archived unused and old writings

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diff --git a/unused/culture-shock.txt b/unused/culture-shock.txt
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+When you step outside your own culture you experience what is often called "culture shock", though exactly what this means is difficult to put your finger on. You know it if you've had it. For most of us it's a nebulous and very vague feeling that often manifests as stress, anxiety, and sometimes outright panic. It's not really fun. It is culture "shock" after all, not culture "embrace" or whatever. 
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+I think what people mean when they say "culture shock" is the severe cognitive dissidence that comes from realizing that everything you think is true, and "just the way things are" turns out to only true for the world you learned those things in. Everything is relative, we say that a lot but by and large we don't live it. Go abroad and you will suddenly live it.
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+To pick a very simple example, if you're American you "know" that you drive on the right. If you go to Britain, or a former British colony, that's no longer true. That's a tiny, not too difficult to overcome, example. 
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+Imagine that sort of undercutting of your knowledge happening for just about every single thing you want to do in the course of living day to day and you can imagine what it's like to go abroad for an extended period of time. 
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+The simplest things in life become grand adventures. You either thrive on this or you have a very rough time until you either figure out the world you're in or you go home.
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+This is why, generally speaking, people spend their vacation in little islands of their own culture that have established themselves abroad. People from the United States go to Cancun because there's an entire industry set up to insulate them from having to deal with the vast difference between their culture and the local culture.
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+Australians go to Bali for the same reason. The British love India. The Japanese have enclaves in Bangkok that put a little bit of Tokyo in Bangkok. You can rest assured that every place you think of as a tourist destination, every place that's on the cover of a glossy travel magazine, is a place your culture has established a kind of bulkhead. 
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+Self-styled "world travelers" and ex-pats tend to turn up their noses at these so-called tourist traps, but that's just one of the many reasons to avoid such people. Tourist traps, bulkheads, if you will, are important gateways between worlds. If there wasn't some way to smooth over cultural differences nearly everyone who ever left their own culture would be back the next day. I know this because I made the rookie mistake of avoiding tourist traps on my first trip abroad and believe me, if I could have flown home after a week, I would have. 
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+It's really hard to relearn every assumption you've ever made about the world. No one wants to spend their two to six weeks of vacation a year doing that. It's not most people's idea of fun. Good tourist bulkheads smooth some of this over, allow in just enough outside culture to whet your appetite for more, but not so much that you spend an entire day struggling to find toothpaste.
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+The United States is not a good value for the money.
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+I happen to really enjoy this sort of adventure, which doesn't mean it's any easier for me, but it does help if you enjoy it since it's at least somewhat enjoyable even as it's both physically, mentally and emotionally draining.
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+All binary reductions are wrong. That said, there are, broadly speaking, two basic approaches to life:
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+Adapt the world to you. 
+Adapt to the world.
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+Contrary to what some people will say embracing either of these approaches exclusively is a bad idea.
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+Generally speaking is more difficult to adapt the world to you. It typically requires much more money, time and effort on your part. Still, if that's what makes you happy, then by all means. And good luck.
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+At the same time, there are some things that you simply cannot adapt to. Lack of potable water for instance is not something you can adapt to
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diff --git a/unused/downsizing.txt b/unused/downsizing.txt
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+Part of our decision to hit the road was to travel, which is fun in its way, but another part, the far more important part, was to change the way we live our lives -- the amount of stuff we have, the amount of space we have and so on. People in the U.S. often ask why? And here, as the saying goes, be dragons.
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+No one in the U.S. wants to talk about it, or even to think about it, but ours is a society in decline. The nation-state we call the United States has been in its declining phases for, depending on who you ask, fifty to ninety years. In your head, when you finished that last sentence, you immediatedly formulated at least three examples to prove to someone, not me, because I can't hear what's happening in your head, but someone that that is absolutely untrue. Think about who you're trying to prove that too.
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+I've never been much interested in the decline of the U.S. empire and broader society because I've never really felt like part of it anyway, but I am fascinated by the decline of Faustian culture more generally, which, if you haven't read Spengler, is an instructive term to refer to the culture that arose out of the ashes on the Roman empire along the banks of roughly the Thames, Seine and Volga rivers beginning roughly around 1000AD, which is to say, what we usually call western culture. Given that our planet is round, there really is no west in way that's useful for talking about cultures so Spengler came up with the term Faustian.
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+Whatever the case Faustian culture is the long process of winding down. It will take at least another 300 years for it finish up, some years of what later cultures will refer to as dark ages, but which probably won't be all that dark to those living through them, and then some new culture will arise from those ashes, for reasons I won't go into here I think it's highly likely one of those future cultures will grow out of the great lakes area.
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+What the holy living fuck does any of that have to do with moving your family into a vintage motorhome?
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+An author I coined a lovely little turn of phrase to suggest one method of dealing with a society in decline which is: collapse now, avoid the rush.
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+Which is to say moving into an RV is a way of learning to live in ways that most of us have forgotten, to struggle out way through situations most of us have forgotten and have a little bit of fun along the way. It is a way to downsize our lives without the pain that comes from downsizing because you lost your job, or because your house was underwater or whatever system of the stuttering march alng the downslope of decline happens to befall you.
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+I already *know* solar energy is super useful to the individual, totally useless to society. I already know that there's almost always a way to fix mechanical things. I already know how to build a fire from nothing, I know how to emotionally handle a variety of situations with some degree of grace that I would never have learned to deal with if I had not chosen to collapse my standard of living long before it was necessary.
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+And I was able to bring my family on this journey, see a million beautiful things we'll never forget and take charge of the raising of our kids in ways that we would never have been able to do if we had not abandoned the normalcy of our lives as defined by current standards of the United States.
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+Here's the thing though. The bus was always a half way step. Societies don't, sorry hollywood distaster movie fans, collapse, they decline. Individuals collapse, societies, cultures, they just decline and fits and starts and they do it so subtly most people never even notices it. Long after what we call the end of the Roman Empire there are plenty of authors still singing the praises of Rome and talking about how all the contemporary problems will work themselves out, just you wait, they'll find a solution. Sound familiar? The only different between those authors and the ones saying the same thing now is that we can see the future they got, it's our past, but our future looks just like theirs.
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+Now that we've learned to live in the bus, without all the convenience of a house it's time to let go of the bus. It's time to learn how to live without a vehicle to get us where we want to be, yes, that's the loss. And of course there's the emotional loss of our home, but one thing we learned from the last homes we gave up is there there's plenty to gain as well. We'll be nearly out of the iron triangle that has imprisoned most of us all our lives -- house, car, job. Each requires the other in an endless viscous cycle.
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+The only thing I don't like about that phrase is that some people take it to mean that some kind of hollywood style societal collapse is coming, which neither I, nor the author of that phrase, nor Oswald Spengler would want you to think is true. THERE IS NO COLLAPSE, just very subtle, long drawn out decline.
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+Now by modern U.S. standards our lives were never particularly extravagant. We were a family of five living in a 1200 square foot house. We considered it a bit extravagant though.  
diff --git a/unused/ennui.txt b/unused/ennui.txt
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+It's difficult to describe the sense of freedom that comes from traveling through the world, unleashed from all the responsibility or worry of normal suburban/urban life in 21st century America. The perpetual motion of open-ended travel is liberating in a way that few other things can really match. 
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+Traveling long term is also a kind of curse though. Don't forget that exile was once a favorite punishment for all sorts of crimes in more than a few cultures. Cain, perhaps western culture's most famous criminal, was condemned to wander the earth aimlessly as a punishment for murdering his brother. The worst thing his culture could conceive of was to strip him of a home and set him adrift in the world.
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+I think there's an important lesson there for travelers. Long term travel that has no sense of purpose, no mission, no project behind it inevitably leaves you lost, adrift in the world, wandering aimlessly, trapped in a pit of ennui. 
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+Do it too long and you'll find that ennui, no matter who you are. It is too easy to let your brain slip into a mindless blur of cocktails and sunsets that leave your mind limp as a lime floating in yesterday's beer. It's okay to do that for a while, but too long and you'll throw in the towel or turn to one of those sad, soused expats staring blankly at the wall behind the bar all day.
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+If you want to do more than just travel for a bit, if you want to make a life on the road, to make a life of exploring the planet, you need to work at it bit. In my experience you need two things to really make it work. 
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+The first thing you need is a project, a purpose to drive you, no matter how quixotic or strange it might be. Almost every long term traveler I know has something that drives them. Often these projects are the reason I know of them. I know people who [make movies](https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCirYAT7CafNatSyJH3-O4pQ), many [others](https://www.bumfuzzle.com/) [who write](https://www.vagabondjourney.com/), others who [photograph](http://charlenewinfred.com/journal/), others who [paint](https://expeditionaryart.com/blog/), others who are [avid birdwatchers](https://www.notesfromtheroad.com/), others who take work along the way, traveling chefs, traveling teachers, archaeologists -- anyone who travels for an extended period of time has something driving them, even if it's nothing more than a desire to show their children the world.
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+For me it's usually several things, but the obvious public one is this website. I have been writing for this site more or less steadily since 2003. I've managed to put down over 280,000 words here, most of which I can even re-read without wanting to punch myself in the face, which is more than I can say for most of the writing I've been paid to do.
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+I don't have a real reason for doing any of this beyond the fact that it's an neverending project that I enjoy and that gives a certain sense of purpose to my days on the road. I don’t make luxagraf because I travel, I also travel because I make luxagraf. The two go hand in hand, they are in fact very much the same project. 
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+The second thing you need for a successful and happy life on the road is a little more nebulous, but I like to define it as an acute sense of place and your place in places.
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+You have to make sure you're in places that move your soul, places that fill the spiritual hunger inside you that sent you traveling in the first place. The point to existence isn't to accumulate stuff you know (and places can be stuff just as much as stuff can be stuff) the point to existence is to fully develop who you are. To make that task easier it really helps to be in places you love.
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+But I don't just mean places you love in the sense that pretty much everyone loves the beach. I mean places that you go to and you immediately feel at home there for whatever reason you can't really put your finger on. I believe this is actually a sense you can develop, the ability to feel what once might have been called the vibe of a place. I don't know whether that energy is a result of human experience in a place, some kind of innate energy of a place, some sort of being that occupies a place or, most likely, some combination of all those things. 
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+Once you know how to tap into and sense of the vibe of a place you'll be well on your way to making your travels a much more enjoyable experience. There are a variety of ways to do this, but the one that I've had the most success with is a kind of mediation, but not the sort of meditation you're probably familiar with. I've tried that, emptying your mind and whatnot. There's value in that, but it's never really led anywhere for me.
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+I mentioned in [a recent post][1] that I often spend a good bit of time "doing nothing". Certainly more than I used it. Early on on this trip we ran around and did things. And sometimes we still do, but I would say less than we used to. These days, so long as it's a wild enough spot, we're happy hanging around camp, walking whatever trails or seashore might be around and generally doing "nothing". Sitting still and observing the world around. 
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+In the post linked above the "nothing" we did is stare out at the sparkling waters of Pensacola's East Bay, but it could be anything really. I spent hours watching the pine forests of Colorado, the deep woods of Mount Shasta, the deserts of the southwest, the rocky stream beds of Utah, the snowy peaks of the Sierra Nevada. We stare at campfires almost every night. 
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+But watching the world, observing the natural environment around you isn't really doing nothing. It took me quite a while to internalize that, even if I might have *said* it from the beginning. I've come to recognize that there's a big difference between saying something and actually knowing it through experience. And staring at nothing isn't doing nothing. It so happen 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.
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+I also think it offers a practical way to get a sense of a place by learning to pick up the vibe it has. I find the relatively easy in cities, more difficult out in nature which has larger, deeper patterns that are harder to pick up on. 
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+I remembered that the first day we were in California. We drove through Redding and I started to get cranky. My wife says I was cranky the rest of the time as well. I believe it. California puts me on edge. There is no real rhyme or reason to it. I've tried to trace out what it is, but it's nothing specific, it's nothing you can pin down. It's a place I don't have a place in, I never have and I never will. Simple as that.
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+Sometimes you end up in places where you are not happy for one reason or another and you can't leave them. That's when traveling gets hard and people end up throwing in the towel. Like I almost did in California. 
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diff --git a/unused/mileage.txt b/unused/mileage.txt
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+7-11 to ridgway: 161
+montrose to ridway: 35x2
+ridgway to GJ: 68
+driving in GJ: 20
+GJ to GreenRiveri 102
+green river to castle rock: 237+20
+cedar city to zion: 60
+zion: 10
+zion to vof: 160
+vof to vegas: 80
+vegas to red rock: 22
+red rock to gold pointe: 182
+gold point to big pine: 90
+big pine to walker lake: 134
+to topaz: 100
+to washoe: 100
+to susanville: 155
+to redding: 112
+to patrick's point: 156
+to mackerchier 292
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+calc 161+70+68+20+102+257+60+10+160+80+22+182+90+134+100+100+112+156+292
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+calc 2174+1808+
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+It's been a year on the road now, so to the handful of people who ask how long we're going to do this, I can say with some authority: more than a year.
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+<img src="images/2018/2018-04-01_094955_st-joseph-st-park.jpg" id="image-1285" class="picwide" />
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+After our time in the woods we headed back down to the coast, picking up the main highway in Port St. Joe before heading out, way out, on to the long peninsula known as Cape San Blas. There's a state park out at the end of the cape with a nice enough campground and by far the nicest beach on this stretch of the Panhandle. It doesn't hurt that it's only a few steps from the campground.
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+<img src="images/2018/2018-04-03_130436_st-joseph-st-park.jpg" id="image-1292" class="picwide" />
+<img src="images/2018/2018-04-03_130452-1_st-joseph-st-park.jpg" id="image-1293" class="picwide" />
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+This is just around the corner from what I think is still our favorite spot in the Panhandle, the St. George Island, Apalachicola Bay. I don't know what it is about this stretch of Florida. Maybe it's me. To me then everything seems just a little bit nicer here, sharper here, clearer here, the sand a little whiter, the sea a little calmer, the sun a little brighter, the bugs a little fewer. Okay that's a lie. There's plenty of biting midges here just like the rest of the coast.
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+Winter seems to have left anyway, finally, a brief rainstorm on our first day giving up a week of perfect 75 and sunny days at the beach. 
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+<div class="cluster">
+<span class="row2">
+<img src="images/2018/2018-04-03_075405_st-joseph-st-park.jpg" id="image-1290" class="cluster pic5" />
+<img src="images/2018/2018-04-03_125155_st-joseph-st-park.jpg" id="image-1291" class="cluster pic5" />
+</span>
+</div>
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+<img src="images/2018/2018-04-01_094931_st-joseph-st-park.jpg" id="image-1284" class="picwide" />
+<img src="images/2018/2018-04-01_113439_st-joseph-st-park.jpg" id="image-1287" class="picwide" />
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+A year later we're very close to right back where we started, which feels natural to me. 
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+Everything moves in cycles. Time is a vast swirling whirlpool, spinning us all around and around, each time a little different than the last, but themes emerge, patterns emerge, events repeat, for us, in the world around us. It's spring again, the birds are migrating back from the Yucatan and points south, just as they did last year. We've returned from our own migration. In couple of months the storms will begin to spin across the ocean, gather speed and rush toward the land. Animals, people, natural systems, everything is moving through cycles that have been repeating endlessly for longer than anyone can calculate. Don't like where things are today? Wait a week, it'll all change.
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+There are cycles within cycles. From Ice Ages to Civilizations, everything rises and fall following roughly the same cyclical trajectories. Travelers rise and fall. It's been a year worth of rises and falls, with any luck we'll have a many more years, many more seasons, many more migrations, many more rises and yes, many more falls.
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+My wife is a member of quite a few Facebook groups related to travel and she tells me about things people discuss sometimes. Typically she tells me the sort of stories that make us shake our heads, like the person from Britain who wanted some advice on getting RV to travel the U.S. and was told it would be simply impossible without a massive rig with twenty slide outs and every conceivable gadget. Obviously, as our lives show, not the case. 
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+Getting too big of a rig is one of the huge mistakes you can make when setting out to live this way. 
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+The problem with big RVs is that -- aside from weighing you down with a ton of crap you don't need, offering up more places to leak water and more things to break -- they limit where you can go. I can count on one hand the number of campgrounds we've stayed in that could accommodate a rig over 35 feet. If you go big, you're restricting yourself to RV parks and Walmart parking lots.
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+We're 27 feet long bumper to bumper and honestly I wish we were bit smaller so we could get into some places that we can't (for example I know we can't do the main road into San Miguel De Allende because we're a foot too long and I also know we can't drive the road into Natural Bridges, among others).
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+Then there's the part where these rigs cost about 200K, which is enough to travel the world like we do for about eight years. But of course no one actually owns their RVs. I already know we're anomalous in the fact that we like to own things rather than rent them from a bank.
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+Now if you get a smaller rig you may not have room for the five or six TVs I see in some RVs. And yes, predictably, I don't own a TV. Which reminds me of a joke, how do you know someone doesn't own a TV? Oh don't worry, they'll tell you.
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+I really don't understand the TV in your RV thing, but hey to each their own. Except. Except that people regularly ask how we're able to live this way. Round about answer? We don't watch TV. I haven't in well over twenty-five years. Instead I do other things, for example, I taught myself how to program computers in my spare time, evenings, late nights and so on. The times people watch TV. I got pretty good at it after putting a few years into it. And now I can work from anywhere. So yeah, not watching TV is how we're able to do this. 
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+"The tiny miracles of the here and now." Moacir Zeledon as said in the film I Lost My Dream by Stefan Hunt. https://vimeo.com/127536182
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+Quite the contrary, it promises to be a world in which raw survival, among other things, will depend on having *achieved at least a basic mastery of one or more of a very different range of skills. There’s no particular mystery about those latter skills; they were, in point of fact, the standard set of basic human survival skills for thousands of years before those glass screens were invented*, and they’ll still be in common use when the last of the glass screens has weathered away into sand; but they have to be learned and practiced before they’re needed, and there may not be all that much time left to learn and practice them before hard necessity comes knocking at the door.
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+*L.E.S.S.—that is, Less Energy, Stuff, and Stimulation.* We are all going to have much less of these things at our disposal in the future.  Using less of them now frees up time, money, and other resources that can be used to get ready for the inevitable transformations. It also makes for decreased dependence on systems and resources that in many cases are already beginning to fail, and in any case will not be there indefinitely in a future of hard limits and inevitable scarcities.
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+*deliberate technological regression as a matter of personal choice is also worth pursuing.* Partly this is because the deathgrip of failed policies on the political and economic order of the industrial world, as mentioned earlier, is tight enough that any significant change these days has to start down here at the grassroots level, with individuals, families, and communities, if it’s going to get anywhere at all; partly, it’s because technological regression, like anything else that flies in the face of the media stereotypes of our time, needs the support of personal example in order to get a foothold; partly, it’s because older technologies, being less vulnerable to the impacts of whole-system disruptions, will still be there meeting human needs when the grid goes down, the economy freezes up, or something really does break the internet, and many of them will still be viable when the fossil fuel age is a matter for the history books.
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+Still, there’s another aspect, and it’s one that the essay by Douglas Coupland mentioned above managed to hit squarely: the high-tech utopia ballyhooed by the first generation or so of internet junkies has turned out in practice to be a good deal less idyllic, and in fact a good deal more dystopian, than its promoters claimed. All the wonderful things we were supposedly going to be able to do turned out in practice to consist of staring at little pictures on glass screens and pushing buttons, and these are not exactly the most interesting activities in the world, you know. The people who are dropping out of social media and ditching their allegedly smart phones for a less connected lifestyle have noticed this.
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+I’ve talked about two of these possibilities at some length in posts here. The first can be summed up simply enough in a cheery sentence:  “Collapse now and avoid the rush!”  In an age of economic contraction—and behind the current facade of hallucinatory paper wealth, we’re already in such an age—nothing is quite so deadly as the attempt to prop up extravagant lifestyles that the real economy of goods and services will no longer support. Those who thrive in such times are those who downshift ahead of the economy, take the resources that would otherwise be wasted on attempts to sustain the unsustainable, and apply them to the costs of transition to less absurd ways of living. The acronym L.E.S.S.—“Less Energy, Stuff, and Stimulation”—provides a good first approximation of the direction in which such efforts at controlled collapse might usefully move.o
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+In the early days of this blog, I pointed out that technological progress has a feature that’s not always grasped by its critics, much less by those who’ve turned faith in progress into the established religion of our time. Very few new technologies actually meet human needs that weren’t already being met, and so the arrival of a new technology generally leads to the abandonment of an older technology that did the same thing. The difficulty here is that new technologies nowadays are inevitably more dependent on global technostructures, and the increasingly brittle and destructive economic systems that support them, than the technologies they replace. New technologies look more efficient than old ones because more of the work is being done somewhere else, and can therefore be ignored—for now.
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+This is the basis for what I’ve called the externality trap. As technologies get more complex, that complexity allows more of their costs to be externalized—that is to say, pushed onto someone other than the makers or users of the technology. The pressures of a market economy guarantee that those economic actors who externalize more of their costs will prosper at the expense of those who externalize less. The costs thus externalized, though, don’t go away; they get passed from hand to hand like hot potatoes and finally pile up in the whole systems—the economy, the society, the biosphere itself—that have no voice in economic decisions, but are essential to the prosperity and survival of every economic actor, and sooner or later those whole systems will break down under the burden.  Unlimited technological progress in a market economy thus guarantees the economic, social, and/or environmental destruction of the society that fosters it.
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+the more complex and integrated technologies become, the more externalities they will generate. It’s precisely because technological complexity makes it easy to ignore externalized costs that progress becomes its own nemesis.