path: root/essays.txt

# Unpubbed

## No Cavalry—what to do?




Once you accept that there is no cavalry coming, or perhaps more conservatively, that you don't need a cavalry to come, or, at the very least make the decision that you want to life your life in such a way that you don't *want* to need a cavalry, the question arises: what then do I do? How do I get from where I am, to that state of mental, physical, and spiritual security? 

Another way to put this would be: How do I begin to take responsibility for and become accountable for myself, my family, my world?

I have no idea. Which is to say that I know what I am doing for those things, but I don't know what you should do—that's for you to figure out. If I told you what to do you'd just be dependant on me, no better off than being dependant on the cavalry. 

No one can tell you how to get on the path to self-dependency because no one other than you knows what your path to self-dependency looks like. You have to find it. And you'll know when you have. Find it is the fun part. Don't worry if it takes a while. It took me the better part of two decades. But I know people who figured it out much quicker.

So I am not going to prescribe some recipe for how you can take responsibility for your world, but I am going to tell you something that might help you figure out your own path: you first have to reclaim your time. One of the things that keeps us dependant on the cavalry is our perceived lack of time to do anything about it. How are you going to learn how to rebuild your leaf blower motor when you work 9-5 and spend an hour on each side of that commuting? From 8-6 you have no time for leaf blowers. Throw in breakfast and dinner and suddenly from 7-7 you have no time for anything else.



How do you find time to build relationships with your neighbors when you spend 12 hours (or more) of your waking day working?  


In the first essay on this subject I suggested that you stop using money to meet all your needs. That is, begin to build relationships with people such that you can begin to meet some of your needs by offering something of yourself to others. I don't know what that might look like for you, but here's a quick example: when we lived out in woods in South Carolina much of the land surrounding our house was leased to a hunt club. In exchange for keeping an eye on the area, we were free to hunt. Actually we were offered other people's deer, though we had to decline for lack of freezer space. 

If you live in Manhattan this scenario isn't going to come up. But if you start trying to meet people, to listen to them, you will build relationships that lead to things like this. Perhaps not free food, perhaps it will end up being chess lessons or tk, but it will be something and your life will be richer, and slightly, ever so slightly less dependant on the system of The Machine.

This will also give you agency. You are the one with the connection to others, nothing is mediating that. This is agency. Agency reduces stress. It helps you to see bad things, bad situations for what they are: bad situations. When you have agency and the self-confidence that it, along with experience, give you, you begins to see that with sufficient resources—time, effort, knowledge, money, etc -- any problem can be solved.



## 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.

# OK Computer, Goodbye

date:2024-09-14 17:42:40
url:/essay/spirit/ok-computer-goodbye

My laptop broke the other day. It was third laptop that's broken on me this year. Perhaps I am having a bad year. MOre likely laptops are. Most consumer gadgets are crap these days. Everyone knows this, I know it better than most given that I test consumer gadgets for a living. Did I have a bad run of laptops? Yes. But the more laptops you have, the more bad runs you're going to have because consumer gadgets are crap.

Anyway after the third one died I did not have a backup. I was forced to borrow my wife's MacBook Air (which has outlasted 8 PC laptops[^1]. I am not a Mac person. I was, but then at some point I felt constrained by MacOS and switched to Linux, which let me do things my own way, however I wanted. Going back to the Mac was disorienting. The keyboard shortcuts are different, I needed to fix things I didn't on Linux. It was rough. 

And, even once I did get things working inn a way that didn't drive me crazy, I was sharing the laptop. My wife tutors students 3 hours a day most days. During that time I had nothing to work with.

And I loved it.

I hate screens. I stare at one far too much. I have too. This is the compromise I make for the ability to live the way we do. It's a compromise I make knowingly, gratefully even, but it is still a compromise, with negative trade offs.

What I did not realize is how much time I was spending staring at a screen when I did not need to be staring at a screen. It's deceptively easy to tell yourself you're working when you type a few words but then when you're done, you just "look something up real quick" and then next thing you know you've spent half an hour researching the best way to some weird thing you'll probably never do anyway. 

This is my vice anyway. I know I have it. It's part of what makes me good at my job, but it also leads me to spend more time than I need to staring at screen. 

This got me thinking about that old axiom, if you don't have it, you don't need it. Do I really need a laptop?

## Once And Future Luddite

I hated computers as a kid. Didn't like video games. Didn't really interact with a computer other than to type up school papers. That was true all the way through college. Even then, when all the nerdy people I knew were hanging out on the proto internets of BBS and tk, I just didn't care. I was out rock climbing, body surfing, writing, and playing music. Those were the things I obsessed over, screens didn't have any appeal. I wrote in notebooks. I recorded music to tape. Why would I need a screen?

This continued until about 2001, when, through a variety of coincidences, blind luck, and, I've always assumed, some coffee spilled on keyboards in the offices of a place called Wired, I was made apparent to me that I might be able to make money writing about things that happened on screens. I happened to be standing outside a shoe store on Broadway in Manhattan when I realized this, which is an odd detail that I feel is somehow meaningful, though I haven't yet figured out how it's meaningful.

Whatever the case, at the time this door swung open I was a chef running a restaurant, working 60-70 hours a week in a hot, stressful kitchen. I loved it, but it was a lot of work. The idea that I could make money without leaving the house was an absolute revelation. Sign me up.

So I pulled out my then girlfriend's Macbook and started figuring out how to build stuff on the web. About as fast as I learned it, I wrote about it for Webmonkey. That was possible back in those days because there wasn't a lot to learn and there weren't that many people learning it. 

The rest as they say, is history. I wrote for Webmonkey on a freelance basis for the next four years (while traveling the world for some of it), and weirdly, I started actually building things on screens. That became a second source of income, but it also because a kind of obsession. 

At first it was just staying on top of what was happening, what I needed to write about for Webmonkey and what I could use to make this website better. I started off with shared hosting accounts, but before long I was working with real servers, both virtual and bare metal (clients). I kept going deeper down into the stack as it's known. I wrote about this recently for Wired if you're interested in that journey.

Suffice to say that in the end I became quite capable of doing just about anything with a computer. The Luddite had succumbed to the screen.

But the more I shared my wife's laptop, the more I realized I didn't care anymore. I don't want to think about technology anymore, my job no longer requires me too, so why am I? In the end it felt like an addiction. 

Maybe that's too strong of a word, but it had compulsive elements, born of that weird combination of boredom and ease, that reminded me of drinking.

What if... I just didn't get a new laptop?

So that's what I did. Or didn't. 

I got all the data off my hard drive onto an external SSD, which I plug into my wife's laptop when I need to edit photos or videos, which turns out to be pretty much the only time I need a laptop. 

The rest of the time I am just writing. I’ve been writing more on paper, even for work. When it’s time to type things up, I use my $75 tablet or an old iPad we all share (and hardly use).

The iPad is especially compelling for me to work on because I don't like it. There's no way to hack it. It's a highly managed, father-knows-best-style device that's the antithesis of what I liked about computers -- bending them to my will. Oddly enough, this makes the iPad perfect for how I want to live now, with less time spent on a screen, less time spent thinking about digital problems, and more time spent with my family, working on projects that exist in the real world. Projects made of wood and metal, governed by things like physical limitations and weather, requiring sweat and blood and maybe even bone.


[^1]: Before you think, wow, this guy spends a lot of money on laptops, understand that I only bought 2 of those 8, the rest were loaners sent to me to test. But they all really did die in one way or another while the Macbook keeps going.

# We'll Make It Work

date:2024-06-16 11:06:28
url:/essay/spirit/well-make-it-work

The title of this post comes from my wife. I'd more likely say, *We'll Figure It Out*, but that's very different. Sometimes you do need to figure things out, but more often you have to take them as they are and Make It Work. 

We'll Make It Work. This phrase, her way of thinking about problems essentially, is the only reason we're still out here.

Broken down in the [high desert of California](https://luxagraf.net/jrnl/2017/12/terrible-horrible-no-good-very-bad-week)? We'll make it work. Lost my income right after moving to Mexico? We'll make it work. [Blown a head gasket](https://luxagraf.net/jrnl/2022/10/going-down-swinging) in the middle of nowhere Colorado? We'll make it work. [Brakes failing](https://luxagraf.net/jrnl/2022/03/more-adventures-travco-brakes)? We'll make it work. [Brand new Jeep dead](https://luxagraf.net/jrnl/2023/12/repair-fail)? We'll make it work. World ending in a rain of fire? We'll make it work.

I never really thought much about this attitude until recently when it started to come up a lot as we contemplate some big changes in our lives. I would raise potential objections to plans, and Corrinne would shrug and say "we'll make it work." Other times she would say, "how the #%$& are we going to do that?" And I'd shrug and say "we'll figure it out." It works both ways, we complement each other in this regard. Things I worry about she does not. And things she worries about don't even cross my mind until she asks about them. 

And then we each shrug at the other. *We'll make it work*.

This I realized is what makes us able to do this. We're not rich. We're not all that smart. We're not particularly skilled. But we're willing to do whatever is necessary to make things work. 

Sometimes that means sacrifices are made. Sometimes that means working really hard. Sometimes that means letting go of preconceived ideas. Sometimes it means really accepting that something has happened. You'd be surprised at how far accepting the reality of your situation goes toward getting you out of it. [There is no cavalry](https://luxagraf.net/essay/spirit/the-cavalry-isnt-coming), the sooner you accept where you are, the sooner you'll get going again.

Sometimes making it work might mean coming up with a new plan. It might mean you don't make it out west one year. It might mean you spend some extra time in California. It might mean you camp in a mechanic's driveway from time to time. 

I am very leery of the word compromise. The way most people use this word it seems to me means "mutual defeat by concession." No one gets what they want, no one is happy. That's no way to live. If you're compromising by making concessions, you're doing it wrong. 

A good compromise is when you say yes to everything, even to things you don't necessarily want to do. Sure, we'll go over here to the Biggest Week in America Birding and we'll also go over here to the diamond mines. We'll cross this bridge, but we'll also cross this other one even though I might want to avoid the second one. Doesn't matter what I want. Make it work. Everyone gets what they want. Are there times when that's not possible? Sure, but we'll make it work.

What *We'll Make It Work* always means, more than anything else, is being flexible and fluid in your thinking and actions. It means not clinging to preconceived ideas when it turns out the facts on the ground are different. Making it work might mean you need rethink the path to your goals. 

We'll make it work does not mean it's going to be easy. That's okay, the easy way is rarely [the way](https://luxagraf.net/jrnl/2022/01/path). The internet loves to make memes of Bruce Lee's dictum, *be like water*[^1], but few people think this all way through. Sure, water flows, water carves canyons with its patience, but water also doesn't only goes on its path. It never stays where it is and it never takes a route that it is not meant to go. Some routes that it does take mean it smashes into rocks and is pulverized until it becomes mist, barely water at all anymore. Then it slowly falls back, becomes flowing water again, but is different somehow, changed in unaccountable ways. You want to be like water? Be prepared for the world to turn you into mist at times. Make that work.

Above all else, We'll Make It Work means that you have to have faith in yourself and whomever else you're with that you can make it work. You have to know it in your bones. You can (and should!) second guess yourself on the particulars of making things work, but know that you can. Everyone can. It just takes faith and discipline. Learn to make your own choices and craft your own life. Commit to making it work and you will find a way to make it work.

[^1]: I could write thousands of words unpacking this simple idea, because there is so much here, but I will spare you.

# Simple Machines, Complex Tasks

date:2024-05-15 17:56:42
url:/essay/craft/simple-machines-complex-tasks

I picked up my dad's Pentax camera sometime in the 1980s and was hooked from day one. By high school I was committed. I set off to college with the vague idea that I would major in photography, but I dropped out before that ever came to fruition.

Like most photographers I made the jump to digital cameras some time ago. I sold my last film camera right before we left on this trip. It was a sad moment, but I hadn't shot with the camera (a Nikon F3) in years. I knew there were people out there still shooting film, and I wanted the camera to be used, not sit around gathering dust, so I sold it. 

I didn't give film much thought after that. From a technical standpoint 35mm film is massively more expensive, has less resolving power, and it's more difficult to work with, develop, print, etc. 

Then, about six months ago, an editor at Wired reached out and asked if I would put together a guide to film photography. This caught me a little off guard. Film? Did you really say film photography? 

I said I would so long as Wired bought me a new film camera because I didn't think they would do that. Surprisingly, my editor agreed. I went on eBay and bought an old Nikon FE2, which was sort of the less pro version of the F3. It came with a Nikkor 50mm f/1.4 lens. I bought some Tri-X, and some Velvia, and went wandering around the Outer Banks trying to remember how to shoot film. 

Film photography is not like riding a bike. Everything I once knew... I forgot. But the technical hurdles didn't really bother me much after the first (embarrassingly bad) roll I developed. 

I realized pretty quickly that more than nailing complex exposures, what I really needed to do was slow down my whole way of working. I was trying to shoot film as if it were digital. It is most emphatically not digital. It has a very different process. Film has to be shot calmly, carefully, and consciously. 

This I realized is also what elevates something to a craft, doing it calmly, carefully, and consciously. 

Could you do with with a digital camera? Sure, but it's not required. The digital images that aren't quite right can be easily fixed later on your laptop. Film cannot. My experience has been that if something doesn't require me to work at something more like craft, often I do not.

What the Nikon FE2 forced me to do was slow down. You can't just mash the shutter, you have to take everything in first. Look closely at where the light meter is reading on the subject vs the background, which raise the question, what is the subject? Should I recompose? What if I moved so that it was better framed? And so on. Then you have to turn the dials to match the light meter's reading of scene. Then check your composition again. At this slower pace there is more space to reflect on what you're doing, what you're after, and this sharpens your vision. It gives you room to think. You can wander through your memory even, remember other images you've seen or made, and use those reflections to steer your hand now. It's almost like the process becomes similar to reading a book, you generally don't rush through a book, the world of the book just unfolds at the pace of your reading. 

Why would a 40-year-old camera enable all that? I'm not entirely sure, but I think it has something to do with the simplicity of the machine and the complexity of the task. There must be a balance here, but I think on the whole what humans really need are simple machines that enable complex tasks.

The FE2 is very simple. It lets me make the complex decisions. I am in charge of focusing the lens. I am in charge of figuring out the correct exposure. The camera gives me a light reading of the scene in front of me, but it's an average, and doesn't take into account the characteristics of the film I'm shooting, the range of light and dark in the scene, where the subject is, or any other of a dozen things I am expected to take into account. The machine is very simple, the task is very complex.

Digital cameras are the opposite. They are very complex machines that can do 80 percent of what I have to do myself with the FE2, all I really have to do is press the shutter button. The machine is very complex, the task is very simple. While the result may be equal, or even better, the satisfaction in the task is less.

We often focus on the results without giving much thought to the process. I think taking the opposite view, that the process is what matters, is the beginning of entering into a craft. Not this is a *thing* I am making, but this is the *process* that makes this thing. In many (most?) cases this approach also leads to better outcomes.

It's tempting to think that it is a luxury to have the time to fully engage the process like this. It's easy to say, well, sometimes I just want to get the shot of my kids blowing out the candles or perhaps dinner needs to be ready before the kids are off to juijitsu or baseball or what have you. I don't have time to make this a process, it just needs to get done. But if I'm honest with myself, these are cop-outs. If I'm short on time it's because I didn't allot enough time for what I needed to do. Okay, start sooner. You have to give yourself the time to slow down by carving it out. Calm, careful, *conscious*.

And sure, not everything needs to be a craft. Not everything needs to be raised to that level. I had a friend who would get all zen about doing the dishes. Maybe you do that too. That's not me. I just want the damn dishes clean. But if there's something you do a lot, I find that my enjoyment of it goes way up when I slow down and really, carefully sweat over the details. The results are usually better too.

I made an offhand comment in a post about [Pensacola's Navy museum](https://luxagraf.net/jrnl/2024/02/fly-navy) that I think is related. I was wondering aloud really, but I wrote: what if hard is good, struggle is good, and that’s why the past is so appealing?

What if that's what makes something a craft rather than a task that must be done? What if it's supposed to be, if not hard, then at least laborious, done carefully rather than rushed? Isn't that the whole point -- to do things well? And doesn't that usually mean doing them slowly, carefully? I think that's what film is trying to tell me: it's the complexity of the task, the difficulty of the task that makes it enjoyable, and more broadly, that the more I slow down, the more I can do carefully and consciously, the better life will be.

# The Spirit of Craft

date:2024-04-28 17:16:10
url:/essay/spirit/spirit-of-craft

> I am convinced, both by faith and experience, that to maintain one's self on this earth is not a hardship but a pastime <cite>--Henry David Thoreau</cite>

I enjoy making things. The things are often irrelevant, it's the making that I enjoy. It reminds me of traveling. When you make something you are completely absorbed in that process to the point that you forget everything else, forget the world, save this tiny part of it that you are reshaping. 

Travel is the same way, there is only right now. A complete absorption, obsession even, with the world in front of you. The plantains and steak on the plate, the potholes in the road, the birds calling in the cold morning air. Wherever you are, there is only that, the rest of the world pales, ceases to exist. It's a state of ease, of relaxed absorption, of freedom. Realizing that you have nowhere to go, nowhere to be, nothing to do to maintain yourself in this world, save to be where you are, doing what you're doing. 

This is freedom. Doing things. Making things. Same thing.

Yet one of the current cultural ideals is getting others to do things for you. Outsourcing your life. Someone else mows the lawn. Someone else cleans the house. Someone else fixes the car. This is called success. 

I ran across Hegel's paradigm of servant and master the other day, which I don't think I've thought of since I dropped out of college in 1994. I was struck though at how well Hegel defines modern culture. If you're not familiar, in Hegel's story the master grows increasingly impoverished through idleness while the servant grows daily in skill and wisdom because he is doing things for himself. So one starts dependent on the other, the other ends up dependent. The pivotal moment of Hegel is when the servant realizes he no longer needs the master, what he needs is to perfect his skill further. 

We're in danger of becoming the "master", who is really master in name only. I'm not saying you have to get out and mow your lawn to achieve freedom, but I am not alone in thinking that in the pursuit of "freedom from" we're losing our "freedom to"... to do, to make, to say, to think. 

It's not just that we're becoming masters of nothing, it's that we've lost the very resourcefulness that marks a truly free human being, one who is independent and capable of solving problems on his or her own, thinking for his or herself. Contrary to what marketers are selling, freedom is in doing, in making, growing in skill and wisdom.

The more often you can do this, the better life will be.

Why? That's the question isn't it? 

When making, your concentration becomes sharply focused on the task at hand and everything else that makes up you fades away. The chattering I that is usually busy thinking and analyzing is set aside while someone else drives the ship. It's an odd thing when you experience it. Something working through you. A kind of communion with the gods perhaps. The Greeks held this to be true of great craftsmen[^1], that Athena, or Hephaestus, or whoever governed the craft at hand was in fact working through the craftsman to create the work. In this sense the craftsman is no longer there. They become a conduit for the gods to move in the world.

Most people I know who are great craftsmen speak in these terms, saying that they do not know where their ideas come from, nor are they conscious of the particular skills they're using at any given moment, they simply do, they simply are, or are not in this case. As a skilled woodworker I know says, the key to being good at anything is to get out of your own way.

This is how making things becomes a spiritual discipline, an act of letting the gods move the world through you. "For true masonry is not held together by cement but by gravity, that is to say, by the warp of the world, by the stuff of creation itself," writes Cormac McCarthy in *The Stonemason*. "The keystone that locks the arch is pressed in place by the thumb of God." 

[^1]: This is a gendered word where I do not intend a gender, anyone can be a creator, a craftsman, but English has no better term that I know of, sorry.

# Review: UG Monk Analog Notecard Productivity System

date:2024-02-29 09:42:17
url:/essay/tools/ug-monk-analog-notecard-productivity-system

Every morning I do the same thing. Rain, shine, wind, snow. Doesn't matter. I get up, go outside, and either submerge myself in cold water (if we're near some) or use a bandanna to dowse myself in cold water. Then I do some spiritual exercises, between 200-400 kettlebell swings (depending on the day), and then make some tea and eat breakfast with my family. 

This ritual forms an anchor from which I rarely deviate, but the rest of my day is not structured at all. My job requires flexibility. Some days I need to sit and write, other days I need to be out wandering around testing cameras, paddle boards, backpacks, and other things.

To balance this out I recently added a second ritual at the end of my day thanks to a little wooden box called Analog.

### Analog, a Japanese tea ceremony for your todo list.

My work day usually starts around 9 AM. I pick up a note card that has the tasks I am focusing on that day and start doing them. I don't have to think about what I should do, spend any time planning what to do, and I don't for the love of god start my day by looking at my email. I don't even open my laptop. I pick up a notecard. At the top of the card today it says, *write about notecard ritual*. I start writing. 

I have been doing this for decades. I wrote a [short blurb](https://www.wired.com/story/best-paper-planners/#indexcards) about how I use note cards as a "planner" for my friend Medea Giordano's [guide to paper planners](https://www.wired.com/story/best-paper-planners/). I was surprised by how much email I got from this little thing I contributed. Eventually I wrote a more extensive guide to [how I use note cards as a planning tool](https://luxagraf.net/essay/craft/getting-things-done-with-notecards). This led someone to email me and ask if I had tried something called Analog, from a company with the curious name of UG Monk.

I wrote [a review of Analog for Wired](https://www.wired.com/review/ugmonk-analog-starter-kit/), so if you want more on the nuts and bolts of what Analog is and why I like it, read that. What I want to talk about here is something I only mention in passing in the Wired review, that is the potential usefulness of ritual in everyday things.

Back to the notecard I picked up about 10 minutes ago, the one that said, write Analog review. This notecard which holds everything I need to do, gets filled out in the evening of the day before, when I stop working. 

Before I got the Analog Starter Kit, this process was somewhat haphazard. For someone whose morning ritual is well honed, my afternoons are more chaos. Analog changed that to some degree. The process I go through did not change, but the way I did it and the focus I bring to it now is greater than before. Why? Because I have a beautiful walnut box now.

Ritual is important because it it makes mundane activities sacred. Eating a cracker is nothing. The ritual of the Eucharistic makes the cracker more than a cracker. 

I would never want anyone to think that going over the stuff you need to do is a religious ceremony, but if you can bring a little of that intensity to other things it can help. Ritual is both a way of focusing, and a way of reinforcing the behavior. Pick the right rituals, the right behaviors, and you can change your life. 

I think ritual is important because if you look at something like Analog, which is $108 plus tax, it might seem like a lot to spend on something for your todo list. But if the money spent, the object acquired, raises the level of respect you have for what you're doing, if it helps bring a ritual aspect that inspires you to sit down and use them then $108 is nothing.

This is why I say Analog is a Japanese tea ceremony for your todo list.

If you're not familiar with a Japanese tea ceremony it's an extremely ritualized way of preparing and drinking tea (matcha). It started in the 16th century as an artistic hobby of the upper class and warrior elite, and eventually spread to wealthy merchants and others looking for formal ways forge and reinforce strong social ties. The ceremony itself is highly choreographed and to do it right requires years of study. It's usually done in a small room, modeled on a hermit’s hut, with room for four or five people. The point is to pull people out of the mundane world of their busy lives to temporarily focus on the tea and conversation.

Creating a ritual around a todo list can have the same effect, helping you to withdraw from the busyness of actual doing, and focus on why you're doing anything at all, and what you hope to get out of it. Do you need this for everything? No, there are some things you just have to do and you know why, like the emails you need to send and phone calls you need to make. But then, why are making those phone calls and sending those emails? Uh, because I have a job. Okay, but why do you have *that* job? What do you get out of it that you don't out of any other job?

These are the sorts of higher level questions that are worth thinking about on a regular basis.Not everyday, maybe not even weekly, but once a month it's worth reflecting on why you're doing what you doing, not just what you need to get done. This is what Analog has made me thing about more.

### Daily Reviews With Analog

At the end of the day -- which might be anywhere from 3 to 8 depending on the day -- I sit down with my notecard and I see what I didn't get to that day. I decided if those things are things I am still committed to doing, and, if so, I write them on a card for the next day. I also mark them as deferred by using a >, which I think I stole from bullet journaling.

Then I pull out the notecard that holds my weekly tasks, another with monthly tasks, and another with seasonal tasks (quarterly tasks if you prefer), along with a notebook that contains my longer term, strategic goals and list of projects. I review all these lists and make sure that tasks are getting done so projects are moving forward. Based on all this I write down my goals for the next day.

Once I have the next day's todo list filled out, I put it on top of my Analog box and go do something else for the remainder of the day.

This little review ritual might sound complex, but it's not. It took longer to write it than it does to do it. I spend about five minutes on this each afternoon. Sunday mornings I spend about an hour going through the same process, but at higher level, looking at my longer term goals and figuring out what needs to get done in the next next season, next year, next five years.

Analog does two things that I think are important. The first is physical -- it gives me a place to put my notecards. I put everything in the box, then I can put it away and my work day feels done. Pull it out again the next morning and I know it's time to focus. It's a good way to bookend my days, which is particularly helpful for people whose work varies from day to day.

The second is the ritual aspect. I think a lot of times I get caught up in rushing to do stuff without putting in the more difficult, higher level thinking that ought to precede putting items on your todo list. Why am I doing this? That kind of thinking comes out more when you turn your daily review into a kind of tea ceremony, which, at least for me, Analog very much helps to do. Everyone's job is different of course. I'm not sure a ceremonial ritual around my todo list would have been as helpful when I was running a restaurant. But it might have. It might have been a faster way to figure out that running a restaurant wasn't what I wanted to do with my life. So maybe I take that back. Maybe we could all use a little tea ceremony in our days. Whether Analog fits into that is your own decision, but it's definitely working for me.

# The Nothing That Is

date:2024-02-25 18:29:03
url:/essay/spirit/the-nothing-that-is

> For the listener, who listens in the snow, <br />
> And, nothing himself, beholds <br />
> Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is. <br />
<cite>-- [Wallace Stevens][1]</cite>

Long leaf pine bark is a patchwork quilt of overlapping grays, reds, browns, flaking to leave bluish tinged valleys between them. It reminds me of the canyon country of the Colorado plateau, a miniature world of mesas and canyons turned on its side and drizzled with rivers of sap. 

Some of the same forces of wind and water are at work on the pine as they are in the canyons of Utah and Colorado. An echo of the endless in the finite. 

<div class="cluster">
    <span class="row-2">
<img src="images/2024/2024-02-26_163406_fort-pickens.jpg" id="image-3910" class="cluster pic66" />
<img src="images/2024/2010-07-10_141628_dinosaur-national-park.jpg" id="image-3909" class="cluster pic66" />
    </span>
</div>

The sound is the same. The rush of pine needles catching the wind. From damp maritime forests to box canyons in the southwest, the under story may change from palmettos to red-barked manzanita, but the over story remains the same. The pines are always singing.

The breath of the world. Air rushing from one place to another, a force we can only see the effect of, never the thing itself. The nothing that is.

On cool nights I leave the windows open to hear the wind. When we lived in a house I would sleep on the couch on windy nights. Only a few of our windows opened, the best was right next to the couch. I propped it open with a dowel and would fall asleep to puffs of wind on my face. 

Before dawn, before the birds are up, there is only the sea and the wind. I lay awake in the 5 AM darkness, listening to the pines softly roar. The low music of the pines is joined by the dry rattle of oak leaves, the snap of a towel left out to dry over night. The wind like fingers tracing over the land, feeling their way through our small slice of the world.

I think of going out into it. It is warm under the covers, but I always think of Marcus Aurelius, "what do I have to complain of, if I'm going to do what I was born for -- the things I was brought into the world to do? Or is this what I was created for? To huddle under the blankets and stay warm?" I get up.

Outside there is already a pink and yellow glow on the horizon. The wind comes in gusts, swaying pines, rattling oaks. I stand facing east, watching the sun. Just before dawn the wind dies down, the temperature drops noticeably, as if the world draws in a deep breath and holds. And then there is light.






[1]: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45235/the-snow-man-56d224a6d4e90

# Developing Photos With Darktable

date:2023-12-19 12:25:19
url:/essay/craft/darktable-getting-started

Ansel Adams said "the negative is the score, and the print the performance.” Were he shooting digital today, I suspect Adams would rephrase that to: ***the RAW file is the score, and the print the performance.*** 

Today's RAW file is somewhat like a film negative. RAW files are considerably more malleable, but you get the idea. If you want more control over the final look of your photographs, you want to shoot RAW format images. These days nearly every camera can shoot RAW files -- even my four-year-old phone can do it. You may have to set your camera to shoot RAW though, most are only set to capture JPGs out of the box. Look through your manual or menus until you find "image format", which should have options for JPG and RAW. You want RAW. You can shoot in RAW *and* JPG if you want, but I tend to shoot just RAW.

The problem with RAW is that they are the equivalent of film negatives. You have to "develop" them. As with developing film, the process of developing a RAW file takes time and skill. When you're first starting it can seem overwhelming, which is probably why you're here. Don't worry. Remember what Thoreau said, "nothing can be more useful to a man than the determination not to be hurried." I'm sure Thoreau would say "a person" if he were writing today, but the point is, relax, take a breath, there's no need to rush, it'll make sense eventually.

There are several tools out there to develop RAW files, the most common is Adobe Lightroom. I used to use Lightroom, but found its tool limiting after trying Darktable, an open source RAW developer. Darktable bills itself as "a photography workflow application and raw developer... it manages your digital negatives in a database, lets you view them through a zoomable lighttable and enables you to develop raw images and enhance them."

There are a lot of great tutorials out there on Darktable. The problem I noticed as I was learning is that tutorials go out of date, especially video tutorials. Videos show you what to do better than words can sometimes, but they're a pain to re-shoot and keep up-to-date so hardly anyone does. When I was learning Darktable, I found it frustrating to watch good tutorials, but discover that the features described no longer worked the same way in Darktable. I am trying to avoid doing that here. Darktable is updated twice a year at the moment, so not that often, but things do change. And I find new tricks from time to time too. I will keep this guide updated to reflect both changes in Darktable and changes in my own workflow.

Okay, ready? Let's get started.

---

##### Table of Contents

- [Setting Up Darktable](#setup)
- [Learning Your Way Around Darktable](#around)
- [Customizing Development Modules](#customize)
- [Example Quick Edits (Video)](#example)
---

### Set Up Darktable {: #setup }

The first thing to do is [download Darktable](https://www.darktable.org/install/) for your PC. Darktable is available for Linux, Mac, and Windows. 

Once you have Darktable installed, open it up and you will get a blank library screen. Before you do anything else, let's check some settings to make sure we're all on the same page. Click the gear icon toward the top of the screen to the right side:

<img src="images/2023/darktable40-settings.jpg" id="image-3854" class="picwide" />

Click the Processing tab on the left side of the settings panel and make sure that **Auto Apply Pixel Workflow defaults** is set to **scene-referred (filmic)**, like this:

<img src="images/2023/darktable40-processing-settings_6cAuG3R.jpg" id="image-3849" class="picfull caption" />

This will ensure that what's applied by default when you import an image is the same as what's applied to mine. This isn't necessarily the "right" thing to use, scene-referred (sigmoid) will also work, but it won't produce the same results as the rest of these tutorials. 

We're done with settings. Hit escape to close the settings window and save your changes. Yes, that's weird way to do it, but that's the way it works in Darktable (on Linux at least). 

Let's add some images to our Library view so we can explore both that and the darktable view. To do that you want to open the import module in the upper left corner of the screen and click the **add to library** button.

<img src="images/2023/darktable40-import_zzr1pfq.jpg" id="image-3851" class="picwide caption" />

Naming and organizing your images is a topic onto itself. I am going to assume that you have a system for this and that you don't want Darktable to move or rename images. Because you don't, it's tools are not the best for that. 

I have a custom shell script that renames my images for me, but you can do the same thing using [Rapid Photo Downloader](https://damonlynch.net/rapid/) on Linux. I'm sure MacOS and Windows have similar apps (if you have suggestions, drop a comment below and I will add them here).

When it comes to organizing images, use what works for you. What I do is use a directory structure of a folder for the year, then within that folders that start with the month number, followed by the event name. So if I took some pictures at Edisto Beach in January of 2024, those images would live in `2024/01_edisto-beach`. Within that folder every image is named YYYY-MM-DD_HHMMSS_event-name.ARW. Which works out to a timestamp with the event name on the end so I can sort them by date taken in any application, including the file browser, but also know roughly what they are without opening them (thanks to the event name on the end). Anyway, this is what works for me, do what works for you.

The Darktable import images dialog has a few options worth understanding. The "select only new pictures" option is a handy option if you regularly add more images to existing folders as I do. Darktable **WILL NOT** automatically add new images to your database. You must go and import them manually, even if the folder is already in Darktable. If you check the "select only new pictures" option, the new images will be automatically selected when you open that folder in the import dialog.

The other option worth knowing is find new images recursively. I leave this unchecked because I never import a folder with another folder inside it, but if you do, this will tell Darktable to import all the images, no matter how many folders deep they might be buried.

Also see the [relevant Darktable Manual entry for the import dialog](https://docs.darktable.org/usermanual/4.4/en/module-reference/utility-modules/lighttable/import/#import-dialog).

###Learning Your Way Around Darktable  {: #around }

Now that you've got Darktable installed and few images imported, let's figure out what we can do. 

The main view is the Lighttable. This is modeled after the old lightbox we used to put slides on then stare at with a loupe until we were half blind. Fortunately in Darktable you can just zoom in and out. 

I use a laptop and rarely get out a mouse, so I prefer to navigate Darktable mostly using keyboard shortcuts. There are some good built-in shortcuts, like using **`d`** and **`l`** to switch between **`d`**arkroom and **`l`**ighttable views. You can do that now if you want to see Darktable's other main view, the darkroom view which is where you actually edit images.

Switch back to Lighttable by hitting **l** again. 

The first thing I do in Lighttable when I import new images is figure out which ones I want to spend time on and which are not worth the effort. I never throw the latter away, but I do tend to ignore them most of the time. 

Darktable offers a "culling" mode to help out with the process. You can try it if you like, the shortcut is **x** which will change the view in put two images side-by-side so you can compare them. 

I don't use this mode, it came along after I'd already figured out a way to do the same, so I've continued with my method, which is more complex, but adapted to how I shoot and process images.

Like most people I almost always underexpose my digital images. It's easier to recover shadows than highlights so this make sense in digital photography. Unfortunately it leaves me with a lot of overly dark images to compare to figure out which are worth keeping. My solution to this was to create a quick way to lighten them, primarily using keyboard shortcuts. 

The shortcut I consider most essential is mapping Darktable's Exposure module to **`Shift+e`**. 

This allows me to hold down **Shift-e** and flick my mouse scroll wheel (or trackpad) up and down to increase and decrease exposure. I don't have to futz with opening the Exposure module or anything else, I hit the shortcut and adjust. This saves tons of time when I'm developing images. 

What I do is select the first image in the Lighttable view, hit "**d**" to enter darkroom mode, then I hold down **shift** and **e** and scroll up and down to adjust the exposure to a level where I can tell what's going on in the image. When I have it where I want it, I hit **shift + k** to move to the next image, and then repeat the process. Using this method I can run through a batch of images in a few minutes, lightening them up so I can see what's happening. I don't worry about getting the perfect exposure, just light enough to be able to cull them down to the "keepers".

If you'd like to try this -- and I can't recommend the exposure shortcut enough, nothing sped up my workflow like that one -- here's how you set it up.

Open the preferences pane again. Choose **Shortcuts** in the left menu and then click the little arrow to open the **processing modules** section and scroll down to **exposure**. Click the arrow next to **exposure** and then double-click on **exposure**. After you double-click, Darktable is waiting for you to define the keyboard shortcut. Hold down shift, press 'e' and scroll your mouse. Now look below and you should see a line like what's in this screenshot:

<img src="images/2023/darktable40-exposure-shortcut.jpg" id="image-3852" class="picwide caption" />

**Note: As of Darktable 4.8.0/1 the scrolling no longer works with my trackpad. Or as far as I can tell, any trackpad, but I've only got two to test. Neither works. I haven't filed a bug yet, but I will if it isn't working in the current dev build.**

If you want to move between images with the shift j/k shortcuts you'll need to set those up too. The method is the same, the action is image back/image forward, which is under **views >> darkroom**. By default the shortcuts there are space (forward) and backspace (back), but I don't like training my brain to it backspace so I went for the Vim-style j/k. 

Hit escape to save and exit preferences. Yup, still weird, but now we're used to it. Next select an image, hit **d** to open it in Darktable view. Test your shortcut: hold down **Shift** and **e** and scroll up and down and your image should get lighter and darker. Awesome. If not, re-read the above. It took me hours to figure this out the first time I tried to set this up, so don't feel bad if it doesn't work right away. Re-read the above and try again. Remember Thoreau. Don't hurry.

### Customizing Development Modules  {: #customize }

As you saw above when we tweaked the exposure, Darktable adjustments are done in what are called modules, little tools that handle a certain type of adjustments. If you open up the actual exposure modules on the right side of the screen you'll see that it adjusts exposure, sets a black point and handles other things related to exposure. Darktable has enough of these little modules that I am overwhelmed by the full list even after using the app for eight years. When I counted just now I came up with 64 user-adjustable modules. That's a lot of options. Too many in fact. But you don't have to use all of them. 

Of those 64 modules I use 9 on a regular basis and another 6 occasionally. Why so many options? This is the nature of open source software to some extent. Anyone with an itch can write some code to scratch it, and if the core developers are okay with including it in the app, it ships. I rather like that, even if most of it gets in my way. There's an easy solution: I narrow down the modules considerably by customizing which ones I see.

If you'd like to do the same, here's what I suggest. These are the core modules where I spend most of my time:

- **Exposure** (lighten or darken an image)
- **Filmic RGB** (control how light the whites and how dark the blacks)
- **Color Calibration** (set the white balance)
- **Color Balance RGB** (enhance colors and color contrasts)
- **RGB Primaries** (rarely, but color correction)
- **Diffuse or Sharpen** (Sharpen)
- **Crop**
- **Tone Equalizer** (raise shadows)
- **Retouch** (fix spots)
- **Rotate and Perspective**
- **Len Correction** (fix distortion in wide angle lenses)

Then there are some others I use only occasionally but I like to have around, things like **denoise**, **chromatic aberrations**, and **LUT 3D** since I use a number of LUTs to speed up development. There are a couple others you can see in the screenshots below, but mostly I ignore the other 51 modules.

To make them easier to ignore, I hide them. To customize which development modules are shown, click the hamburger menu at the top of the modules section (which is on the right side of the screen in darktable mode) and select **Manage presets**.

That will bring up a huge screen with all the modules in columns. I suggest first clicking the preset drop down menu and selecting **workflow: scene-referred**. That gives you all the modules optimized for a scene-referred workflow. It's not important to understand what that means, but if you'll recall, we set up Darktable to apply the scene-referred presets when we import new images. This continues using that same workflow. We want to use those modules, but not all of them, so select duplicate and give your new module layout a name. Now you can customize this layout. I start by deleting the quick access column completely because I don't need it, nor do I find it quick. There's a checkmark at the top of the screen to disable it.

Then I set up the other four like this:

<img src="images/2024/darketable408-custom-modules.jpg" id="image-3989" class="picwide caption" />

When you have things set up that way hit... wait for it... escape to save your changes. Still weird, but maybe less so after the third time. Or not. I still think it's weird.

### Example Edits (Video)  {: #example }

Okay, you now have Darktable set up just like I do. This may or may not end up suiting you, but for now it gives you place to start. To show you how I work within this setup, check out the video below and then you can jump to the next article in this series, which covers what each module does and how I use them (coming soon).

<div class="self-embed-container">
	<video poster="https://luxagraf.net/media/images/videos/2024/demo-01-screen.jpg" controls="true" loop="false" preload="auto" id="27" class="vidautovid">
		<source src="https://luxagraf.net/media/images/videos/2024/Darktable_Quick_Edits_With_Shortcuts.webm" type="video/webm">
		<source src="https://luxagraf.net/media/images/videos/2024/Darktable_Quick_Edits_With_Shortcuts.mp4" type="video/mp4">
		Your browser does not support video playback via HTML5.
	</video>
	<a class="figcaption" href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y0tkHYFaFqE">Watch on YouTube</a>
</div>

# Getting Things Done With Notecards

date:2023-11-29 20:00:49
url:/essay/craft/getting-things-done-with-notecards

I don't think anything I've written for Wired has generated so much interest as a throw away comment I made about notecards in our [guide to paper planners](https://www.wired.com/story/best-paper-planners/#indexcards). Every time that article is updated I get more email asking for details. Here are the details.

---

First, lets make sure we're all on the same page: if you want to accomplish things in life you need to make plans. 

Not *a plan*, plans are useless. You need *plans*. 

Many plans means you go through the process of planning. That's what's valuable, the process. Planning requires thinking deeply about life, your life, and what you're doing here. What you want to do here, what you were put here to do.

I can't help you with that part, but after you've made some decisions about what you want do do, where you want to go, it's time to plan how to get there. That requires lists. Lots of lists. Lists of goals, lists of outcomes you're aiming for, lists of things you need to do to get from here to there, lists of what you did to get from where you were to where you are, and so on.

If you step back a bit, you'll see that there are several levels of stuff you need to keep track of -- long terms goals, shorter term projects aligned with those goals, and day to day stuff you need to accomplish to complete the projects that get you to the goals. Life isn't nearly this simple or neat, but at a very broad level that's three things to keep track of: long term things, medium term things, short term things. There's one more important element: a way to record ideas as they come to you.

I use notecards for two of these four things: to track day-to-day tasks and to capture ideas. Medium and long term planning I do in a notebook (more on that below).

The notecard system started when I was in my early 20s and was pretty much spinning my wheels. Working in a restaurant, drinking too much, not sleeping enough, never working out. Living without direction. It's good for you sometimes, but I think I maybe enjoyed it a little too much and maybe spent a little too much time in this stage, but I digress.

One of my good friends at the time, who lived more or less the same way I did, nevertheless managed to run a successful business, play in a band, and otherwise be a much more effective person than me. All while doing all the same bad things I was doing. I asked him one day how he managed get so much done. "I make a list of all the stuff I need to do," he said, "then I do it."

That this was revolutionary to me tells you everything you need to know about me in my twenties. But it was. I asked him, okay, but like, what do you *do*? It turned out he took whatever paper was handy and wrote down what he needed to do. Then he did it. Naturally I focused on the first part: how he wrote it down. That was the easiest thing to copy. Actually doing stuff? That's hard.

I wasted a week or so deciding what sort of paper to use for my lists. I chose index cards because they were small, cheap, fit in your pocket, and wouldn't get mixed up with other paper. The fact that they're small also meant my todo list would never get to more than twenty or so items. That's manageable. 

Finally, paper decision behind me, I started writing things down on index cards. Then I had to do them. That was annoying. But there they were, on the list. Needing to be done. It turned out that crossing stuff off the list was fun. Almost addictive. It was like a game in a way. Could I get everything crossed off in a day? I got moderately obsessed with lists.

One night at sushi with my then-girlfriend and her father (also a very successful person) I happened to mention my notecard system (see, obsessed, as in bringing it up at dinner). "I do that too," he said. "Every night before I go to bed I write down everything I have to do, and all the extraneous things I've been thinking about. I try to completely empty my head. Helps me sleep," he said. 

Notice that he did not say anything about what sort of paper he used. Only idiots like me obsess over paper. Focus on the craft, not the tools.

This idea made sense to me, so I took this craft and incorporated it into my life as well. I didn't even obsess over what sort of paper to use. I started writing out my todo lists in the evening, along with anything else that felt like it needed to get off my mind, which I also wrote on notecards since I had them around. These cards I threw in a shoe box and, to be honest, didn't do much with them, but they helped clear my head, which was the important part[^1].

This system, tracking what I needed to do, and clearing my ideas at the end of the day, was far more powerful than I expected. The notecards themselves are incidental. Use whatever scraps of paper work for you, the point is the craft. The system works. I started getting more stuff done. Lots more stuff. To the point that I ended up going back and finishing college because I realized I had enough time in my day to do that, in part because I knew what I had to do each day. 

Over the years I have experimented with other ways of keeping todo lists, including notebooks of various shapes and sizes, probably a dozen different digital methods, including two I wrote myself. None of them stuck. I keep coming back to notecards. They are the single most effective way to keep track of what you need to do without introducing unnecessary complexity. 

This is a flexible enough system that I've used it as a chef, a computer programmer, a writer, a father, and more. I honestly think it would work for anyone in just about any job where you have to keep track of what you need to do.

[^1]: When I had kids I kind of gave up on this habit to spend my time reading to them before bed. In practice it accomplishes the same thing -- it clears my head by sticking a story in it -- I just lose whatever ideas might have been rattling around. The only notecards I really use as a filing system anymore are reading notes.

# Turn Your Own Wrenches

date:2023-03-28 15:39:03
url:/essay/craft/turn-your-own-wrenches

There's no temperature gauge. That broke several thousand desert miles ago. But you can smell trouble coming, whiffs of radiator fluid slipping in the draft at the front of the engine doghouse. That's when you know it's time to stop. This doesn't happen often. The 318 likes to run hot, but climbing mountains with a 12,000-pound RV on your back will eventually make any small block engine overheat.

I start looking for a place to pull over. There's nothing. The left side of the road is a sheer cut of rock, quartzite, phyllite, and limestone laid bare by dynamite. To the east, as far as I can see, the barren rocky foothills of the White Mountains bubble and scrape their way toward a desert valley floor, dust-swept and brown. Dotted here and there are clumps of creosote and sagebrush, interrupted occasionally by splashes of yellow rabbitbrush. It's a stark but beautiful landscape. Without a pullout. But it doesn't matter, we haven't seen another car in at least an hour of driving. We are on Highway 168 somewhere in Eastern California, between the Nevada ghost town where we camped last night and the top of the White Mountains. 

So I stop right in the middle of the road.

When the engine shuts off a quiet descends. No wind. No birds. No talking. We—my wife, three children, and me—just listen to the faint hissing of steam escaping the radiator cap, and then a gentle gurgle of coolant in the engine. It's October, but I'm glad I had the presence of mind to stop in the shade; the desert sun casts a harsh light on the road. After a minute my wife turns to the kids and says, “You want to walk around and see if we can find some fossils?" 

<img src="images/2023/2017-09-28_162046_bishop.jpg" id="image-3423" class="picwide caption" />

As a child of the ’70s, I've spent a fair amount of time on the side of the road next to broken-down vehicles. This is what vehicles of those days did. The 1967 Volkswagen fastback, which managed to get us home safely from the hospital after I was born, was replaced by a 1976 mustard-yellow VW Dasher that routinely overheated near Yuma, Arizona, on its way from my childhood home in Los Angeles to my grandparents’ house in Tucson. To this day my father curses that car. There was also a 1969 Ford F-250 pickup that was reliable until you stuck a camper on its back and tried to climb over the Sierra Nevada mountains. It used to be more of a necessity to know how to fix a car. These days it is often, if not a luxury, a labor of love. 

My father handed that F-250 down to me. I wanted to work on it, but the truth is I was intimidated. What if I broke something irreparable? What if I just couldn't hack it? I was a computer programmer then. In principle, fixing code is not so different from fixing an engine. But a computer will tell you what is wrong with your code. An engine—at least an older one—doesn't do that. When you work on an older vehicle, you are the computer. And I was one with no software.

That made it hard to know where to start, and so I didn't. Instead I helped more knowledgable friends with their cars. In the process I discovered that, for me, solving mechanical problems brought a kind of satisfaction that digital ones did not. One weekend I was helping a friend bleed the brakes on his car, pumping the pedal while he was under the chassis turning the bleeder screws. As we worked I could feel the resistance building, a tactile feedback that I loved. I was hooked. I wanted to learn how to repair engines, but to do that I knew I needed a project of my own—one with higher stakes than the F-250.

In June 2015, my wife and I [bought a 1969 Dodge Travco](https://luxagraf.net/jrnl/2015/06/big-blue-bus), a motor home that, at the time, was just shy of its 50th birthday. My kids called it the bus. Which was apt. When you say “motor home,” most people picture something that looks nothing like our old Dodge. To call it an RV is to say a Stradivarius is a violin. The Travco is a 27-foot-long fiberglass container of beauty and joy. It’s bright 1960s turquoise and white with sweeping curves and rounded windows. It is bold in a sea of beige modern RVs. The Travco was cool enough that it was once featured in Playboy magazine, back when that was a marker of cool. Johnny Cash had one. So did John Wayne.

We didn’t buy it solely so I would have a project. We bought it to make it our full-time home. We were tired of the suburbs, and we wanted our kids to see the United States, to have a better sense of the place they were born. I didn’t want them to read about the deserts and mountains and forests, I wanted them to be in them. I wanted them to know the difference between the South, where they were born, the Midwest, the West, the Northeast. I wanted them to also know the frustration and the joy of continuing down the road by your own sweat and effort. Out of a muddled sense of self-reliance born of stubbornness and ideals, I wanted them to know that anything worth fixing can be fixed, and anything that can't be fixed isn't worth having. But sitting there in the heat of the California sun on Highway 168 that afternoon, the bus felt more like a giant check my ego had written that my fumbling fingers and tools could not cash.

In truth, I didn’t have much experience with cars, but I did grow up around repair and restoration. My grandfather worked for the telephone company and had a shed full of tools behind his house in Tucson. When he retired, he spent his weekends buying broken things at the swap meet and his weekdays fixing them to resell the next weekend. In the summer it was blazing hot in Grandpa’s shed, but my cousins and I didn't notice. We were too excited watching him tear things apart—phones, televisions, radios, blenders—and breathe life back into them.

My dad had a garage full of tools as well. I was playing with hammers and tape measures from the time I could walk, building model airplanes in grade school. As I got older, I started taking more and more things apart and trying to put them back together. I sketched bookshelves, tables, chairs, and then built them as best I could. I came out of childhood with a few carpentry skills, and more importantly, perhaps misguidedly, a belief that with the right tools and a good mentor, anything was fixable. 

Years later, a line in Matthew Crawford’s best-selling manifesto of the manual arts, *Shop Class as Soulcraft*, echoed the feeling my mentors had instilled in me. There is a type of person, he writes, who “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.” 

[Going down swinging](https://luxagraf.net/jrnl/2022/10/going-down-swinging) is central to the culture of repair. You have to be willing to try. Yet in these days of high technology, products are often covered with stickers warning you that even undoing a screw will void the warranty or risk injury. Companies like John Deere have even restricted the owners of their machines from repairing them themselves or through a third party. Those stickers aren’t an accident. Manufacturers know that the best way to stop people from repairing things is to convince them that they can’t.

But to be more than a consumer of stuff, to not be dependent, you must first believe that you can repair it. That willingness to try—in spite of, or to spite, the stickers—is where it starts, whether you’re trying to fix your laptop or replace your head gasket.

There aren't many Travcos left in the world, but in June 2015, after a few months of haunting Craigslist, I found one for sale in the mountains of North Carolina, in the sleepy college town of Mars Hill. A couple who restored vintage trailers found the bus somewhere in Tennessee and tried their hand at fixing it up. Then they changed their mind and put it up for sale. A few days later I was standing there in the hills, looking over the bus. There was some obvious water damage, but nothing I didn’t think I could fix.

I was blissfully ignorant about the engine. It was hard to start, but once it got running it seemed good enough to my untrained ear. I handed over the money and climbed into the cockpit.

That first drive was nerve-racking. Strapping yourself into a 27-foot-long monstrosity is nothing like driving a car, especially when the monstrosity is in unknown condition and pointing downhill. A prudent man would have done a test drive. A couple of hairpin turns had my palms sweating—I made a note to myself to buy my next vehicle in Kansas—but I finally managed to get her out on a four-lane road where she felt more manageable. After I had been driving, tensely, for a couple of hours I pulled over at a rest area to take a break.

I’d barely come to a stop when two people came up to the bus to take pictures and ask about it: What year is it? Where did you get it? Then they asked the question everyone who loves old cars wanted to know: What engine is in it? 

The Travco is driven by a Chrysler 318 LA, a 5.2L small-block V8 engine. The LA stands for lightweight A-series engine. This is the same engine type you could find in most things Dodge made in 1969, from the Dart to the D100 truck. Larger V8s like the 440 are more sought after in vintage racing circles, but the 318, as most enthusiasts call it, is the unsung hero of the muscle car era. Some people claim the cylinder bore size in my 318 is bigger than what you’d find in a Dart, which would give the bus’s 318 more power. (I’ve done a little research and still can’t confirm or deny this. On the side of a long mountain climb in the desert hills of Nevada, it can certainly feel like I have the power of a Dodge Dart, with 8,000 extra pounds of weight on top.) On that first drive with the Travco, when I stopped at that rest area to collect my wits, all I knew was the engine’s name, and that it lacked the sensors, computer chips, automation, and complexity of modern vehicles. It was something I felt I could take a swing at. 

The first year with the Travco, I spent most of my free time [rebuilding the interior](https://luxagraf.net/jrnl/2015/09/progress). For the bulk of 2016 it sat in our driveway with me inside, sweating through the southern summer, freezing through the winter. Our neighbors begin to give directions based on it: “We’re two houses after the big blue bus.” 

<img src="images/2023/bus-work_2016-05-30_083439.jpg" id="image-3424" class="picwide caption" />


I gutted the inside. I wanted to understand how all the systems worked, and to design and build out everything so I could fix it if I needed to. There are no backup cameras, no motorized awnings, no automated systems at all. I had to go out of my way to find a water heater with a nonelectric pilot light system. Every time we reach camp, I have to get out and light it by hand—but the system will never fail. 

A friend of mine joked that I had become like Captain Adama from Battlestar Galactica, who famously wouldn’t let networked computers on his ship because they introduced a vulnerability he considered unacceptable. It wasn’t that he was opposed to technology—his character commands a spaceship after all—but that he distrusted a particular kind of technology. In his case, networked systems opened the door to murderous robots bent on destroying humanity. Our case was a little less dramatic. We just didn’t want to have something break far away from the nearest place that could fix it. Every technology you use should be something you choose for a known benefit, with trade-offs you can accept.

No one is perfect though, and the bus does include one complex, fragile system: our solar panels and batteries. I think Adama would approve of the solar panels—they have been our primary source of power for years. But he wouldn’t approve of the Bluetooth network the solar charge controller uses; it’s an unnecessary potential point of failure. Sure, it’s nice to be able to check our solar and battery status from my phone, but we don’t have to. To mitigate that vulnerability, I installed a shunt with a hardwired gauge. Should the Bluetooth fail (or, more likely, should I lose my phone), I can just look at the gauge. Like Adama, I am not opposed to technology. I’m opposed to unnecessary technology and single points of failure.

The late comedian Mitch Hedberg had a joke about how an escalator can never break, it can only become stairs. In web design this is referred to as graceful degradation. How good your technology is depends on how elegantly it handles failures. A lot of modern design has taken exactly the opposite approach. In the name of convenience, complex systems are hidden behind deceptively simple user interfaces. But no matter how simple these things might seem when you use them, the complexity behind them is inherently fragile. 

Sometimes inconvenience can even be a benefit. It has a way of forcing you off autopilot and getting you to pay attention. With an engine as old as the Travco’s, I found out I need to pay attention. It's part of the cost of admission. 

Modern user interfaces have hidden this fact from you, but the first time you start your car every morning, the engine is cold, which makes it hard to start. There are three important components in an internal combustion engine: air, fuel, and spark. The spark is a constant, but when your engine is cold it needs more fuel than air. A computer chip controls this mixture in modern cars, but in older, aspirated engines like the 318, the carburetor controls this mixture with a flap that opens and closes. In our 318 this flap is controlled by the driver via the choke cable—a steel wire attached to the carburetor flap at one end, and a knob on the dashboard at the other. Pull out the knob and the flap in the carburetor closes, limiting the air coming in and allowing the cold engine to start up.

Manual choke is archaic. But since ours was broken when we got it, I went even more archaic. Every time I start the engine, I lift up the engine cover, unscrew the air filter, and close the carburetor flap with my finger. At first this was just expedient. Fixing the choke was on my list of things to do, but finding a long enough choke cable, with a period-correct Dodge dashboard knob, took years of scouring eBay. By the time I found one I was simply used to doing it myself, literally by hand. The eBay choke cable has been sitting in a storage hatch under the back bed for more than a year.

The truth is, I like opening the engine, I like making sure everything looks right, I like watching it come to life. If something is wrong, I know right away. Once a wire came off the ignition coil, and instead of wondering why the engine wasn't starting—which it wasn't—I was startled to watch electricity arcing out of the ignition coil. That's not right. But it was also very simple to fix. I found the wire and plugged it back in. The engine started right up.

Every morning before we head out on the road, I open the engine cover and spend some time studying the 318, connecting with it. It's a ritual, somewhere between making coffee and invoking the gods, a small part of my morning that's dedicated to making sure the rest of our day goes smoothly. For a long time I really was looking over the engine before every drive; these days I am often just spending time with it.

Car enthusiasts often get this way. It might seem irrational to be attached to a particular set of nuts and bolts and cast iron, but it happens. Now, driving around the country, when I see broken-down cars in someone's yard I don't see junk, I see failed relationships.

The bus is very much a relationship. The five of us moved in and hit the road on April 1, 2017. My wife said that if it didn't work out, we’d just pass it off as a bad April Fools joke. It worked out. Though, as in any relationship, the bus and I have had some rocky moments.

On April 2, less than 100 miles from home, we had our first problem. I had just finished backing into a [campsite at Raysville campground](https://luxagraf.net/jrnl/2017/04/april-fools), still in Georgia, when I smelled a strange scent, something like burnt grapefruit. I lay down in the dirt and slid myself under the engine. A thin, warm red liquid splashed onto my forehead. Transmission fluid was leaking out of the bottom of the radiator. There are two transmission lines running into the bottom of the radiator where fluid is cooled before being sent back to the transmission.

<img src="images/2023/2017-04-01_163510_raysville.jpg" id="image-3422" class="picwide caption" />

I didn't know exactly how to fix it, but I knew just enough about engines to recognize that this wasn't too serious. As long as I kept the fluid level topped off, it wouldn’t be too much of a problem. I didn't want to disrupt our new life on the road by taking the bus in for repairs on our third day out. Instead, I added a transmission fluid refill to my morning ritual.

I went through a lot of transmission fluid those first three weeks. I topped it off every morning before we hit the road and every time we stopped for gas. Treating symptoms works for a while, but inevitably the underlying cause gets worse. We made it [down to the South Carolina coast](https://luxagraf.net/jrnl/2017/04/edge-continent) and then swung south, through the windswept marshes of the Georgia coast. Then we headed inland, across the [swampy pine flats of south Georgia](https://luxagraf.net/jrnl/2017/04/swamped) and into [the Florida panhandle](https://luxagraf.net/jrnl/2017/04/gulf-islands-national-seashore).

I put off dealing with the leak in part because state and national parks frown on people working on their rigs in campgrounds. And we were heading to a friend’s [beach house on St. George Island](https://luxagraf.net/jrnl/2017/04/coming-home). Friends’ driveways are much more conducive to repairs. But the day we arrived, the leak got dramatically worse. I pulled into the driveway with barely any transmission fluid left. At this point, I felt overwhelmed by the problem; it seemed like too big of a task, but I also wasn’t sure I wanted to go down so soon. So I spent an hour on the phone searching for a mechanic willing to work on such an old, huge vehicle. I finally found one who was game. A few days later, my wallet lighter, the problem was solved. Yet every time I went to a mechanic I felt inadequate. Why didn’t I try to fix it myself? I made excuses (there wasn’t time, I wanted to play with my kids), but the truth is I was afraid I would fail. 

We got back in the bus and on our way, tracing a route along the white sand beaches of the Gulf Coast, west through [Alabama](https://luxagraf.net/jrnl/2017/05/dauphin-island), [Mississippi](https://luxagraf.net/jrnl/2017/05/davis-bayou), [Louisiana](https://luxagraf.net/jrnl/2017/05/new-orleans-instrumental-number-1), into [New Orleans](https://luxagraf.net/jrnl/2017/05/new-orleans-instrumental-number-2), where people cheered the bus from the sidewalks. For two months it ran perfectly. But as we headed into the [June heat of Texas](https://luxagraf.net/jrnl/2017/05/austin-part-one), the temperature gauge began to climb. And climb. All the way into the red. We took to driving in the early mornings, which helped, but something needed to be done. 

We stopped to [visit relatives in Dallas](https://luxagraf.net/jrnl/2017/06/dallas), and at yet another mechanic, we had the radiator re-cored. That eliminated it as the source of the problem. (Again, I chastised myself for taking it to a mechanic, but I had a good excuse—even experienced mechanics rarely re-core their own radiators.) Not an hour outside of Dallas, the temperature gauge shot right back up to the red. We stopped at another repair shop. They replaced the water pump and thermostat. We headed out of town early again, before it got too hot. That worked. Until it got hot. The temperature gauge climbed again. 

Our [temperature problem](https://luxagraf.net/jrnl/2017/06/escaping-texas), and the brutal West Texas heat, was getting to us. I punted. In Amarillo we got a hotel for the night and I called my uncle. He listened to me for a while and then told me to go get a temperature gun and take readings around the engine when it was running. That night, I paid way too much for a temperature gun at a local hardware store, and we hit the road again early the next morning. Every half hour, I stopped, got out, and took readings on the top and bottom of the engine. Everything was within the operating parameters. We drove on into the midday heat and watched the temperature gauge climb again, but the readings done with the gun remained fine. I called my uncle back. “If I were you,” he said, “I'd pull the temperature sensor out of your engine and chuck it out in the desert somewhere.” I hung up feeling that the main problem with the bus was me. I didn't know how to find the problems, let alone fix them. I don’t know when my uncle started working on cars, but he’s 35 years older than me. Thirty-five years chasing the spirit of inquiry teaches you a lot. 

I took his advice. I unhooked the temperature gauge from the engine sensor. I was happy to realize there was nothing wrong. I wasn't happy thinking about the thousands of dollars I'd spent trying to fix what turned out to be a faulty $15 sensor. I also wasn’t happy now that I could see the learning curve I faced. It felt insurmountably steep. 

<img src="images/2023/2017-06-16_080436_escaping-texas.jpg" id="image-3425" class="picwide caption" />

Two months later, near the end of a summer [spent in cool pine forests](https://luxagraf.net/jrnl/2017/07/time-and-placement) in the Rocky Mountains, we decided to attempt a 10,000-foot pass near [Ridgway, Colorado](https://luxagraf.net/jrnl/2017/08/ridgway-state-park). We'd managed to get the bus over 9,600 feet before, and the pass we were headed toward was not a steep climb as Rocky Mountain passes go. We started early, but we didn't get more than a mile into the climb before I smelled that familiar grapefruit smell of transmission fluid. I pulled over and crawled under the bus —and saw the transmission cooler line leaking again. 

We turned around, limped back to Ridgway, and found a side street to park on. I got under the bus again. This time I knew what I was looking for, and sure enough, once I got the nut off the end of the transmission line I could see that the metal pipe, which flares out to wrap over a metal fitting on the radiator, was not just cracked but missing a whole chunk. Instead of forming a tight seal over the metal fitting, fluid was shooting out the side. The transmission cooler lines are fitted tightly along the side of the engine. There is no slack. I couldn't just cut them off, put in a new flare, and reattach them. Even if I could have made it work, they would have been nearly touching the exhaust, which would heat them far more than the transmission cooler ever cooled them.

I was forced to reach out for help, again. I called around for a shop that had big enough bays to work on the bus and eventually found one in Montrose, 30 miles away down the mountain. I put the existing line back on as best I could and limped back to the Ridgway State Park campground. We started repacking and gathering up what we’d need for [a few days of tent camping](https://luxagraf.net/jrnl/2017/09/aspen). 

<img src="images/2023/2017-08-25_205350-1_ridgway-state-park.jpg" id="image-3426" class="picwide caption" />


That evening, I was sitting outside the laundry room in the campground, watching the famous golden light of the Rockies play across the Cimarron Range, when a fellow camper came to do his laundry. He stuffed his laundry in the machine, and we started talking. The conversation came around to the bus, as most conversations I have in campgrounds do. After he asked about the engine, he asked me something no one ever had, something that caught me off guard. Something that has haunted me since: “Do you turn your own wrenches?” I said I did as much as I could, but that sometimes I had to get professional help. “You have to turn your own wrenches,” he said, shaking his head. “You can't have a vehicle like that if you don’t turn your own wrenches.” 

I already knew that—I’d been feeling it for months—but it didn’t really hit home until someone else said it to me. You can’t have a vehicle like this if you don’t turn your own wrenches. You'll go crazy or broke or both. I vowed that this would be the last time I would resort to a mechanic. I took the bus to that mechanic in Montrose. We spent a couple weeks in a tent while the shop found new transmission cooler lines and installed them. A couple weeks later, coming down through [western Utah](https://luxagraf.net/jrnl/2017/09/on-the-road-again), bound for [Zion National Park](https://luxagraf.net/jrnl/2017/09/zion), I stopped for gas—and guess what I saw pooling under the bus? 

It was a Sunday in Utah. We pulled over on a back street, across from a mechanic's shop that was, like everything else on a Sunday in Utah, closed. I crawled under the bus and started poking around. Sure enough, the flare on the transmission line was cracked again. I knew what to do, but I didn't have the tools, and the hardware stores weren't open. 

I climbed out from under and sat down on the Travco’s step, wiping the grease from my hands. My wife was just asking me what we were going to do, when the rolling metal door of the shop across the street rattled and opened with a clang. A man about my age came walking over and asked if I needed help. I told him my problem. It turned out it was his shop. He didn't work Sundays, but he was there working on his own projects. Together we pulled off the transmission line, took it inside, cut off the cracked flare, and reflared it. Then he showed me where the last mechanic had gone wrong. He'd overtightened the nut, crushing the metal onto the fitting until it cracked. We tightened it. Gently. The mechanic wouldn't take any money. Help someone else out someday, he told me.

We were almost two years into our family odyssey with the Travco when we found ourselves beached in the [middle of the road on that desert mountain pass in Eastern California](https://luxagraf.net/jrnl/2017/10/trains-hot-springs-and-broken-buses). By then, I knew that an engine’s tendency to overheat isn’t really a thing that can be fixed. It’s what happens when a small engine tries to climb a big hill. Eventually old cars will teach you so much, including patience.

<img src="images/2023/2017-09-28_121417__.jpg" id="image-3427" class="picwide caption" />


I walked up the road to see what was beyond the next bend. Maybe the blacktop crested a ridge and dropped into a cool, lush valley with a river running through it. But the curve didn't end. I kept walking but could never see more than the next few hundred yards; the road just kept climbing. I gave up and headed back to the bus. My wife and kids were back from their explorations, ready to go. The engine had cooled some, so we clamored in and decided to make another push up the mountain. But now we were starting from zero. On this kind of incline, I gave us a mile before we’d overheat again. (I’d never know exactly, because the odometer was broken.) After about five minutes I spied a pullout. I hadn't smelled radiator fluid yet, but I decided to take advantage of the ability to get out of the road. 

My wife and I talked about turning back. There was a strange college back in the valley behind us called Deep Springs. They had a sign out front that said no phone and not to bother them, but something told me they'd be OK with the bus. We could get a fresh start in the morning. It had been a long day of driving, and the kids were tired and hot. 

Then we heard an unmistakable sound that always makes me smile. A loud engine, with the distinctive thump-thump heartbeat roar of a Harley Davidson, was rumbling up the hill. In a few minutes the bike appeared and the rider pulled over. He asked if we were OK. We went through the usual talk about the bus. Then he told us we were only about a mile from the top. Suddenly we weren’t quite so tired. Making it over the mountains felt possible again. We thanked the rider, and he continued on his way. We gave the engine more time to cool off. 

An hour later we tried again. It was a long mile, and we never got above 20 miles an hour, but after a while we crested a ridge and a spectacular view of the Owens Valley in California opened up below. I could see the Sierra Nevada rising up out of the hazy valley. We were at the top. I had just a second to enjoy it before we passed a sign that read “Caution, One-Lane Road Ahead.” The Narrows, as this bit of highway is called, came up so fast we didn't have time to plan for it. We were just in it. Thankfully, nothing came the other way.

<img src="images/2023/2017-09-28_162100_bishop.jpg" id="image-3428" class="picwide caption" />

Coming down the steep grade we stopped to rest the brakes a few times. After about three hours of descending, we pulled into a campground outside of Big Pine, California. It was empty this time of year, and the road was full of ruts that had the bus lurching and creaking around. About 20 yards from the first campsite we heard a loud clang. My wife and I looked at each other. I pulled in for the night and shut off the engine for the final time with a deep sense of relief.

<img src="images/2023/2017-09-28_181252__.jpg" id="image-3430" class="picwide caption" />

The next morning we watched the sun light up the high peaks of the eastern Sierra Nevada. We had a leisurely breakfast and sipped our coffee well into the morning. We found a train museum up the road and thought we'd take the kids. 

It was around 10 when I started up the engine and made my customary walk around the bus to make sure all the windows and hatches and vents were closed and properly secured while the engine warmed up. Everything looked good until I came around to the driver’s side. The rear wheels were oddly far back in the wheel well. Wheels don't just move around … that would mean the entire axle had moved. Oh shit. 

I knelt down and peered under the frame. The rear axle, which supports about 5,000 pounds, is held in place by two mounts, one to the front of the axle, one to the rear of the axle. These hold the leaf springs in place. The mounts are secured by four welded steel pins, one at each corner, which hold the axle mount to the chassis. On the driver's side, the forward axle mount, three of the four pins were gone. The mount was hanging by one pin and had swung down and backward, shifting the entire rear axle about 6 inches backward.

<img src="images/2023/2002-12-08_120000-27__.jpg" id="image-3429" class="picwide caption" />

If that pin gave out while we were moving, the axle would come free and likely tear the back end of the bus off before dropping it on the ground. We weren't going anywhere. Suddenly, all the things that had happened until now, all the leaking fluids, excess oil, even overheating, seemed pretty mild compared to this. Then I thought of something my uncle had said to me over and over: “It's all just nuts and bolts.”

Nuts and bolts aren't where most of the work is, though. It's in the problem-solving that happens in your head. That skill takes years, even decades, to develop. But there’s an infectious thrill when you hold some unknown in your head until you come up with a hypothesis about what might be wrong. This takes me many miles of thinking.

It also requires asking many questions of many people. I've met Travco salesmen who knew the original designer, mechanics who've worked on Travcos, and dozens of people who knew the 318 engine inside and out. All of them helped me in some way, even if it was just an encouraging word, a congratulations on keeping it on the road.

Yet, as I sat there staring at the axle dangling by a single pin, I had no idea what to do. So I texted my uncle a picture of the problem. A few minutes later my phone rang. My uncle happens to live about two hours from Big Pine, back over the state line in Nevada. Sit tight, he said. He was loading up some tools and would be there that afternoon. 

<img src="images/2023/2017-09-30_163027_bishop.jpg" id="image-3431" class="picwide caption" />

We took the kids hiking down to a nearby river. (Making the bus “work” for us is as much about making sure the kids have space to run and play as it is turning wrenches.) Around three that afternoon my uncle pulled into our campsite with a truck full of floor lifts, jacks, and tools. He crawled under the bus with me. He didn't say anything, just lay there studying the situation. When he climbed back out he said, “I think we can fix that.” We made a run to a hardware store in Bishop, about an hour up the road, where we bought some grade 8 steel bolts, which are strong enough to hold. We then went to the store and grabbed some steaks and potatoes for dinner. Another lesson I've learned from my uncle: “Relax, and make sure you're having fun while you do this.”

That night after dinner, around the campfire, he told me the plan. We'd use two jacks, one to hold up the bus should that last pin give out, and another to maneuver the axle mount back in place. Once it was close we'd use a flange alignment tool to line up the hole in the axle mount with the hole in the chassis. Then we'd slip in the grade 8 bolts. Once he said it, the plan seemed simple enough, obvious even. But I never would have thought of it on my own. I'd never even heard of a flange alignment tool, and I had no idea there were bolts strong enough to replace forged steel pins. 

The next morning we started in, and the work took the better part of the day, but when we were done the axle was back where it should be. My uncle didn’t like the sound of the engine though. “Why don’t you bring it to my place, and we’ll see what we can do about that noise,” he said. 

The kids got to see the train museum. We [swam in some hot springs](https://luxagraf.net/jrnl/2017/10/trains-hot-springs-and-broken-buses). Then, a few days later, we made [our way up to my uncle’s house](https://luxagraf.net/jrnl/2017/10/dialed-in) and I began to learn exactly how the engine worked.

This is, in part, what I love about living in the bus, part of why we keep doing it six years later. It's all the people I know, all the people I've met, the people who've helped—some professionals, most not. We haven't stopped needing to fix things in the bus. In the course of writing this article I had to [rebuild the vacuum booster](https://luxagraf.net/jrnl/2022/03/more-adventures-travco-brakes) that powers our brake system. I had to [replace a head gasket](https://live.luxagraf.net/jrnl/2022/10/going-down-swinging), several worn belts, a failed alternator, the voltage regulator, and a fuel pump, and I had to do all the routine maintenance, like changing the spark plugs, wires, and oil. No mechanics were consulted, though I still regularly text my uncle for advice.

The bus will never not need fixing. But my relationship with it has changed. I no longer look at the engine in awe and mystery. Nor do I look at it with perfect, go-it-alone mastery. I know what all the parts do. I don't know everything that can go wrong, and I don't always know what to do when it does. But I have the thing I've come to prize the most—the relationship with my fellow shade tree mechanics and car enthusiasts. It isn't just me turning my own wrenches that I rely on; it's everyone who turns their own wrenches. 

It isn’t just wrenches either. We are in the middle of a repair revival. Other repair gurus are out there helping the next generation. Sewing groups hold “mending days” where you can get your clothing repaired, and learn to do it yourself. A luthier friend of mine has apprenticed under a master and now helps others learn how to build and repair guitars. Another friend who started out buying and repairing bicycles for fun now regularly runs workshops for people to learn how to repair their own bikes. All around the country there are local fixing groups. Check the bulletin boards in your community and you’ll likely find someone organizing a repair group. 

The community of people who repair things is an interesting group, perched on a curious dichotomy. We are, by and large, people who prize self-reliance. Whether that spirit grows out of economic necessity, pure enjoyment, or something else, it is essential to the ethic of repair. At the same time, the community is very hierarchical, which means those of us near the bottom must learn from those above. Self-reliance alone tends to make you isolated and either snobbish (if you think you're good) or intimidated (if you know you're not). The only way out of these predicaments is to connect with other people who know more than you. In the first case they'll quickly put you in your place. In the second, they'll lift you up to where they are.

# Everything is a Practice

date:2022-12-28 11:07:47
url:/essay/spirit/everything-is-a-practice

There is no finish line. There is no winning, no losing.

**Everything is a Practice.**

A practice is the disciplined repetition of what you know with enough experimentation in that repetition to unlock those things you don't yet know. It is ever-accumulating, and never-ending. It is sometimes painful, but that is the way.

Individual projects may come to an end, but the practices that made them possible do not. You may finish writing a book, or reach the end of a run, or understand how to fix an engine, but there is no point where you've written enough, you've worked out enough, you've learned enough. The practices never end, which means you get to keep improving.

The practice leaves a path behind you to show you how far you have come and carves out a path ahead of you to show you where you can go.

The practices of your life *are* your life. They form the path you follow, they are how you become what you want to become, they make you who you are and who the world wants you to be. You are not solely in charge of your practices or the path they form. The world gets a vote too. In the end that's part of the practice too -- adjusting to feedback from the world, your body, your life, your family, your friends. All of these things are part of the practice, all of them inform it.

The practice also informs the experimentation that expands it.

The trick is to follow your curiosity. That often forgotten part of you that society tries to get you to repress. That voice that says, what would happen if... This is the way. Follow it. Follow it knowing you will likely fail, knowing that you're probably doing it the wrong way, but you're going to try it anyway... you'd be surprised what works. I've fixed loose battery wires with a bit of nail, held hoses on with zip ties, and countless other things that should not have worked, but did, at least for a little while. There's plenty of failures along the way of course. Those people always telling you it can't be done -- whatever it might be -- are sometimes right, but wouldn't it be better to find out for yourself? 

Now there are reasonable limits to this... I wouldn't go trying to repair a $4,000 lens on your first attempt at lens repair. I wouldn't pick a rare, difficult to replace engine for your first rebuild. Learn to manage risk. When you know you're headed off the map to experiment, pick things to experiment on and situations to experiment in where you can keep the risk level low. Whether that means using something cheap, or doing it at low speed, or making sure the water is deep enough before you jump. Whatever the case, learn to manage risk so that your lessons learned aren't so painful -- financially, emotionally, physically --- that you forget what you learned and remember only the trauma of the learning.

In this process though you will become a better human being. You will get better at living. You will have less pain down the road. Your path will be smoother. You are building real world skills that you can use over and over. Every skill that you pick up transfers to other things too. Your practice will expand and keep growing.

The experience you gain using a multimeter to untangle the rats nest of wires under the dash will come in handy when you need to figure out why the fridge suddenly stopped. That method of troubleshooting, following wires, testing voltages, making sure resisters are working, and so on, that method of inquiry you learned working under that dash transfers to other things. It's the same method of inquiry needed to figure out what's happening with anything electrical. There will be some differences between the fridge and the dash and the dishwasher and the vacuum, but the basic method is the same. From one small repair you gain an insight that makes countless future repairs that much easier. But only if you do it yourself.

In this way everything you do is always building your skill set. You're always expanding your practice. This makes the path that much easier. You are that much more proficient at being human. The journey becomes easier, you are less reliant on others and you free up resources to focus on life's more interesting things. That way when the fridge dies at anchor in the San Blas, two days sail from the nearest repair shop, you don't worry. You fix the issues and get on with the dive you were planning to do that day. 

Skills transfer in unexpected ways too. It isn't all just troubleshooting methods that transfer. The experience you gain struggling at terrible sketches of birds will come in handy when you start staring at the engine, trying to make sense of what's gone wrong -- you've trained your mind to pay attention to the little details of feathers, which is not so different than paying attention to the little details of how a machine is running or how the wind and weather are changing. It is all connected.

I should probably stop here and point out that I am a miserable hack with very few skills. I am not a repair expert or wunderkind of any sort. I can barely fix my way out of a paper bag. I am writing this not because I have mastered it on some long journey of experience, but because I have lived a couple of these examples and when thinking about it later, realized, oh, I made that connection because of this other things that I didn't see as related at the time, but then it turned out it was. 

I am writing this because I have seen other people who can do this at a level I know I'll never get close to. I am writing this because you may be younger than me, you may have more time to learn. By the time you get to my age, you might be where I wish I was. Where I would be if I'd been paying more attention earlier on in life.

I write not as an expert, but as a cautionary tale. Learn more than I did. Experiment more than I did. Expose yourself to more adversity than I did so that you learn to overcome it, not in theory, not by reading on the comfort of your couch, but in practice, at the side of the road, in the middle of nowhere, when it really counts.

And now a little practice I wish I'd run across when I was much younger.

---

How do you find *your* practice? I don't know what you need to do or where you ought to go, but I can offer some places to start, some questions to think about. 

The Webster's 1913 dictionary definition of practice includes as examples, "the practice of rising early; the practice of making regular entries of accounts; the practice of daily exercise." That's not a bad place to start: get up, get moving, and keep track of where your money is going. That can take you far. None of that is revolutionary. Ben Franklin is famous for saying roughly the same thing. You can find similar quotes going back to the very edges of written history, but it's still a solid place to start. Get up and get going. 

What I think gets lost in our time -- [the time of The Experts](https://luxagraf.net/essay/the-cavalry-isnt-coming) -- is that there's not a single path, not a set of practices that work for everyone. We've been conditioned to look for prescriptions that fit everyone and that's just not how life works. You and I are different. You have to experiment and find what works for you. It might be nearly the same as what works for me, but it also might be totally different. I know people who are very much on their path who are vegans and do their best work late at night. You have to find your own way.

That said, I do have a suggestion on where to start: start with touching your nose.

I know, that sounds stupid. If you're into making some kind of huge change in your life the last thing you want to hear is that you should start by touching your nose. What the hell is that going to do? The answer is: it's going to train your will.

If you were out of shape, unable to do a single push up, but desiring to be able to knock out 100 push ups in two minutes you wouldn't start with 50, you'd start with one. But even then, there is a high risk of failure because the effort it takes to get from zero push ups to ten is more than it takes to get from ten to 100. There's a very good chance that you're going to give up before you get to ten -- not because it's too hard, but because you aren't accustomed to forcing yourself to do things. You are not in control of your will.

It's not your fault. Unless you happen to have enlisted in the armed forces, practice a martial art, or have monastic religious training, you have very likely never even been taught that you can train your will, let alone how to do it. That's okay. 

The good news is that, unlike the hypothetical arms in the push up example, the will is not weak. Your will is as strong as it was when you were a baby starting to crawl and you willed your entire body to do something it had never done before. If your will feels weak it is because it's divided against itself. The power of the will comes from disciplined focus. When you can focus your will on a single thing, and only that thing, you can do remarkable things. 

Getting to that point is the hard part. That is the practice of the will. This is where all practices start. This is the metapractice that enables all the other practices to come into being. The will, directed, is the thing that enables you to turn words into ideas, ideas into action, action into skills. The will is what opens up the path in front of you and enables you to move forward. 

When you say "will" though most people think of some miserable thing where you grit your teeth and bear some suffering. That's not the will, that's you fighting your will. When your will is focused following it is effortless, in fact you can't not follow it, you are directing it after all.

The problem is that most of your life you've been told to do things you didn't want to do. School is the primary culprit here for most of us, though there maybe other things in your life. Schooling in the United States is almost universally designed to damage the will and leave you unable to do much of anything save serve the will of others. This is why most of us leave school and get a job. We literally go out to serve another's will. Our will has been so damaged we think that the thing we fight against when we "grit our teeth" or "just do it" is our will. 

That's not your will, that's your will divided. Our wills know a bad deal when they see one, even if we don't. And so they fight it -- they fight school, they fight our pointless jobs, they fight our uninspired cities and all the rest. And we fight our will. And we become convinced that this struggle against ourselves is what it means to direct our will. We become convinced that we're weak. 

That makes for a ton of emotional baggage wrapped up in our divided will. That why every New Year's when we vow to hit the gym and do those push ups, we fail. We spiral downward, further convinced we are weak.

This is compounded by the fact that your will is the source of most of your emotions -- when your will succeeds in the world, you are happy, when it fails you are miserable. If you have a lot of miserable emotions locked up in your will and you try to focus it... it doesn't work. By the end of February it's been two months since you went to the gym.

That's why you start with touching your nose. This is a variation on what every religious training manual (and some of the better secular ones) I've read advises doing. Something silly. Something that doesn't matter. Something that you have no emotional attachment to. Something you will not fail to do because of years of damage to your will. Touching your nose is easy and has no emotional baggage for most people. 

So do it. Right now. Wherever you are sitting, reading this. Use your left hand and touch your nose ten times, returning your hand to your side or lap each time. Do it now before you read any further.

Congratulations, you unified your will and succeeded. This is the beginning. This is how you train yourself to use your will deliberately. 

Now you need to do that every day. Write "touch your nose!" on a piece of note paper and put it somewhere you will see it every day, ideally multiple times a day, ideally somewhere other people won't bother you about it. Then every time you see it, touch your nose ten times with your left hand.

Congratulations. You have a new practice in your life. No, not touching your nose. The habit of doing something because you chose to do it. Not because some authority told you to or some unnoticed compulsion drove you to -- you chose to do this. You do it. You direct your will. 

That is the beginning of the practice.

# Sunbeams

date:2022-12-22 15:42:15
url:/essay/craft/sunbeams

Patrick’s Point is a beautiful place. When you can see it. Most of the time it's enveloped in cloud and mist. We [drove in on a broken alternator](https://luxagraf.net/jrnl/2017/10/through) (not knowingly, but it wasn't charging the battery) and ended up stuck. Our solar system was no good in a place where the sun really doesn't shine much. But one evening we were down the cliff from our campsite, on the seashore, and the setting sun conspired with the fog to let a few rays of light through. I made this image on the way back up the trail.

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	<a class="figcaption" href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p-v1dhFafnE">Watch on YouTube</a>
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In developing this all I really wanted to do was up the contrast and cut some of the haze to emphasize the sunbeams more, nothing too complicated.

# Safety Third

date:2022-12-02 16:40:18
url:/essay/spirit/safety-third

If you land on luxagraf.net on an odd day of the month, you might notice the little tag line under the site title is "safety third". This comes from a sticker we saw on a pole outside the [Henry Miller Library](https://henrymiller.org) in [Big Sur, California](https://images.luxagraf.net/2017/2017-11-28_161158_monterey_picwide.jpg). Miller no doubt would have agreed. He might have ranked safety even lower in his decision calculus. I often do.

<img src="images/2023/2017-11-28_161158_monterey.jpg" id="image-3319" class="picfull" />

Every time we go to any sort of government park -- state, national, county, city, you name it -- we get handed a set of rules. I can tell which level of government land we are on by the number of rules, the more rules, the higher level government. These rules are invariably couched in terms of safety. 

They range from the ridiculous to the obvious, but almost never tell anyone anything they didn't already know. As we all know, these rules serve no purpose beyond heading off lawsuits. Go abroad to less litigious cultures (like Mexico) and you'll discover there are far fewer rules, yet somehow no radical increase in accidents.

The Safety Third sticker became our antidote to the endless rules of public spaces. It was a good family joke. Whenever we do something other people might frown on, one of us will invariably shout, "safety third!" before plunging ahead. 

Then the pandemic happened.

Regardless of your opinion on the response to the pandemic, one overarching truth struck me early on: a very vocal and powerful segment of our culture believes that safety trumps everything. For some people I realized, all those ridiculous signs aren't ridiculous. They aren't a joke. They aren't just their to head off lawsuits. For some people these signs are words to live by. 

What was more troubling though was that these people assumed that the rest of us would agree with their thinking, that nothing is worth risking life for, absolutely nothing. 

I think we need to go back to the phrase itself and think about what we're really saying when we say "Safety First". If safety is truly first then love, joy, honesty, purpose, and a thousand other elements of human existence mean nothing once they conflict with safety. 

We saw this in the pandemic when loved ones were forced to die alone isolated in hospitals because it would not have been "safe" for their families to be with them. Again, I don't care what you think of the disease, there is some fucked up thinking behind that "logic".

Still, this thinking shouldn't have been surprising. It's the natural outcome of an obsession with safety. Our lives were already littered with the tools of safety -- rules, warning labels, helmets, straps, leashes, railings, walls, soaps, disinfectants, goggles, and so on. Who will object to a few more on top of that? 

But I am not so much concerned with any new levels of safety mania, I'd prefer to cut it off at the root. I don't want to live obsessing over safety, and I don't want my kids to live that way either. I suspect most people don't. You probably don't.

<img src="images/2023/2023-01-21_160211_pensacola-museums.jpg" id="image-3316" class="picfull caption" />

Safety is an endless positive feedback loop. The safer you think your are, the less risk you are willing to take. Once you get on that treadmill, it's nearly impossible to get off without knocking the whole thing over. People get trapped. Witness Howard Hughes, an extreme, but illuminating example. Cultures too seem to get trapped, with ours currently steaming up that lofty mountain of self-imposed isolation and madness that Howard Hughes pioneered.

Before I get too deep it's probably necessary to point out that if safety is at one end of a spectrum and reckless idiocy is at the other, in rejecting an obsession with safety I am not suggesting the antidote is reckless idiocy. The opposite of one idea is invariably another bad idea. Sanity is in the middle.

There is a third option between the timidity born of fear and safety obsession, and cliff diving in Acapulco. It's called thinking for yourself. You can find a balance point between paranoia and recklessness, recognizing that other people will find different balance points than you and that's okay. 

This is what I mean when I say safety third. Not that you should be reckless, but that thinking of safety first isn't going to lead to a meaningful life. When you come to the end of your life, whenever that may be, I am confident that you are not going to be thinking "I wish I had been safer". Bonnie Ware's famous book, *The Top Five Regrets of the Dying* has [not one mention of safety](https://bronnieware.com/regrets-of-the-dying/).

Life is not always safe. The sooner you accept this and move on, the happier you will be. Just getting out of bed is fraught with risk. Ask Hughes. He eventually stopped doing it. So if it's safety you really want, that's probably the way to go. 

Still, I'd like to propose that things aren't actually nearly as risky as our ingrained safety-first mentality might make it seem. You may have noticed you weren't born wearing a helmet. In fact your skull was literally smashed as you were born and yet here you are. You then grew to have a reasonably strong skull, similar models managed to help the rest of your species survive lo these last 400,000 or so years. And, while you weren't born with knee and elbow pads, you were born with some pretty remarkable joints and an almost Wolverine-like ability to heal thanks to a very sophisticated immune system. All of which is to say that nature, god, whatever you like to attribute this state of affairs to, has provided you with a pretty good starting point. You've got a good system for avoiding and dealing with injury should you miscalculate risk in some way.

Proponents of the safety-industrial complex will here likely note that you weren't born with a mountain bike or internal combustion engine at your disposal, and therefore all the defenses of nature are useless, which is true, to a point. 

This is an important objection, we *have* made the world less safe for ourselves. Yet here we are. Enough of us somehow hanging on, just walking around breathing and doing stuff and not dying. 

Ironically the one time it might be worth considering, for example, a helmet -- while driving 65 MPH down a highway -- no one does, and, more to the point, even the most ardent of safety-first supporters will look at you like an idiot if you strap on a helmet before climbing in their Prius.

What we're left with then is a pretty good system for avoiding and coping with injury, and the notion that we're awfully bad at figuring out which activities are actually dangerous.

It'd be easy here to point out some of the many other ironies this leads to, for example how padded playgrounds actually lead to children taking greater risks because the padding literally cushions them from life's little bruises, which then spectacularly backfires when they encounter the rest of life, which lacks padding. The whole reason you need to get hurt playing on the playground is so you come to understand what hurts, what you can do, what you can't do, and how to use the information to calculate which new activities you undertake might be risky and what you can do to mitigate risk. You don't understand risk until you take some and earlier you do that, the less painful your failures will be.

But then our safety mania was never rooted in logic, it's not rooted in a concern for safety at all, but in a fear of death. 

It seems axiomatic that fear of death is a natural outcome of materialist beliefs. Remember that we learned in the pandemic that, for our institutions and leaders, death is the worst possible thing. It is, from their point of view, the ultimate failure of man. It is the one limit no one can get around and therefore the thing to be most feared. But why? Why fear what is as much a part of life as the rest of life?

Philosopher and writer [Charles Eisenstein](https://charleseisenstein.org/) astutely [points out](https://charleseisenstein.substack.com/p/pandemania-part-5), "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.**" (emphasis mine)

In other words death phobia is a result of not knowing how to live.

Disconnection from purpose and passion is where death phobia begins to feedback into itself, driving an increased obsession with safety, which in turn makes us incredibly risk adverse, which in turn keeps us from exploring and potentially finding our purpose and passion. On and on in a vicious cycle. 

It's a vicious cycle that infantilizes us further and further at every turn. The more we avoid for fear of our safety the more lose our ability to judge what is and isn't dangerous. Even those of us who grew up with the good hard ground under our jungle gyms can end up forgetting those lessons and come to see the world as a big bad place full of dangerous stuff. 

How do you get out of the cycle? If you're reading this, chances are you aren't in that cycle, but I have an idea of how we get out at a cultural level: By playing without our helmets.

If you're constantly worried about safety you can't play. If you can't play, you can't be free. Play is freedom and play does not wear a helmet. A helmet means supervision. We who play are unsuperviseable.

This I believe is how we remake the world: by playing.

To play amidst a world full of rules is perhaps the most subversive act.

I know, that's not a Very Serious Solution that Very Serious People can go out and implement, but that's the point isn't it? To remake the world any other way would end up right back here eventually.

You beat the safety game by playing a different one. You play the personal responsibility and risk management game. You go slow, you learn your limits, but then you keep playing. You push your limits. You do things that scare you because they also call to you. You keep expanding and growing, and when the end finds you, you won't think, I wish I had...

# The Cavalry Isn't Coming

date:2022-10-19 14:26:28
url:/essay/spirit/the-cavalry-isnt-coming

The Cavalry isn't coming. This is the lesson 21st century America is trying to teach us. We are going to have to re-learn how to depend on ourselves and on each other. There is no one else. That's okay. We don't need anyone else.

Self-reliance backed up by tight community bonds used to be the norm. You depended on yourself, your family, your community, because who else was there? So far as I can tell from reading history this was most people's outlook until roughly the middle of the 20th century. That's when a number of things happened that changed how people saw themselves and their communities.

Around then things began to centralize and as they did the solutions people had always relied on were suddenly found wanting. Self-appointed experts stepped in to tell us how things should be done. How we should eat. How we should live. How we should love. Sometimes the experts had good ideas. But often they did not. And even when their ideas were good, there was an unintended consequence to listening to the experts: communal bonds were weakened, people were deprived of skills, people questioned their instincts. Soon people believed they needed experts for everything.

The world according to experts is a world that depends on those experts, the cavalry. The people we mean when we say "they'll think of something."

Except that as we've all witnessed in the last twenty years, they won't think of something. They're out of ideas. Worse, the old ideas don't work anymore. The world of the expert is collapsing all around us. The cavalry isn't coming because the cavalry doesn't know how to ride anymore.

For four years we've been driving around the United States, passing through all its unique regions (except New England and the Pacific Northwest) and I've noticed not only the experts are failing us, but that there are some places where that has had little to no effect on life.

It took me a long time to figure this out because this shift, from the local community as the hub of life, to there being no hub, happened long before I was born. That is to say, the disconnected lives we all lead, depending on experts to tell us everything from what to eat to how to fix our cars, was normal to me. It was the water I lived in and I never noticed it. What I did notice pretty early on was that some places were decidedly different. Northern Wisconsin. Okracoke. Parts of the Florida Panhandle.

We were drawn to these places and continue to return to them in part I think because they resisted the shift to expert authority that happened everywhere else. Self-reliance, independent businesses, and close-knit communities still thrive in these places. These places somehow escaped the chain-storification of the world. It was refreshing. It was different. These places felt like what I want the future to be like.

I have read enough books of the American road to know that everywhere used to be like this, but I never gave much thought to how or why that changed. I assumed that chain stores took over. And they did. But I think there's considerably more underlying that simple observation, and I think understanding how it happened, how we got into this mess, is going to help us get out of it.

I think it happened because not enough people resisted it. We were swept along and did not stand up to it. It's hard to avoid shopping at Walmart. So we did. And so on, until the old ways were swept aside. We prized newer bigger better because we lost sight of what life is really about. 

Singular cause and effect cannot explain how an entire culture shifts, that's a subtle and multifaceted process, but it begins and ends with the choices of individuals. Millions of individuals, all of whom have different beliefs, different desires, different wills. It's important to keep this in mind because the kind of thinking that says "here's the problem, here's how to fix it" is the kind of thinking that made the problem.

And now here we are, waiting for the other shoe to drop. We're a bit like Wile E. Coyote when he's run off the edge of the cliff but doesn't realize it yet. Ignorance of his true situation keeps him from plunging down right away, but there's always that moment when it starts to sink in. The cartoonists let his ears droop just before he confronts his situation and falls. That's about where I see modern America just now. Our ears are drooping and we know what's coming, but no one knows how high we are or how hard we'll fall. 

That is a pretty dismal place to be. But I believe we can still exercise some control over that descent. We have to fall, but there are branches we can grab onto, things that can slow us down. Not as a culture, but as individuals. We can descent gradually and with some degree of grace perhaps. 

Everywhere will be different, and the solutions will be different for everyone. That's what five years living on the road has taught me. There is no collective anything. There is just you and me and the rain. When I say we have to figure this out without the cavalry, don't mistake me for some alternate cavalry. I don't know what you need to do. I know some of what I need to do, but you are different. You have your own path. We need to work together, help each other, but work together and help each other down our own paths. The balance between individualism and community that has been lost, we have to restore it one person at a time. The good news is that I think we still have a chance to land at the bottom of that descent without too much damage. To understand what I mean, let me tell you a little story about an engine.

---

At the end of 2017, after we'd been traveling in the bus for about nine months we were [climbing up Tehachapi Pass](https://luxagraf.net/jrnl/2017/12/terrible-horrible-no-good-very-bad-week) to get out of California's central valley. About halfway up the incline there was a loud bang from the engine and the smell of burning oil. The leaking head gasket we didn't know about had leaked enough that one piston shattered and we were dead in the water. I didn't know that at the time. All I knew was that something was very, very wrong. 

I called a tow truck and we were towed over the pass down to Mojave, CA, where we spent three weeks and over $6,000 replacing that piston and head gasket. We had no choice. While I knew how to fix some things, I was a long way from knowing how to take apart an entire engine. But, when I was signing that credit card receipt for six grand, I decided, never again. Whatever happens from here on out, I am going to fix it or we're going to sell it and find some other way to travel. 

The bus has never been to a mechanic since. This is not meant as a slight of those mechanics who have worked on it over the years. Some did good work. Some did not. But none of them love this engine the way I do. Why should they? It's not their engine. If you love something you learn how to take care of it yourself. 

So I set about trying to educate myself on how to repair a Chrysler 318 LA engine. This was not easy. The aspirated 318 with LA heads hasn't been in a production vehicle since the late 1970s. Even mechanics in their mid 50s might never have actually worked on one. Slowly though I began to stumble across people working on them. The [Mopar A-body forums](https://www.forabodiesonly.com/mopar/) have been helpful, and several YouTube channels have taught me a ton, especially [Uncle Tony's Garage](https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC9SzQNYLqsPQGY_nbHogDDw). 

But while strangers could provide some framework and theory, which it comes to figuring out what's wrong I've mainly turned to my uncle Ron who has an uncanny knack for being able to diagnose problems over the phone with very little to go on. Without him I would not know half of what I know today (which is still disappointingly little, but enough to get by). 

Somewhere along the way I started to wonder what was driving me. It was partly curiosity, partly necessity, but also partly something more. Matthew Crawford's *Shop Class as Soul Craft* articulates this something more far more eloquently than I've been able to. Crawford sees the need to be capable of repair as more than just a desire to fix things. He sees it as a desire to escape the feeling of dependence on stuff. The more I began to work on the bus the more I understood what Crawford meant. There is empowerment in knowing how things work. Your stuff will never again fail you because if it does break, you can repair it. Empowerment in this case means removing the expert between you and your stuff. Your stuff is more yours, you are more in control of your stuff.

Crawford calls the person who wants to fix their own stuff, the Spirited Man. In his book this figure becomes 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."

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." 

In the time since I read that I have literally done exactly that. I have decided I'd rather go down swinging, taking apart my valve train, rather than seeking the help of a professional. It’s not just me. YouTube and other sharing sites are littered with people teaching each other how to fix stuff. Then there are the thousands people without social media 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 to the heart of our existence... why are we here? Are we here, as the technomedia landscape would have it, to be passively entertained and coddled from birth to death? Or are we here for something more? I don't know about you, but I don't think we're just along for the ride. We’re here to stand at the helm, trim the sails and steer the ship.

I think rejecting the world of passivity, of getting off our butts and taking matters into our own hands, of asking our neighbors and like-minded strangers how to fix things, how to build things, what's working and what isn't. All of this is on the path to rebuilding a life of value and meaning. 

---

We eliminate our dependence on the cavalry by becoming the cavalry for ourselves, for our families, and for our neighbors. *Être fort pour être utile*. Be strong to be useful.  

Eliminate the central conceit of modernism -- that there is a group of people you need to save you from... the world, yourself, your shortcomings, your neighbors, your neighbors' shortcomings and on down the line -- by taking responsibility for yourself and the expanding that responsibility outward to your family, to your community. 

The message of modernism is that you're helpless and you need saving. If you want to dig deep into the psychology of this I'd say it's about what you'd expect to get when a culture takes the gods out of its religion and replaces those gods with administrative systems. We're not the first. The Romans went down this path, so did the Chinese. Read Oswald Spengler or Arthur Toynbee if the history interests you. All you really need to know though is that there's a long history showing it doesn't work. Look around you, is stuff working? No, no, it is not.

Everything requires highly specialized skills and knowledge. This is a choice. Things don't have to be built this way. Culture doesn't have to be arranged this way. It didn't use to be this way. Even 100 years ago there were very few "experts" telling you how to live. Now even lightbulbs have to include instructions on how to change them. 

Once you needed to be able to do a bit of everything yourself -- help your neighbors build their homes, raise and butcher animals, preserve your food, fight fires, fix stuff, pull a tooth, deliver a child. All the things Robert A. Heinlein famously suggested a human being out to be able to do: "A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects."

Prior to the coming of the machine age, we were able to do this stuff. It was no factor.

But I know, I know, industrialization relies on specialization. Specialization means highly trained workers. Professionals are better than self-taught amateurs. Their skills can develop everything to increasing levels of complexity. And look, there are aspects of this that are good. It would take me years to learn how to machine a camshaft. I'm happy to let an expert do that because their expertise has allowed them to develop better tools and using those tools requires skills that only those experts have. Not everyone had a mill at their house. Not everyone could forge a great blade. There has always been specialization. It's the degree of specialization that's the problem. Our problems are the problems of overspecialization.

The problem with the specialization model isn't so much the specialization as the exclusion. As Christopher McDougall so eloquently puts it in *Natural Born Heros*, over time, "a subtle cancer spread: where you have more experts, you create more bystanders. Professionals did all the fighting and fixing we used to handle ourselves; they even took over our fun, playing our sports while we sat back and watched."

When was the last time you played baseball? When was the last time you watched it? I know I listened to a game last week. The last time I played was in the previous century. That's sad really. I like playing. Life is playing. Not watching. What are we here for? To play or to watch? I think that will become central question of our age, at least for those that haven't found their gods. 

I believe the disconnection that comes from watching life instead of participating in it is responsible for just about all our problems. Our mental health problems, our physical health problems, our cultural problems. All these things stem from being disconnected from life, from each other, from ourselves.

How did we get here? We got here because we allowed other people to tell us what was good for us. And they were wrong. From diet and health to design and visions of the future, they were wrong.

It's time we stopped listening to them and went back to fixing stuff ourselves, taking care of each other, taking care of ourselves.

---


The question becomes, how do we get back to where our grandfathers were?

There isn't one answer to this. I am not here on high telling you how to find your path because that top-down model is what caused the problem. I'm not even going to tell you what I am doing because even in that I think there's a tendency to see it as a recipe.

I would suggest that the first and most important thing is the realize that no one else is going to figure it out for you. The top-down, expert provides a solution system *is* the problem. 

I would suggest that reclaiming control of your life, your community, your world is actually easier than you think. You are already more skilled than you think. And you are surrounded by skilled people. Find something that interests you and get better at it. Connect with other people who share your interests. 

Early drafts of this had a few suggestions on specific things you could do, but again, I don't want to give you a recipe. That said, there is one thing that I think isn't intuitive, but will really open doors for you: **stop using money to meet all your needs**. 

Find one problem, one thing, that you pay for now that you can either make/do yourself, or, even better can be borrowed or done with help from friends and family. The goal is to find something that puts you in a debt of gratitude to someone else. This is the basis of community—gratitude. When you are grateful to the world, you become more helpful to the world. Gratitude is a powerful motivator. It subverts one of the most powerful outside, centralized structures that we're eventually going to have to do without: currency.

Your great grandparents fixed things for people, made things for people, and were grateful to receive the same from others. This formed much of the basis of community that held life together before the coming of centralization. It isn't the only thing, but it's a place to start and that's what we need to do. Start. Remember, we don't want to change the world, that's the top down thinking that got us in the mess. The goal here is to change the only part of the world you can: you.

# Rules for Screens, Part Two

date:2022-08-03 13:47:28
url:/essay/tools/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. Well maybe not, CRT screens aren't around anymore. Anyway, if you didn't actually hurl it out a window, 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 screen 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 of 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 if you believe everything you read. Which is sign you're using your phone too much.

I don't love phones, and I do think we should all use them less. If you've feel addicted to your phone, well, um, you're right. You are. Everything about the design of the apps on your phone is engineered to create dopamine pathways that make sure you experience physical withdrawal when you go without them. That's addiction pure and simple.

But. Did you know that culturally we've been wringing our hands over the distractions in our lives for centuries? Meister Eckhart, writing around 1307, calls "distraction" the second most powerful thing preventing communion with God. In 1550s Swiss scientist Conrad Gessner worries that the printing press will worsen the problem of distraction with a "confusing and harmful" amount of data "unleashed on the unsuspecting." To pick a more recent, and revealing, example consider writer Italo Calvino's 1983 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 being distracted is not new. Think of it slightly differently, the desire for distraction is not new. All that's happened over the last century is we've created ever more engrossing mediums to distract ourselves with. This 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. Not a smart watch or fitness tracker, just a watch.

A few things I have heard of people doing 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, and using a pen and paper to make notes rather than using your phone. 

## 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. Turn them off, all of them.

## Rule Eight: Practice Doing Nothing

This does not mean meditating. It means doing nothing. Or at least do nothing productive. When you were a child you were probably happy to lie in the grass all afternoon doing nothing. At most you might pick out shapes in the clouds, but you were fine doing nothing. Or at least if you're over 35 and actually had a childhood then you might remember doing nothing. If not. Well, learn. Practice.

Of all the rules in this list, this is the hardest for me. I have this need to always be making something. I am ill at ease doing nothing. I read a good bit, I also practice discursive meditation, but neither of those qualify. The only time I really do nothing, is lying in a hammock, so I make sure to get some time in the hammock at least a couple times a week.

It might take some time to figure out the way you do nothing the best. If you do get stuck on this one, I highly recommend a hammock.

## Rule Nine: Record Your Practice

Write down when you do nothing. Write down when you don't do nothing. Write down how you miss notifications if you do. Write how you overcome your strange screen habits and most of all, write down when you still use screens. Don't judge yourself for it, step back, detach and just record what happened, what you did, and for how long. Try to be a disinterested observer of yourself, this will be much more helpful than berating or congratulating. 

## 


[^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 One

date:2022-08-02 17:14:59
url:/essay/tools/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](https://luxagraf.net/1969-dodge-travco-motorhome). 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 stopped doing that, so 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 giving in to all these urges to check social media wouldn't be 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**

A lot 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. You were operating on autopilot. Some of this autopilot living is a good thing, especially, I've found, morning routines, but too much autopilot will strip away your agency. You will no longer be in control of your life. That's how I felt about screens. I could not stop using them until I became conscious I *was* using them.

This step then is to keep track of every time you use a screen. It doesn't have to be a big thing, just remember to do it. Don't judge yourself for it, or chastise yourself, 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. But you don't have to do that. Just note it in your mind.

Unlike the steps above, this is not really a rule. 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 doing this years ago, I still do it today, with varying degrees of success and failure.

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 and other markers along the way, but it's not like you get to place where you're done, you win at life, you never have to do anything again. Well, I mean technically there is, it's called death, but that's not what I mean here. I just mean that everything is ongoing. 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. 

Okay, now go kill your television.

# Birds, Sky

date:2021-11-11 21:46:20
url:/essay/craft/black-sky

My friend Mike and I took a quad ride through the country one weekend in San Miguel. It was a good trip, I wrote about it [here](https://luxagraf.net/jrnl/2018/11/lets-go-ride), but at one point we stopped for water and a huge flock of either ravens or crows came circling overhead. I like to think they were crows, since that would make them a murder of crows, but I couldn’t say for sure, I had no binoculars on me. I thought I'd maybe take a picture and see if I could zoom in later and figure out what they were. That idea failed, but I ended up with this picture which I really like. 

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	<video poster="https://luxagraf.net/media/images/videos/2021/range-013-poster.jpg" controls preload="auto" id="19" class="vidautovid">
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		<source src="https://luxagraf.net/media/images/videos/2021/range-013-compressed.mp4" type="video/mp4">
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	<a class="figcaption" href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qgu1Bu9G_Ho">Watch on YouTube</a>
</div>

On a whim I decided to see if I could figure out how to get dramatically black skies in Darktable using the newer workflow tools, and I thought of this image. I think it works better as black and white, especially with the dark sky. It's dramatic, but the moment was dramatic so for me at least, it works.

# Bayside Sunset

date:2021-11-05 20:49:10
url:/essay/craft/bayside-sunset

This was one of our favorite hidden spots in Florida. Unfortunately it's not hidden anymore, and last I heard it was closed to RVs, but it was pretty great when [we were there in 2018](https://luxagraf.net/jrnl/2018/03/green-sea-days). It was a small campground at the end of a dusty dirt road made of dried Florida red clay. We spent almost two weeks there and probably would have stayed longer, but we had plans to meet up with some people farther down the panhandle.

This image is the defining image of our time there for me. Every night after dinner we'd walk down the shore and watch the sun set over Pensacola Bay. Every night it was this spectacularly warm, slightly greenish light that I've never seen anywhere else. I didn't actually take many pictures of the sunset, in fact this is one of only three I could find, but this managed to grab everything about those nights, at least for me. I think it looks like my daughter is dancing here, but she actually tripped on a root and is about to fall on the sand. But even she had tried to revise history to say she was just dancing. Dancing it is then.

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	<video poster="https://luxagraf.net/media/images/videos/2021/range-012-poster.jpg" controls preload="auto" id="18" class="vidautovid">
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	<a class="figcaption" href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M_O81P7YCaA">Watch on YouTube</a>
</div>

The campground is closed now and the Florida wildlife management won't say when it'll be reopened. I got the impression talking to the ranger the other day on the phone that the answer was never. That's fine with me, it would never be the same, could never be the same, best to leave it in photo form, and in memory where it can't be harmed.

# Pawnee Grassland

date:2021-10-29 11:10:48
url:/essay/craft/pawnee-grassland

Colorado conjures images of mountains and pine forests, but that's actually only the Rocky Mountains. Most of the state is grassland and plains, wide open country with huge skies, dramatic storms, and nowhere to hide from them. It can be exciting.

Most of it is farmland, but there are a few National Grasslands that have been set aside to preserve things as they were about 100 years ago. We camped here in the Pawnee Grasslands for about a week. I wrote about it in a post called, appropriately, [Grassland](https://luxagraf.net/jrnl/2018/08/grassland), which also has some more images if you want to see some of the storms. But I like the simplicity of this one, it captures how very small even a 26ft RV feels out here.

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	<video poster="https://luxagraf.net/media/images/videos/2021/range-011-screencap.jpg" controls preload="auto" id="17" class="vidautovid">
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		<source src="https://luxagraf.net/media/images/videos/2021/range-011-compressed.mp4" type="video/mp4">
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	<a class="figcaption" href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HPPU1xLici8">Watch on YouTube</a>
</div>

In developing this all I really wanted to do was up the contrast a bit and correct the color balance, which was tending toward the green side with all that grass.

# Alborada Festival

date:2021-10-22 17:36:19
url:/essay/craft/alborada-festival

San Miguel de Allende's [Alborada Festival](https://luxagraf.net/jrnl/2018/10/alborada) starts at 4 AM. Actually it was closer to 2 AM. The main Jardin gets packed way before that, but 4 is when it kicks off. Mexicans are serious about their parties. I’ve been in quite a few large scale parties — Songkran, Chinese New Year, New Year’s Eve in New York. San Miguel’s Alborada deserves a spot among those, it’s a hell of a party and it lasts for four or five days.

I won't pretend to understand all of it, but the highlight for me was a particular group of dancers, La Sagrada Familia. I ended up photographing them many times over the months. I am actually not 100 percent sure that this gentleman was part of that group, but his dress and face paint fits. This was a random shot grabbed in the blink of an eye and then he was gone. 

<div class="self-embed-container">
	<video poster="https://luxagraf.net/media/images/videos/2022/range-10-poster.jpg" controls="true" loop="false" preload="auto" id="21" class="vidautovid">
		<source src="https://luxagraf.net/media/images/videos/2022/Darktable_Edit_010.webm" type="video/webm">
		<source src="https://luxagraf.net/media/images/videos/2022/Darktable_Edit_010.mp4" type="video/mp4">
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	<a class="figcaption" href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SFDrQB3-tos">Watch on YouTube</a>
</div>

I would like to have made a portrait, but I never did see him again during the festival or in the next nine months we called San Miguel home. Sometimes all you get is an instant.

You can download the Darktable preset I used in this video [here](https://luxagraf.net/darktable/colorbalancergb_colorcontrastboost.dtpreset).

# Black and White Badlands

date:2021-04-23 20:50:08
url:/essay/craft/black-and-white-badlands

Late in the summer of 2018 we spent [two weeks camping in Buffalo National Grassland](https://luxagraf.net/jrnl/2018/08/range-life), on the edge of Badlands National Park. We only went into the park itself a couple of times, but this day rain was in the forecast and I already knew that without some clouds, the Badlands made for boring images (standing there looking at it was breathtaking, but sometimes that feeling doesn't translate into the image, and for me, in this case, it did not). I figured the storm would add some drama to the sky and make for better pictures. 

Most of the black and white images I've done so far for *Range* were composed knowing I would develop them to be black and white. This one is different. I had in mind color. But then the other day I was searching through my Darktable library for an image that would lend itself to making the sky black (in black and white). I know how to get a black sky using Darktable's old channel mixer, but I haven't done it in the new color calibration module (which replaces the channel mixer). Anyway, this image isn't great for that, but when I saw it something said, *you should make that black and white*. So I did, and I like it much better than the color version.

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	<video poster="https://luxagraf.net/media/images/videos/2021/range-009-poster.jpg" controls  preload="auto" id="15" class="vidautovid">
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		<source src="https://luxagraf.net/media/images/videos/2021/range-009-compressed.mp4" type="video/mp4">
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	</video>
	<a class="figcaption" href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AviWkfPT8Yg">Watch on YouTube</a>
</div>

I think this image is a good example of how a mundane image can be made much more striking in black and white. It's important to note this is not a great image even in black and white, but it serves my purpose here. Which is to illustrate that sometimes thinking in texture rather than color yields a more interesting image.

# Lone House, Near Rutherford Beach, LA

date:2021-04-09 09:19:22
url:/essay/craft/lone-house-la

Coastal Louisiana doesn't have many beaches. It's mostly marsh, cat tails and reeds populated primarily by herons, spoonbills, coots, and other water birds. It's a flat, almost featureless, world when you drive through it sitting high up in an RV.

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	<a class="figcaption" href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FWcNMTsTx8U">Watch on YouTube</a>
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There are no houses on the ground. There's very little ground and almost all of it will be inundated with water several times a year at a minimum. Maybe that's why everything out here is called a "camp", it's a way of acknowledging the temporary, precarious nature of the structures.

Nearly every house has a sign out front with a name. Camp Canal, Camp Dr. Herbert, Camp David, Camp Southern Leisure, Camp 12 Oaks, and my personal favorite, Camp Plan B. I even saw a single wide mobile home on 12 foot high stilts with a sign on it that read: Cajun High-Rise.

We spent five days camping on the only beach around, Rutherford Beach. It's free and you can pull right up on the sand. It stormed a good bit and fog would roll in pretty much every night, hiding the lights both onshore and off, making it feel like we were all alone in the world.

That's what I like about this photo and why I went black and white with it, it feels more stark, more isolating, more raw, which is exactly how the Louisiana coast felt to me. And unlike the last image, I felt like the grain worked in this one. I shot it while driving, so it had a bit more softness to it that lent itself to adding grain. It looks more like film with that little bit of softness.

# Dragoon Mountains

date:2021-04-02 08:44:07
url:/essay/craft/dragoon-mountains

Southeastern Arizona is one of my favorite places in the desert southwest. The nearest big city is Tucson, but even that's a couple hours away. It's a lonely area, I love it. The Dragoons Mountains are among my favorite spots in the area. I've spent a few weeks in and around them over the years, entering from both the east and west sides, as well as from the south on foot. The west entrance is my favorite, but that road is too rough for [the big blue bus](https://luxagraf.net/1969-dodge-travco-motorhome) so on this trip we came in from the east.

The east is home to Cochise Stronghold, the place where Chihuicahui leader Cochise lived, later hid, and eventually died and was buried. As I've written elsewhere, [Cochise's presence is still easy to feel](https://luxagraf.net/jrnl/2018/01/ghost-cochise) in the Dragoons.

On this trip we spent most of our time hiking and hanging around the campground. During the week we had the place to ourselves. There was a dry creek bed a few yards beyond our campsite and for the kids it was like having a giant sandbox to play in. 

It was down in the creek bed, where I sat watching the kids, the birds, the world, when I noticed the way the sunbeams were coming through this yucca tree. I knew when I was taking it that the lens was going to flare, that's just what older lenses do, so I was thinking black and white from the moment I took it.

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	<a class="figcaption" href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gRmiNHFm7yk">Watch on YouTube</a>
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In redeveloping it using 2021 darktable, I ended up with almost exactly the same look at the original, which you can see [here](https://luxagraf.net/jrnl/2018/01/ghost-cochise). The difference is that this version, which uses the Color Calibration module, took about half the time as the original. It's slightly ironic perhaps but my favorite feature of the Color Calibration module is how easy it is to get the black and white look I want. 

For this one I wanted to replicate the look of my favorite black and white film, Tmax 3200. Alas, the magic of Tmax 3200 is about more than grain and when I made this image grainy the result looked terrible to me. So if you're reading this on luxagraf.net and you notice the large image above doesn't have the grain that's in the video it's because I decided it didn't work. Tmax 3200 has something about it (softness perhaps?) that I just can't get out of Sony's sensors. That's okay though, I'm happy enough with this image. As with the rest, it's not a work of art, but it reminds me of the experience of making it, and it illustrated a part of the story I wanted to tell about the Dragoons.

# Three Quick Edits

date:2021-03-19 08:25:01
url:/essay/craft/three-quick

Someone emailed me after the last post and asked if I really spent 10 minutes or more on every photo I post. The answer is of course not. If I shoot 100 images, 95 of them go in the trash, three of them I edit much like I do the images in this video, and the remaining two, while I might like them, probably have something fundamentally wrong with them that takes me ten minutes per image to fix. 

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	<a class="figcaption" href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H_JE6lo33A4">Watch on YouTube</a>
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Also, please don't mistake me liking an image enough to post here with me thinking it's a good photo. I have studied photogeaphy enough to know what a good photo looks like. For the most part, I do not make good photos. Once every 5-8k images I produce one that's actually a good photograph. 

But good photos aren't necessarily the point for me. I am almost always shooting to tell a story. My images are very rarely meant to stand on their own. I may not know the story when I am shooting, but I know there will be text and other photos involved, which is a very different way of thinking from someone who's making art images. At least I think so, I've honestly never attempted to make art with a camera. Most of these photos are a) images I like because of the story they are part of, and b) show off something I do in darktable that other people might like to know how to do.

Anyway, I decided that I would make this video showing the faster editing process I use on the images that are part of the story, but don't need major help. All of these were shot within 100 meters of my front door last weekend, and processed in real time with a screen recorder running. I did no editing on this one.

# Zion Canyon

date:2021-03-12 16:22:35
url:/essay/craft/zion-canyon

This was a fun hike. It's on the way to a hanging canyon I used to hike to when I was a kid. Two of my own kids are with me, my son was riding on my shoulders, and I was hiking in flip flops. I mean, Zion is all paved trails and a little bit Disneyland these days, so why wouldn't you hike in flip flops? We got some looks though. We even got a few comments. I just ignored it. I wrote about it [once before](/jrnl/2017/09/zion).

I think the kids were 3 and 5 at the time. We ended doing three miles round trip. It's steep hike, straight up, straight down, surrounded by this gorgeous red rock the whole time. It's really a shame Zion turned into the circus it is because it's an incredibly beautiful place. 

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	<a class="figcaption" href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WBbcvkH7Q5g">Watch on YouTube</a>
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Anyway, this photo. Mid afternoon sun with shadows in a canyon, one of those rare times I'm happy to shoot digital and not film. I knew there was no way I could get both, so I metered for the highlights and just hoped the shadows wouldn't be too noisy. I'm not fond of the sky in the final result, but I tried all kinds of ways to desaturate it and nothing worked. I can live with it. If you click the link in the first paragraph you can see the first time I developed it. Much happier with this result.

# Trinidad Road

date:2021-03-05 09:23:00
url:/essay/craft/trinidad-road

This is one of those images I wish I could go back and redo. I was in a rush, and it shows. My wife and three very cranky kids are in the car behind me. No one wants to be stopped. Everyone is hungry and tired. The water pump in [our RV](/1969-dodge-travco-motorhome) had broken. We were on our way back from buying a new one, which turned out to be an hour drive each way, most of it on a very washboard dirt road. 

The light on the grass in the distance caught my eye, the way it contrasted with the clouds. But I only had a couple of seconds to make an image. Which might be why I shot this at 640 ASA in aperture-priority mode and didn't stop down beyond f/5.6. Oops. Double oops with this lens, which has really soft corners until about f/11. Most likely I'd been shooting the evening before in a low light situation where those settings made sense, for example the [last image on this piece](/jrnl/2017/06/escaping-texas), and then I dashed out of the car, snapped this image, and that was it.

The point is, this image, from a technical standpoint, is pretty much garbage. The composition is okay though, maybe not great, but it works well enough, and the light isn't too bad, so let's see what we can do with it.

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	<a class="figcaption" href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t5xpXUWBXQk">Watch on YouTube</a>
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My main goal was to convey a better sense of the light. Mountain light is the best light I've ever worked in, especially Colorado mountain light. Every place I've ever been has its distinctive light, in Colorado there's a strange mix of harsh and soft light that's always swirling around, spotlighting something and then moving it back into shadow. That ends up being the main thing I went for in this image, getting the light and tones right.

Whether or not I did is debatable. If I were to do it again I'd probably ease off the vignetting fix a little, and I'd probably push the mid-ground highlights even more. I still remember how that green just beyond the road was glowing, almost iridescently. The print I have captures that pretty well, but this web version still falls a little flat if you ask me. 

Of course everything could always be redone and made better. At some point you have to just say, good enough, and be done.

# Ancestral Puebloan Dwelling

date:2021-02-15 15:07:25
url:/essay/craft/ancestral-puebloan

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	<a class="figcaption" href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=coM06JSQOMg">Watch on YouTube</a>
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I've traveled the Utah southeastern desert since I was two. This is the only time I have ever come across a restored kiva-like structure that was open the public. Not just open to the public, but the nearest ranger was a long, long way away.

It was a unique and very special experience. I spent about half an hour down inside. I only took three photos though, this one, one of my kids looking up the ladder, and a self portrait. Mostly I just sat there and watched the shaft of light move across the floor and thought about all the other people who had sat there over the centuries and watched something similiar.

I thought of this image recently because I was reading *[Photographs Not Taken](https://daylightbooks.org/products/photographs-not-taken-a-collection-of-photographers-essays)*, a collection of essays by photographers about images they didn't take. The reasons vary, but there are more than a few essays about people who felt like the camera was pulling them out of the moment in some way. I felt like that whenever I picked up my camera inside this structure. It just did not feel right.

The famous big wall free climber Ron Kauk spoke once at The North Face when I was working there, and I remember him talking about how he didn't really like being photographed when he climbed. He accepted it as a price he had to pay if he wanted sponsorships and the rest of the circus that let him climb for a living, but I remember him saying that he felt like looking at those images later interferred with his memories, like the photograph crowded the memory out of his head. 

I can relate to that, particularly with this image which, though I have spent hours on it, still doesn't match my memory of the experience of sitting on the floor of that kiva. And I wonder, if I did get it right, if the colors did map to what I can still see in my head, would it replace my memory? Would it crowd it out? Would I be left with nothing more than these ones and zeros encoded on this silcon?

# Is This Water?

date:2021-01-23 15:38:56
url:/essay/spirit/is-this-water

2021 has arrived. We're well beyond the future dates I used to idly try to imagine during boring high school classes. It's a strange feeling. We are further into the future than past me was able to conceive of -- where the hell does that put us?

I don't know. What I do know is that hunting season is over. Deer season anyway. That deer season ends around January 1st is one of those factoids that I have always vaguely known, but never had a reason to care about. Now I do. 

Most of the land surrounding our current home, the land I call the 100 acre wood, because, well, it's roughly 100 acres, isn't technically part of the property we live on. We live on three acres *surrounded* by those 100 acres of woods. Those 100 acres are leased to a hunting club, so we can't really do much exploring during deer season. But that's over now and we've been getting out there on the dry days, which has been nice. 

About a half mile back behind the house there's a creek bed, never more than ten feet wide, but it's enough for the kids to get their feet wet and explore. I haven't tried yet, but I'm hopeful that my cellular hotspot will have some signal out there so I can work creekside when it warms up. I need a good portable desk. 

Not really though. Really I don't need anything. I need less things. It's the time of year when I find myself taking stock of things and seeing what I can streamline, simplify, and do without. It's my form of a new year's resolution I think. Or perhaps some seasonally wayward attempt at early spring cleaning. Whatever the case this time of year is when I go through my life and think, what can I get rid of? What can I do without? What can I improve on? What is no longer necessary? 

It's a fun thought process. I always change things up. Sometimes silly things, like the number of spoons in the drawer. Too many damnit. Out spoons, out. Other times I realize a don't need some tool I've previously considered indispensable. Some other tool I hardly pay attention to will turn out to do the job even better and I didn't realize it because I'd stopped thinking about the problem when I found the first solution.

The problems is those first solutions are often ugly hacks, temporary patch jobs, but then you forget to go back and redo them. Or I do anyway. It's good to go back and check your old work, make sure there aren't any hack jobs left around.

I don't do this annual taking stock to change my life, it's more of a cleaning out. It's a chance to pull off the rutted road for a few days and see what all is going on down there in the grooves. This is especially true when I get past the silly stuff like too many spoons in the drawer and start looking at my thought patterns.

Any pattern of thought soon becomes transparent. That's part of what the pattern is for, and for many things that's good. I don't want to think *what should I do?* every morning. I want to make a cup of coffee and relax for a bit, like I always do. Still, I am sometimes alarmed to find patterns I didn't know I had when I step back and detach, and really *look* at myself.

David Foster Wallace has a parable that I think is relevant:

> There are these two young fish swimming along, and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says, “Morning, boys, how's the water?” And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes, “What the hell is water?”

Wallace's whole text is [worth a read](http://bulletin-archive.kenyon.edu/x4280.html) if you're not familiar (it was a commencement speech originally), but the salient point is, to quote Wallace's own explication: "the most obvious, ubiquitous, important realities are often the ones that are the hardest to see and talk about."

I think "realities" is too vague. I don't know exactly what Wallace had in mind, but for me "realities" are the patterns of thought that govern my day.

These patterns are hardest to see because they are the things that provide the framework in which we live. They're the things we decided way back when we couldn't even conceive of 2021 as a now that would eventually be *now*. They're the things we figured out so long ago we can't even recall exactly what we figured out. Still, they're there in the background informing everything we do. They're the water in which we live.

When you see the water around you, you see yourself differently. Sometimes that means you find a few spoons you don't need. Other times it might mean something more. 

So every year, around this time, I take a pen, a scrap of paper, and go for a walk. Woods are ideal for this, there's such a tangle of growth and life all around you that somehow the tangle of your own thoughts becomes less intimidating. From the tangle patterns emerge, pathways of thought through the trees. Somewhere in there I try to figure out what it is I am doing, where I am going, where I want to be going, and which patterns are going to close the gap between those two things. With any luck I find my way home before dark.

# Bayou, Palmetto Island, LA

date:2021-01-17 17:17:52
url:/essay/craft/palmetto-island

We stumbled on Palmetto Island very early on in our travels. It's a little state park south of Abbeville. It's not much, just a postage stamp plot of swampy land on Vermillion River, but it makes a good stopping point for exploring, Abbeville, Lafayette, and the surrounding rural areas. We've been several times, but this is from out very first trip and the only time I have seen the duck weed this thick (that's not solid ground, that's water with duck weed on it).

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This one was mostly about getting the colors right. It was incredibly green, almost chartreuse. It looked unreal, which is why I stopped. I love the A7ii, but sometimes greens go yellow and flat. Scenes like this make me miss Velvia 50, my second favorite film (after Kodachrome 25). 

My goal here was to bring back that rich bright green in the trees, and maybe to get a more Velvia feel. I am not happy with the weird shadow effect up in the trees, but that happens a lot with this lens and I have yet to find a good solution.

# Quay Wardlaw House

date:2021-01-02 21:26:19
url:/essay/craft/quay-house

This is an image born of pandemic boredom. I was driving around the South Carolina countryside looking for something to do when I stumbled across this historic building in downtown Abbeville, SC. 

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I had a specific look in mind for this image. I shot it with the Fujifilm X100V, with the Acros simulation on, so I had a black and white JPG. At first I wanted to see how close I could get to that using darktable's new color calibration tools. I thought maybe I'd make a style or something. But then as I was playing with it, it ended up going in a different direction. 

I like the end result better than the Fuji JPG, but it definitely isn't very Acros, which in my mind is most notable for its gradation and soft white-to-black fall off. I abandoned that in favor of this harsher, contrastier look, which I thought added some drama to an otherwise fairly boring composition.

# The Best Shoes I've Ever Worn Are Hardly Shoes at All

date:2020-11-19 08:14:09
url:/essay/tools/best-shoes-ive-ever-worn-are-hardly-shoes-all

The Z-Trail sandals from footwear maker Xero are true "barefoot" shoes. The [sandals](https://xeroshoes.com/shop/gender/mens/ztrail-men/) are so thin of sole, so minimal of strap, I routinely forget I'm wearing them. Which is the whole point: Instead of protecting your feet from the ground, barefoot shoes bring the feel of the ground through the sole to your feet.

Barefoot shoes—a design that has gained a sizable following among runners and outdoors enthusiasts, particularly those of us inclined to believe that modernity creates more problems than it solves—take everything you think you know about shoes and inverts it. 

A growing body of evidence [suggests](https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/07/090724091339.htm) that the padding in the modern shoe [isn't good for your feet](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/24500535/). Allowing your feet to bend, twist, flex, stretch and otherwise do [what feet evolved to do](https://www.nature.com/articles/nature08723) can reduce injuries and improve balance and agility. The more information your feet can convey to your brain, the better you can navigate the terrain.

Still, there's something undeniably quixotic about paying real money for footwear with almost no support or cushion. While emerging science appears to be on the side of bare feet, for me the barefoot shoe is about something more than the purely physical benefits. I have had a lifelong love affair with being barefoot, because to be barefoot is to be free.

Not free in any political sense of the word, but free in the way you were free as a child. Free to run and jump and play. Free of obligation. Free to do whatever you wanted for no reason at all because that freedom is the foundation of all human delight.

Remember when school first let out for the summer? Your feet had been imprisoned in shoes all through the year and suddenly they were free. You'd head to the pool or the beach or the park and jump out of the car with bare feet, ready to play. Of course, it hurt. The burning hot asphalt singed your bare soles. But it hurt so good. Walking across the hot blacktop was nothing compared to the boredom of staring at a blackboard all day. That pain would be gone after a few weeks—your feet are remarkably adaptable body parts—but that sense of freedom remained.

This carries into adulthood. What do we do at the end of the long day? We take off our shoes. If you're barefoot, it's unlikely you're working. (And if you can do your job barefoot, congratulations, you win.) If you're barefoot, you're also unlikely to have any pressing tasks. You're more likely to be in the backyard or at a pool or at the park or at the beach. You're probably outside and free, or at least doing something delightful.

There was only one thing that ruined those barefoot summers. It was that sign you'd always see at the entrance to the mini mart: "No shirt. No shoes. No service." Ah, commerce, enemy of freedom.

That's where the Z-Trails come in. I'm not ten anymore. I want my freedom *and* I want to go into the store. The soles of the Z-Trails are 10 millimeters thin, and the shoes are enough that I don't even notice them in my bag. (They're a favorite camp shoe among ultralight backpackers.) Walking around, I still feel like I'm barefoot. My feet stretch and flex and bend and roll the same way they would even if I wasn't wearing the sandals.

While I had already tried a few barefoot shoes, I wasn't sold on the idea until I tried the $80 Z-Trails. Every other "barefoot" design I had tried felt too much like a regular shoe. Then Xero sent me a pair of the sandals to test for a barefoot shoes buying guide I'm working on. I distinctly remember putting them on and going outside to walk around the yard for a bit. I remember following my kids around the yard, and when they headed into the brambles at the back of the house, I hesitated. I thought I wasn't wearing shoes. Then I looked at my feet, and surprise, I *was* wearing shoes. I plowed right into the brambles. Twenty minutes later, I was on the Xero Shoes website buying myself three pairs. Since that day, I have worn next to nothing else on my feet.

Barefoot shoe advocates would probably prefer I extol the science behind the benefits of barefoot shoes rather than sounding like a hippie chasing childhood memories down flower strewn trails, but you can discover that yourself by starting with the links I put at the top of this piece. I will also say that an increasing body of evidence shows that, while comfortable shoes make life easy on our feet, they make life much harder on the rest of our body. Balance and coordination decline over time, injuries become more likely.

More compelling to me, the Xero Z-Trails are the type of shoes people have worn for most of human history. The materials may be new, but the design is very nearly as old as human feet. Put on these sandals and you will walk like your ancestors. Their tactility creates a positive feedback loop between your feet and your brain. You step on a rock, your brain tells your muscles to adjust. Your balance improves, you stumble less. Your feet grow tougher too.

The benefits of barefoot shoes cascade over time, but if you decide to dive in, start slowly. *Very* slowly. Xero founder Steven Sashen suggests anyone curious about barefoot shoes should begin by going outside and walking about ten steps in bare feet. Yes, just ten. Then tomorrow, walk 20 steps. If there's no pain, keep increasing the daily step counts from there.

I should probably say there may still be some circumstances where padded shoes are better. In October, I spent three days of hiking some of the most brutal, root-strewn, leaf-covered [rocky trails the North Carolina mountains](/jrnl/2020/10/walking-north-carolina-woods) have to offer with 50 pounds on my back and barefoot shoes on my feet. I chickened out and did not wear the Z-Trails backpacking. Instead, I wore [Xero's HFS road running shoe](https://xeroshoes.com/shop/shoes/hfs-men/). It doesn’t offer any more padding than the sandal, but since it's an actual enclosed shoe, it’s better at keeping your foot situated over the sole. Even though I was worried my feet would slide around too much in the Z-Trail sandals, the HFS turned out to be overkill. I missed my sandals.

In fact, the only thing better is letting my bare feet free. That’s the point after all—to feel the world. So even if I haven't convinced you, and even if you never buy a pair of barefoot shoes, take a moment every now and then to delight in that child-like joy of feeling the ground beneath your feet, the earth between your toes. Your soles will thank you.

# Waffle the World

date:2019-08-31 10:15:59
url:/essay/tools/waffle-world

Everyone has some useless kitchen device they love. My parents love their mango peeler, I have a friend who swears one of those multi-edge brownie pans is the bomb. There's even an all-in-one breakfast sandwich device which, if Amazon [reviews](https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00C95O3DY/) are to be believed, is loved by many.

Our version of this is the waffle iron. Except that The waffle iron is not the one trick pony you think it is. It's capable of making everything from burgers to hash browns to chocolate chip cookies. And of course, [chocolate](/jrnl/2017/07/happy-5th-birthday) [waffle](/jrnl/2018/07/six) [cake](/jrnl/2019/07/seven).

<img src="images/2019/2017-05-22_150233_huntsville-tx.jpg" id="image-2058" class="picwide" />


### Origins

My first encounter with non-standard things in a waffle iron came at a campground. My family and I had recently moved into our [1969 Dodge Travco motorhome](/1969-dodge-travco-motorhome) to live full time on the road. I gutted and restored the RV, but one thing I never got around to fixing was the oven. It was on my list of things to do, but honestly, living in a vintage RV, that's a perpetually long list and things like brakes tend to take precedence.

One day in a New Orleans campground some fellow travelers, Taylor and Beth, [had us over for dinner](https://live.luxagraf.net/jrnl/2017/05/new-orleans-instrumental-number-2). It was too hot to run an oven in you RV, so they served up cornbread waffles. I'm pretty sure if you'd been there you could have actually heard the ding that went off in my head when I saw the cornbread waffle. If you can make cornbread in a waffle iron, what else could you make?

Traditionally, the waffle was a leavened bread-like thing, made from a dough rather than the runny batter we're used to now. It seems to have [grown out of a Greek tradition](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waffle) of cakes cooked between two pressed together hot plates. From there, the idea of pressing batter between plates spread through Europe. Europeans started adding yeast to make a leavened dough, and eventually the hot plates found their modern grid pattern. The French were early waffle pioneers, though the Dutch soon dominated. Now, the word "waffle" is often preceded by the word "Belgian."

We were not waffle traditionalists though, just a family without an oven looking for a good way to make cakes and cookies. After that first encounter with cornbread in a grid, we grabbed the cheapest waffle iron we could find and began to experiment.

### Waffle Mastery

We started with what we knew, replicating the cornbread waffles. We tinkered with the recipe until it was just right and then moved on. Our first homegrown success was chocolate waffle cake. The brilliance of cake as a waffle is that all those dents fill up with frosting. To this day, even when we have access to ovens, like in Mexico, my kids want chocolate waffle cake for their birthdays.

After the cake success I was more or less satisfied. Corrinne however, has continued to experiment and come up all sorts of things. Banana bread (excellent). Chocolate chip banana bread (even better). Chocolate chip cookies (still searching for perfection here). Later she tried hash browns (tricky, but can be good), and became slightly obsessed with trying just about everything in a waffle iron. Remarkably, nearly all of it all has worked. Or possibly two years of ovenless life makes your palette more forgiving. 

We quickly discovered that we were not the first waffle iron lovers. There was a blog, Wafflizer.com, now known as [Will it Waffle](https://willitwaffle.com/), which spawned a cookbook of the same name. There were other cookbooks, though we haven't tried any of them because experimenting -- especially with kids eager to learn to cook -- is more fun. 

Often we discovered that companies themselves had recipes adjusted to work in waffle iron. We found a cornbread mix that mentioned that the secret to better cornbread waffles was more oil (this is actually true in a broad sense, though you don't want to get carried away).

When I sat down to write this for WIRED I realized there's a whole internet world of waffling enthusiasts. Daniel Shumski, author of Will it Waffle, includes recipes for things as exotic as Miso-maple glazed salmon, waffled tamali pie, and even filet mignon. Honestly, we haven't tried any of those, though the tamali pie strikes me a potentially awesome.

You probably have an oven, so why bother waffling? It's fun. Kids love the experimental, bending of the rules aspect to it. That said, if we had an oven we'd probably use it. Still, odds are you have a waffle iron tucked away somewhere in your kitchen, neglected and sad in the darkness of a far cabinet. Pull it out and put on the counter with pride. Try waffling something unexpected.

# Why Live in a Vintage 1969 RV?

date:2019-03-31 17:33:28
url:/essay/spirit/why-a-vintage-rv

Everything smells like grapefruit. 

Out of the corner of my eye I can see the Colorado sunshine, but under here it's dark and cramped and it smells like grapefruit. The smell is transmission fluid, a slick, translucent red lubricant with an unpleasantly sweet citrus odor. I've been sticking my hands in it for months, over 4000 miles now, chasing a leak that won't stop. That leak caused the engine to overheat, leaving me on my back in the grass and gravel at the side of the road half way up Dallas Divide, outside of Ridgway, Colorado. There's blood on my knuckles, transmission fluid on my forehead and cheek, and I'm half on the ground, half off it, my torso twisted up into the engine, my face inches from an extremely hot radiator, wondering, not for the first time -- what in the world am I doing?

It started three years earlier. My wife had just given birth to our third child and we were feeling dissatisfied with life in the American suburbs. We wanted to spend more time outdoors, more time together as a family. A raft of studies has shown that time outside makes us happier, healthier people. What's more, listening to the wind in the trees, feeling the sun on your face, the rain on your head, the more we experience these things as children, the happier we are as adults. We feel it in our bones, that peace that comes from being outdoors. 

We could have moved to the country, we considered it, we may yet, but instead we decided to buy an RV and hit the road to see the whole country. And now, having lived this way for over two years, I can say that, for our family at least, the studies, the things we feel in our bones, are all absolutely right. The best part of the way we live is waking up in the morning and stepping outside. We live outside. We cook outside, we eat outside, we learn outside, we play outside. Only the weather drives us inside.

But before we made the leap to life on the road it was all untested intuition. We knew we wanted to home school, which was an easy choice since my wife is a teacher. As a freelance writer and programmer, I've long worked from home. Those two things combined gave us a huge head start on our way to life on the road. Our main hesitation was that we wanted our three children to still have a place they could call their own. We didn't want to travel, we wanted to take our home on the road.

The logical thing to do was to buy an RV. The problem for us was that modern RV design leaves much to be desired. Most RVs struck us as generic beige boxes, not unlike the suburban housing we wanted to leave behind. Worse, the construction is often very flimsy. 

We wanted an RV that would make us smile when we saw it, something that was made of actual steel, and preferably something that didn't cost a fortune. That's a tough combo to come across. We were ready to give up on the idea when we discovered the Dodge Travco.

To call it an RV is to say a Stradivarius is a violin. The Travco is not an RV; it's a 27 foot long fiberglass container full of magic and joy. I have no idea what it is about it, I've owned it for four years now, lived in it for over two, and I still can't put my finger on it. Some objects transcend themselves. The Travco has that thing no one can put their finger on, but everyone feels it. 

My wife was not 100 percent sold on the idea of living on the road until she saw the Travco. That combined with a trial trip to Florida added up to an afternoon where, over a couple beers in the sweltering Florida sun, we agreed, let's do this. 

Two days later we bought a 1969 Travco and a few weeks later I went to get it. I fired it up, pointed it downhill, and we were on our way. The first time I stopped, at a rest area on I-85, a man was up at the driver's window asking if he could take a picture before I'd even taken off my seatbelt. "What is this thing," he asked excitedly, "it's the coolest thing I've ever seen". This would happen hundreds of times more over the years and eventually I realized no one really wants me to tell them what it is, the name doesn't matter, it simply exists and people want to acknowledge that it exists.

I managed to get it the 200 miles back home, despite having no real idea the condition of the engine or brakes. I immediately started ripping out it's insides, re-wiring, re-plumbing, re-paneling, re-covering things to turn it into something livable for a family of five. The kids took to calling it the big blue bus, a name that has stuck with us ever since.

It's only 27 feet long, small for an RV by today's standards, but big enough to sleep six and after two years of living in it we know it's all we need. 

It took me nearly two years to fully restore the bus and even with all that work we left long before everything was done. 

We sold our house and moved into the bus before we had working plumbing or propane. It wasn't until four months into our trip that I finally got around to installing a water tank. Two months after that we got our solar system working. We were more interested in getting on the road than having everything perfect. Even today, after two years on the road I've still yet to install a refrigerator. We've lived for two years with an ice box and small freezer. Sometimes that's been a pain. Texas in June, 115 degrees and 99 percent humidity will melt your icebox in a hurry. 

That's been a big lesson of the road though -- you need very little to be happy.

Stepping outside the traditional structures of modern life means re-evaluating things, especially that cornerstone of modern life -- comfort. Comfort is freedom and independence. Comfort means having sweat glands and metabolic tolerance to deal with heat and cold rather than relying on air conditioning. 

There are some things that make life easier, on the road and otherwise, but more things do not make life more easy. Quite the opposite I'd argue -- more things mean more things that can break down and more time spent fixing or replacing them. Would it be easier to flip a switch from the inside? Yes, until that switch breaks. The simpler you keep things the less there is to worry about.

Which doesn't mean there's nothing to worry about. Like anyone with solar panels, we worry about hail. We get skittish around storms. One afternoon we were headed out of Colorado, bound for Canyonlands. We were heading almost due west, but to the south was started as a gentle tufts of cumulus cloud had, by midday, built into something ominously dark, day turning to night. The distant mountains we were hoping to make camp in were swallowed into the darkness and we watched as lightning snapped out in front of the storm. 

We stopped and consulted the map. To the northeast there was a small bit of state land that said it had a campground, but there was no further information. We decided to sit the storm out. We cut off the highway and followed an increasingly narrow dirt road -- always a good sign if you're looking for secluded spots -- and ended up with a campsite to ourselves with a canyon wall to one side and a bubbling river on the other. 

We unfurled the awning, set up the mat and let the kids take off exploring. Instead of driving headlong into who knows what we spent the afternoon playing in the river, watching the thunderheads roll by far downstream. That even we found bobcat tracks and what might have been some mountain lion prints. The next day we met two women foraging herbs along the river. They told us about a canyon to the east that only locals ever visit, full of petroglyphs and ruins that became our next destination. In fact the next two weeks we explored leads that all came because we turned to avoid a storm. 

But I've made it sound like we know what we're doing, which is not true. We have no clue. We make it up as we go along. We stumble along, following our noses as it were. We let the kids decide where we go. We spent a whole summer visiting the region in which Louise Erdrich's <cite>The Birchbark House</cite> takes place for no other reason than my daughters and I love the book.

And then there's a grapefruit smell. The bus breaks down. We spend days at the side of the road. The kids have learned to roll with it. They play games at the table while Daddy mutters under the bus and Mommy searches YouTube for videos on engine repair. We don't know what we're doing, but we love doing it. 

That particular day I wrapped a combination of duct tape and exhaust tape to stop the leak. I rolled out from under the bus, grabbed some water from in the bus and sat down on the guard railing. To the east the whole of the Cimarron Range spread out before us, it was September, the days growing shorter. I watched as the sun began to soften and light up Chimney Rock and other peaks and I remembered why we do this, why I don't mind stopping at the side of the road to fix something. There's nowhere to get to, we're already there. We limped back to Ridgway where I replaced all the transmission lines. I've never had a leak since.

# Life in Chains: Del Taco

date:2019-02-10 13:02:26
url:/essay/spirit/life-in-chains-del-taco

<img src="images/2019/deltaco.jpg" id="image-1866" class="picfull" />

Del Taco has no beginning, no end. It is a continuous haze of orange. 

It appears in my memory without clear origin and then slips away, slowly disintegrating over the years like a photograph bleaching in the harsh sunlight of adulthood until it is gone again. 

Everything in the Del Taco of my memory is orange, the tables, the booths, the floor, the signs, the mop bucket tucked back behind the racks of orange trays, the mottled tile in the bathroom, even the grease leaking out the back of the burritos. All of it glowing like a sunburnt George Hamilton.

I think of that orange whenever I'm home for a holiday, walking the gauntlet of fading family photos flanking the hallway walls on my way to the bathroom at my parents' house. I wonder if the photos look as strangely tinted to my children as they do to me, or if the novel notion that I was once a child overshadows the rest of the picture.

My childhood shimmers like a dry desert lake washed in heat, but it is still capable of rushing up out of that wavering indistinct haze with a startling immediacy at the slightest provocation. R.E.M.'s Radio Free Europe, the original "Hib Tone" version, catapults me instantly back to Corey's puke green VW Fastback lurching and backfiring its way into the parking lot at Cappy's diner where we sought greasy yellow omelets awash in a sea of pinto beans and cheese. The smell of a highlighter still lives back behind the shelving cart in the library where Shelly first kissed me, her blond hair brushing lightly against my neck as my fingers let go of the book I'd been pulling out. And the orange photo wash of faded Kodachrome 64 summons a vision of Del Taco on a Saturday afternoon, ice skating the tile floor in scuffed Adidas soccer cleats.

Del Taco's tables were pale orange, with molded plastic bench seats. There were three along the side by the drive thru, beneath the window. This was before SUVs, even the longest line at the drive thru could not block the view of the planes taking off from the airport, whose runway ended across the road. The notion of building anything next to a runway sounds quaint now, but there they were, giant lumbering planes roaring up into the sky while we sat in the molded white plastic and watched them.

The booths themselves were slick from countless pairs of jeans sliding in and out of them. When the dry Santa Ana winds blew in from the desert the static electricity would build up as I fidgeted in the booth, a fuzzy softness against the plastic. When I had enough I would discharge it against the metal window sill with a satisfying pop and surge of adrenaline, like the sweaty, metallic jolt you got from sucking hot sauce straight out of the packet.

Back then my father and I were burrito men. Burritos with fries. It sounds odd to me now, this notion of fries with a burrito. But it was California in the 1980s, many things from then sound odd to me now. David Lee Roth, Valley girls saying "like", the rat tail, New Coke, dolphin shorts.

Occasionally my dad would get tacos, but neither of us really liked hard shell tacos. This was the first sort of food elitism I can remember, this vague unspoken notion that whatever a taco might be, it was not something that came in a hard, molded shell that crunched. Tacos did not crunch. 

I don't know what ever propelled my family to Del Taco. My father says it was proximity. When I was very young I liked to watch the planes take off and land at John Wayne airport. Del Taco happened to be near the airport. We were hungry. We went once. We went again. A habit was formed. 

I am not a particularly sentimental man, but I won't lie, I'd hoped for more meaning, some import to it all, which is a little odd since when I was younger I was fond of spitting Wallace Stevens' sentiment: "Sentimentality is a failure of feeling." I said this at parties for years without ever bothering to wonder, not *why* sentimentality is a failure, but why I used this statement as shield. Stevens was railing against the syrupy banality of so much Victorian poetry, but me? I was avoiding something. When I said it, what I meant was "feeling is a failure to evade the past."

Why do I shrink from the past, preferring the standoffish distance, hiding behind a sarcasm I wear like dark sunglasses? I'm not sure. I do know that I would like for there to be more than proximity behind something that figures so large in my memory. But the world can be a monster. Who wants to walk around with naked feelings in a place like this?

---

The late 1990s. The Del Taco by the airport is still there, but it's remodeled, there's hardly any orange oil leaking out of the burritos. We've moved on. Corey sells the fastback. Shelly left town years ago. The world feels somehow smaller, diminished. 

---

Another decade passes. There is no orange oil left in LA. All I can find near the airport is a Chipotle. The burritos do not drip orange grease. They do not drip anything. Nothing in the entire place drips anything. There are no leaks, it is a white and glass world of perfection. There is no food here for the living, just some blue magic that began with Edward Bernays, passed through a brief phase of luminous orange, and ended in dry sawdust burritos, comfortable foam cushioned chairs, and a carefully engineered floor on which no cleats will ever slip.

I ducked and dodged my way east, moving across the country to a tiny town with no Del Taco, but completely steeped in orange oil. I arrived in the evening to watch a wall of humidity swallow the sun out of the western sky, leaving behind an orange haze that never faded, but glowed from the street lights until the orange dawn rose again. Home.

I let myself sink in to the orangeness of the place. I let JB's red-orange comeback sauce keep pulling me back into the parking lot next to the 40 Watt to soak up the alcohol. I let the orange tater tots linger in the grease pooling beneath my burger at the diner downtown. I let Weaver pass me plates of thick, gravy-smothered friend pork chops, collard greens and macaroni with orange cheese. I layered memory on memory until the sound of Innervisions slid me back in the door of Jimmy's '68 Falcon, jetting black through the humid night, sliver hood trim glinting in the streetlights of the university back roads where the cops and stops signs were fewer. I wrote at a table in the library, in front of a tall, narrow window looking out on the orange and red brick of downtown. I traded the Kodachrome for pixels. I drank coffee sitting on the rough pine porch of a converted church thinking at last I have a real religion.

Wallace Stevens never ate at Del Taco. It would have been sentimental somehow. Not sentimental in the way things were sentimental when he railed against it, but sentimental in the way things are now, when we have replaced sentimentality with irony, the only sentimentality we can stomach, but a failure of the imagination nonetheless. A failure to be out there, raw nerves prickling against the rough edges of world, the raw elements without which the world is reduced, small and mean.

We need orange grease leaking into the world. We need the dirt in the corner, a messy bathroom where we have to debate whether or not our hands will actually be cleaner after touching that sink. We need some modicum of risk to our lives, is this good for me? Does it need to be? We need wide open trays, vast arrays of jiggly food in badly lit underground cafeterias, not everything so neatly wrapped up and subdivided.

It's been so long since the world was orange. Still those raw nerves are there. They tingle in the quiet spaces between, we seek them across parking lot oceans, wandering the stucco deserts of strip malls, thirsting for the feeling of cool water on our tongues. 

I watched the world build a new world out of screens. They were blue, but somehow orange at first too.

Jimmy sold the Falcon. The coffee shop in the old church closed down. I drifted across town, sitting outside a different coffee shop in the warm summer evenings, watching a cloud of restless spring insects circling the street light above Waffle House, thinking that perhaps this digital oil can save us, give the rawness somewhere to exist, let us pull these things out again and look at them in the light. But that hope fades with time. The same forces that homogenized the real world, homogenize the screen world too. Soon all the raw edges are wrapped up in a scroll of blue and white easily digestible nuggets of nothingness without so much as an orange pixel to be seen.

Still the moths circle the light. Across the street a row of flycatchers sits, resting on the wire through which all these dreams pulse. It is easy pickings here, the birds so stuffed with moths they only watch now. Later, after the sun sets and the birds are asleep, what moths remain sometimes come to sip the salt from the tears lingering in the birds' eyes.

It's not a failure of feeling. It's a failure to make room for feeling.

---

Last year I found myself passing time in a nameless suburb south of Oklahoma City, not unlike the one I grew up in south of Los Angeles. I went to do laundry one day and there it was, Del Taco. 

I watched it while the washer ran, R.E.M. in my headphones. I stuffed the clothes in the dryer and walked down the street to see if it was in fact an endless sea of shimmering orange. I stood a moment on the sidewalk, looking at the black rimmed glass windows, thinking of the time I tracked down my great grandmother's tiny house, still bleaching its bones somewhere in the Arizona desert. I felt the same hesitation I had felt then. It wasn't my house. I was out of place, a stranger outside looking in. I backed up and turned around. I had time before the laundry was done. I went behind the stucco walls of the strip mall, down an alley and out another side street that led away from the chains, away from the clean bathrooms, the healthy burritos, the five star reviews, until eventually the street ended at a guard rail, the pavement gave way to open fields, and I kept walking, farther away, to some place where there is grass and sun and spring and green forever.

# What's Missing Is

date:2015-05-06 15:20:23
url:/essay/spirit/whats-missing

Claire woke up in a sleeping bag. The familiar shimmer of nylon against her skin. The smell of creosote and dampness. Already the darkness was lifting off the desert in front of her. She rolled over on the chaise lounge and groped the ground until she found her headlamp.

The little tuna can stove was back against the wall of the house. She stretched until she could hook it with a fingertip. She filled it with alcohol and lit it with a match. As the stove heated up she poured the water and grounds into the moka pot.

She sat up, still in the sleeping bag, and sipped the inky black coffee. She thought of something an ex had once said to her, "Claire, normal people want to be liked and accepted. You don't seem to give a shit. All you seem to care about is your coffee in the morning and your drinks in the evening". More or less. She took another sip. But not really.

Little bubbles of the past had been welling up and bursting on the surface like that ever since the plane touched down yesterday evening. Every time she heard that horrid kitty litter crunch of someone walking on the endless gravel of Tucson, some bit of her younger self broke loose inside. 

She was facing west, but could tell that the sun had not cleared the horizon. Two Cardinals flitted in the Mesquite tree at the edge of the patio. Flashes of red amongst the blacks and greens. She listened to them talking, the thin chip of their song muted by the morning stillness.

The desert began to sketch itself in the morning light, watercolor hues of sand and rock that surged together over the rolling canvas until everything was a million rioting shades of pink sandstone that held the river plain like a cradle, the dark green Palo Verde and Mesquite groves nestled like some dark scars in the blushing sand. It seemed to extend forever, spreading out to the west until it climbed up and disappeared into the green, juniper and pine cloaked world of the Catalina mountains. 

It was wet. The rain she had dreamed was not just a dream. Everything beyond the few feet of solid patio cover where she had slept was dripping. The foot of her sleeping bag was wet. She slid out into the cool of the morning, gravel gouging at her heels, and hung the sleeping bag to dry from a hook on the patio cover. 

She cupped her hand to the window and looked inside the house. Her grandfather was passed out in the recliner, fully reclined, just the way she had left him six or seven hours ago, when his eyelids had finally slid shut over the constellations of grief she had watched drift quietly across those dark expanses. The TV still flickered. Ever since she was a girl, the only way he had ever slept. 

<hr />

The late evening sun was just starting to temper its edge, take a little something off finally, maybe give a little respite from this goddamn heat, Ambrose was thinking when the entirety of the gravel station lot just outside the window was swallowed by a giant dust cloud that might, he realized, have somewhere in it a car, a customer, perhaps even customers, something he had not otherwise seen since much earlier in the day, back when it was hotter than Ambrose's repertoire of swear words could convey.

He'd been wondering for some time if he'd need to expand that repertoire for the jungle. The Army was unclear on many things, especially to Guardsmen like Ambrose, not the least of which was how many words he might need to describe the heat of Panama.

He was still standing in the shadows of the garage wiping his tanned forehead with a greasy rag, trying to imagine humidity, or at least the idea of water, when he heard the door slam and the inevitable gravel crunch of footsteps coming his way. Squinting against the glare of the setting sun he was just stepping out of the shadows when a woman's voice startled him.

"Sorry about the dust."

"That's all right ma'am."

"We need some petrol and a place to stay."

"Okay. Well I'll fill it up for you. You can stay down to street at the Vida Court. I'm sure there's some rooms."

"I see."

Ambrose followed her back to the truck where two small boys and a teenage girl sat atop a pile of trundles and suitcases in the bed. He nodded to the boys and tipped his hat to girl who met his gaze directly, without flinching in the slightest, which brought a warm heat to his cheeks before he could stop it.

Ambrose turned his head away and busied himself with the gas pump. 

"Heat brings the color to your cheeks." The woman was beside him again.

"Yes ma'am." Ambrose stared at the ground. "Been a hell of summer, if you'll pardon me."

"It's not always this hot?"

"It's always this hot, but not for so long." The woman said nothing, Ambrose glanced up at her. "Ma'am?"

"I was thinking, I was wondering if my grandchildren will have to endure this place."

"Ma'am?"

"We're here for my husband. They said that the dry air would be good for his tuberculosis."

"Mmmhmm. They say that." Ambrose studied his feet.

"I don't expect I will get to leave." She was staring off in the distance. "But I'd like to think my daughter might."

He waited a moment, but she did not say anything more. She paid him in coins and climbed back in the truck. The engine coughed back to life after a few sputters that Ambrose attributed to grungy spark plugs. Most people didn't know to soak them in gasoline, it was rare that they need to be replaced. He decided he liked the woman, she was maybe a bit odd, but the heat did funny things to you if you weren't used to it. He imagined she would endure, something about her seemed incapable of not enduring. At the very least he didn't feel like she should need to buy new spark plugs just yet. He would tell her as much tonight, after he went home to the Vida Court.

He watched the truck crawl out onto Prince road. He followed it out, kicking a rock out the driveway into the road. He saw the brake lights at the end of the street. The truck lurched into the Vida Court. He thrust his hands in his pockets and walked back toward the office.

<hr />

If she really didn't give a shit Claire reasoned, then she would not have come. People who don't give a shit don't abandon their lives half way around the world, book very expensive last minute plane tickets and come back to this godforsaken fucking desert.

Although, in truth, now that she was here, she missed this desert in some deranged way that made her half understand why people stayed in abusive relationships. Hate is just a perversion of love, but rage, rage is another thing altogether.

She had left the desert in a kind of rage, a dull rage of unfairness wrapped up in punk rock and politics, and being born at the wrong time in the wrong place to the wrong people. The people who didn't stick around.

Claire found her aunt's cigarettes tucked in the side of her purse, which she had left next to the impossibly long telephone cord that connected the old push button land line her grandfather insisted on keeping around. She took two and ducked out the back door for walk in the desert. She wanted to get away from her aunts. 

Her mother's sisters both thought she didn't give a shit. They always had. All because Claire hadn't cried at her own parents' funeral. As if a six year old is aware of social decorums. 

They still hated her for it. Or, if not hated, at least thought she was strange, most likely a little dangerous and best studied in silence. That she insisted on sleeping outside, like animal she had heard her aunt say last night, only reaffirmed this belief. But outside was the only place the rage dissipated. Outside there was only the heat and the stillness and the relative cool of the evening and mornings. Coffee and cocktails were not so far off after all perhaps. 

There was also the rather insulting move of leaving the desert. Claire did what no one else in the family had dared to do since her grandmother stepped off the beat up flatbed into the cactus-strewn world of kitty litter. Leave. We are here to go she had said with the smirk and she disappeared over the horizon, traveling halfway around the world to do god knows what. Claire imagined how much they must enjoy talking about her when she wasn't around. Sometimes she thought she should sit them down and just tell them everything, but they had over the years made it pretty clear that they actually liked her better as an object of fascination than a person. Who was she to deny them such pleasure? 

It was April, the edge of searing heat, more of a baking heat right now. The dry heat of spring in a place where somehow flowers still contrived to not just exist, but explode out of the seemingly dead soil. Claire looked down at the cigarette between her fingers. She'd quit years before, but somehow it seemed like something Emma would do. Now though, standing in the middle of a flame red cluster of Ocotillo flowers she realized Emma would never have lit the cigarette. Would never have even taken it. Would never have even come at all. She was never part of the desert the way Claire was, she had floated above it like a cloud.

Claire watched a tiny dust devil gathering in the wash down the hill. The desert was where the earth's dust came from. Bits of the Sahara coat the Amazon every year. There is no escaping the desert. Even if you travel half way around the world your desert past will find you, grain by grain, dust to dust. Everything ends up back here in the dry desert plain where it settles and bakes in the heat until it's all as hollow as a corn husk. A little wind and it would all be off again, headed south down to the Mexican coast and out to sea.

<hr />

Emma had developed a peculiar fascination with chewing sand. It came to her mouth as a dry film licked off her lips. From western Oklahoma onward she had been chewing at the nothingness of sand. Now, after jumping down from the truck bed, she violently spat the contents of her mouth on a cactus and resolved to never chew sand again. 

Except that it kept settling on her lips. And she kept licking them, out of habit. Perhaps, she thought, the whole West is just one thin dusty film settling over the world. Certainly the room at the Vida Court was saturated with fine grit. 

Mother had laid Father out on the bed and was giving him a glass of water and some saltines. They were talking in low voices that Emma could not make out. She went outside to get her bag and have a look around.

The Vida Court was, Emma reasoned, better than sitting atop trundles in the back of the flatbed wedged between sweaty siblings and a mucus and blood-spewing father. And that was about all that could be said of it. 

It was not, for instance, a ten-room farmhouse with three floors and a tornado cellar. Nor was it surrounded by endless acres of imported genuine Kentucky bluegrass with a semicircle of drooping cottonwood trees growing around the pond. There were no ponds for miles. Just a small, rusted copper tub full of sun-warmed water.

It was only after she removed her stockings that she realized how thoroughly the sand had saturated her. Or perhaps, she thought, perhaps my thighs have tanned through these skirts. She climbed into the water and watched as the brown of her legs faded back to milky white, the dusty film of Oklahoma and New Mexico drifting across the water like great orange clouds moving from one end of the tub to the other.

She could see the young man from the gas station through the chalky pink haze of the bathroom window, but only as a still, dark frame in a chair on the porch. It wasn't long before Emma found herself standing in the bathtub, dripping water, watching the shadowy porch for signs of movement.

She put on a clean dress and evacuated the bungalow as fast as she could without raising undue suspicion. The sun was already gone, but the air still held the heat like a treasure of the day. She walked around the cacti and was tempted to touch the thorns. She reached out her hand and ran it from the center out and down the edge, careful to keep her hand moving with the hooked direction of the needles.

"So y'all sold your farm, bought the truck and hauled your dad out here for some fresh air huh?"

His voice startled her enough that she almost leaned on the cactus for support.

"Sorry?"

"You sold the farm, bought the truck and here you are, TB and all."

"Something like that."

"We get quite a few passing through these days..."

"Oh we're staying I believe."

"I'm Ambrose"

He extended his hand and she stepped out of the cacti and took it in her own. 

"Emma."

"You know, Emma," he took another sip of the beer for courage, "that truck you're family is drivin... you need to pull the plugs and soak them in some gasoline. I can do it if you like."

<hr />

The funeral was over by four. Claire sat on the patio with her Grandfather, eating leftover Fancy Franks. 

"These were her favorite," he said staring down at the last one in his hand. 

"No they weren't, she hated little cocktail crap like this."

He laughed and pitched the last one out into the desert. "You're right, she did."

She watched a Brown Thrasher study the frank from a low branch of a Palo Verde tree. "Are you sure you're going to be okay?"

"Have I ever not been okay?"

"You wife just died Papa..."

"She died three years ago Claire, her body stopped working recently is all. I'm old, she was old. People die. It's what we do Claire. Next time you come around here it'll be for me."

"Don't take this the wrong way Papa, but I'm not coming back for you."

"I know."

"How do you know that?"

"Because when I'm gone there's no one to come back to."

Claire smiled. "True, plus I'd hate to disappoint all of them. Everyone thinks I don't give a shit. If I show up here after you... well, that would seem like I gave a shit wouldn't it?"

"Who thinks you don't give a shit? Give a shit about what? They don't think that."

"About anything. And they do. Like everyone else has these complicated situations and feelings and worries and all this shit and I just float away on a bunch of merry red little balloons."

Ambrose chuckled. "Who thinks this?"

Claire gestured around her, "I dunno, everyone..."

"Mmmhmm. Claire, you know better than most that there is no everyone."


<hr />


The rock sounded like a bomb against the window. She was a foot clear of her bed before she had even made sense of the noise. Then she heard his hissing whisper, "Emma..."

She pulled the window up and crawled out, tumbling down into his arms. "Stop with the rocks, you scared the life out of me". 

They crept through the sandy yard and down the banks of Palo Verde snarls to the edge of the river. He stopped suddenly and she crashed into his body. He started to say something, but she smothered his mouth with a kiss.

Later they lay on their backs listening to the river. Ambrose told her the names of the stars that he could remember, making up the rest on the spot. 

She asked about the stars in Panama and then suddenly, "you aren't going to get Malaria are you?"
Despite all the words he had conjured for Panama this was one he had not thought of. The Army had not mentioned it either. "Do they have malaria in Panama?"

"Of course. And snakes and worms and all sorts of nastiness. It's a jungle you know."

"I know. It'll be beautiful, no desert, no dry cracking horridness."

Emma smiled. "You've never felt humidity have you?" 

"No, but I already know I love it."

Emma laughed. "You might be the only person I've met who's happy to be going to war."

"I'm not happy to be going to war, but I'm happy to get out of here. I've been trying to get out of here for years."

She laughed again ans stroked his cheek. "You can always leave anywhere Ambrose, you just go. You just have to make sure you understand what you're leaving." She slid out of his arms and walked down to the water's edge. He watched as she crouched down at the river’s edge and skipped rocks out toward the middle. 


<hr />


The patio had a fan. It spun too slow to move the air much. It had always reminded Claire of a tape reel or a movie projector, except that it was broken and only spun backward. A tape reel forever rewinding. 

The rain had started again off in the distance, a low cloud hung over the mountains, a black mist trailing down from it, filling the canyons and ravines with drops that would become a raging wall of water by the time it passed by here tomorrow morning.

Inside the house Ambrose tilted back the reclining chair with a long angry sounding trail of ratcheting clicks. She could hear her aunts talking in the kitchen, their words muffled by the faucet and clatter of dishes. She heard the TV come on. They would be running the ticker tape at the bottom of television again tonight: Flash flood warning in effect. 

Tomorrow the newspaper would want everyone to know that someone had died; that a new golf course is going to be built on the hillside above someone’s watery grave; that the threat of flood is the price we pay for sunshine; that the desert is a barren curse; that every place has its curse, that eventually all the curses will combine; that everything will be cursed; that the curse is not so bad; that loneliness is a curse; that loneliness is different than alone, that still, the coffee is quite good down at the....

Claire slid her legs into the sleeping bag, enjoying the dry slipperiness of nylon against her skin. It felt like slipping between worlds, cool dry worlds where she could float on red balloons forever. Darkness closed in, the world telescoped down into blackness. The foothills faded, the dark splotches of river slipped into black. Eventually there was only the lone saguaro still glowing in the soft blue light of the television flickering behind her.

# Comeback Sauce

date:2010-09-08 15:17:01
url:/essay/spirit/comeback-sauce

<img src="https://web.archive.org/web/20150908045114im_/http://one.longshotmag.com/media/images/jb.jpg" alt="bottle of comeback sauce" class="pullpicleft" />

I met JB under a very short bridge nearly a decade ago. He was wearing a dejected look I would never see on him again—a momentary interruption in his universally good mood. I was new to the South, recently transplanted from Los Angeles, so when I stopped the car to survey the roadside scene, I wasn't expecting to find a massive overturned oil drum-style barbecue lying in the grass just beyond the crumpled mini trailer that was introducing worry to JB's spirited face.

I helped him pull the trailer out from under the small railroad trestle bridge. The air felt so hot and still and thick that it was like trying to breathe underwater, and our shirts soaked through with sweat. I leaned on the tailgate of JB's truck while he tried to pound the frame of his trailer roof back into shape. It was the first time I remember ever noticing Kudzu, or hearing the throbbing, ceaseless drone of Southern insects lurking beneath. Everything was alive.

I helped JB haul the enormous rusted grill pit back onto the trailer. My hands were black with charcoal and grease. JB tied the grill back down and thanked me, promising free sausages when he was back up and running. I smiled, assuming I'd never see him again. But this was not LA. "Oh you'll see me everywhere," he assured me with the knowing tone of a local, "I've got comeback sauce."

Two weeks later I played a show at the 40 Watt club in downtown Athens, famous for once having been lit by a single 40 Watt bulb. It's a legendary club that helped put Athens on the music map. I was thrilled to play there. I drank gallons of beer, and met what seemed like hundreds of people. After closing time, we all stumbled out the front door looking for something to eat.

And there was JB. Parked on the edge of the small crumbling parking lot, cooking up sausages for a crowd of drunk kids. I was shocked he remembered me and came through with free sausages, "with comeback sauce ya hear? Cause you'll always come back for more." He smiled. I walked away into the warm night and ate. The sausages were, well, sausages. But the sauce was something else.

As I was walking home with my friends, JB drove by and then stopped and waited for us to walk up to his truck. "There's a party up ahead, ya'll want a ride?" We jumped on the trailer and rode up the hill. JB set up in the front yard of someone's house. He didn't ask. He didn't need to. This isn't LA, there are probably street food codes, but no one lets them get in the way of a good thing. It wasn't long before the party emptied out of the house and spilled into the street, everyone coming out for the comeback.

For the next eight or so years I would pay a visit to JB's sausage truck at least once a month. I always came back. Sometimes even when I didn't really want a sausage. I found it difficult to walk by without buying something. Over time JB ceased to recognize me, my face blended back in with the rest of the drunken, if polite, crowds.

A decade is a long time in a small town. I watched friends come and go. And come and go again. I moved away for a few years myself, lived in big cities, small ones, traveled around the world. But I always came back.

Athens has it's own comeback sauce, something that draws people back to it like the moths and lacewings that form clouds around the streetlights on a warm summer night.

It's been a long time since I've seen JB outside the 40 Watt. Sometimes there's a big silver truck serving a full menu. It probably meets city code. I haven't eaten there. I suspect they have no comeback sauce.

I'm not sure what happened to JB. It wouldn't be to hard to find out -- Athens is still a small town when it comes to that sort of thing -- but I don't want to know. I prefer to keep coming back, hoping maybe one day I'll see that dirty old oil drum of a barbecue throwing smoke up into the thick summer air and hear JB telling someone, ya'll come back now, ya hear.

# One Nation Under a Groove

date:2005-03-25 14:35:18
url:/essay/spirit/one-nation-under-groove

The sky is falling again. The man outside the liquor store seems unconcerned. The sky seems to fall a good bit. Perhaps the man didn't notice. Perhaps the sky has fallen too many times now. Perhaps it's been falling for quite some time and we're just now noticing it. Perhaps its always falling. Perhaps it never has and never will fall. Perhaps we just really like to say the sky is falling. 

This latest chunk of sky hurling down at us is a brilliant little piece of circuitry known as the iPod. Andrew Sullivan, writing for The London Times claims "[society is dead, we have retreated into the iWorld](https://web.archive.org/web/20060113045721/http://www.timesonline.co.uk/printFriendly/0,,1-1501-1491500-1501,00.html)." A catchy headline no doubt, but it's basis in reality is questionable. 

Echoing this trend is John Naughton's recent article for The Guardian "[a generation lost in its personal space](https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2005/jan/23/comment.business)." 

Joining these authors is Christine Rosen who has managed to parlay this topic into two separate articles, [The Age of Egocasting](http://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/the-age-of-egocasting) and [Bad Connections](http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/20/magazine/20WWLN.html?ex=1268974800&amp;en=fca8190266cc6b78&amp;ei=5088&amp;partner=rssnyt).

The underlying implication of all these articles is that the iPod (and the cellphone and TiVo and the remote control and...) narrow our perspectives and, in case of the first two, make us oblivious to and in public spaces. 

> The proportion of young people who never venture out in public without first putting on headphones is astonishing <cite>&ndash; John Naughten</cite>

> Even without the white wires you can tell who they are. They walk down the street in their own mp3 cocoon, bumping into others, deaf to small social cues, shutting out anyone not in their bubble. <cite>&ndash; Andrew Sullivan</cite>

I have owned an iPod since 2001 and I really enjoy my bubble. It's not so much that I disagree with any of the authors cited above, it's that I think the iPod is less a destroyer of worlds (public space in this case) and more a *response* to the destruction of personal spaces, the origin of which lies far deeper and farther away than a pair of white headphones.

I was in a band a few years back and we were recording what would be our only production, a five song ep. For those that have never been in a recording studio and have this mistaken idea that it's all fun and games... well, it's not. Recording music is pretty boring actually. One evening the drummer and I were smoking cigarettes outside our studio and we got to talking about walkmans and the newfangled mp3 players that were just hitting the market. Nice we agreed, but what would be really cool I said, what I really want, is a way to put my entire collection of music in a device the size of a deck of cards. True story, 1995 or so. Buena Park California, sunset iridescent orange. High clouds lending a bit of purple. Swig of beer. Drag of cigarette. 

The first few iPods were too small, 5 gigs and then 10, if I recall correctly from a billboard in Redondo Beach stuck in traffic and thinking, holy shit, they're gonna do it. And they did. When the 20 gig version arrived it seemed like plenty of space so I bought one. Unfortunately when I got done ripping all my cds it was almost full. Now four years later I have almost 35 gigs worth of mp3s and I'm needing a new iPod (holding out for the 80 gig model, which again seems like plenty...).

I am far too much an audiophile however to settle for the cult of white ear buds and in fact have never used apple's provided headphones (too much time spent in the recording studio to trust my music to cheap speakers). No I am actually worse in Mr Sullivan's view, I use noise canceling earbuds from Sennheiser. Even if I turn off my iPod I am still deaf to your social cues Mr. Sullivan. 

I will even confess that sometimes, when my iPod runs out of batteries, I leave the headphones in just to have an excuse to ignore social interaction. In fact, I find it really irritating when people fail to respect the message of headphones (don't talk to me) and insist that I remove them so they can ask me for a cigarette (no) or a donation (sorry, one step away from the breadline myself).

###Space is the Place

At the same time, as a writer, overheard conversation and snippets of other lives caught accidentally or through purposeful audio voyeurism are very important to me, invaluable even. This is the sort of accidental material that can put you where you ought to be -- where you least expected to be. 

But at the same time I never knew I would feel quite like *that* as the winter afternoon glare crystallized the spires at the top of the Sixth Avenue Library to the sound of Grant Lee Buffalo's lament of New Orleans. I got the same juxtaposition of the familiar and foreign that I might glean from an unexpected snippet of the overheard. 

So maybe, while it doesn't fit the binary choice narrative of our age, just maybe it's possible that both wearing headphones and not wearing headphones have their place.

I like to be able to choose whether or not to involve myself in the public space. But the elective to remove oneself from the public is troubling for our iPod critics. "Walk through any airport in the United States these days and you will see person after person gliding through the social ether as if on autopilot," writes Sullivan. 

Naughten even has the dystopia mapped out for us: "imagine the future: a crowded urban street, filled not with people interacting with one another, but with atomized individuals cocooned in their personalized sound-bubbles, moving from one retail opportunity to another. The only sounds are the shuffling of feet and the rock muzak blaring from the doorways of specialized leisurewear chains."

It's funny to read this in 2019 and realize that in fact Naughten was close. I haven't been in a major American city in a few years, but last time I was his description would have fit perfectly. But are the "atomized individuals" the cause or the result? I'd argue they're the latter.

It seems natural to me that people bombarded with advertising and the crass commercial commodification of public space at every turn would want an isolationist bubble to protect themselves. Naughten's vision, which turns out to be more or less the culture we have in the west in 2019, seems a perfectly logical extension of the culture we have created. 

It's perfectly logical to string together phrase that, in 2005, would have sounded like something out of Infinite Jest: Meet me down at the Blockbuster Pavilion where we can catch the Verizon Wireless Presents show tonight and maybe afterward we can head to the Trojan Condom presents DJ Circuit City spinning at Club Walmart. Come on down, we'll have a grand time ringing in the new Year of the Depend Undergarment.  

What Mr. Naughten seems to ignore is the second to last sentence of his own nightmare, one that has nothing to do with headphones and everything to do with cultural changes that precede the iPod -- *moving from one retail opportunity to another*. 

This is the sum total of our public spaces. They are "retail opportunities". Our "public" space is not public at all, it's branded private space that views the public as little more than advertising targets. How long before we have advertisements beamed up into the night sky?

Rather than contributing to this sort of corporate co-opting of public spaces, the iPod allows us an escape into private worlds of the imagination.

Headphones are an attempt to avoid the homogenization of the "rock musak blaring from the doorways of specialized leisurewear chains". 

Is it not the desire to escape the vulgar commercialism of our advertising-polluted culture that drives us to block out it's monotony? To seek something meaningful in one of the most intimately and meaningful realms, music and interject back the danger that once lurked outside the burlesque theaters and dance halls that seem to have closed just after Henry and June sneaked out the back door.

### The New (Old) Danger

The problem with the iPod for these authors, and for similar articles about phones in 2019, seems to lie in the shutting off of the public space in favor of the personal.

As I've already pointed out we the public largely lost our collective spaces to more nefarious forces than the iPod. But, setting aside larger cultural issues like promiscuous advertising, what of the iPod's privatization of public space as these authors claim?

Neither author gives any kind of reason as to why this is bad. They both get abstract and use the iPod as jumping off point for larger concerns, starting with Mr Sullivan who sees in the iPod the loss of, call it respect for music.

"Music was once the preserve of the living room or the concert hall," writes Sullivan. "It was sometimes solitary but it was primarily a shared experience, something that brought people together, gave them the comfort of knowing that others too understood the pleasure of a Brahms symphony or that Beatles album."

I don't know about you, but the music I listen to was never welcome in the living room I grew up in. 

For some reason, my parents failed to relate to or appreciate *License to Ill* or *Nothing's Shocking*. Mr. Sullivan seems to think 'once upon a time' music was confined to the space where we expect it and now, good god, now it's everywhere and no one is sharing or bonding over it. 

I for one would much rather everyone carried around a pair of speakers with their iPod and blasted them at 11 so music became a truly public space, but apparently I am alone in this desire and there are noise ordinances against this sort of thing. (If this notion intrigues you check out some of the Flaming Lips' experiments with hundreds of simultaneous playbacks to form textures of sound).

Typical of a lazy essayist, Sullivan is really just aping statements made a generation earlier in response to the iPod's predecessor, the Walkman. 

Far more reasoned and persuasive is Christine Rosen's piece in The New Atlantis. As Rosen relates in her essay, "music columnist Norman Lebrecht argued, 'no invention in my lifetime has so changed an art and cheapened it as the Sony Walkman.' By removing music from its context -- in the performance hall or the private home -- and making it portable, the Walkman made music banal. It becomes a utility, undeserving of more attention than drinking water from a tap."

I suppose that's one way to look at it. But you could go back further. Swap "radio" for "Sony Walkman" and the argument still stands. Want to go further, gramophone works too. Yes, it's true, recorded music has never had a context. It has always existed in the abstract space of our heads more than any temporal location. We are not in the room as it as the music is played, we get only an abstracted representation of the music. 

This is where to whole thing collapses for me -- so what? The notion that music has to have a context in order to understand it is only one way of approaching it. I'm not saying it's a wrong way, I agree music is more powerful in person, but the abstraction, the ability to summon up the music you love whenever you want is indistinguishable from magic, to me anyway.

The notion that music has a natural space where it belongs is an extremely limiting definition of music. But even accepting that notion for a moment, applying it to recorded music makes no sense. If recorded music is located outside any temporal location, how can it have an appropriate place?

So ultimately Rosen is arguing that personal space is invading public space, that is, headphones are narrowing our public cultural space, but also, that music (in said headphones) really ought to remain in a private performance space as well. At least I think that's what's she's saying, though it makes no sense.

I for one don't think music should be consigned to where we feel comfortable and safe with it. Music is not safe. It should not be relegated to the living room or the concert hall, it should be played in the streets at top volume until the sky really does shudder and crumble. But that option has already been taken away by noise ordinances. So we have gone internal, put the speaker directly in our ear.

If anything changes with headphones it's the attention devoted to the music. Music coming from speakers has a directional vector. It approaches you from some point and is blatantly external to the listener. Put on a decent pair of headphones and the music becomes omnidirectional and you are enveloped in it. Close your eyes and you can swim through it and pick out tiny bits of sound that you would never notice coming from an external speaker. For the listener on headphones the experience is both more intimate and more consuming than music from a living room stereo or even a concert hall stage.

As for the loss of public culture to personal headphone cocoon, is not the mere recognition of white earbuds itself a form of cultural interaction? Even if it be only a nod and smile, is this not even closer to the truth of life, the mystery unfathomed but acknowledged? I know how you feel the nod says and it is good speaketh the smile. 

### Its All Around You

Neither Sullivan nor Naughton is content with the iPod as harbinger of doom, the end of social space, the isolationist future of automatons. Yawn. No, it does not stop there, this is the slippery slope down which we all slide into communism and cannibalism and [them russians and them russians](https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/49305/america-56d22b41f119f) and them earbuds and them earbuds and them them, damnit the sky is falling why don't you see it? 

Rosen at least has a more reasoned argument that might actually be on to something.

She believes that the personalization of media is leading to a narrowing of experience. That's a legitimate fear that the passing of time has shown to be very legitimate indeed. 

Mr. Naughton in the Guardian article sounds a bit like Wordsworth calling us all back to the countryside. He even goes so far as to stake his critique partly on recently uncovered Edwardian era documentary films. These movies he claims reveal a society where, "men raise their hats to women; people stop to talk; groups congregate at junctions and street corners." The clear implication is that, for Edwardians, being out in public meant being on display and being sociable. It meant paying attention to what was going on around you, and acknowledging the existence of others.

Beware all calls for a return to past glories. Still, assuming for a moment that people act naturally in front of a camera, and that they weren't in fact congregating to discuss the weirdos at the end of street pointing lenses at everyone, the Edwardians were more self-consciously aware when out in public. Does that make them role models of public behavior? They were also more elitist, racist, and classist as well; should we emulate those behaviors too while we're out for a Sunday stroll?

In researching this little piece I found several nice rebuttals to Sullivan's piece. The best of which is by a man named Jerry Stratton in an essay entitled [society never ends, it just fades away](http://www.hoboes.com/Mimsy/?ART=92). 

Stratton rightly cuts past the iPod intro of Sullivan's article and addresses what Sullivan really wants to talk about. "His most worthwhile observation was that iPod users sometimes accidentally break out into out-of-tune singing to whatever is on their pod," writes Stratton. "But [Sullivan] seems to think that it's bad, whereas I stand with Joni Mitchell that the more out-of-tune voices, the better. And that's the real point of Andrew's editorial. The proliferation of multiple viewpoints runs the risk of isolating individuals so that they hear only the viewpoints that they want to hear. We as individuals need more out-of-tune voices."

This is also Rosen's concern in both of her essays, that our means of consuming information (for her the remote control, TiVo, and iPod) are narrowing our exposure to new ideas. By meticulously selecting content that we already know we like we are even less likely to discover the new stuff. Couple this with &quot;smart&quot; search algorithms that pick recommendations based on what we already like and our chances of encountering the shocking, the challenging or the potentially enlightening approach nil according to Rosen. 

Without these sorts of jarring, chance encounters with the unknown we cease to think outside ourselves. This may well be true, but it's always been true. Conservative viewers are more likely to tune into Fox news because it fits their pre-existing worldview. Liberals read the New York Times and watch Woody Allen movies. This is nothing new. It has always taken conscious effort to find viewpoints outside your own reality tunnel of beliefs.

I fail to see anyway in which the iPod contributes to this trend. In fact it may well go against it if only by virtue of its ubiquity. On college campuses for instance many students swap headphones to see what the other is listening to. The iPod's ease of use and the easy availability of mp3s make exploring new music simple -- hear a band on someone's headphones, go home and fire up a torrent search, grab the album, slap it on your iPod and be enlightened. Illegal? Certainly. Potentially life enriching? Certainly.

### No Alarms and No Surprises

When you come down to it, how is the iPod any different from other music devices that use headphones? It's not. It's just the latest harbinger on the chopping block if we mash our metaphors for a moment.

At the same time, the targeted nature of new modes of consumption do raise some issues for thought. Is algorithmic content, narrowly selected constricting our exposure to the unfamiliar? Maybe, but as illustrated earlier there has always been a tendency to seek the familiar, the safe, the comfortable, the expected. 

But even that doesn't always happen. The gravity of this potential danger, if we may call it that, that comes from targeted advertising depends greatly on the realm in which occurs. If we are talking about the realm of politics then this kind of marsupial burrowing is decidedly bad. If you bought Bill O'Reilly's book (presumably he has one) and the suggested &quot;you might like...&quot; stuff is more of the same, then yes your worldview remains narrow. But in the realm of art where the political statement is often less overt, less likely to be partisan, more likely to be complicated and often not there at all, then the suggestion might be welcome and can lead one far from the sources that suggested it.

For example let's say you really like Jay-Z and so when the new album comes out you pre-order it on Amazon.com. The &quot;you might like...&quot; screen claims that people who like Jay-Z have also purchased Outkast. So you figure, what the hell I'll pick up this Outkast album. Turns out that those who purchased Outkast also bought both Stevie Wonder and Sun Ra. Hey, why not? You buy them too. If you're a fan of Jay-Z but have never ventured into Sun Ra territory, well, you're about to blow your mind.

In my own experience, I find that I tend to read books that mention other books. So I read the other books and maybe they mention some other books and on it goes. I don't see a significant difference between that and the Amazon suggestions. Or potentially TiVo's suggestions or any other targeted marketing. In the realm of the arts nothing is so much the same that it cannot lead to <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Six_degrees_of_separation" title="Theory of Six Degrees of Separation">something ever more different</a>.

It seems that to a certain extent the authors in question here are specifically concerned with the potential narrowing of political capital, which is a concern given that democracy depend on the existence of a multitude of voices. Are we losing that? Well that's a larger question and one that does not necessarily relate to remote controls, TiVo or the iPod.

### You Were Wrong When You Said Everything's Gonna Be All Right

All three of these articles reveal more about their author's sentimentality for earlier times than anything else. If those kids took the headphones out of their ears, put down the remote, turned off the television and read a couple of books everything would be fine...

In fact this notion of iPod=evil represents the same simplistic thinking that has landed us where we are in the first place. If easy prescriptions worked to solve our problems we wouldn't have the reactionary mess we have. And I don't mean that in partisan terms. I think we can all agree that America is somewhat of a mess right now. I don't think one political party or the other is as fault. We are all culpable. And we are all looking for solutions. 

I don't believe in the techno-utopist future of completely wired life and peace through blogging, but I also don't believe in the techno-dystopist future where we all end up like the overweight blobs in floating chaise lounges ala Wall-E.

Reality is much more complex and to avoid it authors like Sullivan resort to cheap, easy sentimentality."What are we missing?" he asks, answer ever at the ready: "That hilarious shard of an overheard conversation that stays with you all day; the child whose chatter on the pavement takes you back to your early memories; birdsong; weather; accents; the laughter of others."

A lovely piece of sentimentality, it almost makes me want to take out these headphones and listen to the silence of the house.  But as Wallace Stevens' said "sentimentality is a failure of feeling." Sentimentality is false feeling, pseudo-feeling and affectation. Sullivan's quote is an embarrassing episode of mindless sentimentality, it fails to account for all kinds of complexity and depth ever-present in our lives.

Sentimentality is the easy answer: the birds, the laughter, the children.... Real feeling involves complexity, it rejects the simple. To realize that there is more to it than unplugging, more to it than any technology, more to it than a sound bite you can pass off as heartfelt -- that is actually the very essence of the problem: the failure to engage your surroundings as anything other than a simplistic snapshot of what you wanted to see. 

Does Sullivan acknowledge the ugliness? Never. He skips right over it and tells you what you wanted to hear. Sullivan's sentimentality does the very thing he accuses the iPod of doing -- he narrows your reality. 

Never for a second does Sullivan acknowledge that the birds might be endangered, headed for extinction, that the weather might be worsening with global warming, that the laughter of others might well be cynical and cheap or that the children are living below the poverty line, abused etc, etc. This the same sort of narcissistic thinking that gave us romanticism, is it any wonder that these authors look too fondly at the Edwardians? 

Everything looks good from the lazy middle class intellectual point of view. Edit out the things you don't like and you too can narrow your reality to the point of irrelevancy.

Please do not mistake me for a cynic though. I use this example merely to acknowledge that there are things below the surface that we can happily ignore if we are constructing the world to our own desires rather than recognizing the complexity that is inherent in it. 

### ...And I Feel Fine

Perhaps the problem with the iPod is so ephemeral it's slipping through our fingers. Perhaps there is no problem with the iPod. No harm in headphones. No danger to run from save the desire to have a new danger to run from, a new evil to fight because the real one is just too big to tackle, a new threat to declare war on because the old one just bores us to death, a new something to rage against because the dying of the light seems inevitable and unvanquishable. Perhaps the new danger, same as the old, is our own failure, our own sentimentality that shows us the world not as it is but as we wish to see it.

At the same time I encourage everyone, as Robert Anton Wilson put it, to change reality tunnels often. Find viewpoints you don't share, something outside your belief system, something you might even consider crazy. Listen to what these viewpoints are saying and think critically about why you do or don't agree with them. 

There has never (not even yesterday) been a day in the history of humankind when you have had so much information at your finger tips. Take advantage of that and see where it leads you -- hopefully where you least expected. And hey, listen to music while you think.