The energy of chaos is required to change the existing order.
# Scratch
Code
1) Everything is a Practice
There is no finish line in life. You don't Individual projects may come to and end, but most things you want to do are essentially endless.
2) Retain agency above all
3) Make something you like everyday
4) Prefer the Analog
5) Don't Report Stories, Live Them
6) Novelty wears off, routines carry you through
7) Live small, venture wide
8)
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.
---
Safety mania and death phobia are signs of a disconnection from purpose and passion. If you have nothing more important than your own life, then preserving life is left as the only purpose. Because our civilizational answer to “Why are we here?” has unraveled, many of us individually have trouble answering that question too, for the individual story draws from the collective.
OK, I realize I may have risen to too high an altitude for the practical purpose of preventing the next bout of pandemania. So I will end with this: We can reduce our general susceptibility to fear-mongering by reducing the levels of fear current in society. A society ridden with fear will acquiesce to any policy that promises them safety. How do we reduce ambient levels of fear? There is no single answer. Besides, each one of us already knows how.
https://charleseisenstein.substack.com/p/pandemania-part-5
---
## Fall
distance to tucson via theodore roosevelt: 2,200
distance to Fl via New Orleans: 1900
distance from tucson to Athens via New Orleans and st george: 2100
mardi gras: feb 21
# Stories to Tell
An alternative to the front porch culture. it think we went wrong when we became to sedentary, it made us see the world as fixed, unchanging, things as they are become things as they have always been. I think the connectedness and community that you find in people who want to create a front porch culture is the right way forward, but I don't think that a rootedness to place is what drive that. I think that's a conscious human decision. I don't think it organically springs into a being. I think people have to want it, and I think so long as there is television, the internet, screens, that will not happen. the culture from afar is too strong, to universal and too enslaving to overcome. it's not until that culture has run its course that something new will arise. that doesn't mean of course that you can't free yourself from screens, from the culture of afar. That's not too difficult. But you aren't going to free the whole of culture.
## August Jottings
***August 2*:** Already I feel the end of summer heading toward us. There's a fleetingness to the warm days now, an inevitability to the cold that comes in the evenings and is slower to go again in mornings.
I miss the merlins. Every morning since we arrived the first thing I heard in the morning was five or six merlin chicks shrieking and playing in the pines around our campsite. Today I heard nothing. They've gone. Or they all died. Either way the bird life here as changed. The small birds are back. Nuthatches and chickadees are the morning sounds now, with occasional crows and blue jays.
The pileated woodpeckers were through again this morning, you can never fail to notice that flaming-red crest streaking through the trees. It sounds like a jackhammer when they beat on the bark. Such a massive bird for something that spends most of it's time clinging to the side of a tree. This morning there were three. One stayed on the ground, which I had never seen a pileated do before. At first I thought it might be injured, but eventually it took off to join its fellows in the trees.
***August 6*:** Strange mayfly hatch this morning. The bathroom building is completely covered in mayflies. Thousands of them, inside and out. Camp host tried blowing them with a leaf blower but it didn't work, they hung on. Reminded me of [the night in New Orleans when the termites hatched](https://luxagraf.net/jrnl/2017/05/new-orleans-instrumental-number-2), (which I didn't actually write about in that post, not everything makes out of the journal). Fortunately we were far enough away this time that nothing ended up swarming in the bus.
***August 8*:** The kids started sailing camp this morning. I picked them up at lunch time and managed to see the girls sailing, Elliott was already in. Their first day on the water and it was probably the windiest we've had in quite a while. Can't reef an [Optimist](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optimist_(dinghy)). I guess you just go fast. They spent most of the day practicing knots and righting flipped boats so they knew what to do, but according to them no one flipped in the stiff breezes.
I've been challenged to many a knot tying contest this afternoon. I have lost almost all of them. I used to be able to tie a bowline one-handed without thinking about it. Now I have to sit there and tell myself the rabbit story to get it right.
***August 12*:** Final day of sailing camp featured a sail by for the parents followed by a potluck lunch. Unfortunately there was very little wind so it was more a drift, crank-the-tiller-back-and-forth by. Still, it was good to see them out on the water, having fun and making new friends.
***August 13*:** Heading to the country fair later today. We're suckers for a local fair, but we're used to fairs in October. Yet another reminder that cold comes early up here.
Years ago at the [Elberton Fair](https://luxagraf.net/jrnl/2019/10/elberton-county-fair) Elliott was too short to ride some of the rides with his sisters. This year Olivia was too tall to ride some of the rides with her siblings. We can't seem to completely win. At least there was a lumberjack show, complete with crosscut saws and log rolling exhibitions.
***August 13*:** Cooler this morning. 54 on the gauge. Blue-gray fog bank on the far show enshrouding the hills. Crows are unhappy about something this morning. Red-breasted nuthatches seem unconcerned.
Signs of winter are increasing. The weather has shifted, more birds are passing through. Cape may warblers are already headed south from wherever they've been north of here. On the way to the store today I saw the city had pulled out it's snow plows and was giving them a wash. Seasons remain a strange thing to this Los Angeles native. I like the idea of them, I like the transitions between them, but we are not sticking around to live in them.
## Around Washburn
One weekend I took the kids over to Madeline Island again. The museum was have a trading post-style reenactment., and we are suckers for a good reenactment festival.
We got to see some real birch bark canoes, and some artifacts like trade blankets, early compasses and navigation tools, even early pharmacy tools, including a pill-making board the kids got to try out, making some playdough pills.
Most of the reenactment stuff was things Voyageurs would have used in the fur trade, though there were a couple of people there representing local tribes. One man in particular was really great at show the kids various tools and demonstrating how they worked. He was so good I forgot to take any pictures, which I realized later is kind of the highest praise I can (accidentally) give.
## Ten
I was thinking the other day about some friends I haven't talked to since I left Los Angeles for good in 1999. I was thinking how astounded they would probably be to know that I had managed to keep two children alive and well for ten years now. What they would probably say is, *I think you mean your wife has managed to keep two children alive and well for ten years*. And of course they'd be right.
Whatever the case, somehow, our twins are ten. Double digits. Decades old. And all that.
## Midsummer
We pulled into Memorial Park Campground in Washburn, Wisconsin just before lunch on a Thursday and grabbed one of the few spots left in the campground. It was just a few sites down from where we [stayed four years ago](https://luxagraf.net/jrnl/2018/08/island-golden-breasted-woodpecker). We love a good first-come, first-serve campground, especially one with no stay limits. We unfurled the awning and settled in for the summer.
For us, these days, settling in means signing the kids up for Jui Jitsu, getting library cards, and figuring out the best places to get in whatever body of water is nearby. Washburn, and nearby Ashland, provide all that and more, perhaps most importantly, reasonable temperatures all summer, little in the way of crowds, and the kind of hospitality you really only find in small towns anymore.
At their first Jui Jitsu class one of their classmate's mother invited us to a midsummer party. Summer is bigger deal up here than it is in say Florida. When something is so fleeting you appreciate it more I think. Whatever the case, we showed up and had a great time. There was music, flower wreaths, comedy, even sack races. The kids danced late into the night. It was a good way to celebrate midsummer, something I've never celebrated before.
While Jui Jitsu, libraries, and swimming holes are all we really need, we do appreciate there being good Mexican food, and as of this summer, Washburn has that. All this corner of the world needs now is for the shifting climate to mellow out the winters a bit.
I think if we'd been closer to Washburn in 2020 when the U.S. shut everything down, we'd have rented a place around here. But of course that's not where we were so we'll likely never know how we'd handle a winter up here. For now though, it's a pretty great place to spend your summer.
## Away From the Crowds
We would have stayed longer at Harrington Beach State Park, and we would have loved to head up into the Door Peninsula, but we were facing every full time RVer's least favorite holiday: Fourth of July weekend. Everything was booked. So, we loaded up our still-not-installed awning and headed north, where the crowds are fewer and we knew of at least one first come first served campground.
You can't just show up at a first come first serve campground on the Friday of fourth of July weekend though. Corrinne does 90 percent of the camp planning and she, marvel that she is, found a campground somewhere in the middle of Wisconsin that was somehow not already booked for the fourth and was on our way. We had reservations the day before and hit the road Friday.
Now, you might be asking yourself, what sort of campground *isn't* full on America's most popular camping weekend? How awful is it that no one wants to go there? Actually it was quite nice. I think no one wants to go there in part because it's in a very rural area and when you have wild acreage, camping isn't really something you care about as much. At least that was our experience living in a 300-acre pine forest. Whatever the case Governor Thompson State Park was nice and we were happy to have a spot to park for the holiday weekend.
Admittedly, there wasn't much to do at Governor Thompson if you don't have a boat (it's on a lake). One fellow vintage camper owner we met ventured over to the swim beach one day and called it the saddest little thing he'd ever seen. We never went to find out for ourselves. We just relaxed, did a lot of reading, and finally had the space to get our new awning installed.
After putting on the window awning on the other side I was dreading the full size patio awning. Fortunately for me, the installation process was different, so my fears proved unfounded. In some ways I think it was easier to install the patio than the window awning, though there were a couple of awkward moments. But now have plenty of shade to sit around and relax (and work, and play) in.
I'd forgotten how nice it is to have that under the awning space. We used to live in that shade, but we stopped using our old awning because it was so beat up and gross. Sitting under it was not a pleasant experience the last few months. With the Zipdee we've reclaimed that space. We have a wonderfully warm yellow light bathing the bus from all angles, and we've been spending a lot more time outside. Zipdee awnings aren't cheap, but well worth the money in my opinion.
With the holiday weekend behind us we continued north, bound for the shores of Lake Superior. We stopped off at a place called Copper Falls for a couple of nights. It's supposedly one of the highlights of the area, but our experience was that it's buggy and there's not much to do other than hike to see the falls. They are nice waterfalls, but you can't get near them and the mosquitoes and black flies were bad enough that it would have made Yosemite miserable.
I never like to complain too much about anywhere because it's an incredible experience to be able to live the way we do and a few bad nights for us is a tiny price to pay (and Copper Falls wasn't even that bad), but I was glad to hit the road again.
And our plan worked. We pulled into the first-come first-serve campground in Washburn WI on a Thursday morning, snagged the best site, and settled in for the summer.
## Hello Milwaukee
The drive up to Harrington Beach State Park wasn't far, about 50 miles, but somehow that 50 miles changed everything. Once we were past Milwaukee (Harrington Beach is about 30 minutes north of Milwaukee) the last traces of heat disappeared. There were cheese curds at every gas station -- a sure sign you're in Wisconsin -- and the world felt quieter, more relaxed, more natural. Even the lake seemed somehow wilder.
Last time we were here I [wrote about the yellow warblers](https://luxagraf.net/dialogues/yellow-warbler) that were everywhere in our campsite. This time was no different, one even came in the bus to check it out.
We came back to Harrington because it's a good place to camp and access Milwaukee. We don't spend much time in cities anymore. We avoid them actually, especially large cities. Driving into the Chicago to get the awning was a nightmare I'd just as soon never repeat. Smaller cities like Milwaukee are more tolerable, though still not our thing anymore.
That said, we made an exception here because we actually like Milwaukee and we have some friends living here that we wanted to catch up with, however briefly. We had also promised the girls we'd get some sushi and cupcakes, and then go to a museum for their birthday since we'd be spending their actual birthday somewhere without sushi.
We started with cupcakes of course.
Then we had a sushi lunch and popped into a bookstore that was pretty amazing, but, despite having a seemingly endless number of books, did not have the one that the girls wanted.
The next stop was the Milwaukee Public Museum, which is such a vague name we didn't really know what to expect except that it had some dinosaur exhibit of some kind. I think that was a good way to go in, not knowing anything (the opportunity for you to go not knowing anything is about to be ruined) because now that I've been, I am still not totally sure what the Milwaukee Public Museum is, beyond, the very generic: really fun.
The specimen collection in the lobby area reminded me of [La Specula in Florence](https://luxagraf.net/jrnl/2011/06/natural-science), and set the tone of the place. It's a throw back the museums of old: big dioramas, lots of signs and welcome absence of any screens, or QR codes, or any of the ridiculous digital gimmicks that pass for content in modern museums. Instead it was interactive in the original sense -- the kids could touch the buffalo fur and ride a penny farthing and even let butterflies land on them.
The natural history portion of the Milwaukee Public Museum was extensive and full of great dioramas, though I have to take some exception the tiny little section devoted to the south. The south is apparently little more than a footnote here and can be adequately represented by a banjo, a musket, a few ears of corn, and a flag none of us recognized.
What the Public Museum does a far, far better job with is the history of Milwaukee, which is set up in a lifesize replica of Milwaukee through the ages, though most of it is done up like the late 19th century. This was by far the most fun to walk around. It was lit with the equivalent of old gas lamps so it's a very dark exhibit that you can get lost in.
-- roughly the technological level I suspect my grandkids will live in.
## Illinois Beach
I think it's important to remember that it's fun to do something for no reason at all. That is, not everything needs a reason beyond simply the freedom to do it.
This is what Sir Edmund Hilery was hinting at when he was asked, *why do you want to climb Mount Everest,* and he answered, *because it's there*. Because the freedom of the will to choose and act and do, the freedom for you to do something for no other reason than you happen to want to do it, is irreducible, unassailable base on which all human delight is built.
That has nothing to do with how we came to be at Illinois Beach State Park, on the far northern reaches of Chicago, or what we did there, but I think it's worth saying things from time to time about the meta-journey if you will and one of the key things I've learned from this adventure is that life isn't so serious as it seems, perhaps especially when it seems most serious. The universe is a whimsical place after all, how else do you explain the giraffe? Or this strange, abandoned concession center in the middle of Illinois Beach State Park looking for all the world like it was plucked out of a 1950s Soviet seaside resort and plopped here in Illinois?
One of the things I was most looking forward to about coming back to the Great Lakes area was replicating the day we [drove out of the heat and into the wonderfully cool summer of Wisconsin](https://luxagraf.net/jrnl/2018/06/wisconsin). Alas, that did not happen this time (you can [never go back](https://luxagraf.net/jrnl/2008/06/you-cant-go-home-again)).
The heat wave followed us up through Chicago, where I stopped off at the Zipdee factory to pick up two awnings we'd ordered several months ago. With the giant, fifteen foot tubes on the floor of the bus, I hit the road again bound for Illinois State Beach, on the shores of Lake Michigan.
Thankfully the heat wave only lasted two more days, and we had the nice clear, cool waters of Lake Michigan to keep us cool in the mean time. Almost any day spent on the water is a good day in my book, though the temperature extremes were more than we're used to -- 100 in the air, 53 in the water. Stay in for more than a few minutes and you're shivering, but by the time you're out two minutes you're ready to cool back down again.
Fortunately after the weekend the air temp settled back down to a nice 80 degrees, making it a bit for fun to sit (and play) on the beach.
The abandoned concession stand wasn't the only odd thing in Illinois State Beach, in fact there were quiet a few oddities. My favorite was the pair of Sandhill Cranes that strolled through the campground every day utterly unconcerned with any humans that might be around. In fact they would march right up to people looking for food, I saw one sneak a hot dog off a picnic table and proceed to eat it before any of the people around noticed.
However odd it might have been, Illinois State Park was perfectly suited to the real reason we came -- to install our new Zipdee awnings and get rid of our old. No one complained about the sawing and the remains of the old one fit nicely in the dumpster. In the end rain stopped me from getting the big awning installed here, but I got our new side awning on at least.
It keeps the afternoon sun out of the window and allows us to have the window open even if it's raining, but really we just like it... because it's there. It makes the bus a little more fun, a little more delightful if I do say so myself.
""
## Birding
I spent most of the afternoon today watchng a least tern fish in the waters of Hatteras island in the outer banks of North Carolina. The tern hovered, fluttering like a sheet of white paper in the wind, ducking and diving in the currents until it tucked in its wings and dropped like a rock into a wave. It was too far away to see if it got anything.
An osprey I watched was heavier, weightier in the air, purposeful until it too tucked its wings and dove. In that moment of freefall both seemed no longer in control. Only gravity was in charge at the moment. The osprey came up empty, but did something I've never noticed a bird doing before, it shook itself as it hovered over the waves, skaing and ruffling its features to shed the water it had picked up when it dove. And then with a few quick strong wingbeats it roase up, gaught and updraft and drifted down the shoreline, scan the waves for fish.
Bird watching isn't really anything more than deciding to pay great attention to birds. Bird watching is really a never ending process of turning something that is always happening in the background to something you're focused solely on. It's the process of learning that that brown and white bird likes to sit on the top of the myrtle in the morning and sing, but spends its afternoons rather silently, scratching at the ground in search of grubs and seeds. These days birdwatchers call it a brown thrasher, or Toxostoma rufum, but that there are many other names for it, the rusty mockingbird, the brown thrush. The Ojibwe call it apagaande-ikwewinini.
This process of turning your full attention to something not only outside yourself, but not even human is I think a large part of what makes bird watching so popular. I don't think we were made to live in a wholly human world, and I think much of what ails us these days has roots back in this entirely self-reflexive world we've trapped ourselves in. Birds offer a way outside of ourselves, our culture, our species.
To pay attention to anything in great detail is a rewarding thing. This is why I like make this site, I like to pay attention to things and then I like to do something with the results of that attention. Sometimes I write things only for myself in my journal, sometimes I take photographes, sometimes I sketch something in pencil or pen, sometimes I write things and put them up here. All of these are outlets for the accumulated results of paying attention to something, be it birds, the shape and rythem of waves, the wind in the leaves, the movement of clouds or what my kids are doing around me.
---
I know there's other reasons for the popularity of birdwatching. I'd be lying if I said there wasn't some competitive aspect to it to for me. Would I like to have a life list in the 1000s? Sure, but not because I want to have seen more than you or anyone else, but because that would mean that I'd have paid attention to over 1000 birds.
Cameras are increasingly designed to remove the human factor from the act of taking a picture. With the addition over the last several decades of features like autofocus, auto white balance, and auto light metering, the engineering effort of most camera manufacturers has gone into replacing the learned choices of the individual photographer with algorithms. These algorithms turn the act of producing a great image into something that’s no longer a challenge you must rise to or adapt to, but a series of options you can choose between.
To repair is to join a community.
The right to repair the need to repair the desire to repair is fundamentally a communal desire it's a hierarchical desire hierarchical community of experience being handed down but it's fundamentally communal you can't get this knowledge without it being handed down to you whether that is through books through more experienced people through YouTube through any number of other means of disseminating information it has to come down 3 time from someone hierarchical a above you with more skills than you and it takes humility to become part of that system so you have humility and community and these are two things that are fundamentally opposed pictures of dominant worldview of the modern world
## Possible use for about Atlanta
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.
# Birds
## 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
## Quotes
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
# Notes
## No Risk
Whatever one’s opinion of the response to the disease, what is undeniable is that so many people of influence took for granted that safety must always trump social relations and that the human being is not the center of a web of loyalties and commitments but is rather a physical fact needing technical management. Nothing, it was revealed to us, is worth risking life for—nothing. If other occasions for risk remain, this is evidently only because administration has not yet found the means to quash them. It was revealed that no danger is greater than death. It was revealed that life is sheer matter and not something else, for example, the capacity for love.
https://www.frontporchrepublic.com/2022/06/atoms-and-the-void-review-of-interventions-2020/
## Travel Cheaper
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
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
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 ciclical nature of, well, nature.
## No Reason At All
"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
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
ipalm fronds, whirls, fans, crisp browned tips, peeling trunks as if the whole tree were some giant alien flower, other with trunks smooth and stalk straight leading up to bunches of fronds that look like pineapples on stilts. The can be so absolutely still when the ind doesn't blow.. The slash pine mixed in, it too has a very stright trunk, shedding its lower branches as it grows so that the long, delicate needles grow in tuffs and clumps of needle fans near the top of the tree. Here and there an oak, never a big one in the palm-dominated areas, but vaguely sickly looking oaks scratching out an existence in this sandy soil.
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
# Essays
## Rules for Screens, Part One
I have a strange page about [technology](/technology) buried on this site. Still, people find it. Something must link to it? I'm not sure how or why, but it seems to get a lot of traffic. Or at least it generates a fair bit of email. About a dozen people a year take the time to email me about the first line of that article:
**The less technology your life requires the better your life will be.**
I get a mix of responses to this ranging from the occasional "who are you to judge me, how dare you tell me not to play video games" (which I don't usually respond to), to the more frequent, and thoughtful, "hey, I feel the same way but I can't seem to get technology out of my life".
In crafting a response to the most recent person who wrote some variation of that comment, I accidentally wrote a massively long post I am breaking into a three-part series, retracing how I came to use screens so little, despite editing photos, writing for this site, and working for an online publication, all of which do in fact require a screen. I use screens when it makes sense to do so, but the rest of the time I avoid them.
We're going to start with the basic stuff. I did most of the steps in this part back in 2016 when we were getting ready to move into the bus. This is actually all the hardest things to do, because these will free up enough time that you'll find yourself staring into the void for the first time since you were a kid. Don't worry, it's good for you. Anyway, on with it.
**Luxagraf's rules for screens, part one.**
---
## **Rule One: Throw Your Television in the Nearest Dumpster**
Yup, we're going to start with the hardest one. You'll notice that I am more sympathetic to not going cold turkey with other things below. Not this one. This is the absolute requirement. Kill your television. Now. Tough love people.
But... but. Look. Here's the thing. You have this gift of life for, on average, around 73 years. 73 YEARS. You won't even last as long as the average hardwood tree. And you're going to spend that precious time watching television? No. No you're not. Not anymore. You're going to live. Find a dumpster. Put your TV in it.
Okay, you don't want to put your $1,200 TV in the dumpster. Then find an old sheet or blanket and cover it up. Put some low-tack painters tape on there, make it hard to take off. That'll work for now. But get ready to eBay that thing. Or find a dumpster.
Now cancel Netflix, Hulu, or whatever other subscriptions you had. If you subscribe to two streaming services, that's just under $30 a month. That's $360 a year. That's $1,800 every five years. That's crazy. But now you have about $30 a month you can either save or spend on something you want. Something tangible. I mean, reward yourself if you really do this. At least buy some ice cream.
---
## **Rule Two: Make Something**
If you watched television for 3 hours in the evenings, congrats you were already watching less than most people -- and you stop doing that you have just reclaimed 15 hours a week. FIFTEEN HOURS! That's enough to get a part time job somewhere. It's enough time to do, lord, there's no limit to what you could do really. Start a business, write a book, read the entire canon of Russian literature. The paradox of choice can get you here and you'll end up watching YouTube for hours on your laptop. I know, I've done it.
You have to start creating something. I strongly suggest you create something real and tangible. Something you can hold in your hands. Cook yourself a fancy dessert if you like. Yeah you can even look up a recipe on a screen, don't worry about it. The internet is incredibly helpful for learning things. That's another idea. Find something you really love and learn more about it. Read everything you can about agates if that's your bag (it's my wife's bag). But do it by checking books out from the library, not by reading on your phone.
Do what you want, but do something. Deliberately carve out some time to make something. And I know everyone says, I'm not a creative person, I don't know what to make. Start small. Write a card to your closest relative. Write a postcard if a card is too much. Make dessert for your family, your significant other, yourself, whatever. Just make something. Except maybe don't make a fancy dessert every night. That won't end well. If all else fails, just go for a walk.
---
## **Rule Three: Delete Social Media Apps**
Yeah, now we're getting real. I know it's going to be hard. But you know what, take easy, start small. You probably have Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Tiktok, a bunch of stuff in other words, on your phone. Just pick one and delete it for one week. You can always reinstall it so it's not like there's too much to lose here.
But we're not done.
Get a piece of paper and a pen. Fold the paper up so it's small enough to fit in your pocket. Put it in your pocket, or otherwise keep it on you. Now, every time you feel like checking whichever social network you deleted, instead of checking it, pull out your paper and pen and write down why you wanted to check it. It doesn't need to be an essay, just write like "wanted to see what Mark was up to" or whatever the source of the urge was.
Do that for one week. At the end of the week look back over what you wrote down and decide for yourself if those things you were planning to do are worth your time. If they are then re-install that app and be on your merry way. If they aren't, or more likely, if you aren't sure, do the experiment for another week.
If you decide that this wasn't the best use of your limited time on earth, repeat this process with the next social app on your phone. When you've deleted all the unnecessary apps from your phone you're done with this step.
Oh, and the ones you keep, don't feel bad about those. If you're feeling a sense of guilt about them still it might be worth repeating this experience, but if you really do enjoy them then don't feel guilty about them.
## **Rule Four: Track What You Do When You Use a Screen**
Far to much of our lives are lived in a kind of automated mode. Think back over everything you did in the last five minutes before you started reading this. If you're like me, you probably struggle to remember what it was you were doing or how you ended up precisely here at this moment. Some of this autopilot living is a good thing, especially, I've found, morning routines, but I do it far too much.
So I started keeping closer track of what I was doing and why. I'm not suggesting you do that. That's actually advanced level stuff, what I am suggesting is very simple: every time you use a screen, remember to do it consciously. Don't judge yourself for it, just note that hey, I am using a screen. That's all. Now if you're somewhat obsessive like I am you might want to write down whatever notes you can, about why you're using a screen.
Unlike the steps above, this is not really a rule. It's a process. It's an ongoing process that will probably never end, at least in my case. I like to be conscious of when I use a screen, so although I started this years ago, I still do it today.
That brings me to the final point I will leave you with: everything is a process. To paraphrase Alan Watts, you are not a thing, you are a happening. Which is to say, all of life is a never ending process, there may be goals, there maybe markers along the way, but it's not like you get to place where you never have to do anything again. The goal, at least at this very basic level of using less screens, is to build systems and processes that will help you do things other than stare at a screen.
Now go kill your television.
## Rules for Screens, Part Two
Last time we hurled our televisions out the window into a dumpster. If you actually did that, like I did once in college, you know that the sound of that crunch and exploding screen was awesome. If you didn't, well, hopefully you at least sold or gave away your TV. Remember, you can have a television or you can have a life.
Televisions are not the thing everyone wrings their hands over these days though. That's a little odd to me because according to statistics on screen time, that's where most us spend our time. But the evil de jour is phones. You phone is doing all kinds of things to you and will probably eventually be a direct contributor to the collapse of western culture.
But, as an aside, did you know that culturally we've been wringing our hands over the distractions in our lives for centuries? In the 1550s Swiss scientist Conrad Gessner said the printing press "confusing and harmful" for the amount of data it was unleashing on the unsuspecting. To pick a revealing, more recent example, consider writer Italo Calvino's account of [his daily newspaper habit](https://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/2027/the-art-of-fiction-no-130-italo-calvino):
> Each morning I already know I will be able to waste the whole day. There is always something to do: go to the bank, the post office, pay some bills... always some bureaucratic tangle I have to deal with. While I am out I also do errands such as the daily shopping: buying bread, meat, or fruit. First thing, I buy newspapers. Once one has bought them, one starts reading as soon as one is back home—or at least looking at the headlines to persuade oneself that there is nothing worth reading. Every day I tell myself that reading newspapers is a waste of time, but then... I cannot do without them. They are like a drug.
Note the use of the phrase, "like a drug," which we're still using today to describe our latest and most powerful distraction, phones.
I point this out not to downplay the addictive, attention-steal nature of screens, but to remind you that this is a cultural-level problem in addition to a personal one. And this problem seems, based on historical evidence, to be a) a problem inherent in all written technology, and b) getting worse. It also strongly suggests that if we just reduce our exposure to the current symptom without addressing the underlying desire for distraction we're just switching one thing for another, like alcoholics chugging coffee and chain smoking at AA meetings[^1].
And I bring up AA in part because I think that phones are a problem partly for the same reason alcohol is a problem: they're culturally acceptable. No one pulls our a syringe in the middle of four star restaurant and shoots up heroin, but no one bats an eye when someone orders a bottle of wine in the same situation. Both are addictive, destructive drugs (arguably alcohol is much worse on your body), but one is culturally acceptable and one is not. This makes a world of difference when it comes time to stop. You don't have to work hard to avoid heroin, but you'll run into alcohol, and screens, at every turn.
Our phones aren't just addictive, they're also completely culturally acceptable in the west. No one cares if you pull one out in the middle of dinner. Well, I will. You might. But the cultural message seems to be that it's okay. In some places and some situations the cultural message might even be that you're an oddball if you're *not* staring at a screen.
Let's assume though, that, like people who email me, you want to use your phone less. Here are some tricks to help with that, most of which I used to cut back on my own screen use.
**Luxagraf's Rules for Screens, part deux.**
## Rule Five: Know Yourself
If you want to use your phone less, you need to know how much you use it. There are some tools to figure this out built-in to both iOS and Android, but I never bothered to figure those out because I had already downloaded and used Your Hour ([Android App Store](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.mindefy.phoneaddiction.mobilepe)). Space appears to offer similar features and [works on iOS too](https://apps.apple.com/gb/app/space-break-phone-addiction/id916126783). The app isn't really important, just get something that records how much time you spend and how often you unlock your phone.
That will give you a baseline and let you know how much you use your phone. Personally I disabled tracking for maps and music/podcasts because although I'm using my phone, I'm not really staring at the screen. There's an element of gamification to these apps that's easy to get sucked into. I had Your Hour on my phone for about a week before I got pretty obsessed with how little I could use my phone in a day.
## Rule Six: Adapt to Yourself
If, like me, you discover that you use your phone to check the time throughout the day, consider getting a watch. Or, if you hate wearing a watch, and live in a small bus with your family like I do, just encourage everyone else to wear a watch and ask them what time it is.
The point is, most likely Rule Five will reveal some habits that you can break, but are too idiosyncratic to you for me to solve for you. My general advice is, if you have some behavior that involves the phone that could involve some analog thing, like a watch for instance, replace those screen checks with a watch. There will be more on this in part three, but a few things I have heard of include, putting your phone in a bag to make it more of a pain to pull out and use, using it as a coaster so you can't pick it up
## Rule Seven: Turn Off All Notifications
I think the reason we are bothered by how much we use our phones has to do with agency. We like to think we are the rulers of our days and are conscious of all our decisions and actions and phones are stark reminder that we are not that guy/gal. The best way to grant yourself back some agency is to get rid of all notifications.
Notifications are really just little serotonin agitators. Check your email when you feel like it, not when a notification badge agitates your serotonin level past the point of resistance.
[^1]: This is not meant to disparage AA or anyone struggling with alcoholism. Most AA members I know are fully aware of the irony of swapping one addiction for another, but when alcohol has taken over your life to that point, it's not a bad trade to make.
## Rules for Screens, Part Three
Did you know there's a Reddit for people who want quit staring at screens so much? Also a true story.
If you've feel addicted to your phone, well, um, you're right. You are. Everything about the design of your
## Buying Used
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.
## Essay on Will
If you want control over what you consume, you're going to have to strengthen your will. So long as you are surrounded by signals that are trying to get you to spend money on crap, it is going to be an uphill battle. If you can I strongly suggest removing yourself from the signals—think about where your attention is going and how you can redirect it to craft rather than stuff.
but there are things more powerful. The most important of those is your will.
If, like most people, you can't pick and move to foreign country for a month then you're going to have to try to change in the midst of the battle so to speak. While possible, this is much much harder. And again, while I like to think I have mastered this, my spreadsheet says otherwise, so take this advice with a grain of salt. Chances are good that this actually much harder than you or I think and you're going to need to put in more effort than I'm suggesting.
The most important thing is to develop your will. I am serious. Start doing exercises to develop your will. For example, force your self up out of the chair right now, turn away from the computer and walk to the nearest wall. Touch it. Come back and sit down. Repeat this at random during the day. Is it pointless? Absolutely. So is lifting weights. The principle is the same. So choose a deliberately pointless thing to do, and do it. Then do another one. Then do the same thing every morning for a week.
One will-building exercise I do periodically is what I call, for lack of a better phrase, micro travel. It works like this: pick a place at random in the city you live, somewhere you've never been. Choose a time and make an appointment with yourself. Now go work out all the details of getting there, if possible use public transit or walk. Then meet yourself there and make sure you're there on time. Now enjoy a few minutes exploring the area and head home.
I'll leave thinking up other exercises to you, but the point is to develop your will, to have control over your life. It takes a little time to see and feel the effects of this, it's quite subtle, but it will cascade throughout your life in a number of interesting ways, I promise. One will be better control over your impulses. When you walk into, say Target, to buy a new toothbrush your newly developed will will make it easier to walk past everything else and only buy the toothbrush.
Eventually your will may help you recognize that stores that have everything are too much for your will. It would be cleverer to buy that toothbrush at a smaller store with fewer things, because it's easier to remove temptation than resist it. Think of it like dieting. If you're trying to eat less ice cream it's much easier to not walk down the ice cream aisle at all than it is to walk down it and without buying anything.
This also leads into my second suggestion for buying less stuff: change your habits. It's convenient to go to Target and get everything you need in one place, but chances are you're going to spend more than you intended without realizing it. In fact the entire experience of being in Target has been engineered to increase the chance you'll spend more than you intended. Every time you enter a store you are entering a hostile environment designed to extract your life energy from you.
Oh sure it's all abstracted so you don't have think of it that way. Still, strip the abstraction and relationship is pretty clear, you trade hours of your life for shit you buy at Target. You get up the morning and go to work. That's a day of your life you just traded for paper tickets. Why do you need those tickets? To put a roof over your head and food in your stomach. Pretty much everything after that is not strictly necessary. So once those basics are met you're in th realm of swapping your existence on earth for stuff.
The less stuff you buy, the less you need to work. By extension, the less time you spend in places designed to extract money from you, the less of your life you'll have to trade for stuff.
That's a habit you can break—going to all-in-one-place stores—but there are other habits you can build that will help immensely as well.
One of the things I've been at pains to avoid is making it sound like we don't like the United States. In fact we do very much, it's one of the most beautiful places in the world and has some of the wildest and safest wilderness you're ever going to enter.
Unfortunately, the United States is not the best travel value for us. Without an income we'd have to dip heavily into savings to travel the states in the bus.
# Pages
## Technology
The less technology your life requires the better your life will be.
That's not to say technology is bad, but I encourage you to spend some time considering your technology use and making sure you *choose* the things you use rather than accepting everything marketed at you.
This is not my idea. I stole it from the Amish. The Amish have a reputation for being anti-technology, but they're not. Try searching for "Amish compressed air tool conversion" if you don't believe me. The Amish don't rush out and get the latest and greatest, that much is true. They take their time adopting any new technology. They step back, detach, and evaluate new technology in a way the rest of us seldom do -- they're arguably more engaged with technology than you and I -- and this allows them to make better informed decisions.
That's what I try to do. I take my time. There's very little latest and greatest on this page. And I am always trying to get by with less, if for no other reason than this stuff costs money. There's no affiliate links here, no links at all actually. I'd really prefer it if you didn't buy any of this stuff, you probably don't need it. Again, I could get by with less. I should get by with less. I am in fact always striving to need less and be less particular about what I do need.
Still, for better or worse. Here are the main tools I use in building this site and living on the road.
## Writing
### Notebook and Pen, Pencil and Paper
My primary "device" is my notebook. I don't have a fancy notebook. I do have several notebooks though. One is in my pocket at all times and is filled with illegible scribbles that I attempt to decipher later. This one I mainly write in pencil, and I stick post-it notes into the actual notebook so that I can then move the post-it notes to the larger notebook where I write them in pen. This larger notebook is a mix of notes, as well as a sort of captain's log, though I don't write in with the kind regularity real captains do. Or that I imagine captains do. Then I have other notebooks for specific purposes, meditation journal, fiction notebook, and so on.
I'm not all that picky about notebooks, if they have paper in them I'm happy enough. I used to be very picky about pens, but then I sat down and forced myself to use basic cheap, black ink, Bic-style ballpoint pens until they no longer irritated me. And you know what? Now I love them, and that's all I use -- any ballpoint pen. Ballpoint because it runs less when it gets wet, which, given how I live, tends to happen. Pencils are a more recent development for me. I adopted the Pentel P209 with .9mm lead because someone on the internet said the led didn't break. This has proved true, so I've stick with it.
### Laptop
I recently retired my trusty Lenovo x270. I still love it, but it just wasn't up to editing video. I ended up getting an HP Dev One, which I generally like, though the screen is a little glare-prone. This computer is probably overkill for me, and it costs $1,000, but I use it for work so it ends up paying for itself that way.
The laptop runs Linux because everything else sucks a lot more than Linux. Which isn't too say that I love Linux, it could use some work too. But it sucks a whole lot less than the rest. I run Arch Linux, which I have [written about elsewhere](/src/why-i-switched-arch-linux). I was also interviewed on the site [Linux Rig](https://linuxrig.com/2018/11/28/the-linux-setup-scott-gilbertson-writer/), which has some more details on how and why I use Linux.
## Photos
### Camera
I use a Sony A7Rii. It's a full frame mirrorless camera which makes it easy to use the legacy lenses I love. I bought the A7Rii specifically because it was well suited to using with the old lenses that I love. Without the old lenses I find the Sony's output to be a little digital for my tastes,
The A7 series are not cheap cameras. If you want to travel you'd be better off getting something cheaper and using your money to travel. The Sony a6000 is very nearly as good and costs much less. In fact, having tested dozens of cameras for Wired over the years I can say with some authority that the a6000 is the best value for money on the market period, but doubly so if you want at cheap way to test out some older lenses.
### Lenses
All of my lenses are old and manual focus, which I prefer to autofocus lenses. I am not a sports or wildlife photographer so I have no real need for autofocus. Neither autofocus nor perfect edge to edge sharpness are things I want in a lens. I want, for lack of a better word, *character*. I want a lens that reliable produces what I see in my mind.
One fringe benefit of honing your manual focus skills[^1] is that you open a door to world filled with amazing cheap lenses. I have shot Canon, Minolta, Olympus, Nikon, Zeiss, Hexanon, Tokina, and several weird Russian Zeiss clones.
These days I have whittled my collection down to these lenses:
* Minolta 50mm f/2
* Minolta 55mm f/1.7
* Minolta 100mm f/1.7
* Olympus 50mm f/1.8
* Olympus 100mm f/2.8
* Pentax 35 f/3.5
* Pentax 20 f/4
Yes, that's a lot of lenses. I used to keep the Minolta 50 f/2 on there about 90 percent of the time, but these days I actually shoot with all of these pretty regularly. None of these lenses are over $200.
I also have a Tokina 100-300mm f/4 which happens to be Minolta mount so I use a Minolta 2X teleconverter with it to make it a 200-600mm lens. It's pretty soft at the edges. That's a nice way of saying it's utter garbage at the corners, but since I mostly use if for wildlife, which I tend to crop anyway, I get by. I also have a crazy Russian fisheye thing that's hilarious bad at anything less than f/11, but it's useful for shooting in small spaces, like the inside of the bus.
## Video
In addition to the photo gear above, which I also use for video, I have GoPro Hero 10. I mostly use it while driving the bus and have yet to actually make a movie out of any of the footage I shoot. But it piles up on my hard drive and I keep telling myself, one of these days.
## Audio
I like to record ambient sound. I use an Olympus LS-10 recorder, which has the lowest noise floor I can afford (it was $100 on eBay). I use a couple of microphones I made myself and occasionally a wireless Rode mic.
---
And there you have it. I am always looking for ways to get by with less, but after years of getting rid of stuff, I think I have reached something close to ideal.
[^1]: If you've never shot without autofocus don't try it on a modern lens. Most modern focusing rings are garbage because they're not meant to be used. Some Fujifilm lenses are an exception to that rule, but by and large don't do it. Get an old lens, something under $50, and teach yourself [zone focusing](https://www.ilfordphoto.com/zone-focusing/), use the [Ultimate Exposure Computer](http://www.fredparker.com/ultexp1.htm) to learn exposure, and just practice, practice, practice. Practice relentlessly and eventually you'll get there.
# SRC
## Scratch
I know several people who take tech holidays. I understand this urge, probably it's the only solution to what I think is the central problem of modern times -- distraction and the inability to do deep work. That said, I am going to try other things to tame the beast.
I don't think this is an entirely new problem, I'm not even sure it's any worse than it ever was, it's just that anyone in any age facing this problem is daunted and it somehow makes one feel better I think to fall back on the belief that it's worse than ever, even if perhaps it is not.
Whatever the case, whatever the diagnosis may be doesn't really interest me. I am most interested in a cure that works for me. That's not to be overly selfish, but to recognize that what works for me isn't going to work for everyone. I am writing it down mainly in case it does prove helpful to you.
The first step is to eliminate your ability to multitask.
I used to be a fan of browser tabs, but lately I have come to think that the tab model, the conception of their being other stuff right there on the screen next to what you're trying to focus on is actually a huge distraction. I stumbled on this idea quite by accident. I was on Ocracoke Island for a while and the cell reception was awful[^1]. I struggled to load page. Like type in a URL, go boil water for tea, make tea, come back and the page still hasn't loaded.
At some point I thought I wonder if I could at least get the text gist of what I'm after by loading the page in w3m, the text-only cli-based web browser Linux users like us install out of habit but rarely use. At least I rarely used it. But I opened it up and low and behold, it worked. It rendered the text I needed, and it didn't take long using the exact same connection that wouldn't load in a graphical browser.
That's not surprising I know, but yet it *was* surprising.
The downside to w3m was that I didn't have a clue how to use it. In particular I didn't know how to open links in the background, something I've relied on in the browser for who know how many years? I typed man w3m and started reading. I quickly discovered that like Vim, w3m uses the concept of the buffer. While it does support tabs, I've never felt the need for tabs in Vim so I thought maybe I don't need them in w3m either. I like the buffer concept. It's like a stack of things, where only the top thing is visible. To find the other things you have to call up a list and read through it. As far as I know while typing this, this document is the only one open in this application. That's a powerful way to focus. There is nothing else on the screen to distract me.
Here's a screenshot of what my desktop looks like when working this way with Vim:
This way of working helps my focus on the task as hand. There is nothing else anywhere on the screen and that's how I find I do my best work. I can quickly and easily call up a list of all the other files I've edited recently and see something like this:
But all that information is not visible to me the rest of the time.
[^1]: With the 3G spectrum shutdown this is increasingly the case in remote locations like Ocracoke.
I still use them. I keep open some tabs for the stock market because those are really applications running the browser.
## Intentional computing.
"We want to complexify our lives. We don’t have to, we want to. We wanted to be harried and hassled and busy. Unconsciously, we want the very things we complain about. For if we had leisure, we would look at ourselves and listen to our hearts and see the great gaping hold in our hearts and be terrified, because that hole is so big that nothing but God can fill it.
"Man is obviously made for thinking. Therein lies all his dignity and his merit; and his whole duty is to think as he ought. Now the order of thought is to begin with ourselves, and with our author and our end. Now what does the world think about? Never about that, but about dancing, playing the lute, singing, writing verse, tilting at the ring, etc., and fighting, becoming king, without thinking what it means to be a king or to be a man.
"I have often said that the sole cause of man’s unhappiness is that he does not know how to stay quietly in his room." - Blaise Pascal
#############
I believe that screens are a distraction from life.
There is no life in a screen. Life is what happens when we look away from this screen at the actual world around us. Perhaps it is strange to say this on a screen. Still, it feels like a truth we all know. We all used to know. At least, anyone over 35 knows. It is our task to carry this memory through. I am writing this for other people who want to spend less time staring at screens and more time not.
## Rules for Screens, Level Two
### Rule One: Prefer the Analog.
Here's the basic idea: only use a computer when you absolutely have to. Every time I reach for my laptop or phone I force myself pause and think -- do I need to do this right now? Yes? Okay, but could I do whatever it is I am about to do *without* a screen? Quite often the answer is yes. So that's what I do. I use some analog tool instead.
I write for a living, so when I am going to open my laptop chances are, I am about to write. For work, I do write on the laptop. There's too much to reference and link to not use a laptop. When I'm writing for myself though, I prefer to write things like this in a notebook with a pen.
### Rule Two: Batch Your Queries
Writing is as least as much research as it is actual typing, and this tends to be where I really get sucked in to the endlessness of the network. In an effort to cut down on the amount of time I spend "researching" stuff that I probably don't really need to research, I now write down questions on paper instead of immediately typing them in duckduckgo. Only later do I set aside some time to go back to this list and actually look things up.
From this I have learned something important: I am not a very good judge of what is important to me.
A lot of the things, *a lot* -- like almost all -- of the things I go to look up on the internet are utterly trivial things I don't really care about once the two seconds where I did care have passed. I am forced to confront this every time I go over my day's list of stuff to look up later. Of all the things I write down in my notebook to look up later, I actually end up looking up maybe one in twenty. Probably less. I have no real way to catalog how much screen time this has saved me, but it feels like it must be ages.
Once I've exhausted all avenues of analog deferment I still give myself one more ultimatium that I call the Outkast ultimatum: forever ever? Is it really really that important? Right now? Really, really? It might pass. It will probably pass. No? Okay then.
## Rule Three: Single-Task Computing
At the end of the day.What greets me when I open my laptop is an entirely blank screen. Well, actually it's a gloomy, slightly blurry picture I took a long time ago somewhere deep in the lagoons of the Florida panhandle. The point though is that I don't leave any applications open, ever. This encourages what I call single task computing: open an application, complete a task, close the application and then the laptop. The task is done, the last page has been reached so you shut the book, so to speak.
This is the opposite of how we approach computers much of the time, but I find that trying to multitask on a computer ends up with me distracted by all things shiny and next thing I know an hour has gone by. Single task computing prevents this, but you have to be vigilante. Applications encourage the opposite -- especially web browsers, where the tab essentially functions as an ever expanding task list.
Here's where I will suggest something heretical: hide your tab bar. Go into the browser's View menu and disable the tab bar. One tab, one task.
To understand how this can be powerful I have to take a technical detour. The application I do my writing in is called Vim. It is very old. Old enough that it predates the idea of a tab. Instead it has something it calls buffers. They're similar to the tabs in modern applications, but with one important difference: a buffer is a stack of pages with *only the top one visible*.
Tabs are always visible. Tabs are a todo list you don't need. Tabs will will steal your attention. Buffers will not. To change buffers requires a conscious decision and effort on your part. You have to call up a list of buffers and then switch to one. You will never accidentally switch to another buffer. I have used this to my advantage as a way to focus when writing for years.
You know that expression out of sight out of mind? That's buffers. For example I am typing this right now on a screen that looks like this:
That is about as uni-tasky as I've been able to make a screen.
What I've really done here is recreate the typewriter, and no one has ever accuse a typewriter of stealing their attention.
**Rule four: Use The Machine Lest It Use You**
The reason for single task computing is to make sure you always have a task when you sit down to your laptop. Do not use the machine if you don't need to. When you do that the machine is using you. There is no such thing as entertainment. Entertainment is a word designed to hide the truth: you are poring precisions hours of your life into the machine. Why does the machine want your life? I have no idea, but observation suggests it does. Don't give your life away.
**Rule 5: Balance the digital with the Analog**
This started as a throwaway ending, but in the months since I started experimenting with this I've come to believe that this is the most important rule: every time you interact with the digital, make a point to spend the same amount of time not interacting with the digital. If I edit photos for this site for 30 minutes, then I go and either make something tangible, write in a notebook, draw a postcard, whatever it may be for 30 minutes. If you don't feel like making something than go for a walk or play with your kid, or lie down in your yard if you have one. Read a book in a hammock. Just do something that does not involve a screen. And do it for the same amount of time you spent on the screen.
When I started doing this I found myself at a loss for what to do with myself, which was kind of terrifying. Was I really that used to mindlessly staring at a screen that I had nothing else to do? What did we use to do before we had screens? This is the advantage of being part of an analog generation -- the last of those for a while -- you can think back to the pre-digital era, retrace your steps as it were. This ended up unlocking a whole flood of memories that I walked through in great detail in meditation, most of that is not relevant here, but one thing that came back to me was that we used to publish zines. Now that's one of the things I've been doing with what I think of as "my analog time". Another things I did was type, on a typewriter. I'm on the hunt for a good super compact model. Yeah, I know it's like the worst hipster cliche. I don't care. I'm craving that analog pounding of the keys. The sound of something happening in the world.
In order to tell you how I have managed to reduce my screen time it helps to look at the bigger picture. Let's start with the book.
If the screen is a distraction from life than so is a book. A good book is every bit as hard to put down and distracting from the shared human existence we call life as a screen. And yet the book feels less problematic. I think this is because a book has borders. I has hard limits.
A book is a single world. The boundary of its world is well-defined. A book ends on the final page. Its depth is limited. We known our way in, we find our way out just as easily.
The story on the screen offers unlimited depth. A world without beginning or end. There is no final webpage. This is why we fret over the distractions of screens and never worry about books.
Two things started me on a path to less screen time. One was the birth of my children, which were a kind of sledge hammer reminder that nothing on a screen matters. None of it actually exists and none of it matters. The people in front of you, they matter. Not just the people though, the tangible world, the world of artifacts you can hold in your hand. This is what matters. I have not watched a television show or movie since they were born. That screen was easy to stop.
The other thing that really changed my relationship to the screen world was moving into the bus. This was another sledge hammer reminder that the physical world is what matters. Given a choice between staring at a computer screen at night and sitting around a fire, staring up at the night sky, is, well, not even a choice.
These two things greatly reduced how much time I spent using a screen. But then we left the road and rented a house for a year and something happened. I went back to staring at the screen way too much. All that distance I thought I had created? Gone with single change of behavior. I slid right back into those old habits of tucking the kids in and sitting down at my desk to stare at a screen.
I could defend myself and say that I wrote a novel in that time, but that only really accounts for maybe half the time I spent staring at that screen. And now that we're back in the road, I've once again had to wean myself off. I still pick campfires over screens, but like most of us I imagine, I still spend way to much time on a screen.
So how do you stop yourself from getting sucked into a world without end?
I want to spend less though, and so I've been working at this for some time, finding ways to not just get off the screen, but handle the things that I used to do on a screen, without needing a screen. This time I don't want to relapse should I be away from life on the road for some reason.
To lessen the time I spend using a screen I realized I needed to turn it into a book. I needed to put boarders on it and make sure it has a last page. In order to defeat that time sucking endless form of the network we're going to have to put some endings in place.
What I've done is to create many endings. Endings for every beginning. The best ending in this case is the beginning that never begins. Here are my five rules for avoiding the digital.
I have no way to measure how much time browsing in a single window with buffers bidden away until I need them has saved me, but again I believe it is significant.
Now I do leave some background tabs open, mostly investing related tabs because I am a fairly active trader and I like to run through my charts every morning. But the rest of the day, I don't see those tabs.
I got to thinking about this recently because I was out on Ocracoke Island in the Outer Banks for a while where the cell reception was awful[^1]. It was a struggle to load a webpage. I would type in a URL, go boil water for tea, make the tea, come back and the page still hasn't loaded. It was bad enough that I pulled out w3m, the text based browser that started life in 1995 and hasn't changed much since. I opened it up and low and behold, it worked. It rendered the text I needed, I got the info I wanted, and it didn't take long using the exact same connection that wouldn't load in a graphical browser.
Enthused I set out to figure out how to use w3m. How, for example, did I open a link in a tab? Well, you can do that, but before I figured out how I learned that w3m uses the concept of buffers, much like Vim. Because I am lazy and familiar with buffers from Vim, I just configured a shortcut to show the w3m buffer list and I was on my way. I never open links in a new tab anymore, I know that all the previous tabs I've visited are there in the buffer list.
Now buffers might seem like tabs in some since, and perhaps like browsing history in another sense. They're actually neither for a variety of reasons, but the most important difference is that a buffer is a stack of pages with *only the top one visible*. Tabs are always visible. Tabs will steal your attention, buffers will not unless you choose to view the list of them. You know that expression out of sight out of mind? That's buffers. I have no way to measure how much time browsing in a single window with buffers bidden away until I need them has saved me, but again I believe it is significant.
prefer analog over digital
batch your queries before going digital
single task computing
buffers are better than tabs
get in and get out.
single task computing. open an application, do a task and then close it. I think this is ostly a web browser problem for most people, bug for me it's a terminal problem as well, there is always something I could be doing in a terminal, there is always one open. Just like there is always a browser windows open. But what if I worked differently, what if I close out that windows when the task was done? What if I put an edge on it? Gave it a shape that also meant an end to it? Would that just be more beginnings and endings, or would that maybe mean a greater space between myself and the machine?
Fail gracefully when possible (an elevator is still stairs even when broken mitch hedburg joke)
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.
Much ink was spilled, many hands wrung, many complaints lodged about our addiction to screens. All this worry though, about what? I think the answer is distraction. This is what western philosophers -- and ordinary people like you and I -- have worried about for centuries. The only difference to day is the degree for distraction. Why distraction? I think distraction bothers us because it keeps us from attending to the adventure of human existence.
At least I for one, want to spend more time attending to the adventure of shared human existence than I do screens. Screens are ultimately both addictive and boring.
Interestingly though, what's true of a screen is also true of a book. After all a good book is every bit as hard to put down and as distracting from shared human existence as a screen. And yet the book feels less problematic. I think this is because a book has borders, has hard limits, has edges.
A book's distraction from life is much less consuming than a computer screen. It is a single story. Its depth is limited. A book ends on the final page. The boundary of its world is well-defined. We known our way in, we find our way out just as easily.
