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+The idea behind comments, behind Facebook, and twitter as well ends up being, you post your personal experiences and someone comes along and injects their belief system into your experience and judges your experience against their framework. I have no idea why you would want to experience that, but I certainly don't so I don't use this things and I heavily moderate comments here. Most comments here are from friends, family, and other thoughtful people, but every now and then someone feels the need to tell me I am not living inside their moral framework. Here's the thing: I already know that.
+
+
+
+Travel cannot be taught in a class, and lists of travel tips are fraught with problems, because every traveler is different. I am still learning how to travel, and in these travel organization ideas and tips, I try to share some of the lessons and techniques I've learned along the way.
+
+I don't want to presume to tell you how to travel. Everyone is different, and I am still learning. I created this section to share some lessons and techniques I've learned in twenty years of traveling, especially in the last four years on the road, [living full time in a vintage RV](/1969-dodge-travco-motorhome).
+
+
+Spanish palindrome on the subject of pilgrimage: La ruta nos aportó otro paso natural – "The path provides the natural next step". Its form cleverly acknowledges the transformative consequences of the pilgrimage, which turns the mind back upon itself, leaving the traveller both ostensibly unchanged and profoundly redirecte
+
+https://www.theguardian.com/books/2012/jun/15/rites-of-way-pilgrimage-walks
+
+
+
+True materialism is respect for nature—it is an appreciation for what nature has given us: Throw things away just because we tire of them or buying things because we are bored shows lack of respect. I’d argue that traveling (burning jet fuel) for simplistic reasons such as reaching goals we can brag about e.g. “I’ve visited more exotic places or a greater number of destinations than you” is also disrespectful [of nature]. In a similar vein showing off by buying bigger houses or bigger cars or more stuff than one needs is disrespectful and contemptible as well. In general consumer culture is somewhat of an immature delinquent civilization; it is inconsiderate and has no class—it is only concerned with itself.
+
+I repeat: A respectful philosophy is crucial.
+
+Without a philosophy, one’s understanding and behavior is simply a collection of techniques. It is possible to just follow “rules”, but I think this is merely the first step on the path towards living well. Perhaps by repeating the actions of a good life, they will eventually be internalized and grow into something greater, that is, personal growth.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+Abundance is the natural state of the world. If you leave something alone, there is enough, plenty in fact for all. Anyone who thinks that life is a competitive battlefield filled with individuals struggling, clawing at each other to survive needs to get outside more.
+
+That's not what life is and the first time you sit still and listen to the forest, pause in a grassy meadow in the moonlight, or tk you'll realize our conception of the world as struggle is flat wrong. It's flat wrong for many reasons, but the one that's come to interest me the most is that that boundary between individual and environment is not nearly so neat and clean as we imagine.
+
+There is a harmonic resonance between the world and forms that make it up, a kind of vibrating, edge-blurring, feedback loop. Things move, change, do what they need to do, others dissolve, morph, recombine in new ways. Nothing is still, nothing is static, nothing is cut off from anything else. We're still not sure where a tree ends: is it the roots? The mats of fungi feeding nutrients to the roots, without which the tree would die? Where is the beginning and end? 
+
+The better question might be, why are we looking for these things? Where did we get the idea that things begin and end?
+
+If you do pause somewhere and sit and be still and watch, listen, smell, taste, you'll also notice something very important: you are part of this harmonic dance going on around you. The grass presses against your feet, the gnats explore your skin, the carpenter bees' wings announce their arrival to you. 
+
+
+
+
+When we come to a place where the ecosystem is thriving we feel at peace
+
+When we seperate ourselves from the ecosystem that abundance goes away. 
+
+Until we learn to love ourselves we can't fix anything, we can't be part of anything. We have to come to grips with who we are, how we fit into the larger picture. We need to see the ways in which we are part of ecosystems, we just have to change how we do it. We do not use things, we are in things. 
+
+Anyone who believes that life is a battlefield full of
+individual warriors should go out into the meadows
+on a spring night. There, you can learn that the
+biosphere does not spawn cutoff, clearly
+differentiated individuals who compete against one
+another—assuming you find such a meadow; that is,
+now that some farmers have started to sow a single,
+standardized species of grass.
+
+Such an experience of the harmony between a
+landscape and its lifeforms is probably not the
+result of objective analysis. But this is precisely the
+point: If you let the calyxes and grasses slide
+through your hands amid the firefly flurries,
+celebrating the coming summer, you don’t just
+perceive a multitude of other beings—the hundred
+or so species of plants and countless insects that
+make up the meadow’s ecosystem. You also
+experience yourself as a part of this scene. And this
+is probably the most powerful effect of experiences
+in the natural world. When you immerse yourself in
+the natural world, you wander a little through the
+landscape of your soul.
+For a long time now, such experiences have been
+considered not very reliable, certainly unscientific,
+and, if valid at all, deeply steeped in that pleasant
diff --git a/unused/bird-watching.txt b/unused/bird-watching.txt
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+One of the wonderful side effects of home schooling your children is that ornothology can begin at age five, rather than waiting for, well, never.
+
+One of my twin daughters has in fact been studying birds far longer than that. My wife has picture of her, age two, pasifier still in her mouth, cell phone in one hand, looking at an image a friend's mother had texted to my wife, the Sibley guide spread out before her, thumb thoughtfully tracing it's way down a page of yellow warblers. Which was a pretty good guess for what was actually a female goldfinch in non-breading plumage.
+
+It probably helps that her middle name is Bird. Not, actually, for avians, for the intrepid 19th century British explorer Isabella Bird, but when it comes to love and namesakes intention it seems is irrelevant.
+
+It also probably helps that we travel the country by RV, stopping off, when we can, migration hot spots. We're not Kenn Kaufman by any means, but we've been known to be on St. Georgia Island in April, summer in the Great Lakes and perhaps even spend a fall in the Chiricauhua region. And no we did not see a tk, or a tk or a trogan. The truth is we're fans of the rather less rare, but still spectacular avians. The Cardnial never ceases to cause wonder. 
+
+We spent two weeks around the Natchez Trace area watching nesting Summer Tanagers in full breeding plumage. 
+
+
+
+I write a travelogue, mostly for friends and family, but I set it up to list the birds we see, which I know puzzles plenty of relatives and other visitors. 
diff --git a/unused/camera.txt b/unused/camera.txt
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+One of the best parts of my job is that I get to test some very nice cameras. I've used the Hasselblad X1D, the Fuji X-Pro 3 (personal favorite), Canon tk, Sony A7RIV, and others. For the most part I am cynical about new technology, but I won't lie, I love testing new cameras.
+
+That said, every camera I've ever tested I've been happy to send back[^1]. I've yet to test anything that made me want to give up the [camera system](/technology) I actually own.
+
+Part of this is related to how I shoot. For nearly four years now I have been shooting everything with manual focus lenses and fully manual exposure. Everything. Landscapes, street scenes walking the cities, the kids playing, running, jumping, swimming. I compose, I focus, I meter, I shoot, I adjust, I refocus I re-shoot. 
+
+It's a process, one that's become part of me at this point, it just happens without me really thinking about it. I rarely miss a shot that autofocus would have pulled off.
+
+which is something I never realized until I pressed the shutter on the X-T4 and realized, oh, right, that's all there is to it. 
+
+The most recent one to cross my desk is the Sony A7RIV. We've been in this area for a few months now and I have quiet a few images in mind, that I knew I wanted to make at some point. Having a new camera to test is a good excuse to get out and shoot them. I try to mix things up, shooting at different times of day to see how the camera/lens responds.
+
+The scene above is about half a mile down the road, half way between our house and our nearest neighbor. It's just an open field, but when the thunderheads give it a good dramatic backdrop, it's fun to shoot.
+
+I wandered down one afternoon by myself and spent a few minutes taking in the scene and then... pointed the camera, everything snapped into focus, and I pressed the shutter. Well, that was boring.
+
+
+I felt less a part of the process, less invested in the result. 
+
+I felt let down. Being out and doing nothing but making images makes me want to shoot more, that part was good, but it made me want my lenses, the feel of metal turning. There's a hard stop when I reach infinity, there satisfying clicks when you turn the aperture ring. The Canon is a great camera, and the lenses are nice too, but I much prefer what I have.
+
+I worry this sounds like some hipster lamenting the bygone era of records or lumberjack shirts. But then, I'm not really sure I care if that's how it sounds because that's not what I mean. I don't want some previous time to come back, I just think the technology of that time was much better than we might think.
+
+But then I have an attachment to the tactile parts of the process of making a photo. Possibly others do not. I enjoy the process of turning the focus ring and snapping through apertures. Sometimes I count them. That way I can focus on the scene and know what my depth of field is without having to look at the info on screen. 
+
+and am glad that I have found a way to have the best of both worlds, analog process, digital and analog results. 
+
+I don't really miss film the way some do, a little maybe, again the tactile part of standing in the dark, feeding and winding the film into the metal wheels, hoping it wasn't touching as you spiraled it on, but I certainly don't miss paying for film. And I'm far better at developing in darktable than I ever was at working with prints in the darkroom.
+
+Sometimes technology moves so fast and pulls us with it so fast we don't get a chance to process what we're giving up. I didn't start out with manual focus lenses because I was nostalgic or missing focusing and metering. I started out with them because I was frugal and they're cheap. My favorite lense, a Minolta 50.. f/2, which I suspect is no one else's favorite lens, cost me $20. My most expensive lens, which is a 100-300 zoom, which I pair with a 2X teleconverter, was a whooping $200. 
+
+I got in because I was trying to get some good glass without spending a fortune. What I didn't realize was happening was that photography was again becoming a process in which I was a key participant. At first I missed shots all the time. I still miss shots, but far fewer. My focusing skills have become much better and I can meter a scene in my head within a stop  or two without consciously thinking about it any more. I see the kids playing, backlit by the morning sun coming through the trees and I just sort of know that I'm going to want about f5.6 to hold them in focus but let the trees and light blur, and in this light, shooting at 100 ISO I should set the exposure around 1/80, maybe faster or slower depending on how much light is getting in the trees, but I know my starting point before I ever raise the camera to my eye.
+
+That sounds pretentious again perhaps, woohee, look at how skilled I am. But it's not skill, it's repetition. Do anything for a while and it becomes *second nature*. 
+
+
+[^1]: I hope it goes without saying, but I will say it anyway: I don't keep anything I review for work. Expensive cameras go back to the manufacturer. Things that companies don't want back go to charity.
diff --git a/unused/fear.txt b/unused/fear.txt
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+I spend a fair amount of time thinking about fear. My own mostly, but sometimes how others get through or past their fear. 
+
+I listen to a history podcast, particularly military history. I'm interested in warrior cultures, how that way of life manifests itself in the various places it's come up in history, be it amoung the tribes of North America pre-western contact, or special forces soldiers in Vietnam. In practical terms of human behavior there's not a huge difference.
+
+Anyway, dig into this idea at all and you will brush up against fear. In many ways fear is a constant part of any warrior society. It's a very obvious fear though. There is nothing subtle about it. Fear of death, fear of injury. These are things anyone can relate to, what become fascinating is how individuals move past those fears.
+
+I think what I like so much about these stories of overcoming fear is that the fear is so obvious and confrontational. The fears in most of our lives are neither as extreme nor as obvious, which in a paradoxical way makes them almost harder to recognize and deal with.
+
+There are many kinds of fear. There's the one you probably thought of when you first read the word a sentences back: fear as in something is going to get you. There are other sorts of fear though and the one I've been thinking about lately is the kind of fear you have when you get married. Or at least you might have had. I did anyway. 
+
+If you've ever been married you probably recall a certain amount of anxiety, fear, about getting married. Not that you're scared of marriage, or scared of your partner, or the commitment (if you had any of those fears I sincerely hope you didn't get married). The fear I'm thinking of stems I think from the fact that this thing -- this case marriage -- means a lot to you, it's this very important thing, and you want it work out the way you have it in your head, but you're afraid too -- what if it doesn't work out that way?
+
+This is the kind of fear that I think subtly grabs us and pulls us around in all sort of ways. I know it does me. I can sit around for months rationalizing all sorts of inaction, dodging that underlying fear, which usually boils down to: oh crap, what if this doesn't work out the way I want?
+
+God forbid you take this question to the internet because there are seemingly millions out there waiting to browbeat you for your inaction, to belittle your fear and tell you to get over it by just doing it. But what few, if any of these people do is help you answer that questions, what if it doesn't work out?
+
+Like if full of decisions that may not work out. That plan to quit your job and travel the world working in dive shops or building websites? It might work. It also might not. And you'd be wise to spend some time at least considerng the latter and planning around it.
+
+That whole travel in a 1969 RV? There are some ways in which that might not work out. They range from the frustrating, finding yourself at the side of the road, unable to move a 12 ton hunk of steel and fiberglass, to the potentially fatal, finding yourself unable to stop a 12 ton hunk of metal and steel. I've had both happen to me. So far I am still here to tell the tale, but who knows? It's a fear I have. It's fear that's kept me from doing what I've wanted to do a number of times. Glance through our travels, see how many mountains we've climbed?
+
+There's a book I really dislike that nevertheless has one bit of wisdom in it that I do like: "the more we're scared of something, the more we know we have to do it." There's an element of the cheesy, "face your fears" nonsense in that, but there's also something more subtle there if you consider it as speaking to that other sort of fear: that fear of what if it doesn't go the way I want? 
+
+The answer is, it doesn't matter how it goes, if you're scared that it might go wrong the lession to take away is that this thing, getting married, traveling the world, driving a vintage RV, whatever it may be, is important to you. And if it's important to you, you need to follow it. You need to see where it goes. That doesn't mean it won't end badly. It just means you have follow it. 
+
+I'm not telling you to chuck caution to the wind. I'm not suggesting you risk everything just because you're scared of the outcome. But you know those things, those things you're afraid of, but they just won't go away. You do have grab them, you have to direct your will toward them and see where it goes.
diff --git a/unused/fict-book.txt b/unused/fict-book.txt
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+After Oil 5: Any Sufficiently Advanced Technology, and stories should be submitted by January 1, 2020
+
+
+A family father who restores a wrecked boat on the shores of Lake Michigan in order to build a future for his family that will help them rise above their current station in the de-industrial world to lead lives of adventure and daring. he fixes up the boat he found, he makes sails of the skins of dogs, the largest easy to kill animal left in the area. He then takes the extra furs to a town at the mouth of the lock and attempts to sell them and gets laughed off the docks as backward, a yoken with skins in a world that doesn't yet need skins. He manages to get passage through the locks anyway somehow and navigates down the st. larwence river and out to sea.
+
+A young girl, patterned after the hummingbird's daughter and omakayas Mexus people, the ojibwe, the remnants of christianity clinging to power in the city. The high and lowland peoples.
+
+ON THE COOL OCTOBER MORNING when Cayetana Chávez brought her baby to light, it was the start of that season in Sinaloa when the humid torments of summer finally gave way to breezes and falling leaves, and small red birds skittered through the corrals, and the dogs grew new coats.
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+I like airports -- liminal zones between worlds fascinate me even when those zones are only between national borders -- but I really dislike flying. I dislike the process of it the way that everyone dislikes it, but I also dislike parachuting into a place, so to speak, without any context of how you got there. Airplane travel also is far worse for the environment[^1], and, to me at least, feels gratuitous in a way that buses, trains, autos and RVs do not. As I've written before, I like the planning process, I like driving in, I even like traffic sometimes because it teaches you something about the place.
+
+We spent most of December at our friends' house while they were back in the states for the holidays. Aside from saving our asses from homelessness, it was a really nice house and had a lot of books. One of the books I read while we were staying at their house was called Gringo, by Chesa Boudin. I was not a huge fan of the book overall, but Boudin captures my dislike of plane travel in one rather tidy little sentence: "Airplane travel predisposes us to superficial, compartmentalized knowledge of a country, while land travel forces us, often uncomfortably, into contact with more everyday realities".
+
+Arguably, you can go further. Bike in and you'll understand it that much better. Walk and you'll know it rather well indeed. Since walking more than a few miles with a three year old isn't a lot of fun, we effectively parachuted in, as you do. And despite having been here three months I still I feel like I do have a superficial, compartmentalized understanding of the area. That feeling is compounded by the difference in language and culture. It's relatively easy for us as Americans to go from Georgia up the UP, spend the summer there and come away with reasonable understanding of the area. It's impossible to do the same when spanning cultures and throwing in different language for good measure.
+
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+I've debated for years now whether I should write something like this and one day, about a month ago I finally came up with the particular set of circumstance that made for a good story to illustrate the point of writing something like this. It all just sort of came out, felt right, so why not?
+
+I hope that the handful of you who follow along by reading this site realize that what is documented here are only the highlights. While we are fortunate to have what we consider interesting day, adventures, and what have you, it's not like we do that all the time. That would be insane.
+
+One thing I don't think I've ever written about is how damn hard it is to live this way. Some times anyway. There are roughly four weeks a year my job more or less sucks. Which is to say I don't enjoy it. Which is amazing. I mean that's 48 weeks in which my job is more or less amazing. I get sent things in the mail, I use them, I write about them. I am amazed I get paid to do this. but then there are those four weeks. And somehow, heading into them, I've also got to fly to Dallas, pick up the bus, drive it back to Athens, not knowing mind you if it will even begine to make it, it hasn't been driven more than five miles in 18 months. That's nail biting stress. And my wife and kids are back in the GA in a bus they can't even move, have never driven and depend on me to deal with, and we're trying to buy a car in GA, with a loan from a bank in California, while registering it in our home state of South Dakota, while our other car may well stop working at any moment and I'm the one who can fix it and I'm 800 miles away and did I mention I might not make it any closer to home? So if you think living on the road is all fun and games and whatever you see on the internet, instagram or youtube. It's not. Life on the road is harder than the life you live right now because it's everything in the live you live right now, plus all the extra stress of all kinds of weird shit like I just listed.
+
+So the question becomes, why do we do it? There's probably a different answer for everyone you ask, but for me it's pretty simple: it's just more interesting.
diff --git a/unused/instant.txt b/unused/instant.txt
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+I've been living with them for weeks now, scattered like wind nlown seeds around the bus, memories surfacing at first of the images, then of the printing, of times I pve though of them, there are here in the real world,not locked away behind glass somewhere, they do not scroll away, they are here, now, with us, about . It's finny then that we call these instant, they take far more time to come into the world than the digital scenes immediately chimpable under glass. 
+
+They are not particularly good prints as such things are judged from a technical standpoint, and yet they are in some way some immediate and micaculous. This technology is like something out the future and that we are not utterly amazed by it says far more about us than it does about the quality of the prints. 
+
+The immedicy is why. 
+
+The real, the artifact. What does it mean to have the artifacts? The ability to share with others, to take a portrait is far less introsive when you can share the results immideate. I do not have a fuji camera so it takes considerably more effort ofr me, but I've seen several Fuji photographers go on at length about what a game changer this was to be able to immediately hand an artifact to a subject, or even to return the next day with a gift. 
+
+In an age when photography has a sinsier undercurrent about it -- cameras in use! shoplifters will be perscuted! facial recognition -- the instant print reminds us the camera can, and should, be a thing of joy, a thing of sharing, connecting and a bridge between rather than the all-seeing eye that big brother in all its forms seeks to twist it into. 
+
+The little rectagles are smaller than the full size polarouds of my childhood, but they are somehow more powerful for it, as if these are new growth, the old growth has been clear cut away, a loss yes, but look what remains, look wt we still have, look what can still be enjoyed. Thes tiny artifacts have been to put up like seeds taking root. There were siveral tucked in the molding aa cabinent this morning. Tomhgith I found one tucked beneath the wall mounted face in my daughters' room, another leaning against the bookshel and a third wedged in the clasping weave of a bamboo basket. We print, they scatter and take root in our world. The colors are all wrong, the blies too dark, the light tones washed out, the shadows less vibrant than the should be. And no cares, not ne loosk at these and things wow, that black doesn't go to 250.
+
+They have their own frame, setting them off from the world, a little whie border, a way of becoming their own thing perhaps. Little squares and rectables of color popping up everywhere I run. And the more I ove with them the more IO love them. I buy some twine and tiny clothes pins, the one and only time I ave set foot in the crafting isle at Walmart. I want then to have room to grow, places to live, little exibits that subtly keep the past alive all around us. 
+
+It could be argued that perhaps we should keep the past alive only in hour heads, or more in our heads, in our memories and we do. I have know people who displike photographs a famous climber pasked Gelen Rowell not to photograph his climbs because the photo interfered with his meory of the event. ButI don't know, it does not have the affet for me, I think of these events more when I see the phiti, I feel in the detaisl that phoio failed to capture, the minutes befoe and faster the shugger flicked up for that fraction of a second to capture whatever it is that if captured. All those meoment that come bfore and ater come with the phitigraph, it's stack of time not singular moment. Ilike what it is fir the viewer, for the photographer and subject a photoigraph is a stack of time, not a single moment, what happened juest befoer the sutter opened, what happened just after, it is all there in memory and singlyuar images, the moment draw out, calls up all the rest as well. It's a movie of the moments in the mind. perhaps this why I can not particular drawn to video, perhaps this is why the instax has some power because it keeps that movie in the mind, it doesn't share it, it is a private moment.
+
+This may be why photographs do not ruin my memories, but movies do, the feel artifical this need to record, I like to record with my head, memorie becomes my vide I use photographs to categolue and organize it.
diff --git a/unused/june.txt b/unused/june.txt
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+Abundance is the natural state of the world. 
+
+If you leave something alone, it thrives. Anyone who thinks that life is a competitive battlefield filled with individuals struggling, clawing at each other to survive, needs to get outside more.
+
+When you get out in it, that's not what life is. That might be what we have made our lives, but it's not what life *is*.
+
+Sit still and listen to the forest. Pause at the edge of grassy meadow in the moonlight and listen. Crouch in a crook of red sandstone halfway up the canyon wall and listen. Here the insects, the birds, the wind. The conception of the world as struggle did not come from observation of the world.
+
+Observing the world you very rarely find individuals struggling. To be sure, creatures eat each other. Just today I watched a wasp and spider have an epic battle, I turned away for a moment though, and when I looked back, both were gone. Who won? I have no idea. Probably neither. Even if the spider did kill the wasp, it was gone from its web.
+
+Watching this though I couldn't help but think it was actually less an epic battle than a kind of dance. Martial arts, deadly though it can be, often looks like ballet. That's what the spider and wasp looked like, a kind of deadly ballet. 
+
+
+
+is flat wrong. It's flat wrong for many reasons, but the one that's come to interest me the most is that that boundary between individual and environment is not nearly so neat and clean as we like to imagine.
+
+That is to say, in order for there to be competition there must be individuals and, when you start looking closely, the line between you and everything is indistinct at best.
+
+There is a harmonic resonance between the world and forms that fill it. There is a kind of vibrating, edge-blurring, feedback loop. Things move, change, do what they need to do, others dissolve, morph, recombine in new ways. Nothing is still, nothing is static, nothing is cut off from anything else. We're still not sure where a tree ends: is it the roots? The mats of fungi feeding nutrients to the roots, without which the tree would die? Where is the beginning and end? 
+
+The better question might be, why are we looking for these things? Where did we get the idea that things begin and end?
+
+If you do pause somewhere and sit and be still and watch, listen, smell, taste, you'll also notice something very important: you are part of this harmonic dance going on around you. The grass presses against your feet, the gnats explore your skin, the carpenter bees' wings announce their arrival to you. 
+
+Many don't even think of themselves as part of the environment at all, which is part of why they know nothing of the abundance of the world. When we separate ourselves in our minds, when we see ourselves as separate from the ecosystem, the abundance goes away. 
+
+When you live in a bubble, that bubble starts to become the world. It's too easy to live in our bubbles, it becomes hard to reach out. And to do so without passing judgement. Just to say there are all kids of people living here and they're all different, and that's okay. There is no one right way. 
+
+
+
+Homeschooling bothers people because it implies we're living on a single income, and that that's enough. I think it reminds people that that did *use* to be enough, but that things have declined from that, that it is simply no longer possible. 
+
+
diff --git a/unused/ko-kradan-wally.txt b/unused/ko-kradan-wally.txt
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+In February of 2015, my friend Wally Sanger died of natural causes at Paradise Lost on Ko Kradan. 
+
+I spent two weeks on Ko Kradan. I arrived their on a whim. I had been island hopping, traveling alone after a long time with a group, working my way down the Andaman sea side of the Thai peninsula for the better part of the month, mostly by convincing day trip snorkel boats to drop me at various relatively remote islands. 
+
+Ko Kradan was not supposed to be the last. I was heading down to Thailand's Tarutao National Marine Park and then perhaps into Malaysia, but I never made it. And the reason I never made it was Wally Sanger and Ko Kradan.
+
+There was a storm blowing in the day I was dropped off so the snorkle boat I had convinced to take me from Ko Hai down to Ko Kradan would only drop my at an isolated beach on the windward side of the island. I jumped out from the bow and my bag hit the ground about the same time I did. The boat was gone two minutes later. The beach was small and lined with a thick wall of jungle. It was about 3 o'clock in the afternoon and I could tell it would be pouring in 15 minutes.
+
+I sat down on the sand and smoked a cigarette. I figured, worst case scenario, I'd get a little wet. 
+
+The guidebook I had claimed there was a trail to the other side of the island, and somewhere over there were a couple of guesthouses. It took me ten minutes to find the trail and another ten to make it to the other side of the island. The rain held off longer than I thought. The first place I encountered was Wally's Paradise Lost. 
+
+He offered me a room, but at this point I had been in southeast asia for nine months, no way I was taking a room from the first farang I met. I might have literally been fresh off the boat, but metaphorically I was too cynical to take Wally up without surveying the island first. I set off for the other guesthouse on the island, which was down on the beach. 
+
+The rain hit at the edge of the tree line on the leeward beach. I followed a couple of dogs deeper into the trees for shelter. A woman walked up off the beach and came into the thicket. We chatted for a while and she talked me out of even seeing the other guesthouse by describing it as “more of a refugee camp.” I did later head down there and that was in fact an apt description. 
+
+I went back and got a room at Paradise Lost. Wally seemed entirely unperturbed by my snub and reversal; I trust he had seen more than few of my kind -- there's no shortage of self assured dumbasses in Thailand. I would not have blamed him for being a bit standoffish with me, but he was in fact the opposite. That night he pulled some ribeye steaks out of the freezer for me, as well as Tony and Zoe, the only other people staying there are the time. Sure, I paid for the steaks, that's not the point. They weren't on the menu. 
+
+The whole of Paradise Lost was like that. There were quite a few layers to the place. There was the one most people saw while I was there, which was the standard guesthouse experience. It was a clean, friendly and cheap place. There'd be no reason to complain if that was all you ever got.
+
+
+
+
+He will be missed. Condolences to his family and anyone who had the great pleasure of knowing him.
+
+
+http://www.offbeatthailand.com/2015/04/17/ko-kradans-wally-sanger/
diff --git a/unused/leopold-essay.txt b/unused/leopold-essay.txt
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+++ b/unused/leopold-essay.txt
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+One of Thoreau's most quoted phrases claims that "in wildness lies the preservation of the world".
+
+If that's true we're screwed.
+
+Fellow conservationist Aldo Leopold seems to have written much of what he did to let us know not so much what we could save as what it was already too late to save, the wildness we had already lost. The last grizzly killed in Arizona. The jaguars disappearing from the banks of the Colorado as it snakes it's way through the Grand Canyon; the ways countless birds in Leopold's day still clung to existence in the islands of native prairie that speckled his home country of Sand County.
+
+All that was gone long before I was born. Or mostly gone. 
+
+Wilderness 
+
+When I was young there were still small pockets of wildness to be found. Buy enough 7.5 topo sheets and you were bound to find some relatively blank spots. The Superstition mountains. The chocolate mountains. The Chihuahuas. The Dragoons. For a kid who grew up in the decidedly not wilds of southern California, the southern edge of Arizona, the borderlands in more ways than one, retained pockets of wildness here and there. 
+
+My father and I made frequent forays into such places. He always looking for snails. Me looking for something I could not put my finger on at the time. Some intangible thing that felt missing from the world. Adventure perhaps, connection perhaps. Whatever it was, all I knew back then was that it did not, for a few moments here and there, hiking the agave chocked hillsides of nameless mountains, tracing the delicate wisps of shade in the Palo Verde lined washes, sitting at the base of sheer buttes, back leaning against the warm sandstone, watching the shadows lengthen and the thunderheads roll in the from the south, it did not feel like anything was missing from the world.
+
+It wasn't just wildness though. Or not wildness in the sense that we westerner's tend to think of it -- roadless natural areas that are inaccessible. Accessibility is after all, very relative. Could you have driving a 4x4 up the wash to the base of the butte where I sat? Possibly and that alone is enough to destroy the kind of wildness that Leopold wrote about. A kind of wildness that ceases to exist not so much through the loss of land -- though that certainly doesn't help -- but through the growth of technology. 
+
+Leopold writes when I call to mind my earliest impressions, I wonder whether the process of ordinarly referred to as growing up is not actually a process of growing down; whether experience, so much touted among adeults as the thing children lack, is not actually a progressive dilution of the essentials by the trivialities of living.
+
+"When I first lived in Arizona the White Mountain was a horseman's world. Except along a few main routes, it was too rough for wagons. There were no cars. It was too big for foot travel; even sheepherders roade. Thus by elimination, the coutnry-sized plateau know as 'on top' was the exclusing domain of the mountaed man: mounted cowman, mounted sheepman, mounted forest officer, mounted trapper, and those unclassified mounted men of unknown origin and uncertain destination always found on frontiers. It is difficult of this generation to understand this aristocracy of space based upon transport."
+
+These days we eschew aristocracy of space or otherwise. We want everyone to have equal access.:
+
+
+
+
+We called half a dozen or more car rental places, but each time the minute the words four wheel drive and Dragoon Mountains came together in the same breath the lin went dead suspriciously soon after. Finaly we stumbled upon roadrunner car rentals, which had an old Dodge truck we could use. Roadrunner proved to be little more than a single wide trailer in front of car wrecking lot, which did not inspire confidence, but did in fact have a dirt brown dodge truck that looked like it was probably held to gether with tin cans, bailing wire and a healthy amount of duct tape. There seemed to be a mutual don't ask don't tell policy at work in which if we didn't ask the owner about the condition of the truck he wouldn't ask what sort of roads we plannned to take it down.
+
+We brought the thing home amid belches of smoke and accidental peeling of the nearly bald rear tires. It was those tires we were worried about. The roads we planned to take were intended for four wheel drive jeeps, but all we had was a lightweight truck with bald tires. Sometimes when adventurous land is running low you have to create your own adventure.
+
+And so we did. 
+
+Grandpa eyeing the truck. My mom did not come. This was before cellphones, when a modicum of danger still existed in travel.
+
+The drive in, building our own road over the ruts with split fire wood. Piling rock in the back of the truck to weigh it down so the rear wheel drive tires would have some bite/purchase in the rutted dirt. 
+
+the widlness of the west slope versus the tamed campgrounds of the east slope. The chiricuauas in the distance, the history of Cochice and jeffer's, cave creek, Jeffer's house, the dark roots of the blank walnut stump that had become a coffee table.
+
+The last grizzly in arisona.
+
+We did no so much reach a camp as reach a point at which we -- the truck my father and I -- seemed to wordlessly conclude that this is as far as we were going. We set up the tent amid fading light. It was far to dry and windy, to say nothing of the general treeless of the west slope of the mountains for a camp fire fire. We cooked over a Coleman stove borrowed from my grandfather
+
+Mysterious foot prints. There are plenty of possible explanations of the footprints, though they all stretch credulity enough that I don't quite believe any of them. It could have been a barefoot hiker with extrorinarily large feet. It could have been bigfoot, the ghost of cochise, geronimo, an entirely non-hominid source, a hominid stepping in the larger track of something else. Whatever it was though, the location it was in spoke of concealment. If it was a thing, the path it took was one you would take if you wished to stay hidden from view by anyone on the rock summit above or from the trail below. These were the footrpints of something that did not want to be seen and that realization only fueled the mystery over the years.
+
+It's been well over two decades now since I set foot in the Dragoons, but I still think about them. About those footprints. I think two about my dissatifaction with explanations and wonder if herpahs thsi isn't a defense against the lose of wildness. If I explain them away the wildness fades. With so much wildness already gone this feels like too great of a cost so I live with mystery.
+
diff --git a/unused/new-job-essay.txt b/unused/new-job-essay.txt
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+++ b/unused/new-job-essay.txt
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+We came to Mexico with a pretty simple plan -- hang out, visit family, live cheap, save money, get some projects done. It is hard sometimes, traveling and working, to carve out time for your own work and I had some work I wanted to get done.
+
+Sawdust in a hurricane has more permanence than a plan of ours. So nothing we planned to do ended up happening. That's how these things go. I went back to doing what I do, drumming up clients, writing things that made them happy. In my search for new clients I noticed my old friends at Wired were looking for a full time writer to do roughly what I've done on a freelance basis for them for years. 
+
+I applied. I talked to the editors. Some months passed. I talked to more editors. Next thing I knew I was booking plane tickets back to the states. While the job is remote, it involves products, shipping physical things to me. If you know anything about customs, you know that's not something that's going to work abroad. 
+
+So we're headed stateside once more and we're excited about it. We love Mexico, we'll miss the people, our friends, our family, but this feels like the right thing to do to me, at the right time too.
+
+I still have some projects I'd like to tackle, some projects that would be hard to do without the stability of a regular paycheck. As a freelance writer you are either hustling all the time or starving. I need some time, and mental space, to tackle some longer term work and a job provides that, so we're off, back to the United States.
diff --git a/unused/not-traveling.txt b/unused/not-traveling.txt
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--- /dev/null
+++ b/unused/not-traveling.txt
@@ -0,0 +1 @@
+"the joy of travel, in this case, had less to do with the actual motion of travel than escaping the 9-to-5, suburban, consumer-capitalist world of which I’d been a clock-punching member from the beginning. My escape proved life-affirming and necessary." https://rolfpotts.com/ken-ilgunas/
diff --git a/unused/se-renta.txt b/unused/se-renta.txt
new file mode 100644
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--- /dev/null
+++ b/unused/se-renta.txt
@@ -0,0 +1,117 @@
+When we left Dallas our plan was to be gone six months. 
+
+We were going to spend the winter down here, stay warm, improve our Spanish a bit and go back to the bus. 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, spend summer at higher, cooler elevations. Then we'd swing south again when it cooled off and come back down to Mexico and work our way down the west coast of Mexico for the winter of 2019/2020. 
+
+It was a pretty good plan I thought. It still is a pretty good plan. It's important you make plans but it's rare to actually follow one for too long. And that one, much as I still like it, is no longer *the* plan. At least not on that timeline. 
+
+The new plan is to stay down here an extra year. We love Mexico and we don't want to leave just now. We, I especially, have some larger projects I want to work on, projects that require more time than is easy to come by when traveling the way we were. The truth is it's very hard to write from the road. When you're traveling you're too busy living to do more than scribble notes frantically. To write well about travel, the irony is, you need to stop traveling.
+
+Then there's a other reason we're staying: money. 
+
+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. We need more power on hills and the only way I've come up with to do that is to either drop in something bigger, a 440 or the like, or rebuild the 318 to get better compression, which means boring out the engine, new pistons, new manifolds, probably a new transmission and quite a few other things that are not cheap. It's all doable, but it takes money. 
+
+Coming to Mexico was part of that plan, live cheap, save up some extra cash and pour it into the engine. Then, just before it was done, my biggest client decided to scrap the project I'd been working on for a year. I won't lie, it caught me by surprise. It wasn't so much the money, though losing over half your income is rarely good, but it derailed me for a bit. Like you probably do I get wrapped up in the things I make, I want them to good, I want others to like them. No matter how much you like something though, not everyone is always going to like it. It took me a while to get past that on the emotional level, but I finally did and then it hit me, oh right, that was all our money too. Crap.
+
+We're very fortunate to be able to do this and there isn't a day that goes by that I'm not grateful for everything we've been able to do. If we had to sell the bus and go home tomorrow I would have no regrets. We're not going to do that, but I don't mind saying that the belts are going to have to be pulled tighter for a while. Sometimes you do have to adjust things if you want to keep going.  
+
+Throughout this trip people have emailed to ask all kinds of questions about money and for the most part I've avoided the subject. Until now.
+
+It takes money to travel. Sometimes it takes a lot. To get our bus back on the road and house ourselves for nearly a month in California we spent over $7,000. We came close enough to just selling it that I have interior photos I was going to post in a Craigslist ad. That's a lot of money and it was the hardest decision we've ever had to make. 
+
+I tell that story not in search of sympathy, but to point out the obvious. It take money to travel.
+
+For a point so obvious, this one gets little press. Before we left I searched high and low for anyone willing to talk about how much it cost to travel the U.S. by RV and came up with very few hard and fast numbers. Consider this my contribution to anyone searching for information on how much it cost to travel the United States in a 1969 RV.
+
+First though we need to get some terms down. We track our spending to the penny, so I can give some pretty accurate figures at the monthly level. Ultimately though this is not how much it costs. The real answer is that how much is costs to travel the U.S. by RV really depends on where you are, how many of you there are, and how you travel. For contrast's sake, to balance out the $7,000+ month in California we spent less than $2000 the month before we left for Mexico.
+
+That said, here's a rough number: **It costs around $3,000-$4,000 a month for our family of five to live on the road in the United Stats**. This figure assumes no unforeseen expenses, which is a euphemism for the bus didn't break down. Uou need to have extra money available for when it breaks down. It will.
+
+Now I know that's a big spread, $3k-$4k. The reason is that around half our spending is on food, which varies tremendously around the country. The west is much more expensive in nearly every regard, relative to the midwest and south, but especially for food. Generally speaking the $4000 a month areas would be California, Arizona, Nevada, Colorado, etc. The midwest and south are cheaper for us because food is cheaper there. In the end things rounded out to $3438/month[^1]. 
+
+On the flip side of that equation boondocking tends to be easier out west -- there's lots more BLM land, which means you can find a free place to stay much easier -- so you spend less on camping (except in California, Calfornia is just expense). If you're on the Gulf Coast it's going to cost you upwards of $30 a night in to camp in most of Florida (unless you know where to look). 
+
+Another way that average is lying is that throughout the course of our trip we've spent less and less per month (except for last winter in California, which puts an irritating bump in the nice downward sloping graph I generated). There are two reason for this. First, we're getting smarter about boondocking and finding cheap camping. Second, we went back cross the country to the south and midwest where food is cheaper.
+
+Final point -- we could do it for less. We could probably cut our food bill by 30 percent if we dropped the organic meat and eggs for conventional and changed our eating habits a bit (in fact we have by necessity here Mexico). We don't, or we didn't in the U.S., because we didn't need to. As I noted in the post on food, food is one of life's most important elements to me. Not that good food has to be expensive, but good quality ingredients in the U.S. are going to cost you even if you do what we do and mostly shop at Asian and Latin grocery stores.
+
+So what's the point of all this money talk? The U.S. is considerably more expensive than Mexico. We spend just over half our U.S. monthly spending here in Mexico, sans bus. 
+
+You probably could have guessed that, what you probably would not guess is why.
+
+Part of it is that some things are cheaper here. Though really, not that much cheaper. Food, which makes up the largest part of our budget, is about 30% less here. That's nothing to sneeze at, it helps for sure, but it's not the real reason it's cheaper for us to live in Mexico.
+
+When I take a hard look at the spreadsheet, and then rotate it sideways to get a new perspective, what really jumps out is the "miscellaneous" category. I don't get real fine grained with spending categories so miscellaneous holds everything that is not gas, food, lodging or vehicle repair. It holds the non-essentials. That category doesn't exist in Mexico. We have spent less than $200 on misc spending in four months of living in Mexico.
+
+Why? It's pretty simple, we don't have access to Amazon.com.
+
+But wait, you're travelers, you live in a bus, you don't buy useless stuff, you can't, where would you put it? 
+
+I know right? But it turns out they makes some pretty small and expensive useless stuff you even can fit in a bus.
+
+Why do we buy it though, surely we know better? 
+
+We do know better and yet we still buy it.
+
+The spreadsheet does not lie. But why?
+
+After spending some time meditating on this I've a very simple answer: access.
+
+Mexico has pretty much everything the United States has, especially here in San Miguel. My wife brought home duck fat yesterday for crying out loud (it was only $2). We're not in the boonies, we're not just eating beans and tortillas. The difference is that here all the stuff you could buy is not all in your face 24/7. 
+
+Shops here do not have windows, most do not even have a way to browse through stuff. Half of them you can't even get to the stuff yourself. Instead you walk in, tell the person what you need, the person asks small medium or large and then goes rummaging around to find what you want.
+
+Everything you buy here comes from your own mind first and is found second. 
+
+In the United States everything is presented and then your mind decides what to buy. On the internet literally everything is right there at your finger tips.
+
+One of these purchasing models will leave more money in your pocket than the other, full stop.
+
+And I know, I know. I like to think I am immune to advertising too, that I am smarter than the advertisers, that I resist the never-ending onslaught "buy this stuff". 
+
+Unfortunately my spreadsheet says otherwise. I am not immune.
+
+And I don't even own a TV, how much more would I be buying if I watched television and were subjected to that much more advertising? And it's not that I'm comparing many years of life in the U.S to just three months in Mexico. Comparing the U.S. to Mexico is not what led me to this conclusion. It got me thinking about it, but it wasn't until I went back and made another comparison that I believed it. It was when I comparing the time we spent in the bus without a car, to the time we had a car that made it painfully obvious to me. It's very simple: given a car and easy access to everything, we spent more. 
+
+Take away the access and we spent less. Mexico also takes away the access, so we spend less here too, but it's not the situations or places really, it's us.
+
+I am not immune. You are not immune. We all fall for advertising. 
+
+Advertising is a debased form of magic, which is another way of saying it's powerful and you probably are not aware of its power in any conscious way. I know I am not. However, now that I'm outside its sphere of influence a bit, I've noticed something -- I don't want anything. Maybe that's not quite true, I want much less. So much less that I became aware of it, I noticed how much less stuff I wanted. At first I thought I was maybe a little crazy, but we've talked to couple of Americans who've been down here a while longer than us and they've noticed it too. 
+
+A good example of this for me would be camera lenses. I use old, manual focus lenses. In the course of the trip I've bought and sold about a dozen, and there were many more I wanted to buy. I used to follow all the used lens websites and would lust after various expensive hard to find lenses that I wanted. Wanting gives you a hit of dopamine. So nice. Not wanting takes away the dopamine. This is biochemical source of buyers remorse, once you have something, no more dopamine from wanting it. You have to move on to wanting something new. This will never end. Nothing you ever buy will satisfy you. It can't, no dopamine. Subjected to this cycle of wanting we become like a rat in cage, running on a wheel, around and around, chasing that hit of dopamine in an endless loop -- desire gratification dissatisfaction, desire gratification dissatisfaction. 
+
+Once you see yourself doing this you can't unsee it. It's horrible to realize this is you. That you are a lab rat in someone else's experiment. You also start thinking more broadly about other things. I started obsessing more and more about where my attention goes and how that affects me.
+
+In the case of the lenses I stopped reading all those sites and redirected my attention to actual photographs. I started directing my focus to technique instead of tools -- things like composition, texture, light, tone and all the other bits of craft that actually make good photos. Not only have I not bought a lens since, I've become much more satisfied with the ones I own. 
+
+This dovetails with a lesson we learned early on in the bus -- once you realize you can live without something, get rid of it. It will never become more useful by existing in your closet. It is either useful right now or not at all (tools are the only exception to that rule). Once I realized I could live without reading about cool new camera lenses I sat down and scrutinized everything I read on a regular basis and got rid of anything that was likely to make me want stuff. 
+
+I wanted off that wheel.
+
+If you like to travel there's a good chance you have more D4 dopamine receptors (here's a good link to learn about D4) than the average person, which makes you especially prone to wanting, which in turn makes you susceptible to advertising, which in turn, ironically, makes you less likely to be able to save up the money to travel. 
+
+What does this have to do with traveling? Well we sat back and took stock of things, what we all wanted to do, why we wanted to do it, the whole bit and we decided that we wanted to stay here in San Miguel for longer than six months.
+
+Not too long after that we found a house that was just about perfect for us so we signed a year lease and we're staying here. We're staying here to slow down for a while, to work on some projects that require the kind of deeper focus that's difficult to manage on the road, to get better at Spanish, to try to move beyond a superficial, compartmentalized understanding of the place we're in, and to save money, both because we can live a little cheaper and because we spend less here.
+
+There are other reasons, the kids wanted to do somethings that are hard to do on the road, like take gymnastics and swimming lessons, and I wanted a break from crawling under the bus every other day to see what the mysterious fluid was leaking now.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+[^1]: This is endlessly debated on the internet by people looking to justify which variety of travel they support. Based on what I've read at the [Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies][1], as well as Michael Sivak's work for the University of Michigan Transportation Research on the energy intensity of both driving and flying, a family of 5 driving, even in the bus, puts less carbon in the air than flying. Would it be better to do neither? Yes. As for the whole climate change debate, I managed to pick up enough of an understand of energy flow and the laws of thermodynamics back in high school to realize that billions of tons of infrared-trapping gases into Earth’s atmosphere is going to fuck things up as it were. The fact that Earth’s climate has changed drastically without human interference in the past should really just demonstrate how idiotic it is to tinker with a system clearly vulnerable to destabilization.
+
+[^2]: To arrive at that figure I also threw out all our early spending on bus restoration. If you haven't been following along since the beginning, know that we went ahead and hit the road with no water tank (no plumbing at all for the first two weeks), no propane system and no solar system. Solar especially makes our actual monthly spending considerably higher for the first year, but assuming you're not remodeling on the road, you won't have these expenses so I left them out.
+
+[1]: https://www.yaleclimateconnections.org/2015/09/evolving-climate-math-of-flying-vs-driving/
+
+
+