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| -rw-r--r-- | fear.txt | 37 | ||||
| -rw-r--r-- | ko-kradan-wally.txt | 9 | ||||
| -rw-r--r-- | mold.txt | 14 | ||||
| -rw-r--r-- | quality-of-things.txt | 3 | ||||
| -rw-r--r-- | the-worst.txt | 61 |
5 files changed, 74 insertions, 50 deletions
diff --git a/fear.txt b/fear.txt new file mode 100644 index 0000000..a6e70cf --- /dev/null +++ b/fear.txt @@ -0,0 +1,37 @@ +We've started telling people about our plans to live full time in the blue bus. + +<figure class="picwide"> +<img src="images/2016/bus-joes_2016-06-03_093840.jpg" class="picwide" /> +<figcaption>Home sweet home.</figcaption> +</figure> + +After the eyebrows come down and the puzzled frowns flatten out, the questions come. Most of them revolve around some form of, but, but but... *what will you do without a house? What will you do when that thing breaks down? What will you do when...* + +Rather than answer everyone individually I thought I'd answer all those questions here, as best I can: + +***I don't know***. + +And I'm not particularly worried about it. I don't know what we'll do without a house, because we have a house. It's just somewhat smaller than the average American dwelling and comes with an engine. + +And when it breaks I suspect we'll stop by the side of the road and spend some time sweating, swearing, scratching our heads, failing, asking more experienced people questions, failing some more, sweating some more, maybe taking a near bath in gasoline. And then we might even have to walk somewhere and find someone smarter and more experienced to help us. Then, eventually, we'll probably get it running again. + +Then again it could totally break down into an unfixable hunk of fiberglass and metal that has to towed to the nearest scrapyard. It could burst into flames at a stoplight. It could drop a transmission trying to downshift its way up a hill. A million things could go wrong. + +But a million things can always go wrong, the only thing you get worrying about them is an anxiety attack. I find it more useful to carry a reasonable amount of tools and deal with things as they come. In my experience so far the future is seldom as grim as our fears[^1]. + +What if though? That's the action-killing nag at the back of all our minds. I have it too. You don't think I worry about these things? I do. I know of a Travco that really did burst into flames at a stoplight. It is what it is though. It's not going to stop me from going on this trip. Because you know what? I know of 328 Travcos that didn't burst into flames. That one is scary, but it's only one. + +A whole lot of houses burst into flames too, yet most of us don't sit around worrying about that. Instead we do what practical things we can, unplug appliances when we're not using them, install new breakers, keep an eye on the candles and so on, and get on with our lives. In the end we manage to ignore the fact that [seven people a day die in house fires](http://www.nfpa.org/news-and-research/news-and-media/press-room/news-releases/2013/seven-people-die-each-day-in-reported-us-home-fires) and just live. + +It all comes back to comfort, the ultimate comfort, the little lie we tell ourselves: if I just stay where I am, physically, metaphysically, metaphorically, then I will be safe. It's a nice fiction that helps get all that potential anxiety out of the way, but it's still a fiction. + +Clinging to a life of "security" at the expense of living the way you want will fail you twice. Not only are you missing out on the life you want to have, but even the security you think you're getting in exchange for foregoing that life turns out to be an illusion. The extra irony is that there's never been a safer time to be alive, yet we're all worried about the lion that might be lurking in the grass. Old habits die hard. + +Jon Krakauer's <cite>Into the Wild</cite> [quotes](https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/511021-nothing-is-more-damaging-to-the-adventurous-spirit-within-a) a letter [Christopher McCandless](http://www.christophermccandless.info/) wrote to a friend in which he says, "nothing is more damaging to the adventurous spirit within a man than a secure future. The very basic core of a man's living spirit is his passion for adventure. The joy of life comes from our encounters with new experiences and hence there is no greater joy than to have an endlessly changing horizon, for each day to have a new and different sun." + +Travel is certainly not the only way to have an endlessly changing horizon, at least metaphorically speaking. I'm not suggesting that everyone should sell their house and travel. But I am suggesting that it might be a good time to stop and take a close look at your life and make sure that you're really happy. Make sure that fear isn't holding you back from what you want. I was terrified to have kids. I probably never would have had them if it weren't for my wife assuring me that we could do it. And we did. And it was the best thing I've ever done. Not a single one of my fears turned out to be accurate. + +Traveling isn't the only way to live, but it is one way. And for us it's one that's the most immediate and exciting right now. We may not have a house, we may not have much stuff, we may break down, we may get stuck, we may be uncomfortable. That's okay. I believe we'll make it.Somewhere anyway. + +[^1]: There are exceptions. Global warming looks to be every bit as grim as we imagine. War, violence in general, also very grim. + diff --git a/ko-kradan-wally.txt b/ko-kradan-wally.txt index 8fc62a5..25ad9b5 100644 --- a/ko-kradan-wally.txt +++ b/ko-kradan-wally.txt @@ -1 +1,10 @@ +In February of last year, 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, 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. + + + +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/ @@ -8,25 +8,27 @@ She brought along a friend to check it out too. He was hipstered out in plaid sh What got me was that he was so afraid of mold he wouldn't even get in the trailer to check out the details. Bear in mind that this is a trailer from 1969 that had, until I bought it, been rotting in the woods of south Georgia, used as a place to sleep on hunting trips (incidentally, it was decked out in frilly stain pillows when I bought it, which makes me wonder about the nature of these hunting trips). -The woman was ready to commit, to buy something and restore it with her bare hands. She had already told me her big plans for it. But her friend, whose hands I couldn't help noticing, were pearly white with so much as a scratch or dirty fingernail, was afraid of mold. +The woman was ready to commit, to buy something and restore it herself. She had already told me her big plans for it. But her friend, whose hands I couldn't help noticing, were pearly white with so much as a scratch or dirty fingernail, was afraid of mold. I almost spoke up when I overheard him call the trailer a biohazard. I felt like screaming, "it's fucking mold, man, like the black stuff that grows on anything wet." -I'd hate to hear what he'd make of India, Indonesia or even Florida for that matter, half the things in those places are covered in black mold. Mold is something that happens when it's warm and wet. It won't kill you and it certainly isn't a biohazard[^1]. +I'd hate to hear what he'd make of India or Indonesia, or even Florida for that matter, half the things in those places are covered in black mold. Mold is something that happens when it's warm and wet. It won't kill you and it certainly isn't a biohazard[^1]. For my favorite part of the story we have to go back to the moment hipster douche stepped out of the car... smoking a cigarette. Why I am telling this story? To make fun of some hipster who caused his friend to miss out on a great deal on a cool project? No, not really. Okay, maybe a little, but the things that's been bothering me for a while is that the world I inhabit -- in other words this is all my own fault -- has become increasingly paranoid about what feels like all the wrong things. Mold is horrifying, cigarettes (or vaporizers) are fine. -Today the woman at the public pool told me they make everyone get out for 30 minutes every time they hear thunder. It made me think about one of my favorite memories, of body surfing off the coast of Zihuatanejo as a recently-downgraded-to-tropical-storm hurricane came ashore. My dad and I watched lighting hitting the ocean on the horizon in between catching waves. Salt water conducts much better than fresh. Amazingly, I'm still here. +Today the woman at the public pool told me they make everyone get out for 30 minutes every time they hear thunder. It made me think about one of my favorite memories, of body surfing off the coast of Zihuatanejo as a recently-downgraded-to-tropical-storm hurricane came ashore. My dad and I watched lighting hitting the ocean on the horizon in between catching waves. Amazingly, I'm still here. And I know the public pool doesn't close down because anyone is actually paranoid about lightning. They close down like that because they're paranoid about getting sued if they didn't. And they're right, I have no doubt they would be sued, lightning or not. -We're all worried about the wrong things. +We're all worried about the wrong things. The planet is heating up, the seas are rising and we're excited about some fucking gadget or another. -What made me angry was that hipster douche pissed on his friends dream of building something because he was worried about things he didn't understand, things he had obviously never researched. The woman backed out. I ended up listing the trailer on Craigslist and a few days later a man who wasn't afraid of mold towed it away and rebuilt it. And so it goes I suppose. +What made me angry was that hipster douche pissed on his friends dream of building something because he was worried about things he didn't understand, things he had obviously never researched. The woman backed out. I ended up listing the trailer on Craigslist and a few days later a man who wasn't afraid of mold towed it away and rebuilt it. +And so it goes. -[^1]: I'm not saying mold is good. Or that you shouldn't use precautions like a respirator if you're sensitive to it and in a closed space with it. But christ, it's not a biohazard. Mold might give you a headache, in some rare cases long term exposure is bad for some people, but it's not going to kill you. + +[^1]: I'm not saying mold is good. Or that you shouldn't use precautions like a respirator if you're sensitive to it and in a closed space with it. But damn, it's not a long way from a biohazard. Mold might give you a headache, in some rare cases long term exposure is bad for some people, but it's not going to kill you. diff --git a/quality-of-things.txt b/quality-of-things.txt new file mode 100644 index 0000000..3834e76 --- /dev/null +++ b/quality-of-things.txt @@ -0,0 +1,3 @@ +2x4s aren't 2x4 anymore +Plywood is shot full of holes (unless it's marine grade) + diff --git a/the-worst.txt b/the-worst.txt index 4334322..20c0185 100644 --- a/the-worst.txt +++ b/the-worst.txt @@ -1,62 +1,35 @@ -We've started telling people about our plans to live full time in the blue bus. +We've postponed our departure three times now. Our original plan was to leave town in March. Then when March sailed right by and the bus wasn't done yet, and the house was in no condition to sell. So we moved things back to June. Then June came and went. Right now we're on September and this time I'm reasonably confident we'll do it. -<img src="images/2016/bus-joes_2016-06-03_093840.jpg" class="picwide" /> +Some of the delays are a result of things beyond my control, notably clients that didn't pay on time (a perpetual problem for anyone who works for themselves), which meant I couldn't buy things I need to restore the bus. But there were plenty of things that were in my control. -After the eyebrows come down and the puzzled frowns flatten out, people start trying to bring up -- usually as politely as they can -- the question they really want to ask: *how can you possibly afford to travel around in an RV? Do you have a trust fund or something?* +I have a very particular vision of how the bus is going to look. I want it to be perfect. I want it to be The Best. But that old saying that perfect is the enemy of good enough turns out to be very true. I started out needing to have everything perfect, but that's cost us at least a month of time on the road. -Never mind that living in an RV is orders of magnitude cheaper than the average American mortgage (including ours). I always want to say, how can you possibly afford a $400k mortgage? Never mind that though, no one really cares how we can afford to travel, what they're really asking is* how come I can't afford to do this too?* +I'm about done with perfect. I just want to go. -The answer is the same though. No, there are no trust funds here. We're not even wealthy by American standards. It just so happens that if you get rid of your debts and life doesn't actually cost all that much. - -But if you really want to travel full time you need the part that no one wants to hear: you need to be okay with existing outside your comfort zone. - -We're able to do this because we've combined a few traits and made some sacrifices. The bus is 26ft long. We don't have a large home with room for tons of stuff. I guess we just have a certain sense of not needing much, not being afraid to get outside our comfortable zone, learning to improvise with what you have rather than buying something new and saving most of what you make. - -I am also a big believer in the concept of [The Worst](https://moxie.org/blog/the-worst/), which makes it much easier to not worry about stuff. I don't know that we qualify as minimalists, but once you stop needing stuff, particularly The Best stuff, a lot of self-imposed constraints disappear. To understand the rest of what I'm going to say you need to follow that link and read it. Here's a brief quote to illustrate the difference between The Best and The Worst: +I've been thinking about an old post on Moxie Marlinspike's blog about something he calls "[The Worst](https://moxie.org/blog/the-worst/)". To understand the rest of what I'm going to say you need to follow that link and read it, but here's a brief quote to illustrate the difference between The Best and The Worst: >The basic premise of the worst is that both ideas and material possessions should be tools that serve us, rather than things we live in service to. When that relationship with material possessions is inverted, such that we end up living in service to them, the result is consumerism. When that relationship with ideas is inverted, the result is ideology or religion. -When people ask how we can afford to travel my first thought is usually pretty simple: we can afford to travel because we don't spend all our money on stuff. Perhaps just as important, we don't wait until everything is perfect to go. Nothing will ever be perfect, go when it's good enough. - -As a kind of example of how the philosophy of The Worst works I thought I'd deconstruct a couple of product reviews I wrote for Wired a few years back. One was about knives and one about knife sharpeners. Coincidentally, Marlinspike's article is based on forks. Kitchens are apparently a common source of overspending. In my case this is partly written out of guilt. Despite the best efforts of my editors, both of the reviews have been bothering me for years now precisely because they're about The Best, rather than The Worst. What's been bothering me all these years is that I had the incredible privilege of testing all this cool stuff to tell you about and I didn't come out and just say all this stuff is pretty cool, but **you don't need it**. Or at least I don't think you do, you can decide for yourself. But since I wrote those reviews, here's a counter-review of sorts in the spirit of The Worst. - -The internet loves its tips and tricks, so here's the luxagraf guide to outfitting your kitchen for less than $50, which is $150 less than the budget assumed in the Wired pieces. Yes, the budget in the Wired pieces I wrote is $100 for a knife and another $100 for a sharpener. That's probably not even that much money to Wired's audience, but to me spending that much on two tools is madness. - -That's way more than enough to outfit an entire kitchen. How? Glad you asked. - -First go to your local thrift store and find a cheap 6 or 8 inch chef knife. Do not under any circumstances spend more than $10. - -<img src="images/2016/__2016-06-20_140933.jpg" class="picfull caption" /> - -Now that you have a knife go ahead and drop $10 on the cheapest sharpener you can find. Now follow the directions that came with your cheapo knife sharpener. Congrats, you're all set for knives for the rest of your life. Trust me on this, I have had my $20 Ikea 8 inch chef blade for over 20 years now and it is still razor sharp. I minced garlic with it tonight. And yeah, I overspent. I was young, didn't know better. The point is you do not need some artisanal handcrafted Japanese purple steel bullshit knife just to slice a tomato. Your piece of shit knife is now sharp and will get the job done. - -Now we're going to go high dollar. Take another $30 to your local thrift store and pick up a couple cast iron skillets. Brands don't matter, just avoid rust (Lodge brand are the most common where I live). Buy one 8 inch cast iron skillet and one 10 inch. Follow these directions to season your new skillets. Also grab some mixing bowls, stainless steel if you can find them. Ceramic and glass are also fine. I suggest you get as many 2-4 Qt mixing bowls as you can, but don't spend more than $30 for all this stuff. +I'm not cutting corners on the bus. I still plan to adhere to my original vision. To me The Worst doesn't mean half-ass, it means being okay with incomplete. I've started to incorporate that idea of having the bus be in service to us rather than me in service to it more. We're ready to go and the bus isn't done. And that's okay. We'll figure out the rest as we go. That's part of the adventure. -Okay peelers, you need them but they can't really be sharpened so used is a no go[^1]. Buy the cheapest you can find new. Don't spend more than $10 for a 3-5 pack (Asian markets are a good source for cheap peelers). +Currently there's no floor, no water tank, no propane, no solar power, and all the seats still need to be recovered. Of those though only two will likely get done before we leave. We'll recover the seats and we'll put in a floor. Everything else can be done as we go. -Okay so we've spent around $50 and we have a knife, a sharpener, 2 skillets, 3-8 mixing bowls and some peelers. We still have about $150 bucks left. You could go back to the thrift store and get a nice enameled cast iron braising pot with part of it (no more than $20). But I suggest you put the money in a savings account, head to the library and check out these books. Seriously, **do not buy them**, check them out from the library. After you've read them, practiced their recipes and find yourself wanting to refer back to them then consider buying them. Used of course. +Everything has costs. In this case it's money and time. If you have to have a water tank before you leave it's going to cost you money, which in turn is going to cost you time. Or you could grab a $5 water color from Home Depot and make do until you can get a tank. In some case not only does embracing "good enough for now" get you on the road faster, it can also save you money. -For the basics: +A lot of the expense of a water tank is the shipping. The tank we want is only about $400, but it costs another $250 to ship it to us. If you're willing to hit the road without a water tank you can drive to the water tank production facility and pick it up yourself. This is also true of awnings, windows and paint jobs, all of which we long ago decided we'd do as we go. -* La Technique by Jacques Pépin -* Mastering The Art of French Cooking by Julia Child, Louisette Bertholle, and Simone Beck (Knopf, 1961) -* The Frugal Gourmet by Jeff Smith -* The Joy of Cooking (Scribner, various editions 1931-2006) +Because what I've been forced to confront is that if you have to have everything perfect you're never going to go. -Because they are awesome: +And deep down I suspect that my need for perfect is a kind of excuse to not go. A way of avoiding all the fear that comes with leaving. Fear that if it's not perfect it won't work. Fear that something will go wrong. Whatever. Something will go wrong anyway. And you what? A lot of times its the things that go wrong that turn out to be the most fun. Maybe not at the time, but later. -* Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking by Marcella Hazan (Knopf, 1992) -* The Art of Simple Food: Notes, Lessons, and Recipes from a Delicious Revolution by Alice Waters (Clarkson Potter, 2007) -* Invitation to Indian Cooking by Madhur Jaffrey (Knopf, 1973) -* The Alice B. Toklas Cookbook -* The New Book of Middle Eastern Food by Claudia Roden (Knopf; Revised edition, 2000) +It's impossible to overcome that fear of discomfort. It's natural. You can't "get past it", you have to learn to live with it. At this point in the evolution of our culture I think those of us in the privileged position of being able to do this in the first place could all use a bit of discomfort. Countless people all over the world are living in situations that make our worst moments seem like the petty, insignificant discomforts they are. It helps to put things in perspective: and no matter how you frame it, we're incredibly lucky to be in the position we're in. We didn't even earn most of the privilege we have. Our comfort and possibilities are an accident of birth. -Okay, now, cook. That was the point right? Apply The Worst broadly to your life and it will mean no one is going to walk into your kitchen and go, wow, you have such nice stuff, so if you need to impress them -- and if you're human, you do want to impress them on some level -- then you need to do it with really delicious food. Because the reason you have a knife isn't because it's immaculately handcrafted, but because it's a tool that helps you make delicious food. +Even in comparison to our ancestors we have it easy. My great grandmother raised eight children in a one bedroom 800 square foot house with no air condition in Tucson AZ. My wife's mother picked cotton from the time she was a little girl. We are soft. We don't even know what discomfort is, let alone the host of horrors visited upon innocent people all over the world every day. -Now take this philosophy and apply it to the rest of your life. Spend more time in thrift stores, less time in Ikea. Spend more time at the library, less time staring at Amazon.com. Spend more outdoors doing things that are free less time paying someone else to curate your experiences. Keep track of the money you're *not* spending and put it in a savings account. Consider that if you save 50% of your annual spending you can take a year off work every two years. +We are incredibly thankful to be able to embrace whatever discomfort we might encounter. To chose to be uncomfortable is a luxury, perhaps the greatest luxury. I'm pretty sure my great grandmother would have taken a 4000 ft home with central air if someone had given it to her, and I suspect my mother-in-law would just as soon have not spent her childhood picking cotton. They weren't choosing discomfort, it was just life. I'm less sure that either would have exchanged the experience though. -The beauty of buying cheap stuff is that it gets out of your way. You don't have to think about it, you don't have to obsess over it and read reviews. You buy it once for a minimal amount of money and you move on to the actual point -- in this case cooking. You simplify not by buying some quality item you think will last forever, but by eliminating the need to think about anything other than the cooking. +There's a line in that piece I linked to earlier, "the best moments of my life, I never want to live again." I have feeling my great grandmother would agree. It goes on say: -I'll leave you with Marlinspike's words, which I think are good enough to live by: "**We don't simplify by getting the very best of everything, we simplify by arranging our lives so that those things don't matter one way or the other."** +> The best means waiting, planning, researching, and saving until one can acquire the perfect equipment for a given task. Partisans of the best will probably never end up accidentally riding a freight train 1000 miles in the wrong direction, or making a new life-long friend while panhandling after losing everything in Transnistria, or surreptitiously living under a desk in an office long after their internship has run out — simply because optimizing for the best probably does not leave enough room for those mistakes. Even if the most stalwart advocates of the worst would never actually recommend choosing to put oneself in those situations intentionally, they probably wouldn't give them up either. -[^1]: It probably is possible to sharpen peelers, so if you want to one-up me, figure out how to do it and buy the cheapest on you can find. Please email and let me know how I can do the same. +If you have the luxury of being able to embrace discomfort then take it. Forget perfect and just go, even if "go" is metaphorical. You'll figure it out along the way. |