bravery to take everyone and everything important out into the woods this weekend, it becomes a question of matching big person ambition and rules to little person energy. " - https://bedrockandparadox.com/2019/08/31/the-veneration-of-lameness/ 
 
-## Universal Druid Prayer 
 
-It appears in several forms; the one most often used in AODA runs like this: 
+How do you find time to build relationships with your neighbors when you spend 12 hours (or more) of your waking day working?  
 
-Grant, O Holy Ones, thy protection
-And in protection, strength;
-And in strength, understanding;
-And in understanding, knowledge;
-And in knowledge, the knowledge of justice:
-And in the knowledge of justice, the love of it;
-And in that love, the love of all existences;
-And in the love of all existences, the love of Earth our mother and all goodness.
 
-And yes, it's a good intro to any sort of communion with the deities.
+In the first essay on this subject I suggested that you stop using money to meet all your needs. That is, begin to build relationships with people such that you can begin to meet some of your needs by offering something of yourself to others. I don't know what that might look like for you, but here's a quick example: when we lived out in woods in South Carolina much of the land surrounding our house was leased to a hunt club. In exchange for keeping an eye on the area, we were free to hunt. Actually we were offered other people's deer, though we had to decline for lack of freezer space. 
 
-## difference between in the streets and closed door cultures
+If you live in Manhattan this scenario isn't going to come up. But if you start trying to meet people, to listen to them, you will build relationships that lead to things like this. Perhaps not free food, perhaps it will end up being chess lessons or tk, but it will be something and your life will be richer, and slightly, ever so slightly less dependant on the system of The Machine.
 
-> Go to Africa, Latin America, the backwoods of China, SE Asia … it’s easy to make friends: all you need to do is walk down the street with your head up. These are “in the streets” cultures. Europe, on the other hand, is a “closed door” culture. That doesn’t mean that people are not nice. It’s just that they don’t have the social avenues that allow for on the fly engagements with people they don’t know. Talk with someone there and they ask the question, “What does this guy want? Why is he talking to me?” Start talking with someone you don’t know in Haiti and it’s just something normal and ordinary — everybody is talking with everybody anyway. -Wade Shepard
+This will also give you agency. You are the one with the connection to others, nothing is mediating that. This is agency. Agency reduces stress. It helps you to see bad things, bad situations for what they are: bad situations. When you have agency and the self-confidence that it, along with experience, give you, you begins to see that with sufficient resources -- time, effort, knowledge, money, etc -- any problem can be solved.
 
 
-## Octavio Paz quote
 
-> Modern man likes to pretend that his thinking is wide-awake. But this wide-awake thinking has led us into the maze of a nightmare in which the torture chambers are endlessly repeated in the mirrors of reason. When we emerge, perhaps we will realize that we have been dreaming with our eyes open, and that the dreams of reason are intolerable. And then, perhaps, we will begin to dream once more with our eyes closed. <cite>&ndash;Octavio Paz</cite>
+## The Cavalry Isn't Coming
 
-## Stopping travel
+The Cavalry isn't coming. This is the lesson 21st century America is trying to teach us. We are going to have to re-learn how to depend on ourselves and on each other. There is no one else. That's okay. We don't need anyone else.
 
-Full time travelers who stop traveling, regardless of how long or why, tend to feel like we've failed somehow. Which is silly, but I'm no exception. I feel it anyway. I have been feeling it lately. 
+Self-reliance backed up by tight community bonds used to be the norm. You depended on yourself, your family, your community, because who else was there? So far as I can tell from reading history this was most people's outlook until roughly the middle of the 20th century. That's when a number of things happened that changed how people saw themselves and their communities.
 
-I like living on the road for two main reasons. One, we spend more time outside. There is nothing so valuable as spending all day outside. Two, it satisfies a pretty basic curiosity: what does it look like around that bend? What is the view like from the other side of the hill? What does the river sound like down in that valley? What is like to wake up in middle of the desert? How does it feel to fall asleep in the sand listening to the sea? How does it feel sitting in the shade of a sandstone overhang where someone else sat thousands of years ago? What's the scent of an aspen forest in a downpour? How does the sandstone feel on your fingertips after the thunderstorms pass? 
+Around then things began to centralize and as they did the solutions people had always relied on weren't suddenly found wanting. Self-appointed experts stepped in to tell us how things should be done. How we should eat. How we should live. How we should love. Sometimes the experts had good ideas. But often they did not. And even when their ideas were good, there was an unintended consequence to listening to the experts: communal bonds were weakened, people were deprived of skills, people questioned their instincts. Soon people believed they needed experts for everything.
 
-So to answer that question everyone keeps asking me: yes I miss living in the bus. And to answer the follow up question, yes, we're going to get back to that eventually. At the moment we're in San Miguel.
+The world according to experts is a world that depends on those experts, the cavalry. The people we mean when we say "they'll think of something."
 
+Except that as we've all witnessed in the last twenty years, they won't think of something. They're out of ideas. Worse, the old ideas don't work anymore. The world of the expert is collapsing all around us. The cavalry isn't coming because the cavalry doesn't know how to ride anymore.
 
-We were going to spend the winter down here, stay warm, improve our Spanish a bit and go back to the bus when it warmed up a little. Then we were going to spend spring traveling the southwest desert, see some areas of Arizona, New Mexico and Utah that we hadn't seen yet, and then head up to Wyoming, Idaho and Montana when it got hot, and spend summer at higher, cooler elevations. Good plan right? Well.
+For four years we've been driving around the United States, passing through all its unique regions (except New England and the Pacific Northwest) and I've noticed not only the experts are failing us, but that there are some places where that has had little to no effect on life.
 
-When we parked the bus last year we knew that before it went much further it was going to need some work. Significant, time and money-eating work. To get to the places we want to get, we need more power and less worry. The only way I've come up with to get to that point is to either drop in a bigger engine, a 440 or the like, or rebuild the 318 to get better compression, which means boring out the engine, new pistons, maybe new manifolds, probably a new transmission and quite a few other things that are not cheap. It's all doable, but it takes time and money. There's also the possibility we could move to a different rig[^1], but that again is time and money. 
+It took me a long time to figure this out because this shift, from the local community as the hub of life, to there being no hub, happened long before I was born. That is to say, the disconnected lives we all lead, depending on experts to tell us everything from what to eat to how to fix our cars, was normal to me. It was the water I lived in and I never noticed it. What I did notice pretty early on was that some places were decidedly different. Northern Wisconsin. Okracoke. Parts of the Florida Panhandle.
 
-Time and money we don't have right now. 
+We were drawn to these places and continue to return to them in part I think because they resisted the shift to expert authority that happened everywhere else. Self-reliance, independent businesses, and close knit communities still thrive in these places. These places somehow escaped the chain-storification of the world. It was refreshing. It was different. These places felt like what I wanted the future to be.
 
-I think now that true sweetness can only happen in limbo. I don't know why. Is it because we are so unsure, so tantative and waiting? Like it needs that much room, that much space to expand. The not knowing anything really, the hoping, the aching transience. This is not real, not really, and so we let it alone, let it unfold lightely. Those times that can fly. That's the way it seems now looking back. 
+I have read enough books of the American road to know that everywhere used to be like this, but I never gave much thought to how or why that changed. I assumed that chain stores took over. And they did. But I think there's considerably more underlying that simple observation, and I think understanding how it happened, how we got into this mess, is going to help us get out of it.
 
-[^1]: I have never liked driving with a trailer, but it probably makes more sense for the way we travel. We like to set up camp and then spend a few weeks roaming an area. Certain things about trailers make them better for this, like the ability to haul out your black water and go fetch fresh water without breaking camp. The other marked advantage of the trailer and tow vehicle is that when you do need a mechanic's help, you don't lose your house. But pretty sure my family would abandon me if I tried to sell the bus.
+I think it happened because not enough people resisted it. We were swept along and did not stand up to it. It's hard to avoid shopping at Walmart. So we did. And so on, until the old ways were swept aside. We prized newer bigger better because we lost sight of what life is really about. 
 
+Singular cause and effect cannot explain how an entire culture shifts, that's a subtle and multifaceted process, but it begins and ends with the choices of individuals. Millions of individuals, all of whom have different beliefs, different desires, different wills. It's important to keep this in mind because the kind of thinking that says "here's the problem, here's how to fix it" is the kind of thinking that made the problem.
 
-## Bird watching as a way to get out
+And now here we are, waiting for the other shoe to drop. We're a bit like Wile E. Coyote when he's run off the edge of the cliff but doesn't realize it yet. Ignorance of his true situation keeps him from plunging down right away, but there's always that moment when it starts to sink in. The cartoonists let his ears droop just before he confronts his situation and falls. That's about where I see modern America just now. Our ears are drooping and we know what's coming, but no one knows how high we are or how hard we'll fall. 
 
+That is a pretty dismal place to be. But I believe we can still exercise some control over that descent. We have to fall, but there are branches we can grab onto, things that can slow us down. Not as a culture, but as individuals. We can descent gradually and with some degree of grace perhaps. 
 
-"Looking for birds, in this case, means seeing the private gardens of the brightly-colored houses in a small mountain town, with their fiery pink and orange blossoms, their mango and papaya trees, and their tangled blooming vines. Birding gets you to places you can’t otherwise go, or never thought to see. It gives you access to new foods and flavors. For example, birding gives you unparalleled access to taste rare fruits and other micro-local foods." - https://www.notesfromtheroad.com/neotropics/tapir-valley.html
+Everywhere will be different, and the solutions will be different for everyone. That's what five years living on the road has taught me. There is no collective anything. There is just you and me and the rain. When I say we have to figure this out without the cavalry, don't mistake me for some alternate cavalry. I don't know what you need to do. I know some of what I need to do, but you are different. You have your own path. We need to work together, help each other, but work together and help each other down our own paths. The balance between individualism and community that has been lost, we have to restore it one person at a time. The good news is that I think we still have a chance to land at the bottom of that descent without too much damage. To understand what I mean, let me tell you a little story about an engine.
 
+---
 
+At the end of 2017, after we'd been traveling in the bus for about nine months we were [climbing up Tehachapi Pass](https://luxagraf.net/jrnl/2017/12/terrible-horrible-no-good-very-bad-week) to get out of California's central valley. About halfway up the incline there was a loud bang from the engine and the smell of burning oil. The leaking head gasket we didn't know about had leaked enough that one piston shattered and we were dead in the water. I didn't know that at the time. All I knew was that something was very, very wrong. 
 
-I don't want you to be like me. I want you to figure out who you are, how to think your own thoughts and maybe, if you're lucky, figure out what you're supposed to be doing. One of the easiest ways to get the kind of perspective you need to figure these things out is to travel, particularly outside your own  culture
+I called a tow truck and we were towed over the pass down to Mojave, CA, where we spent three weeks and over $6,000 replacing that piston and head gasket. We had no choice. While I knew how to fix some things, I was a long way from knowing how to take apart an entire engine. But, when I was signing that credit card receipt for six grand, I decided, never again. Whatever happens from here on out, I am going to fix it or we're going to sell it and find some other way to travel. 
 
-## Failure of materialism
+The bus has never been to a mechanic since. This is not meant as a slight of those mechanics who have worked on it over the years. Some did good work. Some did not. But none of them love this engine the way I do. Why should they? It's not their engine. If you love something you learn how to take care of it yourself. 
 
-I have become increasingly dissastified with the scientific materialist view of the world. I don't disagree with it, I just don't think it's the whole story. Which is to say that science provides a wonderful toolkit for exploring one of the worlds we live in, but it's a terrible toolkit for exploring the other worlds we live in. Now you could say, but we don't live in other worlds. But you're wrong. Imagine for a moment your favorite place, the warm sand of a beach, the wind through the pines on a ridge of mountains, the still heat of an afternoon in the desert, what have you. See it clearly in your mind. Hear it, the waves crashing the shore, the wind in the pines, the crunch of shoes as you walk through the gravel of the desert. Smell the salt, the pines, the sagebrush. Make it real in your mind.
+So I set about trying to educate myself on how to repair a Chrysler 318 LA engine. This was not easy. The aspirated 318 with LA heads hasn't been in a production vehicle since the late 1970s. Even mechanics in their mid 50s might never have actually worked on one. Slowly though I began to stumble across people working on them. The [Mopar A-body forums](https://www.forabodiesonly.com/mopar/) have been helpful, and several YouTube channels have taught me a ton, especially [Uncle Tony's Garage](https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC9SzQNYLqsPQGY_nbHogDDw). 
 
-What world is that? It's not the world scientific materialism describes. Add a unicorn to your favorite place. See, easy. Easy because it's a different world. It's the world of imagination. There are other worlds too. Depending on which tradition of thought you find best describes your experience there might be three worlds, or five, for ten. The model that's always made the most sense to me happens to have five world, but it's just a model. 
+But while strangers could provide some framework and theory, which it comes to figuring out what's wrong I've mainly turned to my uncle Ron who has an uncanny knack for being able to diagnose problems over the phone with very little to go on. Without him I would not know half of what I know today (which is still disappointingly little, but enough to get by). 
 
-Borges said the map is not the territory, and, while that's true, it should bear some scaled down resemblance to the territory otherwise it's not going to make a very helpful guide to the territory.
+Somewhere along the way I started to wonder what was driving me. It was partly curiosity, partly necessity, but also partly something more. Matthew Crawford's *Shop Class as Soul Craft* articulates this something more far more eloquently than I've been able to. 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 Crawford meant. There is empowerment in knowing how things work. Your stuff will never again fail you because if it does break, you can repair it. Empowerment in this case means removing the expert between you and your stuff. Your stuff is more yours, you are more in control of your stuff.
 
+Crawford calls the person who wants to fix their own stuff, the Spirited Man. In his book this figure becomes the antidote to passive consumption. Passive consumption displaces agency, argues Crawford. One is no longer master of one's stuff because one does not truly understand how stuff works. "Spiritedness, then," writes Crawford, "may be allied with a spirit of inquiry, through a desire to be master of one’s own stuff. It is the prideful basis of self-reliance."
 
+Crawford writes that 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." 
 
-## On Writing
+In the time since I read that I have literally done exactly that. I have decided I'd rather go down swinging, taking apart my valve train, rather than seeking the help of a professional. It’s not just me. YouTube and other sharing sites are littered with people teaching each other how to fix stuff. Then there are the thousands people without social media 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.
 
-What I love most about writing is the thinking that happens first, it frees your mind from itself, it gives your mind something to turn over and over, it becomes like an old friends. You look at it this way, you look at it that way, you try to figure out why it's there. For a long time it's just there. It's there when I'm putting the coffee in the moka, it's there when I stand in the shower, feeling the water on my back, it's there when I walk up the hill, threading my way around concrete telephone polls and women selling nopales and tortillas. 
+I think this goes to the heart of our existence... why are we here? Are we here, as the technomedia landscape would have it, to be passively entertained and coddled from birth to death? Or are we here for something more? I don't know about you, but I don't think we're just along for the ride. We’re here to stand at the helm, trim the sails and steer the ship.
 
-And then some part of it, suddenly you know why it's there, you know where it leads, you know what that bit is going to do and you move on to the next part. 
+I think rejecting the world of passivity, of getting off our butts and taking matters into our own hands, of asking our neighbors and like-minded strangers how to fix things, how to build things, what's working and what isn't. All of this is on the path to rebuilding a life of value and meaning. 
 
-Some times unfortunately it can take years to figure things out, which makes it hard to feed a family writing. I have done it, but I have done it by writing terrible, terrible things. Book summaries for something like Cliff's Notes, which would have been a find job if it had paid more than $.03 a word, to blog posts for people trying to get people sliding down some slimy mailing list funnel. It was all unpleasant work, but in some ways it made me a better writer. Not at craft, but at volume. If you want to feed your family using words, plan to use a lot of them. One month I wrote 80,000 words. I averaged 60,000 for an entire year and nearly starved to death.
+---
 
-You have to love to write, and you have to have the disciple to write even what you don't love. If I were you, I would get a job. If anyone had hired me, I would taken a job, but no one ever did. So I kept writing.
+We eliminate our dependence on the cavalry by becoming the cavalry for ourselves, for our families, and for our neighbors. *Être fort pour être utile* *. Be strong to be useful.  
 
-## Work
+Eliminate the central conceit of modernism—that there is a group of people you need to save you from... the world, yourself, your shortcomings, your neighbors, your neighbors' shortcomings and on down the line -- by taking responsibility for yourself and the expanding that responsibility outward to your family, to your community. 
 
-"Well, it depends on how much you love your work. 
+The message of modernism is that you're helpless and you need saving. If you want to dig deep into the psychology of this I'd say it's about what you'd expect to get when a culture takes the gods out of its religion and replaces those gods with administrative systems. We're not the first. The Romans went down this path, so did the Chinese. Read Oswald Spengler or Arthur Toynbee if the history interests you. All you really need to know though is that there's a long history showing it doesn't work. Look around you, is stuff working? No, no, it is not.
 
-After all, we’re really dealing with two separate things: 
+Everything requires high specialized skills and knowledge. This is a choice. Things don't have to be built this way. Culture doesn't have to be arranged this way. It didn't use to be this way. Even 100 years ago there were very few "experts" telling you how to live. Now even lightbulbs have to include instructions on how to change them. 
 
-The purpose of work is to create. It is to fuel your soul.
+Once you needed to be able to do a bit of everything yourself—help your neighbors build their homes, raise and butcher animals, preserve your food, fight fires, fix stuff, pull a tooth, deliver a child. All the things Robert A. Heinlein famously suggested a human being out to be able to do: "A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects."
 
-Whereas the purpose of earning money is to have enough of the stuff. How much is enough? Whatever you need to max out your happiness potential. After that, more money will not make you any happier."—MMM
+Prior to the coming of the machine age, we were able to do this stuff. It was no factor.
 
+But I know, I know, industrialization relies on specialization. Specialization means highly trained workers. Professionals are better than self-taught amateurs. Their skills can develop everything to increasing levels of complexity. And look, there are aspects of this that are good. It would take me years to learn how to machine a camshaft. I'm happy to let an expert do that because their expertise has allowed them to develop better tools and using those tools requires skills that only those experts have. Not everyone had a mill at their house. Not everyone could forge a great blade. There has always been specialization. It's the degree of specialization that's the problem. Our problems are the problems of overspecialization.
 
-Greek Proverb which says, “A society grows great when the old people plant trees, even when they know they will never get to enjoy their shade.”
+The problem with the specialization model isn't so much the specialization as the exclusion. As Christopher McDougall so eloquently puts it in *Natural Born Heros*, over time, "a subtle cancer spread: where you have more experts, you create more bystanders. Professionals did all the fighting and fixing we used to handle ourselves; they even took over our fun, playing our sports while we sat back and watched."
 
+When was the last time you played baseball? When was the last time you watched it? I know I listened to a game last week. The last time I played was in the previous century. That's sad really. I like playing. Life is playing. Not watching. What are we here for? To play or to watch? I think that will become central question of our age, at least for those that haven't found their gods. 
 
-## An Invitation
+I believe the disconnection that comes from watching life instead of participating in it is responsible for just about all our problems. Our mental health problems, our physical health problems, our cultural problems. All these things stem from being disconnected from life, from each other, from ourselves.
 
+How did we get here? We got here because we allowed other people to tell us what was good for us. And they were wrong. From diet and health to design and visions of the future, they were wrong.
 
-In 1993 I headed off to college to a quiet little town called Redlands, CA, which had a college of the same name. It was at the base of the mountains and edge of the desert. At the time all I wanted to do was spend as much time hiking, climbing and skiing as I could. Redlands was a good base camp for all that. It was also one of a handful of colleges around the country that allowed you to write your own major. I originally went because I planned to write a major that was half studying photography and half writing about nature. Basically this was when I concieved luxagraf, I just had to wait ten years for the technology that would make it possible to become widespread.
+It's time we stopped listening to them and went back to fixing stuff ourselves, taking care of each other, taking care of ourselves.
 
-Before I dropped out of Redlands, which I did after two semesters, my advisor mentored my first class in my self- written  major, which was a kind of Nature Writing 101, reading and reacting to authors I'd mostly already read and reacted to, all the usual American suspects, Thoreau, Abbey, Dillard, Lopez, Stegner, and so on. My professor was more knowledgable about this area than me though and he threw a few authors I did not know on the list. The one that's relevant now is one that remains largely overlooked by the canon of American nature writing, Mary Hunter Austin.
+---
 
-Austin traveled and lived in the Mojave desert for 17 years, studying native life, as well as spanish-american immigrant life in the region and writing defenses of both long before anyone else. But she is probably best known for a book called <cite>The Land of Little Rain</cite>, her <cite>Walden<cite> with the Mojave desert playing the role of Thoreau's pond. 
+The question becomes, how do we get back to where our grandfather's were?
 
-It's a good book, one that made me appreciate the Mojave much more than I did at the time. Since I lived in Redlands, not far from the Mojave, I was able to go out and explore quite a bit of what she wrote about. Recently, in searching for new books for the kids I discovered that Austin also wrote a children's book, called simply <cite>The Trail Book</cite>. Imagine Night in the Museum, but with Native American tales and you've got the idea. Finding this sent me off searching for more Austin, and somewhere in the early hours of the morning, bleery-eyed and half asleep at the keyboard, I ran across a digital copy of a collection of Austin's short stories called <cite> Lost Borders</cite>. What caught my eye was the dedication, "to Marion Burke and the Friends of a Long Year." 
+There isn't one answer to this. I am not here on high telling you how to find your path because that top-down model is what caused the problem. I'm not even going to tell you what I am doing because even in that I think there's a tendency to see it as a recipe.
 
-Who were the friends of a long year? What were the friends of a long year? When were the friends of a long year? It's hard to tell from the typesetting if Austin capitalized Friends of a Long Year or not, but I like to think she did, I like to think it was some kind of club. I did a little research before I dragged myself to bed and dreamed of a the friends of a long year.
+I would suggest that the first and most important thing is the realize that no one else is going to figure it out for you. The top-down, expert provides a solution system *is* the problem. 
 
+I would suggest that reclaiming control of your life, your community, your world is actually easier than you think. You are already more skilled than you think. And you are surrounded by skilled people. Find something that interests you and get better at it. Connect with other people who share your interests. 
 
+Early drafts of this had a few suggestions on specific things you could do, but again, I don't want to give you a recipe. That said, there is one thing that I think isn't intuitive, but will really open doors for you: **stop using money to meet all your needs**. 
 
-## Hard Times
+Find one problem, one thing, that you pay for now that you can either make/do yourself, or, even better can be borrowed or done with help from friends and family. The goal is to find something that puts you in a debt of gratitude to someone else. This is the basis of community—gratitude. When you are grateful to the world, you become more helpful to the world. Gratitude is a powerful motivator. It subverts one of the most powerful outside, centralized structures that we're eventually going to have to do without: currency.
 
+Your great grandparents fixed things for people, made things for people, and were grateful to receive the same from others. This formed much of the basis of community that held life together before the coming of centralization. It isn't the only thing, but it's a place to start and that's what we need to do. Start. Remember, we don't want to change the world, that's the top down thinking that got us in the mess. The goal here is to change the only part of the world you can: you.
 
-It was a hard time. My wife took a job teaching English to Chinese five year old. It was a degrading business for someone with a master's in education, dancing like a monkey (I mean that literally) for tech companies whose "training materials" had more typos than a teenager's messaging logs. It was a dark time, but one you have to put somewhere else so your children don't realize how thin the line between having food and not can be because that's stress you try to keep your children from, even if you ultimately can't. Better your child be hungry than be hungry and have to wrestle with why. There's a surface level of why, the obvious, the because we have no job, that's easy enough to explain and we did, what's harder is to look the whole system in the eye and consider it, this thing humans have built where in fact there needs be nothing of the sort. Why force people to earn paper tickets, really electronic tickets these days, not even real tickets, that can be exchanged for food, shelter, etc. Why allow such a small number of humans to own all the land? Why allow anyone to own the land at all? These are much harder questions for children to face, for anyone to face. The rest of us have time and effort already invested in ignoring these questions, in pretending that the way things are is the only way they could be, that we don't have to face them the way children do, we simply look the other way and hang our heads and dance like monkeys for the foriegn kids and collect our digital tickets and buy food for our children, or try anyway.
 
-The stupid thing is we know this isn't the only way. The status quo only seems inevitable if it's all you know and we, creators of a culture that is obsessed with past cultures, know for absolute surety that there are other ways. Pretty much any tribal society for instance—which is a huge negative value judgment in that phrase that I'll be coming back to --
+etc etc. suggestions
 
+Trust yourself.
 
+Get outside
 
+Talk to your neighbors
 
-## Meditation
+Start walking
 
-Like many people who practice meditation, it has been transformative for me. I don't talk about it much because who the hell wants to hear their friends talk about how meditation has been transformative? Even I don't want to hear that. But I'll put it here for total strangers on the internet. Weird. But anyway.
+Find religion
 
-I have experimented with many different forms of meditation, Vipassanna, mindfulness, zazen, transcendental, and others, but the one that actually did something for me, and which I continue to practice today, is discursive meditation. This is different than the mind-emptying meditation popular in the west just now. It's not mind-emptying, but rather focused, purposeful thinking (usually the full systems of thought from which the mind-emptying meditation techniques have been lifted have this sort of meditation as well, often under the name "contemplation" or similar).
 
-Discursive meditation does not require anything, but a comfortable place to sit, which might be part of the reason it's not very popular in this gear-obsessed age. A nice wooden chair works well for sitting, but anywhere you can get comfortable and relaxed works. I live in RV and don't have a nice wooden chair, so I can tell you with some authority that you need nothing more than a comfortable place to sit. No expensive retreats, no fancy buckwheat-filled pillow cushions, no special pants. Just sit down, breathe and call up whatever image or theme you're meditating on.
 
-What you meditate on varies by tradition and person. I recommend using some form of established tradition in the beginning, this will give you a place to turn when unexpected things happen. And they will. Eventually. The tradition I follow is that of hermeticism, which includes spiritual, ritual and other components as well, but discursive meditation was once [a big part of Catholicism](), and [druids](http://aoda.org/publications/articles-on-druidry/discursivemeditation/) practice it as well, which should give some idea of the range of appeal.
 
-The ability to think deeply and purposefully is one of those skills that, once you have it, you'll wonder how you ever got by without it.
 
 
-## family in mexico
 
 
-I've never lived in a culture that was so hard working an so devoted to family. These are things that I grew up hearing people talk about—hard work and family—but I've never actually seen it like I see it here. Which is not meant to denigrate people in other places, hard work is not a zero sum game, but here work and life flow together with no real strong boundaries like you'd find in the States, for example.
 
-My favorite example of this is bus drivers. In the United States if you drive a bus, you wear a uniform and, aside from your face and body shape, you are largely indistinguishable from whomever is driving the next bus. Chances are, when you get off you park the bus and go home. It's not in any meaningful way, your bus or even your work, you are by design an meaningless cog in a profit wheel where most of the profits go to someone other than you. I could make a good case that this is an awful way to live, severely limits your humanity, leads to depression and dissatisfaction with your work and life, and is one of the more profound and overwhelming problems in American culture, but we won't get into that here.
 
-Instead consider the Mexican bus driver. His bus is his bus. Her bus is her bus. The dashboard is given over to shrines of La Virgen de Guadalupe, or whomever their patron saint might be, along with photos of family, friends, wives, children, what have you. Usually there's a crucifix and some pithy quotes about god, country and most importantly, family. Mi familia, Mi Trabajo, Mi Vida, was one I saw. I don't know where the buses get parked at night, but I do know that the next day the same person is driving the same bus. Mi familia, Mi Trabajo, Mi Vida. 
 
-For me this helps to make sense of 
 
 
 
 
 
-## doing nothing
 
-I'm not going to pretend to know what Wallace Stevens was referring to by the Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is, but it has always reminded me of the fact that there are myriad complex worlds around us to which we are wholly ignorant. Not because we don't pay attention, though that may be part of it, but because we can't pay attention. There are vast existences too small to see with the naked eye. Ponds full of pond scum that have their own version of stressful jobs, political and social situations, and whatnot just as we do. They're just having it all on a very different scale, from us and happen to use chemicals instead of words to communicate. 
 
-For all you know that puddle you didn't even notice on your way into work this morning is home to a population of microbes undergoing an extremely stressful existence which they would desperately like to escape just as much as you would desperately like to escape your cubicle. 
+The solutions being proposed by the people who champion this idea are the same as they've always been: more technology, more bureaucracy, more centralized control (and not coincidentally more jobs for more experts).
 
-By the same token, the nothing that is has also always reminded me that it's entirely possible, likely even I would argue, that there are some beings out there to which our existence is about the same as the pond scum. Not insignificant or unimportant, just too small to really pay any kind of meaningful attention to. After all, pretty much everyone and everything has its own set of problems to worry about.
+We know where these ideas get us and we're done.
 
+It's popular these days to say that politics is downstream from culture, which is to say we get the politics of our culture. But as John Michael Greer often says, "it needs to be remembered in turn that culture is downstream from imagination." We have the power here because we are limited only by our imaginations and our bodies' ability to make our imaginings true.
 
-Staring at nothing isn't doing nothing. It so happens that watching the world in silence isn't something our culture considers valuable and so you and I have been trained to casually dismiss it as "doing nothing". But the more I've done it, the more I realized that sitting, "doing nothing" is actually, possibly, the secret of the world so to speak. Whatever it may be, I can say from experience that it's incredibly valuable to me now and has helped me grow by leaps and bounds as a person.
 
-I also think it offers a practical, easy way out of many of the social messes we've created for ourselves.
+https://luxagraf.net/jrnl/2019/11/land
 
-There's a lot of windbags out there criticizing the internet, especially social media, for fostering narcissism, consumer culture, intellectual bullying, and whatever other social ill gets their particular goat as it were. But it's rare that said windbags have any good ideas on how we can counteracting these forces beyond turning off the TV and internet. 
 
-To be fair, that does work. Especially turning off the TV. Few things will improve your life so dramatically as throwing your TV out the highest window you can find (making sure there's no one below). 
+---
 
-The internet though is more neutral in my view. It can be good, it can be bad, it all depends on you and how you use it. In my case I have to use it, it's how I make money to live this way. And sure I can say oh I'm only going to look up whatever technical thing I need to look up to solve a particular problem, but that ideal is very different from the messy relaity that the internet is full of interesting stuff to stare at. 
+Virtues require cultivation, but our culture has left us with somewhat untended gardens. We have undisciplined minds, undisciplined debates, and undisciplined media consumption habits. 
 
-\l
 
-Observing nature is not nothing. 
+---
 
-Which is to say all the things we as a culture don't want to talk about right now.
 
-You and I find ourselves born into a declining culture. A culture that is what Spengler would call the end of an abstraction phase that will soon start swinging toward 
 
 
-is a bit more complex than that. If you want to still use social media, try first developing humility. One easy way to do that is to create an active practice cultivating humility, for example, pending time in quiet observance of nature. Spend some time realizing that most of life care not at all what humans think, say or do, is helpful in 
 
-seems like it would require an active practice.
 
-## quotes borrowed
 
-“The pessimist complains about the wind; the optimist expects it to change; the realist adjusts the sails.” –William Arthur Ward
 
-people have been talking to gods and demons for far more of human history than they have not. - Terrance McKenna http://www.erowid.org/culture/characters/mckenna_terence/mckenna_terence_tryptamines_consciousness.shtml
 
-Because if you don’t build your dream, someone will hire you to help build theirs. https://medium.com/what-i-learned-building/1b7dfe34fced
 
-In civilizations without boats, dreams dry up, espionage takes the place of adventure, and the police take the place of pirates. -- Michel Foucault, Of Other Spaces, 1967
 
-“It’s more fun to be a pirate than to join the navy.” -Steve Jobs (quoted in Odyssey: Pepsi to Apple, 1987)
 
-The true adventurer goes forth aimless and uncalculating to meet and greet unknown fate. -- O. Henry
 
-"Do what you can, with what you have, where you are." T. Roosevelt
+I'll be honest, I don't have a lot to add that you can't find in the writings of Jacques Ellul, Ivan Illich, Lewis Mumford, Neil Postman, Wendell Berry and others who've been trying to warn us for over a century now (I also think Tolkein's Lord of the Rings is an overloked, very subtle critique of technological society that's well worth reading from that angle). If I do nothing else than inspire you to read them, I will call that success. However, I think that I'm in a somewhat unique position to observe things in a variety of places and make connections that others might not be able to see, and so here we are.
 
-“In the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship.” -- David Foster Wallace
 
-"The wilderness should be preserved for political reasons. We may need it someday not only as a refuge from excessive industrialism, but also as a refuge from authoritarian government, political oppression" -- Edward Abbey, Desert Solitaire
 
-I am the happiest man alive. I have that in me that can convert poverty to riches, adversity to prosperity, and am more invulnerable than Achilles; fortune have not one place to hit me - Sir Thomas Browne Religio Medici
 
-"You never know what is enough unless you know what is more than enough." --William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell
-But as we struggle through this crisis of legitimacy, what is left over when the abstractions start to wear thin? When I decide I don’t want to become an opiate addict and need to find something else? What about when it’s more serious than just a headache – what if it turns out to be cancer, and I don’t want to follow the standard ‘cut, poison, burn’ protocol? For me, it sometimes feels like there’s only a smoking crater where my brain should be. My mind often feels like it’s just a collection of Other People’s opinions and regurgitated sound bites. Even if I do try to pay attention to my own experiences, what I am able to perceive is limited by my analysis of the information coming in to my brain, which is itself conditioned by the habits of thought I learned from other people and my society. I filter out the information to which I am exposed. So there really is no objective truth out there! -https://www.ecosophia.net/the-truths-we-have-in-common/#comment-17128
 
-It’s when you realize that most of your opinions and ideas belong to other people that you can begin the central work of an age of reflection — the work of learning how to think your own thoughts, and assess other people’s opinions and ideas and your own with a set of critical tools that don’t depend on checking their fit to some collectively approved set of abstract generalizations. JMG
+People in the United States ignore such proposals because we tried that experiment and found out just how badly it worked. In 1961, the new presidential administration of John F. Kennedy set out to improve US foreign policy by staffing the State Department with “the best and the brightest,” which meant in the context of the time a bevy of intellectuals fresh out of Ivy League universities, full of the latest fashionable ideas in international relations. Those experts promptly led America straight into the quagmire of the Vietnam War, while loading the military with a flurry of contradictory demands that made victory impossible and withdrawal unacceptable.
 
-palm fronds, whirls, fans, crisp browned tips, peeling trunks as if the whole tree were some giant alien flower, other with trunks smooth and stalk straight leading up to bunches of fronds that look like pineapples on stilts. The can be so absolutely still when the ind doesn't blow.. The slash pine mixed in, it too has a very stright trunk, shedding its lower branches as it grows so that the long, delicate needles grow in tuffs and clumps of needle fans near the top of the tree. Here and there an oak, never a big one in the palm-dominated areas, but vaguely sickly looking oaks scratching out an existence in this sandy soil.
+One of the precepts of the last couple of centuries is that there is one answer to every problem and it is the right answer and it is the answer you are going to choose like it or not. This is more or less the central premise of what is generally called liberalism or later, when people tried to distance themselves from the failures of liberalism, neo-liberalism.
 
-Twilight is soft yellow that gradually fades up to a cool white that gets cooler and cooler blow as it climbs up the sky until it reachs the rich coblant I see up through the faint waiving of pine tops in the wind, the deep rich blue of twilight, the spirit who guides the stars into the night. The sand looks gray and soft when the sun is gone, the coean grows dark and seems to settle it's restlessness a bit as the light disappears.
 
+I want to connect the story of taking apart the bus to the individualism and closed community of the west to the idea that we have to depend on ourselves and each other, not outside help coming from on high. The old order is collapsing and those of us farthest from its center are going to lose it first. The new world starts out here on the edges, the fringes the forgotten corners of the country where the old order has never held much sway.
 
-Moo Krob Nam Ma Prow
+I recently told a story about my decision to replace the bus engine's head gasket. It was a small thing really, when you consider the realm of human possibilities, but for me it was a big thing. Still, I didn't really want to do it. 
 
-having grown up in mid-twentieth century suburbia — and then escaped! — I have a very low tolerance for the kind of boring world that comes from excess conformity and obedience to authorities. As for ways to sort through the abstractions — ah, we’ll be getting to those. - ecosophia, greer
+In that piece I made a somewhat flippant comment about no one ever stopping to help us when we're at the side of the road out west. That's been true, but it doesn't mean no one has helped us. It helps to remember that the west was built on deceit. The original inhabitants were decieved with treats that have not been honored, the people who came after them were decieved by the government and the railroads who needed them to farm in a country both knew well would never support farming. They recruited people from all over the world, people to whome the notion of living alone in a vast landscape was appealing and then, when those people turned out to want to do their own thing, not what the government wanted them to do (shocking that these independant spirits who surviced out here didn't want to do anyone's bidding) they were deceived again. And again. Perhaps the most eloquent recounting of these desceptions is the book Bad Land. I think it is important to remember these things when you are out here.
 
+That is I think, why no stops to help us. First and foremost, we are outsiders and in the current west there is more distrust of outsiders than anywhere else we've been. Justifiably I'd say. 
 
-> In a home I need walls, roof, windows, and a door that can be opened and closed. I also need a place to cook, a place to eat, a place to sleep, a place for a guest, and a place to write. More space is not better... more space attracts more stuff which eventually means less space. 
 
-> Some things make life easier, but more things do not make life more easy. More things mean more things that can break down and more time spent fixing or replacing them. 
+## Rules for Screens, Part One
 
-> Comfort is freedom and independence. Comfort is having the sweat glands and metabolic tolerance to deal with heat and cold. It is not central heating or air conditioning which may fail or be unavailable. It is not plushy seats but a healthy back. Luxury is not expensive things. It is a healthy and capable body that moves with ease with no restraints because something is too heavy, too far, too hard, or too much. It is a content and capable mind that can think critically, solve problems, and form opinions of its own.
+I have a strange page about [technology](/technology) buried on this site. Still, people find it. Something must link to it? I'm not sure how or why, but it seems to get a lot of traffic. Or at least it generates a fair bit of email. About a dozen people a year take the time to email me about the first line of that article:
 
-> Success is having everything you need and doing everything you want. It is not doing everything you need to have everything you want. If so then you do not own your things, instead your things own you. I do not need to own a particular kind of vehicle. I need to go from A to B. I do not need fancy steak dinners, rare ingredients, or someone else to prepare my meals whether it is a pizza parlor, a chef, or an industrial food preprocessor. I need food to live. Food to fuel my body and brain. Luxury is not eating at 5 five star restaurants. Luxury is being able to appreciate any food. Comfort is eating the right kind and the right amount of food. Not whatever I want. Eating and moving right prevents diseases, pains, and lack of functionality. I am what I eat and I look what I do. Everybody is. It is the physiological equivalent of integrity. To say what I mean and mean what I say. This too makes life more comfortable. Money is opportunity. Opportunity is power. Power is freedom. And freedom means responsibility. Without responsibility, eventually there is no freedom, no power, no opportunities, and no money. More importantly, freedom is more than power. Power is more than opportunity. Opportunity is more than money. And money is more than something that just buys stuff. It is simple to understand but hard to remember, but do remember this if nothing else.
+**The less technology your life requires the better your life will be.**
 
-http://earlyretirementextreme.com/manifesto.html
+I get a mix of responses to this ranging from the occasional "who are you to judge me, how dare you tell me not to play video games" (which I don't usually respond to), to the more frequent, and thoughtful, "hey, I feel the same way but I can't seem to get technology out of my life". 
 
-The Labyrinth of Solitude
-Juana Inés de la Cruz. Her superb book "Poems, Protest, and a Dream"
-Mariano Azuela's "The Underdogs"
-## Podcasts
+In crafting a response to the most recent person who wrote some variation of that comment, I accidentally wrote a massively long post I am breaking into a three-part series, retracing how I came to use screens so little, despite editing photos, writing for this site, and working for an online publication, all of which do in fact require a screen. I use screens when it makes sense to do so, but the rest of the time I avoid them.
 
-podcasts are great because you can do other things while you listen right? Like you can be doing the dishes or gardening or working on your car and listening to a podcast and that's like giving you that time that you would have spent in a book or video and now you can spend it doing two things. Now is that divided attention as good as the focused attention? probably not. so for me, I tend to combine two low lift things. I listen to a podcast on tk when I'm doing the dishes but something that requires a good bit of focus I might save for a drive. But either way this opens up a way to kind of double time your life. You want to learn about something new, but you need to weed the garden right? Well, now you can.
+We're going to start with the basic stuff. I did most of the steps in this part back in 2016 when we were getting ready to move into the bus. This is actually all the hardest things to do, because these will free up enough time that you'll find yourself staring into the void for the first time since you were a kid. Don't worry, it's good for you. Anyway, on with it.
 
-## Monohull must haves
-Here are *my* must haves for a monohul, if you want to live aboard for extended stays:
+**Luxagraf's rules for screens, part one.**
 
-Head and galley right down at the companionway.
-You don’t want to go halfway through the boat, let alone pass through cabins to reach their ensuite head, with dripping wet oilies in a heavy seaway. It has to be right at the bottom of the stairs.
+---
 
-If you like to eat in the cockpit, it’s very nice to be able to pass food directly from the galley without walking around with it.
-Also, the area in front of the companionway is usually the most stable one of the boat. Best for cooking at sea.
+## **Rule One: Throw Your Television in the Nearest Dumpster**
 
-A separate shower stall.
-Usually we like to wash from the stern but when anchorages are crowded or the weather is a little cooler it’s very nice to be able to wash inside without splashing all over the head and the sink.
+Yup, we're going to start with the hardest one. You'll notice that I am more sympathetic to not going cold turkey with other things below. Not this one. This is the absolute requirement. Kill your television. Now. Tough love people.
 
-Seats 4 at the indoor table without having to unfold table leaves or hampering mobility inside.
+But... but. Look. Here's the thing. You have this gift of life for, on average, around 73 years. 73 YEARS. You won't even last as long as the average hardwood tree. And you're going to spend that precious time watching television? No. No you're not. Not anymore. You're going to live. Find a dumpster. Put your TV in it. 
 
-All lines, especially reefing, lead aft to the cockpit so you can do the heavy weather sailing without ever leaving the cockpit.
+Okay, you don't want to put your $1,200 TV in the dumpster. Then find an old sheet or blanket and cover it up. Put some low-tack painters tape on there, make it hard to take off. That'll work for now. But get ready to eBay that thing. Or find a dumpster.
 
-Walk through transom to facilitate boarding from the dinghy with your hands full of groceries. Also the nicest way to take a swim, or for washing yourself as mentioned above.
+Now cancel Netflix, Hulu, or whatever other subscriptions you had. If you subscribe to two streaming services, that's just under $30 a month. That's $360 a year. That's $1,800 every five years. That's crazy. But now you have about $30 a month you can either save or spend on something you want. Something tangible. I mean, reward yourself if you really do this. At least buy some ice cream. 
 
-One of the smallest boats corresponding to the above whilst sporting 3 cabins, is the Beneteau Oceanis 361 that I’ve owned and loved very much. Crossed the Atlantic twice with it. You may want a Jeanneau Sun Odyssey 40 from around 1999 (the 3 cabin - 1 head layout) for a bit more payload and space in the forward cabin and twin cockpit wheels that facilitate mobility to and from the walk through transom. Otherwise a very similar boat. These are two ‘budget’ options, which seem to be the prudent choice given the description of your means. Better spend far less on the initial acquisition cost than you think you can afford. 
+---
 
-### Forward Wind Scoop 
+## **Rule Two: Make Something**
 
-Forward wind scoop: a bit of triangular canvas strung over a forward hatch between two scasions, sloping down to the deck as you move aft with a tension line to the rigging above to keep it taunt. Doubles as forward windshade and forces air down into the hatch to keep below decks cool. Keeps the air moving through. Saw this on Allied Seawind 30 on YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hRHskbdRFFs
-## CC
+If you watched television for 3 hours in the evenings, congrats you were already watching less than most people—and you stop doing that you have just reclaimed 15 hours a week. FIFTEEN HOURS! That's enough to get a part time job somewhere. It's enough time to do, lord, there's no limit to what you could do really. Start a business, write a book, read the entire canon of Russian literature. The paradox of choice can get you here and you'll end up watching YouTube for hours on your laptop. I know, I've done it. 
 
-When I first saw you I was just trying to get a cup of coffee. But then I decided I'd rather have you. 
-That proved more difficult that I thought. Once You sat in my lap once at Jason and Christy's house
-but I was pretty sure you were dating someone else and I was positive I was so that didn't go far
-but I found I rather enjoyed you in my lap. Another time we went to prom and you made out with me
-I know I was dating someone else then too but I didn't care. For years I made you many a spinach salad with salmon on it,
-even when you were eating with someone else. Then you became a picture on my refrigerator for 3 years. 
+You have to start creating something. I strongly suggest you create something real and tangible. Something you can hold in your hands. Cook yourself a fancy dessert if you like. Yeah you can even look up a recipe on a screen, don't worry about it. The internet is incredibly helpful for learning things. That's another idea. Find something you really love and learn more about it. Read everything you can about agates if that's your bag (it's my wife's bag). But do it by checking books out from the library, not by reading on your phone.
 
-Once when I try to meet up with you you ditched me. Then you decided to marry someone else I went traveling the world for years 
-I didn't think about you very much for a while, but when I got back I met you again at Nancy's house
-I spilled Sangria on your dog but still you said it could be okay for me
-to visit you in Charleston. We ate lots of seafood without going far
-We went skinny dipping in your pool, in hindsight I'm surprised you did it.
-the first night was a little rough, I had to fight the dog, she didn't want me, she wanted you.
+Do what you want, but do something. Deliberately carve out some time to make something. And I know everyone says, I'm not a creative person, I don't know what to make. Start small. Write a card to your closest relative. Write a postcard if a card is too much. Make dessert for your family, your significant other, yourself, whatever. Just make something. Except maybe don't make a fancy dessert every night. That won't end well. If all else fails, just go for a walk. 
 
-And then I considered once what I would do without and found I could not imagine life without you.
-As Donne wrote, "All joys are thanks to you" and somehow I convinced you of it
-I might redo them now, those standard vows we read, or listen to out back of our house
-If I could do it over I'd tell you I'll love you forever, forever ever, years,
-even beyond death, for I've walked many of the happy roads that take you round the world and far
-away and have found them good, so long as you are with me.
+---
 
+## **Rule Three: Delete Social Media Apps**
 
----
+Yeah, now we're getting real. I know it's going to be hard. But you know what, take easy, start small. You probably have Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Tiktok, a bunch of stuff in other words, on your phone. Just pick one and delete it for one week. You can always reinstall it so it's not like there's too much to lose here.
 
+But we're not done.
 
-From "Valentine" by John Fuller
+Get a piece of paper and a pen. Fold the paper up so it's small enough to fit in your pocket. Put it in your pocket, or otherwise keep it on you. Now, every time you feel like checking whichever social network you deleted, instead of checking it, pull out your paper and pen and write down why you wanted to check it. It doesn't need to be an essay, just write like "wanted to see what Mark was up to" or whatever the source of the urge was. 
 
-The things about you I appreciate
-May seem indelicate:
-I'd like to find you in the shower
-And chase the soap for half an hour.
-I'd like to have you in my power
-And see your eyes dilate.
-I'd like to have your back to scour
-And other parts to lubricate.
+Do that for one week. At the end of the week look back over what you wrote down and decide for yourself if those things you were planning to do are worth your time. If they are then re-install that app and be on your merry way. If they aren't, or more likely, if you aren't sure, do the experiment for another week.
 
-I'd like to find a good excuse
-To call on you and find you in.
-I'd like to put my hand beneath your chin,
-And see you grin.
-I'd like to taste your Charlotte Russe,
-I'd like to feel my lips upon your skin
-I'd like to make you reproduce.
+If you decide that this wasn't the best use of your limited time on earth, repeat this process with the next social app on your phone. When you've deleted all the unnecessary apps from your phone you're done with this step. 
 
-I'd like you in my confidence.
-I'd like to be your second look.
-I'd like to let you try the French Defence
-And mate you with my rook.
-I'd like to be your preference
-And hence
-I'd like to be around when you unhook.
-I'd like to be your only audience,
-The final name in your appointment book,
-Your future tense.
+Oh, and the ones you keep, don't feel bad about those. If you're feeling a sense of guilt about them still it might be worth repeating this experience, but if you really do enjoy them then don't feel guilty about them.
 
----
+## **Rule Four: Track What You Do When You Use a Screen**
 
+Far to much of our lives are lived in a kind of automated mode. Think back over everything you did in the last five minutes before you started reading this. If you're like me, you probably struggle to remember what it was you were doing or how you ended up precisely here at this moment. Some of this autopilot living is a good thing, especially, I've found, morning routines, but I do it far too much.
 
-Have you forgotten what we were like then
-when we were still first rate
-and the day came fat with an apple in its mouth
+So I started keeping closer track of what I was doing and why. I'm not suggesting you do that. That's actually advanced level stuff, what I am suggesting is very simple: every time you use a screen, remember to do it consciously. Don't judge yourself for it, just note that hey, I am using a screen. That's all. Now if you're somewhat obsessive like I am you might want to write down whatever notes you can, about why you're using a screen. 
 
-it's no use worrying about Time
-but we did have a few tricks up our sleeves
-and turned some sharp corners
+Unlike the steps above, this is not really a rule. It's a process. It's an ongoing process that will probably never end, at least in my case. I like to be conscious of when I use a screen, so although I started this years ago, I still do it today.
 
-the whole pasture looked like our meal
-we didn't need speedometers
-we could manage cocktails out of ice and water
+That brings me to the final point I will leave you with: everything is a process. To paraphrase Alan Watts, you are not a thing, you are a happening. Which is to say, all of life is a never ending process, there may be goals, there maybe markers along the way, but it's not like you get to place where you never have to do anything again. The goal, at least at this very basic level of using less screens, is to build systems and processes that will help you do things other than stare at a screen. 
 
-I wouldn't want to be faster
-or greener than now if you were with me O you
-were the best of all my days
+Now go kill your television.
 
-# 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.
+## Rules for Screens, Part Two
 
+Last time we hurled our televisions out the window into a dumpster. If you actually did that, like I did once in college, you know that the sound of that crunch and exploding screen was awesome. Well maybe not, CRT screens aren't around anymore. Anyway, if you didn't actually hurl it out a window, well, hopefully you at least sold or gave away your TV. Remember, you can have a television or you can have a life.
 
-## Safety Third
+Televisions are not the screen everyone wrings their hands over these days though. That's a little odd to me because according to statistics on screen time, that's where most us spend our time. But the evil de jour is phones. You phone is doing all kinds of things to you and will probably eventually be a direct contributor to the collapse of western culture if you believe everything you read. Which is sign you're using your phone too much.
 
-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](https://images.luxagraf.net/2017/2017-11-28_161158_monterey_picwide.jpg). Miller no doubt would have agreed. He might have ranked safety even lower in his decision calculus. I often do.
+I don't love phones, and I do think we should all use them less. If you've feel addicted to your phone, well, um, you're right. You are. Everything about the design of the apps on your phone is engineered to create dopamine pathways that make sure you experience physical withdrawal when you go without them. That's addiction pure and simple.
 
-The sticker and its motto became something of a family joke. Whenever we did something other people might have frowned on, someone would shout, "Safety third!" and we'd go do whatever it was.
+But. Did you know that culturally we've been wringing our hands over the distractions in our lives for centuries? Meister Eckhart, writing around 1307, calls "distraction" the second most powerful thing preventing communion with God. In 1550s Swiss scientist Conrad Gessner worries that the printing press will worsen the problem of distraction with a "confusing and harmful" amount of data "unleashed on the unsuspecting." To pick a more recent, and revealing, example consider writer Italo Calvino's 1983 account of [his daily newspaper habit](https://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/2027/the-art-of-fiction-no-130-italo-calvino):
 
-Over time I began to feel less jokey about it. I've come to see our culture's obsession with safety as one of the key axes on which our world is turning, and I don't like where it's leading us. It's not a place I want to go, it's not a place I want my kids to go. I think safety first is the reason we had a worldwide panic over Covid, it's the reason so many young adults are meek and unable to handle the world, it's the reason our leaders are failing us, and it's a big part of the reason so many people are dissatisfied with their lives. 
+> Each morning I already know I will be able to waste the whole day. There is always something to do: go to the bank, the post office, pay some bills... always some bureaucratic tangle I have to deal with. While I am out I also do errands such as the daily shopping: buying bread, meat, or fruit. First thing, I buy newspapers. Once one has bought them, one starts reading as soon as one is back home—or at least looking at the headlines to persuade oneself that there is nothing worth reading. Every day I tell myself that reading newspapers is a waste of time, but then... I cannot do without them. They are like a drug.
 
-It's also a big part of the reason we came to [depend on "experts."](https://luxagraf.net/essay/the-cavalry-isnt-coming)
+Note the use of the phrase, "like a drug," which we're still using today to describe our latest and most powerful distraction, phones. 
 
-Before I get too deep though, let me just say that, if safety is at one end of the spectrum and careless idiocy is at the other, in rejecting an obsession with safety I am not suggesting the antidote is careless idiocy. 
+I point this out not to downplay the addictive, attention-steal nature of screens, but to remind you that being distracted is not new. Think of it slightly differently, the desire for distraction is not new. All that's happened over the last century is we've created ever more engrossing mediums to distract ourselves with. This strongly suggests that if we just reduce our exposure to the current symptom without addressing the underlying desire for distraction we're just switching one thing for another, like alcoholics chugging coffee and chain smoking at AA meetings[^1].
 
-Removing safety from your decision calculus completely would not be a wise choice. Likewise making it the top of your decision calculus is not a wise choice. As with most things, there is a third option: thinking for yourself. You can find a balance point between paranoid and being reckless, and also recognize that other people will find different balance points and that's okay. 
+And I bring up AA in part because I think that phones are a problem partly for the same reason alcohol is a problem: they're culturally acceptable. No one pulls our a syringe in the middle of four star restaurant and shoots up heroin, but no one bats an eye when someone orders a bottle of wine in the same situation. Both are addictive, destructive drugs (arguably alcohol is much worse on your body), but one is culturally acceptable and one is not. This makes a world of difference when it comes time to stop. You don't have to work hard to avoid heroin, but you'll run into alcohol, and screens, at every turn.
 
-This is what I mean when I say safety third. Not that you should be reckless, but that you should demote that desire for safety.
+Our phones aren't just addictive, they're also completely culturally acceptable in the west. No one cares if you pull one out in the middle of dinner. Well, I will. You might. But the cultural message seems to be that it's okay. In some places and some situations the cultural message might even be that you're an oddball if you're *not* staring at a screen.
 
-Safety third. For me this simple slogan stands in opposition to one of the dominant narratives of our time: safety first. Safety is one of the primary obsessions of our age. Our lives are littered with the tools of safety -- rules, warning labels, helmets, straps, leashes, railings, walls, disinfectants, goggles, and so on. 
+Let's assume though, that, like people who email me, you want to use your phone less. Here are some tricks to help with that, most of which I used to cut back on my own screen use. 
 
+**Luxagraf's Rules for Screens, part deux.**
 
+## Rule Five: Know Yourself
 
-Safety is largely illusory anyway.
+If you want to use your phone less, you need to know how much you use it. There are some tools to figure this out built-in to both iOS and Android, but I never bothered to figure those out because I had already downloaded and used Your Hour ([Android App Store](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.mindefy.phoneaddiction.mobilepe)). Space appears to offer similar features and [works on iOS too](https://apps.apple.com/gb/app/space-break-phone-addiction/id916126783). The app isn't really important, just get something that records how much time you spend and how often you unlock your phone.
 
-Oscar Wilde once said “Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else’s opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation”
+That will give you a baseline and let you know how much you use your phone. Personally I disabled tracking for maps and music/podcasts because although I'm using my phone, I'm not really staring at the screen. There's an element of gamification to these apps that's easy to get sucked into. I had Your Hour on my phone for about a week before I got pretty obsessed with how little I could use my phone in a day. 
 
+## Rule Six: Adapt to Yourself
 
-for what it really is and it has made me afraid.
+If, like me, you discover that you use your phone to check the time throughout the day, consider getting a watch. Or, if you hate wearing a watch, and live in a small bus with your family like I do, just encourage everyone else to wear a watch and ask them what time it is.
 
+The point is, most likely Rule Five will reveal some habits that you can break, but are too idiosyncratic to you for me to solve for you. My general advice is, if you have some behavior that involves the phone that could involve some analog thing, like a watch for instance, replace those screen checks with a watch. Not a smart watch or fitness tracker, just a watch.
 
+A few things I have heard of people doing include, putting your phone in a bag to make it more of a pain to pull out and use, using it as a coaster so you can't pick it up, and using a pen and paper to make notes rather than using your phone. 
 
-I should probably make it part of [my code](/code).
+## Rule Seven: Turn Off All Notifications
 
+I think the reason we are bothered by how much we use our phones has to do with agency. We like to think we are the rulers of our days and are conscious of all our decisions and actions and phones are stark reminder that we are not that guy/gal. The best way to grant yourself back some agency is to get rid of all notifications. 
 
+Notifications are really just little serotonin agitators. Check your email when you feel like it, not when a notification badge agitates your serotonin level past the point of resistance. Turn them off, all of them.
 
+## Rule Eight: Practice Doing Nothing
 
-Philosopher and writer [Charles Eisenstein](https://charleseisenstein.org/) astutely [points out](https://charleseisenstein.substack.com/p/pandemania-part-5), "safety mania and death phobia are signs of a disconnection from purpose and passion. **If you have nothing more important than your own life, then preserving life is left as the only purpose.**" (emphasis mine)
+This does not mean meditating. It means doing nothing. Or at least do nothing productive. When you were a child you were probably happy to lie in the grass all afternoon doing nothing. At most you might pick out shapes in the clouds, but you were fine doing nothing. Or at least if you're over 35 and actually had a childhood then you might remember doing nothing. If not. Well, learn. Practice.
 
+Of all the rules in this list, this is the hardest for me. I have this need to always be making something. I am ill at ease doing nothing. I read a good bit, I also practice discursive meditation, but neither of those qualify. The only time I really do nothing, is lying in a hammock, so I make sure to get some time in the hammock at least a couple times a week.
 
-Whatever one’s opinion of the response to the disease, what is undeniable is that so many people of influence took for granted that safety must always trump social relations and that the human being is not the center of a web of loyalties and commitments but is rather a physical fact needing technical management. Nothing, it was revealed to us, is worth risking life for—nothing. If other occasions for risk remain, this is evidently only because administration has not yet found the means to quash them. It was revealed that no danger is greater than death. It was revealed that life is sheer matter and not something else, for example, the capacity for love.
-https://www.frontporchrepublic.com/2022/06/atoms-and-the-void-review-of-interventions-2020/
-The obsession with safety is bound up in a fear of death.
+It might take some time to figure out the way you do nothing the best. If you do get stuck on this one, I highly recommend a hammock.
 
-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
+## Rule Nine: Record Your Practice
 
+Write down when you do nothing. Write down when you don't do nothing. Write down how you miss notifications if you do. Write how you overcome your strange screen habits and most of all, write down when you still use screens. Don't judge yourself for it, step back, detach and just record what happened, what you did, and for how long. Try to be a disinterested observer of yourself, this will be much more helpful than berating or congratulating. 
 
+## Rule Ten: Get After It
 
 
-Because our civilizational answer to “Why are we here?” has unraveled, many of us individually have trouble answering that question too, for the individual story draws from the collective.
 
-OK, I realize I may have risen to too high an altitude for the practical purpose of preventing the next bout of pandemania. So I will end with this: We can reduce our general susceptibility to fear-mongering by reducing the levels of fear current in society. A society ridden with fear will acquiesce to any policy that promises them safety. How do we reduce ambient levels of fear? There is no single answer. Besides, each one of us already knows how.
 
-https://charleseisenstein.substack.com/p/pandemania-part-5
+[^1]: This is not meant to disparage AA or anyone struggling with alcoholism. Most AA members I know are fully aware of the irony of swapping one addiction for another, but when alcohol has taken over your life to that point, it's not a bad trade to make.
 
+## Rules for Screens, Part Three
 
-I think this goes to the heart of our existence... why are we here? Are we here, as the technomedia landscape would have it, to be passively entertained and coddled from birth to death? Or are we here for something more? I don't know about you, but I don't think we're just along for the ride. We’re here to stand at the helm, trim the sails and steer the ship.
+Did you know there's a Reddit for people who want quit staring at screens so much? Also a true story. 
 
-I think rejecting the world of passivity, of getting off our butts and taking matters into our own hands, of asking our neighbors and like-minded strangers how to fix things, how to build things, what's working and what isn't. All of this is on the path to rebuilding a life of value and meaning. 
 
 
-Greek Proverb which says, “A society grows great when the old people plant trees, even when they know they will never get to enjoy their shade.”
+## Buying Used
 
+I can't recall the last time I bought something new. We almost always buy electronics used, mostly off eBay. We also rarely buy new books. We generally pick up books at used bookstores around the country, but when we can't find what we want we use Thriftbooks.
 
----
+Buying used has several advantages over buying new. The obvious one is that it's almost always cheaper. But beyond that there are other appealing aspects. Buying used means you're not contributing as much to the waste stream of modern economies, and you're (potentially) removing things from that waste stream by finding a use for them. Used items, especially electronics, tend to be functionally superior to new ones[^1] both because they are farther back on the curve of [diminishing returns](https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/law%20of%20diminishing%20returns) and because they have stood the test of time. There are exceptions of course, but buy and large last year's model is as good, and sometimes better, than this year's model. 
 
-## Everything is a Practice
+Buying used also enables you to take advantage of little curiosities of time. For example all the really good low-noise sound recording devices seem to have been made between 2007-2016. Why? No idea. But everyone who needs low noise recording seems to agree, and high end recorders from that era sell for more than they did when they were new. Which is to say that buying used isn't always cheaper, but when it's not it generally means you're getting something superior. And not something that the manufacturer thinks is superior, but something the people using it the most think is superior.
 
-There is no finish line. There is no winning, no losing.
+This is why the only affiliate links on luxagraf.net lead to either eBay or Thriftbooks, my two preferred marketplaces for buying used stuff. 
 
-**Everything is a Practice.**
+Anyone using affiliate links is trying to sell you something—that includes me—and you should always be suspicious about that. I know my motives are simple, to make some money to pay for this website and maybe some tea for myself, but you have every right to skeptical. Really though, I don't want you to buy anything you don't need. But if you do need something, please buy it used. And if you're going to buy something I've recommended based on my experiences with it, then the affiliate links will help support this website.
 
-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.
+[^1]: The odd mixture of capitalism and our culture's worship of "progress" means that new things must constantly be released, but the law of diminishing returns suggests that newer/bigger/better/faster eventually fails to deliver any meaningfully improvement. This is most obvious in software, where the most feared phrase in any software user's heart is "please restart to update", but this lack of improvement over previous versions is increasingly painfully obvious in hardware as well.
+## Essay on Will
 
-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.
+If you want control over what you consume, you're going to have to strengthen your will. So long as you are surrounded by signals that are trying to get you to spend money on crap, it is going to be an uphill battle. If you can I strongly suggest removing yourself from the signals—think about where your attention is going and how you can redirect it to craft rather than stuff. 
 
-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.
+but there are things more powerful. The most important of those is your will. 
 
-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.
 
-The practice also informs the experimentation that expands it.
+If, like most people, you can't pick and move to foreign country for a month then you're going to have to try to change in the midst of the battle so to speak. While possible, this is much much harder. And again, while I like to think I have mastered this, my spreadsheet says otherwise, so take this advice with a grain of salt. Chances are good that this actually much harder than you or I think and you're going to need to put in more effort than I'm suggesting.
 
-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? 
 
-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.
 
-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.
 
-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.
 
-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. 
 
-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.
+The most important thing is to develop your will. I am serious. Start doing exercises to develop your will. For example, force your self up out of the chair right now, turn away from the computer and walk to the nearest wall. Touch it. Come back and sit down. Repeat this at random during the day. Is it pointless? Absolutely. So is lifting weights. The principle is the same. So choose a deliberately pointless thing to do, and do it. Then do another one. Then do the same thing every morning for a week. 
 
-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. 
+One will-building exercise I do periodically is what I call, for lack of a better phrase, micro travel. It works like this: pick a place at random in the city you live, somewhere you've never been. Choose a time and make an appointment with yourself. Now go work out all the details of getting there, if possible use public transit or walk. Then meet yourself there and make sure you're there on time. Now enjoy a few minutes exploring the area and head home.
 
-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.
+I'll leave thinking up other exercises to you, but the point is to develop your will, to have control over your life. It takes a little time to see and feel the effects of this, it's quite subtle, but it will cascade throughout your life in a number of interesting ways, I promise. One will be better control over your impulses. When you walk into, say Target, to buy a new toothbrush your newly developed will will make it easier to walk past everything else and only buy the toothbrush. 
 
-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.
+Eventually your will may help you recognize that stores that have everything are too much for your will. It would be cleverer to buy that toothbrush at a smaller store with fewer things, because it's easier to remove temptation than resist it. Think of it like dieting. If you're trying to eat less ice cream it's much easier to not walk down the ice cream aisle at all than it is to walk down it and without buying anything.
 
-And now a little practice I wish I'd run across when I was much younger.
+This also leads into my second suggestion for buying less stuff: change your habits. It's convenient to go to Target and get everything you need in one place, but chances are you're going to spend more than you intended without realizing it. In fact the entire experience of being in Target has been engineered to increase the chance you'll spend more than you intended. Every time you enter a store you are entering a hostile environment designed to extract your life energy from you. 
 
----
+Oh sure it's all abstracted so you don't have think of it that way. Still, strip the abstraction and relationship is pretty clear, you trade hours of your life for shit you buy at Target. You get up the morning and go to work. That's a day of your life you just traded for paper tickets. Why do you need those tickets? To put a roof over your head and food in your stomach. Pretty much everything after that is not strictly necessary. So once those basics are met you're in th realm of swapping your existence on earth for stuff. 
 
-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 less stuff you buy, the less you need to work. By extension, the less time you spend in places designed to extract money from you, the less of your life you'll have to trade for stuff.
 
-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. 
+That's a habit you can break—going to all-in-one-place stores—but there are other habits you can build that will help immensely as well. 
 
-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.
+One of the things I've been at pains to avoid is making it sound like we don't like the United States. In fact we do very much, it's one of the most beautiful places in the world and has some of the wildest and safest wilderness you're ever going to enter. 
 
-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.
+Unfortunately, the United States is not the best travel value for us. Without an income we'd have to dip heavily into savings to travel the states in the bus. 
 
-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 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. 
+# Birds
 
-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.
+## Carolina Wren
+I have so many Carolina wren stories it's hard to know where to start. 
 
-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. 
+If you're ever in the eastern woods and you hear a bird singing and you think *that's beautiful, what bird is that?* there's a good chance it's a Carolina wren. 
 
-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. 
+These little gregarious, brown, slightly hook-billed birds are champion singers and, insatiably curious. According to my kids we've had about ten birds come in the bus in five years of traveling.  Nine of them have been Carolina wrens[^1]. Several of them have ended up having to be rescued by hand.
 
-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.
+<img src="images/2022/wreninhand.jpg" id="image-2792" class="picwide" />
 
-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.
+Before that they used to come in our house in Athens from time to time. This one would sit on the corner of the roof singing every morning for years. 
 
-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. 
+<img src="images/2022/bird-feeder_2015-01-10_112302_01.jpg" id="image-2774" class="picwide" />
 
-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.
+Well, it seemed like the same bird, but who knows. Birds do have individual songs, especially Carolina wrens, so if I had been paying attention I might know if it really was the same bird, but I didn't pay that much attention back then. Life before the road tended to run together, I lacked focus and attention. Which isn't to say the days don't sometimes run together on the road, or that I live in a state of constantly heightened awareness, just that there are more markers by which to measure on the timeline of our travels.
 
-Congratulations, you unified your will and succeeded. This is the beginning. This is how you train yourself to use your will deliberately. 
+To tell the truth I didn't pay much attention to Carolina wrens until we started to travel. They were so ubiquitous I found them overwhelming. I've always thought of wrens as the more solitary creatures of the desert southwest, where canyon wrens are a familiar sound in the red rock country of Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado. But they're a familiar sound you usually hear by itself, not a chorus like you get with the Carolina wrens.
 
-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.
+It wasn't until they started flying in the bus that I really started pay attention to the Carolina wren. 
 
-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. 
+[^1]: Regardless of the actual number, only one has not been a wren, that much I know. It was a chickadee. For whatever reason, all these happened on the east coast. Perhaps western birds are more wild?
 
-That is the beginning of the practice.
+- tree swallow
+- black capped chickadee
+- cedar waxwing
+- kingbird
+- that hawk on the ground
+- willet
+- gold crowned kinglet
+- blackthroated green warbler
 
 
 
+## Quotes
 
+Almost every article you'll ever find on attention will at some point repeat Simone Weil's statement that "Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.
 
+"It seems to me that we all look at nature too much, and live with her too little." -Oscar Wilde, De Profundis
 
-*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.
+The average person spends 87% of their time indoors and another 6% in enclosed vehicles https://indoor.lbl.gov/sites/all/files/lbnl-47713.pdf
 
-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.
 
 
+# Notes 
+## rules
 
+   1. Stop buying stuff you don't need
+   2. Pay off all your credit cards
+   3. Get rid of all the stuff that doesn't fit in your house/apartment (storage lockers, etc.)
+   4. Get rid of all the stuff that doesn't fit on the first floor of your house (attic, garage, etc.)
+   5. Get rid of all the stuff that doesn't fit in one room of your house
+   6. Get rid of all the stuff that doesn't fit in a suitcase
+   7. Get rid of all the stuff that doesn't fit in a backpack
+   8. Get rid of the backpack
 
+## beauty
 
-What do you care about?
+I used to think I traveled to learn about different cultures or broaden my perspective.
 
-Who do you want to be?
+And those are certainly nice ancillary benefits to travel. But I’ve realized that the real reason that I travel is for the brief glimpses of beauty. Whether it’s playing soccer with kids on the beach in Mozambique or spotting my first Orca in New Zealand, my travels have provided me with these perfect moments that will hang in my memory forever. No price tag can be assigned to them, no photo can capture them – but those moments are waiting out there and every time I travel I seem to stumble into a few. That’s why I keep doing it. That’s why I’m in love with it.
 
-What matters most to you?
+http://www.bootsnall.com/articles/10-02/how-i-travel-steve-bramucci.html
 
+## estuary time
 
+In nature, an estuary is the wide mouth of a river into which the tides flow, an area where the fresh water of the river and the salt water of the sea mix together. “In an estuary,” Lopez observes, “nature creates a set of organisms which are not from one side or the other, but completely different. In the same way, people who live on the Tijuana border have this kind of estuarian time. It’s not a Mexican time. It’s not an American time. It’s a different time. 
 
-What are the most important things in your life?
+from geography of time, robert levine p206 note: [[rn The Geography of Time]]
 
+## Storms
 
+The night I was born there was a huge storm. At least if my parents are to be believed. My mother still claims that the storm, and a broken window in her hospital room are the reason she can down with ppnemona the next day. All I know is that I have always loved storms, not just sitting and listening to them -- though I like that too -- but getting out in the them, or just before them, when the lightening is still a ways off, flashing the horizen and the dark thunderheads have obscured the light of day, the wind is starting to pick up, it's as if the world were waking up, finally coming alivve with something massive and important to say, you can literally feel it in the air, electricity and ozone are a potent mix, they smell something like freedome to me.
 
-Who are the most important people in your life and what do they need from you?
+A good storm is my favorite time to get out in nature -- camping, hiking the high country or swimming in the ocean. I've been surfing as hurricanes approached, swam in Mexico while lighten struck the sea in front of me and I still love to be out on the shore when storms arrive. 
 
+I've been thinking about storms. It's the time of year to do that here in the American South. More than stormms though, I've been thinking about what 
 
 
+I'm not a huge fan of torrential downpours. Snow is fun for the first three days. Torandos are so far outside anything I've experienced they remain unfathomable to me. I've been through two relatively minor hurricanes and I'm not sure I'd enjoy the full frontal assault, but a good thunderstorm is beautiful thing.
 
+It's one of the things I love about the American south. Nearly every afternoon in the summer you can count on some sort of storm. Sometimes it rains, sometimes it's just lightening and thunder off in the distance, but the sky nearly always delivers around here. Occassionally it over delivers and destroys the roof of your porch, but that's how life goes, you have to accept of bad with your good, it's inevitable. And hey, now we can grow full sun plants on the porch.
 
 
+## recognize what is lost
 
+To recognize that what has been lost is a part of what remains, however, still leaves questions of scale and character. How large an absence are we talking about? Where do we see it's effects? What is the complete inventory of the missing? The answers to these questions not only shape the way we measure the world around us, but also help reveal the character of nature itself--including human nature.
 
+## manifesto:
 
+walk
+take the stairs
+turn of the air conditioning
+Light a fire in the fireplace
+That which is old and useful has proven itself (like cast iron)
+That which is very old may contain wisdom.
+That which is very old may be utter bollocks.
+everything you know is wrong. including this.
+You are responsible for what you put into the world.
 
-Your higher self is the part of you that continues from one incarnation to the next, that was around long before you were born and will still be aroung long after your current body dies. While you’re alive, unless you’re engaged in very intensive spiritual practices, your higher self is basically asleep and dreaming, and your life is its dream. The great secret of the higher self is that it’s you — the real you — and the personality you think you are right now is like the personalities you sometimes have in your dreams at night. When your current body dies, you’ll wake up out of the dream and say, “Wow, that was interesting,” and then go on to other things.
+"A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, and die gallantly. Specialization is for insects."
 
-David BTL, nope. The mess that is your psyche is exactly what it should be: the raw materials you have to work with, the pieces of the kit you need to assemble. It just looks screwed up because you’re beginning to glimpse what it can become once you fit all the pieces together where they belong.
+Note: I have never designed a building, butchered a hog, comforted the dying or died gallantly
 
-[^1]: The world in this case consisting of both material and other realities.
 
+## Travel Cheaper
 
+Ways to reduce travel spending:
+    * better planning means more boondocking and less money on camping 
+    * change of diet from mexico means less on food
+        - no more sausage for breakfast
+        - more tortillas, less bread for lunches
+            + bread is special occassions
+        - use oat/rice flour from bulk bins for pancakes
+        - shop mexican markets, asian markets
+        - go meatless twice a week
+        - drop organic/grass fed, eat less of it
+    * having propane fridge would mean less trips for ice, longer away from money spending opportunities
+    * doing bucket laundry to get by, with full laundry once a month would do the same (again, fewer money spending opportunities)
+    * no more lenses, amazon orders, ever.
+    * use local libraries
+    * have corrinne get meds down here.
+    * start with forays into mexico, but gradually reverse—here becomes our home base with forays into the states
+    
+    * how much less? Don't know but I think we could do 
+        - $1200/month groceries
+        - $500/month camping (if we go over, better hole up and boondock)
+        - $400/month gas (if we're headed over, better hole up)
+        - $500/month repairs and incidentals
+    * So at reliable $3000 a month we can get by pretty much anywhere
+        - Need the ability to take a serious breakdown and keep going, what does that look like?
+        - maybe $5000- $8000 savings for repairs
 
+## Systems
 
+Complex systems are inherently fragile. The optimization that makes the system "easy" to use, also generally eliminates the redundancies and graceful degadation that makes a system resilient.
+## Midlife
 
+I think there are two major tasks to be undertaken in the middle of your life, one is coming to terms with the reduced possibilities of the future, letting go of the ones you are sure aren't happening to focus on the one's that could still happen. I will never make the U.S Olympic rowing team and rather than have that missed goal rattling around somewhere in the back of my mind going, I have to address it. Rather than sitting around mumbling about how I could have been a contender I have to accept that no I could not, I tried and literally could not, and let that go so that other goals become more feasible.
 
+The other major task in midlife is to recognize the ciclical nature of, well, nature.
 
-The One True Dictionary defines practice as:
 
-    > Frequently repeated or customary action; habitual
-      performance; a succession of acts of a similar kind;
-      usage; habit; custom; as, 
 
+## No Reason At All
 
-The three examples happen to all be practices I pursue
+"It's fun to do something for no reason at all because freedom is the foundation of all human delight... freedom of the will, the capacity to choose and act and attend for no other reason than that we happen to want to." 
 
-Not in human terms anyway. Individual projects may come to an end, but the practices that made them possible do not. Most things worth doing do not have a stopping point. There is no point where you've written enough, you've worked out enough. Everything is a practice. Embrace it. The practice is never done, which means you get to keep improving.
+## Margins
 
-[^1]: This would be a good example of 
+You learn to live your life on the margin, that strange zone between what is known and what is not. There are some answers here, but not many, and you have to make that place your home.
 
-## No Cavalry -- what to do?
+The margins are where you want to be though, this is where everything happens, it's where life is, where growth is. Go deep in the forest and everything gets soft and quiet, but come out to the edge and you'll find the berries and the birds and the deer and all the rest of life—inhabiting the margins. In ecology this is sometimes called a liminal zone. It's where life is in transition and biodiversity is greatest. It's where the action is and it's where you want to be.
 
+I've learned that the future will get here at the same steady pace as it always does whether you worry about it or not. 
 
+There's a third principle I'm still meditating on, but my suspicion is that the first principle of not changing the environment around you, extends well beyond you and your immediate environment to encompass, well, everything. The ripple effects of any action are significant and we spend very little time considering them, and this is troubling.
 
+The less you alter the environment of you, the less you need to alter the environment of your home. The less you need alter the environment of your home, the less you need to alter your neighborhood, and so on. I suspect that this cascades in positive ways far beyond just turning off the air conditioning. At the same times, I suspect it cascades in negative ways as well, which is why I am still thinking on it.
 
-Once you accept that there is no cavalry coming, or perhaps more conservatively, that you don't need a cavalry to come, or, at the very least make the decision that you want to life your life in such a way that you don't *want* to need a cavalry, the question arises: what then do I do? How do I get from where I am, to that state of mental, physical, and spiritual security? 
+I saw, and still see, living in the bus as a first step in a transition away from life as a "consumer". In the bus we consumed much less, that's good, but I've come to think that it's not good enough. I think I can (and should) go much farther than that. What that looks like is still taking shape, but one thing we all have right now is plenty of time to sit and think.
 
-Another way to put this would be: How do I begin to take responsibility for and become accountable for myself, my family, my world?
 
-I have no idea. Which is to say that I know what I am doing for those things, but I don't know what you should do -- that's for you to figure out. If I told you what to do you'd just be dependant on me, no better off than being dependant on the cavalry. 
+## Sustainable vs regenerative
 
-No one can tell you how to get on the path to self-dependency because no one other than you knows what your path to self-dependency looks like. You have to find it. And you'll know when you have. Find it is the fun part. Don't worry if it takes a while. It took me the better part of two decades. But I know people who figured it out much quicker.
 
-So I am not going to prescribe some recipe for how you can take responsibility for your world, but I am going to tell you something that might help you figure out your own path: you first have to reclaim your time. One of the things that keeps us dependant on the cavalry is our perceived lack of time to do anything about it. How are you going to learn how to rebuild your leaf blower motor when you work 9-5 and spend an hour on each side of that commuting? From 8-6 you have no time for leaf blowers. Throw in breakfast and dinner and suddenly from 7-7 you have no time for anything else.
 
+sustainability is about keeping things as the are, regeneration is about making things better than they are.
 
 
-How do you find time to build relationships with your neighbors when you spend 12 hours (or more) of your waking day working?  
 
 
-In the first essay on this subject I suggested that you stop using money to meet all your needs. That is, begin to build relationships with people such that you can begin to meet some of your needs by offering something of yourself to others. I don't know what that might look like for you, but here's a quick example: when we lived out in woods in South Carolina much of the land surrounding our house was leased to a hunt club. In exchange for keeping an eye on the area, we were free to hunt. Actually we were offered other people's deer, though we had to decline for lack of freezer space. 
 
-If you live in Manhattan this scenario isn't going to come up. But if you start trying to meet people, to listen to them, you will build relationships that lead to things like this. Perhaps not free food, perhaps it will end up being chess lessons or tk, but it will be something and your life will be richer, and slightly, ever so slightly less dependant on the system of The Machine.
 
-This will also give you agency. You are the one with the connection to others, nothing is mediating that. This is agency. Agency reduces stress. It helps you to see bad things, bad situations for what they are: bad situations. When you have agency and the self-confidence that it, along with experience, give you, you begins to see that with sufficient resources -- time, effort, knowledge, money, etc -- any problem can be solved.
 
+## Close 
 
+Y'all are going to be very close.
 
-## The Cavalry Isn't Coming
+That's what an inspector said to me once when we were selling our house and I told him what we were doing after it sold. That comment stuck in my head the whole time we traveled because he was right. Spend twenty-four hours a day every day with someone and you will be close. And we are.
 
-The Cavalry isn't coming. This is the lesson 21st century America is trying to teach us. We are going to have to re-learn how to depend on ourselves and on each other. There is no one else. That's okay. We don't need anyone else.
 
-Self-reliance backed up by tight community bonds used to be the norm. You depended on yourself, your family, your community, because who else was there? So far as I can tell from reading history this was most people's outlook until roughly the middle of the 20th century. That's when a number of things happened that changed how people saw themselves and their communities.
 
-Around then things began to centralize and as they did the solutions people had always relied on weren't suddenly found wanting. Self-appointed experts stepped in to tell us how things should be done. How we should eat. How we should live. How we should love. Sometimes the experts had good ideas. But often they did not. And even when their ideas were good, there was an unintended consequence to listening to the experts: communal bonds were weakened, people were deprived of skills, people questioned their instincts. Soon people believed they needed experts for everything.
 
-The world according to experts is a world that depends on those experts, the cavalry. The people we mean when we say "they'll think of something."
+I want to be tested in ways I can't imagine and try to be ok no matter what happens.
 
-Except that as we've all witnessed in the last twenty years, they won't think of something. They're out of ideas. Worse, the old ideas don't work anymore. The world of the expert is collapsing all around us. The cavalry isn't coming because the cavalry doesn't know how to ride anymore.
+I looked forward to disasters, I looked forward to having to get out of tough situations. 
 
-For four years we've been driving around the United States, passing through all its unique regions (except New England and the Pacific Northwest) and I've noticed not only the experts are failing us, but that there are some places where that has had little to no effect on life.
+Now, mind you, "ok" doesn't mean happy as a clam, totally unaffected, no bad feelings ever. On the contrary, it means letting go of the reigns, opening myself up to the unknown and trusting that I had the ability to see myself through it. That's basically welcoming a whole heap of tough stuff to happen to ya. And it has. And I'm ok. Heck, I'm more than ok. I'm better than before. This whole endeavor, from the word go, has done nothing but affirmed my suspicions that we are stronger and more malleable than we ever give ourselves credit for. And no matter what, we will adjust and find a way to be ok. ⁣
 
-It took me a long time to figure this out because this shift, from the local community as the hub of life, to there being no hub, happened long before I was born. That is to say, the disconnected lives we all lead, depending on experts to tell us everything from what to eat to how to fix our cars, was normal to me. It was the water I lived in and I never noticed it. What I did notice pretty early on was that some places were decidedly different. Northern Wisconsin. Okracoke. Parts of the Florida Panhandle.
+Cycles. Loops. Close them where you find them. For example, heres an energy loop: sun, plants, animals, waste, plants animals, waste. Find yourself in that. For example, the sun helps plants grow, hogs eat some of those plants, hog get slaughtered and made into bacon, I eat the bacon, I crap out the bacon into a composting toilet that eventually becomes soil for the plants that grow so the hogs can eat them... this is a minimally wasteful loop. I don't want to call it closed because there are variables (water, sunlight, not having a plague of locusts decend on your plants, etc), but it is robust on scale that swings from robust to totally batshit crazy, which would be the cycle that puts bacon in a package you buy from the store.
 
-We were drawn to these places and continue to return to them in part I think because they resisted the shift to expert authority that happened everywhere else. Self-reliance, independent businesses, and close knit communities still thrive in these places. These places somehow escaped the chain-storification of the world. It was refreshing. It was different. These places felt like what I wanted the future to be.
+## Alt Medicine
 
-I have read enough books of the American road to know that everywhere used to be like this, but I never gave much thought to how or why that changed. I assumed that chain stores took over. And they did. But I think there's considerably more underlying that simple observation, and I think understanding how it happened, how we got into this mess, is going to help us get out of it.
+A while back someone at work mentioned wanting to write about how there is little to no regulation in the realm of "alternative" medicine and its rife with scams. I volunteered to write a rebuttal, because I'm glad alternative medicine is not regulated. I did not elaborate and I forgot all about it until someone brought it up again, this time specifically asking why I was glad there were no regulations.
 
-I think it happened because not enough people resisted it. We were swept along and did not stand up to it. It's hard to avoid shopping at Walmart. So we did. And so on, until the old ways were swept aside. We prized newer bigger better because we lost sight of what life is really about. 
+I will likely never write a rebuttal because for one thing it would be publishable as anything other than Op/Ed. I am not scientist by training and, lack credentials, not allowed into the debate on equal footing. 
 
-Singular cause and effect cannot explain how an entire culture shifts, that's a subtle and multifaceted process, but it begins and ends with the choices of individuals. Millions of individuals, all of whom have different beliefs, different desires, different wills. It's important to keep this in mind because the kind of thinking that says "here's the problem, here's how to fix it" is the kind of thinking that made the problem.
+I don't hold this against science as a method of inquire, but I do very much hold it against scientists, who have become a modern priesthood controlling public discourse, just as the Catholic church did through the middle ages, the high priests of Set did in ancient Egypt, and so on through any other culture you want to cite. 
 
-And now here we are, waiting for the other shoe to drop. We're a bit like Wile E. Coyote when he's run off the edge of the cliff but doesn't realize it yet. Ignorance of his true situation keeps him from plunging down right away, but there's always that moment when it starts to sink in. The cartoonists let his ears droop just before he confronts his situation and falls. That's about where I see modern America just now. Our ears are drooping and we know what's coming, but no one knows how high we are or how hard we'll fall. 
+There is always a priesthood setting the limits of acceptable discourse, what matters is how that priesthood (and the culture more broadly) handles dissent. How much room is there for discourse outside the acceptable? We're very fortunate to live in a culture where for the most part there are no limits placed on dissenters. I can write this, publish it where anyone can read it, and there are (currently) no consequences. I will not be burned at the stake, exiled or any number of horrible things visited on those with "unacceptable" ideas in various cultures throughout the ages. There is some risk of publishing these opinions and having them come back to haunt me at some point in the future of course, but ultimately all I am advocating for is that we continue to not punish, or censor people who hold opinions, beliefs, customs, what have you, that are considered unacceptable to the current priesthood.
 
-That is a pretty dismal place to be. But I believe we can still exercise some control over that descent. We have to fall, but there are branches we can grab onto, things that can slow us down. Not as a culture, but as individuals. We can descent gradually and with some degree of grace perhaps. 
+## Present
 
-Everywhere will be different, and the solutions will be different for everyone. That's what five years living on the road has taught me. There is no collective anything. There is just you and me and the rain. When I say we have to figure this out without the cavalry, don't mistake me for some alternate cavalry. I don't know what you need to do. I know some of what I need to do, but you are different. You have your own path. We need to work together, help each other, but work together and help each other down our own paths. The balance between individualism and community that has been lost, we have to restore it one person at a time. The good news is that I think we still have a chance to land at the bottom of that descent without too much damage. To understand what I mean, let me tell you a little story about an engine.
+How do I make this while still being present. Here. Right now. In this bus, on this night, feeling this feeling?
 
----
+This turns out to be a very difficult problem to solve. 
 
-At the end of 2017, after we'd been traveling in the bus for about nine months we were [climbing up Tehachapi Pass](https://luxagraf.net/jrnl/2017/12/terrible-horrible-no-good-very-bad-week) to get out of California's central valley. About halfway up the incline there was a loud bang from the engine and the smell of burning oil. The leaking head gasket we didn't know about had leaked enough that one piston shattered and we were dead in the water. I didn't know that at the time. All I knew was that something was very, very wrong. 
+Writing inherently pulls you out of the moment. It has to all reflective thinking is, well reflecting on something rather than something. So there's that. But I accept that. I've been writing for so long now I've long ago forgotten what it would be like not to always be compising things in my head. There may be some negative consequences to this habit, but for me, it was what it is and I am okay with it.
 
-I called a tow truck and we were towed over the pass down to Mojave, CA, where we spent three weeks and over $6,000 replacing that piston and head gasket. We had no choice. While I knew how to fix some things, I was a long way from knowing how to take apart an entire engine. But, when I was signing that credit card receipt for six grand, I decided, never again. Whatever happens from here on out, I am going to fix it or we're going to sell it and find some other way to travel. 
+I am less okay with the performative aspects of creating things based your experiences. This enters a peculiar gray zone in which one must be very careful. For me, it is fine if the desire to write about something drives me to go to a place that I might not otherwise have gone to. For example I doubt I would ever have gone to tk, except I wanted to write about it. But wanting to write about it is a kind of wanting to go.
 
-The bus has never been to a mechanic since. This is not meant as a slight of those mechanics who have worked on it over the years. Some did good work. Some did not. But none of them love this engine the way I do. Why should they? It's not their engine. If you love something you learn how to take care of it yourself. 
+The danger lies in pulling yourself out of the experience of being there by performing for the imagined audience. I try to avoid this. It works for some people. Some people are able to think about getting a great image while still enjoying themselves. I am not. I have to lose myself in those moments or whatever I try to produce from them suffers. 
 
-So I set about trying to educate myself on how to repair a Chrysler 318 LA engine. This was not easy. The aspirated 318 with LA heads hasn't been in a production vehicle since the late 1970s. Even mechanics in their mid 50s might never have actually worked on one. Slowly though I began to stumble across people working on them. The [Mopar A-body forums](https://www.forabodiesonly.com/mopar/) have been helpful, and several YouTube channels have taught me a ton, especially [Uncle Tony's Garage](https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC9SzQNYLqsPQGY_nbHogDDw). 
+Which is to say I almost universally miss the great shot because I am too busy watching whatever it might be unfold. 
 
-But while strangers could provide some framework and theory, which it comes to figuring out what's wrong I've mainly turned to my uncle Ron who has an uncanny knack for being able to diagnose problems over the phone with very little to go on. Without him I would not know half of what I know today (which is still disappointingly little, but enough to get by). 
 
-Somewhere along the way I started to wonder what was driving me. It was partly curiosity, partly necessity, but also partly something more. Matthew Crawford's *Shop Class as Soul Craft* articulates this something more far more eloquently than I've been able to. 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 Crawford meant. There is empowerment in knowing how things work. Your stuff will never again fail you because if it does break, you can repair it. Empowerment in this case means removing the expert between you and your stuff. Your stuff is more yours, you are more in control of your stuff.
+Things need edges, edges are a kind of contract with things. The book ends when you close it. Begins when you open it. In between there is no contract. Or not much of one?
 
-Crawford calls the person who wants to fix their own stuff, the Spirited Man. In his book this figure becomes the antidote to passive consumption. Passive consumption displaces agency, argues Crawford. One is no longer master of one's stuff because one does not truly understand how stuff works. "Spiritedness, then," writes Crawford, "may be allied with a spirit of inquiry, through a desire to be master of one’s own stuff. It is the prideful basis of self-reliance."
+I think we have our edges wrong. Things that should have softer, indistinct edges, like our homes, have hard edges that divide us from the world. Things that should have hard, distinct edges, like tools for communicating, have no edge at all, the loops are always running, never closing off.
 
-Crawford writes that 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." 
+Adding edges to the loops closes them.
 
-In the time since I read that I have literally done exactly that. I have decided I'd rather go down swinging, taking apart my valve train, rather than seeking the help of a professional. It’s not just me. YouTube and other sharing sites are littered with people teaching each other how to fix stuff. Then there are the thousands people without social media 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.
+----
 
-I think this goes to the heart of our existence... why are we here? Are we here, as the technomedia landscape would have it, to be passively entertained and coddled from birth to death? Or are we here for something more? I don't know about you, but I don't think we're just along for the ride. We’re here to stand at the helm, trim the sails and steer the ship.
+Solutions I have seen work, and that I am experiementing with: 
 
-I think rejecting the world of passivity, of getting off our butts and taking matters into our own hands, of asking our neighbors and like-minded strangers how to fix things, how to build things, what's working and what isn't. All of this is on the path to rebuilding a life of value and meaning. 
+All communication happens in loops, you say something, there is a response, you respond to that response and so on. This is the communication loop. How long is the loop? I find that the longer the loop is, the better the thing I am able to produce. So where instagram has loops measured in minutes, maybe hours, maybe at the most days, I find that loop overwhelming and short. The most I can do there is put something out, I can't and don't partake in the loops there.
 
----
+A website I control is an infinite loop potentially. Or rather I have to create the loops, I have to set the pace. And I generally do not do well at that.
 
-We eliminate our dependence on the cavalry by becoming the cavalry for ourselves, for our families, and for our neighbors. *Être fort pour être utile* *. Be strong to be useful.  
 
-Eliminate the central conceit of modernism—that there is a group of people you need to save you from... the world, yourself, your shortcomings, your neighbors, your neighbors' shortcomings and on down the line -- by taking responsibility for yourself and the expanding that responsibility outward to your family, to your community. 
 
-The message of modernism is that you're helpless and you need saving. If you want to dig deep into the psychology of this I'd say it's about what you'd expect to get when a culture takes the gods out of its religion and replaces those gods with administrative systems. We're not the first. The Romans went down this path, so did the Chinese. Read Oswald Spengler or Arthur Toynbee if the history interests you. All you really need to know though is that there's a long history showing it doesn't work. Look around you, is stuff working? No, no, it is not.
+Consolidate data on a schedule, publish one thing on a schedule.
 
-Everything requires high specialized skills and knowledge. This is a choice. Things don't have to be built this way. Culture doesn't have to be arranged this way. It didn't use to be this way. Even 100 years ago there were very few "experts" telling you how to live. Now even lightbulbs have to include instructions on how to change them. 
 
-Once you needed to be able to do a bit of everything yourself—help your neighbors build their homes, raise and butcher animals, preserve your food, fight fires, fix stuff, pull a tooth, deliver a child. All the things Robert A. Heinlein famously suggested a human being out to be able to do: "A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects."
+## Step Back, Detach, Ask Better Questions
+The consumer education system has conditioned you to think in terms of products, you need to step back in ask bigger questions to find more interesting and sustainable answers. For example, the question, *should I buy this camera?* has no good answer without first asking *how to I create photos that make me happy?* It may be that some particular camera really does help in that quest, but more likely, it doesn't. More likely what you need to learn is technique and acquire skills like composition and reading light.
 
-Prior to the coming of the machine age, we were able to do this stuff. It was no factor.
 
-But I know, I know, industrialization relies on specialization. Specialization means highly trained workers. Professionals are better than self-taught amateurs. Their skills can develop everything to increasing levels of complexity. And look, there are aspects of this that are good. It would take me years to learn how to machine a camshaft. I'm happy to let an expert do that because their expertise has allowed them to develop better tools and using those tools requires skills that only those experts have. Not everyone had a mill at their house. Not everyone could forge a great blade. There has always been specialization. It's the degree of specialization that's the problem. Our problems are the problems of overspecialization.
+##From Ben Falk's book:
 
-The problem with the specialization model isn't so much the specialization as the exclusion. As Christopher McDougall so eloquently puts it in *Natural Born Heros*, over time, "a subtle cancer spread: where you have more experts, you create more bystanders. Professionals did all the fighting and fixing we used to handle ourselves; they even took over our fun, playing our sports while we sat back and watched."
+•	104 nuclear reactors in 31 states, operated by 30 different companies. Every single one “temporarily” storing high-level waste that will be lethal for 10,000 to 24,000 years
 
-When was the last time you played baseball? When was the last time you watched it? I know I listened to a game last week. The last time I played was in the previous century. That's sad really. I like playing. Life is playing. Not watching. What are we here for? To play or to watch? I think that will become central question of our age, at least for those that haven't found their gods. 
+•	40,000 to 80,000 (exact number unknown) chemical factories producing or processing materials with multiple “compounds known to be carcinogenic and/or mutagenic”
 
-I believe the disconnection that comes from watching life instead of participating in it is responsible for just about all our problems. Our mental health problems, our physical health problems, our cultural problems. All these things stem from being disconnected from life, from each other, from ourselves.
+•	More than 40 weapons-testing facilities and 70,000 nuclear bombs and missiles
 
-How did we get here? We got here because we allowed other people to tell us what was good for us. And they were wrong. From diet and health to design and visions of the future, they were wrong.
+•	104,000,000 cubic meters of high-level radioactive waste from weapons-testing activities alone
 
-It's time we stopped listening to them and went back to fixing stuff ourselves, taking care of each other, taking care of ourselves.
+•	925 operating uranium mines
 
----
+•	20 to 30 times the average historical background rates of mercury in rain
 
-The question becomes, how do we get back to where our grandfather's were?
+•	2,200 square miles of excavated valleys and leveled mountains in Appalachia alone
 
-There isn't one answer to this. I am not here on high telling you how to find your path because that top-down model is what caused the problem. I'm not even going to tell you what I am doing because even in that I think there's a tendency to see it as a recipe.
+•	478,562 active natural gas mines in the United States in 2008, with 1,800 expected to be drilled in the Marcellus Shale of Pennsylvania alone in 2010
 
-I would suggest that the first and most important thing is the realize that no one else is going to figure it out for you. The top-down, expert provides a solution system *is* the problem. 
+•	18,433,779,281 cubic feet of trash per year, or 100,000 acres of trash one-foot deep per year, or about 250 square miles, with trash 400 feet deep
 
-I would suggest that reclaiming control of your life, your community, your world is actually easier than you think. You are already more skilled than you think. And you are surrounded by skilled people. Find something that interests you and get better at it. Connect with other people who share your interests. 
 
-Early drafts of this had a few suggestions on specific things you could do, but again, I don't want to give you a recipe. That said, there is one thing that I think isn't intuitive, but will really open doors for you: **stop using money to meet all your needs**. 
 
-Find one problem, one thing, that you pay for now that you can either make/do yourself, or, even better can be borrowed or done with help from friends and family. The goal is to find something that puts you in a debt of gratitude to someone else. This is the basis of community—gratitude. When you are grateful to the world, you become more helpful to the world. Gratitude is a powerful motivator. It subverts one of the most powerful outside, centralized structures that we're eventually going to have to do without: currency.
+## Novelty and place
 
-Your great grandparents fixed things for people, made things for people, and were grateful to receive the same from others. This formed much of the basis of community that held life together before the coming of centralization. It isn't the only thing, but it's a place to start and that's what we need to do. Start. Remember, we don't want to change the world, that's the top down thinking that got us in the mess. The goal here is to change the only part of the world you can: you.
+It's one Barry Lopez spends some time on in *Artic Dreams*, noting that for natives of the Arctic Circle, "land does... what architecture sometimes does for us. It provides a sense of place, of scale, of history." Architecture has never done much for me, but I've been known to try constructing a cathedral of words to describe simple things, the way a blade of grass bends in the wind.
 
+Lopez's thought jumped out at me because I catch myself telling stories the wrong way these days. More and more I notice how much of the stories I tell are not what happened, but where it happened. I have developed a need to locate the past in space as well as time. I have to watch out for this because I've noticed many people find it annoying. I can watch their minds wander as I talk. I lose them.
 
-etc etc. suggestions
+You gain a sense of place by merging into it, however briefly, in way that can only be done by giving up familiarity. Novelty sharpens the experience of place. Perhaps because we evolved to be wary of the novel, to be on edge in experiencing the unfamiliar. All that grass doesn't matter, that one part where it's novel, that one part where there are no shadows when there should be shadows. That's a lion. Novelty is bad in that sense. 
 
-Trust yourself.
+Now the evolutionary threat is largely gone though novelty becomes useful. It a grindstone sharpening your experience of place until it comes to the foreground. You notice what was not there yesterday. It's not a lion anymore, but still you notice.
 
-Get outside
+## Maps
 
-Talk to your neighbors
+“Some for one purpose and some for another liketh, loveth, getteth, and useth Mappes, Chartes, & Geographicall Globes.”—John Dee, 
 
-Start walking
+source: https://www.theguardian.com/travel/2019/oct/20/the-perfect-combination-of-art-and-science-mourning-the-end-of-paper-maps
 
-Find religion
 
+## Immersing yourself
 
+In his book, <cite>Written in the West</cite> Wim Wenders talks about improving photography by completely immersing yourself in what you see, "no longer needing to interpret, just looking." I find that it's not just photography that can be enhanced this way, but all of life. All you need to do is let go and look. Let go of any agenda and just walk (or sit) and watch the world around you. The world is endlessly fascinating. Even the parts you don't like, like Texas. Step back from the  things you want, the things you think you need, the things you think you should do, and a new range of possibilities opens up. 
 
+## travel with kids
 
+"As with any thing, the needs of small people are different, and the same, as big people.  They thrive on novelty, on the right amount of ease and challenge, and struggle with boredom.  They find it hard to regulate when hungry or tired.  These needs are simply scaled down.  Adults, especially adults who have been around a bit, like to see what is between two mountains by viewing it from all sides.  Little people and their minds are content with seeing the two mountains via their emissaries, the little rocks which have fallen off into the valley in between.  Little people almost do well getting outside and having an adventure, again, today, but once things proceed much beyond a few miles the wants of the little become subservient to those of the big.
 
+Which reminds us that adventure, especially in the internet age, is always found in the mind anyway.  There is nothing more adventurous than trying, really trying, the impossible task of understanding another person.  Is this task more weighty with progeny than with a spouse?  Your answer tells everything.
 
+Understanding the two of them at home is simply easier, if by easier I mostly mean more predictable.  With answers readily accessible.  Beyond that, after deciding have we the adults sufficient energy, sufficient motivation, sufficient bravery to take everyone and everything important out into the woods this weekend, it becomes a question of matching big person ambition and rules to little person energy. " - https://bedrockandparadox.com/2019/08/31/the-veneration-of-lameness/ 
 
+## Universal Druid Prayer 
 
+It appears in several forms; the one most often used in AODA runs like this: 
 
+Grant, O Holy Ones, thy protection
+And in protection, strength;
+And in strength, understanding;
+And in understanding, knowledge;
+And in knowledge, the knowledge of justice:
+And in the knowledge of justice, the love of it;
+And in that love, the love of all existences;
+And in the love of all existences, the love of Earth our mother and all goodness.
 
+And yes, it's a good intro to any sort of communion with the deities.
 
+## difference between in the streets and closed door cultures
 
+> Go to Africa, Latin America, the backwoods of China, SE Asia … it’s easy to make friends: all you need to do is walk down the street with your head up. These are “in the streets” cultures. Europe, on the other hand, is a “closed door” culture. That doesn’t mean that people are not nice. It’s just that they don’t have the social avenues that allow for on the fly engagements with people they don’t know. Talk with someone there and they ask the question, “What does this guy want? Why is he talking to me?” Start talking with someone you don’t know in Haiti and it’s just something normal and ordinary — everybody is talking with everybody anyway. -Wade Shepard
 
 
+## Octavio Paz quote
 
+> Modern man likes to pretend that his thinking is wide-awake. But this wide-awake thinking has led us into the maze of a nightmare in which the torture chambers are endlessly repeated in the mirrors of reason. When we emerge, perhaps we will realize that we have been dreaming with our eyes open, and that the dreams of reason are intolerable. And then, perhaps, we will begin to dream once more with our eyes closed. <cite>&ndash;Octavio Paz</cite>
 
+## Stopping travel
 
+Full time travelers who stop traveling, regardless of how long or why, tend to feel like we've failed somehow. Which is silly, but I'm no exception. I feel it anyway. I have been feeling it lately. 
 
-The solutions being proposed by the people who champion this idea are the same as they've always been: more technology, more bureaucracy, more centralized control (and not coincidentally more jobs for more experts).
+I like living on the road for two main reasons. One, we spend more time outside. There is nothing so valuable as spending all day outside. Two, it satisfies a pretty basic curiosity: what does it look like around that bend? What is the view like from the other side of the hill? What does the river sound like down in that valley? What is like to wake up in middle of the desert? How does it feel to fall asleep in the sand listening to the sea? How does it feel sitting in the shade of a sandstone overhang where someone else sat thousands of years ago? What's the scent of an aspen forest in a downpour? How does the sandstone feel on your fingertips after the thunderstorms pass? 
 
-We know where these ideas get us and we're done.
+So to answer that question everyone keeps asking me: yes I miss living in the bus. And to answer the follow up question, yes, we're going to get back to that eventually. At the moment we're in San Miguel.
 
-It's popular these days to say that politics is downstream from culture, which is to say we get the politics of our culture. But as John Michael Greer often says, "it needs to be remembered in turn that culture is downstream from imagination." We have the power here because we are limited only by our imaginations and our bodies' ability to make our imaginings true.
 
+We were going to spend the winter down here, stay warm, improve our Spanish a bit and go back to the bus when it warmed up a little. Then we were going to spend spring traveling the southwest desert, see some areas of Arizona, New Mexico and Utah that we hadn't seen yet, and then head up to Wyoming, Idaho and Montana when it got hot, and spend summer at higher, cooler elevations. Good plan right? Well.
 
-https://luxagraf.net/jrnl/2019/11/land
+When we parked the bus last year we knew that before it went much further it was going to need some work. Significant, time and money-eating work. To get to the places we want to get, we need more power and less worry. The only way I've come up with to get to that point is to either drop in a bigger engine, a 440 or the like, or rebuild the 318 to get better compression, which means boring out the engine, new pistons, maybe new manifolds, probably a new transmission and quite a few other things that are not cheap. It's all doable, but it takes time and money. There's also the possibility we could move to a different rig[^1], but that again is time and money. 
 
+Time and money we don't have right now. 
 
----
+I think now that true sweetness can only happen in limbo. I don't know why. Is it because we are so unsure, so tantative and waiting? Like it needs that much room, that much space to expand. The not knowing anything really, the hoping, the aching transience. This is not real, not really, and so we let it alone, let it unfold lightely. Those times that can fly. That's the way it seems now looking back. 
 
-Virtues require cultivation, but our culture has left us with somewhat untended gardens. We have undisciplined minds, undisciplined debates, and undisciplined media consumption habits. 
+[^1]: I have never liked driving with a trailer, but it probably makes more sense for the way we travel. We like to set up camp and then spend a few weeks roaming an area. Certain things about trailers make them better for this, like the ability to haul out your black water and go fetch fresh water without breaking camp. The other marked advantage of the trailer and tow vehicle is that when you do need a mechanic's help, you don't lose your house. But pretty sure my family would abandon me if I tried to sell the bus.
 
 
----
+## Bird watching as a way to get out
 
 
+"Looking for birds, in this case, means seeing the private gardens of the brightly-colored houses in a small mountain town, with their fiery pink and orange blossoms, their mango and papaya trees, and their tangled blooming vines. Birding gets you to places you can’t otherwise go, or never thought to see. It gives you access to new foods and flavors. For example, birding gives you unparalleled access to taste rare fruits and other micro-local foods." - https://www.notesfromtheroad.com/neotropics/tapir-valley.html
 
 
 
+I don't want you to be like me. I want you to figure out who you are, how to think your own thoughts and maybe, if you're lucky, figure out what you're supposed to be doing. One of the easiest ways to get the kind of perspective you need to figure these things out is to travel, particularly outside your own  culture
 
+## Failure of materialism
 
+I have become increasingly dissastified with the scientific materialist view of the world. I don't disagree with it, I just don't think it's the whole story. Which is to say that science provides a wonderful toolkit for exploring one of the worlds we live in, but it's a terrible toolkit for exploring the other worlds we live in. Now you could say, but we don't live in other worlds. But you're wrong. Imagine for a moment your favorite place, the warm sand of a beach, the wind through the pines on a ridge of mountains, the still heat of an afternoon in the desert, what have you. See it clearly in your mind. Hear it, the waves crashing the shore, the wind in the pines, the crunch of shoes as you walk through the gravel of the desert. Smell the salt, the pines, the sagebrush. Make it real in your mind.
 
+What world is that? It's not the world scientific materialism describes. Add a unicorn to your favorite place. See, easy. Easy because it's a different world. It's the world of imagination. There are other worlds too. Depending on which tradition of thought you find best describes your experience there might be three worlds, or five, for ten. The model that's always made the most sense to me happens to have five world, but it's just a model. 
 
+Borges said the map is not the territory, and, while that's true, it should bear some scaled down resemblance to the territory otherwise it's not going to make a very helpful guide to the territory.
 
 
 
+## On Writing
 
-I'll be honest, I don't have a lot to add that you can't find in the writings of Jacques Ellul, Ivan Illich, Lewis Mumford, Neil Postman, Wendell Berry and others who've been trying to warn us for over a century now (I also think Tolkein's Lord of the Rings is an overloked, very subtle critique of technological society that's well worth reading from that angle). If I do nothing else than inspire you to read them, I will call that success. However, I think that I'm in a somewhat unique position to observe things in a variety of places and make connections that others might not be able to see, and so here we are.
+What I love most about writing is the thinking that happens first, it frees your mind from itself, it gives your mind something to turn over and over, it becomes like an old friends. You look at it this way, you look at it that way, you try to figure out why it's there. For a long time it's just there. It's there when I'm putting the coffee in the moka, it's there when I stand in the shower, feeling the water on my back, it's there when I walk up the hill, threading my way around concrete telephone polls and women selling nopales and tortillas. 
 
+And then some part of it, suddenly you know why it's there, you know where it leads, you know what that bit is going to do and you move on to the next part. 
 
+Some times unfortunately it can take years to figure things out, which makes it hard to feed a family writing. I have done it, but I have done it by writing terrible, terrible things. Book summaries for something like Cliff's Notes, which would have been a find job if it had paid more than $.03 a word, to blog posts for people trying to get people sliding down some slimy mailing list funnel. It was all unpleasant work, but in some ways it made me a better writer. Not at craft, but at volume. If you want to feed your family using words, plan to use a lot of them. One month I wrote 80,000 words. I averaged 60,000 for an entire year and nearly starved to death.
 
+You have to love to write, and you have to have the disciple to write even what you don't love. If I were you, I would get a job. If anyone had hired me, I would taken a job, but no one ever did. So I kept writing.
 
+## Work
 
-People in the United States ignore such proposals because we tried that experiment and found out just how badly it worked. In 1961, the new presidential administration of John F. Kennedy set out to improve US foreign policy by staffing the State Department with “the best and the brightest,” which meant in the context of the time a bevy of intellectuals fresh out of Ivy League universities, full of the latest fashionable ideas in international relations. Those experts promptly led America straight into the quagmire of the Vietnam War, while loading the military with a flurry of contradictory demands that made victory impossible and withdrawal unacceptable.
+"Well, it depends on how much you love your work. 
 
-One of the precepts of the last couple of centuries is that there is one answer to every problem and it is the right answer and it is the answer you are going to choose like it or not. This is more or less the central premise of what is generally called liberalism or later, when people tried to distance themselves from the failures of liberalism, neo-liberalism.
+After all, we’re really dealing with two separate things: 
 
+The purpose of work is to create. It is to fuel your soul.
 
-I want to connect the story of taking apart the bus to the individualism and closed community of the west to the idea that we have to depend on ourselves and each other, not outside help coming from on high. The old order is collapsing and those of us farthest from its center are going to lose it first. The new world starts out here on the edges, the fringes the forgotten corners of the country where the old order has never held much sway.
+Whereas the purpose of earning money is to have enough of the stuff. How much is enough? Whatever you need to max out your happiness potential. After that, more money will not make you any happier."—MMM
 
-I recently told a story about my decision to replace the bus engine's head gasket. It was a small thing really, when you consider the realm of human possibilities, but for me it was a big thing. Still, I didn't really want to do it. 
 
-In that piece I made a somewhat flippant comment about no one ever stopping to help us when we're at the side of the road out west. That's been true, but it doesn't mean no one has helped us. It helps to remember that the west was built on deceit. The original inhabitants were decieved with treats that have not been honored, the people who came after them were decieved by the government and the railroads who needed them to farm in a country both knew well would never support farming. They recruited people from all over the world, people to whome the notion of living alone in a vast landscape was appealing and then, when those people turned out to want to do their own thing, not what the government wanted them to do (shocking that these independant spirits who surviced out here didn't want to do anyone's bidding) they were deceived again. And again. Perhaps the most eloquent recounting of these desceptions is the book Bad Land. I think it is important to remember these things when you are out here.
+Greek Proverb which says, “A society grows great when the old people plant trees, even when they know they will never get to enjoy their shade.”
 
-That is I think, why no stops to help us. First and foremost, we are outsiders and in the current west there is more distrust of outsiders than anywhere else we've been. Justifiably I'd say. 
 
+## An Invitation
 
-## Rules for Screens, Part One
 
-I have a strange page about [technology](/technology) buried on this site. Still, people find it. Something must link to it? I'm not sure how or why, but it seems to get a lot of traffic. Or at least it generates a fair bit of email. About a dozen people a year take the time to email me about the first line of that article:
+In 1993 I headed off to college to a quiet little town called Redlands, CA, which had a college of the same name. It was at the base of the mountains and edge of the desert. At the time all I wanted to do was spend as much time hiking, climbing and skiing as I could. Redlands was a good base camp for all that. It was also one of a handful of colleges around the country that allowed you to write your own major. I originally went because I planned to write a major that was half studying photography and half writing about nature. Basically this was when I concieved luxagraf, I just had to wait ten years for the technology that would make it possible to become widespread.
 
-**The less technology your life requires the better your life will be.**
+Before I dropped out of Redlands, which I did after two semesters, my advisor mentored my first class in my self- written  major, which was a kind of Nature Writing 101, reading and reacting to authors I'd mostly already read and reacted to, all the usual American suspects, Thoreau, Abbey, Dillard, Lopez, Stegner, and so on. My professor was more knowledgable about this area than me though and he threw a few authors I did not know on the list. The one that's relevant now is one that remains largely overlooked by the canon of American nature writing, Mary Hunter Austin.
 
-I get a mix of responses to this ranging from the occasional "who are you to judge me, how dare you tell me not to play video games" (which I don't usually respond to), to the more frequent, and thoughtful, "hey, I feel the same way but I can't seem to get technology out of my life". 
+Austin traveled and lived in the Mojave desert for 17 years, studying native life, as well as spanish-american immigrant life in the region and writing defenses of both long before anyone else. But she is probably best known for a book called <cite>The Land of Little Rain</cite>, her <cite>Walden<cite> with the Mojave desert playing the role of Thoreau's pond. 
 
-In crafting a response to the most recent person who wrote some variation of that comment, I accidentally wrote a massively long post I am breaking into a three-part series, retracing how I came to use screens so little, despite editing photos, writing for this site, and working for an online publication, all of which do in fact require a screen. I use screens when it makes sense to do so, but the rest of the time I avoid them.
+It's a good book, one that made me appreciate the Mojave much more than I did at the time. Since I lived in Redlands, not far from the Mojave, I was able to go out and explore quite a bit of what she wrote about. Recently, in searching for new books for the kids I discovered that Austin also wrote a children's book, called simply <cite>The Trail Book</cite>. Imagine Night in the Museum, but with Native American tales and you've got the idea. Finding this sent me off searching for more Austin, and somewhere in the early hours of the morning, bleery-eyed and half asleep at the keyboard, I ran across a digital copy of a collection of Austin's short stories called <cite> Lost Borders</cite>. What caught my eye was the dedication, "to Marion Burke and the Friends of a Long Year." 
 
-We're going to start with the basic stuff. I did most of the steps in this part back in 2016 when we were getting ready to move into the bus. This is actually all the hardest things to do, because these will free up enough time that you'll find yourself staring into the void for the first time since you were a kid. Don't worry, it's good for you. Anyway, on with it.
+Who were the friends of a long year? What were the friends of a long year? When were the friends of a long year? It's hard to tell from the typesetting if Austin capitalized Friends of a Long Year or not, but I like to think she did, I like to think it was some kind of club. I did a little research before I dragged myself to bed and dreamed of a the friends of a long year.
 
-**Luxagraf's rules for screens, part one.**
 
----
 
-## **Rule One: Throw Your Television in the Nearest Dumpster**
+## Hard Times
 
-Yup, we're going to start with the hardest one. You'll notice that I am more sympathetic to not going cold turkey with other things below. Not this one. This is the absolute requirement. Kill your television. Now. Tough love people.
 
-But... but. Look. Here's the thing. You have this gift of life for, on average, around 73 years. 73 YEARS. You won't even last as long as the average hardwood tree. And you're going to spend that precious time watching television? No. No you're not. Not anymore. You're going to live. Find a dumpster. Put your TV in it. 
+It was a hard time. My wife took a job teaching English to Chinese five year old. It was a degrading business for someone with a master's in education, dancing like a monkey (I mean that literally) for tech companies whose "training materials" had more typos than a teenager's messaging logs. It was a dark time, but one you have to put somewhere else so your children don't realize how thin the line between having food and not can be because that's stress you try to keep your children from, even if you ultimately can't. Better your child be hungry than be hungry and have to wrestle with why. There's a surface level of why, the obvious, the because we have no job, that's easy enough to explain and we did, what's harder is to look the whole system in the eye and consider it, this thing humans have built where in fact there needs be nothing of the sort. Why force people to earn paper tickets, really electronic tickets these days, not even real tickets, that can be exchanged for food, shelter, etc. Why allow such a small number of humans to own all the land? Why allow anyone to own the land at all? These are much harder questions for children to face, for anyone to face. The rest of us have time and effort already invested in ignoring these questions, in pretending that the way things are is the only way they could be, that we don't have to face them the way children do, we simply look the other way and hang our heads and dance like monkeys for the foriegn kids and collect our digital tickets and buy food for our children, or try anyway.
 
-Okay, you don't want to put your $1,200 TV in the dumpster. Then find an old sheet or blanket and cover it up. Put some low-tack painters tape on there, make it hard to take off. That'll work for now. But get ready to eBay that thing. Or find a dumpster.
+The stupid thing is we know this isn't the only way. The status quo only seems inevitable if it's all you know and we, creators of a culture that is obsessed with past cultures, know for absolute surety that there are other ways. Pretty much any tribal society for instance—which is a huge negative value judgment in that phrase that I'll be coming back to --
 
-Now cancel Netflix, Hulu, or whatever other subscriptions you had. If you subscribe to two streaming services, that's just under $30 a month. That's $360 a year. That's $1,800 every five years. That's crazy. But now you have about $30 a month you can either save or spend on something you want. Something tangible. I mean, reward yourself if you really do this. At least buy some ice cream. 
 
----
 
-## **Rule Two: Make Something**
 
-If you watched television for 3 hours in the evenings, congrats you were already watching less than most people—and you stop doing that you have just reclaimed 15 hours a week. FIFTEEN HOURS! That's enough to get a part time job somewhere. It's enough time to do, lord, there's no limit to what you could do really. Start a business, write a book, read the entire canon of Russian literature. The paradox of choice can get you here and you'll end up watching YouTube for hours on your laptop. I know, I've done it. 
+## Meditation
 
-You have to start creating something. I strongly suggest you create something real and tangible. Something you can hold in your hands. Cook yourself a fancy dessert if you like. Yeah you can even look up a recipe on a screen, don't worry about it. The internet is incredibly helpful for learning things. That's another idea. Find something you really love and learn more about it. Read everything you can about agates if that's your bag (it's my wife's bag). But do it by checking books out from the library, not by reading on your phone.
+Like many people who practice meditation, it has been transformative for me. I don't talk about it much because who the hell wants to hear their friends talk about how meditation has been transformative? Even I don't want to hear that. But I'll put it here for total strangers on the internet. Weird. But anyway.
 
-Do what you want, but do something. Deliberately carve out some time to make something. And I know everyone says, I'm not a creative person, I don't know what to make. Start small. Write a card to your closest relative. Write a postcard if a card is too much. Make dessert for your family, your significant other, yourself, whatever. Just make something. Except maybe don't make a fancy dessert every night. That won't end well. If all else fails, just go for a walk. 
+I have experimented with many different forms of meditation, Vipassanna, mindfulness, zazen, transcendental, and others, but the one that actually did something for me, and which I continue to practice today, is discursive meditation. This is different than the mind-emptying meditation popular in the west just now. It's not mind-emptying, but rather focused, purposeful thinking (usually the full systems of thought from which the mind-emptying meditation techniques have been lifted have this sort of meditation as well, often under the name "contemplation" or similar).
 
----
+Discursive meditation does not require anything, but a comfortable place to sit, which might be part of the reason it's not very popular in this gear-obsessed age. A nice wooden chair works well for sitting, but anywhere you can get comfortable and relaxed works. I live in RV and don't have a nice wooden chair, so I can tell you with some authority that you need nothing more than a comfortable place to sit. No expensive retreats, no fancy buckwheat-filled pillow cushions, no special pants. Just sit down, breathe and call up whatever image or theme you're meditating on.
 
-## **Rule Three: Delete Social Media Apps**
+What you meditate on varies by tradition and person. I recommend using some form of established tradition in the beginning, this will give you a place to turn when unexpected things happen. And they will. Eventually. The tradition I follow is that of hermeticism, which includes spiritual, ritual and other components as well, but discursive meditation was once [a big part of Catholicism](), and [druids](http://aoda.org/publications/articles-on-druidry/discursivemeditation/) practice it as well, which should give some idea of the range of appeal.
 
-Yeah, now we're getting real. I know it's going to be hard. But you know what, take easy, start small. You probably have Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Tiktok, a bunch of stuff in other words, on your phone. Just pick one and delete it for one week. You can always reinstall it so it's not like there's too much to lose here.
+The ability to think deeply and purposefully is one of those skills that, once you have it, you'll wonder how you ever got by without it.
 
-But we're not done.
 
-Get a piece of paper and a pen. Fold the paper up so it's small enough to fit in your pocket. Put it in your pocket, or otherwise keep it on you. Now, every time you feel like checking whichever social network you deleted, instead of checking it, pull out your paper and pen and write down why you wanted to check it. It doesn't need to be an essay, just write like "wanted to see what Mark was up to" or whatever the source of the urge was. 
+## family in mexico
 
-Do that for one week. At the end of the week look back over what you wrote down and decide for yourself if those things you were planning to do are worth your time. If they are then re-install that app and be on your merry way. If they aren't, or more likely, if you aren't sure, do the experiment for another week.
 
-If you decide that this wasn't the best use of your limited time on earth, repeat this process with the next social app on your phone. When you've deleted all the unnecessary apps from your phone you're done with this step. 
+I've never lived in a culture that was so hard working an so devoted to family. These are things that I grew up hearing people talk about—hard work and family—but I've never actually seen it like I see it here. Which is not meant to denigrate people in other places, hard work is not a zero sum game, but here work and life flow together with no real strong boundaries like you'd find in the States, for example.
 
-Oh, and the ones you keep, don't feel bad about those. If you're feeling a sense of guilt about them still it might be worth repeating this experience, but if you really do enjoy them then don't feel guilty about them.
+My favorite example of this is bus drivers. In the United States if you drive a bus, you wear a uniform and, aside from your face and body shape, you are largely indistinguishable from whomever is driving the next bus. Chances are, when you get off you park the bus and go home. It's not in any meaningful way, your bus or even your work, you are by design an meaningless cog in a profit wheel where most of the profits go to someone other than you. I could make a good case that this is an awful way to live, severely limits your humanity, leads to depression and dissatisfaction with your work and life, and is one of the more profound and overwhelming problems in American culture, but we won't get into that here.
 
-## **Rule Four: Track What You Do When You Use a Screen**
+Instead consider the Mexican bus driver. His bus is his bus. Her bus is her bus. The dashboard is given over to shrines of La Virgen de Guadalupe, or whomever their patron saint might be, along with photos of family, friends, wives, children, what have you. Usually there's a crucifix and some pithy quotes about god, country and most importantly, family. Mi familia, Mi Trabajo, Mi Vida, was one I saw. I don't know where the buses get parked at night, but I do know that the next day the same person is driving the same bus. Mi familia, Mi Trabajo, Mi Vida. 
 
-Far to much of our lives are lived in a kind of automated mode. Think back over everything you did in the last five minutes before you started reading this. If you're like me, you probably struggle to remember what it was you were doing or how you ended up precisely here at this moment. Some of this autopilot living is a good thing, especially, I've found, morning routines, but I do it far too much.
+For me this helps to make sense of 
 
-So I started keeping closer track of what I was doing and why. I'm not suggesting you do that. That's actually advanced level stuff, what I am suggesting is very simple: every time you use a screen, remember to do it consciously. Don't judge yourself for it, just note that hey, I am using a screen. That's all. Now if you're somewhat obsessive like I am you might want to write down whatever notes you can, about why you're using a screen. 
 
-Unlike the steps above, this is not really a rule. It's a process. It's an ongoing process that will probably never end, at least in my case. I like to be conscious of when I use a screen, so although I started this years ago, I still do it today.
 
-That brings me to the final point I will leave you with: everything is a process. To paraphrase Alan Watts, you are not a thing, you are a happening. Which is to say, all of life is a never ending process, there may be goals, there maybe markers along the way, but it's not like you get to place where you never have to do anything again. The goal, at least at this very basic level of using less screens, is to build systems and processes that will help you do things other than stare at a screen. 
 
-Now go kill your television.
 
+## doing nothing
 
+I'm not going to pretend to know what Wallace Stevens was referring to by the Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is, but it has always reminded me of the fact that there are myriad complex worlds around us to which we are wholly ignorant. Not because we don't pay attention, though that may be part of it, but because we can't pay attention. There are vast existences too small to see with the naked eye. Ponds full of pond scum that have their own version of stressful jobs, political and social situations, and whatnot just as we do. They're just having it all on a very different scale, from us and happen to use chemicals instead of words to communicate. 
 
-## Rules for Screens, Part Two
+For all you know that puddle you didn't even notice on your way into work this morning is home to a population of microbes undergoing an extremely stressful existence which they would desperately like to escape just as much as you would desperately like to escape your cubicle. 
 
-Last time we hurled our televisions out the window into a dumpster. If you actually did that, like I did once in college, you know that the sound of that crunch and exploding screen was awesome. Well maybe not, CRT screens aren't around anymore. Anyway, if you didn't actually hurl it out a window, well, hopefully you at least sold or gave away your TV. Remember, you can have a television or you can have a life.
+By the same token, the nothing that is has also always reminded me that it's entirely possible, likely even I would argue, that there are some beings out there to which our existence is about the same as the pond scum. Not insignificant or unimportant, just too small to really pay any kind of meaningful attention to. After all, pretty much everyone and everything has its own set of problems to worry about.
 
-Televisions are not the screen everyone wrings their hands over these days though. That's a little odd to me because according to statistics on screen time, that's where most us spend our time. But the evil de jour is phones. You phone is doing all kinds of things to you and will probably eventually be a direct contributor to the collapse of western culture if you believe everything you read. Which is sign you're using your phone too much.
 
-I don't love phones, and I do think we should all use them less. If you've feel addicted to your phone, well, um, you're right. You are. Everything about the design of the apps on your phone is engineered to create dopamine pathways that make sure you experience physical withdrawal when you go without them. That's addiction pure and simple.
+Staring at nothing isn't doing nothing. It so happens that watching the world in silence isn't something our culture considers valuable and so you and I have been trained to casually dismiss it as "doing nothing". But the more I've done it, the more I realized that sitting, "doing nothing" is actually, possibly, the secret of the world so to speak. Whatever it may be, I can say from experience that it's incredibly valuable to me now and has helped me grow by leaps and bounds as a person.
 
-But. Did you know that culturally we've been wringing our hands over the distractions in our lives for centuries? Meister Eckhart, writing around 1307, calls "distraction" the second most powerful thing preventing communion with God. In 1550s Swiss scientist Conrad Gessner worries that the printing press will worsen the problem of distraction with a "confusing and harmful" amount of data "unleashed on the unsuspecting." To pick a more recent, and revealing, example consider writer Italo Calvino's 1983 account of [his daily newspaper habit](https://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/2027/the-art-of-fiction-no-130-italo-calvino):
+I also think it offers a practical, easy way out of many of the social messes we've created for ourselves.
 
-> Each morning I already know I will be able to waste the whole day. There is always something to do: go to the bank, the post office, pay some bills... always some bureaucratic tangle I have to deal with. While I am out I also do errands such as the daily shopping: buying bread, meat, or fruit. First thing, I buy newspapers. Once one has bought them, one starts reading as soon as one is back home—or at least looking at the headlines to persuade oneself that there is nothing worth reading. Every day I tell myself that reading newspapers is a waste of time, but then... I cannot do without them. They are like a drug.
+There's a lot of windbags out there criticizing the internet, especially social media, for fostering narcissism, consumer culture, intellectual bullying, and whatever other social ill gets their particular goat as it were. But it's rare that said windbags have any good ideas on how we can counteracting these forces beyond turning off the TV and internet. 
 
-Note the use of the phrase, "like a drug," which we're still using today to describe our latest and most powerful distraction, phones. 
+To be fair, that does work. Especially turning off the TV. Few things will improve your life so dramatically as throwing your TV out the highest window you can find (making sure there's no one below). 
 
-I point this out not to downplay the addictive, attention-steal nature of screens, but to remind you that being distracted is not new. Think of it slightly differently, the desire for distraction is not new. All that's happened over the last century is we've created ever more engrossing mediums to distract ourselves with. This strongly suggests that if we just reduce our exposure to the current symptom without addressing the underlying desire for distraction we're just switching one thing for another, like alcoholics chugging coffee and chain smoking at AA meetings[^1].
+The internet though is more neutral in my view. It can be good, it can be bad, it all depends on you and how you use it. In my case I have to use it, it's how I make money to live this way. And sure I can say oh I'm only going to look up whatever technical thing I need to look up to solve a particular problem, but that ideal is very different from the messy relaity that the internet is full of interesting stuff to stare at. 
 
-And I bring up AA in part because I think that phones are a problem partly for the same reason alcohol is a problem: they're culturally acceptable. No one pulls our a syringe in the middle of four star restaurant and shoots up heroin, but no one bats an eye when someone orders a bottle of wine in the same situation. Both are addictive, destructive drugs (arguably alcohol is much worse on your body), but one is culturally acceptable and one is not. This makes a world of difference when it comes time to stop. You don't have to work hard to avoid heroin, but you'll run into alcohol, and screens, at every turn.
+\l
 
-Our phones aren't just addictive, they're also completely culturally acceptable in the west. No one cares if you pull one out in the middle of dinner. Well, I will. You might. But the cultural message seems to be that it's okay. In some places and some situations the cultural message might even be that you're an oddball if you're *not* staring at a screen.
+Observing nature is not nothing. 
 
-Let's assume though, that, like people who email me, you want to use your phone less. Here are some tricks to help with that, most of which I used to cut back on my own screen use. 
+Which is to say all the things we as a culture don't want to talk about right now.
 
-**Luxagraf's Rules for Screens, part deux.**
+You and I find ourselves born into a declining culture. A culture that is what Spengler would call the end of an abstraction phase that will soon start swinging toward 
 
-## Rule Five: Know Yourself
 
-If you want to use your phone less, you need to know how much you use it. There are some tools to figure this out built-in to both iOS and Android, but I never bothered to figure those out because I had already downloaded and used Your Hour ([Android App Store](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.mindefy.phoneaddiction.mobilepe)). Space appears to offer similar features and [works on iOS too](https://apps.apple.com/gb/app/space-break-phone-addiction/id916126783). The app isn't really important, just get something that records how much time you spend and how often you unlock your phone.
+is a bit more complex than that. If you want to still use social media, try first developing humility. One easy way to do that is to create an active practice cultivating humility, for example, pending time in quiet observance of nature. Spend some time realizing that most of life care not at all what humans think, say or do, is helpful in 
 
-That will give you a baseline and let you know how much you use your phone. Personally I disabled tracking for maps and music/podcasts because although I'm using my phone, I'm not really staring at the screen. There's an element of gamification to these apps that's easy to get sucked into. I had Your Hour on my phone for about a week before I got pretty obsessed with how little I could use my phone in a day. 
+seems like it would require an active practice.
 
-## Rule Six: Adapt to Yourself
+## quotes borrowed
 
-If, like me, you discover that you use your phone to check the time throughout the day, consider getting a watch. Or, if you hate wearing a watch, and live in a small bus with your family like I do, just encourage everyone else to wear a watch and ask them what time it is.
+“The pessimist complains about the wind; the optimist expects it to change; the realist adjusts the sails.” –William Arthur Ward
 
-The point is, most likely Rule Five will reveal some habits that you can break, but are too idiosyncratic to you for me to solve for you. My general advice is, if you have some behavior that involves the phone that could involve some analog thing, like a watch for instance, replace those screen checks with a watch. Not a smart watch or fitness tracker, just a watch.
+people have been talking to gods and demons for far more of human history than they have not. - Terrance McKenna http://www.erowid.org/culture/characters/mckenna_terence/mckenna_terence_tryptamines_consciousness.shtml
 
-A few things I have heard of people doing include, putting your phone in a bag to make it more of a pain to pull out and use, using it as a coaster so you can't pick it up, and using a pen and paper to make notes rather than using your phone. 
+Because if you don’t build your dream, someone will hire you to help build theirs. https://medium.com/what-i-learned-building/1b7dfe34fced
 
-## Rule Seven: Turn Off All Notifications
+In civilizations without boats, dreams dry up, espionage takes the place of adventure, and the police take the place of pirates. -- Michel Foucault, Of Other Spaces, 1967
 
-I think the reason we are bothered by how much we use our phones has to do with agency. We like to think we are the rulers of our days and are conscious of all our decisions and actions and phones are stark reminder that we are not that guy/gal. The best way to grant yourself back some agency is to get rid of all notifications. 
+“It’s more fun to be a pirate than to join the navy.” -Steve Jobs (quoted in Odyssey: Pepsi to Apple, 1987)
 
-Notifications are really just little serotonin agitators. Check your email when you feel like it, not when a notification badge agitates your serotonin level past the point of resistance. Turn them off, all of them.
+The true adventurer goes forth aimless and uncalculating to meet and greet unknown fate. -- O. Henry
 
-## Rule Eight: Practice Doing Nothing
+"Do what you can, with what you have, where you are." T. Roosevelt
 
-This does not mean meditating. It means doing nothing. Or at least do nothing productive. When you were a child you were probably happy to lie in the grass all afternoon doing nothing. At most you might pick out shapes in the clouds, but you were fine doing nothing. Or at least if you're over 35 and actually had a childhood then you might remember doing nothing. If not. Well, learn. Practice.
+“In the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship.” -- David Foster Wallace
 
-Of all the rules in this list, this is the hardest for me. I have this need to always be making something. I am ill at ease doing nothing. I read a good bit, I also practice discursive meditation, but neither of those qualify. The only time I really do nothing, is lying in a hammock, so I make sure to get some time in the hammock at least a couple times a week.
+"The wilderness should be preserved for political reasons. We may need it someday not only as a refuge from excessive industrialism, but also as a refuge from authoritarian government, political oppression" -- Edward Abbey, Desert Solitaire
 
-It might take some time to figure out the way you do nothing the best. If you do get stuck on this one, I highly recommend a hammock.
+I am the happiest man alive. I have that in me that can convert poverty to riches, adversity to prosperity, and am more invulnerable than Achilles; fortune have not one place to hit me - Sir Thomas Browne Religio Medici
 
-## Rule Nine: Record Your Practice
+"You never know what is enough unless you know what is more than enough." --William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell
+But as we struggle through this crisis of legitimacy, what is left over when the abstractions start to wear thin? When I decide I don’t want to become an opiate addict and need to find something else? What about when it’s more serious than just a headache – what if it turns out to be cancer, and I don’t want to follow the standard ‘cut, poison, burn’ protocol? For me, it sometimes feels like there’s only a smoking crater where my brain should be. My mind often feels like it’s just a collection of Other People’s opinions and regurgitated sound bites. Even if I do try to pay attention to my own experiences, what I am able to perceive is limited by my analysis of the information coming in to my brain, which is itself conditioned by the habits of thought I learned from other people and my society. I filter out the information to which I am exposed. So there really is no objective truth out there! -https://www.ecosophia.net/the-truths-we-have-in-common/#comment-17128
 
-Write down when you do nothing. Write down when you don't do nothing. Write down how you miss notifications if you do. Write how you overcome your strange screen habits and most of all, write down when you still use screens. Don't judge yourself for it, step back, detach and just record what happened, what you did, and for how long. Try to be a disinterested observer of yourself, this will be much more helpful than berating or congratulating. 
+It’s when you realize that most of your opinions and ideas belong to other people that you can begin the central work of an age of reflection — the work of learning how to think your own thoughts, and assess other people’s opinions and ideas and your own with a set of critical tools that don’t depend on checking their fit to some collectively approved set of abstract generalizations. JMG
 
-## Rule Ten: Get After It
+palm fronds, whirls, fans, crisp browned tips, peeling trunks as if the whole tree were some giant alien flower, other with trunks smooth and stalk straight leading up to bunches of fronds that look like pineapples on stilts. The can be so absolutely still when the ind doesn't blow.. The slash pine mixed in, it too has a very stright trunk, shedding its lower branches as it grows so that the long, delicate needles grow in tuffs and clumps of needle fans near the top of the tree. Here and there an oak, never a big one in the palm-dominated areas, but vaguely sickly looking oaks scratching out an existence in this sandy soil.
 
+Twilight is soft yellow that gradually fades up to a cool white that gets cooler and cooler blow as it climbs up the sky until it reachs the rich coblant I see up through the faint waiving of pine tops in the wind, the deep rich blue of twilight, the spirit who guides the stars into the night. The sand looks gray and soft when the sun is gone, the coean grows dark and seems to settle it's restlessness a bit as the light disappears.
 
 
+Moo Krob Nam Ma Prow
 
-[^1]: This is not meant to disparage AA or anyone struggling with alcoholism. Most AA members I know are fully aware of the irony of swapping one addiction for another, but when alcohol has taken over your life to that point, it's not a bad trade to make.
+having grown up in mid-twentieth century suburbia — and then escaped! — I have a very low tolerance for the kind of boring world that comes from excess conformity and obedience to authorities. As for ways to sort through the abstractions — ah, we’ll be getting to those. - ecosophia, greer
 
-## Rules for Screens, Part Three
 
-Did you know there's a Reddit for people who want quit staring at screens so much? Also a true story. 
+> In a home I need walls, roof, windows, and a door that can be opened and closed. I also need a place to cook, a place to eat, a place to sleep, a place for a guest, and a place to write. More space is not better... more space attracts more stuff which eventually means less space. 
 
+> Some things make life easier, but more things do not make life more easy. More things mean more things that can break down and more time spent fixing or replacing them. 
 
+> Comfort is freedom and independence. Comfort is having the sweat glands and metabolic tolerance to deal with heat and cold. It is not central heating or air conditioning which may fail or be unavailable. It is not plushy seats but a healthy back. Luxury is not expensive things. It is a healthy and capable body that moves with ease with no restraints because something is too heavy, too far, too hard, or too much. It is a content and capable mind that can think critically, solve problems, and form opinions of its own.
 
-## Buying Used
+> Success is having everything you need and doing everything you want. It is not doing everything you need to have everything you want. If so then you do not own your things, instead your things own you. I do not need to own a particular kind of vehicle. I need to go from A to B. I do not need fancy steak dinners, rare ingredients, or someone else to prepare my meals whether it is a pizza parlor, a chef, or an industrial food preprocessor. I need food to live. Food to fuel my body and brain. Luxury is not eating at 5 five star restaurants. Luxury is being able to appreciate any food. Comfort is eating the right kind and the right amount of food. Not whatever I want. Eating and moving right prevents diseases, pains, and lack of functionality. I am what I eat and I look what I do. Everybody is. It is the physiological equivalent of integrity. To say what I mean and mean what I say. This too makes life more comfortable. Money is opportunity. Opportunity is power. Power is freedom. And freedom means responsibility. Without responsibility, eventually there is no freedom, no power, no opportunities, and no money. More importantly, freedom is more than power. Power is more than opportunity. Opportunity is more than money. And money is more than something that just buys stuff. It is simple to understand but hard to remember, but do remember this if nothing else.
 
-I can't recall the last time I bought something new. We almost always buy electronics used, mostly off eBay. We also rarely buy new books. We generally pick up books at used bookstores around the country, but when we can't find what we want we use Thriftbooks.
+http://earlyretirementextreme.com/manifesto.html
 
-Buying used has several advantages over buying new. The obvious one is that it's almost always cheaper. But beyond that there are other appealing aspects. Buying used means you're not contributing as much to the waste stream of modern economies, and you're (potentially) removing things from that waste stream by finding a use for them. Used items, especially electronics, tend to be functionally superior to new ones[^1] both because they are farther back on the curve of [diminishing returns](https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/law%20of%20diminishing%20returns) and because they have stood the test of time. There are exceptions of course, but buy and large last year's model is as good, and sometimes better, than this year's model. 
+The Labyrinth of Solitude
+Juana Inés de la Cruz. Her superb book "Poems, Protest, and a Dream"
+Mariano Azuela's "The Underdogs"
+## Podcasts
 
-Buying used also enables you to take advantage of little curiosities of time. For example all the really good low-noise sound recording devices seem to have been made between 2007-2016. Why? No idea. But everyone who needs low noise recording seems to agree, and high end recorders from that era sell for more than they did when they were new. Which is to say that buying used isn't always cheaper, but when it's not it generally means you're getting something superior. And not something that the manufacturer thinks is superior, but something the people using it the most think is superior.
+podcasts are great because you can do other things while you listen right? Like you can be doing the dishes or gardening or working on your car and listening to a podcast and that's like giving you that time that you would have spent in a book or video and now you can spend it doing two things. Now is that divided attention as good as the focused attention? probably not. so for me, I tend to combine two low lift things. I listen to a podcast on tk when I'm doing the dishes but something that requires a good bit of focus I might save for a drive. But either way this opens up a way to kind of double time your life. You want to learn about something new, but you need to weed the garden right? Well, now you can.
 
-This is why the only affiliate links on luxagraf.net lead to either eBay or Thriftbooks, my two preferred marketplaces for buying used stuff. 
+## Monohull must haves
+Here are *my* must haves for a monohul, if you want to live aboard for extended stays:
 
-Anyone using affiliate links is trying to sell you something—that includes me—and you should always be suspicious about that. I know my motives are simple, to make some money to pay for this website and maybe some tea for myself, but you have every right to skeptical. Really though, I don't want you to buy anything you don't need. But if you do need something, please buy it used. And if you're going to buy something I've recommended based on my experiences with it, then the affiliate links will help support this website.
+Head and galley right down at the companionway.
+You don’t want to go halfway through the boat, let alone pass through cabins to reach their ensuite head, with dripping wet oilies in a heavy seaway. It has to be right at the bottom of the stairs.
 
-[^1]: The odd mixture of capitalism and our culture's worship of "progress" means that new things must constantly be released, but the law of diminishing returns suggests that newer/bigger/better/faster eventually fails to deliver any meaningfully improvement. This is most obvious in software, where the most feared phrase in any software user's heart is "please restart to update", but this lack of improvement over previous versions is increasingly painfully obvious in hardware as well.
-## Essay on Will
+If you like to eat in the cockpit, it’s very nice to be able to pass food directly from the galley without walking around with it.
+Also, the area in front of the companionway is usually the most stable one of the boat. Best for cooking at sea.
 
-If you want control over what you consume, you're going to have to strengthen your will. So long as you are surrounded by signals that are trying to get you to spend money on crap, it is going to be an uphill battle. If you can I strongly suggest removing yourself from the signals—think about where your attention is going and how you can redirect it to craft rather than stuff. 
+A separate shower stall.
+Usually we like to wash from the stern but when anchorages are crowded or the weather is a little cooler it’s very nice to be able to wash inside without splashing all over the head and the sink.
 
-but there are things more powerful. The most important of those is your will. 
+Seats 4 at the indoor table without having to unfold table leaves or hampering mobility inside.
 
+All lines, especially reefing, lead aft to the cockpit so you can do the heavy weather sailing without ever leaving the cockpit.
 
-If, like most people, you can't pick and move to foreign country for a month then you're going to have to try to change in the midst of the battle so to speak. While possible, this is much much harder. And again, while I like to think I have mastered this, my spreadsheet says otherwise, so take this advice with a grain of salt. Chances are good that this actually much harder than you or I think and you're going to need to put in more effort than I'm suggesting.
+Walk through transom to facilitate boarding from the dinghy with your hands full of groceries. Also the nicest way to take a swim, or for washing yourself as mentioned above.
 
+One of the smallest boats corresponding to the above whilst sporting 3 cabins, is the Beneteau Oceanis 361 that I’ve owned and loved very much. Crossed the Atlantic twice with it. You may want a Jeanneau Sun Odyssey 40 from around 1999 (the 3 cabin - 1 head layout) for a bit more payload and space in the forward cabin and twin cockpit wheels that facilitate mobility to and from the walk through transom. Otherwise a very similar boat. These are two ‘budget’ options, which seem to be the prudent choice given the description of your means. Better spend far less on the initial acquisition cost than you think you can afford. 
 
+### Forward Wind Scoop 
 
+Forward wind scoop: a bit of triangular canvas strung over a forward hatch between two scasions, sloping down to the deck as you move aft with a tension line to the rigging above to keep it taunt. Doubles as forward windshade and forces air down into the hatch to keep below decks cool. Keeps the air moving through. Saw this on Allied Seawind 30 on YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hRHskbdRFFs
+## CC
 
+When I first saw you I was just trying to get a cup of coffee. But then I decided I'd rather have you. 
+That proved more difficult that I thought. Once You sat in my lap once at Jason and Christy's house
+but I was pretty sure you were dating someone else and I was positive I was so that didn't go far
+but I found I rather enjoyed you in my lap. Another time we went to prom and you made out with me
+I know I was dating someone else then too but I didn't care. For years I made you many a spinach salad with salmon on it,
+even when you were eating with someone else. Then you became a picture on my refrigerator for 3 years. 
 
+Once when I try to meet up with you you ditched me. Then you decided to marry someone else I went traveling the world for years 
+I didn't think about you very much for a while, but when I got back I met you again at Nancy's house
+I spilled Sangria on your dog but still you said it could be okay for me
+to visit you in Charleston. We ate lots of seafood without going far
+We went skinny dipping in your pool, in hindsight I'm surprised you did it.
+the first night was a little rough, I had to fight the dog, she didn't want me, she wanted you.
 
-The most important thing is to develop your will. I am serious. Start doing exercises to develop your will. For example, force your self up out of the chair right now, turn away from the computer and walk to the nearest wall. Touch it. Come back and sit down. Repeat this at random during the day. Is it pointless? Absolutely. So is lifting weights. The principle is the same. So choose a deliberately pointless thing to do, and do it. Then do another one. Then do the same thing every morning for a week. 
+And then I considered once what I would do without and found I could not imagine life without you.
+As Donne wrote, "All joys are thanks to you" and somehow I convinced you of it
+I might redo them now, those standard vows we read, or listen to out back of our house
+If I could do it over I'd tell you I'll love you forever, forever ever, years,
+even beyond death, for I've walked many of the happy roads that take you round the world and far
+away and have found them good, so long as you are with me.
 
-One will-building exercise I do periodically is what I call, for lack of a better phrase, micro travel. It works like this: pick a place at random in the city you live, somewhere you've never been. Choose a time and make an appointment with yourself. Now go work out all the details of getting there, if possible use public transit or walk. Then meet yourself there and make sure you're there on time. Now enjoy a few minutes exploring the area and head home.
 
-I'll leave thinking up other exercises to you, but the point is to develop your will, to have control over your life. It takes a little time to see and feel the effects of this, it's quite subtle, but it will cascade throughout your life in a number of interesting ways, I promise. One will be better control over your impulses. When you walk into, say Target, to buy a new toothbrush your newly developed will will make it easier to walk past everything else and only buy the toothbrush. 
+---
 
-Eventually your will may help you recognize that stores that have everything are too much for your will. It would be cleverer to buy that toothbrush at a smaller store with fewer things, because it's easier to remove temptation than resist it. Think of it like dieting. If you're trying to eat less ice cream it's much easier to not walk down the ice cream aisle at all than it is to walk down it and without buying anything.
 
-This also leads into my second suggestion for buying less stuff: change your habits. It's convenient to go to Target and get everything you need in one place, but chances are you're going to spend more than you intended without realizing it. In fact the entire experience of being in Target has been engineered to increase the chance you'll spend more than you intended. Every time you enter a store you are entering a hostile environment designed to extract your life energy from you. 
+From "Valentine" by John Fuller
 
-Oh sure it's all abstracted so you don't have think of it that way. Still, strip the abstraction and relationship is pretty clear, you trade hours of your life for shit you buy at Target. You get up the morning and go to work. That's a day of your life you just traded for paper tickets. Why do you need those tickets? To put a roof over your head and food in your stomach. Pretty much everything after that is not strictly necessary. So once those basics are met you're in th realm of swapping your existence on earth for stuff. 
+The things about you I appreciate
+May seem indelicate:
+I'd like to find you in the shower
+And chase the soap for half an hour.
+I'd like to have you in my power
+And see your eyes dilate.
+I'd like to have your back to scour
+And other parts to lubricate.
 
-The less stuff you buy, the less you need to work. By extension, the less time you spend in places designed to extract money from you, the less of your life you'll have to trade for stuff.
+I'd like to find a good excuse
+To call on you and find you in.
+I'd like to put my hand beneath your chin,
+And see you grin.
+I'd like to taste your Charlotte Russe,
+I'd like to feel my lips upon your skin
+I'd like to make you reproduce.
 
-That's a habit you can break—going to all-in-one-place stores—but there are other habits you can build that will help immensely as well. 
+I'd like you in my confidence.
+I'd like to be your second look.
+I'd like to let you try the French Defence
+And mate you with my rook.
+I'd like to be your preference
+And hence
+I'd like to be around when you unhook.
+I'd like to be your only audience,
+The final name in your appointment book,
+Your future tense.
 
+---
 
 
-One of the things I've been at pains to avoid is making it sound like we don't like the United States. In fact we do very much, it's one of the most beautiful places in the world and has some of the wildest and safest wilderness you're ever going to enter. 
+Have you forgotten what we were like then
+when we were still first rate
+and the day came fat with an apple in its mouth
 
-Unfortunately, the United States is not the best travel value for us. Without an income we'd have to dip heavily into savings to travel the states in the bus. 
+it's no use worrying about Time
+but we did have a few tricks up our sleeves
+and turned some sharp corners
 
+the whole pasture looked like our meal
+we didn't need speedometers
+we could manage cocktails out of ice and water
 
+I wouldn't want to be faster
+or greener than now if you were with me O you
+were the best of all my days
 
 # Pages
 ## Technology