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| -rw-r--r-- | published/2019-01-03_these-walls-around-me.txt | 52 | ||||
| -rw-r--r-- | published/2019-01-11_sounds-san-miguel.txt | 35 | ||||
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diff --git a/calendar.txt b/calendar.txt new file mode 100644 index 0000000..cbb0d39 --- /dev/null +++ b/calendar.txt @@ -0,0 +1,53 @@ +## ESSAYS + - Panasonic Lumix S1R Field Test + ** tasks: + - create CSS of inline picture stories ala CM + - create referal link callout at top of the page + - + - TNF essay + - history of american nature writing, listing some more obscure authors, (themes therein?) + - list of nature writing books, + - where is the thoreau of africa? + - Is there a thoreau of russia? + - what is the relationship of other literatures to nature. + +## JRNL + - Sounds of mexico [~/writing/luxagraf/sounds-of-mexico.txt] + - Blessing of the seeds Candelaria [candelaria.txt] + - On not traveling + - Eggs in the jardin + - Invitation to mailing list + - Travco after page + +## GUIDES + - How to + +## SRC: +### django tutorial for beginners - part 1 + * what is django + - python based framework for creating websites + - models urls views templates + * How can django simplify my life? + - built in tools + - admin + - ORM + - interface with Python’s unit testing tools + - authentication system + - basic CRUD tools + - generate feeds + - GIS + - internationalization/localization tools + - once you know your way around you can prototype things really quickly + -- ??? + * Sites that use django at scale + - Instagram + - Mozilla + - National Geographic + - Disqus + - Bitbucket + +### django tutorial for beginners - part 2 +### django tutorial for beginners - part 3 + + + diff --git a/essays/comeback-sauce.txt b/essays/comeback-sauce.txt new file mode 100644 index 0000000..1cf7f05 --- /dev/null +++ b/essays/comeback-sauce.txt @@ -0,0 +1,29 @@ +#Comeback Sauce +##An Ode to JB's Sausage Cart, an Athens, GA Institution +### originally published by Longshot Magazine https://web.archive.org/web/20100904114555/http://one.longshotmag.com/article/going-for-seconds + +<img src="https://web.archive.org/web/20150908045114im_/http://one.longshotmag.com/media/images/jb.jpg" alt="bottle of comeback sauce" class="pullpicleft" /> + +I met JB under a very short bridge nearly a decade ago. He was wearing a dejected look I would never see on him again—a momentary interruption in his universally good mood. I was new to the South, recently transplanted from Los Angeles, so when I stopped the car to survey the roadside scene, I wasn't expecting to find a massive overturned oil drum-style barbecue lying in the grass just beyond the crumpled mini trailer that was introducing worry to JB's spirited face. + +I helped him pull the trailer out from under the small railroad trestle bridge. The air felt so hot and still and thick that it was like trying to breathe underwater, and our shirts soaked through with sweat. I leaned on the tailgate of JB's truck while he tried to pound the frame of his trailer roof back into shape. It was the first time I remember ever noticing Kudzu, or hearing the throbbing, ceaseless drone of Southern insects lurking beneath. Everything was alive. + +I helped JB haul the enormous rusted grill pit back onto the trailer. My hands were black with charcoal and grease. JB tied the grill back down and thanked me, promising free sausages when he was back up and running. I smiled, assuming I'd never see him again. But this was not LA. "Oh you'll see me everywhere," he assured me with the knowing tone of a local, "I've got comeback sauce." + +Two weeks later I played a show at the 40 Watt club in downtown Athens, famous for once having been lit by a single 40 Watt bulb. It's a legendary club that helped put Athens on the music map. I was thrilled to play there. I drank gallons of beer, and met what seemed like hundreds of people. After closing time, we all stumbled out the front door looking for something to eat. + +And there was JB. Parked on the edge of the small crumbling parking lot, cooking up sausages for a crowd of drunk kids. I was shocked he remembered me and came through with free sausages, "with comeback sauce ya hear? Cause you'll always come back for more." He smiled. I walked away into the warm night and ate. The sausages were, well, sausages. But the sauce was something else. + +As I was walking home with my friends, JB drove by and then stopped and waited for us to walk up to his truck. "There's a party up ahead, ya'll want a ride?" We jumped on the trailer and rode up the hill. JB set up in the front yard of someone's house. He didn't ask. He didn't need to. This isn't LA, there are probably street food codes, but no one lets them get in the way of a good thing. It wasn't long before the party emptied out of the house and spilled into the street, everyone coming out for the comeback. + +For the next eight or so years I would pay a visit to JB's sausage truck at least once a month. I always came back. Sometimes even when I didn't really want a sausage. I found it difficult to walk by without buying something. Over time JB ceased to recognize me, my face blended back in with the rest of the drunken, if polite, crowds. + +A decade is a long time in a small town. I watched friends come and go. And come and go again. I moved away for a few years myself, lived in big cities, small ones, traveled around the world. But I always came back. + +Athens has it's own comeback sauce, something that draws people back to it like the moths and lacewings that form clouds around the streetlights on a warm summer night. + +It's been a long time since I've seen JB outside the 40 Watt. Sometimes there's a big silver truck serving a full menu. It probably meets city code. I haven't eaten there. I suspect they have no comeback sauce. + +I'm not sure what happened to JB. It wouldn't be to hard to find out -- Athens is still a small town when it comes to that sort of thing -- but I don't want to know. I prefer to keep coming back, hoping maybe one day I'll see that dirty old oil drum of a barbecue throwing smoke up into the thick summer air and hear JB telling someone, ya'll come back now, ya hear. + +Upon re-reading this, I like it much less now than I did at the time. In my defense, I wrote this in about an hour, sent it off to Longshot and somehow it became the cover for the first issue. They even made a t-shirt out of the comeback sauce bottle artwork (not mine). Still, I'm not super fond of this story because I actually know JB and I don't feel like I did him justice. He deserves better. -sng, 2019. diff --git a/essays/whats-missing-is.txt b/essays/whats-missing-is.txt new file mode 100644 index 0000000..0f6c7d7 --- /dev/null +++ b/essays/whats-missing-is.txt @@ -0,0 +1,204 @@ +# What's Missing Is +## A story (fictional) based on my grandparents and other bits of family history. +### Originally published by The Cost of Paper https://web.archive.org/web/20150506051746/http://1888.center/scott-gilbertson/ + +Claire woke up in a sleeping bag. The familiar shimmer of nylon against her skin. The smell of creosote and dampness. Already the darkness was lifting off the desert in front of her. She rolled over on the chaise lounge and groped the ground until she found her headlamp. + +The little tuna can stove was back against the wall of the house. She stretched until she could hook it with a fingertip. She filled it with alcohol and lit it with a match. As the stove heated up she poured the water and grounds into the moka pot. + +She sat up, still in the sleeping bag, and sipped the inky black coffee. She thought of something an ex had once said to her, "Claire, normal people want to be liked and accepted. You don't seem to give a shit. All you seem to care about is your coffee in the morning and your drinks in the evening". More or less. She took another sip. But not really. + +Little bubbles of the past had been welling up and bursting on the surface like that ever since the plane touched down yesterday evening. Every time she heard that horrid kitty litter crunch of someone walking on the endless gravel of Tucson, some bit of her younger self broke loose inside. + +She was facing west, but could tell that the sun had not cleared the horizon. Two Cardinals flitted in the Mesquite tree at the edge of the patio. Flashes of red amongst the blacks and greens. She listened to them talking, the thin chip of their song muted by the morning stillness. + +The desert began to sketch itself in the morning light, watercolor hues of sand and rock that surged together over the rolling canvas until everything was a million rioting shades of pink sandstone that held the river plain like a cradle, the dark green Palo Verde and Mesquite groves nestled like some dark scars in the blushing sand. It seemed to extend forever, spreading out to the west until it climbed up and disappeared into the green, juniper and pine cloaked world of the Catalina mountains. + +It was wet. The rain she had dreamed was not just a dream. Everything beyond the few feet of solid patio cover where she had slept was dripping. The foot of her sleeping bag was wet. She slid out into the cool of the morning, gravel gouging at her heels, and hung the sleeping bag to dry from a hook on the patio cover. + +She cupped her hand to the window and looked inside the house. Her grandfather was passed out in the recliner, fully reclined, just the way she had left him six or seven hours ago, when his eyelids had finally slid shut over the constellations of grief she had watched drift quietly across those dark expanses. The TV still flickered. Ever since she was a girl, the only way he had ever slept. + +<hr /> + +The late evening sun was just starting to temper its edge, take a little something off finally, maybe give a little respite from this goddamn heat, Ambrose was thinking when the entirety of the gravel station lot just outside the window was swallowed by a giant dust cloud that might, he realized, have somewhere in it a car, a customer, perhaps even customers, something he had not otherwise seen since much earlier in the day, back when it was hotter than Ambrose's repertoire of swear words could convey. + +He'd been wondering for some time if he'd need to expand that repertoire for the jungle. The Army was unclear on many things, especially to Guardsmen like Ambrose, not the least of which was how many words he might need to describe the heat of Panama. + +He was still standing in the shadows of the garage wiping his tanned forehead with a greasy rag, trying to imagine humidity, or at least the idea of water, when he heard the door slam and the inevitable gravel crunch of footsteps coming his way. Squinting against the glare of the setting sun he was just stepping out of the shadows when a woman's voice startled him. + +"Sorry about the dust." + +"That's all right ma'am." + +"We need some petrol and a place to stay." + +"Okay. Well I'll fill it up for you. You can stay down to street at the Vida Court. I'm sure there's some rooms." + +"I see." + +Ambrose followed her back to the truck where two small boys and a teenage girl sat atop a pile of trundles and suitcases in the bed. He nodded to the boys and tipped his hat to girl who met his gaze directly, without flinching in the slightest, which brought a warm heat to his cheeks before he could stop it. + +Ambrose turned his head away and busied himself with the gas pump. + +"Heat brings the color to your cheeks." The woman was beside him again. + +"Yes ma'am." Ambrose stared at the ground. "Been a hell of summer, if you'll pardon me." + +"It's not always this hot?" + +"It's always this hot, but not for so long." The woman said nothing, Ambrose glanced up at her. "Ma'am?" + +"I was thinking, I was wondering if my grandchildren will have to endure this place." + +"Ma'am?" + +"We're here for my husband. They said that the dry air would be good for his tuberculosis." + +"Mmmhmm. They say that." Ambrose studied his feet. + +"I don't expect I will get to leave." She was staring off in the distance. "But I'd like to think my daughter might." + +He waited a moment, but she did not say anything more. She paid him in coins and climbed back in the truck. The engine coughed back to life after a few sputters that Ambrose attributed to grungy spark plugs. Most people didn't know to soak them in gasoline, it was rare that they need to be replaced. He decided he liked the woman, she was maybe a bit odd, but the heat did funny things to you if you weren't used to it. He imagined she would endure, something about her seemed incapable of not enduring. At the very least he didn't feel like she should need to buy new spark plugs just yet. He would tell her as much tonight, after he went home to the Vida Court. + +He watched the truck crawl out onto Prince road. He followed it out, kicking a rock out the driveway into the road. He saw the brake lights at the end of the street. The truck lurched into the Vida Court. He thrust his hands in his pockets and walked back toward the office. + +<hr /> + +If she really didn't give a shit Claire reasoned, then she would not have come. People who don't give a shit don't abandon their lives half way around the world, book very expensive last minute plane tickets and come back to this godforsaken fucking desert. + +Although, in truth, now that she was here, she missed this desert in some deranged way that made her half understand why people stayed in abusive relationships. Hate is just a perversion of love, but rage, rage is another thing altogether. + +She had left the desert in a kind of rage, a dull rage of unfairness wrapped up in punk rock and politics, and being born at the wrong time in the wrong place to the wrong people. The people who didn't stick around. + +Claire found her aunt's cigarettes tucked in the side of her purse, which she had left next to the impossibly long telephone cord that connected the old push button land line her grandfather insisted on keeping around. She took two and ducked out the back door for walk in the desert. She wanted to get away from her aunts. + +Her mother's sisters both thought she didn't give a shit. They always had. All because Claire hadn't cried at her own parents' funeral. As if a six year old is aware of social decorums. + +They still hated her for it. Or, if not hated, at least thought she was strange, most likely a little dangerous and best studied in silence. That she insisted on sleeping outside, like animal she had heard her aunt say last night, only reaffirmed this belief. But outside was the only place the rage dissipated. Outside there was only the heat and the stillness and the relative cool of the evening and mornings. Coffee and cocktails were not so far off after all perhaps. + +There was also the rather insulting move of leaving the desert. Claire did what no one else in the family had dared to do since her grandmother stepped off the beat up flatbed into the cactus-strewn world of kitty litter. Leave. We are here to go she had said with the smirk and she disappeared over the horizon, traveling halfway around the world to do god knows what. Claire imagined how much they must enjoy talking about her when she wasn't around. Sometimes she thought she should sit them down and just tell them everything, but they had over the years made it pretty clear that they actually liked her better as an object of fascination than a person. Who was she to deny them such pleasure? + +It was April, the edge of searing heat, more of a baking heat right now. The dry heat of spring in a place where somehow flowers still contrived to not just exist, but explode out of the seemingly dead soil. Claire looked down at the cigarette between her fingers. She'd quit years before, but somehow it seemed like something Emma would do. Now though, standing in the middle of a flame red cluster of Ocotillo flowers she realized Emma would never have lit the cigarette. Would never have even taken it. Would never have even come at all. She was never part of the desert the way Claire was, she had floated above it like a cloud. + +Claire watched a tiny dust devil gathering in the wash down the hill. The desert was where the earth's dust came from. Bits of the Sahara coat the Amazon every year. There is no escaping the desert. Even if you travel half way around the world your desert past will find you, grain by grain, dust to dust. Everything ends up back here in the dry desert plain where it settles and bakes in the heat until it's all as hollow as a corn husk. A little wind and it would all be off again, headed south down to the Mexican coast and out to sea. + +<hr /> + +Emma had developed a peculiar fascination with chewing sand. It came to her mouth as a dry film licked off her lips. From western Oklahoma onward she had been chewing at the nothingness of sand. Now, after jumping down from the truck bed, she violently spat the contents of her mouth on a cactus and resolved to never chew sand again. + +Except that it kept settling on her lips. And she kept licking them, out of habit. Perhaps, she thought, the whole West is just one thin dusty film settling over the world. Certainly the room at the Vida Court was saturated with fine grit. + +Mother had laid Father out on the bed and was giving him a glass of water and some saltines. They were talking in low voices that Emma could not make out. She went outside to get her bag and have a look around. + +The Vida Court was, Emma reasoned, better than sitting atop trundles in the back of the flatbed wedged between sweaty siblings and a mucus and blood-spewing father. And that was about all that could be said of it. + +It was not, for instance, a ten-room farmhouse with three floors and a tornado cellar. Nor was it surrounded by endless acres of imported genuine Kentucky bluegrass with a semicircle of drooping cottonwood trees growing around the pond. There were no ponds for miles. Just a small, rusted copper tub full of sun-warmed water. + +It was only after she removed her stockings that she realized how thoroughly the sand had saturated her. Or perhaps, she thought, perhaps my thighs have tanned through these skirts. She climbed into the water and watched as the brown of her legs faded back to milky white, the dusty film of Oklahoma and New Mexico drifting across the water like great orange clouds moving from one end of the tub to the other. + +She could see the young man from the gas station through the chalky pink haze of the bathroom window, but only as a still, dark frame in a chair on the porch. It wasn't long before Emma found herself standing in the bathtub, dripping water, watching the shadowy porch for signs of movement. + +She put on a clean dress and evacuated the bungalow as fast as she could without raising undue suspicion. The sun was already gone, but the air still held the heat like a treasure of the day. She walked around the cacti and was tempted to touch the thorns. She reached out her hand and ran it from the center out and down the edge, careful to keep her hand moving with the hooked direction of the needles. + +"So y'all sold your farm, bought the truck and hauled your dad out here for some fresh air huh?" + +His voice startled her enough that she almost leaned on the cactus for support. + +"Sorry?" + +"You sold the farm, bought the truck and here you are, TB and all." + +"Something like that." + +"We get quite a few passing through these days..." + +"Oh we're staying I believe." + +"I'm Ambrose" + +He extended his hand and she stepped out of the cacti and took it in her own. + +"Emma." + +"You know, Emma," he took another sip of the beer for courage, "that truck you're family is drivin... you need to pull the plugs and soak them in some gasoline. I can do it if you like." + +<hr /> + +The funeral was over by four. Claire sat on the patio with her Grandfather, eating leftover Fancy Franks. + +"These were her favorite," he said staring down at the last one in his hand. + +"No they weren't, she hated little cocktail crap like this." + +He laughed and pitched the last one out into the desert. "You're right, she did." + +She watched a Brown Thrasher study the frank from a low branch of a Palo Verde tree. "Are you sure you're going to be okay?" + +"Have I ever not been okay?" + +"You wife just died Papa..." + +"She died three years ago Claire, her body stopped working recently is all. I'm old, she was old. People die. It's what we do Claire. Next time you come around here it'll be for me." + +"Don't take this the wrong way Papa, but I'm not coming back for you." + +"I know." + +"How do you know that?" + +"Because when I'm gone there's no one to come back to." + +Claire smiled. "True, plus I'd hate to disappoint all of them. Everyone thinks I don't give a shit. If I show up here after you... well, that would seem like I gave a shit wouldn't it?" + +"Who thinks you don't give a shit? Give a shit about what? They don't think that." + +"About anything. And they do. Like everyone else has these complicated situations and feelings and worries and all this shit and I just float away on a bunch of merry red little balloons." + +Ambrose chuckled. "Who thinks this?" + +Claire gestured around her, "I dunno, everyone..." + +"Mmmhmm. Claire, you know better than most that there is no everyone." + + +<hr /> + + +The rock sounded like a bomb against the window. She was a foot clear of her bed before she had even made sense of the noise. Then she heard his hissing whisper, "Emma..." + +She pulled the window up and crawled out, tumbling down into his arms. "Stop with the rocks, you scared the life out of me". + +They crept through the sandy yard and down the banks of Palo Verde snarls to the edge of the river. He stopped suddenly and she crashed into his body. He started to say something, but she smothered his mouth with a kiss. + +Later they lay on their backs listening to the river. Ambrose told her the names of the stars that he could remember, making up the rest on the spot. + +She asked about the stars in Panama and then suddenly, "you aren't going to get Malaria are you?" +Despite all the words he had conjured for Panama this was one he had not thought of. The Army had not mentioned it either. "Do they have malaria in Panama?" + +"Of course. And snakes and worms and all sorts of nastiness. It's a jungle you know." + +"I know. It'll be beautiful, no desert, no dry cracking horridness." + +Emma smiled. "You've never felt humidity have you?" + +"No, but I already know I love it." + +Emma laughed. "You might be the only person I've met who's happy to be going to war." + +"I'm not happy to be going to war, but I'm happy to get out of here. I've been trying to get out of here for years." + +She laughed again ans stroked his cheek. "You can always leave anywhere Ambrose, you just go. You just have to make sure you understand what you're leaving." She slid out of his arms and walked down to the water's edge. He watched as she crouched down at the river’s edge and skipped rocks out toward the middle. + + +<hr /> + + +The patio had a fan. It spun too slow to move the air much. It had always reminded Claire of a tape reel or a movie projector, except that it was broken and only spun backward. A tape reel forever rewinding. + +The rain had started again off in the distance, a low cloud hung over the mountains, a black mist trailing down from it, filling the canyons and ravines with drops that would become a raging wall of water by the time it passed by here tomorrow morning. + +Inside the house Ambrose tilted back the reclining chair with a long angry sounding trail of ratcheting clicks. She could hear her aunts talking in the kitchen, their words muffled by the faucet and clatter of dishes. She heard the TV come on. They would be running the ticker tape at the bottom of television again tonight: Flash flood warning in effect. + +Tomorrow the newspaper would want everyone to know that someone had died; that a new golf course is going to be built on the hillside above someone’s watery grave; that the threat of flood is the price we pay for sunshine; that the desert is a barren curse; that every place has its curse, that eventually all the curses will combine; that everything will be cursed; that the curse is not so bad; that loneliness is a curse; that loneliness is different than alone, that still, the coffee is quite good down at the.... + +Claire slid her legs into the sleeping bag, enjoying the dry slipperiness of nylon against her skin. It felt like slipping between worlds, cool dry worlds where she could float on red balloons forever. Darkness closed in, the world telescoped down into blackness. The foothills faded, the dark splotches of river slipped into black. Eventually there was only the lone saguaro still glowing in the soft blue light of the television flickering behind her. diff --git a/invitation.txt b/invitation.txt new file mode 100644 index 0000000..c6130fc --- /dev/null +++ b/invitation.txt @@ -0,0 +1,49 @@ +In 1993 I moved to the sleepy little college town of Redlands, California. Wedged between two mountain ranges, the Mojave desert, and Los Angeles, Redlands was a good base camp for the hiking, climbing, skiing and body surfing I hoped to get out of college. + +Redlands was also one of a handful of colleges where you could write your own degree program, which I thought sounded like a swell idea. It turned out to be a good deal more work than I imagined, or was willing to put in, but I originally planned to write a major that was one part photography and one part "nature writing". + +I still think it was a good idea, one I could never let go. Luxagraf is more or less the third draft of this idea. + +But the first draft did not take off. I dropped out after two semesters. Before slinking back down the freeway to Los Angeles I did manage to write and complete a couple of classes. One was akin to Nature Writing 101, if such a thing existed[^1]. I tried to keep it simple, I had a lot of photography and climbing and hiking to do as well. So I read and wrote about authors I'd already read before. I didn't get too creative, mostly the usual American "nature writing" suspects -- Thoreau, Muir, Leopold, Abbey, Dillard, Lopez, Stegner. + +Fortunately, my advisor in this project, who looked like a heavier-set John Muir, threw in a few authors I was not familiar with. I remember thinking damn, I *am* going to have to do some work. But that's how I first heard of Mary Hunter Austin. + +Mary Austin remains an overlooked author of the west. Austin is best known, when she is known at all, for a book called <cite>The Land of Little Rain</cite>, her <cite>Walden</cite>, with the Mojave desert starring in the role of Thoreau's pond. + +Perhaps she came to early. The west, especially the Mojave desert, wasn't fully settled when Austin went exploring and writing. She began traipsing around the desert in the 1890s, no one wanted to think about anything but silver and gold and pick axes and railroads. Austin's sensibility as a writer was colored by three things that flew in the face of her time, and to an unfortunate degree, ours as well. Mary Austin was three things that a nature writer shall not be: a woman, a mystic, and a defender of rights and lives of native people. It was the middle thing that intrigued me then, and it still does today because, I think it's what grew out of the other two things. + +Recently, in searching for new books for the kids, I was re-united with Austin. Austin wrote several children's books. I stumbled across one, <cite>The Trail Book</cite>, that the girls loved. Exhibits in the Natural History Museum in New York come to live for two children and various adventure ensue. Finding this sent me off searching for more Austin, and somewhere in the early hours of the morning, bleary-eyed and half-asleep at the keyboard, I ran across a digital copy of a collection of Austin's short stories called <cite> Lost Borders</cite>. What caught my eye was the dedication, "to Marion Burke and the Friends of a Long Year." + +Who were the friends of a long year? What were the friends of a long year? When were the friends of a long year? It's hard to tell from the typesetting if Austin capitalized Friends of a Long Year or not, but I like to think she did, I like to think it was some kind of club. I did a little research before I dragged myself to bed and dreamed of the friends of a long year. + +<hr /> + +As several people have noted, I've been writing for luxagraf less than previously. There are partly practical reasons for this, but also I've been suffering from the feeling of writing into a black hole. + +Now I know a few thousand people a month stop by this site, and I know that several hundred of them appear to actually read things, or perhaps they go off to make coffee and forget to close the tab. Either way I guess I can say I know there are readers out there. + +Unfortunately, I've recently come to realize I don't really want to have readers, I want to have conversations. + +I spend most of my time on the internet interacting with communities, sometimes through forums, occasionally through the comments on websites, but what I like is having conversations. + +And I've come to think that websites might not be such a good way to have a conversation. They're rather one-sided. And leaving comments here is kind of a pain because I have to moderate them, you have to come back to see if I responded and so on. Technology is getting in the way of the conversations. + +But wait, Scott, this problem has been solved. You can post on Facebook or Twitter. Those are great for conversations! + +Well. So. No. Those are not the conversations I want to have. + +Conversations in public become strangely twisted by the knowledge of the audience watching. The same thing happens when you record a conversation. People change, slide that public persona mask on. + +So, in casting about for some solution to this problem I considered building a forum. I may still do that, but then I happened to think of these really long emails my friend Mike used to send when he was traveling around Southeast Asia decades ago. He'd send them to a group of us, people would respond, threads would form, conversations would be had, things were learned, plans were made. + +I don't think I've ever given my friend Mike the credit he deserves for propelling me on the trajectory that my life has been on since 2005. But he does deserve credit. And some of it goes to those emails. + +So I decided to start a newsletter in the spirit of Mike's emails, about things Mary Austin would have enjoyed talking about, deserts, mountains, trees, walking, photography, and yes, mystics. If you'd like to join the Friends of a Long Year, you can do so right here: + + + +Two things to note. Until the list gets to large for it I plan to send these by hand in such a way that you can reply directly to me, no one else will see your response. I encourage you to do so, that's the point after all. Mailing lists are for introverts, we can have a conversation without the rest of the world looking on and I think that's a good thing. + + +[^1]: Nowadays it does, perhaps not under that name, and not at every school, but it's out there. +[^2]: Not that I don't find it interesting diff --git a/published/2019-01-03_these-walls-around-me.txt b/published/2019-01-03_these-walls-around-me.txt new file mode 100644 index 0000000..bc31939 --- /dev/null +++ b/published/2019-01-03_these-walls-around-me.txt @@ -0,0 +1,52 @@ +We moved into a new place at the beginning of the year, down a block and over a street from where we'd been, overlooking Canal. I miss swinging open the heavy wood doors on the second floor of that house and watching the life of the street below. Our new place has its charms though. We have a courtyard, a roof top deck. Pretty fancy stuff for us. Haven't been able to find the engine though. + +It's a spare place, tending toward the monastic, which is perfect us. There's no knick knacks, no clutter, nothing on the walls even, save one image of Guadalupe. It suits us I think. It's nice enough, but it seems obvious that this a place for people who are passing through, in every sense of the idea. We did our own temporary decorating. + +<img src="images/2019/2018-12-31_114506_around-san-miguel.jpg" id="image-1847" class="picwide" /> +<img src="images/2019/2018-12-31_190310_new-years-eve_01.jpg" id="image-1846" class="picwide caption" /> +<img src="images/2019/2018-12-31_184208_around-san-miguel.jpg" id="image-1798" class="picwide" /> + +We moved in a couple days before the new year. One nice thing about our one-bag-per-person lifestyle, moving is simple. Except for food. Pretty sure our new neighbors thought I was crazy schlepping bags of sauces and spices and flours and oils and vinegar down the street, but hey, we like to cook. And we wanted to spend the new year in a new place, which we did. With sparklers of course. + +<img src="images/2019/2018-12-31_200336_new-years-eve.jpg" id="image-1845" class="picwide" /> +<img src="images/2019/2018-12-31_195758_new-years-eve.jpg" id="image-1844" class="picwide caption" /> +<img src="images/2019/2018-12-31_194845_new-years-eve_d52MViZ.jpg" id="image-1843" class="picwide" /> + + +The streets here are cobblestone rivers threading canyons of smooth, watercolor concrete. The canyon walls rise on either side as you walk, one side offering shade, the other sun, their smooth contours running continuous, unbroken lines down the street, save the occasional door or window. + +Sometimes it's hard to tell where homes begin and end. Looking at photographs, you might assume that color changes in the canyon wall mark where one home ends and the next begins. Sometimes you'd be right. This can be misleading though -- sometimes colors change for no reason, or don't change at all from one house to the next for an entire block. + +The doors aren't much help either. It's hard to know which door goes to which house, or even if they lead to a house at all. Many doors, usually double doors, open to courtyards like ours, or similar outdoor spaces, which offer an air-gap between home and world, making home feel at least a little removed from the bustle of the street. + +<img src="images/2019/2019-02-17_103244_around-sma.jpg" id="image-1852" class="picwide" /> +<img src="images/2019/2019-02-17_103439_around-sma.jpg" id="image-1853" class="picwide" /> +<img src="images/2019/2019-02-14_134558_around-sma_et2XULk.jpg" id="image-1850" class="picwide" /> + +Courtyards are one-way mirrors of sound. The street comes in. You hear everything. Less seems to go out. Walking down the streets you rarely hear noise coming out of the walls. Perhaps the noise of the street hides it, or perhaps a single family can't make a enough noise to get it over the tops of the walls. + +I do a lot of listening in the courtyard. It's visually cut off from the world, but sound surges over the high yellow walls. Disconnected from the source, it's only tiny parts of stories, never the whole thing. Inchoate beginnings, clipped endings, snippets of sound -- brakes whining sharp and shrill, engines grinding gears, cracked mufflers growling, conversations drifting, doorbells buzzing, phones chiming, whistles, horns, bells, birds, buzzers. + +On rare days when the wind blows, it seems oddly quiet on the street. The courtyard swirls with sound of rustling bamboo and clattering palm leaves, putting me back in southeast Asia, or wishing for the west coast of Mexico, the Yucatan, somewhere tropical, somewhere sandy, somewhere hot and humid, with watery winds, salt air, the unbroken horizon of the sea. + +<img src="images/2019/2019-02-17_103638_around-sma.jpg" id="image-1854" class="picwide" /> + +In our courtyard, near the door to the street there's a cluster of bamboo stretching far above the broken-glass topped walls. The leafy crowns of bamboo play host to a flock of house sparrows every morning and every evening. + +It's a deafening chorus of feathers, a large enough flock to leave a significant amount of crap on the concrete below. Strangely though, you rarely actually see the birds. The bamboo isn't particularly dense, but it's enough to mask them. The balcony off our bedroom is roughly eye level with the top of the bamboo, and even from there it still takes concentrated effort to make them out. If you sit and stare, wait for your eyes to adjust to the subtlety of shadow and leaf and bird and light you slowly begin to make them out, singing, fluttering and bouncing among the leaves. + +<audio controls preload="auto"> + <source src="/media/audio/2019/house_sparrows_compressed.mp3" /> + <source src="/media/audio/2019/house_sparrows.ogg" /> + Sorry, your browser does not support audio in HTML +</audio> + +They've been here for a long time. One day I was walking back from the market, about to cross the street to our house, when I noticed a little girl walking, tugging on her mom's dress, saying *mama, mama, el arbol de los pájaros*. Another day I was sitting at the table in the courtyard, drinking coffee when I heard a little girl's voice drifting in from the street, roughly the same words, but in English. + +You can set clocks by the sparrows, light clocks anyway. They are shadow singers. Like true Mexican birds, they don't seem to care much about watch time, but they do sing at the same time everyday, with regard to the light. When the light in the evening reaches a certain point, when the tops of the bamboo are in shadow I think, and it seems obvious that dusk has settled on the world, they begin their farewell songs. + +<img src="images/2019/2019-02-16_191512_around-sma.jpg" id="image-1851" class="picwide" /> + +In the mornings, when it is light enough to see, but the sun hasn't yet risen high enough to reach the bamboo, they sing again. Each time their singing and chattering lasts about twenty minutes and then they sort of fade out. In the mornings they don't leave all at once, they trickle away in pairs and alone, which makes the noise of them seem to fade away, you don't notice them leaving, just later, when they're definitively gone. + +They come back around the time we eat dinner and have their evening song and chattering, and then, I'm not sure, but I suspect they roost in the bamboo. It seems at tad rude to go out later at night and shine lights on them just to check a hunch, but I think they're up there all night. I like to think of them still up there anyway, roosted down for the night, a ruffle of feathers tucked in a bamboo node here and there, sleeping, waiting for dawn, waiting to sing again. diff --git a/published/2019-01-11_sounds-san-miguel.txt b/published/2019-01-11_sounds-san-miguel.txt new file mode 100644 index 0000000..ba2f673 --- /dev/null +++ b/published/2019-01-11_sounds-san-miguel.txt @@ -0,0 +1,35 @@ +In California I only ever met my neighbors after an earthquake. In Georgia it was big snowstorms that brought everyone together. In Massachusetts it took the first Red Sox victory in 86 years for me to meet my upstairs neighbor. + +Down here the trash truck brings everyone together every morning. + +One of the men hops off the truck at each stop and walks ahead, banging a bell up and down the street. It's not really a bell, though it sounds like one. It's a hunk of metal the size of reporter's notepad, which he beats with a broken bit of pipe that clangs and echoes off the concrete facades. There is no mistaking when the trash man cometh. Assuming you know what the sound means. + +<audio controls preload="auto"> + <source src="/media/audio/2019/trash_bell.mp3" /> + <source src="/media/audio/2019/trash_bell.ogg" /> + Sorry, your browser does not support audio in HTML +</audio> + +That's how trash is done here, you bring it to the truck yourself. You hear the bell, grab your trash and then stand in line with your neighbors, awaiting the trash truck. Everyone says hello, everyone chats. Some raised an eyebrow at me in the beginning, a gringo bringing out the trash. Unexpected apparently. After a few days people started to say buenos dias to me as well, commenting on the chill of the desert mornings, and then turning to ask after their other neighbors. + +<img src="images/2019/2019-03-12_085338_around-sma.jpg" id="image-1867" class="picwide" /> + +San Miguel has a reputation for being a bright and colorful colonial town, with good reason. Still, what I end up noticing when I walk around is the kaleidoscope of sound that bounces around amidst all those colors. Not the random noise of chaos in a city, though there is that, but out of that comes organized sounds -- the bells, chimes, whistles, and clangs that mean something. There's always a melody drifting around the corner, down the alleys, always someone signaling their whereabouts. + +<img src="images/2019/2019-02-17_103244_around-sma_WNtVYLs.jpg" id="image-1865" class="picwide" /> +<img src="images/2019/2019-02-17_103138_around-sma.jpg" id="image-1863" class="picwide" /> +<img src="images/2019/2019-02-17_103439_around-sma_sSILqSC.jpg" id="image-1864" class="picwide" /> + +Even in our courtyard, [sounds drift in](/jrnl/2019/01/these-walls-around-me) and the kids know now, sound has meaning. They always want to open the courtyard doors and discover the source of whatever reaches us. Every morning they yell, *Daddy, trash man is here*. But the trash man isn't the only one announcing his arrival. + +The knife man comes by in the afternoons. You know him by the piercing whistle he plays. He carries what looks like a miniature pipe organ, similar to indigenous flutes I've seen elsewhere. Whatever it is, it's an unmistakable calling card. Grab your knife and head out the door to get it sharpened. + +The propane tank guys aren't so creative. They blast a musical spiel that I assume is some sort of sales pitch, though I can't understand it. It's not the Spanish that's hard, it's because it's played out of what sounds like a New York City subway announcement speaker. It squawks and buzzes in roughly four-four time with a scratchy harmony, and that's when you know the truck with all the propane tanks is near. Not to be confused with the propane truck, which is one giant tank of propane, and must be summoned by phone. + +Bells, softer bells you won't notice if the windows are closed, are generally pushcart vendors of some kind, helado or elote or pina or who knows. + +<img src="images/2019/2019-03-12_154558_around-sma.jpg" id="image-1868" class="picwide" /> + +The honey hawkers shout, miel, *miel!* The shrimp man, whose son usually carries the bucket of shrimp, cups his hands and yells something that vaguely resembles the word camarones, but we live in a desert and for a long time I thought I must be mishearing him. But no, it is a bucket of camarones on ice. + +The water truck is silent. The delivery man holds everything in his head, knows who needs what and delivers it all without any signifying sound. I want to tell him he should leave a few empties on the outside of the truck, they'd drone all down the road, but my Spanish isn't that good, besides, maybe silence is his calling card. diff --git a/scratch.txt b/scratch.txt index 2cd3b61..3f710da 100644 --- a/scratch.txt +++ b/scratch.txt @@ -1,4 +1,73 @@ + +All of life is limits, right now we are up against some hard limits + + +## On Writing + +What I love most about writing is the thinking that happens first, it frees your mind from itself, it gives your mind something to turn over and over, it becomes like an old friends. You look at it this way, you look at it that way, you try to figure out why it's there. For a long time it's just there. It's there when I'm putting the coffee in the moka, it's there when I stand in the shower, feeling the water on my back, it's there when I walk up the hill, threading my way around concrete telephone polls and women selling nopales and tortillas. + +And then some part of it, suddenly you know why it's there, you know where it leads, you know what that bit is going to do and you move on to the next part. + +Some times unfortunately it can take years to figure things out, which makes it hard to feed a family writing. I have done it, but I have done it by writing terrible, terrible things. Book summaries for something like Cliff's Notes, which would have been a find job if it had paid more than $.03 a word, to blog posts for people trying to get people sliding down some slimy mailing list funnel. It was all unpleasant work, but in some ways it made me a better writer. Not at craft, but at volume. If you want to feed your family using words, plan to use a lot of them. One month I wrote 80,000 words. I averaged 60,000 for an entire year and nearly starved to death. + +You have to love to write, and you have to have the disciple to write even what you don't love. If I were you, I would get a job. If anyone had hired me, I would taken a job, but no one ever did. So I kept writing. + +## Work + +"Well, it depends on how much you love your work. + +After all, we’re really dealing with two separate things: + +The purpose of work is to create. It is to fuel your soul. + +Whereas the purpose of earning money is to have enough of the stuff. How much is enough? Whatever you need to max out your happiness potential. After that, more money will not make you any happier." -- MMM + + +Greek Proverb which says, “A society grows great when the old people plant trees, even when they know they will never get to enjoy their shade.” + + +## An Invitation + + +In 1993 I headed off to college to a quiet little town called Redlands, CA, which had a college of the same name. It was at the base of the mountains and edge of the desert. At the time all I wanted to do was spend as much time hiking, climbing and skiing as I could. Redlands was a good base camp for all that. It was also one of a handful of colleges around the country that allowed you to write your own major. I originally went because I planned to write a major that was half studying photography and half writing about nature. Basically this was when I concieved luxagraf, I just had to wait ten years for the technology that would make it possible to become widespread. + +Before I dropped out of Redlands, which I did after two semesters, my advisor mentored my first class in my self- written major, which was a kind of Nature Writing 101, reading and reacting to authors I'd mostly already read and reacted to, all the usual American suspects, Thoreau, Abbey, Dillard, Lopez, Stegner, and so on. My professor was more knowledgable about this area than me though and he threw a few authors I did not know on the list. The one that's relevant now is one that remains largely overlooked by the canon of American nature writing, Mary Hunter Austin. + +Austin traveled and lived in the Mojave desert for 17 years, studying native life, as well as spanish-american immigrant life in the region and writing defenses of both long before anyone else. But she is probably best known for a book called <cite>The Land of Little Rain</cite>, her <cite>Walden<cite> with the Mojave desert playing the role of Thoreau's pond. + +It's a good book, one that made me appreciate the Mojave much more than I did at the time. Since I lived in Redlands, not far from the Mojave, I was able to go out and explore quite a bit of what she wrote about. Recently, in searching for new books for the kids I discovered that Austin also wrote a children's book, called simply <cite>The Trail Book</cite>. Imagine Night in the Museum, but with Native American tales and you've got the idea. Finding this sent me off searching for more Austin, and somewhere in the early hours of the morning, bleery-eyed and half asleep at the keyboard, I ran across a digital copy of a collection of Austin's short stories called <cite> Lost Borders</cite>. What caught my eye was the dedication, "to Marion Burke and the Friends of a Long Year." + +Who were the friends of a long year? What were the friends of a long year? When were the friends of a long year? It's hard to tell from the typesetting if Austin capitalized Friends of a Long Year or not, but I like to think she did, I like to think it was some kind of club. I did a little research before I dragged myself to bed and dreamed of a the friends of a long year. + + + +## Hard Times + + +It was a hard time. My wife took a job teaching English to Chinese five year old. It was a degrading business for someone with a master's in education, dancing like a monkey (I mean that literally) for tech companies whose "training materials" had more typos than a teenager's messaging logs. It was a dark time, but one you have to put somewhere else so your children don't realize how thin the line between having food and not can be because that's stress you try to keep your children from, even if you ultimately can't. Better your child be hungry than be hungry and have to wrestle with why. There's a surface level of why, the obvious, the because we have no job, that's easy enough to explain and we did, what's harder is to look the whole system in the eye and consider it, this thing humans have built where in fact there needs be nothing of the sort. Why force people to earn paper tickets, really electronic tickets these days, not even real tickets, that can be exchanged for food, shelter, etc. Why allow such a small number of humans to own all the land? Why allow anyone to own the land at all? These are much harder questions for children to face, for anyone to face. The rest of us have time and effort already invested in ignoring these questions, in pretending that the way things are is the only way they could be, that we don't have to face them the way children do, we simply look the other way and hang our heads and dance like monkeys for the foriegn kids and collect our digital tickets and buy food for our children, or try anyway. + +The stupid thing is we know this isn't the only way. The status quo only seems inevitable if it's all you know and we, creators of a culture that is obsessed with past cultures, know for absolute surety that there are other ways. Pretty much any tribal society for instance -- which is a huge negative value judgment in that phrase that I'll be coming back to -- + + + + +## Meditation + +Like many people who practice meditation, it has been transformative for me. I don't talk about it much because who the hell wants to hear their friends talk about how meditation has been transformative? Even I don't want to hear that. But I'll put it here for total strangers on the internet. Weird. But anyway. + +I have experimented with many different forms of meditation, Vipassanna, mindfulness, zazen, transcendental, and others, but the one that actually did something for me, and which I continue to practice today, is discursive meditation. This is different than the mind-emptying meditation popular in the west just now. It's not mind-emptying, but rather focused, purposeful thinking (usually the full systems of thought from which the mind-emptying meditation techniques have been lifted have this sort of meditation as well, often under the name "contemplation" or similar). + +Discursive meditation does not require anything, but a comfortable place to sit, which might be part of the reason it's not very popular in this gear-obsessed age. A nice wooden chair works well for sitting, but anywhere you can get comfortable and relaxed works. I live in RV and don't have a nice wooden chair, so I can tell you with some authority that you need nothing more than a comfortable place to sit. No expensive retreats, no fancy buckwheat-filled pillow cushions, no special pants. Just sit down, breathe and call up whatever image or theme you're meditating on. + +What you meditate on varies by tradition and person. I recommend using some form of established tradition in the beginning, this will give you a place to turn when unexpected things happen. And they will. Eventually. The tradition I follow is that of hermeticism, which includes spiritual, ritual and other components as well, but discursive meditation was once [a big part of Catholicism](), and [druids](http://aoda.org/publications/articles-on-druidry/discursivemeditation/) practice it as well, which should give some idea of the range of appeal. + +The ability to think deeply and purposefully is one of those skills that, once you have it, you'll wonder how you ever got by without it. + + +## family in mexico + + I've never lived in a culture that was so hard working an so devoted to family. These are things that I grew up hearing people talk about -- hard work and family -- but I've never actually seen it like I see it here. Which is not meant to denigrate people in other places, hard work is not a zero sum game, but here work and life flow together with no real strong boundaries like you'd find in the States, for example. My favorite example of this is bus drivers. In the United States if you drive a bus, you wear a uniform and, aside from your face and body shape, you are largely indistinguishable from whomever is driving the next bus. Chances are, when you get off you park the bus and go home. It's not in any meaningful way, your bus or even your work, you are by design an meaningless cog in a profit wheel where most of the profits go to someone other than you. I could make a good case that this is an awful way to live, severely limits your humanity, leads to depression and dissatisfaction with your work and life, and is one of the more profound and overwhelming problems in American culture, but we won't get into that here. @@ -11,7 +80,7 @@ For me this helps to make sense of - +## doing nothing I'm not going to pretend to know what Wallace Stevens was referring to by the Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is, but it has always reminded me of the fact that there are myriad complex worlds around us to which we are wholly ignorant. Not because we don't pay attention, though that may be part of it, but because we can't pay attention. There are vast existences too small to see with the naked eye. Ponds full of pond scum that have their own version of stressful jobs, political and social situations, and whatnot just as we do. They're just having it all on a very different scale, from us and happen to use chemicals instead of words to communicate. @@ -43,12 +112,12 @@ is a bit more complex than that. If you want to still use social media, try firs seems like it would require an active practice. - +## quotes borrowed But as we struggle through this crisis of legitimacy, what is left over when the abstractions start to wear thin? When I decide I don’t want to become an opiate addict and need to find something else? What about when it’s more serious than just a headache – what if it turns out to be cancer, and I don’t want to follow the standard ‘cut, poison, burn’ protocol? For me, it sometimes feels like there’s only a smoking crater where my brain should be. My mind often feels like it’s just a collection of Other People’s opinions and regurgitated sound bites. Even if I do try to pay attention to my own experiences, what I am able to perceive is limited by my analysis of the information coming in to my brain, which is itself conditioned by the habits of thought I learned from other people and my society. I filter out the information to which I am exposed. So there really is no objective truth out there! -https://www.ecosophia.net/the-truths-we-have-in-common/#comment-17128 -! It’s when you realize that most of your opinions and ideas belong to other people that you can begin the central work of an age of reflection — the work of learning how to think your own thoughts, and assess other people’s opinions and ideas and your own with a set of critical tools that don’t depend on checking their fit to some collectively approved set of abstract generalizations. JMG +It’s when you realize that most of your opinions and ideas belong to other people that you can begin the central work of an age of reflection — the work of learning how to think your own thoughts, and assess other people’s opinions and ideas and your own with a set of critical tools that don’t depend on checking their fit to some collectively approved set of abstract generalizations. JMG ipalm fronds, whirls, fans, crisp browned tips, peeling trunks as if the whole tree were some giant alien flower, other with trunks smooth and stalk straight leading up to bunches of fronds that look like pineapples on stilts. The can be so absolutely still when the ind doesn't blow.. The slash pine mixed in, it too has a very stright trunk, shedding its lower branches as it grows so that the long, delicate needles grow in tuffs and clumps of needle fans near the top of the tree. Here and there an oak, never a big one in the palm-dominated areas, but vaguely sickly looking oaks scratching out an existence in this sandy soil. diff --git a/se-renta.txt b/se-renta.txt index fbe2759..48690af 100644 --- a/se-renta.txt +++ b/se-renta.txt @@ -1,38 +1,58 @@ -When we left Dallas a few months ago 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 the Spring traveling the southwest, 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, to spend the 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. +When we left Dallas our plan was to be gone six months. -It was a pretty good plan I thought. It still is a pretty good plan. But as the man said, it's important that you make them, but it's rarely to actually follow a plan for too long. And that one, much as we still like it, is not going to work out for us. At least not on the timeline we'd envisioned. +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. -There are a variety of reasons it's not going to happen, one of them is money. To get where we want to go in the bus, we need to rebuild the engine. 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 and we lost about 50 percent of our income earlier this year. +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. -I don't want to sound like I'm complaining or asking for money, I'm not doing either, 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 ready to do that yet, I'm not even sure what that means anymore, but sometimes you do have to adjust things if you want to keep going. +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. -I'm going to get into something very few people seem get into: money. It takes 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. +Then there's a other reason we're staying: money. -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. +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. -That said, here's a rough number for a family of five: $3000-$4000 a month, baring unforeseen expenses -- which is a euphemism for months where the bus doesn't break down. +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. -Yes, that's a big spread. The reason is that roughly 30-40% tends to be food, which varies tremendously depending on where we are in 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 just over $3000/month[^1]. +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 thing worth noting 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 I think, first, we're getting smarter about boondocking and finding cheap camping, and two, we went back cross the country to the south and midwest where food is cheaper. +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. +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. I'd say 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. +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? +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? -I know right? But it turns out they makes some pretty small and expensive useless stuff you can fit in the bus. +We do know better and yet we still buy it. -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, so why? +The spreadsheet does not lie. But why? After spending some time meditating on this I've a very simple answer: access. @@ -68,10 +88,11 @@ This dovetails with a lesson we learned early on in the bus -- once you realize I wanted off that wheel. -If you like to travel there's a good chance you have more D4 dopamine receptors 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. +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. -What does this have to do with traveling? Well we sat back and took stock of things, what we all wanted to do, 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. +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. |