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| -rw-r--r-- | eight-track-gorilla.txt | 37 | ||||
| -rw-r--r-- | eight-track-gorilla2.txt | 18 | ||||
| -rw-r--r-- | tnf.txt | 33 | ||||
| -rw-r--r-- | tools.txt | 29 |
4 files changed, 113 insertions, 4 deletions
diff --git a/eight-track-gorilla.txt b/eight-track-gorilla.txt index 572a913..be09c97 100644 --- a/eight-track-gorilla.txt +++ b/eight-track-gorilla.txt @@ -4,13 +4,42 @@ Right now there's a bidding war on ebay for an old Oldsmobile 8 track I pulled o Seriously, I sold an antiquated music player that takes a format no one has manufactured in over four decades for $86. -Just for context, the stereo I'm putting in the bus plays everything from MP3 to whatever you want to plugin in the line-in and cost me $45. +In purely practical terms the current value of the 8 track is bewildering. Eight track cassettes are unwieldy, easily damaged, didn't sound very good even when they were brand new and were never produced in the quantities that vinyl or the cassette tapes that replaced them. There were something of black swan when it comes to music storage formats. -Why? +Consider that the brand new, reasonably hight end car stereo that will replace that eight track costs a mere $45 on Amazon. It will play every digital music format you've ever heard of and dozens more you haven't. It's a knock off a fancier name-brand model most likely made by the same workers in the same factory. Capitalism. + +It's also a complete piece of crap, made of cheap plastic and designed to be chucked in a rubbish bin the minute it starts to malfunction. In fact the advent of the car stereo wiring "harness", which eliminates any need to understand soldering and reduces the installation process to clicking little plastic pieces into place, was designed to facilitated just this kind disposability. Consumer capitalism. + +The 8-track player on the other hand is a purely mechanical device. Whoever installs it will be soldering it in (or perhaps just twisting and taping some wires, but either way there will most definitely not be any snapping of plastic. It can, if it does turn out to not be working, be repaired by just about anyone with the patience to sit down, take it apart and figure out how it works. + +What's more, there is a kind of satisfaction in taking something apart, wrapping your head around how it works and then putting it back together better than it was before. No matter what the things is -- clocks, wood burning stoves, vehicles, radios, tk tk -- I garentee there are people out there devoting their free time and energy to fixing these things. + +Sure, at this point you might have to fabricate some parts if they turn out the be broken, but with 3D printers that's well within the realm of possibility. Forget even 3D printers, even if you have to turn to a good old fashioned metal lathe or something, well, they're still around. + +Anyone with the free time and patience to study it can fix a mechanical device. + + + +At perhaps the simplest level the act of remembering is the act of reconstructing the past in the present. + +Repairing things from the past is an act of memory, but it's an act of memory outside of oneself. + +The person with the 8-track is recreating a collective memory of the sort I'm not sure we have a word to describe.We can describe it economically -- it looks strange to us, even me who has the thing, but it's there, this is a thing of value to some, for whatever inarticulable reason. + +That sounds dismissive, but it's not meant to be. I don't know precisely how to articulate it, and in the case of the 8 track I don't really understand it -- + +-- but I understand what it's like. I have no memory of 1969 Dodge Travcos[^3], but in recreating one I'm doing something more than just making a home for my family. + + + + + + +Digital devices actively discourage this with threats of voiding your warranty, or, in the case of Apple and other, making it deliberately difficult to disassemble thanks to bizarre screws and fasteners that require expensive, specialized tools. + +Pre-digital things tend to be the opposite, often encouraging you to descstruct them by providing detaild schematic (early Apple computers did this as well). -Because the $45 stereo I bought is complete piece of crap, made of cheap plastic and designed to be chucked in a rubbish bin the minute it starts to malfunction. The 8-track player on the other hand is purely mechanical and can be repaired by just about anyone with the patience to sit down, take it apart and figure out how it works. -Sure, at this point you might have to fabricate some parts if they turn out the be broken, but with 3D printers that's well within the realm of possibility. Forget even 3D printers, even if you have to turn to a good old fashioned metal lathe or something, well, they're still around. The point is, just about anyone can fix purely mechanical devices. Almost no one can fix digital devices. This means that the value over time of digital devices is necessarily always falling unless you maintain your device in near mint condition. Mechanical devices on the other hand are purely market driven -- if something proved over time to be a reliable, useful device there's probably a market out there for it. Even if it's an antiquated 8-track player. diff --git a/eight-track-gorilla2.txt b/eight-track-gorilla2.txt new file mode 100644 index 0000000..9155166 --- /dev/null +++ b/eight-track-gorilla2.txt @@ -0,0 +1,18 @@ + + + +At perhaps the simplest level remembering is reconstructing the past in the present. + +There is something terrible about time. Something truly horrifying about time lapse photography, imagine your life displayed in a time lapse film. I'm sure someone over at Flickr is doing it right now. One picture a day every day, same background, same arms length pose, put them together and slap them in a movie and you'd have the first film that might truly qualify as frightening. + +Our escape from time, the trick we use to ignore its passage on the average day is that it moves just slow enough that we don't notice it except in large chunks. Yesterday is largely indistinguishable from today, last week not that different than this one, months even blur sometimes, it's not until we get to years that we start to think of big changes, real differences, but by then time appears fairly abstract and our memories play it out in still frames. + +There is no continuous motion in memory, moments added up minute by minute. + +Time is not part of memory, time is the space between memories, it lives in the shadows, runs down between and fills the cracks, + + + +
At some length my friend and I stopped collecting minutes and said goodbye. I wandered over to my truck and poked my fingers in a puddle to see if it was gasoline. It wasn't which was even more puzzling. Eventually I discovered that there was in fact gas leaking, as it turned out the fuel line had ruptured and the gas was slowly leaking out and running in a thin rivult through the stones and into the grass. + +After switching to the empty auxillary tank and deciding that that was problem for tomorrow I spent a little longer staring up at the sky in some vain attempt to spot the comet asldkfj, which is passing by at the moment. @@ -0,0 +1,33 @@ +In 1995 I dropped out of college for the first time[^1]. I had made it through three semesters, which was pretty good I thought, especially considering how much college had been in the way of my life, which at the time consisted mainly of hiking, climbing, surfing and generally living outdoors. It wasn't an expensive lifestyle by any means. I shared a single bedroom trailer a few blocks from the beach (location, location, location) for which we paid, I believe, $220 each. Everything I needed save the mountains and desert was within walking distance. + +My biggest expense was gear. Rock climbing gear especially tended to be both expensive and, due to the often brutal conditions it existed in, short lived. It was all good and well to live on bean burritos, but smart climbers did not try to overextend the life of ropes and cams. + +Looking around for ways to fund this lifestyle I did what countless others before and after me had done -- I got a job at the nearest outdoor retailer that would have me. + +In my case that turned out to be The North Face[^2]. My girlfriend through high school had worked at the Gap so I new the retail clothing drill more or less and I definitely knew outdoor gear. I ate, slept and breathed it. Aside from obscure punk and hardcore, there was little I knew more about that retail gear. I turned in an application and after one short interview, got the job. + +I was quite proud of myself. I had set out to do something and just did it. I won't try to unpack the privilege going on here, I was 19, I thought I had skills. I got some inclining of how little skills and how much unearned privilege I enjoyed later when my manager Kristine confessed to me over after work drinks that I was horrible at interviewing and she almost didn't hire me because I never looked her in the eye. But she thought I was cute, so I got the job. + +I also go the job in part because it was nearly summer and half the regular employees would be departing soon for seasonal work around the west, guiding white water trips, leading climb expeditions and otherwise doing the sorts of things that people (and The North Face itself) expected North Face employees to do. + +This was back a bit, when The North Face (hereafter TNF) still appealed primarily to those spending their lives outdoors. I was selling gear mainly to fellow hikers, climbers and campers. Most of them didn't need the expensive gear they were buying, but then again nobody did until they did and then you life depended on it. Or so we all told ourselves. I just the other day sold a jacket I bought there 20 years ago that I had literally never put on outside. + +Still, back then a job at TNF was a highly coveted thing for someone with my aspirations. I got the job because I wanted one of the four season tents. I dumped probably 25 percent of what I made back into gear and you know the one thing I never bought? A tent. Naturally. + +While the perks were good and the pay enabled me to get by and do what I wanted to do, the job itself was little different that what my ex-girlfriend had been doing at the Gap. It was retail clothing sales. There were a few things I enjoyed about it. I enjoyed helping out the occasional thru-hiker calling from somewhere along the PCT in need of new gear or a warranty repair. The TNF back then had the best warranty in the business. If an item could be repaired it was repaired. If it couldn't be repaired, it was replaced. Very few questions asked. In fact employees like me could make the call, though the ideal things to do was send it in to the warranty department. But for PCT thru-hikers, I just sent out a new bit of gear, sometimes without even seeing their old one. This was before the internet; people were more trusting. + +Another part of the job I enjoyed was the gear testing. It didn't happen very often, but a few times, maybe four or five times in my nine months working there the San Francisco headquarters would send out some prototype piece of gear they were thinking of making into a product. They'd send out a few tents to all the stores or a dozen jackets and the employees would take them out on their next trip. On one hand it was free gear, on the other it was possibly defective gear. It added a bit of spice to your trip. + +I have no idea how other stores did it, but at our store the gear shipments would generally come in on Thursdays. If there was gear for us to test we would all look over the schedule, see who had the weekend off, sometimes call unsuspecting fellow employees and try to switch shifts and then make a group trip to the desert. + +After work on Friday we'd meet up at the Goat Hill Tavern, a terrible, brightly lit bar with sawdust and peanut shells scattered all over the floor, chosen chiefly because it was across the street from the store. One unlucky soul would be the designated driver and the rest would proceed to drink themselves silly. When the bar closed we would all pile in Roy's wood paneled Dodge minivan and high tail it out to Joshua Tree National Park. We'd get into the campground around three or four in the morning (yeah, we were those people), in varying states of exhaustion, bleary-eyed drunkness and sometimes already hungover. We would then proceed to do any tent testing. If anyone could get a prototype tent set up in the dark, it passed muster. We'd give it rave reviews. Most of the time though we just threw sleeping bag in the dirt and crawled in for a few hours of sleep under the Milky Way before the blazing desert sun found us early the next morning. Then it was a full day of hungover climbing and a long drive back to the beach. + +The other thing I remember about working at TNF was the incredible amount of downtime. In fact, if my memory is correct there were only about 100 customers the entire time I worked there[^3]. There were stretches on mid-week afternoons when no one would come in for four hours or more. + +There was a small climbing wall which we regularly reconfigured in a futile effort to challenge ourselves, but by and large we read books and magazines. There + +I got a great many other things out of working at TNF, including things I would never have expected, like connections to some branch of the Mexican mob in Santa Ana and an introduction to really good Thai food, Thai food so good I wouldn't taste better until I finally made it to Thailand. But + +[^1]: I would drop out four more times from three different schools before finally graduating from the University of Georgia, 12 years and 3000 miles from where I started. +[^2]: I had originally hoped to get a job at a privately owned shop named Adventure 16, but they were not hiring at the time I was looking. +[^3]: This is no doubt a slight exaggeration. However the store I worked at did eventually close for lack of business and in fact entire shopping center did the same a bit later. Last time I was in the area it was largely abandoned and in the process of being converted into loft apartments. diff --git a/tools.txt b/tools.txt new file mode 100644 index 0000000..f87d2b2 --- /dev/null +++ b/tools.txt @@ -0,0 +1,29 @@ +The bag has been sitting on the table in the front room for weeks before I ever carry it out to the bus. It's canvas. Or a nylon made to look like canvas perhaps. It's reasonably solid though, strong enough to hold fifteen pounds or so of tools without straining. It looks like it will weather some abuse. It hasn't yet. Not much, by the looks of it anyway. I don't really understand how it came to be here on the table in the front room. But it belongs in the bus now. + +There are a few screw drivers inside. Some wrenches, files and a plastic jar of the sort men my grandfather's age seemed inordinately fond of keeping things in, their wives having doled out all the Skippy or Jif the container once held on sandwiches or in cookies baked in ovens surrounded by Formica counters and build atop linoleum floors, surfaces of the golden age of petroleum, the postwar three bedroom brick ranches of the west, well stocked with sugary sweet and creamy peanut butter whose jars were destined not for the recycling bin but the tool shed behind the carport. + +My cousins and I might have eaten the contents of this jar at some point, though it looks perhaps too new for that. Our children maybe. My cousin's children. Mine have never seen a three bedroom brick ranch house in the desert. Never will. Not that one anyway. + +Inside the jar is an impressive collection of jeweler's screw drivers, tiny files, a loupe, a wire brush and a tool whose use is a mystery to me, labeled simply ATT. Not the Bell Telephone Corporation he worked fifty some odd years for, but ATT. Tools demand brevity. The rest of the bag is filled with larger equivalents of the same tool in the jar. The red and clear lucite handled craftsman screwdriver I remember hanging from the magnetic strip on the front of the shelf. The larger flathead with the wooden handle that always stuck too far out of another Jif jar, precarious leaning against the back wall of the workbench. The shed was metal, unbearable in the midday Tucson summer. It was a mornings and evenings place to work. The book ends of the day. + +It's late now. Another day. A long day of tools. There's much to be done on a warm December day. Clue that can't cure in December cold suddenly can cure on a day like today. Now the bus smells of acetone, Sticky Stuff and old carpet. Low voltage wires hand down for the ceiling, scraps of polyiso insulation board scatter the floor. The light is yellow. That yellow light isn't as common as it used to be when he would go out to the shed at night after dinner to tinker with radios and television sets. The light from the warmest LED bulbs I can get isn't nearly as warm as these old incandescents. + +Why were they called ranches, those postwar dwellings America scattered across the landscape? They're nothing like ranches. A house is not the ranch. The land is the ranch. + +Most of these tools I recognize. Or imagine that I do. I know I remember the screwdrivers. I don't know if they were really there, but I believe my memory of them. I know I don't remember the bag. I can tell by the lack of wear that it's too new, came along long after I stopped coming around the toolshed. Or Tucson for that matter. + +Alan Watts once said, "every one of us is a whirlpool in the tide of existence." The context, or his point actually, is that everything passes through us. On one level that's all of existence, but right here, right now, these tools have passed through a whirlpool and into another. + +we are not things he was fond of saying, we are happenings. + +I've often wondered what he would have thought of the bus. It's not his style really. Too big, too comfortable. When we went camping he always slept in a tent. With a cot. A setup I imagine was something like what he spent the years of WWII living in. I was always in a camper with my parents. My grandparents were in the tent. A tent was good enough for New Guinea it was good enough for Zion, Arches, Bryce, Canyonlands and the rest of the red rock desert we explored for years. It was always good enough for me. + +The LED bulbs will never do. The light in here with them on is too blue. I'd rather lose the energy, lose a day of boondocking than light the world with the harsh blue of spotlights. + +The funniest thing about the bus is how much disdain I've always had for RV dwellers. What's the point, there's nothing about living in an RV that's any "closer to nature" than the average house. Why not just stay at home? Those beliefs were predicated on their being a home. I don't know that it ever occurred to me that for some of those RV owners that was home. LED lights and all. + +My beliefs were in some respect his. He never had any respect for people who needed comfort or modern convenience. He never said as much, but it wasn't hard to absorb that lesson being around him. That's not to say he did not like comfort, he just didn't need it. He grew the son of alcoholics, his family owned a wood lot in the desert. It was bad enough that he ran away at fourteen. Not that he told me that, not that I even knew that back then. That came later, like the tool bag. + +Every day when we were out camping, no matter the weather or temperature outside he washed his face every morning in the same silver bowl filled with half boiling water and half cold from the water bottle that had spent the night in the cold desert air of the tent. He used the hot water, but even as he did you couldn't help suspect that he didn't need it, that he appreciated it for what it was, but was not at loss without it, that he'd have scrubbed his face with a block of ice if he had to. + +Or maybe Freud was right, maybe he was just washing his face. Perhaps it's all just a case of the imagination projecting the image it wants to recall on the scenes of the past that it has access too. But then does it matter one way or the other? Memory is a construct, built with the tools your imagination has on hand. I have these scenes from camping trips, these screw drivers in plastic jars, this warm yellow light to sit beneath. Does it matter which light we choose to see by? I like this yellow light, the weaker light, the warmer light. I like the way it glows. And I like this bag of tools, even if I don't need them right now. |