Your power is proportional to your ability to relax.
Nothing can be more useful to a man than a determination not to be hurried.
"The next great division of the world will be between people who wish to live as creatures and people who wish to live as machines." -- Wendell Berry, An Essay Against Modern Superstition
"what you contemplate, you imitate."
"The more constraints one imposes, the more one frees one's self. And the arbitrariness of the constraint serves only to obtain precision of execution." Igor Stravinsky
Almost every article you'll ever find on attention will at some point repeat Simone Weil's statement that "Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.
"It seems to me that we all look at nature too much, and live with her too little." -Oscar Wilde, De Profundis
The average person spends 87% of their time indoors and another 6% in enclosed vehicles https://indoor.lbl.gov/sites/all/files/lbnl-47713.pdf
# Scratch
requirements for property:
at least 6 acres. Water. existing well or drillable. ability to capture water. Spectacular views. on a slope. good sun exposure.
Pleasure in the job, puts perfection in the work -- Aristotle's prescription for excellence
every essay needs a story to hang it on. And an audio/visual podcast of it.
Is something good because God wills it or is it good because god willed it?
God is not a being, but being.
The good and the true are convertible with being, they are fundamentally the same as being but as related to our faculties of reason and will. The good then is simply being as it relates to will. It is being under the aspect of its desirableness. Something is not good because god wills it, neither is it some standard outside of god which he is measured by. God who is the ullness o being simply wills his own goodness, the goodness that he is, he himself is the highest good. he wills himself. - Aquinas. more or less
The counter argument is that God should not be constrained by his own nature. Therefore something is good because god wills it. (voluntarism). But this then leads to the idea that Not the nature of a thing, its being goodness and truth, determine reality, but the sheer act of a will. e.g. Schopenhauer. The problem is overemphasis on the will leads here, where we are divorced from the world as it really is. If I decide entirely what is true, then I can decide what is true then I can weigh 600 pounds and declare myself healthy. I can say I'm a cat and force my employer to provide a litter box.
## 7 years on the Road
themes:
crashing communities. the way so many places have welcomed us. excited to have outsiders take an interest in what is happening in their community.
## Seems Like a Lot of Folks Gave Up or Got Out, Except For the Truly Devote
Spend a some time in the environment around you, really spend some time. Lose the headphones. Maybe put aside some of the plastic sports gear. Just walk with no plan, no goals, not for your health, your mental health any of that stuff. Find a quiet place to sit, somewhere near you. Sit with the rocks, the trees, the dirt, the sky, the plants, the animals. Then think of all of it, pretend for a moment, that these things are valuable to you like other people are valuable, and more importantly, that you matter to them. That your presence is important to the rocks, to the trees, to the sky, to all of it. Now what sort of life would you lead if you really believed that? Go live that life.
We have so little time to engage with the world around us compared to people in pre-industrial times.
There is a baseline of financial success you need before you can start to be more spontaneous.
I think the view from your window when you’re writing really does inform what you’re writing about quite a lot. I need to stare out of a window whilst I’m writing. That helps me find where I’m going. I was by the harbor, so I could see people coming and going in boats, and I could look out at the sea. There was a fun fair that would pitch up in a field to the right of the restaurant every June, so for a while, I had a fun fair outside my window. I’m sure that contributed in some way to Rid of Me. There was a wonderful collection of furniture and also Russian vinyl 78s. The restaurant owner’s mother had lived there previously — she was Russian — and it was all her furniture and things. Not so long ago, I borrowed the Russian 78s back off the restaurateur so I could record them, because they’d been so much in my memory. I used a sample of one of them on the 4-Track Demos [on “Hook”]. At the time I was listening almost exclusively to those Russian 78s, along with Howlin’ Wolf, Tom Waits, and the Pixies. I’d also been reading a lot of Flannery O’Connor’s short stories, and J.D. Salinger’s Franny and Zooey. I might’ve also been reading [Friedrich Nietzsche’s] Thus Spake Zarathustra. Some light reading. [Laughs] It was a wonderful period of time because I did suddenly have my life back again. That was the period when I was really writing the record. - PJ Harvey
## Notecard System
I don't think anything I've written for Wired has generated so much interest as a throw away comment I made about notecards in our [guide to paper planners](https://www.wired.com/story/best-paper-planners/#indexcards). Every time that article is updated I get more email asking for details. Here are the details.
---
First, lets make sure we're all on the same page: if you want to accomplish things in life you need to make plans.
Not *a plan*, plans are useless. You need *plans*.
Many plans means you go through the process of planning. That's what's valuable, the process. Planning requires thinking deeply about life, your life, and what you're doing here. What you want to do here, what you were put here to do.
I can't help you with that part, but after you've made some decisions about what you want do do, where you want to go, it's time to plan how to get there. That requires lists. Lots of lists. Lists of goals, lists of outcomes you're aiming for, lists of things you need to do to get from here to there, lists of what you did to get from where you were to where you are, and so on.
If you step back a bit, you'll see that there are several levels of stuff you need to keep track of -- long terms goals, shorter term projects aligned with those goals, and day to day stuff you need to accomplish to complete the projects that get you to the goals. Life isn't nearly this simple or neat, but at a very broad level that's three things to keep track of: long term things, medium term things, short term things. There's one more important element: a way to record ideas as they come to you.
I use notecards for two of these four things: to track day-to-day tasks and to capture ideas. Medium and long term planning I do in a notebook (more on that below).
The notecard system started when I was in my early 20s and was pretty much spinning my wheels. Working in a restaurant, drinking too much, not sleeping enough, never working out. Living without direction. It's good for you sometimes, but I think I maybe enjoyed it a little too much and maybe spent a little too much time in this stage, but I digress.
One of my good friends at the time, who lived more or less the same way I did, nevertheless managed to run a successful business, play in a band, and otherwise be a much more effective person than me. All while doing all the same bad things I was doing. I asked him one day how he managed get so much done. "I make a list of all the stuff I need to do," he said, "then I do it."
That this was revolutionary to me tells you everything you need to know about me in my twenties. But it was. I asked him, okay, but like, what do you *do*? It turned out he took whatever paper was handy and wrote down what he needed to do. Then he did it. Naturally I focused on the first part: how he wrote it down. That was the easiest thing to copy. Actually doing stuff? That's hard.
I wasted a week or so deciding what sort of paper to use for my lists. I chose index cards because they were small, cheap, fit in your pocket, and wouldn't get mixed up with other paper. The fact that they're small also meant my todo list would never get to more than twenty or so items. That's manageable.
Finally, paper decision behind me, I started writing things down on index cards. Then I had to do them. That was annoying. But there they were, on the list. Needing to be done. It turned out that crossing stuff off the list was fun. Almost addictive. It was like a game in a way. Could I get everything crossed off in a day? I got moderately obsessed with lists.
One night at sushi with my then-girlfriend and her father (also a very successful person) I happened to mention my notecard system (see, obsessed, as in bringing it up at dinner). "I do that too," he said. "Every night before I go to bed I write down everything I have to do, and all the extraneous things I've been thinking about. I try to completely empty my head. Helps me sleep," he said.
Notice that he did not say anything about what sort of paper he used. Only idiots like me obsess over paper. Focus on the craft, not the tools.
This idea made sense to me, so I took this craft and incorporated it into my life as well. I didn't even obsess over what sort of paper to use. I started writing out my todo lists in the evening, along with anything else that felt like it needed to get off my mind, which I also wrote on notecards since I had them around. These cards I threw in a shoe box and, to be honest, didn't do much with them, but they helped clear my head, which was the important part[^1].
This system, tracking what I needed to do, and clearing my ideas at the end of the day, was far more powerful than I expected. The notecards themselves are incidental. Use whatever scraps of paper work for you, the point is the craft. The system works. I started getting more stuff done. Lots more stuff. To the point that I ended up going back and finishing college because I realized I had enough time in my day to do that, in part because I knew what I had to do each day.
Over the years I have experimented with other ways of keeping todo lists, including notebooks of various shapes and sizes, probably a dozen different digital methods, including two I wrote myself. None of them stuck. I keep coming back to notecards. They are the single most effective way to keep track of what you need to do without introducing unnecessary complexity.
This is a flexible enough system that I've used it as a chef, a computer programmer, a writer, a father, and more. I honestly think it would work for anyone in just about any job where you have to keep track of what you need to do.
[^1]: When I had kids I kind of gave up on this habit to spend my time reading to them before bed. In practice it accomplishes the same thing -- it clears my head by sticking a story in it -- I just lose whatever ideas might have been rattling around. The only notecards I really use as a filing system anymore are reading notes.
## The Importance of Notebooks and Time blocking
There's only so much you can do in day. There is what there is, use it wisely. I have a full time job, three kids, and live on the road. I also manage to not work all the time. In fact I rarely work past 3. It's not that I'm so great at anything, it's that I can focus, and I can focus because I block out time in my day to work intensely rather than haphazardly throughout the day.
I had been using notecards for years before I encountered David Allen's Getting Things Done, which inspired me to expand my daily system (which was already close enough to his that I didn't change that) into longer term thinking and planning. To me the core benefit of Allen's system is clearing your mind of trivial details so you can thing about the big picture stuff.
This may also have had something to do with getting older, and it coincided with me wanting to accomplish longer term goals. While notecards are a key part of a big project like writing a book, they aren't enough. I found note cards to be less ideal for longer term planning. It's hard to fit much about a multi-year project on a single note card. For a while I used multiple cards when necessary and kept them all together with little binder clips. That worked, but it was difficult to carry around and hard to see everything at once without a large table, which I didn't always have.
I bought a notebook and started keeping my projects (to use David Allen's terms) in that, then making my daily lists of things to do for those projects on the notecards. When I moved from freelancing to full-time at Wired, I started evolving this system because most of what I do at Wired is very long term and needs to be broken down into more manageable bits. Most of my planning for work starts at the seasonal level, then moves to monthly, then weekly. If find it easiest to track this flow in a notebook.
To give a practical example, consider my tent guide. This is something I update every Spring, Summer and Fall, which means it's on three different pages in my notebook. March 1st or so I flip to the spring projects list, review it, note that Best Tents is on there, and move it to my list of things to do in March. Both lists are in the same notebook, but the season lists I don't cross things off or mark them in any way. I revisit the same list next spring. The actual list of things to do that gets crossed off is the monthly list. I review my monthly list at the start of every week, and move whichever things I want to work on that week to a weekly list. Then I break that down by day. That's where the notecards come out.
I write down what I need to get done the next day in the evening and then the next morning when I brew my coffee and sit down to work, I pick up the notecard and get to work.
tk
I rarely buy books. I rely on libraries so just writing in the book isn't an option. Also, writing in the book means to find anything I'd have to do get the book, open it, thumb through it looking for the quote. All I have to do is flip through my note cards, which are archived (VERY loosely) by subject.
He gave me some more details about his system, which had simple priority rankings for tasks. And by "file" he meant toss it in a shoebox. Not perfect, but I started to do both things. Amazingly, I too started to accomplish more.
To this day when I read a book I kept a stack of note cards nearby, writing down things that catch my attention[^1]. I do the same for things I read online, conversations I have, and ideas that come to me though out the day.
and a way to file stuff that might be useful in the future, for me that's reading notes, story ideas, observations and so on.
The last two became a problem. There was no way to know at a glance which index cards were valuable insights gleaned from a book or meditation and which were just reminding me to get paper towels at the store. This is when I stumbled on extra-sticky post-it notes. They're like regular post-it notes. But they actually stick to stuff. Pretty much forever from what I can tell. They also come in this very attention-getting yellow. So I started writing todos and grocery type lists on these little yellow post its. I know that
## The Nothing That Is
> For the listener, who listens in the snow,
> And, nothing himself, beholds
> Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.
-- [Wallace Stevens][1]
Long leaf pine bark is a patchwork quilt of overlapping grays, reds, browns, flaking to leave bluish tinged valleys between them. It reminds me of the canyon country of the Colorado plateau, a miniature world of mesas and canyons turned on its side and drizzled with rivers of sap.
Some of the same forces of wind and water are at work on the pine as they are in the canyons of Utah and Colorado. An echo of the endless in the finite.
The sound is the same. The rush of pine needles catching the wind. From damp maritime forests to box canyons in the southwest, the under story may change from palmettos to red-barked manzanita, but the over story remains the same. The pines are always singing.
The breath of the world. Air rushing from one place to another, a force we can only see the effect of, never the thing itself. The nothing that is.
On cool nights I leave the windows open to hear the wind. When we lived in a house I would sleep on the couch on windy nights. Only a few of our windows opened, the best was right next to the couch. I propped it open with a dowel and would fall asleep to puffs of wind on my face.
Before dawn, before the birds are up, there is only the sea and the wind. I lay awake in the 5 AM darkness, listening to the pines softly roar. The low music of the pines is joined by the dry rattle of oak leaves, the snap of a towel left out to dry over night. The wind like fingers tracing over the land, feeling their way through our small slice of the world.
I think of going out into it. It is warm under the covers, but I always think of Marcus Aurelius, "what do I have to complain of, if I'm going to do what I was born for -- the things I was brought into the world to do? Or is this what I was created for? To huddle under the blankets and stay warm?" I get up.
Outside there is already a pink and yellow glow on the horizon. The wind comes in gusts, swaying pines, rattling oaks. I stand facing east, watching the sun. Just before dawn the wind dies down, the temperature drops noticeably, as if the world draws in a deep breath and holds. And then there is light.
When there is no wind the world is wondrously silent.
Life is about the ineffable presence in the silence of stone. The smell of rain in dry lands. The taste of salt before you can see the water. What you know before you know it. The presence in the absence of everything else.
[1]: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45235/the-snow-man-56d224a6d4e90
I try to spend some time each day "doing nothing". That is, not working, not writing, not reading, not even meditating, not engaged with anything but the world as it is. To sit and listen.
This started as a way to get better at birding, listening intently to all the different bird calls that are always all around, but get filtered out -- to stop that filtering and listen consciously to everything, picking out individual sounds, trying to identify them.
I found that concentrating this way had a hypnotic effect, it was like gaining access to a new world. I wanted to do more of it, to go further somehow.
All my life I have sought these wild, isolated places. I'm not entirely sure why, but I think the
<<<
Draw people in here, and make the language more compelling.
>>>
It may be that that's already a part of us if we stop long enough, become still enough and work hard enough to find it.
We stare at campfires almost every night.
[3]: http://www.pnas.org/content/112/28/8567
The 50mm lens forces you to dissect what you're seeing and figure out a way to tell the story you see by combining fragments back into a narrative. It forces you to cut up the story and re-arrange it into your own, which is the beginning of creativity -- the destruction. The narrower field of view of the 50mm lens forces you to sequence and narrate your way into the experience you are trying to communicate. That's what I love about it. You can't contain the story in one shot like you can with a wide lens, you have to go deeper in and see what you can pull out as the essential elements. The 50mm make you work for it. And yeah the 50 part isn't that important, 40, 45, 50, 55, 58, they all have the same effect
1) Think about framing first. The 50 lends itself to simple direct framing. Figure out what's important in the scene and get rid of the rest.
2) Use depth of field wisely. Don't go nuts with the bokeh. Lenses have f/8 for a reason. I get it, the falloff can be pretty awesome, especially in portraits, but go easy here.
3) Move around. Ansel Adams: A good photograph is knowing where to stand. To dissect a scene you have to move around in it. Like move your body.
4) Think in narratives. The 50 tells stories in pieces, you don't have to get everything in the frame. Be less reactive and more intentional.
5) Think in triptychs: establishing shot, then what's the action, then some detail within the scene.
## Art
The past and future of art is patronage. The past is one person giving you thousands, the future, as Kevin Kelly famously put it, is thousands of people giving you $1, but either way, selling direct to your audience has always been the way to support yourself by making stuff.
The future is unevenly distributed though. We are living in an aberration where a lot of art is not supported by patronage, but instead is corralled on platforms to serve algorithms that turn everything into a popularity contest.
It won't last. Aberrations never do. But when you are in it, this current aberration is an all-consuming one that seems to be destroying people who are trying to create good, thoughtful, intelligent, disciplined art. That is a problem.
The solution is to better distribute the future into now, which is why I am writing this. My solution here is not new solution, but I think it's going to take some more people pointing it out to make it catch on.
### How We Got Here.
The problem of the current aberration is an inevitable result of the democratization of distribution that happened when the internet came along. There's nothing new conceptually about the internet. It's the Gutenberg press on steroids. It brought the cost of distributing art very close to zero, which effectively means anyone can make art. But not really. Because there is more to it than distribution. Now though everyone has the capability to reach an audience with their thing, whatever it may be.
That is both the brilliance and curse of a zero cost distribution network. There's no gatekeepers. Yay! But wait a minute. Servers are not free. They're cheap, but not free. There might not be a gatekeeper in the since of an editor sifting through a slush pile of manuscripts, but someone has to keep the servers running. That's the new gatekeeper. Same as the old really, though the close have changed.
In order to pay for the servers the platforms have to do something. The model that some early efforts stumbled on is to capture viewers' attention and then sell that attention to advertisers. The platform then has a need to always be increasing the number of eyeballs staring at the ads. This is why everything has been engineered to be addictive.
I know you already know this, I'm only laying this out because it's the next part people seem to miss. The algorithms that serve up your creations on these platforms need your creations to serve their needs. That is, they need your creations to be addictive. Again, this is not new. The patrons supporting art throughout the ages have always had agendas and some of them where pretty shady.
The problem is that the distribution platforms have turned everything into a competition to see who can get the most eyeballs. Even this is not inherently bad. I don't know about you, but I want to reach as many people as I can. But that quest for eyeballs turns into your quest. Your work exists primarily to feed the algorithm and it's treated as food essentially.
The way this plays out is that even if people start off making things for the love of it, they get sucked into the world of the platform. Soon people aren't making things because they love them, they're making things because they're hoping you'll love them and that never works.
Unfortunately, even if you can get past that temptation and keep making things you love to make, even if you really pour all your energy into something, it ends up being eaten by the same algorithm. It ends up on these platforms alongside everything else, no matter if that else is someone's energy and love distilled, or a 30 second flippant rant about tomatoes.
The modern platform, be it YouTube, Instagram, or whatever is big now, is the equivalent of going to the Louve and instead of curated artwork, the walls are plastered with every scrap of art everyone had ever created.
At first this would be amazing. You would discover all kinds of wonderful art. Sure there would be some really bad stuff, but look at this one... this is amazing. You would wander in rapture.
This euphoric discover phase would eventually become overwhelming. You would reach a saturation point. It would be too much to look at another wall of art and try to wade through the hundred pieces you didn't like to find the two you did. You'd retreat to enjoy what you'd already found. You'd look for more by those artists. You'd, dare I say, follow them. You'd begin to encourage them to feed the algorithm.
### Finding a Way Out
There are two widely accepted solutions to the overwhelm problem. There's also a less used, more interactive, third option that I think points the way forward, but first let's talk about the two solutions most widely employed: professional curation and machine curation.
Professional curation kicked off with the relative democratization of publishing back in the late middle ages. As soon as the printing press started cranking out more books than you could read in a year someone popped up to offer suggestions on which ones you should read and which you should skip. Fast forward a bit and you have the professional curator. To my mind this encompasses everything from editors picking works to publish to critics telling the wider public which pieces of art to consume, as well as all the people in between those points.
It's worth mentioning that I grew up under this system and watched it gradually collapse and fall apart to be replaced by machine curation. I don't completely love either system, both have trade offs.
The professional system works to a point, after which it becomes cliqueish, ego-driven, and self-defeating. Once it crosses that threshold it tends to be circumvented. In art you get the rise of the gallery to showcase those that can't make it into the museum. Then you get the pop up gallery to circumvent the gallery. Presumably this keeps going though I will admit I exited that scene at the pop up gallery stage because I felt like I saw where it was going. I saw the same thing happen in publishing. In publishing the independent presses circumvented the big publishers until they turned into them, and then the zine makers circumvented the independent publishers until they turn into them. Presumably this would have gone on in these loops forever where it not for the rise of the machine.
Professional curation is valuable. People who spend their lives thinking about what is good or bad writing, good or bad art, good or bad music, if they do it well, and I have worked with many who do it well, they really do have a better sense of what is working and what is not. They're not perfect. For every Rembrandt that's discovered when they should be there is a Basquiat who is not. This is the downside to professional curation. Everything has its trade offs.
The main alternative to professional curation is machine curation. This is where we are today. There is too much on YouTube for professionals to curate. This is the realm of the machine. As with the professional, when the machine works for you (as a lover of art seeking it) it works quite well, but even when it works it is feeding the algorithm and potentially killing the thing you are there to see -- the art.
### What Is Art
Let's back up, what is "art"? I think what people mean by "art" is when people try to turn scenes, moments of life, into something larger than they are, to be able to communicate ideas to other people.
To me this is not "art". This is something far deeper and more primeval. This is the basic human need to communicate with each other. To tell people what it was like on the mountain top as it were. You can do this at any time. No one is stopping you. Seek transcendence until you experience it. Rinse and repeat. You don't need a platform, you don't need a patron.
Now if that transcendence drives you to make something to explain it or share it in some way, that's where patrons come in. Making stuff usually takes at the very least time, time that can not be spent putting food on you table. You either need to have a lot of food on the table already or you're going to have to figure out a way to sell whatever you've made.
To me this is where the noun "art" comes in. I define "art" as turning the act of transcendence into a paycheck.
Here be dragons.
### The Gatekeeper Gauntlet
I know you think you want to make your living making art. But do you? Do you know what that's going to do to the feeling you were trying to convey? I don't care what platform you put your work out on, be it feeing the algorithm on Instagram or publishing it in Wired magazine, it will not come out the way you want. It might come out better in some ways, but either way, it's not you anymore, it's you and the platform working together.
I have turned in pieces of writing that were intended to convey one thing that ultimately failed to convey that thing because an editor pushed me in another direction. I still don't know if that's good or bad or neither, but it will definitely happen. And oh, by the way, your ego will shattered into tiny little shards you can maybe collect up when the paycheck arrives. Maybe you never find them, they're still lying there in an office somewhere. I've seen it go both ways.
I have gone this route and continue to go this route when I think whatever idea it is I am trying to convey is one that will survive the crucible of editing in which the perceived unnecessary is seared away. The truth is editors are often right. Not always, but more often then even I want to admit.
This is why I don't write about those moments of transcendence for gatekeeper publications. That stuff goes here and makes me no money. That's fine. I have a day job. It's still writing. I write about my experiences with products. My title is Senior Writer and Reviewer, but really what I do is write a string of personal essays, 3-4 a week, about my encounters with the stuff other people make. Sometimes this is fulfilling, sometimes it is not, even when it's not it's still pretty fun. Last week I shot about 300 photographs with $20,000 camera I would never in a million years get to touch in any other scenario. This even I cooked up dry aged grass-fed filets to see what a meat subscription box with like. It's a pretty sweet gig.
That's great for you Scott, but I have to slave away over TPS reports in a cubical and I want people to by my six dimensional crocheting, how come I can't do that? In a word: because that's not how it works.
The issues of patronage only arises if you try to turn those moments of transcendence into objects of some kind and then you try to earn a living from them.
What then is so different from turning transcendence into a paycheck and turning a selfie of your lunch into a paycheck? Why call one art and the other content?
I do think there is a difference.
Once upon a time I followed a great community of photographers and writers on the early web.
---
One of the horrors of the online world is the way in which it cuts off the senses.
The energy of chaos is required to change the existing order.
"Security is mostly a superstition. It does not exist in nature, nor do the children of men as a whole experience it. Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. Life is either a daring adventure, or nothing"—Helen Keller
---
We're sliding toward a post-political mode of government, in which expert administration replaces democratic contest, and political sovereignty is relocated from representative bodies to a permanent bureaucracy that is largely unaccountable. Common sense is disqualified as a guide to reality and with this disqualification the political standing of the majority is demoted. -- Matthew Crawford Anti-Humanism and the Post-Political Condition First Things Lecture https://yewtu.be/watch?v=pC0bxPbk5nw
People need... the freedom to make things among which they can live, or give shape to them according to their own tastes, and to put them to use in caring for and about others.
If you don't define success for yourself, you can never be successful. That sounds silly, but it's true. Not defining where you want to get to means you'll never get there. This lack of vision isn't an accident usually, it's actually a clever dodge your subconscious mind comes up with because it also means you can't fail. If there's no target to hit, you can't miss.
But without a vision of what success if for you, you will never be successful. And that will haunt you and leave you feeling incomplete in vague, difficult to recognize ways. You have to define what success looks like *for you*, lest you always feel like you're failing—whether or not you actually are.
I submit that it is better to know you failed than to have no idea where you are.
The thing to remember is that your definition of success will have to change and evolve. The dangerous thing is to coast. If you're coasting, you're not adapting, you're not changing and the only thing I can tell you is that nothing in life is static, everything is changing.
, even if it's like my definition, which is somewhat nebulous: I want to keep doing those things that I want to do more of and less of those things that I want to do less of.
The primary tools that one needs in modern day culture are to know how to make things up, and how to figure things out. This is creativity in two of its forms. These are called imagination and problem-solving. —STEVEN SNYDER
Technology is a means to an end, not an end
---
## UG Monk Review
Every morning I do the same thing. Rain, shine, wind, snow. Doesn't matter. I get up, go outside, and either submerge myself in cold water (if we're near some) or use a bandanna to dowse myself in cold water. Then I do some spiritual exercises, between 200-400 kettlebell swings (depending on the day), and then make some tea and eat breakfast with my family.
This ritual is a tether from which I rarely deviate, but the rest of my day is not structured at all. My job requires flexibility. Some days I need to sit and write, other days I need to be out wandering around testing cameras, paddle boards, backpacks, and other things.
To give some additional, useful structure to this chaos I recently added a second ritual at the end of my day, mostly thanks to a little wooden box called [Analog](https://ugmonk.com/pages/analog).
### Analog, a Japanese tea ceremony for your todo list.
My work day usually starts around 9 AM. I pick up a note card that has the tasks I am focusing on that day and start doing them. I don't have to think about what I should do, spend any time planning what to do, and I don't for the love of god start my day by looking at my email. I don't even open my laptop. I pick up a notecard. At the top of the card today it says, *write UG Monk Analog review*. I start writing.
I have been doing this for decades. I wrote a [short blurb](https://www.wired.com/story/best-paper-planners/#indexcards) about how I use note cards as a "planner" for my friend Medea Giordano's [guide to paper planners](https://www.wired.com/story/best-paper-planners/). I was surprised by how much email I got from this little thing I contributed. Eventually I wrote a more extensive guide to [how I use note cards as a planning tool](). This led someone to email me and ask if I had tried something called Analog, from a company with the curious name of UG Monk.
I wrote [a review of Analog for Wired](), so if you want more on the nuts and bolts of what Analog is and why I like it, read that. What I want to talk about here is something I only mention in passing in the Wired review, that is the potential usefulness of ritual in everyday things.
Back to the notecard I picked up about 10 minutes ago, the one that said, write Analog review. This notecard which holds everything I need to do, gets filled out in the evening of the day before, when I stop working.
Before I got the Analog Starter Kit, this process was somewhat haphazard. For someone whose morning ritual is well honed, my afternoons are more chaos. Analog changed that to some degree. The process I go through did not change, but the way I did it and the focus I bring to it now is greater than before. Why? Because I have a beautiful walnut box now.
Ritual is important because it it makes mundane activities sacred. Eating a cracker is nothing. The ritual of the Eucharistic makes the cracker more than a cracker.
I would never want anyone to think that going over the stuff you need to do is a religious ceremony, but if you can bring a little of that intensity to other things it can help. Ritual is both a way of focusing, and a way of reinforcing the behavior. Pick the right rituals, the right behaviors, and you can change your life.
I think ritual is important because if you look at something like Analog, which is $108 plus tax, it might seem like a lot to spend on something for your todo list. But if the money spent, the object acquired, raises the level of respect you have for what you're doing, if it helps bring a ritual aspect that inspires you to sit down and use them then $108 is nothing.
This is why I say Analog is a Japanese tea ceremony for your todo list.
If you're not familiar with a Japanese tea ceremony it's an extremely ritualized way of preparing and drinking tea (matcha). It started in the 16th century as an artistic hobby of the upper class and warrior elite, and eventually spread to wealthy merchants and others looking for formal ways forge and reinforce strong social ties. The ceremony itself is highly choreographed and to do it right requires years of study. It's usually done in a small room, modeled on a hermit’s hut, with room for four or five people. The point is to pull people out of the mundane world of their busy lives to temporarily focus on the tea and conversation.
Creating a ritual around a todo list can have the same effect, helping you to withdraw from the busyness of actual doing, and focus on why you're doing anything at all, and what you hope to get out of it. Do you need this for everything? No, there are some things you just have to do and you know why, like the emails you need to send and phone calls you need to make. But then, why are making those phone calls and sending those emails? Uh, because I have a job. Okay, but why do you have *that* job? What do you get out of it that you don't out of any other job?
These are the sorts of higher level questions that are worth thinking about on a regular basis.Not everyday, maybe not even weekly, but once a month it's worth reflecting on why you're doing what you doing, not just what you need to get done. This is what Analog has made me thing about more.
### Daily Reviews With Analog
At the end of the day -- which might be anywhere from 3 to 8 depending on the day -- I sit down with my notecard and I see what I didn't get to that day. I decided if those things are things I am still committed to doing, and, if so, I write them on a card for the next day. I also mark them as deferred by using a >, which I think I stole from bullet journaling.
Then I pull out the notecard that holds my weekly tasks, another with monthly tasks, and another with seasonal tasks (quarterly tasks if you prefer), along with a notebook that contains my longer term, strategic goals and list of projects. I review all these lists and make sure that tasks are getting done so projects are moving forward. Based on all this I write down my goals for the next day.
Once I have the next day's todo list filled out, I put it on top of my Analog box and go do something else for the remainder of the day.
This little review ritual might sound complex, but it's not. It took longer to write it than it does to do it. I spend about five minutes on this each afternoon. Sunday mornings I spend about an hour going through the same process, but at higher level, looking at my longer term goals and figuring out what needs to get done in the next next season, next year, next five years.
Analog does two things that I think are important. The first is physical -- it gives me a place to put my notecards. I put everything in the box, then I can put it away and my work day feels done. Pull it out again the next morning and I know it's time to focus. It's a good way to bookend my days, which is particularly helpful for people whose work varies from day to day.
The second is the ritual aspect. I think a lot of times I get caught up in rushing to do stuff without putting in the more difficult, higher level thinking that ought to precede putting items on your todo list. Why am I doing this? That kind of thinking comes out more when you turn your daily review into a kind of tea ceremony, which, at least for me, Analog very much helps to do. Everyone's job is different of course. I'm not sure a ceremonial ritual around my todo list would have been as helpful when I was running a restaurant. But it might have. It might have been a faster way to figure out that running a restaurant wasn't what I wanted to do with my life. So maybe I take that back. Maybe we could all use a little tea ceremony in our days. Whether Analog fits into that is your own decision, but it's definitely working for me.
## Yuma scene.
lemon yellow Volkswagon Dasher. smell of radiator fluid. hot wind. simba on the floor in the only scrap of shade. inside the diner, air conditioned, cool. eating ice cream. laying down in the backseat, the windows wrapping around above me.
## stoic journal:
1. Prepare For The Day Ahead: Each morning you should prepare, plan and meditate on how you aim to act that day. You should be envisioning everything that may come and steeling yourself so you're ready to conquer it. As Seneca wrote, "The wise will start each day with the thought, 'Fortune gives us nothing which we can really own.'" Or think of Marcus’s reminder: "When you wake up in the morning, tell yourself: The people I deal with today will be meddling, ungrateful, arrogant, dishonest, jealous, and surly. They are like this because they can’t tell good from evil."
2. Put The Day Up For Review: Stoicism isn't just about thinking, it's about action—and the best wayto improve is to review. Each evening you should, like Seneca did, examine your day and your actions. As he put it, "When the light has been removed and my wife has fallen silent, aware of this habit that's now mine, I examine my entire day and go back over what I've done and said, hiding nothing from myself, passing nothing by." The question should be: Did I follow my plans for the day? Was I prepared enough? What could I do better? What have I learned that will help me tomorrow?
---
S.M. Stirling’s characters*. “History becomes myth, myth becomes legend, and legend becomes history [as people act it out in their deeds]. Time is not a straight line. Time is a serpent.”
*The character was our old friend The Wanderer, here seen as an old mountain man in a sheepskin poncho, making coffee over a campfire – who suddenly, for an instant, is also seen with long black braids, a black Stetson, and the face of Coyote Old Man.
---
In his 1870 essay What is Authority?, Bakunin wrote:
Does it follow that I reject all authority? Far from me such a thought. In the matter of boots, I refer to the authority of the bootmaker; concerning houses, canals, or railroads, I consult that of the architect or the engineer. For such or such special knowledge I apply to such or such a savant. But I allow neither the bootmaker nor the architect nor savant to impose his authority upon me. I listen to them freely and with all the respect merited by their intelligence, their character, their knowledge, reserving always my incontestable right of criticism and censure. I do not content myself with consulting a single authority in any special branch; I consult several; I compare their opinions, and choose that which seems to me the soundest. But I recognise no infallible authority, even in special questions; consequently, whatever respect I may have for the honesty and the sincerity of such or such individual, I have no absolute faith in any person.
---
As Matthew Crawford observes in Shop Class as Soulcraft, “shared memories attach to the material souvenirs of our lives, and producing them is a kind of communion, with others and with the future.”
## advertising
One of the interesting things about living the way we do is that we're subjected to very little advertising. We don't have a television, we don't go out to eat (and see TVs there), and we seldom drive on interstate highways, subject to billboards. There are some billboards on the backroads we favor—I don't think it's possible to escape billboards completely, save in Vermont, Maine, Alaska and Hawaii, all of which have outlawed them—but not that many. I think the main place we encounter advertising is at the gas pump and that's pretty easy to ignore because I don't think I've ever put gas in the bus without having a conversation with someone passing by.
Despite the gas pumps, it seems safe to say that, living as we do in the bus, we are subjected to very little advertising. This is something I generally spend absolutely zero time thinking about until we come into major American city—something we try to avoid doing—and I am awestruck by how much advertising there is -- it absolutely saturates the environment.
## What are people for
a line from Wendell Berry that has stuck with me for a long time: “it is easy for me to imagine that the next great division of the world will be between people who wish to live as creatures and people who wish to live as machines
## Collapse notes
---
Other Owen, and for good reason! But that’s an important part of what I was talking about. A market economy depends on the fundamental agreement that the seller will provide the buyer with a product worth buying. Now that corporations by and large no longer do this, the market is collapsing, and they have no idea what to do about it — since listening to consumers and providing them with what they need and want is nowhere in the modern corporate vocabulary.
-JMG
Making sense of the ideas of one great culture from within another great culture is notoriously hard. (It’s an interesting detail of history, for example, that the first two European scholars to study the I Ching both went incurably insane.) Thus I don’t claim to be able to sound the depths of either of the two future cultures I’ve sketched out here; I was raised in a culture weighed down by the Faustian veneer, and I live in a region that mediates between western Europe and the North American heartland. (The ground under my feet is part of the same long-vanished continent as the western half of Britain.) Being who, when, and where I am, I’m poised unsteadily between two great cultures, the fading Faustian culture and the future American culture. That’s part of the hand I was dealt when I was born.
That awkward position, between the dissolving forms of the Faustian vision and the first stirrings of tamanous culture, seems to be becoming common among my American and Canadian readers, for what it’s worth. (I haven’t yet seen it among my European readers, which comes as no surprise—again, each great culture is rooted in its own land.) Here in North America, the Faustian veneer seems to be cracking very rapidly just now, outside those classes that have adopted Faustian thoughtways as the basis for their identity and their power. The widening gap between the Faustian managerial caste and the post-Faustian masses is among the major facts in American public life today, and it accounts for a great deal of the total incomprehension with which each side regards the other.
One of the chief questions in my mind right now is how that gap will evolve in the years ahead. Most great cultures, once they leave their ages of reason, wind up their creative eras, and settle into stasis, can expect a long slow decline—in cases such as ancient Egypt and traditional China, this lasted for many centuries. The surge toward infinity is so central to the Faustian ethos, however, that the total failure of the will to power that drives it may send the nations of the West down another, harsher route. We’ll talk about that in two weeks.
-JMG
---
## On the Economy of Walden
Walden is a curious book. Curious because what the world has chosen to remember about Thoreau is that he opted to go live in the woods for a time, renounce in some way the modern world and get fback to nature. But this isn't at all what Thoreau did. Forget the historical context (which is that Thoreau went into the woods to write another book, A week and concord and merrimack river, while at the same time processing his bother's death. Forget that because if you just come to book without any of that there is still no reason to walk away thinking you've read a book about a man who renounced the modern world. He does nothing of the sort, and most of the book isn't nature writing. The first and longest chapter is called Economy.
Thoreau's writing on nature and his own inner expereinces is just something you should read. Me telling you about it won't mean anything. It is experiential writing.
This is what struck me about Walden when I recently reread it: that it starts with something very practical, very bound up in 19th century Concord, very grounded you might say in the world of its day, and yet ends up in place that is very spiritual. It struck me because I have had exactly the same experience.
In getting in the bus I did not set out to step away from society. I have not stepped away from it at all. I am typing this using grid powered electricity, listen to the cacophony of helicopter rides while staring at the dense Florida branbles around our campsite, which, were I to bushwack through them, would lead me to the Walmart parking lot where I stocked up on steak, eggs and veggies not four hours ago. I am in Concord. And yet I am not. I understand now HD. And I also see both your flaws and mine.
20th-century French anthropologist René Girard's mimetic theory takes this idea of Thoreau's—that we do not want things a vacuum, we want them because other people want them -- and reminds us that when you leave behind one certain mimetic process, you always enter into another one. You might not want a big fancy house, but you might really want a cool vintage RV, or a particular sailboat. Something will always fill that vacuum of desire and unless you're really on your toes -- and I certainly am not -- chances are that thing that fills it will again be something you don't need at all and only want because someone else has it.
What one needs to do is question the forces which are pulling them. Mimetic desire runs deep, so deep that most of it is simply accepted as opposed to worked with. What I mean by this is that the majority of items we have and actions we undertake are not acquired or undertaken out of conscious wanting, but out of the general acceptance that they and that is what you do/get. People have 3-piece sofas, fridges, tons of cutlery and plates, nic-nacs, new cars, new phones etc. People go to school, have kids, get mortgages, take out loans, perform Christmas day etc. And all of this falls under the idea of 'It's just want you do.' In fact, perhaps that's a good place to finish up, as I've just found my new favorite slogan...
is in many ways a restating of the standard arguments agains
---
"The best you can do in this moment, with whatever awareness and resources you can muster right now. Make the best spaghetti sauce you can with what you have and who you are, right now. Make this the best staff meeting you could possibly have, given the circumstances at the moment. While talking with your friend, your spouse, your mom, or your son, make it the very best conversation that you could be having. The best proposal, the best drive with my family, the best performance review, and the best nap."
---
The true warrior is not the one who is willing to kill. That doesn’t make a warrior. The true warrior is the one who is willing, if need be, to die - Charles Eisenstien
---
A thousand times in history—a million, more likely—visionaries, prophets, artists, and philosophers have wandered away from the social world that made them and sat themselves in nature, to see what could be seen when you stop demanding that nature echo back precisely the creeds of your community. We can think here of Elijah or John the Baptist, Muhammad or the Buddha, or Christ. Closer to our own time, Thoreau, Whitman, and Emerson went to nature to find a renewed, energized version of America. Analogous solitudes have been sought and found even in prison cells—think of Martin Luther King Jr. or Fyodor Dostoevsky. As much as all of these men’s cultural formations accompanied them into solitude, shaped what they would see, there is also—in nature, in reality—more than is contained in any philosophy or culture. The main things that are needed are silence and trust—and not just for the would-be prophets among us, but for all of us: teachers, policymakers, clerics, parents, humans of any stripe. Panicked catastrophism will only ensure that our challenged cultures stay brittle and stuck. https://hedgehogreview.com/issues/hope-itself/articles/deep-down-things-in-a-time-of-panic
---
Richard Wagamese’s lovely movie (from his book), Indian Horse:
"Mystery fills us with awe and wonder. It is the foundation of humility and humility is the foundation of all learning. So we do not seek to unravel it. We honor it by letting it be that way forever."
---
There is an underground movement of people united around a common goal of relocalizing life. Many, probably not all, but the examples I know of anyway, of the people driving this movement have embraced what is sometimes called a front porch culture. That is, a culture of staying in one place all your life, of being a part of your community, and so on. I completely support this, which might seem odd for someone who lives in an RV, but I see what we do as a similar kind of localization. Localization need not be literal, at least not for everyone. Every culture everywhere
---
And stupidity combined with greed and arrogance is frankly more dangerous than deliberate evil. Someone who's evil and smart usually has the common sense to know when the risk of blowback is getting too high, and backs down fast when that happens in order to save his own skin so he can enjoy his nasty pleasures and ill-gotten gains. Somebody who's arrogant, greedy, and stupid doesn't do that, and such people go charging ahead and create major disasters that cause much more suffering and misery, and get dragged down with their victims.
---
Art is the transmission of a feeling across time. The artist feels something that drives him or her to make something and then the viewer experiences a feeling when they see or read or otherwise interact with that thing that the artist made. Those may be very different feelings, the feeling in the artist and in the viewer, but that thing that is making that connection is, I think, art as we define it in western culture. There are different conceptions of art. Even our culture at earlier periods had different definitions. And there are still artists who would probably disagree with this and say that the purpose of art is actually the expression of the divine, but I would still argue that it's the feeling of the divine that drives the artist to create. So it may not be that they're trying to communicate their own feeling, but that feeling is still the driving impulse behind the creation of the thing. And then, like I think of cooking, and I think well, at it's best cooking is exactly what I just described, but then also other times I am just scrambling these eggs so the kids can eat before Corrinne starts work at the table.
---
Working in Crawford quote:
Matthew Crawford's Shop Class as Soul Craft captures this feeling in a way that no other books I've read manages. Crawford defines this desire, this need to be capable of repair as a desire to escape the feeling of dependence. What he called the Spirited Man, becomes a kind of archetype of the antidote to passive consumption. Passive consumption displaces agency, argues Crawford. One is no longer master of one's stuff because one does not truly understand how stuff works. "Spiritedness, then," writes Crawford, "may be allied with a spirit of inquiry, through a desire to be master of one’s own stuff. It is the prideful basis of self-reliance."
In the years since Shop Class was published I have witnessed a convergence of two worlds, the collision of the spirit of inquire that looks to books and the spirit of inquiry that wants to works in the real world, to fix things, to get one's self moving down the road again. I see this in the work of Van Neistat, who explicitly took the Spirited Man mantle and ran with it. But also in the thousand people without filmmaking skills who are quietly working in their yards, in their garages, at the side of the road. Shade tree mechanics. Tinkerers. Spirited men and women who want first and foremost to understand, to expand their understanding of the world around them, to know how to use the tools we toolmakers have created for ourselves.
I think this goes the heart of the question of existence... why are we here? Are we here to optimize our days in service to some unknown thing are we here to be entertained? Or are we here to understand the world around us, to take part in the co-creation of our world? Are we along for the ride or are we standing at the helm, trimming the sails and pointing the bow into uncharted territory?
Crawford writes that the spirited man "hates the feeling of dependence, especially when it is a direct result of his not understanding something. So he goes home and starts taking the valve covers off his engine to investigate for himself. Maybe he has no idea what he is doing, but he trusts that whatever the problem is, he ought to be able to figure it out by his own efforts. Then again, maybe not—he may never get his valve train back together again. But he intends to go down swinging."
This was the spirit in which I set off in the bus. I had no idea how the engine worked or if I would be able to keep it running, but I intended to go down swinging.
Passive consumptions displaces agency. One is no longer masters of one's stuff but a servant of its makers.
---
I don't want to report stories, I want to live them.
Have your own code. Not a contractors code. Not any organizations code. Your own code that means something to you, that makes you take pride in your work.
When you live in a small space you have to be organized. Everything needs a place. Even if that place is to just shove it in a messy cabinet and close the door quickly. Otherwise you space will be unbearable.
I think after a while the novelty of anythin wears off. even living on the road. or perhaps its that I felt the need to dial back the novelty a little. first we returned to places we'd already been, but that wasn't the answer. Then we went to new places, but moved much slower. settled in a bit. but that wasn't entirely the answer either. it wasn't until we enrolled the kids in juijitsu that i realized, oh, this is what i am supposed to do. i am supposed to look more closely at these places. to befriend the people within in them, to understand them to a greater degree. I do not know why, I just know that this is part of it. i still do not have all of it, it is still not perfected, but every day that passes i get new ideas and things fit more.
as a spin off of the moving slower idea i came to realize that okay, i have achieved the thing I set out to do. we live on the road. now what? it wasn't until i sat twith this question for a long time in meditation that something like an answer began to form. and a big part of the answer was, now you make stuff. now you write, now you build, now you create, now you fix. now you do all the things you have always done, but you find a way to do them on them within the constraints of how you life now. Fewer tools, less space, in some cases i've added some ttools that seem strange at first glance.
the answer is to put the art back in. to blend the books and the life and use them to make some kind of art. mechanical, analog art. and digital recordings to supplement it. but that mechnaical stuff needs to happen. it has been missing too long.
---
For Midgley, the post-Enlightenment myths that orient us in the modern world are so potent because they base their authority, paradoxically, on the myth of mythlessness. That is, the Enlightenment project was, among other things, committed to overcoming the restrictive chains of religious dogma, inherited belief systems, and, yes, grand narratives of mythology. But this was only to change one set of answers to our biggest questions for a host of others. We can’t escape myths; we only exchange them. And some of the post-Enlightenment myths by which we continue to live tell a tale of humans as autonomous and atomized beings, of an inert world of knowable laws scrutinized by the detached and disinterested rational gaze, of an environment whose value is reduced to commodification and utility, and of a human species that is on some ineluctable frog-march of progress.
But myths are not just intellectual abstractions. They manifest in the real. The industrial—and arguably now digital—revolutions and the built world of mass manufacturing, global trade networks of shipping lanes and rail lines and interstate highways, and the ever-increasing consumption of fossil fuels and the mining of scarce and precious resources in whose name we will even wage international war are, in part, the physical embodiment of this deeply ingrained post-Enlightenment mythology. What we make reveals to us what we love and believe. And over centuries, these lived, incarnated mythologies shape our posture and stance to the world.
https://www.frontporchrepublic.com/2022/08/what-in-the-world-is-the-world-a-review-of-this-sacred-life-humanitys-place-in-a-wounded-world/
---
Paul Kingsnorth on solutions:
Climate change is a great example of that. It’s really interesting to me that we talk about climate change as if it were somehow disconnected from all the other things that are happening to the planet. The industrial economy’s assault on the earth, which has been going on for a couple hundred years, has basically wrecked the health of the planet in all sorts of different ways. And there are a lot of things happening — large rates of extinction, soil erosion, ocean pollution, a changing climate, all sorts of smaller, subtler things as well — but it’s climate change that’s just a one-off, almost self-contained phenomenon that has somehow grabbed the headlines and has become this enormous thing that we somehow have to stop. That’s the problem, so what’s the solution? And the solution inevitably is always technological, because nobody can think about anything else. That’s the way we think in our culture: we’ve created the problem with technology, so we must have to solve it with technology. So the issue has boiled down to, the wrong kind of gas is going up into the atmosphere, so we need a fuel technology that doesn’t put it up there, as if that were the problem, rather than the way we’re living our lives, the entirety of the economy, the value system that it’s based on. It’s the kind of notion that we’re extractive individuals and we just live in a market system. All of these complex things have happened over the last hundred years where we’ve completely retooled the way we live — we’ve disconnected ourselves from nature and culture and community, and we’ve made ourselves consumer individuals living in a machine. And the problem then is seen as, the Machine is using the wrong fuel, so let’s do something else. It’s not going to work, anyway, but even if it did work, what would the solution look like? Is that the world we want to be living in? Are the values correct? Is our disconnection okay as long as it doesn’t pollute the atmosphere? Is it okay to live in this kind of radical individualistic machine world as long as we’re not putting carbon up into the air?
It’s very difficult to ask the bigger questions because, as you say, relentlessly, as soon as you do, there’s an immediate backlash, which usually comes in completely familiar clichéd language —“So you’re saying we should go back and live in caves?” etc. And there’s not really much you can do with that.
it’s not neutral technology, it’s only designed for one thing. A gun only does one thing. But a smartphone is not neutral technology. If you use that thing, you are going to get addicted to that thing, you’re going to be taken into a certain way of life, you’re going to be acting in a certain way, you’re undoubtedly going to have your brain rewired by your use of it. Yeah, sure, you could be using it to promote organic farming rather than pornography, but you’re still on your phone all day, and so is everybody else who has to do that, and you’re still pumping carbon into the atmosphere — but more to the point, you rewire your whole life. Nobody has time to go folk dancing when they’re on their phone all the time. It doesn’t matter how well-intentioned you are.
I perpetually would like to get the internet out of my house, but then I wouldn’t be able to earn a penny, so I can’t. So there it is! So we have to make these choices. I would genuinely like to live without the internet, but I have no idea how I would feed my children, so I can’t at the moment. So there it is. But you know, maybe it’s just the process of drawing lines, like it is with anything else. You just say, okay, I’m not going over this line. It’s just a thing I’m not going to do. So I’ve said for a long time I’m not having a smartphone. I’m just not going to have one. And I don’t care what that means. It’s inconvenient for me in all sorts of ways, but I’m just not going to do it, so that’s that. I don’t have to think about it. And that’s one of my lines. There are things I’m just not going to do, that I’m not going to compromise on, and then there are other things I go, Well, okay, I have to do that because we’re all living in the world. So I think that’s probably the way to think about it.
https://mereorthodoxy.com/following-christ-in-the-machine-age-a-conversation-with-paul-kingsnorth/
---
## What Happened to 'How Are You'?
One used to meet up with an old friend and ask, “How are you?” And get a little recap of how that person has actually been. Today, when we ask how someone is, it’s quite common to get back a “BUSY!” Yes, of course. Busy.
I’m not asking about the tempo of your life, I’m asking about you. I’m interested in you. Tell me about you.
We’ve come to somehow equate worth with how harried we are. We are the VIPs of our own little worlds, engrossed in the importance of our serious affairs. Busy! So busy! To me, this busyness is evidence of a mismanaged life. If all I can say to someone when they ask me what’s happening in my life is, “BUSY!” I’m doing a poor job of it. It’s like a thermometer with the temperature climbing, a little tell of something going askew.
We can have much to do, deadlines and meals and kiddos and never ending tasks, but that doesn’t mean we need to feed the busy monster. We don’t have to allow frenetic energy to drive us into that whirlwind of tasks. It’s not helpful. I’ve learned that my perspective truly does determine how I show up in my life. Who I am to my people. How I experience my time here. By a shift in that perception - say from focusing on the overwhelm to one of gratitude, everything changes.
## Gurdjieff Do It By Hand
Gurdjieff notion that you should do a task by hand. if you have to dig a ditch you should do it and dig it by hand because there's an opportunity there for spiritual growth. if you're offloading it to a machine you're losing that opportunity for spiritual growth. if we offload tasks to machines we lose the opportunities that they have for spiritual growth and we may not fully understand the consequences of offloading things to technology because we'll never go through it to see what Spiritual Development we might have had if we had done it ourselves
## Have your own code
Not a contractors code. Not any organizations code. Your own code that means something to you, that makes you take pride in your work.
When you live in a small space you have to be organized. Everything needs a place. Even if that place is to just shove it in a messy cabinet and close the door quickly. Otherwise you space will be unbearable.
## Fire Notes: Seeking the Sun
People have forgotten how important the sun is. You can die from lack of sun.
# Stories to Tell
## Lemon Lyme Summer
The sun rises as a thin band of orange squeezed between twin blue worlds of lake and cloud. The tips of the pines above glow for a moment before the sun slides up and behind the distant clouds.
The sun rises near the center of the bay when we arrive in April, but by the solstice it's no longer rising over the lake at all, but far to the north, from some spot obscured by trees. There it rises most of the summer.
Summer on the shores of Lake Superior is difficult to put in words. It's idyllic. It's never that hot here. Not in the sense that it gets hot in the rest of the country. It's often [warmer in Florida in April](https://luxagraf.net/jrnl/2023/05/goodbye-florida) than it is up here in July. But temperature is always relative, and come July we're just like the people I [once laughed at](https://luxagraf.net/jrnl/2018/07/crystal-lake), calling a 85 degree day here "hot."
The midday the light burns through the evergreens, a sluggish heat hangs in the air, the haze of humidity weighing it down. Ashland, a mere four miles across the bay, gets lost in the watery blur of the horizon. Thankfully the lake is always there, always cool, usually cold, even on the hottest days.
It's more than the weather though. There is something about summer up here that feels more like the world of my youth than anywhere else we've been in the U.S. It's one of the few places we've been where the kids can wander the woods, follow the creeks, ride their bikes around town, make food over a fire, fish, swim, and whatever else they want to do, on their own.
Despite my best [determination not to be hurried](https://luxagraf.net/jrnl/2023/11/dunes), we spend May and June living between baseball and juijitsu, acting camp and sailing camp. This year the girls were invited to teach sailing for the younger kids, so that stretched out even more. When I type it out it doesn't sound like much. Maybe it isn't. Busy is like the temperature, relative.
The girls' birthday marks what I think of the real beginning of summer up here. This is around the time it get "hot" with days above 80 and the lake water in the shallows of Chequamegon Bay gets into the low 60s, which feels like bathwater after swimming in May and June.
I had a number of projects I wanted to get done this summer, which made it feel busier than usual. These projects were largely physical, building things. Toward the end of July I found that my joints were hurting more than they should, even with the abuse of lifting heavy sheets of plywood and spending 6 hours a week on the mats. I honestly would never have thought anything about it, except that I mentioned it one day and my wife pointed out that that is a symptom of Lyme disease, and I'd had a tick in me about two weeks before.
If you do any research on Lyme you'll quickly enter a minefield of conflicting information. Luckily for me, a good friend of ours was a nurse in the area, and has had Lyme, so she suggested I go to a Lyme-specific clinic about two hours away. I made an appointment for a week later, but in the mean time, Lyme began to eat away at me. And I mean that literally. You can feel it inside you, in your joints, in your head. The only other thing I've ever had that was like was Covid. Coincidentally there is some pretty good evidence Lyme is another bioweapons accident. Make of that what you will.
Whatever its origins, half the problem with Lyme is finding a doctor who understands it. Fortunately I did and I got the prescriptions I needed (antibiotics along with a slew of supplements). If you've got Lyme and you're anywhere near the [Tick-Borne Illness Center](https://www.aspirus.org/find-a-location/aspirus-tickborne-illness-center-552) in Woodruff, Wisconsin, just go. Unfortunately you'll have to pay out of pocket. The tick center does not follow the CDC's guidelines (which will leave you with Lyme for a lifetime) and therefore most insurance won't cover it.
I'm still not 100 percent. Maybe I never will be again. I do feel much better and have been able to get back to juijitsu and physical labor, which I'm thankful for, though my joints continue to hurt and swell up at times.
August rolls around, air thick and still, before the sun begins again to rise over the water. Orange and blue mornings return. I look forward to the middle of August, when things settle down. This year we had a string of warm weeks around then, almost no rain and temps in the 80s. We spent most of our time in the lake, on the paddle boards, with the occasional break to hike or pick berries.
but the light is changed. Autumn is a quality of light, a taste in the air. Something new is added. The world is clearer, the edges sharper, it feels like around the corner, all will be revealed. The earth is brilliantly alive. You can taste it. If I could live in perpetual Autumn I would, for a while at least.
In between, while sun rises in the trees, is Summer. The light is bright and yellow by the time it cuts through the evergreens. It feels slightly sluggish, the haze of humidity weighing it down. Ashland, a mere four miles across the bay, is sometimes lost in the haze. Thankfully the lake is always there, always cool, often cold, even on the hottest days.
Still,
## economics
Once people get over the big blue bus, two questions inevitably follow.
The first is, *so... what do you do?* This is the polite American way of saying, *how the hell do you afford to do this?*
The second thing people ask is what the kids do for school. That requires a much more complex answer. Let's stick to money. Money is simple. Well, compared to education.
### Set a Goal
Before you figure out how you can afford to travel you need a goal. What is your goal? Is it to travel somewhere specific? Some specific means of traveling (e.g. RV, boat, AirBnB, etc)?Is it some specific amount of time (e.g. a few months between jobs, during a summer break, etc)?
It's important to have a concrete goal in mind before you start trying to arrange your life in a way that carries you to that goal. I hate to sound like a life coach, but if you don't have a goal you'll never find your path. Without a clear path you won't go anywhere.
For example, the first time I went on a long term trip I had general destination in mind (India and Southeast Asia). That allowed me to research to costs of getting to those places, the likely costs of life there, and then I could work backwards to figure out how much I need to save. I had a concrete number in mind ($10k, which I expected to last me 6 months), and I started saving until I had enough and I then I left. When it ran out I came home. I was young enough then that I just crashed on friends couches until I landed a new job, if that's not an option be sure to set aside a fund to re-enter normal life.
This isn't the only way to do it though. I met several people on that trip who went the opposite direction, they saved up a chunk of money and then figured out where they could make it last the longest. That's another way to do it.
And finally there is what I do now, which is working on the road. I only recommend this if your goal is to travel indefinitely. And for the record, neither I nor anyone I've ever met traveling left home planning to travel indefinitely. That tends to be something you decide when it comes time to end a long trip. You start thinking, *I want to keep doing this forever*, and that sudden pressure (the thought of going back) tends to lead to the creative thinking you need to develop if you do indeed want to live on the road.
### Get Rid of Everything
The first step to affording to travel is to get rid of everything you don't absolutely need. I actually think it would be easier to get rid of literally everything, head out the door and just buy things as you need them, but no one has ever taken this suggestion seriously so the best I can say is: if everything you doesn't fit in two bags, you're going to run into problems.
Get down to two bags. If you need to add things down the road, that's fine. For example, if you end up traveling with your home, like a van, RV, boat, or whatever, you're going to need tools, you can add those in later. But for the most part get rid of everything.
This is important literally, as an act, but also as a process. It will teach you things. It will teach you how remote your wants are from your needs. Get rid of your wants along with all the debris those wants have brought into your life. Focus on what you absolutely need. If you want nothing you will not need as much money. Needs turn out to be pretty cheaply met. Find a dumpster and throw your TV in it. That alone will do more to get you on your way to having enough money to travel than anything else on this page.
Don't worry if this is really hard or insanely time consuming. It's that way for everyone. I've written about this elsewhere, but it is astronomically easier to let stuff into your life than it is to get it out.
Stuff costs money and takes up space, neither of which you have future traveler. Life on the road is one of necessities (food and shelter) and great views, not endless wants fulfilled and Amazon deliveries. The less you want the better off you will be financially. Yes, you can take this too far, but very few people do so don't worry about that.
One trap to beware of, having less doesn't mean you have to have the best. I see things on the internet from people who profess to be minimalists because they have only one fork, spoon, and knife, but those utensils are $40. That's not what you're after. Let go of the need to impress if you can, it will save you a ton of money. And none of us out here traveling will be impressed anyway.
### Become Financially Self-Dependant
I stole the phrase Financially Self-Dependant from the good people at Wanderer Financial because it captures something key that no other way of putting it does: you're in control. There are myriad ways this can be achieved depending on your skill set, but one thing I can absolutely promise you is that it won't mean having a traditional job. Can you travel with a full time job? Sure. I have several times. It sucks. It doesn't suck because you have set hours, though that's part of it, but mostly it sucks because you are not in direct control of your income. Worse, you only have one source of income.
Lose your job at home and it's a big deal.
I hate to tell you this, but the truth is we saved up for a long time before we went traveling so that we would have a good cushion of money should anything go wrong.
Speaking of which, if you're like me you got no financial education. You're going to need to fix
## The Good Life
I was recently talking with my editor about my decidedly low ambitions at work. Writers often have trajectories. They start at small publications, write that one big story, then move to a larger publication, write that one big story, then move on to a larger publication, and so on. I have never had any interest in that. I've spent my entire writing "career" primarily at Wired. I've been writing for Wired in one form or another since 1999. In all that time Wired has never rejected a pitch[^1], why would I want to write for anyone else?
I don't and never have felt the need to climb any ladders. At least not in a job.
But then later I was thinking, perhaps I am looking at this whole thing the wrong way. Perhaps I'm not that driven because I've already got everything I ever wanted.
One of the great dangers of life is that we don't know what the good life looks like until it's in the rearview mirror.
[^1]: That's not literally true, but it's close. Sometimes I pitch something that someone else is already doing, and sometimes I pitch something I know they don't want because it's in my contract to do so, but by and large I am fortunately to pretty much unlimited freedom. I mean, they let me write about how we have no oven and cook on waffle irons.
## April White
The mild winter of 2023-2024 brought very little snow to Wisconsin. We watched the weather for months waiting for more snow to fall, but it never did. Last year we arrived after Memorial Day and it was still cool. This year we headed up April 1 and found not a patch of snow on the ground.
So far as I have been able to discover, there is only one Wisconsin state park that opens this early and as luck would have it, it's right where we wanted to be to visit some friends. We headed north from [Ferne Clyffe](https://luxagraf.net/jrnl/2024/03/illinois-cliffs), stopped off for a night in Rockford, and made it up to Hartman Creek State Park the day it opened.
The forecast called for some rain that afternoon, but on the drive in I hit a few snow flurries and the temperature dropped to unpleasant levels for driving the bus (the heater in the bus has never worked). The last few miles the "rain" alternated between sleet and snow, and by the time we pulled into camp it was steady snow.
This was only the second time we've hit snow in our travels, though we've had plenty of days at or below freezing. But none of us were ready for ten inches of snow, which is what we got at Hartman Creek. The snow didn't let up much in the night and was back at the next morning, continuing all through the day.
We had the campground to ourselves. Two other people had brought out their rigs, but they seemed to be locals claiming a spot. They left their rigs and went (I assume) home. It was just us and the snow.
I forgot how utter silent the world is when it snows. Even the simple act of walk seems an unforgivable intrusion on the silence.
I have no way to photograph it, but we put the snow under the loupes to see the fractal patterns, the tiny geometric order scattered about in the chaos of wind, often blowing out of my hand before I could even focus on it. I can't help thinking there's a lesson in that, but I'm not sure what it means.
The heavy wet snows of spring never last long though and it was soon gone, leaving behind
## Growing
Welcome to this channel. My name is Scott Gilbertson.
Seven years ago my wife and I sold our house, all of our belongings, loaded our three children in a 1969 Dodge Travco motorhome and set out to explore the united states.
Our twin daughters were 4 years old. Just learning to ride bikes. Our son was not yet 2.
We spent 18 months traveling, breaking down, repairing the bus, traveling some more, breaking down a little less and traveling some more, from Florida, across the gulf, through texas, new mexico, colorado, Utah, Nevada, Cailfornia, and then back east through Arizona, texas again, the midwest, the great lakes. Last time I counted we'd been through 27 states.
We took some breaks. We spent 9 months living in Mexico. Then we rented a house when the world shut down in 2020. But we've never had a home aside from the bus as we call it.
Before we left, when we were selling our house, I was walking through it with the buyer's inspector, he asked about our plans, and I told him we were planning to live in a 27 foot RV. He stopped and stared at me for a minute. Then all he said was, Y'all are going to be close.
He was right. We are close. We've had a wonderful time sharing our lives and traveling. But we've also grown. Well, our kids have grown. When we left they could sleep all three sideways in full bed. Now our daughter's are nearly 12, half grown women, and our son is growing every day too. We needed more space.
After talking it over for months. Years really. Debating every kind of rig we've ever seen or heard of, most of which we knew we did not want, we decided to go the school bus route. A school bus is a blank slate. We wanted to design our home to fit our lives, to add the things that are missing in the bus and above all, to never, ever have to put up or put down beds again so long as I live.
Which is how I came to be here.
Certainly this is how writing is for me. Not that I am a great craftsman, but I do know that experience of knowing what to write not because I thought of it consciously, but because it's there, one word after another until they all fit. I am merely transcribing.
That's not to say it's easy. The opposite actually. Usually this is presaged by struggle. I can't figure out how to say what I want to say. I write, I re-write, nothing works. I step away. I do something else. I try to get the whole thing out of my head, and when I finally do I either forget it entirely, or it comes crashing out in one long burst, all there for me, all I have to do is type it up. Did I think of it? Was it given to me from elsewhere? I don't know.
I must backpedal on the statement I opened with, that it doesn't really matter what you make. That's not entirely true. It doesn't matter what the thing is, but the person making it must want it, must need it. Inspired making of the sort I am thinking of leads to things of beauty. Useful or purely ornamental doesn't matter, but to invest something with the thumb of God cannot result in anything other than the beautiful, and you have to want it to get there. In that sense the thing matters.
It's possible to go further than with this than just making things. If done properly everyday tasks can be lent this same holiness. This is why there are elaborate ceremonies around things like tea, coffee, food, even cleaning. All ordinary things made extraordinary by focusing attention on them and excluding everything else for a moment.
For me they are threads woven together in stories I've lived. Some told here, some told elsewhere, some never told. I've been thinking a lot lately about stories, the stories I tell. This is why I did not write anything for many months. I wasn't sure about the stories I wanted to tell, but I also wasn't sure about the stories I was telling myself.
If the stories you tell yourself diverge to greatly from the world as it is, you have a problem. We are the stories we tell. If you want to change, change the story you are telling yourself.
Before you can do that though, you have to figure out which stories you're telling yourself that are true, which ones you're the process of making true, and which ones you just wish were true. I find that there is progression here. You tell yourself a story you wish was true, then you tell yourself the story of making it true, and then you tell the story of it because it is true.
That said, not everything --whether you tell it to yourself or to someone else -- is a good story. The story of the people who almost did something is not a good story. We all have that story in our lives, few of us want to hear other people's version. We want good stories. I spend most of my life looking for good stories.
Increasingly, over the last few months, life in the bus has not been a good story. At first I couldn't put my finger on it, things just felt off. blah you might say.
my greatest skill has been to want but little—so little capital it required, so little distraction from my wonted moods, I foolishly thought. While my acquaintances went unhesitatingly into trade or the professions, I contemplated this occupation as most like theirs; ranging the hills all summer to pick the berries which came in my way, and thereafter carelessly dispose of them; so, to keep the flocks of Admetus. I also dreamed that I might gather the wild herbs, or carry evergreens to such villagers as loved to be reminded of the woods, even to the city, by hay-cart loads. But I have since learned that trade curses everything it handles; and though you trade in messages from heaven, the whole curse of trade attaches to the business.
As I preferred some things to others, and especially valued my freedom, as I could fare hard and yet succeed well, I did not wish to spend my time in earning rich carpets or other fine furniture, or delicate cookery, or a house in the Grecian or the Gothic style just yet. If there are any to whom it is no interruption to acquire these things, and who know how to use them when acquired, I relinquish to them the pursuit. Some are "industrious," and appear to love labor for its own sake, or perhaps because it keeps them out of worse mischief; to such I have at present nothing to say. Those who would not know what to do with more leisure than they now enjoy, I might advise to work twice as hard as they do—work till they pay for themselves, and get their free papers. For myself I found that the occupation of a day-laborer was the most independent of any, especially as it required only thirty or forty days in a year to support one. The laborer's day ends with the going down of the sun, and he is then free to devote himself to his chosen pursuit, independent of his labor; but his employer, who speculates from month to month, has no respite from one end of the year to the other.
if we will live simply and wisely; as the pursuits of the simpler nations are still the sports of the more artificial. It is not necessary that a man should earn his living by the sweat of his brow, unless he sweats easier than I do.
We sprinted across Florida in two quick drives over to the far end of the panhandle. We stopped in the middle at the Tallahassee Car Museum, I weird little museum that has a few campsites out front (not everything in Harvest Hosts is a farm)
## Spirit of Craft
> I am convinced, both by faith and experience, that to maintain one's self on this earth is not a hardship but a pastime --Henry David Thoreau
I enjoy making things. The things are often irrelevant, it's the making that I enjoy. It reminds me of traveling. When you make something you are completely absorbed in that process to the point that you forget everything else, forget the world, save this tiny part of it that you are reshaping.
Travel is the same way, there is only right now. A complete absorption, obsession even, with the world in front of you. The plantains and steak on the plate, the potholes in the road, the birds calling in the cold morning air. Wherever you are, there is only that, the rest of the world pales, ceases to exist. It's a state of ease, of relaxed absorption, of freedom. Realizing that you have nowhere to go, nowhere to be, nothing to do to maintain yourself in this world, save to be where you are, doing what you're doing.
This is freedom. Doing things. Making things. Same thing.
Yet one of the current cultural ideals is getting others to do things for you. Outsourcing your life. Someone else mows the lawn. Someone else cleans the house. Someone else fixes the car. This is called success.
I ran across Hegel's paradigm of servant and master the other day, which I don't think I've thought of since I dropped out of college in 1994. I was struck though at how well Hegel defines modern culture. If you're not familiar, in Hegel's story the master grows increasingly impoverished through idleness while the servant grows daily in skill and wisdom because he is doing things for himself. So one starts dependent on the other, the other ends up dependent. The pivotal moment of Hegel is when the servant realizes he no longer needs the master, what he needs is to perfect his skill further.
We're in danger of becoming the "master", who is really master in name only. I'm not saying you have to get out an mow your lawn to achieve freedom, but I am not alone in thinking that in the pursuit of "freedom from" we're losing our "freedom to"... to do, to make, to say, to think.
It's not just that we're becoming masters of nothing, it's that we've lost the very resourcefulness that marks a truly free human being, one who is independent and capable of solving problems on his or her own, thinking for his or herself. Contrary to what marketers are selling, freedom is in doing, in making, growing in skill and wisdom.
The more often you can do this, the better life will be.
Why? That's the question isn't it?
When making your concentration becomes sharply focused on the task at hand and everything else that makes up you, fades away. The chattering I that is usually busy thinking and analyzing is set aside while someone else drives the ship. It's an odd thing when you experience it. Something working through you. A kind of communion with the gods perhaps. The Greeks held this to be true of great craftsmen[^1], that Athena, or Hephaestus, or whoever governed the craft at hand was in fact working through the craftsman to create the work. In this sense the craftsman is no longer there. They become a conduit for the gods to move in the world.
Most people I know who are great craftsmen speak in these terms, saying that they do not know where their ideas come from, nor are they conscious of the particular skills they're using at any given moment, they simply do, they simply are, or are not in this case. As a skilled woodworker I know says, the key to being good at anything is to get out of your own way.
This is how making things becomes a spiritual discipline, an act of letting the gods move the world through you. "For true masonry is not held together by cement but by gravity, that is to say, by the warp of the world, by the stuff of creation itself," writes Cormac McCarthy in *The Stonemason*. "The keystone that locks the arch is pressed in place by the thumb of God."
[^1]: This is a gendered word where I do not intend a gender, anyone can be a creator, a craftsman, but English has no better term that I know of, sorry.
## Darktable shortcuts:
### Darkroom dev shortcuts:
Shift + e while scrolling to change exposure
Shift + c open color calibration eyedropper
Shift + l to apply Astia LUT
Shift + b Boost color balance rgb preset
Shift + s to apply clarity preset
control + s to apply lxf sharp
### Lighttable shortcuts
alt + - zoom out (custom)
alt + = zoom in (custom)
0-5 rate pics
## Before The Motor Laws
Electric cars are limited to a city for the most part. I don't think this is a design flaw. I think this is a design intent. Kill the ability to take to the open road and you kill the myth of the open road and the myth of the open road is the quintenssential myth of america. It is, I would argue, the entire idea on which america was founded, long before the road was paved or had cars on it. The electric car is designed to castrate that idea and the current reality along with it.
f the urban operating system is going to happen, as the WEf and all the smart city avocates believe, I want to throw my lot in with the free softwareists—the drivers.
## Car Show Post
Someone stopped by the bus the other day to talk about it. I answered his questions, but then as he was getting ready to go he said something that stuck with me, "thanks for keeping it going". It jumped out at me because he was the second person to say that to me. *I love knowing these things are out there, still going.*
This evening I went to the grocery store in town and there was an early 1970s-ish Ford Bronco at the gas pump. I'm not a huge fan of Broncos, I'll probably never own one, but it was my kind of car, not perfect, plenty of patina in the finish. It had been around and I thought, you know, I too am glad it's out there, still running.
It's not the thing though. The thing is irrelevant. *Thanks for keeping it going.* What is it? The past? Thanks for keeping this tiny thread of the past alive in the present. Thanks for the path back, thanks for keeping these things, and the memories we have that are connected to them alive.
Nostalgia is commonly used pejoratively. The American Psychological Association considers it a subset of depression, which is, ahem, depressing. But then I guess if you're stuck trying to prop up the present as better than the past, at this point, you have to do some serious philosophical dancing.
I find it far more telling that the meaning of nostalgia has shifted over the years from the original conception of "pain, grief, and distress" from trying "to reach some place, escape, return, get home," to our more modern connotation, "wistful yearning for the past." The genuineness of grief has be replaced with the easier to dismiss *yearning*.
The word nostalgia comes from two Greek words, *algos*, which gives us the "pain, grief, distress", and *Nostos* the returning home bit. But combining these two words and then ending up with a "wistful yearning for the past," says far more about our values than anything.
*Nostos* is the part that interests me. It has an Old English cognate, *genesen*, which means "to recover." There's also the Gothic *ganisan*, which means "to heal." This is the thread I think of when I see those Broncos and Travcos, those old appliances that actually work, those old clothes not made of plastic, all these things are not a homesickness for another time or place, but a yearning to heal the present. It's a yearning to recover those elements of the past that were better than what we have today. Not nostalgically, but tangibly, demonstrably better.
*Thanks for keeping it going.* Thanks for maintaining a path to healing the present. Thanks for pointing the way.
I didn't say anything to the Bronco though. There was no one around. Maybe the steel and iron understand, I think they do, but no one, including me, wants to be the weirdo talking to the car in an empty parking lot. Besides, it's the person who's maintaining that connection that matters. It's their struggle to keep that thing working that matters. All those people laboring to keep those bits of the past working in the present, that's what matters. Without them the objects are just rust and decay. Someone has to maintain them, recover them, repair them—this is what matters. This is the bond in the present to the past. Those who keep things going understand them, understand where they came from, why they work the way the work, and what that means. You have too, otherwise you'll never be able to keep whatever it is working.
This means you're constantly communing with the past. If that sounds too hippy for you, don't worry, that communication with the past often goes like this, "what #$%@ idiot wired this together with electrical tape" or words to that effect. It's not all good, the past. But most things from prior to about 1995, were made with the implicit understanding that they would, at some point in the future, need to be repaired. This was an understood part of the design process, even if the designer assumed the repair person would be "a professional".
Go back a bit further and not only is that part of the design process, but there's no assumption about professionals, the assumption is that the owner would be fixing it. Read any car manual—not the repair manual, just the owner's manual -- and you'll find the manufacturers assumed owners would change the oil, repair the brakes, and perform other basic maintenance.
Somewhere in the last 30 years, we lost this culture of repair.
Actually lost is the wrong word. I believe it was a concerted effort to destroy not just the ability to repair things, but the culture of repair, the idea that repairing things is something you could and should do.
Today we live in a world where even professional mechanics can't repair some vehicles. It's so bad that Massachusetts passed a law requiring vehicle manufacturers to allow third-party repair and the United States federal government suggested that car makers not comply (the feds just changed their mind, somewhat). The primary effect of the Massachusetts law so far hasn't been what it's author's hope for though. Instead of giving mechanics and users access to the data the dealers can access, car makers like Kia and Subaru have decided to disabled their telemetric systems completely for Massachusetts drivers. The logic, if you can call it that, seems to be "if we have to give it to you, we'll just not record it, then we *can't* give it to you."
This is why, in 2073, no one is ever going to see a 2023 Subaru at the gas station and say, "hey, thanks for keeping it going." The 2023 Subaru is going end up in a landfill with every other car made since about 2012.
I write about cars because it's something I've come to know and love, but you can swap out car for washing machine, refrigerator, toaster, what have you and the story is the same.
Right now keeping it going is often a hobby, though for many of us it's an economic necessity as well. The day is coming though when it will be more than an economic necessity. It will be a necessity because there is no alternative.
No one knows when that's going to be, but increasingly, I think we all feel it coming. The world as we know it is going away, and we have a front-row seat to the change. The question is, what are we going to do?
The past hundred years have been unlike anything in human history. Today you can buy things made in China for a $1 at your local hardware store. But the global trade that's made our world possible is falling apart. We aren't going to keep getting endless replacements doodads, and most of the things that surround us now can't be repaired. We're going to have to reach back, to dig the old stuff that was repairable out of the weeds and get it running again.
This is where I believe the anachronists can guide us into a saner future—by going through the past -- but that's not why I started learning to fix things and it isn't why I fix things now.
Where we spend our summers there are a number of campsites that are designated "seasonal", that is, the occupants, like us, have the site from the middle of May to the middle of October. As you would expect, we get to know the other seasonal people.
In the past things had to be repairable because replacing them would be too expensive. This is the world we will return to, but you don't have to wait for it to be forced on you. You can start now. You can get ahead of the curve. Repair is something you can learn to do right now and it has benefits *right now*, even if global trade remains a stable thing for decades to come.
It likely won't, I think we are just a couple of high profile acts of piracy away from the death of international trade as we know it.
There's nothing your or I can do about the fate the seas, but the next time the blender breaks we could have a crack at fixing it before we throw it away. Even better we could learn to do without a blender by gaining skills with a chef knife or mortar and pestle.
Learning skills like this, whether to repair things or how to use older, more robust systems of doing the same task, is an investment in the future. In your future, in our future. If not you, then who? If you can repair it, then you might never need another. That's a future in which you're a little less dependant on the fragile, global systems.
I think of all skills this way. I've spent the last year teaching myself to cook over open flame, especially using a dutch oven, in part because, well, open flame is the way all cooking was done until about 100 years ago, there's that connection to the past, but also because, if we happen to run out of propane, or don't have the electricity to run the waffle iron, it really doesn't matter, so long as I can start a fire I can cook just about anything.
Every withdrawal you can make from fragile systems empowers you.
Why be glad that someone else has an old car? It is a peculiar thing to think. I think it has to do with recognizing a kindred spirit in the person behind the car. In a culture that prizes the new and chucks the old without a thought, those of us who appreciate the old, the time-tested, the well-worn are anachronisms. We're out of pace with the world and it can be lonely to be left behind by your culture. It helps to know there are others out there like yourself. The things, the cars, the trucks, the buses, they're talismans perhaps, so we anachronists will know each other when we see each other.
Thanks for that reminder that cars used to be objects of art rather than commodities.
Making and fixing things with purpose. Extending the life of this thing is extending its potential to the world. Repair with purpose.
We know what it's like to bang our heads against a problem for weeks. We know the pain of seeing that white smoke coming out the valve cover vent. We understand the sense of victory when it starts up and purrs after hours of work. We know these things.
Will my children feel a nostalgic connection to iPads and e-bikes? Perhaps.
This is why I am always disappointed to meet people with classic cars who just take it to the mechanic. I know not everyone has the time or inclination to do it themselves, but I won't lie, I am always disappointed to hear it. The shared experience isn't there. They don't know. In some respects I do think perhaps you should have to earn the talismans.
It's the same with people who ask if we plan to paint the bus. We don't. I wouldn't if it were free. Every worn patch, every scrape, every dent and frayed bit of fiberglass has a story to it. I don't know all the stories, but I've spent a good bit of time thinking about what might have happened. I've made up some stories. I've added a few of my own. I won't erase any of them, even ones I don't know[^1].
[^1]: If there were rust, or something that threatened the longevity of the bus, then I would patch and paint if necessary, but fortunately that's not a factor since the bus is two giant pieces of fiberglass.
## Parts of the Whole
One of the interesting things about repairing engines is that they teach things about life more generally. Engines have taught me that while the parts might influence how the whole functions, all that really matters is the whole. If the whole isn't right, it doesn't matter how good the parts are.
It doesn't matter if you have the best headers in the world if your rings are cracked and leaking. Your brand new rings are useless if you put them above an old and worn cam. All these parts have to function as a whole[^1]. They only matter in the context of the whole. And that whole, you quickly learn, is greater than the sum of its parts. All wholes have something that cannot be found by breaking them down into parts.
This is the way of the world. Everything must work as a whole or it doesn't work at all. The engine stutters and dies, the heart stops, the tree falls, the salmon floats belly up. All those things are themselves also part of larger systems, and those in turn are part of larger systems until there is, one primordial system, *the prime movement* if you will, which began everything.
Strangely, we live in an age where the dominant myth, the story most of us live by, says the exact opposite.
The myths we were handed from 17th-century culture (which is where most of our myths begin) claim that everything can be reduced to understandable parts, dealt with at that level, and the whole will somehow benefit. The famous mechanistic universe. Anyone who has spent any time working on engines should have serious doubts about Descartes mechanistic universe. Pipe organs, which were the beginnings of the modern engine in many ways, were probably no different than internal combustion engines when it comes to mysterious failure of the parts to make a whole, which means Descartes had no excuse. Descartes, I suspect, did not turn his own wrenches.
If he had he might have saved us a 400-year-long detour into the fantasy world we currently inhabit. We do not experience the world as the sum of its part and, so far as I can tell, this is just not at all how the world works. It might be nice if it were how the world works. But it doesn't. On the plus side, if the universe truly were mechanistic I don't think half the hacks and things I do to keep the bus going would work. I think this is a big clue that things are very different than what the stories claim—things that should work didn't, things that shouldn't work often do.
I read a lot of writers who explore this space, that is, the gap between myth/story and the reality we experience, and there tends to be a good bit of hand wringing about how this leaves us fragmented, incapable of certain things that were easy to someone living 500, 1000, 5000 years ago when myths better matched the world. That may well be the case. Certainly what I have read of indigenous people of North America, they seemed by the large have cohesive myths that created a world in which they were... content? Where things made sense to them. They had a place within their world that they fit into you.
That's not where we are now. It's not, apparently, where we need to be. We are here, which I take to mean we need to be here for some reason. Perhaps we need figure out how to either live with the gap between myth and reality or to create new myths that better match reality. Perhaps both in some cases.
I don't know that I am capable of creating a new myth, but one thing I can say is that you can certainly cast off the old myths. You can leave behind most of what culture handed you and get by on your own terms. It's a lot of work, and it will really bother some people (which is odd, but it happens), but it's worth if if it's something you truly want to do. There a plenty of days when you think *what in the hell am I doing this for?*, but then there are far more days when you know exactly why you're doing this.
You're doing this because if the whole doesn't work then none of the parts matter.
That said, when the parts break, the whole falls apart. I've been ordering parts, slowing building up a whole. The tailpipe is at the shop several hours away, hopefully being rebuilt into a new whole. The seats are about to be pulled out and torn down and remade, whole, new.
This is basic systems theory. A good intro to the study of systems is Gerald Weinberg's *An Introduction to General Systems Thinking*, though it's worth keeping in mind that even breaking things down into systems is fraught with problems. In other words, it helps the have your cooling system sorted, but if your exhaust system is a mess then the whole system doesn't work and your cooling system really doesn't matter.
Divisions between systems are useful at times. While it's true that the bus running is a small part of the system that is our live in it, it is a part that can generally be dealt with as though it were discreet. I find though that I am better at keeping it running when I am conscious that this division is artificial and arbitrary and best treated as such. The idea that there is a division between the bus and my life is a temporary tool I use when it useful and discard when it is not.
Personally though systems theory leaves me cold and I think is in the habit of, ironically, focusing on very small systems. It is really just considering larger parts, but it still isn't willing to confront that everything is connected through that prime movement (and throughout the flowing of the universe).
[1]: On the other side of the coin, your worn cam might not matter that much if the rest of the system is fine.
You can drink all of the structured water, bask under the UV rays, dim your EMFs, clean with baking soda, only wear organic materials on your body, breathe good air, lift weights and move until the cows come home, (and you should) but if your mind is full of poison and your heart is closed to light, it’s all for naught.
I know people often read sites like this because they think we lead interesting lives and like to live vicariously. There can be a trap to writing a site like this because you feel the need to be interesting all the time, which tends to translate as doing stuff.
Really though I think what's interesting about our lives is how little we do. We've essentially traded a certain level of stability (I would argue it is illusory anyway, so not much of a trade really) for the ability to appreciate the now
The secret to
One morning twenty-four years ago I went to work and found the coffee shop I worked at padlocked shut with an eviction notice on the door. Unsure what to do, I ended up going back home where I found another eviction notice on my own door. It wasn't the best day. I decided it was best to ignore it all. I went to the beach for the rest of the day.
A few short weeks later my roommates and I moved from Los Angeles, California to Athens, Georgia. A few years before I'd done the sort of long road trip you do when you drop out of college and don't know what else to do, and Athens had been the highlight of the trip. This, I thought, was a place I could live. It was cheap, everyone was nice, and no one cared about appearances. It was about as far from LA as you could get in every way.
And I was right. I lived there for most of the next fifteen years. It's the first year I think about the most though.
## Fire, cooking with fire
"No longer did pre-humans hide in the safety of their trees, but communicated, learned to make music, discuss politics, gossip and laugh under the protection of ground predator’s worst enemy - the campfire, while cooking meals that were collaboratively brought home.{
"During the age of the campfire, communication and language, cunning and humor, strategy and camaraderie all intermingled in a shared life by the warmth of a fire. The campfire imposed advanced communication and social interaction onto the arc of human evolution, and this is the time in which the human brain swelled in size - rapidly by evolutionary standards - to meet the demands of a socialized group."
from: https://www.notesfromtheroad.com/cascadia/dark-divide.html
There are two spiritual dangers in not owning a farm. One is the danger of supposing that breakfast comes from the grocery, and the other that heat comes from the furnace. . . . To avoid the second, he should lay a split of good oak on the andirons, preferably where there is no furnace, and let it warm his shins while a February blizzard tosses the trees outside. If one has cut, split, hauled, and piled his own good oak, and let his mind work the while, he will remember much about where the heat comes from, and with a wealth of detail denied to those who spend the week end in town astride a radiator.
–Aldo Leopold (“February” in A Sand County Almanac)
"First and foremost, heating with wood requires planning. Paradoxically, *well-seasoned* wood does not grow on trees. Best practices for heating with wood dictate that one had better budget for several months of curing and drying—a year is even better. And this is not an aspirational best practice given that burning unseasoned, “green” wood is frustrating, inefficient, and dangerous: unseasoned wood leads to greater creosote build-up in the flue and thus an increased risk of a flue fire."
"To have a year’s supply of firewood stacked and covered twelve months before one plans to burn it requires a commitment to preparation that runs counter to our “on demand” and “just-in-time” world. "
"Thus, depending on wood for heat places one in a close relationship with wood. In addition to the BTUs particular species contain, one who is mindful and observant can learn much about other, sometimes subtle characteristics of specific species of trees for, as Thomas Hardy notes at the beginning of Under the Greenwood Tree (1872), “to dwellers in a wood almost every species of tree has its voice as well as its feature.” Black walnut (Juglans nigra), as it burns, buries itself in a layer of ashes that insulate and preserve coals. In this regard black walnut even seems to outlast long-burning, high-BTU species like oak, hickory, and locust. I don’t know exactly what to call this quality other than an afterlife. Black walnut seems to me to have the longest afterlife I have come across—even after the fire has dwindled and the stove cooled, I have uncovered a bed of glowing embers that enables me to bring the fire back to life. Tulip tree (Liriodendron tulipifera) is about the opposite: it ignites quickly and burns out rapidly. And it gets its other name (yellow poplar) from the way it “pops” as it burns, so be wary of leaving an open poplar fire unattended."
https://www.frontporchrepublic.com/2023/01/heating-with-wood-as-a-habit-of-mind/
The best food I've ever eaten was cooked over a campfire.
Ever seen people pull up lawn chairs, encircle the gas grill, roast marshmallows, and sing Kumbaya? Didn’t think so.
https://amazingribs.com/more-technique-and-science/grill-and-smoker-setup-and-firing/campfire-cooking/?p=22415
## loss of getting lost
https://www.vagabondjourney.com/you-cant-get-lost-anymore/
## Programming for Intrinsic Value Vs Extrinsic
Or the difference between Linux culture and startup culture -- giving vs getting and how it shapes the final product.
## Carolina Wren
I have so many Carolina wren stories it's hard to know where to start.
If you're ever in the eastern woods and you hear a bird singing and you think *that's beautiful, what bird is that?* there's a good chance it's a Carolina wren.
These little gregarious, brown, slightly hook-billed birds are champion singers and, insatiably curious. According to my kids we've had about ten birds come in the bus in five years of traveling. Nine of them have been Carolina wrens[^1]. Several of them have ended up having to be rescued by hand.
Before that they used to come in our house in Athens from time to time. This one would sit on the corner of the roof singing every morning for years.
Well, it seemed like the same bird, but who knows. Birds do have individual songs, especially Carolina wrens, so if I had been paying attention I might know if it really was the same bird, but I didn't pay that much attention back then. Life before the road tended to run together, I lacked focus and attention. Which isn't to say the days don't sometimes run together on the road, or that I live in a state of constantly heightened awareness, just that there are more markers by which to measure on the timeline of our travels.
To tell the truth I didn't pay much attention to Carolina wrens until we started to travel. They were so ubiquitous I found them overwhelming. I've always thought of wrens as the more solitary creatures of the desert southwest, where canyon wrens are a familiar sound in the red rock country of Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado. But they're a familiar sound you usually hear by itself, not a chorus like you get with the Carolina wrens.
It wasn't until they started flying in the bus that I really started pay attention to the Carolina wren.
[^1]: Regardless of the actual number, only one has not been a wren, that much I know. It was a chickadee. For whatever reason, all these happened on the east coast. Perhaps western birds are more wild?
- tree swallow
- black capped chickadee
- cedar waxwing
- kingbird
- that hawk on the ground
- willet
- gold crowned kinglet
- blackthroated green warbler
# Notes
## rules
1. Stop buying stuff you don't need
2. Pay off all your credit cards
3. Get rid of all the stuff that doesn't fit in your house/apartment (storage lockers, etc.)
4. Get rid of all the stuff that doesn't fit on the first floor of your house (attic, garage, etc.)
5. Get rid of all the stuff that doesn't fit in one room of your house
6. Get rid of all the stuff that doesn't fit in a suitcase
7. Get rid of all the stuff that doesn't fit in a backpack
8. Get rid of the backpack
## beauty
I used to think I traveled to learn about different cultures or broaden my perspective.
And those are certainly nice ancillary benefits to travel. But I’ve realized that the real reason that I travel is for the brief glimpses of beauty. Whether it’s playing soccer with kids on the beach in Mozambique or spotting my first Orca in New Zealand, my travels have provided me with these perfect moments that will hang in my memory forever. No price tag can be assigned to them, no photo can capture them – but those moments are waiting out there and every time I travel I seem to stumble into a few. That’s why I keep doing it. That’s why I’m in love with it.
http://www.bootsnall.com/articles/10-02/how-i-travel-steve-bramucci.html
## estuary time
In nature, an estuary is the wide mouth of a river into which the tides flow, an area where the fresh water of the river and the salt water of the sea mix together. “In an estuary,” Lopez observes, “nature creates a set of organisms which are not from one side or the other, but completely different. In the same way, people who live on the Tijuana border have this kind of estuarian time. It’s not a Mexican time. It’s not an American time. It’s a different time.
from geography of time, robert levine p206 note: [[rn The Geography of Time]]
## Storms
The night I was born there was a huge storm. At least if my parents are to be believed. My mother still claims that the storm, and a broken window in her hospital room are the reason she can down with ppnemona the next day. All I know is that I have always loved storms, not just sitting and listening to them—though I like that too -- but getting out in the them, or just before them, when the lightening is still a ways off, flashing the horizen and the dark thunderheads have obscured the light of day, the wind is starting to pick up, it's as if the world were waking up, finally coming alivve with something massive and important to say, you can literally feel it in the air, electricity and ozone are a potent mix, they smell something like freedome to me.
A good storm is my favorite time to get out in nature—camping, hiking the high country or swimming in the ocean. I've been surfing as hurricanes approached, swam in Mexico while lighten struck the sea in front of me and I still love to be out on the shore when storms arrive.
I've been thinking about storms. It's the time of year to do that here in the American South. More than stormms though, I've been thinking about what
I'm not a huge fan of torrential downpours. Snow is fun for the first three days. Torandos are so far outside anything I've experienced they remain unfathomable to me. I've been through two relatively minor hurricanes and I'm not sure I'd enjoy the full frontal assault, but a good thunderstorm is beautiful thing.
It's one of the things I love about the American south. Nearly every afternoon in the summer you can count on some sort of storm. Sometimes it rains, sometimes it's just lightening and thunder off in the distance, but the sky nearly always delivers around here. Occassionally it over delivers and destroys the roof of your porch, but that's how life goes, you have to accept of bad with your good, it's inevitable. And hey, now we can grow full sun plants on the porch.
## recognize what is lost
To recognize that what has been lost is a part of what remains, however, still leaves questions of scale and character. How large an absence are we talking about? Where do we see it's effects? What is the complete inventory of the missing? The answers to these questions not only shape the way we measure the world around us, but also help reveal the character of nature itself--including human nature.
## manifesto:
walk
take the stairs
turn of the air conditioning
Light a fire in the fireplace
That which is old and useful has proven itself (like cast iron)
That which is very old may contain wisdom.
That which is very old may be utter bollocks.
everything you know is wrong. including this.
You are responsible for what you put into the world.
"A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, and die gallantly. Specialization is for insects."
Note: I have never designed a building, butchered a hog, comforted the dying or died gallantly
## Travel Cheaper
:travel:finance:
Ways to reduce travel spending:
* better planning means more boondocking and less money on camping
* change of diet from mexico means less on food
- no more sausage for breakfast
- more tortillas, less bread for lunches
+ bread is special occassions
- use oat/rice flour from bulk bins for pancakes
- shop mexican markets, asian markets
- go meatless twice a week
- drop organic/grass fed, eat less of it
* having propane fridge would mean less trips for ice, longer away from money spending opportunities
* doing bucket laundry to get by, with full laundry once a month would do the same (again, fewer money spending opportunities)
* no more lenses, amazon orders, ever.
* use local libraries
* have corrinne get meds down here.
* start with forays into mexico, but gradually reverse—here becomes our home base with forays into the states
* how much less? Don't know but I think we could do
- $1200/month groceries
- $500/month camping (if we go over, better hole up and boondock)
- $400/month gas (if we're headed over, better hole up)
- $500/month repairs and incidentals
* So at reliable $3000 a month we can get by pretty much anywhere
- Need the ability to take a serious breakdown and keep going, what does that look like?
- maybe $5000- $8000 savings for repairs
## Systems
:design:philosophy:
Complex systems are inherently fragile. The optimization that makes the system "easy" to use, also generally eliminates the redundancies and graceful degadation that makes a system resilient.
## Midlife
:philosophy:
I think there are two major tasks to be undertaken in the middle of your life, one is coming to terms with the reduced possibilities of the future, letting go of the ones you are sure aren't happening to focus on the one's that could still happen. I will never make the U.S Olympic rowing team and rather than have that missed goal rattling around somewhere in the back of my mind going, I have to address it. Rather than sitting around mumbling about how I could have been a contender I have to accept that no I could not, I tried and literally could not, and let that go so that other goals become more feasible.
The other major task in midlife is to recognize the cyclical nature of, well, nature.
## No Reason At All
:freedom:
"It's fun to do something for no reason at all because freedom is the foundation of all human delight... freedom of the will, the capacity to choose and act and attend for no other reason than that we happen to want to."
## Margins
You learn to live your life on the margin, that strange zone between what is known and what is not. There are some answers here, but not many, and you have to make that place your home.
The margins are where you want to be though, this is where everything happens, it's where life is, where growth is. Go deep in the forest and everything gets soft and quiet, but come out to the edge and you'll find the berries and the birds and the deer and all the rest of life—inhabiting the margins. In ecology this is sometimes called a liminal zone. It's where life is in transition and biodiversity is greatest. It's where the action is and it's where you want to be.
I've learned that the future will get here at the same steady pace as it always does whether you worry about it or not.
There's a third principle I'm still meditating on, but my suspicion is that the first principle of not changing the environment around you, extends well beyond you and your immediate environment to encompass, well, everything. The ripple effects of any action are significant and we spend very little time considering them, and this is troubling.
The less you alter the environment of you, the less you need to alter the environment of your home. The less you need alter the environment of your home, the less you need to alter your neighborhood, and so on. I suspect that this cascades in positive ways far beyond just turning off the air conditioning. At the same times, I suspect it cascades in negative ways as well, which is why I am still thinking on it.
I saw, and still see, living in the bus as a first step in a transition away from life as a "consumer". In the bus we consumed much less, that's good, but I've come to think that it's not good enough. I think I can (and should) go much farther than that. What that looks like is still taking shape, but one thing we all have right now is plenty of time to sit and think.
## Sustainable vs regenerative
sustainability is about keeping things as the are, regeneration is about making things better than they are.
## Close
Y'all are going to be very close.
That's what an inspector said to me once when we were selling our house and I told him what we were doing after it sold. That comment stuck in my head the whole time we traveled because he was right. Spend twenty-four hours a day every day with someone and you will be close. And we are.
I want to be tested in ways I can't imagine and try to be ok no matter what happens.
I looked forward to disasters, I looked forward to having to get out of tough situations.
Now, mind you, "ok" doesn't mean happy as a clam, totally unaffected, no bad feelings ever. On the contrary, it means letting go of the reigns, opening myself up to the unknown and trusting that I had the ability to see myself through it. That's basically welcoming a whole heap of tough stuff to happen to ya. And it has. And I'm ok. Heck, I'm more than ok. I'm better than before. This whole endeavor, from the word go, has done nothing but affirmed my suspicions that we are stronger and more malleable than we ever give ourselves credit for. And no matter what, we will adjust and find a way to be ok.
Cycles. Loops. Close them where you find them. For example, heres an energy loop: sun, plants, animals, waste, plants animals, waste. Find yourself in that. For example, the sun helps plants grow, hogs eat some of those plants, hog get slaughtered and made into bacon, I eat the bacon, I crap out the bacon into a composting toilet that eventually becomes soil for the plants that grow so the hogs can eat them... this is a minimally wasteful loop. I don't want to call it closed because there are variables (water, sunlight, not having a plague of locusts decend on your plants, etc), but it is robust on scale that swings from robust to totally batshit crazy, which would be the cycle that puts bacon in a package you buy from the store.
## Alt Medicine
A while back someone at work mentioned wanting to write about how there is little to no regulation in the realm of "alternative" medicine and its rife with scams. I volunteered to write a rebuttal, because I'm glad alternative medicine is not regulated. I did not elaborate and I forgot all about it until someone brought it up again, this time specifically asking why I was glad there were no regulations.
I will likely never write a rebuttal because for one thing it would be publishable as anything other than Op/Ed. I am not scientist by training and, lack credentials, not allowed into the debate on equal footing.
I don't hold this against science as a method of inquire, but I do very much hold it against scientists, who have become a modern priesthood controlling public discourse, just as the Catholic church did through the middle ages, the high priests of Set did in ancient Egypt, and so on through any other culture you want to cite.
There is always a priesthood setting the limits of acceptable discourse, what matters is how that priesthood (and the culture more broadly) handles dissent. How much room is there for discourse outside the acceptable? We're very fortunate to live in a culture where for the most part there are no limits placed on dissenters. I can write this, publish it where anyone can read it, and there are (currently) no consequences. I will not be burned at the stake, exiled or any number of horrible things visited on those with "unacceptable" ideas in various cultures throughout the ages. There is some risk of publishing these opinions and having them come back to haunt me at some point in the future of course, but ultimately all I am advocating for is that we continue to not punish, or censor people who hold opinions, beliefs, customs, what have you, that are considered unacceptable to the current priesthood.
## Present
How do I make this while still being present. Here. Right now. In this bus, on this night, feeling this feeling?
This turns out to be a very difficult problem to solve.
Writing inherently pulls you out of the moment. It has to all reflective thinking is, well reflecting on something rather than something. So there's that. But I accept that. I've been writing for so long now I've long ago forgotten what it would be like not to always be compising things in my head. There may be some negative consequences to this habit, but for me, it was what it is and I am okay with it.
I am less okay with the performative aspects of creating things based your experiences. This enters a peculiar gray zone in which one must be very careful. For me, it is fine if the desire to write about something drives me to go to a place that I might not otherwise have gone to. For example I doubt I would ever have gone to tk, except I wanted to write about it. But wanting to write about it is a kind of wanting to go.
The danger lies in pulling yourself out of the experience of being there by performing for the imagined audience. I try to avoid this. It works for some people. Some people are able to think about getting a great image while still enjoying themselves. I am not. I have to lose myself in those moments or whatever I try to produce from them suffers.
Which is to say I almost universally miss the great shot because I am too busy watching whatever it might be unfold.
Things need edges, edges are a kind of contract with things. The book ends when you close it. Begins when you open it. In between there is no contract. Or not much of one?
I think we have our edges wrong. Things that should have softer, indistinct edges, like our homes, have hard edges that divide us from the world. Things that should have hard, distinct edges, like tools for communicating, have no edge at all, the loops are always running, never closing off.
Adding edges to the loops closes them.
----
Solutions I have seen work, and that I am experiementing with:
All communication happens in loops, you say something, there is a response, you respond to that response and so on. This is the communication loop. How long is the loop? I find that the longer the loop is, the better the thing I am able to produce. So where instagram has loops measured in minutes, maybe hours, maybe at the most days, I find that loop overwhelming and short. The most I can do there is put something out, I can't and don't partake in the loops there.
A website I control is an infinite loop potentially. Or rather I have to create the loops, I have to set the pace. And I generally do not do well at that.
Consolidate data on a schedule, publish one thing on a schedule.
## Step Back, Detach, Ask Better Questions
The consumer education system has conditioned you to think in terms of products, you need to step back in ask bigger questions to find more interesting and sustainable answers. For example, the question, *should I buy this camera?* has no good answer without first asking *how to I create photos that make me happy?* It may be that some particular camera really does help in that quest, but more likely, it doesn't. More likely what you need to learn is technique and acquire skills like composition and reading light.
##From Ben Falk's book:
• 104 nuclear reactors in 31 states, operated by 30 different companies. Every single one “temporarily” storing high-level waste that will be lethal for 10,000 to 24,000 years
• 40,000 to 80,000 (exact number unknown) chemical factories producing or processing materials with multiple “compounds known to be carcinogenic and/or mutagenic”
• More than 40 weapons-testing facilities and 70,000 nuclear bombs and missiles
• 104,000,000 cubic meters of high-level radioactive waste from weapons-testing activities alone
• 925 operating uranium mines
• 20 to 30 times the average historical background rates of mercury in rain
• 2,200 square miles of excavated valleys and leveled mountains in Appalachia alone
• 478,562 active natural gas mines in the United States in 2008, with 1,800 expected to be drilled in the Marcellus Shale of Pennsylvania alone in 2010
• 18,433,779,281 cubic feet of trash per year, or 100,000 acres of trash one-foot deep per year, or about 250 square miles, with trash 400 feet deep
## Novelty and place
It's one Barry Lopez spends some time on in *Artic Dreams*, noting that for natives of the Arctic Circle, "land does... what architecture sometimes does for us. It provides a sense of place, of scale, of history." Architecture has never done much for me, but I've been known to try constructing a cathedral of words to describe simple things, the way a blade of grass bends in the wind.
Lopez's thought jumped out at me because I catch myself telling stories the wrong way these days. More and more I notice how much of the stories I tell are not what happened, but where it happened. I have developed a need to locate the past in space as well as time. I have to watch out for this because I've noticed many people find it annoying. I can watch their minds wander as I talk. I lose them.
You gain a sense of place by merging into it, however briefly, in way that can only be done by giving up familiarity. Novelty sharpens the experience of place. Perhaps because we evolved to be wary of the novel, to be on edge in experiencing the unfamiliar. All that grass doesn't matter, that one part where it's novel, that one part where there are no shadows when there should be shadows. That's a lion. Novelty is bad in that sense.
Now the evolutionary threat is largely gone though novelty becomes useful. It a grindstone sharpening your experience of place until it comes to the foreground. You notice what was not there yesterday. It's not a lion anymore, but still you notice.
## Maps
“Some for one purpose and some for another liketh, loveth, getteth, and useth Mappes, Chartes, & Geographicall Globes.”—John Dee,
source: https://www.theguardian.com/travel/2019/oct/20/the-perfect-combination-of-art-and-science-mourning-the-end-of-paper-maps
## Immersing yourself
In his book, Written in the West Wim Wenders talks about improving photography by completely immersing yourself in what you see, "no longer needing to interpret, just looking." I find that it's not just photography that can be enhanced this way, but all of life. All you need to do is let go and look. Let go of any agenda and just walk (or sit) and watch the world around you. The world is endlessly fascinating. Even the parts you don't like, like Texas. Step back from the things you want, the things you think you need, the things you think you should do, and a new range of possibilities opens up.
## travel with kids
"As with any thing, the needs of small people are different, and the same, as big people. They thrive on novelty, on the right amount of ease and challenge, and struggle with boredom. They find it hard to regulate when hungry or tired. These needs are simply scaled down. Adults, especially adults who have been around a bit, like to see what is between two mountains by viewing it from all sides. Little people and their minds are content with seeing the two mountains via their emissaries, the little rocks which have fallen off into the valley in between. Little people almost do well getting outside and having an adventure, again, today, but once things proceed much beyond a few miles the wants of the little become subservient to those of the big.
Which reminds us that adventure, especially in the internet age, is always found in the mind anyway. There is nothing more adventurous than trying, really trying, the impossible task of understanding another person. Is this task more weighty with progeny than with a spouse? Your answer tells everything.
Understanding the two of them at home is simply easier, if by easier I mostly mean more predictable. With answers readily accessible. Beyond that, after deciding have we the adults sufficient energy, sufficient motivation, sufficient bravery to take everyone and everything important out into the woods this weekend, it becomes a question of matching big person ambition and rules to little person energy. " - https://bedrockandparadox.com/2019/08/31/the-veneration-of-lameness/
## Universal Druid Prayer
It appears in several forms; the one most often used in AODA runs like this:
Grant, O Holy Ones, thy protection
And in protection, strength;
And in strength, understanding;
And in understanding, knowledge;
And in knowledge, the knowledge of justice:
And in the knowledge of justice, the love of it;
And in that love, the love of all existences;
And in the love of all existences, the love of Earth our mother and all goodness.
And yes, it's a good intro to any sort of communion with the deities.
## difference between in the streets and closed door cultures
> Go to Africa, Latin America, the backwoods of China, SE Asia … it’s easy to make friends: all you need to do is walk down the street with your head up. These are “in the streets” cultures. Europe, on the other hand, is a “closed door” culture. That doesn’t mean that people are not nice. It’s just that they don’t have the social avenues that allow for on the fly engagements with people they don’t know. Talk with someone there and they ask the question, “What does this guy want? Why is he talking to me?” Start talking with someone you don’t know in Haiti and it’s just something normal and ordinary — everybody is talking with everybody anyway. -Wade Shepard
## Octavio Paz quote
> Modern man likes to pretend that his thinking is wide-awake. But this wide-awake thinking has led us into the maze of a nightmare in which the torture chambers are endlessly repeated in the mirrors of reason. When we emerge, perhaps we will realize that we have been dreaming with our eyes open, and that the dreams of reason are intolerable. And then, perhaps, we will begin to dream once more with our eyes closed. –Octavio Paz
## Stopping travel
Full time travelers who stop traveling, regardless of how long or why, tend to feel like we've failed somehow. Which is silly, but I'm no exception. I feel it anyway. I have been feeling it lately.
I like living on the road for two main reasons. One, we spend more time outside. There is nothing so valuable as spending all day outside. Two, it satisfies a pretty basic curiosity: what does it look like around that bend? What is the view like from the other side of the hill? What does the river sound like down in that valley? What is like to wake up in middle of the desert? How does it feel to fall asleep in the sand listening to the sea? How does it feel sitting in the shade of a sandstone overhang where someone else sat thousands of years ago? What's the scent of an aspen forest in a downpour? How does the sandstone feel on your fingertips after the thunderstorms pass?
So to answer that question everyone keeps asking me: yes I miss living in the bus. And to answer the follow up question, yes, we're going to get back to that eventually. At the moment we're in San Miguel.
We were going to spend the winter down here, stay warm, improve our Spanish a bit and go back to the bus when it warmed up a little. 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, and spend summer at higher, cooler elevations. Good plan right? Well.
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. To get to the places we want to get, we need more power and less worry. The only way I've come up with to get to that point is to either drop in a bigger engine, a 440 or the like, or rebuild the 318 to get better compression, which means boring out the engine, new pistons, maybe new manifolds, probably a new transmission and quite a few other things that are not cheap. It's all doable, but it takes time and money. There's also the possibility we could move to a different rig[^1], but that again is time and money.
Time and money we don't have right now.
I think now that true sweetness can only happen in limbo. I don't know why. Is it because we are so unsure, so tantative and waiting? Like it needs that much room, that much space to expand. The not knowing anything really, the hoping, the aching transience. This is not real, not really, and so we let it alone, let it unfold lightely. Those times that can fly. That's the way it seems now looking back.
[^1]: I have never liked driving with a trailer, but it probably makes more sense for the way we travel. We like to set up camp and then spend a few weeks roaming an area. Certain things about trailers make them better for this, like the ability to haul out your black water and go fetch fresh water without breaking camp. The other marked advantage of the trailer and tow vehicle is that when you do need a mechanic's help, you don't lose your house. But pretty sure my family would abandon me if I tried to sell the bus.
## Bird watching as a way to get out
"Looking for birds, in this case, means seeing the private gardens of the brightly-colored houses in a small mountain town, with their fiery pink and orange blossoms, their mango and papaya trees, and their tangled blooming vines. Birding gets you to places you can’t otherwise go, or never thought to see. It gives you access to new foods and flavors. For example, birding gives you unparalleled access to taste rare fruits and other micro-local foods." - https://www.notesfromtheroad.com/neotropics/tapir-valley.html
I don't want you to be like me. I want you to figure out who you are, how to think your own thoughts and maybe, if you're lucky, figure out what you're supposed to be doing. One of the easiest ways to get the kind of perspective you need to figure these things out is to travel, particularly outside your own culture
## Failure of materialism
I have become increasingly dissastified with the scientific materialist view of the world. I don't disagree with it, I just don't think it's the whole story. Which is to say that science provides a wonderful toolkit for exploring one of the worlds we live in, but it's a terrible toolkit for exploring the other worlds we live in. Now you could say, but we don't live in other worlds. But you're wrong. Imagine for a moment your favorite place, the warm sand of a beach, the wind through the pines on a ridge of mountains, the still heat of an afternoon in the desert, what have you. See it clearly in your mind. Hear it, the waves crashing the shore, the wind in the pines, the crunch of shoes as you walk through the gravel of the desert. Smell the salt, the pines, the sagebrush. Make it real in your mind.
What world is that? It's not the world scientific materialism describes. Add a unicorn to your favorite place. See, easy. Easy because it's a different world. It's the world of imagination. There are other worlds too. Depending on which tradition of thought you find best describes your experience there might be three worlds, or five, for ten. The model that's always made the most sense to me happens to have five world, but it's just a model.
Borges said the map is not the territory, and, while that's true, it should bear some scaled down resemblance to the territory otherwise it's not going to make a very helpful guide to the territory.
## 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 The Land of Little Rain, her Walden 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 The Trail Book. 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 Lost Borders. 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.
Instead consider the Mexican bus driver. His bus is his bus. Her bus is her bus. The dashboard is given over to shrines of La Virgen de Guadalupe, or whomever their patron saint might be, along with photos of family, friends, wives, children, what have you. Usually there's a crucifix and some pithy quotes about god, country and most importantly, family. Mi familia, Mi Trabajo, Mi Vida, was one I saw. I don't know where the buses get parked at night, but I do know that the next day the same person is driving the same bus. Mi familia, Mi Trabajo, Mi Vida.
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.
For all you know that puddle you didn't even notice on your way into work this morning is home to a population of microbes undergoing an extremely stressful existence which they would desperately like to escape just as much as you would desperately like to escape your cubicle.
By the same token, the nothing that is has also always reminded me that it's entirely possible, likely even I would argue, that there are some beings out there to which our existence is about the same as the pond scum. Not insignificant or unimportant, just too small to really pay any kind of meaningful attention to. After all, pretty much everyone and everything has its own set of problems to worry about.
Staring at nothing isn't doing nothing. It so happens that watching the world in silence isn't something our culture considers valuable and so you and I have been trained to casually dismiss it as "doing nothing". But the more I've done it, the more I realized that sitting, "doing nothing" is actually, possibly, the secret of the world so to speak. Whatever it may be, I can say from experience that it's incredibly valuable to me now and has helped me grow by leaps and bounds as a person.
I also think it offers a practical, easy way out of many of the social messes we've created for ourselves.
There's a lot of windbags out there criticizing the internet, especially social media, for fostering narcissism, consumer culture, intellectual bullying, and whatever other social ill gets their particular goat as it were. But it's rare that said windbags have any good ideas on how we can counteracting these forces beyond turning off the TV and internet.
To be fair, that does work. Especially turning off the TV. Few things will improve your life so dramatically as throwing your TV out the highest window you can find (making sure there's no one below).
The internet though is more neutral in my view. It can be good, it can be bad, it all depends on you and how you use it. In my case I have to use it, it's how I make money to live this way. And sure I can say oh I'm only going to look up whatever technical thing I need to look up to solve a particular problem, but that ideal is very different from the messy relaity that the internet is full of interesting stuff to stare at.
\l
Observing nature is not nothing.
Which is to say all the things we as a culture don't want to talk about right now.
You and I find ourselves born into a declining culture. A culture that is what Spengler would call the end of an abstraction phase that will soon start swinging toward
is a bit more complex than that. If you want to still use social media, try first developing humility. One easy way to do that is to create an active practice cultivating humility, for example, pending time in quiet observance of nature. Spend some time realizing that most of life care not at all what humans think, say or do, is helpful in
seems like it would require an active practice.
## quotes borrowed
“The pessimist complains about the wind; the optimist expects it to change; the realist adjusts the sails.” –William Arthur Ward
people have been talking to gods and demons for far more of human history than they have not. - Terrance McKenna http://www.erowid.org/culture/characters/mckenna_terence/mckenna_terence_tryptamines_consciousness.shtml
Because if you don’t build your dream, someone will hire you to help build theirs. https://medium.com/what-i-learned-building/1b7dfe34fced
In civilizations without boats, dreams dry up, espionage takes the place of adventure, and the police take the place of pirates.—Michel Foucault, Of Other Spaces, 1967
“It’s more fun to be a pirate than to join the navy.” -Steve Jobs (quoted in Odyssey: Pepsi to Apple, 1987)
The true adventurer goes forth aimless and uncalculating to meet and greet unknown fate.—O. Henry
"Do what you can, with what you have, where you are." T. Roosevelt
“In the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship.”—David Foster Wallace
"The wilderness should be preserved for political reasons. We may need it someday not only as a refuge from excessive industrialism, but also as a refuge from authoritarian government, political oppression"—Edward Abbey, Desert Solitaire
I am the happiest man alive. I have that in me that can convert poverty to riches, adversity to prosperity, and am more invulnerable than Achilles; fortune have not one place to hit me - Sir Thomas Browne Religio Medici
"You never know what is enough unless you know what is more than enough." --William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell
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
palm 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.
Twilight is soft yellow that gradually fades up to a cool white that gets cooler and cooler blow as it climbs up the sky until it reachs the rich coblant I see up through the faint waiving of pine tops in the wind, the deep rich blue of twilight, the spirit who guides the stars into the night. The sand looks gray and soft when the sun is gone, the coean grows dark and seems to settle it's restlessness a bit as the light disappears.
Moo Krob Nam Ma Prow
having grown up in mid-twentieth century suburbia — and then escaped! — I have a very low tolerance for the kind of boring world that comes from excess conformity and obedience to authorities. As for ways to sort through the abstractions — ah, we’ll be getting to those. - ecosophia, greer
> In a home I need walls, roof, windows, and a door that can be opened and closed. I also need a place to cook, a place to eat, a place to sleep, a place for a guest, and a place to write. More space is not better... more space attracts more stuff which eventually means less space.
> Some things make life easier, but more things do not make life more easy. More things mean more things that can break down and more time spent fixing or replacing them.
> Comfort is freedom and independence. Comfort is having the sweat glands and metabolic tolerance to deal with heat and cold. It is not central heating or air conditioning which may fail or be unavailable. It is not plushy seats but a healthy back. Luxury is not expensive things. It is a healthy and capable body that moves with ease with no restraints because something is too heavy, too far, too hard, or too much. It is a content and capable mind that can think critically, solve problems, and form opinions of its own.
> Success is having everything you need and doing everything you want. It is not doing everything you need to have everything you want. If so then you do not own your things, instead your things own you. I do not need to own a particular kind of vehicle. I need to go from A to B. I do not need fancy steak dinners, rare ingredients, or someone else to prepare my meals whether it is a pizza parlor, a chef, or an industrial food preprocessor. I need food to live. Food to fuel my body and brain. Luxury is not eating at 5 five star restaurants. Luxury is being able to appreciate any food. Comfort is eating the right kind and the right amount of food. Not whatever I want. Eating and moving right prevents diseases, pains, and lack of functionality. I am what I eat and I look what I do. Everybody is. It is the physiological equivalent of integrity. To say what I mean and mean what I say. This too makes life more comfortable. Money is opportunity. Opportunity is power. Power is freedom. And freedom means responsibility. Without responsibility, eventually there is no freedom, no power, no opportunities, and no money. More importantly, freedom is more than power. Power is more than opportunity. Opportunity is more than money. And money is more than something that just buys stuff. It is simple to understand but hard to remember, but do remember this if nothing else.
http://earlyretirementextreme.com/manifesto.html
The Labyrinth of Solitude
Juana Inés de la Cruz. Her superb book "Poems, Protest, and a Dream"
Mariano Azuela's "The Underdogs"
## Podcasts
podcasts are great because you can do other things while you listen right? Like you can be doing the dishes or gardening or working on your car and listening to a podcast and that's like giving you that time that you would have spent in a book or video and now you can spend it doing two things. Now is that divided attention as good as the focused attention? probably not. so for me, I tend to combine two low lift things. I listen to a podcast on tk when I'm doing the dishes but something that requires a good bit of focus I might save for a drive. But either way this opens up a way to kind of double time your life. You want to learn about something new, but you need to weed the garden right? Well, now you can.
## Monohull must haves
Here are *my* must haves for a monohul, if you want to live aboard for extended stays:
Head and galley right down at the companionway.
You don’t want to go halfway through the boat, let alone pass through cabins to reach their ensuite head, with dripping wet oilies in a heavy seaway. It has to be right at the bottom of the stairs.
If you like to eat in the cockpit, it’s very nice to be able to pass food directly from the galley without walking around with it.
Also, the area in front of the companionway is usually the most stable one of the boat. Best for cooking at sea.
A separate shower stall.
Usually we like to wash from the stern but when anchorages are crowded or the weather is a little cooler it’s very nice to be able to wash inside without splashing all over the head and the sink.
Seats 4 at the indoor table without having to unfold table leaves or hampering mobility inside.
All lines, especially reefing, lead aft to the cockpit so you can do the heavy weather sailing without ever leaving the cockpit.
Walk through transom to facilitate boarding from the dinghy with your hands full of groceries. Also the nicest way to take a swim, or for washing yourself as mentioned above.
One of the smallest boats corresponding to the above whilst sporting 3 cabins, is the Beneteau Oceanis 361 that I’ve owned and loved very much. Crossed the Atlantic twice with it. You may want a Jeanneau Sun Odyssey 40 from around 1999 (the 3 cabin - 1 head layout) for a bit more payload and space in the forward cabin and twin cockpit wheels that facilitate mobility to and from the walk through transom. Otherwise a very similar boat. These are two ‘budget’ options, which seem to be the prudent choice given the description of your means. Better spend far less on the initial acquisition cost than you think you can afford.
### Forward Wind Scoop
Forward wind scoop: a bit of triangular canvas strung over a forward hatch between two scasions, sloping down to the deck as you move aft with a tension line to the rigging above to keep it taunt. Doubles as forward windshade and forces air down into the hatch to keep below decks cool. Keeps the air moving through. Saw this on Allied Seawind 30 on YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hRHskbdRFFs
## CC
When I first saw you I was just trying to get a cup of coffee. But then I decided I'd rather have you.
That proved more difficult that I thought. Once You sat in my lap once at Jason and Christy's house
but I was pretty sure you were dating someone else and I was positive I was so that didn't go far
but I found I rather enjoyed you in my lap. Another time we went to prom and you made out with me
I know I was dating someone else then too but I didn't care. For years I made you many a spinach salad with salmon on it,
even when you were eating with someone else. Then you became a picture on my refrigerator for 3 years.
Once when I try to meet up with you you ditched me. Then you decided to marry someone else I went traveling the world for years
I didn't think about you very much for a while, but when I got back I met you again at Nancy's house
I spilled Sangria on your dog but still you said it could be okay for me
to visit you in Charleston. We ate lots of seafood without going far
We went skinny dipping in your pool, in hindsight I'm surprised you did it.
the first night was a little rough, I had to fight the dog, she didn't want me, she wanted you.
And then I considered once what I would do without and found I could not imagine life without you.
As Donne wrote, "All joys are thanks to you" and somehow I convinced you of it
I might redo them now, those standard vows we read, or listen to out back of our house
If I could do it over I'd tell you I'll love you forever, forever ever, years,
even beyond death, for I've walked many of the happy roads that take you round the world and far
away and have found them good, so long as you are with me.
---
From "Valentine" by John Fuller
The things about you I appreciate
May seem indelicate:
I'd like to find you in the shower
And chase the soap for half an hour.
I'd like to have you in my power
And see your eyes dilate.
I'd like to have your back to scour
And other parts to lubricate.
I'd like to find a good excuse
To call on you and find you in.
I'd like to put my hand beneath your chin,
And see you grin.
I'd like to taste your Charlotte Russe,
I'd like to feel my lips upon your skin
I'd like to make you reproduce.
I'd like you in my confidence.
I'd like to be your second look.
I'd like to let you try the French Defence
And mate you with my rook.
I'd like to be your preference
And hence
I'd like to be around when you unhook.
I'd like to be your only audience,
The final name in your appointment book,
Your future tense.
---
Have you forgotten what we were like then
when we were still first rate
and the day came fat with an apple in its mouth
it's no use worrying about Time
but we did have a few tricks up our sleeves
and turned some sharp corners
the whole pasture looked like our meal
we didn't need speedometers
we could manage cocktails out of ice and water
I wouldn't want to be faster
or greener than now if you were with me O you
were the best of all my days
## Buy Used
I very rarely buy new electronics. I can't recall the last time I bought something new. We almost always buy electronics used, mostly off eBay. We also rarely buy new books. We generally pick up books at used bookstores around the country, but when we can't find what we want we use Thriftbooks.
Buying used has several advantages over buying new. The obvious one is that it's almost always cheaper. But beyond that there are other appealing aspects. Buying used means you're not contributing as much to the waste stream of modern economies, and you're (potentially) removing things from that waste stream by finding a use for them. Used items, especially electronics, tend to be functionally superior to new ones[^1] both because they are farther back on the curve of [diminishing returns](https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/law%20of%20diminishing%20returns) and because they have stood the test of time. There are exceptions of course, but buy and large last year's model is as good, and sometimes better, than this year's model.
Buying used also enables you to take advantage of little curiosities of time. For example all the really good low-noise sound recording devices seem to have been made between 2007-2016. Why? No idea. But everyone who needs low noise recording seems to agree, and high end recorders from that era sell for more than they did when they were new. Which is to say that buying used isn't always cheaper, but when it's not it generally means you're getting something superior. And not something that the manufacturer thinks is superior, but something the people using it the most think is superior.
This is why the only affiliate links on luxagraf.net lead to either eBay or Thriftbooks, my two preferred marketplaces for buying used stuff.
Anyone using affiliate links is trying to sell you something -- that includes me -- and you should always be suspicious about that. I know my motives are simple, to make some money to pay for this website and maybe some tea for myself, but you have every right to skeptical. Really though, I don't want you to buy anything you don't need. But if you do need something, please buy it used. And if you're going to buy something I've recommended based on my experiences with it, then the affiliate links will help support this website.
[^1]: The odd mixture of capitalism and our culture's worship of "progress" means that new things must constantly be released, but the law of diminishing returns suggests that newer/bigger/better/faster eventually fails to deliver any meaningfully improvement. This is most obvious in software, where the most feared phrase in any software user's heart is "please restart to update", but this lack of improvement over previous versions is increasingly painfully obvious in hardware as well.
The sun rises near the center of the bay when we arrive in April, but by the solstice it's no longer rising over the lake at all, but far to the north, from some spot obscured by trees. There it rises most of the summer.
Summer on the shores of Lake Superior is difficult to put in words. It's idyllic. It's never that hot here. Not in the sense that it gets hot in the rest of the country. It's often [warmer in Florida in April](https://luxagraf.net/jrnl/2023/05/goodbye-florida) than it is up here in July. But temperature is always relative, and come July we're just like the people I [once laughed at](https://luxagraf.net/jrnl/2018/07/crystal-lake), calling a 85 degree day here "hot."
The midday the light burns through the evergreens, a sluggish heat hangs in the air, the haze of humidity weighing it down. Ashland, a mere four miles across the bay, gets lost in the watery blur of the horizon. Thankfully the lake is always there, always cool, usually cold, even on the hottest days.
It's more than the weather though. There is something about summer up here that feels more like the world of my youth than anywhere else we've been in the U.S. It's one of the few places we've been where the kids can wander the woods, follow the creeks, ride their bikes around town, make food over a fire, fish, swim, and whatever else they want to do, on their own.
Despite my best [determination not to be hurried](https://luxagraf.net/jrnl/2023/11/dunes), we spend May and June living between baseball and juijitsu, acting camp and sailing camp. This year the girls were invited to teach sailing for the younger kids, so that stretched out even more. When I type it out it doesn't sound like much. Maybe it isn't. Busy is like the temperature, relative.
The girls' birthday marks what I think of the real beginning of summer up here. This is around the time it get "hot" with days above 80 and the lake water in the shallows of Chequamegon Bay gets into the low 60s, which feels like bathwater after swimming in May and June.
I had a number of projects I wanted to get done this summer, which made it feel busier than usual. These projects were largely physical, building things. Toward the end of July I found that my joints were hurting more than they should, even with the abuse of lifting heavy sheets of plywood and spending 6 hours a week on the mats. I honestly would never have thought anything about it, except that I mentioned it one day and my wife pointed out that that is a symptom of Lyme disease, and I'd had a tick in me about two weeks before.
If you do any research on Lyme you'll quickly enter a minefield of conflicting information. Luckily for me, a good friend of ours was a nurse in the area, and has had Lyme, so she suggested I go to a Lyme-specific clinic about two hours away. I made an appointment for a week later, but in the mean time, Lyme began to eat away at me. And I mean that literally. You can feel it inside you, in your joints, in your head. The only other thing I've ever had that was like was Covid. Coincidentally there is some pretty good evidence Lyme is another bioweapons accident. Make of that what you will.
Whatever its origins, half the problem with Lyme is finding a doctor who understands it. Fortunately I did and I got the prescriptions I needed (antibiotics along with a slew of supplements). If you've got Lyme and you're anywhere near the [Tick-Borne Illness Center](https://www.aspirus.org/find-a-location/aspirus-tickborne-illness-center-552) in Woodruff, Wisconsin, just go. Unfortunately you'll have to pay out of pocket. The tick center does not follow the CDC's guidelines (which will leave you with Lyme for a lifetime) and therefore most insurance won't cover it.
I'm still not 100 percent. Maybe I never will be again. I do feel much better and have been able to get back to juijitsu and physical labor, which I'm thankful for, though my joints continue to hurt and swell up at times.
but the light is changed. Autumn is a quality of light, a taste in the air. Something new is added. The world is clearer, the edges sharper, it feels like around the corner, all will be revealed. The earth is brilliantly alive. You can taste it. If I could live in perpetual Autumn I would, for a while at least.
In between, while sun rises in the trees, is Summer. The light is bright and yellow by the time it cuts through the evergreens. It feels slightly sluggish, the haze of humidity weighing it down. Ashland, a mere four miles across the bay, is sometimes lost in the haze. Thankfully the lake is always there, always cool, often cold, even on the hottest days.
Still,
## economics
Once people get over the big blue bus, two questions inevitably follow.
The first is, *so... what do you do?* This is the polite American way of saying, *how the hell do you afford to do this?*
The second thing people ask is what the kids do for school. That requires a much more complex answer. Let's stick to money. Money is simple. Well, compared to education.
### Set a Goal
Before you figure out how you can afford to travel you need a goal. What is your goal? Is it to travel somewhere specific? Some specific means of traveling (e.g. RV, boat, AirBnB, etc)?Is it some specific amount of time (e.g. a few months between jobs, during a summer break, etc)?
It's important to have a concrete goal in mind before you start trying to arrange your life in a way that carries you to that goal. I hate to sound like a life coach, but if you don't have a goal you'll never find your path. Without a clear path you won't go anywhere.
For example, the first time I went on a long term trip I had general destination in mind (India and Southeast Asia). That allowed me to research to costs of getting to those places, the likely costs of life there, and then I could work backwards to figure out how much I need to save. I had a concrete number in mind ($10k, which I expected to last me 6 months), and I started saving until I had enough and I then I left. When it ran out I came home. I was young enough then that I just crashed on friends couches until I landed a new job, if that's not an option be sure to set aside a fund to re-enter normal life.
This isn't the only way to do it though. I met several people on that trip who went the opposite direction, they saved up a chunk of money and then figured out where they could make it last the longest. That's another way to do it.
And finally there is what I do now, which is working on the road. I only recommend this if your goal is to travel indefinitely. And for the record, neither I nor anyone I've ever met traveling left home planning to travel indefinitely. That tends to be something you decide when it comes time to end a long trip. You start thinking, *I want to keep doing this forever*, and that sudden pressure (the thought of going back) tends to lead to the creative thinking you need to develop if you do indeed want to live on the road.
### Get Rid of Everything
The first step to affording to travel is to get rid of everything you don't absolutely need. I actually think it would be easier to get rid of literally everything, head out the door and just buy things as you need them, but no one has ever taken this suggestion seriously so the best I can say is: if everything you doesn't fit in two bags, you're going to run into problems.
Get down to two bags. If you need to add things down the road, that's fine. For example, if you end up traveling with your home, like a van, RV, boat, or whatever, you're going to need tools, you can add those in later. But for the most part get rid of everything.
This is important literally, as an act, but also as a process. It will teach you things. It will teach you how remote your wants are from your needs. Get rid of your wants along with all the debris those wants have brought into your life. Focus on what you absolutely need. If you want nothing you will not need as much money. Needs turn out to be pretty cheaply met. Find a dumpster and throw your TV in it. That alone will do more to get you on your way to having enough money to travel than anything else on this page.
Don't worry if this is really hard or insanely time consuming. It's that way for everyone. I've written about this elsewhere, but it is astronomically easier to let stuff into your life than it is to get it out.
Stuff costs money and takes up space, neither of which you have future traveler. Life on the road is one of necessities (food and shelter) and great views, not endless wants fulfilled and Amazon deliveries. The less you want the better off you will be financially. Yes, you can take this too far, but very few people do so don't worry about that.
One trap to beware of, having less doesn't mean you have to have the best. I see things on the internet from people who profess to be minimalists because they have only one fork, spoon, and knife, but those utensils are $40. That's not what you're after. Let go of the need to impress if you can, it will save you a ton of money. And none of us out here traveling will be impressed anyway.
### Become Financially Self-Dependant
I stole the phrase Financially Self-Dependant from the good people at Wanderer Financial because it captures something key that no other way of putting it does: you're in control. There are myriad ways this can be achieved depending on your skill set, but one thing I can absolutely promise you is that it won't mean having a traditional job. Can you travel with a full time job? Sure. I have several times. It sucks. It doesn't suck because you have set hours, though that's part of it, but mostly it sucks because you are not in direct control of your income. Worse, you only have one source of income.
Lose your job at home and it's a big deal.
I hate to tell you this, but the truth is we saved up for a long time before we went traveling so that we would have a good cushion of money should anything go wrong.
Speaking of which, if you're like me you got no financial education. You're going to need to fix
## The Good Life
I was recently talking with my editor about my decidedly low ambitions at work. Writers often have trajectories. They start at small publications, write that one big story, then move to a larger publication, write that one big story, then move on to a larger publication, and so on. I have never had any interest in that. I've spent my entire writing "career" primarily at Wired. I've been writing for Wired in one form or another since 1999. In all that time Wired has never rejected a pitch[^1], why would I want to write for anyone else?
I don't and never have felt the need to climb any ladders. At least not in a job.
But then later I was thinking, perhaps I am looking at this whole thing the wrong way. Perhaps I'm not that driven because I've already got everything I ever wanted.
One of the great dangers of life is that we don't know what the good life looks like until it's in the rearview mirror.
[^1]: That's not literally true, but it's close. Sometimes I pitch something that someone else is already doing, and sometimes I pitch something I know they don't want because it's in my contract to do so, but by and large I am fortunately to pretty much unlimited freedom. I mean, they let me write about how we have no oven and cook on waffle irons.
## April White
The mild winter of 2023-2024 brought very little snow to Wisconsin. We watched the weather for months waiting for more snow to fall, but it never did. Last year we arrived after Memorial Day and it was still cool. This year we headed up April 1 and found not a patch of snow on the ground.
So far as I have been able to discover, there is only one Wisconsin state park that opens this early and as luck would have it, it's right where we wanted to be to visit some friends. We headed north from [Ferne Clyffe](https://luxagraf.net/jrnl/2024/03/illinois-cliffs), stopped off for a night in Rockford, and made it up to Hartman Creek State Park the day it opened.
The forecast called for some rain that afternoon, but on the drive in I hit a few snow flurries and the temperature dropped to unpleasant levels for driving the bus (the heater in the bus has never worked). The last few miles the "rain" alternated between sleet and snow, and by the time we pulled into camp it was steady snow.
This was only the second time we've hit snow in our travels, though we've had plenty of days at or below freezing. But none of us were ready for ten inches of snow, which is what we got at Hartman Creek. The snow didn't let up much in the night and was back at the next morning, continuing all through the day.
We had the campground to ourselves. Two other people had brought out their rigs, but they seemed to be locals claiming a spot. They left their rigs and went (I assume) home. It was just us and the snow.
I forgot how utter silent the world is when it snows. Even the simple act of walk seems an unforgivable intrusion on the silence.
I have no way to photograph it, but we put the snow under the loupes to see the fractal patterns, the tiny geometric order scattered about in the chaos of wind, often blowing out of my hand before I could even focus on it. I can't help thinking there's a lesson in that, but I'm not sure what it means.
The heavy wet snows of spring never last long though and it was soon gone, leaving behind
## Growing
Welcome to this channel. My name is Scott Gilbertson.
Seven years ago my wife and I sold our house, all of our belongings, loaded our three children in a 1969 Dodge Travco motorhome and set out to explore the united states.
Our twin daughters were 4 years old. Just learning to ride bikes. Our son was not yet 2.
We spent 18 months traveling, breaking down, repairing the bus, traveling some more, breaking down a little less and traveling some more, from Florida, across the gulf, through texas, new mexico, colorado, Utah, Nevada, Cailfornia, and then back east through Arizona, texas again, the midwest, the great lakes. Last time I counted we'd been through 27 states.
We took some breaks. We spent 9 months living in Mexico. Then we rented a house when the world shut down in 2020. But we've never had a home aside from the bus as we call it.
Before we left, when we were selling our house, I was walking through it with the buyer's inspector, he asked about our plans, and I told him we were planning to live in a 27 foot RV. He stopped and stared at me for a minute. Then all he said was, Y'all are going to be close.
He was right. We are close. We've had a wonderful time sharing our lives and traveling. But we've also grown. Well, our kids have grown. When we left they could sleep all three sideways in full bed. Now our daughter's are nearly 12, half grown women, and our son is growing every day too. We needed more space.
After talking it over for months. Years really. Debating every kind of rig we've ever seen or heard of, most of which we knew we did not want, we decided to go the school bus route. A school bus is a blank slate. We wanted to design our home to fit our lives, to add the things that are missing in the bus and above all, to never, ever have to put up or put down beds again so long as I live.
Which is how I came to be here.
Certainly this is how writing is for me. Not that I am a great craftsman, but I do know that experience of knowing what to write not because I thought of it consciously, but because it's there, one word after another until they all fit. I am merely transcribing.
That's not to say it's easy. The opposite actually. Usually this is presaged by struggle. I can't figure out how to say what I want to say. I write, I re-write, nothing works. I step away. I do something else. I try to get the whole thing out of my head, and when I finally do I either forget it entirely, or it comes crashing out in one long burst, all there for me, all I have to do is type it up. Did I think of it? Was it given to me from elsewhere? I don't know.
I must backpedal on the statement I opened with, that it doesn't really matter what you make. That's not entirely true. It doesn't matter what the thing is, but the person making it must want it, must need it. Inspired making of the sort I am thinking of leads to things of beauty. Useful or purely ornamental doesn't matter, but to invest something with the thumb of God cannot result in anything other than the beautiful, and you have to want it to get there. In that sense the thing matters.
It's possible to go further than with this than just making things. If done properly everyday tasks can be lent this same holiness. This is why there are elaborate ceremonies around things like tea, coffee, food, even cleaning. All ordinary things made extraordinary by focusing attention on them and excluding everything else for a moment.
For me they are threads woven together in stories I've lived. Some told here, some told elsewhere, some never told. I've been thinking a lot lately about stories, the stories I tell. This is why I did not write anything for many months. I wasn't sure about the stories I wanted to tell, but I also wasn't sure about the stories I was telling myself.
If the stories you tell yourself diverge to greatly from the world as it is, you have a problem. We are the stories we tell. If you want to change, change the story you are telling yourself.
Before you can do that though, you have to figure out which stories you're telling yourself that are true, which ones you're the process of making true, and which ones you just wish were true. I find that there is progression here. You tell yourself a story you wish was true, then you tell yourself the story of making it true, and then you tell the story of it because it is true.
That said, not everything --whether you tell it to yourself or to someone else -- is a good story. The story of the people who almost did something is not a good story. We all have that story in our lives, few of us want to hear other people's version. We want good stories. I spend most of my life looking for good stories.
Increasingly, over the last few months, life in the bus has not been a good story. At first I couldn't put my finger on it, things just felt off. blah you might say.
my greatest skill has been to want but little—so little capital it required, so little distraction from my wonted moods, I foolishly thought. While my acquaintances went unhesitatingly into trade or the professions, I contemplated this occupation as most like theirs; ranging the hills all summer to pick the berries which came in my way, and thereafter carelessly dispose of them; so, to keep the flocks of Admetus. I also dreamed that I might gather the wild herbs, or carry evergreens to such villagers as loved to be reminded of the woods, even to the city, by hay-cart loads. But I have since learned that trade curses everything it handles; and though you trade in messages from heaven, the whole curse of trade attaches to the business.
As I preferred some things to others, and especially valued my freedom, as I could fare hard and yet succeed well, I did not wish to spend my time in earning rich carpets or other fine furniture, or delicate cookery, or a house in the Grecian or the Gothic style just yet. If there are any to whom it is no interruption to acquire these things, and who know how to use them when acquired, I relinquish to them the pursuit. Some are "industrious," and appear to love labor for its own sake, or perhaps because it keeps them out of worse mischief; to such I have at present nothing to say. Those who would not know what to do with more leisure than they now enjoy, I might advise to work twice as hard as they do—work till they pay for themselves, and get their free papers. For myself I found that the occupation of a day-laborer was the most independent of any, especially as it required only thirty or forty days in a year to support one. The laborer's day ends with the going down of the sun, and he is then free to devote himself to his chosen pursuit, independent of his labor; but his employer, who speculates from month to month, has no respite from one end of the year to the other.
if we will live simply and wisely; as the pursuits of the simpler nations are still the sports of the more artificial. It is not necessary that a man should earn his living by the sweat of his brow, unless he sweats easier than I do.
We sprinted across Florida in two quick drives over to the far end of the panhandle. We stopped in the middle at the Tallahassee Car Museum, I weird little museum that has a few campsites out front (not everything in Harvest Hosts is a farm)
## Spirit of Craft
> I am convinced, both by faith and experience, that to maintain one's self on this earth is not a hardship but a pastime --Henry David Thoreau
I enjoy making things. The things are often irrelevant, it's the making that I enjoy. It reminds me of traveling. When you make something you are completely absorbed in that process to the point that you forget everything else, forget the world, save this tiny part of it that you are reshaping.
Travel is the same way, there is only right now. A complete absorption, obsession even, with the world in front of you. The plantains and steak on the plate, the potholes in the road, the birds calling in the cold morning air. Wherever you are, there is only that, the rest of the world pales, ceases to exist. It's a state of ease, of relaxed absorption, of freedom. Realizing that you have nowhere to go, nowhere to be, nothing to do to maintain yourself in this world, save to be where you are, doing what you're doing.
This is freedom. Doing things. Making things. Same thing.
Yet one of the current cultural ideals is getting others to do things for you. Outsourcing your life. Someone else mows the lawn. Someone else cleans the house. Someone else fixes the car. This is called success.
I ran across Hegel's paradigm of servant and master the other day, which I don't think I've thought of since I dropped out of college in 1994. I was struck though at how well Hegel defines modern culture. If you're not familiar, in Hegel's story the master grows increasingly impoverished through idleness while the servant grows daily in skill and wisdom because he is doing things for himself. So one starts dependent on the other, the other ends up dependent. The pivotal moment of Hegel is when the servant realizes he no longer needs the master, what he needs is to perfect his skill further.
We're in danger of becoming the "master", who is really master in name only. I'm not saying you have to get out an mow your lawn to achieve freedom, but I am not alone in thinking that in the pursuit of "freedom from" we're losing our "freedom to"... to do, to make, to say, to think.
It's not just that we're becoming masters of nothing, it's that we've lost the very resourcefulness that marks a truly free human being, one who is independent and capable of solving problems on his or her own, thinking for his or herself. Contrary to what marketers are selling, freedom is in doing, in making, growing in skill and wisdom.
The more often you can do this, the better life will be.
Why? That's the question isn't it?
When making your concentration becomes sharply focused on the task at hand and everything else that makes up you, fades away. The chattering I that is usually busy thinking and analyzing is set aside while someone else drives the ship. It's an odd thing when you experience it. Something working through you. A kind of communion with the gods perhaps. The Greeks held this to be true of great craftsmen[^1], that Athena, or Hephaestus, or whoever governed the craft at hand was in fact working through the craftsman to create the work. In this sense the craftsman is no longer there. They become a conduit for the gods to move in the world.
Most people I know who are great craftsmen speak in these terms, saying that they do not know where their ideas come from, nor are they conscious of the particular skills they're using at any given moment, they simply do, they simply are, or are not in this case. As a skilled woodworker I know says, the key to being good at anything is to get out of your own way.
This is how making things becomes a spiritual discipline, an act of letting the gods move the world through you. "For true masonry is not held together by cement but by gravity, that is to say, by the warp of the world, by the stuff of creation itself," writes Cormac McCarthy in *The Stonemason*. "The keystone that locks the arch is pressed in place by the thumb of God."
[^1]: This is a gendered word where I do not intend a gender, anyone can be a creator, a craftsman, but English has no better term that I know of, sorry.
## Darktable shortcuts:
### Darkroom dev shortcuts:
Shift + e while scrolling to change exposure
Shift + c open color calibration eyedropper
Shift + l to apply Astia LUT
Shift + b Boost color balance rgb preset
Shift + s to apply clarity preset
control + s to apply lxf sharp
### Lighttable shortcuts
alt + - zoom out (custom)
alt + = zoom in (custom)
0-5 rate pics
## Before The Motor Laws
Electric cars are limited to a city for the most part. I don't think this is a design flaw. I think this is a design intent. Kill the ability to take to the open road and you kill the myth of the open road and the myth of the open road is the quintenssential myth of america. It is, I would argue, the entire idea on which america was founded, long before the road was paved or had cars on it. The electric car is designed to castrate that idea and the current reality along with it.
f the urban operating system is going to happen, as the WEf and all the smart city avocates believe, I want to throw my lot in with the free softwareists—the drivers.
## Car Show Post
Someone stopped by the bus the other day to talk about it. I answered his questions, but then as he was getting ready to go he said something that stuck with me, "thanks for keeping it going". It jumped out at me because he was the second person to say that to me. *I love knowing these things are out there, still going.*
This evening I went to the grocery store in town and there was an early 1970s-ish Ford Bronco at the gas pump. I'm not a huge fan of Broncos, I'll probably never own one, but it was my kind of car, not perfect, plenty of patina in the finish. It had been around and I thought, you know, I too am glad it's out there, still running.
It's not the thing though. The thing is irrelevant. *Thanks for keeping it going.* What is it? The past? Thanks for keeping this tiny thread of the past alive in the present. Thanks for the path back, thanks for keeping these things, and the memories we have that are connected to them alive.
Nostalgia is commonly used pejoratively. The American Psychological Association considers it a subset of depression, which is, ahem, depressing. But then I guess if you're stuck trying to prop up the present as better than the past, at this point, you have to do some serious philosophical dancing.
I find it far more telling that the meaning of nostalgia has shifted over the years from the original conception of "pain, grief, and distress" from trying "to reach some place, escape, return, get home," to our more modern connotation, "wistful yearning for the past." The genuineness of grief has be replaced with the easier to dismiss *yearning*.
The word nostalgia comes from two Greek words, *algos*, which gives us the "pain, grief, distress", and *Nostos* the returning home bit. But combining these two words and then ending up with a "wistful yearning for the past," says far more about our values than anything.
*Nostos* is the part that interests me. It has an Old English cognate, *genesen*, which means "to recover." There's also the Gothic *ganisan*, which means "to heal." This is the thread I think of when I see those Broncos and Travcos, those old appliances that actually work, those old clothes not made of plastic, all these things are not a homesickness for another time or place, but a yearning to heal the present. It's a yearning to recover those elements of the past that were better than what we have today. Not nostalgically, but tangibly, demonstrably better.
*Thanks for keeping it going.* Thanks for maintaining a path to healing the present. Thanks for pointing the way.
I didn't say anything to the Bronco though. There was no one around. Maybe the steel and iron understand, I think they do, but no one, including me, wants to be the weirdo talking to the car in an empty parking lot. Besides, it's the person who's maintaining that connection that matters. It's their struggle to keep that thing working that matters. All those people laboring to keep those bits of the past working in the present, that's what matters. Without them the objects are just rust and decay. Someone has to maintain them, recover them, repair them—this is what matters. This is the bond in the present to the past. Those who keep things going understand them, understand where they came from, why they work the way the work, and what that means. You have too, otherwise you'll never be able to keep whatever it is working.
This means you're constantly communing with the past. If that sounds too hippy for you, don't worry, that communication with the past often goes like this, "what #$%@ idiot wired this together with electrical tape" or words to that effect. It's not all good, the past. But most things from prior to about 1995, were made with the implicit understanding that they would, at some point in the future, need to be repaired. This was an understood part of the design process, even if the designer assumed the repair person would be "a professional".
Go back a bit further and not only is that part of the design process, but there's no assumption about professionals, the assumption is that the owner would be fixing it. Read any car manual—not the repair manual, just the owner's manual -- and you'll find the manufacturers assumed owners would change the oil, repair the brakes, and perform other basic maintenance.
Somewhere in the last 30 years, we lost this culture of repair.
Actually lost is the wrong word. I believe it was a concerted effort to destroy not just the ability to repair things, but the culture of repair, the idea that repairing things is something you could and should do.
Today we live in a world where even professional mechanics can't repair some vehicles. It's so bad that Massachusetts passed a law requiring vehicle manufacturers to allow third-party repair and the United States federal government suggested that car makers not comply (the feds just changed their mind, somewhat). The primary effect of the Massachusetts law so far hasn't been what it's author's hope for though. Instead of giving mechanics and users access to the data the dealers can access, car makers like Kia and Subaru have decided to disabled their telemetric systems completely for Massachusetts drivers. The logic, if you can call it that, seems to be "if we have to give it to you, we'll just not record it, then we *can't* give it to you."
This is why, in 2073, no one is ever going to see a 2023 Subaru at the gas station and say, "hey, thanks for keeping it going." The 2023 Subaru is going end up in a landfill with every other car made since about 2012.
I write about cars because it's something I've come to know and love, but you can swap out car for washing machine, refrigerator, toaster, what have you and the story is the same.
Right now keeping it going is often a hobby, though for many of us it's an economic necessity as well. The day is coming though when it will be more than an economic necessity. It will be a necessity because there is no alternative.
No one knows when that's going to be, but increasingly, I think we all feel it coming. The world as we know it is going away, and we have a front-row seat to the change. The question is, what are we going to do?
The past hundred years have been unlike anything in human history. Today you can buy things made in China for a $1 at your local hardware store. But the global trade that's made our world possible is falling apart. We aren't going to keep getting endless replacements doodads, and most of the things that surround us now can't be repaired. We're going to have to reach back, to dig the old stuff that was repairable out of the weeds and get it running again.
This is where I believe the anachronists can guide us into a saner future—by going through the past -- but that's not why I started learning to fix things and it isn't why I fix things now.
Where we spend our summers there are a number of campsites that are designated "seasonal", that is, the occupants, like us, have the site from the middle of May to the middle of October. As you would expect, we get to know the other seasonal people.
In the past things had to be repairable because replacing them would be too expensive. This is the world we will return to, but you don't have to wait for it to be forced on you. You can start now. You can get ahead of the curve. Repair is something you can learn to do right now and it has benefits *right now*, even if global trade remains a stable thing for decades to come.
It likely won't, I think we are just a couple of high profile acts of piracy away from the death of international trade as we know it.
There's nothing your or I can do about the fate the seas, but the next time the blender breaks we could have a crack at fixing it before we throw it away. Even better we could learn to do without a blender by gaining skills with a chef knife or mortar and pestle.
Learning skills like this, whether to repair things or how to use older, more robust systems of doing the same task, is an investment in the future. In your future, in our future. If not you, then who? If you can repair it, then you might never need another. That's a future in which you're a little less dependant on the fragile, global systems.
I think of all skills this way. I've spent the last year teaching myself to cook over open flame, especially using a dutch oven, in part because, well, open flame is the way all cooking was done until about 100 years ago, there's that connection to the past, but also because, if we happen to run out of propane, or don't have the electricity to run the waffle iron, it really doesn't matter, so long as I can start a fire I can cook just about anything.
Every withdrawal you can make from fragile systems empowers you.
Why be glad that someone else has an old car? It is a peculiar thing to think. I think it has to do with recognizing a kindred spirit in the person behind the car. In a culture that prizes the new and chucks the old without a thought, those of us who appreciate the old, the time-tested, the well-worn are anachronisms. We're out of pace with the world and it can be lonely to be left behind by your culture. It helps to know there are others out there like yourself. The things, the cars, the trucks, the buses, they're talismans perhaps, so we anachronists will know each other when we see each other.
Thanks for that reminder that cars used to be objects of art rather than commodities.
Making and fixing things with purpose. Extending the life of this thing is extending its potential to the world. Repair with purpose.
We know what it's like to bang our heads against a problem for weeks. We know the pain of seeing that white smoke coming out the valve cover vent. We understand the sense of victory when it starts up and purrs after hours of work. We know these things.
Will my children feel a nostalgic connection to iPads and e-bikes? Perhaps.
This is why I am always disappointed to meet people with classic cars who just take it to the mechanic. I know not everyone has the time or inclination to do it themselves, but I won't lie, I am always disappointed to hear it. The shared experience isn't there. They don't know. In some respects I do think perhaps you should have to earn the talismans.
It's the same with people who ask if we plan to paint the bus. We don't. I wouldn't if it were free. Every worn patch, every scrape, every dent and frayed bit of fiberglass has a story to it. I don't know all the stories, but I've spent a good bit of time thinking about what might have happened. I've made up some stories. I've added a few of my own. I won't erase any of them, even ones I don't know[^1].
[^1]: If there were rust, or something that threatened the longevity of the bus, then I would patch and paint if necessary, but fortunately that's not a factor since the bus is two giant pieces of fiberglass.
## Parts of the Whole
One of the interesting things about repairing engines is that they teach things about life more generally. Engines have taught me that while the parts might influence how the whole functions, all that really matters is the whole. If the whole isn't right, it doesn't matter how good the parts are.
It doesn't matter if you have the best headers in the world if your rings are cracked and leaking. Your brand new rings are useless if you put them above an old and worn cam. All these parts have to function as a whole[^1]. They only matter in the context of the whole. And that whole, you quickly learn, is greater than the sum of its parts. All wholes have something that cannot be found by breaking them down into parts.
This is the way of the world. Everything must work as a whole or it doesn't work at all. The engine stutters and dies, the heart stops, the tree falls, the salmon floats belly up. All those things are themselves also part of larger systems, and those in turn are part of larger systems until there is, one primordial system, *the prime movement* if you will, which began everything.
Strangely, we live in an age where the dominant myth, the story most of us live by, says the exact opposite.
The myths we were handed from 17th-century culture (which is where most of our myths begin) claim that everything can be reduced to understandable parts, dealt with at that level, and the whole will somehow benefit. The famous mechanistic universe. Anyone who has spent any time working on engines should have serious doubts about Descartes mechanistic universe. Pipe organs, which were the beginnings of the modern engine in many ways, were probably no different than internal combustion engines when it comes to mysterious failure of the parts to make a whole, which means Descartes had no excuse. Descartes, I suspect, did not turn his own wrenches.
If he had he might have saved us a 400-year-long detour into the fantasy world we currently inhabit. We do not experience the world as the sum of its part and, so far as I can tell, this is just not at all how the world works. It might be nice if it were how the world works. But it doesn't. On the plus side, if the universe truly were mechanistic I don't think half the hacks and things I do to keep the bus going would work. I think this is a big clue that things are very different than what the stories claim—things that should work didn't, things that shouldn't work often do.
I read a lot of writers who explore this space, that is, the gap between myth/story and the reality we experience, and there tends to be a good bit of hand wringing about how this leaves us fragmented, incapable of certain things that were easy to someone living 500, 1000, 5000 years ago when myths better matched the world. That may well be the case. Certainly what I have read of indigenous people of North America, they seemed by the large have cohesive myths that created a world in which they were... content? Where things made sense to them. They had a place within their world that they fit into you.
That's not where we are now. It's not, apparently, where we need to be. We are here, which I take to mean we need to be here for some reason. Perhaps we need figure out how to either live with the gap between myth and reality or to create new myths that better match reality. Perhaps both in some cases.
I don't know that I am capable of creating a new myth, but one thing I can say is that you can certainly cast off the old myths. You can leave behind most of what culture handed you and get by on your own terms. It's a lot of work, and it will really bother some people (which is odd, but it happens), but it's worth if if it's something you truly want to do. There a plenty of days when you think *what in the hell am I doing this for?*, but then there are far more days when you know exactly why you're doing this.
You're doing this because if the whole doesn't work then none of the parts matter.
That said, when the parts break, the whole falls apart. I've been ordering parts, slowing building up a whole. The tailpipe is at the shop several hours away, hopefully being rebuilt into a new whole. The seats are about to be pulled out and torn down and remade, whole, new.
This is basic systems theory. A good intro to the study of systems is Gerald Weinberg's *An Introduction to General Systems Thinking*, though it's worth keeping in mind that even breaking things down into systems is fraught with problems. In other words, it helps the have your cooling system sorted, but if your exhaust system is a mess then the whole system doesn't work and your cooling system really doesn't matter.
Divisions between systems are useful at times. While it's true that the bus running is a small part of the system that is our live in it, it is a part that can generally be dealt with as though it were discreet. I find though that I am better at keeping it running when I am conscious that this division is artificial and arbitrary and best treated as such. The idea that there is a division between the bus and my life is a temporary tool I use when it useful and discard when it is not.
Personally though systems theory leaves me cold and I think is in the habit of, ironically, focusing on very small systems. It is really just considering larger parts, but it still isn't willing to confront that everything is connected through that prime movement (and throughout the flowing of the universe).
[1]: On the other side of the coin, your worn cam might not matter that much if the rest of the system is fine.
You can drink all of the structured water, bask under the UV rays, dim your EMFs, clean with baking soda, only wear organic materials on your body, breathe good air, lift weights and move until the cows come home, (and you should) but if your mind is full of poison and your heart is closed to light, it’s all for naught.
I know people often read sites like this because they think we lead interesting lives and like to live vicariously. There can be a trap to writing a site like this because you feel the need to be interesting all the time, which tends to translate as doing stuff.
Really though I think what's interesting about our lives is how little we do. We've essentially traded a certain level of stability (I would argue it is illusory anyway, so not much of a trade really) for the ability to appreciate the now
The secret to
One morning twenty-four years ago I went to work and found the coffee shop I worked at padlocked shut with an eviction notice on the door. Unsure what to do, I ended up going back home where I found another eviction notice on my own door. It wasn't the best day. I decided it was best to ignore it all. I went to the beach for the rest of the day.
A few short weeks later my roommates and I moved from Los Angeles, California to Athens, Georgia. A few years before I'd done the sort of long road trip you do when you drop out of college and don't know what else to do, and Athens had been the highlight of the trip. This, I thought, was a place I could live. It was cheap, everyone was nice, and no one cared about appearances. It was about as far from LA as you could get in every way.
And I was right. I lived there for most of the next fifteen years. It's the first year I think about the most though.
## Fire, cooking with fire
"No longer did pre-humans hide in the safety of their trees, but communicated, learned to make music, discuss politics, gossip and laugh under the protection of ground predator’s worst enemy - the campfire, while cooking meals that were collaboratively brought home.{
"During the age of the campfire, communication and language, cunning and humor, strategy and camaraderie all intermingled in a shared life by the warmth of a fire. The campfire imposed advanced communication and social interaction onto the arc of human evolution, and this is the time in which the human brain swelled in size - rapidly by evolutionary standards - to meet the demands of a socialized group."
from: https://www.notesfromtheroad.com/cascadia/dark-divide.html
There are two spiritual dangers in not owning a farm. One is the danger of supposing that breakfast comes from the grocery, and the other that heat comes from the furnace. . . . To avoid the second, he should lay a split of good oak on the andirons, preferably where there is no furnace, and let it warm his shins while a February blizzard tosses the trees outside. If one has cut, split, hauled, and piled his own good oak, and let his mind work the while, he will remember much about where the heat comes from, and with a wealth of detail denied to those who spend the week end in town astride a radiator.
–Aldo Leopold (“February” in A Sand County Almanac)
"First and foremost, heating with wood requires planning. Paradoxically, *well-seasoned* wood does not grow on trees. Best practices for heating with wood dictate that one had better budget for several months of curing and drying—a year is even better. And this is not an aspirational best practice given that burning unseasoned, “green” wood is frustrating, inefficient, and dangerous: unseasoned wood leads to greater creosote build-up in the flue and thus an increased risk of a flue fire."
"To have a year’s supply of firewood stacked and covered twelve months before one plans to burn it requires a commitment to preparation that runs counter to our “on demand” and “just-in-time” world. "
"Thus, depending on wood for heat places one in a close relationship with wood. In addition to the BTUs particular species contain, one who is mindful and observant can learn much about other, sometimes subtle characteristics of specific species of trees for, as Thomas Hardy notes at the beginning of Under the Greenwood Tree (1872), “to dwellers in a wood almost every species of tree has its voice as well as its feature.” Black walnut (Juglans nigra), as it burns, buries itself in a layer of ashes that insulate and preserve coals. In this regard black walnut even seems to outlast long-burning, high-BTU species like oak, hickory, and locust. I don’t know exactly what to call this quality other than an afterlife. Black walnut seems to me to have the longest afterlife I have come across—even after the fire has dwindled and the stove cooled, I have uncovered a bed of glowing embers that enables me to bring the fire back to life. Tulip tree (Liriodendron tulipifera) is about the opposite: it ignites quickly and burns out rapidly. And it gets its other name (yellow poplar) from the way it “pops” as it burns, so be wary of leaving an open poplar fire unattended."
https://www.frontporchrepublic.com/2023/01/heating-with-wood-as-a-habit-of-mind/
The best food I've ever eaten was cooked over a campfire.
Ever seen people pull up lawn chairs, encircle the gas grill, roast marshmallows, and sing Kumbaya? Didn’t think so.
https://amazingribs.com/more-technique-and-science/grill-and-smoker-setup-and-firing/campfire-cooking/?p=22415
## loss of getting lost
https://www.vagabondjourney.com/you-cant-get-lost-anymore/
## Programming for Intrinsic Value Vs Extrinsic
Or the difference between Linux culture and startup culture -- giving vs getting and how it shapes the final product.
## Carolina Wren
I have so many Carolina wren stories it's hard to know where to start.
If you're ever in the eastern woods and you hear a bird singing and you think *that's beautiful, what bird is that?* there's a good chance it's a Carolina wren.
These little gregarious, brown, slightly hook-billed birds are champion singers and, insatiably curious. According to my kids we've had about ten birds come in the bus in five years of traveling. Nine of them have been Carolina wrens[^1]. Several of them have ended up having to be rescued by hand.
Before that they used to come in our house in Athens from time to time. This one would sit on the corner of the roof singing every morning for years.
Well, it seemed like the same bird, but who knows. Birds do have individual songs, especially Carolina wrens, so if I had been paying attention I might know if it really was the same bird, but I didn't pay that much attention back then. Life before the road tended to run together, I lacked focus and attention. Which isn't to say the days don't sometimes run together on the road, or that I live in a state of constantly heightened awareness, just that there are more markers by which to measure on the timeline of our travels.
To tell the truth I didn't pay much attention to Carolina wrens until we started to travel. They were so ubiquitous I found them overwhelming. I've always thought of wrens as the more solitary creatures of the desert southwest, where canyon wrens are a familiar sound in the red rock country of Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado. But they're a familiar sound you usually hear by itself, not a chorus like you get with the Carolina wrens.
It wasn't until they started flying in the bus that I really started pay attention to the Carolina wren.
[^1]: Regardless of the actual number, only one has not been a wren, that much I know. It was a chickadee. For whatever reason, all these happened on the east coast. Perhaps western birds are more wild?
- tree swallow
- black capped chickadee
- cedar waxwing
- kingbird
- that hawk on the ground
- willet
- gold crowned kinglet
- blackthroated green warbler
# Notes
## rules
1. Stop buying stuff you don't need
2. Pay off all your credit cards
3. Get rid of all the stuff that doesn't fit in your house/apartment (storage lockers, etc.)
4. Get rid of all the stuff that doesn't fit on the first floor of your house (attic, garage, etc.)
5. Get rid of all the stuff that doesn't fit in one room of your house
6. Get rid of all the stuff that doesn't fit in a suitcase
7. Get rid of all the stuff that doesn't fit in a backpack
8. Get rid of the backpack
## beauty
I used to think I traveled to learn about different cultures or broaden my perspective.
And those are certainly nice ancillary benefits to travel. But I’ve realized that the real reason that I travel is for the brief glimpses of beauty. Whether it’s playing soccer with kids on the beach in Mozambique or spotting my first Orca in New Zealand, my travels have provided me with these perfect moments that will hang in my memory forever. No price tag can be assigned to them, no photo can capture them – but those moments are waiting out there and every time I travel I seem to stumble into a few. That’s why I keep doing it. That’s why I’m in love with it.
http://www.bootsnall.com/articles/10-02/how-i-travel-steve-bramucci.html
## estuary time
In nature, an estuary is the wide mouth of a river into which the tides flow, an area where the fresh water of the river and the salt water of the sea mix together. “In an estuary,” Lopez observes, “nature creates a set of organisms which are not from one side or the other, but completely different. In the same way, people who live on the Tijuana border have this kind of estuarian time. It’s not a Mexican time. It’s not an American time. It’s a different time.
from geography of time, robert levine p206 note: [[rn The Geography of Time]]
## Storms
The night I was born there was a huge storm. At least if my parents are to be believed. My mother still claims that the storm, and a broken window in her hospital room are the reason she can down with ppnemona the next day. All I know is that I have always loved storms, not just sitting and listening to them—though I like that too -- but getting out in the them, or just before them, when the lightening is still a ways off, flashing the horizen and the dark thunderheads have obscured the light of day, the wind is starting to pick up, it's as if the world were waking up, finally coming alivve with something massive and important to say, you can literally feel it in the air, electricity and ozone are a potent mix, they smell something like freedome to me.
A good storm is my favorite time to get out in nature—camping, hiking the high country or swimming in the ocean. I've been surfing as hurricanes approached, swam in Mexico while lighten struck the sea in front of me and I still love to be out on the shore when storms arrive.
I've been thinking about storms. It's the time of year to do that here in the American South. More than stormms though, I've been thinking about what
I'm not a huge fan of torrential downpours. Snow is fun for the first three days. Torandos are so far outside anything I've experienced they remain unfathomable to me. I've been through two relatively minor hurricanes and I'm not sure I'd enjoy the full frontal assault, but a good thunderstorm is beautiful thing.
It's one of the things I love about the American south. Nearly every afternoon in the summer you can count on some sort of storm. Sometimes it rains, sometimes it's just lightening and thunder off in the distance, but the sky nearly always delivers around here. Occassionally it over delivers and destroys the roof of your porch, but that's how life goes, you have to accept of bad with your good, it's inevitable. And hey, now we can grow full sun plants on the porch.
## recognize what is lost
To recognize that what has been lost is a part of what remains, however, still leaves questions of scale and character. How large an absence are we talking about? Where do we see it's effects? What is the complete inventory of the missing? The answers to these questions not only shape the way we measure the world around us, but also help reveal the character of nature itself--including human nature.
## manifesto:
walk
take the stairs
turn of the air conditioning
Light a fire in the fireplace
That which is old and useful has proven itself (like cast iron)
That which is very old may contain wisdom.
That which is very old may be utter bollocks.
everything you know is wrong. including this.
You are responsible for what you put into the world.
"A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, and die gallantly. Specialization is for insects."
Note: I have never designed a building, butchered a hog, comforted the dying or died gallantly
## Travel Cheaper
:travel:finance:
Ways to reduce travel spending:
* better planning means more boondocking and less money on camping
* change of diet from mexico means less on food
- no more sausage for breakfast
- more tortillas, less bread for lunches
+ bread is special occassions
- use oat/rice flour from bulk bins for pancakes
- shop mexican markets, asian markets
- go meatless twice a week
- drop organic/grass fed, eat less of it
* having propane fridge would mean less trips for ice, longer away from money spending opportunities
* doing bucket laundry to get by, with full laundry once a month would do the same (again, fewer money spending opportunities)
* no more lenses, amazon orders, ever.
* use local libraries
* have corrinne get meds down here.
* start with forays into mexico, but gradually reverse—here becomes our home base with forays into the states
* how much less? Don't know but I think we could do
- $1200/month groceries
- $500/month camping (if we go over, better hole up and boondock)
- $400/month gas (if we're headed over, better hole up)
- $500/month repairs and incidentals
* So at reliable $3000 a month we can get by pretty much anywhere
- Need the ability to take a serious breakdown and keep going, what does that look like?
- maybe $5000- $8000 savings for repairs
## Systems
:design:philosophy:
Complex systems are inherently fragile. The optimization that makes the system "easy" to use, also generally eliminates the redundancies and graceful degadation that makes a system resilient.
## Midlife
:philosophy:
I think there are two major tasks to be undertaken in the middle of your life, one is coming to terms with the reduced possibilities of the future, letting go of the ones you are sure aren't happening to focus on the one's that could still happen. I will never make the U.S Olympic rowing team and rather than have that missed goal rattling around somewhere in the back of my mind going, I have to address it. Rather than sitting around mumbling about how I could have been a contender I have to accept that no I could not, I tried and literally could not, and let that go so that other goals become more feasible.
The other major task in midlife is to recognize the cyclical nature of, well, nature.
## No Reason At All
:freedom:
"It's fun to do something for no reason at all because freedom is the foundation of all human delight... freedom of the will, the capacity to choose and act and attend for no other reason than that we happen to want to."
## Margins
You learn to live your life on the margin, that strange zone between what is known and what is not. There are some answers here, but not many, and you have to make that place your home.
The margins are where you want to be though, this is where everything happens, it's where life is, where growth is. Go deep in the forest and everything gets soft and quiet, but come out to the edge and you'll find the berries and the birds and the deer and all the rest of life—inhabiting the margins. In ecology this is sometimes called a liminal zone. It's where life is in transition and biodiversity is greatest. It's where the action is and it's where you want to be.
I've learned that the future will get here at the same steady pace as it always does whether you worry about it or not.
There's a third principle I'm still meditating on, but my suspicion is that the first principle of not changing the environment around you, extends well beyond you and your immediate environment to encompass, well, everything. The ripple effects of any action are significant and we spend very little time considering them, and this is troubling.
The less you alter the environment of you, the less you need to alter the environment of your home. The less you need alter the environment of your home, the less you need to alter your neighborhood, and so on. I suspect that this cascades in positive ways far beyond just turning off the air conditioning. At the same times, I suspect it cascades in negative ways as well, which is why I am still thinking on it.
I saw, and still see, living in the bus as a first step in a transition away from life as a "consumer". In the bus we consumed much less, that's good, but I've come to think that it's not good enough. I think I can (and should) go much farther than that. What that looks like is still taking shape, but one thing we all have right now is plenty of time to sit and think.
## Sustainable vs regenerative
sustainability is about keeping things as the are, regeneration is about making things better than they are.
## Close
Y'all are going to be very close.
That's what an inspector said to me once when we were selling our house and I told him what we were doing after it sold. That comment stuck in my head the whole time we traveled because he was right. Spend twenty-four hours a day every day with someone and you will be close. And we are.
I want to be tested in ways I can't imagine and try to be ok no matter what happens.
I looked forward to disasters, I looked forward to having to get out of tough situations.
Now, mind you, "ok" doesn't mean happy as a clam, totally unaffected, no bad feelings ever. On the contrary, it means letting go of the reigns, opening myself up to the unknown and trusting that I had the ability to see myself through it. That's basically welcoming a whole heap of tough stuff to happen to ya. And it has. And I'm ok. Heck, I'm more than ok. I'm better than before. This whole endeavor, from the word go, has done nothing but affirmed my suspicions that we are stronger and more malleable than we ever give ourselves credit for. And no matter what, we will adjust and find a way to be ok.
Cycles. Loops. Close them where you find them. For example, heres an energy loop: sun, plants, animals, waste, plants animals, waste. Find yourself in that. For example, the sun helps plants grow, hogs eat some of those plants, hog get slaughtered and made into bacon, I eat the bacon, I crap out the bacon into a composting toilet that eventually becomes soil for the plants that grow so the hogs can eat them... this is a minimally wasteful loop. I don't want to call it closed because there are variables (water, sunlight, not having a plague of locusts decend on your plants, etc), but it is robust on scale that swings from robust to totally batshit crazy, which would be the cycle that puts bacon in a package you buy from the store.
## Alt Medicine
A while back someone at work mentioned wanting to write about how there is little to no regulation in the realm of "alternative" medicine and its rife with scams. I volunteered to write a rebuttal, because I'm glad alternative medicine is not regulated. I did not elaborate and I forgot all about it until someone brought it up again, this time specifically asking why I was glad there were no regulations.
I will likely never write a rebuttal because for one thing it would be publishable as anything other than Op/Ed. I am not scientist by training and, lack credentials, not allowed into the debate on equal footing.
I don't hold this against science as a method of inquire, but I do very much hold it against scientists, who have become a modern priesthood controlling public discourse, just as the Catholic church did through the middle ages, the high priests of Set did in ancient Egypt, and so on through any other culture you want to cite.
There is always a priesthood setting the limits of acceptable discourse, what matters is how that priesthood (and the culture more broadly) handles dissent. How much room is there for discourse outside the acceptable? We're very fortunate to live in a culture where for the most part there are no limits placed on dissenters. I can write this, publish it where anyone can read it, and there are (currently) no consequences. I will not be burned at the stake, exiled or any number of horrible things visited on those with "unacceptable" ideas in various cultures throughout the ages. There is some risk of publishing these opinions and having them come back to haunt me at some point in the future of course, but ultimately all I am advocating for is that we continue to not punish, or censor people who hold opinions, beliefs, customs, what have you, that are considered unacceptable to the current priesthood.
## Present
How do I make this while still being present. Here. Right now. In this bus, on this night, feeling this feeling?
This turns out to be a very difficult problem to solve.
Writing inherently pulls you out of the moment. It has to all reflective thinking is, well reflecting on something rather than something. So there's that. But I accept that. I've been writing for so long now I've long ago forgotten what it would be like not to always be compising things in my head. There may be some negative consequences to this habit, but for me, it was what it is and I am okay with it.
I am less okay with the performative aspects of creating things based your experiences. This enters a peculiar gray zone in which one must be very careful. For me, it is fine if the desire to write about something drives me to go to a place that I might not otherwise have gone to. For example I doubt I would ever have gone to tk, except I wanted to write about it. But wanting to write about it is a kind of wanting to go.
The danger lies in pulling yourself out of the experience of being there by performing for the imagined audience. I try to avoid this. It works for some people. Some people are able to think about getting a great image while still enjoying themselves. I am not. I have to lose myself in those moments or whatever I try to produce from them suffers.
Which is to say I almost universally miss the great shot because I am too busy watching whatever it might be unfold.
Things need edges, edges are a kind of contract with things. The book ends when you close it. Begins when you open it. In between there is no contract. Or not much of one?
I think we have our edges wrong. Things that should have softer, indistinct edges, like our homes, have hard edges that divide us from the world. Things that should have hard, distinct edges, like tools for communicating, have no edge at all, the loops are always running, never closing off.
Adding edges to the loops closes them.
----
Solutions I have seen work, and that I am experiementing with:
All communication happens in loops, you say something, there is a response, you respond to that response and so on. This is the communication loop. How long is the loop? I find that the longer the loop is, the better the thing I am able to produce. So where instagram has loops measured in minutes, maybe hours, maybe at the most days, I find that loop overwhelming and short. The most I can do there is put something out, I can't and don't partake in the loops there.
A website I control is an infinite loop potentially. Or rather I have to create the loops, I have to set the pace. And I generally do not do well at that.
Consolidate data on a schedule, publish one thing on a schedule.
## Step Back, Detach, Ask Better Questions
The consumer education system has conditioned you to think in terms of products, you need to step back in ask bigger questions to find more interesting and sustainable answers. For example, the question, *should I buy this camera?* has no good answer without first asking *how to I create photos that make me happy?* It may be that some particular camera really does help in that quest, but more likely, it doesn't. More likely what you need to learn is technique and acquire skills like composition and reading light.
##From Ben Falk's book:
• 104 nuclear reactors in 31 states, operated by 30 different companies. Every single one “temporarily” storing high-level waste that will be lethal for 10,000 to 24,000 years
• 40,000 to 80,000 (exact number unknown) chemical factories producing or processing materials with multiple “compounds known to be carcinogenic and/or mutagenic”
• More than 40 weapons-testing facilities and 70,000 nuclear bombs and missiles
• 104,000,000 cubic meters of high-level radioactive waste from weapons-testing activities alone
• 925 operating uranium mines
• 20 to 30 times the average historical background rates of mercury in rain
• 2,200 square miles of excavated valleys and leveled mountains in Appalachia alone
• 478,562 active natural gas mines in the United States in 2008, with 1,800 expected to be drilled in the Marcellus Shale of Pennsylvania alone in 2010
• 18,433,779,281 cubic feet of trash per year, or 100,000 acres of trash one-foot deep per year, or about 250 square miles, with trash 400 feet deep
## Novelty and place
It's one Barry Lopez spends some time on in *Artic Dreams*, noting that for natives of the Arctic Circle, "land does... what architecture sometimes does for us. It provides a sense of place, of scale, of history." Architecture has never done much for me, but I've been known to try constructing a cathedral of words to describe simple things, the way a blade of grass bends in the wind.
Lopez's thought jumped out at me because I catch myself telling stories the wrong way these days. More and more I notice how much of the stories I tell are not what happened, but where it happened. I have developed a need to locate the past in space as well as time. I have to watch out for this because I've noticed many people find it annoying. I can watch their minds wander as I talk. I lose them.
You gain a sense of place by merging into it, however briefly, in way that can only be done by giving up familiarity. Novelty sharpens the experience of place. Perhaps because we evolved to be wary of the novel, to be on edge in experiencing the unfamiliar. All that grass doesn't matter, that one part where it's novel, that one part where there are no shadows when there should be shadows. That's a lion. Novelty is bad in that sense.
Now the evolutionary threat is largely gone though novelty becomes useful. It a grindstone sharpening your experience of place until it comes to the foreground. You notice what was not there yesterday. It's not a lion anymore, but still you notice.
## Maps
“Some for one purpose and some for another liketh, loveth, getteth, and useth Mappes, Chartes, & Geographicall Globes.”—John Dee,
source: https://www.theguardian.com/travel/2019/oct/20/the-perfect-combination-of-art-and-science-mourning-the-end-of-paper-maps
## Immersing yourself
In his book, Written in the West Wim Wenders talks about improving photography by completely immersing yourself in what you see, "no longer needing to interpret, just looking." I find that it's not just photography that can be enhanced this way, but all of life. All you need to do is let go and look. Let go of any agenda and just walk (or sit) and watch the world around you. The world is endlessly fascinating. Even the parts you don't like, like Texas. Step back from the things you want, the things you think you need, the things you think you should do, and a new range of possibilities opens up.
## travel with kids
"As with any thing, the needs of small people are different, and the same, as big people. They thrive on novelty, on the right amount of ease and challenge, and struggle with boredom. They find it hard to regulate when hungry or tired. These needs are simply scaled down. Adults, especially adults who have been around a bit, like to see what is between two mountains by viewing it from all sides. Little people and their minds are content with seeing the two mountains via their emissaries, the little rocks which have fallen off into the valley in between. Little people almost do well getting outside and having an adventure, again, today, but once things proceed much beyond a few miles the wants of the little become subservient to those of the big.
Which reminds us that adventure, especially in the internet age, is always found in the mind anyway. There is nothing more adventurous than trying, really trying, the impossible task of understanding another person. Is this task more weighty with progeny than with a spouse? Your answer tells everything.
Understanding the two of them at home is simply easier, if by easier I mostly mean more predictable. With answers readily accessible. Beyond that, after deciding have we the adults sufficient energy, sufficient motivation, sufficient bravery to take everyone and everything important out into the woods this weekend, it becomes a question of matching big person ambition and rules to little person energy. " - https://bedrockandparadox.com/2019/08/31/the-veneration-of-lameness/
## Universal Druid Prayer
It appears in several forms; the one most often used in AODA runs like this:
Grant, O Holy Ones, thy protection
And in protection, strength;
And in strength, understanding;
And in understanding, knowledge;
And in knowledge, the knowledge of justice:
And in the knowledge of justice, the love of it;
And in that love, the love of all existences;
And in the love of all existences, the love of Earth our mother and all goodness.
And yes, it's a good intro to any sort of communion with the deities.
## difference between in the streets and closed door cultures
> Go to Africa, Latin America, the backwoods of China, SE Asia … it’s easy to make friends: all you need to do is walk down the street with your head up. These are “in the streets” cultures. Europe, on the other hand, is a “closed door” culture. That doesn’t mean that people are not nice. It’s just that they don’t have the social avenues that allow for on the fly engagements with people they don’t know. Talk with someone there and they ask the question, “What does this guy want? Why is he talking to me?” Start talking with someone you don’t know in Haiti and it’s just something normal and ordinary — everybody is talking with everybody anyway. -Wade Shepard
## Octavio Paz quote
> Modern man likes to pretend that his thinking is wide-awake. But this wide-awake thinking has led us into the maze of a nightmare in which the torture chambers are endlessly repeated in the mirrors of reason. When we emerge, perhaps we will realize that we have been dreaming with our eyes open, and that the dreams of reason are intolerable. And then, perhaps, we will begin to dream once more with our eyes closed. –Octavio Paz
## Stopping travel
Full time travelers who stop traveling, regardless of how long or why, tend to feel like we've failed somehow. Which is silly, but I'm no exception. I feel it anyway. I have been feeling it lately.
I like living on the road for two main reasons. One, we spend more time outside. There is nothing so valuable as spending all day outside. Two, it satisfies a pretty basic curiosity: what does it look like around that bend? What is the view like from the other side of the hill? What does the river sound like down in that valley? What is like to wake up in middle of the desert? How does it feel to fall asleep in the sand listening to the sea? How does it feel sitting in the shade of a sandstone overhang where someone else sat thousands of years ago? What's the scent of an aspen forest in a downpour? How does the sandstone feel on your fingertips after the thunderstorms pass?
So to answer that question everyone keeps asking me: yes I miss living in the bus. And to answer the follow up question, yes, we're going to get back to that eventually. At the moment we're in San Miguel.
We were going to spend the winter down here, stay warm, improve our Spanish a bit and go back to the bus when it warmed up a little. 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, and spend summer at higher, cooler elevations. Good plan right? Well.
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. To get to the places we want to get, we need more power and less worry. The only way I've come up with to get to that point is to either drop in a bigger engine, a 440 or the like, or rebuild the 318 to get better compression, which means boring out the engine, new pistons, maybe new manifolds, probably a new transmission and quite a few other things that are not cheap. It's all doable, but it takes time and money. There's also the possibility we could move to a different rig[^1], but that again is time and money.
Time and money we don't have right now.
I think now that true sweetness can only happen in limbo. I don't know why. Is it because we are so unsure, so tantative and waiting? Like it needs that much room, that much space to expand. The not knowing anything really, the hoping, the aching transience. This is not real, not really, and so we let it alone, let it unfold lightely. Those times that can fly. That's the way it seems now looking back.
[^1]: I have never liked driving with a trailer, but it probably makes more sense for the way we travel. We like to set up camp and then spend a few weeks roaming an area. Certain things about trailers make them better for this, like the ability to haul out your black water and go fetch fresh water without breaking camp. The other marked advantage of the trailer and tow vehicle is that when you do need a mechanic's help, you don't lose your house. But pretty sure my family would abandon me if I tried to sell the bus.
## Bird watching as a way to get out
"Looking for birds, in this case, means seeing the private gardens of the brightly-colored houses in a small mountain town, with their fiery pink and orange blossoms, their mango and papaya trees, and their tangled blooming vines. Birding gets you to places you can’t otherwise go, or never thought to see. It gives you access to new foods and flavors. For example, birding gives you unparalleled access to taste rare fruits and other micro-local foods." - https://www.notesfromtheroad.com/neotropics/tapir-valley.html
I don't want you to be like me. I want you to figure out who you are, how to think your own thoughts and maybe, if you're lucky, figure out what you're supposed to be doing. One of the easiest ways to get the kind of perspective you need to figure these things out is to travel, particularly outside your own culture
## Failure of materialism
I have become increasingly dissastified with the scientific materialist view of the world. I don't disagree with it, I just don't think it's the whole story. Which is to say that science provides a wonderful toolkit for exploring one of the worlds we live in, but it's a terrible toolkit for exploring the other worlds we live in. Now you could say, but we don't live in other worlds. But you're wrong. Imagine for a moment your favorite place, the warm sand of a beach, the wind through the pines on a ridge of mountains, the still heat of an afternoon in the desert, what have you. See it clearly in your mind. Hear it, the waves crashing the shore, the wind in the pines, the crunch of shoes as you walk through the gravel of the desert. Smell the salt, the pines, the sagebrush. Make it real in your mind.
What world is that? It's not the world scientific materialism describes. Add a unicorn to your favorite place. See, easy. Easy because it's a different world. It's the world of imagination. There are other worlds too. Depending on which tradition of thought you find best describes your experience there might be three worlds, or five, for ten. The model that's always made the most sense to me happens to have five world, but it's just a model.
Borges said the map is not the territory, and, while that's true, it should bear some scaled down resemblance to the territory otherwise it's not going to make a very helpful guide to the territory.
## 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 The Land of Little Rain, her Walden 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 The Trail Book. 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 Lost Borders. 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.
Instead consider the Mexican bus driver. His bus is his bus. Her bus is her bus. The dashboard is given over to shrines of La Virgen de Guadalupe, or whomever their patron saint might be, along with photos of family, friends, wives, children, what have you. Usually there's a crucifix and some pithy quotes about god, country and most importantly, family. Mi familia, Mi Trabajo, Mi Vida, was one I saw. I don't know where the buses get parked at night, but I do know that the next day the same person is driving the same bus. Mi familia, Mi Trabajo, Mi Vida.
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.
For all you know that puddle you didn't even notice on your way into work this morning is home to a population of microbes undergoing an extremely stressful existence which they would desperately like to escape just as much as you would desperately like to escape your cubicle.
By the same token, the nothing that is has also always reminded me that it's entirely possible, likely even I would argue, that there are some beings out there to which our existence is about the same as the pond scum. Not insignificant or unimportant, just too small to really pay any kind of meaningful attention to. After all, pretty much everyone and everything has its own set of problems to worry about.
Staring at nothing isn't doing nothing. It so happens that watching the world in silence isn't something our culture considers valuable and so you and I have been trained to casually dismiss it as "doing nothing". But the more I've done it, the more I realized that sitting, "doing nothing" is actually, possibly, the secret of the world so to speak. Whatever it may be, I can say from experience that it's incredibly valuable to me now and has helped me grow by leaps and bounds as a person.
I also think it offers a practical, easy way out of many of the social messes we've created for ourselves.
There's a lot of windbags out there criticizing the internet, especially social media, for fostering narcissism, consumer culture, intellectual bullying, and whatever other social ill gets their particular goat as it were. But it's rare that said windbags have any good ideas on how we can counteracting these forces beyond turning off the TV and internet.
To be fair, that does work. Especially turning off the TV. Few things will improve your life so dramatically as throwing your TV out the highest window you can find (making sure there's no one below).
The internet though is more neutral in my view. It can be good, it can be bad, it all depends on you and how you use it. In my case I have to use it, it's how I make money to live this way. And sure I can say oh I'm only going to look up whatever technical thing I need to look up to solve a particular problem, but that ideal is very different from the messy relaity that the internet is full of interesting stuff to stare at.
\l
Observing nature is not nothing.
Which is to say all the things we as a culture don't want to talk about right now.
You and I find ourselves born into a declining culture. A culture that is what Spengler would call the end of an abstraction phase that will soon start swinging toward
is a bit more complex than that. If you want to still use social media, try first developing humility. One easy way to do that is to create an active practice cultivating humility, for example, pending time in quiet observance of nature. Spend some time realizing that most of life care not at all what humans think, say or do, is helpful in
seems like it would require an active practice.
## quotes borrowed
“The pessimist complains about the wind; the optimist expects it to change; the realist adjusts the sails.” –William Arthur Ward
people have been talking to gods and demons for far more of human history than they have not. - Terrance McKenna http://www.erowid.org/culture/characters/mckenna_terence/mckenna_terence_tryptamines_consciousness.shtml
Because if you don’t build your dream, someone will hire you to help build theirs. https://medium.com/what-i-learned-building/1b7dfe34fced
In civilizations without boats, dreams dry up, espionage takes the place of adventure, and the police take the place of pirates.—Michel Foucault, Of Other Spaces, 1967
“It’s more fun to be a pirate than to join the navy.” -Steve Jobs (quoted in Odyssey: Pepsi to Apple, 1987)
The true adventurer goes forth aimless and uncalculating to meet and greet unknown fate.—O. Henry
"Do what you can, with what you have, where you are." T. Roosevelt
“In the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship.”—David Foster Wallace
"The wilderness should be preserved for political reasons. We may need it someday not only as a refuge from excessive industrialism, but also as a refuge from authoritarian government, political oppression"—Edward Abbey, Desert Solitaire
I am the happiest man alive. I have that in me that can convert poverty to riches, adversity to prosperity, and am more invulnerable than Achilles; fortune have not one place to hit me - Sir Thomas Browne Religio Medici
"You never know what is enough unless you know what is more than enough." --William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell
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
palm 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.
Twilight is soft yellow that gradually fades up to a cool white that gets cooler and cooler blow as it climbs up the sky until it reachs the rich coblant I see up through the faint waiving of pine tops in the wind, the deep rich blue of twilight, the spirit who guides the stars into the night. The sand looks gray and soft when the sun is gone, the coean grows dark and seems to settle it's restlessness a bit as the light disappears.
Moo Krob Nam Ma Prow
having grown up in mid-twentieth century suburbia — and then escaped! — I have a very low tolerance for the kind of boring world that comes from excess conformity and obedience to authorities. As for ways to sort through the abstractions — ah, we’ll be getting to those. - ecosophia, greer
> In a home I need walls, roof, windows, and a door that can be opened and closed. I also need a place to cook, a place to eat, a place to sleep, a place for a guest, and a place to write. More space is not better... more space attracts more stuff which eventually means less space.
> Some things make life easier, but more things do not make life more easy. More things mean more things that can break down and more time spent fixing or replacing them.
> Comfort is freedom and independence. Comfort is having the sweat glands and metabolic tolerance to deal with heat and cold. It is not central heating or air conditioning which may fail or be unavailable. It is not plushy seats but a healthy back. Luxury is not expensive things. It is a healthy and capable body that moves with ease with no restraints because something is too heavy, too far, too hard, or too much. It is a content and capable mind that can think critically, solve problems, and form opinions of its own.
> Success is having everything you need and doing everything you want. It is not doing everything you need to have everything you want. If so then you do not own your things, instead your things own you. I do not need to own a particular kind of vehicle. I need to go from A to B. I do not need fancy steak dinners, rare ingredients, or someone else to prepare my meals whether it is a pizza parlor, a chef, or an industrial food preprocessor. I need food to live. Food to fuel my body and brain. Luxury is not eating at 5 five star restaurants. Luxury is being able to appreciate any food. Comfort is eating the right kind and the right amount of food. Not whatever I want. Eating and moving right prevents diseases, pains, and lack of functionality. I am what I eat and I look what I do. Everybody is. It is the physiological equivalent of integrity. To say what I mean and mean what I say. This too makes life more comfortable. Money is opportunity. Opportunity is power. Power is freedom. And freedom means responsibility. Without responsibility, eventually there is no freedom, no power, no opportunities, and no money. More importantly, freedom is more than power. Power is more than opportunity. Opportunity is more than money. And money is more than something that just buys stuff. It is simple to understand but hard to remember, but do remember this if nothing else.
http://earlyretirementextreme.com/manifesto.html
The Labyrinth of Solitude
Juana Inés de la Cruz. Her superb book "Poems, Protest, and a Dream"
Mariano Azuela's "The Underdogs"
## Podcasts
podcasts are great because you can do other things while you listen right? Like you can be doing the dishes or gardening or working on your car and listening to a podcast and that's like giving you that time that you would have spent in a book or video and now you can spend it doing two things. Now is that divided attention as good as the focused attention? probably not. so for me, I tend to combine two low lift things. I listen to a podcast on tk when I'm doing the dishes but something that requires a good bit of focus I might save for a drive. But either way this opens up a way to kind of double time your life. You want to learn about something new, but you need to weed the garden right? Well, now you can.
## Monohull must haves
Here are *my* must haves for a monohul, if you want to live aboard for extended stays:
Head and galley right down at the companionway.
You don’t want to go halfway through the boat, let alone pass through cabins to reach their ensuite head, with dripping wet oilies in a heavy seaway. It has to be right at the bottom of the stairs.
If you like to eat in the cockpit, it’s very nice to be able to pass food directly from the galley without walking around with it.
Also, the area in front of the companionway is usually the most stable one of the boat. Best for cooking at sea.
A separate shower stall.
Usually we like to wash from the stern but when anchorages are crowded or the weather is a little cooler it’s very nice to be able to wash inside without splashing all over the head and the sink.
Seats 4 at the indoor table without having to unfold table leaves or hampering mobility inside.
All lines, especially reefing, lead aft to the cockpit so you can do the heavy weather sailing without ever leaving the cockpit.
Walk through transom to facilitate boarding from the dinghy with your hands full of groceries. Also the nicest way to take a swim, or for washing yourself as mentioned above.
One of the smallest boats corresponding to the above whilst sporting 3 cabins, is the Beneteau Oceanis 361 that I’ve owned and loved very much. Crossed the Atlantic twice with it. You may want a Jeanneau Sun Odyssey 40 from around 1999 (the 3 cabin - 1 head layout) for a bit more payload and space in the forward cabin and twin cockpit wheels that facilitate mobility to and from the walk through transom. Otherwise a very similar boat. These are two ‘budget’ options, which seem to be the prudent choice given the description of your means. Better spend far less on the initial acquisition cost than you think you can afford.
### Forward Wind Scoop
Forward wind scoop: a bit of triangular canvas strung over a forward hatch between two scasions, sloping down to the deck as you move aft with a tension line to the rigging above to keep it taunt. Doubles as forward windshade and forces air down into the hatch to keep below decks cool. Keeps the air moving through. Saw this on Allied Seawind 30 on YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hRHskbdRFFs
## CC
When I first saw you I was just trying to get a cup of coffee. But then I decided I'd rather have you.
That proved more difficult that I thought. Once You sat in my lap once at Jason and Christy's house
but I was pretty sure you were dating someone else and I was positive I was so that didn't go far
but I found I rather enjoyed you in my lap. Another time we went to prom and you made out with me
I know I was dating someone else then too but I didn't care. For years I made you many a spinach salad with salmon on it,
even when you were eating with someone else. Then you became a picture on my refrigerator for 3 years.
Once when I try to meet up with you you ditched me. Then you decided to marry someone else I went traveling the world for years
I didn't think about you very much for a while, but when I got back I met you again at Nancy's house
I spilled Sangria on your dog but still you said it could be okay for me
to visit you in Charleston. We ate lots of seafood without going far
We went skinny dipping in your pool, in hindsight I'm surprised you did it.
the first night was a little rough, I had to fight the dog, she didn't want me, she wanted you.
And then I considered once what I would do without and found I could not imagine life without you.
As Donne wrote, "All joys are thanks to you" and somehow I convinced you of it
I might redo them now, those standard vows we read, or listen to out back of our house
If I could do it over I'd tell you I'll love you forever, forever ever, years,
even beyond death, for I've walked many of the happy roads that take you round the world and far
away and have found them good, so long as you are with me.
---
From "Valentine" by John Fuller
The things about you I appreciate
May seem indelicate:
I'd like to find you in the shower
And chase the soap for half an hour.
I'd like to have you in my power
And see your eyes dilate.
I'd like to have your back to scour
And other parts to lubricate.
I'd like to find a good excuse
To call on you and find you in.
I'd like to put my hand beneath your chin,
And see you grin.
I'd like to taste your Charlotte Russe,
I'd like to feel my lips upon your skin
I'd like to make you reproduce.
I'd like you in my confidence.
I'd like to be your second look.
I'd like to let you try the French Defence
And mate you with my rook.
I'd like to be your preference
And hence
I'd like to be around when you unhook.
I'd like to be your only audience,
The final name in your appointment book,
Your future tense.
---
Have you forgotten what we were like then
when we were still first rate
and the day came fat with an apple in its mouth
it's no use worrying about Time
but we did have a few tricks up our sleeves
and turned some sharp corners
the whole pasture looked like our meal
we didn't need speedometers
we could manage cocktails out of ice and water
I wouldn't want to be faster
or greener than now if you were with me O you
were the best of all my days
## Buy Used
I very rarely buy new electronics. I can't recall the last time I bought something new. We almost always buy electronics used, mostly off eBay. We also rarely buy new books. We generally pick up books at used bookstores around the country, but when we can't find what we want we use Thriftbooks.
Buying used has several advantages over buying new. The obvious one is that it's almost always cheaper. But beyond that there are other appealing aspects. Buying used means you're not contributing as much to the waste stream of modern economies, and you're (potentially) removing things from that waste stream by finding a use for them. Used items, especially electronics, tend to be functionally superior to new ones[^1] both because they are farther back on the curve of [diminishing returns](https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/law%20of%20diminishing%20returns) and because they have stood the test of time. There are exceptions of course, but buy and large last year's model is as good, and sometimes better, than this year's model.
Buying used also enables you to take advantage of little curiosities of time. For example all the really good low-noise sound recording devices seem to have been made between 2007-2016. Why? No idea. But everyone who needs low noise recording seems to agree, and high end recorders from that era sell for more than they did when they were new. Which is to say that buying used isn't always cheaper, but when it's not it generally means you're getting something superior. And not something that the manufacturer thinks is superior, but something the people using it the most think is superior.
This is why the only affiliate links on luxagraf.net lead to either eBay or Thriftbooks, my two preferred marketplaces for buying used stuff.
Anyone using affiliate links is trying to sell you something -- that includes me -- and you should always be suspicious about that. I know my motives are simple, to make some money to pay for this website and maybe some tea for myself, but you have every right to skeptical. Really though, I don't want you to buy anything you don't need. But if you do need something, please buy it used. And if you're going to buy something I've recommended based on my experiences with it, then the affiliate links will help support this website.
[^1]: The odd mixture of capitalism and our culture's worship of "progress" means that new things must constantly be released, but the law of diminishing returns suggests that newer/bigger/better/faster eventually fails to deliver any meaningfully improvement. This is most obvious in software, where the most feared phrase in any software user's heart is "please restart to update", but this lack of improvement over previous versions is increasingly painfully obvious in hardware as well.