path: root/scratch.txt

The energy of chaos is required to change the existing order.

# Scratch

It began the way all Travco adventures should. After the last things were stowed securely away, I fired up the engines, which roared the life. I sat down, grabbed the shift handle, put my foot on the brake... and it went straight to the floor. No brakes at all. Perfect. Travco brakes. You either hate them, or you don't have a Travco.

Actually they aren't that bad, but they do require regular attention. I knew what was wrong. Whenever I park with the wheels angled too sharply to the right, the driver's side wheel leaks brake fluid[^1]. We'd been sitting like that for five days. I opened the master cylinder reservoir and sure enough, it was basically dry. I refilled it and started pumping the pedal. Still nothing. 

I had to run the last of the trash to the dump (where we lived there was no trash service), so I did that and used the time to think about the brakes. Probably just need to pump them some more. I got back and did that. Still no brakes. And it was past departure time. Well. Shit. It was raining by now. The yard was getting muddy, especially right around the bus. 

I pulled out the service manual just to make sure there was nothing unusual about bleeding the brakes in this thing. There didn't seem to be. So I grabbed a strip of sockets and a socket wrench and got down in the mud. Corrinne pressed the pedal, the kids fetched my tools when I forgot them back at the previous wheel, and together we bled the lines all the way around. I got back in and fired it up again. Nice strong pedal. Perfect. We hit the road.

I've had people ask if I am really as calm and collected in these situations as I write them and the answer in the past, was, not always. I do have a natural tendency to remain calm in stressful situations, and in fact I get calmer as tension increases, which even I don't understand. Whenever something goes wrong, the stress for me isn't that something went wrong, it all comes down to -- what is the problem? I used to get very frustrated because I wouldn't know what was wrong with the bus. 

When we left on this trip originally I knew very little about how an engine works and even less about the nearly infinite number of things that can go wrong. I still don't know everything, but after three years of keepin' on keepin' on, I've figured out a few things. Thanks to my uncle Ron, a mechanic in New Orleans, some YouTube channels, and the powerful motivating factor of, I HAVE TO FIGURE THIS OUT, I know more about what might be wrong. Whether or not I can fix it is a different story. Not only are my skills limited, the tools I can carry and the places I have to work are also limited. I'm probably not going to be replacing a cam shaft at the side of the road. Things I can't fix will probably still go wrong, but at least now I'll know when those situations come up. In hindsight, of the four major mechanical repairs I've hired out in the first three years we traveled this way, today I would only hire out one of them. Even though one, I'm not sure I'd hire out. I might at least try to convince a Walmart to let me spend a few days in their parking lot redoing a head gasket. 




[^1]: This is something that needs to be properly addressed at some point, but it's been doing this for over three years now, so I don't worry about it too much. In a campground site the wheels usually end up straight, it's only boondocking that sometimes the wheels end up cockeyed and I forget to spin them straight.

# Stories to Tell
- Packing up chaos, pairing down, getting rid of
- Drive down, perfect beginning, solving problems
- Edisto and birthday

"It seems to me that we all look at nature too much, and live with her too little." -Oscar Wilde, De Profundis

The average person spends 87% of their time indoors and another 6% in enclosed vehicles https://indoor.lbl.gov/sites/all/files/lbnl-47713.pdf

## birds to write about:

- carolina wren
- tree swallow
- black capped chickadee
- cedar waxwing
- kingbird
- that hawk on the ground
- willet
- gold crowned kinglet
- blackthroated green warbler



# In Progress
## Essay on Will

If you want control over what you consume, you're going to have to strengthen your will. So long as you are surrounded by signals that are trying to get you to spend money on crap, it is going to be an uphill battle. If you can I strongly suggest removing yourself from the signals -- think about where your attention is going and how you can redirect it to craft rather than stuff. 

but there are things more powerful. The most important of those is your will. 


If, like most people, you can't pick and move to foreign country for a month then you're going to have to try to change in the midst of the battle so to speak. While possible, this is much much harder. And again, while I like to think I have mastered this, my spreadsheet says otherwise, so take this advice with a grain of salt. Chances are good that this actually much harder than you or I think and you're going to need to put in more effort than I'm suggesting.






The most important thing is to develop your will. I am serious. Start doing exercises to develop your will. For example, force your self up out of the chair right now, turn away from the computer and walk to the nearest wall. Touch it. Come back and sit down. Repeat this at random during the day. Is it pointless? Absolutely. So is lifting weights. The principle is the same. So choose a deliberately pointless thing to do, and do it. Then do another one. Then do the same thing every morning for a week. 

One will-building exercise I do periodically is what I call, for lack of a better phrase, micro travel. It works like this: pick a place at random in the city you live, somewhere you've never been. Choose a time and make an appointment with yourself. Now go work out all the details of getting there, if possible use public transit or walk. Then meet yourself there and make sure you're there on time. Now enjoy a few minutes exploring the area and head home.

I'll leave thinking up other exercises to you, but the point is to develop your will, to have control over your life. It takes a little time to see and feel the effects of this, it's quite subtle, but it will cascade throughout your life in a number of interesting ways, I promise. One will be better control over your impulses. When you walk into, say Target, to buy a new toothbrush your newly developed will will make it easier to walk past everything else and only buy the toothbrush. 

Eventually your will may help you recognize that stores that have everything are too much for your will. It would be cleverer to buy that toothbrush at a smaller store with fewer things, because it's easier to remove temptation than resist it. Think of it like dieting. If you're trying to eat less ice cream it's much easier to not walk down the ice cream aisle at all than it is to walk down it and without buying anything.

This also leads into my second suggestion for buying less stuff: change your habits. It's convenient to go to Target and get everything you need in one place, but chances are you're going to spend more than you intended without realizing it. In fact the entire experience of being in Target has been engineered to increase the chance you'll spend more than you intended. Every time you enter a store you are entering a hostile environment designed to extract your life energy from you. 

Oh sure it's all abstracted so you don't have think of it that way. Still, strip the abstraction and relationship is pretty clear, you trade hours of your life for shit you buy at Target. You get up the morning and go to work. That's a day of your life you just traded for paper tickets. Why do you need those tickets? To put a roof over your head and food in your stomach. Pretty much everything after that is not strictly necessary. So once those basics are met you're in th realm of swapping your existence on earth for stuff. 

The less stuff you buy, the less you need to work. By extension, the less time you spend in places designed to extract money from you, the less of your life you'll have to trade for stuff.

That's a habit you can break -- going to all-in-one-place stores -- but there are other habits you can build that will help immensely as well. 



One of the things I've been at pains to avoid is making it sound like we don't like the United States. In fact we do very much, it's one of the most beautiful places in the world and has some of the wildest and safest wilderness you're ever going to enter. 

Unfortunately, the United States is not the best travel value for us. Without an income we'd have to dip heavily into savings to travel the states in the bus. 



# Notes
## Travel Cheaper

Ways to reduce travel spending:
    * better planning means more boondocking and less money on camping 
    * change of diet from mexico means less on food
        - no more sausage for breakfast
        - more tortillas, less bread for lunches
            + bread is special occassions
        - use oat/rice flour from bulk bins for pancakes
        - shop mexican markets, asian markets
        - go meatless twice a week
        - drop organic/grass fed, eat less of it
    * having propane fridge would mean less trips for ice, longer away from money spending opportunities
    * doing bucket laundry to get by, with full laundry once a month would do the same (again, fewer money spending opportunities)
    * no more lenses, amazon orders, ever.
    * use local libraries
    * have corrinne get meds down here.
    * start with forays into mexico, but gradually reverse -- here becomes our home base with forays into the states
    
    * how much less? Don't know but I think we could do 
        - $1200/month groceries
        - $500/month camping (if we go over, better hole up and boondock)
        - $400/month gas (if we're headed over, better hole up)
        - $500/month repairs and incidentals
    * So at reliable $3000 a month we can get by pretty much anywhere
        - Need the ability to take a serious breakdown and keep going, what does that look like?
        - maybe $5000- $8000 savings for repairs

## Systems

Complex systems are inherently fragile. The optimization that makes the system "easy" to use, also generally eliminates the redundancies and graceful degadation that makes a system resilient.
## Midlife

I think there are two major tasks to be undertaken in the middle of your life, one is coming to terms with the reduced possibilities of the future, letting go of the ones you are sure aren't happening to focus on the one's that could still happen. I will never make the U.S Olympic rowing team and rather than have that missed goal rattling around somewhere in the back of my mind going, I have to address it. Rather than sitting around mumbling about how I could have been a contender I have to accept that no I could not, I tried and literally could not, and let that go so that other goals become more feasible.

The other major task in midlife is to recognize the ciclical nature of, well, nature.



## No Reason At All

"It's fun to do something for no reason at all because freedom is the foundation of all human delight... freedom of the will, the capacity to choose and act and attend for no other reason than that we happen to want to." 

## Margins

You learn to live your life on the margin, that strange zone between what is known and what is not. There are some answers here, but not many, and you have to make that place your home.

The margins are where you want to be though, this is where everything happens, it's where life is, where growth is. Go deep in the forest and everything gets soft and quiet, but come out to the edge and you'll find the berries and the birds and the deer and all the rest of life -- inhabiting the margins. In ecology this is sometimes called a liminal zone. It's where life is in transition and biodiversity is greatest. It's where the action is and it's where you want to be.

I've learned that the future will get here at the same steady pace as it always does whether you worry about it or not. 

There's a third principle I'm still meditating on, but my suspicion is that the first principle of not changing the environment around you, extends well beyond you and your immediate environment to encompass, well, everything. The ripple effects of any action are significant and we spend very little time considering them, and this is troubling.

The less you alter the environment of you, the less you need to alter the environment of your home. The less you need alter the environment of your home, the less you need to alter your neighborhood, and so on. I suspect that this cascades in positive ways far beyond just turning off the air conditioning. At the same times, I suspect it cascades in negative ways as well, which is why I am still thinking on it.

I saw, and still see, living in the bus as a first step in a transition away from life as a "consumer". In the bus we consumed much less, that's good, but I've come to think that it's not good enough. I think I can (and should) go much farther than that. What that looks like is still taking shape, but one thing we all have right now is plenty of time to sit and think.


## Sustainable vs regenerative



sustainability is about keeping things as the are, regeneration is about making things better than they are.







## Close 

Y'all are going to be very close.

That's what an inspector said to me once when we were selling our house and I told him what we were doing after it sold. That comment stuck in my head the whole time we traveled because he was right. Spend twenty-four hours a day every day with someone and you will be close. And we are.




I want to be tested in ways I can't imagine and try to be ok no matter what happens.

I looked forward to disasters, I looked forward to having to get out of tough situations. 

Now, mind you, "ok" doesn't mean happy as a clam, totally unaffected, no bad feelings ever. On the contrary, it means letting go of the reigns, opening myself up to the unknown and trusting that I had the ability to see myself through it. That's basically welcoming a whole heap of tough stuff to happen to ya. And it has. And I'm ok. Heck, I'm more than ok. I'm better than before. This whole endeavor, from the word go, has done nothing but affirmed my suspicions that we are stronger and more malleable than we ever give ourselves credit for. And no matter what, we will adjust and find a way to be ok. ⁣

Cycles. Loops. Close them where you find them. For example, heres an energy loop: sun, plants, animals, waste, plants animals, waste. Find yourself in that. For example, the sun helps plants grow, hogs eat some of those plants, hog get slaughtered and made into bacon, I eat the bacon, I crap out the bacon into a composting toilet that eventually becomes soil for the plants that grow so the hogs can eat them... this is a minimally wasteful loop. I don't want to call it closed because there are variables (water, sunlight, not having a plague of locusts decend on your plants, etc), but it is robust on scale that swings from robust to totally batshit crazy, which would be the cycle that puts bacon in a package you buy from the store.

## Alt Medicine

A while back someone at work mentioned wanting to write about how there is little to no regulation in the realm of "alternative" medicine and its rife with scams. I volunteered to write a rebuttal, because I'm glad alternative medicine is not regulated. I did not elaborate and I forgot all about it until someone brought it up again, this time specifically asking why I was glad there were no regulations.

I will likely never write a rebuttal because for one thing it would be publishable as anything other than Op/Ed. I am not scientist by training and, lack credentials, not allowed into the debate on equal footing. 

I don't hold this against science as a method of inquire, but I do very much hold it against scientists, who have become a modern priesthood controlling public discourse, just as the Catholic church did through the middle ages, the high priests of Set did in ancient Egypt, and so on through any other culture you want to cite. 

There is always a priesthood setting the limits of acceptable discourse, what matters is how that priesthood (and the culture more broadly) handles dissent. How much room is there for discourse outside the acceptable? We're very fortunate to live in a culture where for the most part there are no limits placed on dissenters. I can write this, publish it where anyone can read it, and there are (currently) no consequences. I will not be burned at the stake, exiled or any number of horrible things visited on those with "unacceptable" ideas in various cultures throughout the ages. There is some risk of publishing these opinions and having them come back to haunt me at some point in the future of course, but ultimately all I am advocating for is that we continue to not punish, or censor people who old opinions, beliefs, customs, what have you, that are considered unacceptable to the current priesthood.

## Present

How do I make this while still being present. Here. Right now. In this bus, on this night, feeling this feeling?

This turns out to be a very difficult problem to solve. 

Writing inherently pulls you out of the moment. It has to all reflective thinking is, well reflecting on something rather than something. So there's that. But I accept that. I've been writing for so long now I've long ago forgotten what it would be like not to always be compising things in my head. There may be some negative consequences to this habit, but for me, it was what it is and I am okay with it.

I am less okay with the performative aspects of creating things based your experiences. This enters a peculiar gray zone in which one must be very careful. For me, it is fine if the desire to write about something drives me to go to a place that I might not otherwise have gone to. For example I doubt I would ever have gone to tk, except I wanted to write about it. But wanting to write about it is a kind of wanting to go.

The danger lies in pulling yourself out of the experience of being there by performing for the imagined audience. I try to avoid this. It works for some people. Some people are able to think about getting a great image while still enjoying themselves. I am not. I have to lose myself in those moments or whatever I try to produce from them suffers. 

Which is to say I almost universally miss the great shot because I am too busy watching whatever it might be unfold. 


Things need edges, edges are a kind of contract with things. The book ends when you close it. Begins when you open it. In between there is no contract. Or not much of one?

I think we have our edges wrong. Things that should have softer, indistinct edges, like our homes, have hard edges that divide us from the world. Things that should have hard, distinct edges, like tools for communicating, have no edge at all, the loops are always running, never closing off.

Adding edges to the loops closes them.

----

Solutions I have seen work, and that I am experiementing with: 

All communication happens in loops, you say something, there is a response, you respond to that response and so on. This is the communication loop. How long is the loop? I find that the longer the loop is, the better the thing I am able to produce. So where instagram has loops measured in minutes, maybe hours, maybe at the most days, I find that loop overwhelming and short. The most I can do there is put something out, I can't and don't partake in the loops there.

A website I control is an infinite loop potentially. Or rather I have to create the loops, I have to set the pace. And I generally do not do well at that.



Consolidate data on a schedule, publish one thing on a schedule.


## Step Back, Detach, Ask Better Questions
The consumer education system has conditioned you to think in terms of products, you need to step back in ask bigger questions to find more interesting and sustainable answers. For example, the question, *should I buy this camera?* has no good answer without first asking *how to I create photos that make me happy?* It may be that some particular camera really does help in that quest, but more likely, it doesn't. More likely what you need to learn is technique and acquire skills like composition and reading light.


##From Ben Falk's book:

•	104 nuclear reactors in 31 states, operated by 30 different companies. Every single one “temporarily” storing high-level waste that will be lethal for 10,000 to 24,000 years

•	40,000 to 80,000 (exact number unknown) chemical factories producing or processing materials with multiple “compounds known to be carcinogenic and/or mutagenic”

•	More than 40 weapons-testing facilities and 70,000 nuclear bombs and missiles

•	104,000,000 cubic meters of high-level radioactive waste from weapons-testing activities alone

•	925 operating uranium mines

•	20 to 30 times the average historical background rates of mercury in rain

•	2,200 square miles of excavated valleys and leveled mountains in Appalachia alone

•	478,562 active natural gas mines in the United States in 2008, with 1,800 expected to be drilled in the Marcellus Shale of Pennsylvania alone in 2010

•	18,433,779,281 cubic feet of trash per year, or 100,000 acres of trash one-foot deep per year, or about 250 square miles, with trash 400 feet deep



## Novelty and place

It's one Barry Lopez spends some time on in *Artic Dreams*, noting that for natives of the Arctic Circle, "land does... what architecture sometimes does for us. It provides a sense of place, of scale, of history." Architecture has never done much for me, but I've been known to try constructing a cathedral of words to describe simple things, the way a blade of grass bends in the wind.

Lopez's thought jumped out at me because I catch myself telling stories the wrong way these days. More and more I notice how much of the stories I tell are not what happened, but where it happened. I have developed a need to locate the past in space as well as time. I have to watch out for this because I've noticed many people find it annoying. I can watch their minds wander as I talk. I lose them.

You gain a sense of place by merging into it, however briefly, in way that can only be done by giving up familiarity. Novelty sharpens the experience of place. Perhaps because we evolved to be wary of the novel, to be on edge in experiencing the unfamiliar. All that grass doesn't matter, that one part where it's novel, that one part where there are no shadows when there should be shadows. That's a lion. Novelty is bad in that sense. 

Now the evolutionary threat is largely gone though novelty becomes useful. It a grindstone sharpening your experience of place until it comes to the foreground. You notice what was not there yesterday. It's not a lion anymore, but still you notice.

## Maps

“Some for one purpose and some for another liketh, loveth, getteth, and useth Mappes, Chartes, & Geographicall Globes.” -- John Dee, 

source: https://www.theguardian.com/travel/2019/oct/20/the-perfect-combination-of-art-and-science-mourning-the-end-of-paper-maps


## Immersing yourself

In his book, <cite>Written in the West</cite> Wim Wenders talks about improving photography by completely immersing yourself in what you see, "no longer needing to interpret, just looking." I find that it's not just photography that can be enhanced this way, but all of life. All you need to do is let go and look. Let go of any agenda and just walk (or sit) and watch the world around you. The world is endlessly fascinating. Even the parts you don't like, like Texas. Step back from the  things you want, the things you think you need, the things you think you should do, and a new range of possibilities opens up. 

## travel with kids

"As with any thing, the needs of small people are different, and the same, as big people.  They thrive on novelty, on the right amount of ease and challenge, and struggle with boredom.  They find it hard to regulate when hungry or tired.  These needs are simply scaled down.  Adults, especially adults who have been around a bit, like to see what is between two mountains by viewing it from all sides.  Little people and their minds are content with seeing the two mountains via their emissaries, the little rocks which have fallen off into the valley in between.  Little people almost do well getting outside and having an adventure, again, today, but once things proceed much beyond a few miles the wants of the little become subservient to those of the big.

Which reminds us that adventure, especially in the internet age, is always found in the mind anyway.  There is nothing more adventurous than trying, really trying, the impossible task of understanding another person.  Is this task more weighty with progeny than with a spouse?  Your answer tells everything.

Understanding the two of them at home is simply easier, if by easier I mostly mean more predictable.  With answers readily accessible.  Beyond that, after deciding have we the adults sufficient energy, sufficient motivation, sufficient bravery to take everyone and everything important out into the woods this weekend, it becomes a question of matching big person ambition and rules to little person energy. " - https://bedrockandparadox.com/2019/08/31/the-veneration-of-lameness/ 

## Universal Druid Prayer 

It appears in several forms; the one most often used in AODA runs like this: 

Grant, O Holy Ones, thy protection
And in protection, strength;
And in strength, understanding;
And in understanding, knowledge;
And in knowledge, the knowledge of justice:
And in the knowledge of justice, the love of it;
And in that love, the love of all existences;
And in the love of all existences, the love of Earth our mother and all goodness.

And yes, it's a good intro to any sort of communion with the deities.

## difference between in the streets and closed door cultures

> Go to Africa, Latin America, the backwoods of China, SE Asia … it’s easy to make friends: all you need to do is walk down the street with your head up. These are “in the streets” cultures. Europe, on the other hand, is a “closed door” culture. That doesn’t mean that people are not nice. It’s just that they don’t have the social avenues that allow for on the fly engagements with people they don’t know. Talk with someone there and they ask the question, “What does this guy want? Why is he talking to me?” Start talking with someone you don’t know in Haiti and it’s just something normal and ordinary — everybody is talking with everybody anyway. -Wade Shepard


## Octavio Paz quote

> Modern man likes to pretend that his thinking is wide-awake. But this wide-awake thinking has led us into the maze of a nightmare in which the torture chambers are endlessly repeated in the mirrors of reason. When we emerge, perhaps we will realize that we have been dreaming with our eyes open, and that the dreams of reason are intolerable. And then, perhaps, we will begin to dream once more with our eyes closed. <cite>&ndash;Octavio Paz</cite>

## Stopping travel

Full time travelers who stop traveling, regardless of how long or why, tend to feel like we've failed somehow. Which is silly, but I'm no exception. I feel it anyway. I have been feeling it lately. 

I like living on the road for two main reasons. One, we spend more time outside. There is nothing so valuable as spending all day outside. Two, it satisfies a pretty basic curiosity: what does it look like around that bend? What is the view like from the other side of the hill? What does the river sound like down in that valley? What is like to wake up in middle of the desert? How does it feel to fall asleep in the sand listening to the sea? How does it feel sitting in the shade of a sandstone overhang where someone else sat thousands of years ago? What's the scent of an aspen forest in a downpour? How does the sandstone feel on your fingertips after the thunderstorms pass? 

So to answer that question everyone keeps asking me: yes I miss living in the bus. And to answer the follow up question, yes, we're going to get back to that eventually. At the moment we're in San Miguel.


We were going to spend the winter down here, stay warm, improve our Spanish a bit and go back to the bus when it warmed up a little. Then we were going to spend spring traveling the southwest desert, see some areas of Arizona, New Mexico and Utah that we hadn't seen yet, and then head up to Wyoming, Idaho and Montana when it got hot, and spend summer at higher, cooler elevations. Good plan right? Well.

When we parked the bus last year we knew that before it went much further it was going to need some work. Significant, time and money-eating work. To get to the places we want to get, we need more power and less worry. The only way I've come up with to get to that point is to either drop in a bigger engine, a 440 or the like, or rebuild the 318 to get better compression, which means boring out the engine, new pistons, maybe new manifolds, probably a new transmission and quite a few other things that are not cheap. It's all doable, but it takes time and money. There's also the possibility we could move to a different rig[^1], but that again is time and money. 

Time and money we don't have right now. 

I think now that true sweetness can only happen in limbo. I don't know why. Is it because we are so unsure, so tantative and waiting? Like it needs that much room, that much space to expand. The not knowing anything really, the hoping, the aching transience. This is not real, not really, and so we let it alone, let it unfold lightely. Those times that can fly. That's the way it seems now looking back. 

[^1]: I have never liked driving with a trailer, but it probably makes more sense for the way we travel. We like to set up camp and then spend a few weeks roaming an area. Certain things about trailers make them better for this, like the ability to haul out your black water and go fetch fresh water without breaking camp. The other marked advantage of the trailer and tow vehicle is that when you do need a mechanic's help, you don't lose your house. But pretty sure my family would abandon me if I tried to sell the bus.


## Bird watching as a way to get out


"Looking for birds, in this case, means seeing the private gardens of the brightly-colored houses in a small mountain town, with their fiery pink and orange blossoms, their mango and papaya trees, and their tangled blooming vines. Birding gets you to places you can’t otherwise go, or never thought to see. It gives you access to new foods and flavors. For example, birding gives you unparalleled access to taste rare fruits and other micro-local foods." - https://www.notesfromtheroad.com/neotropics/tapir-valley.html



I don't want you to be like me. I want you to figure out who you are, how to think your own thoughts and maybe, if you're lucky, figure out what you're supposed to be doing. One of the easiest ways to get the kind of perspective you need to figure these things out is to travel, particularly outside your own  culture

## Failure of materialism

I have become increasingly dissastified with the scientific materialist view of the world. I don't disagree with it, I just don't think it's the whole story. Which is to say that science provides a wonderful toolkit for exploring one of the worlds we live in, but it's a terrible toolkit for exploring the other worlds we live in. Now you could say, but we don't live in other worlds. But you're wrong. Imagine for a moment your favorite place, the warm sand of a beach, the wind through the pines on a ridge of mountains, the still heat of an afternoon in the desert, what have you. See it clearly in your mind. Hear it, the waves crashing the shore, the wind in the pines, the crunch of shoes as you walk through the gravel of the desert. Smell the salt, the pines, the sagebrush. Make it real in your mind.

What world is that? It's not the world scientific materialism describes. Add a unicorn to your favorite place. See, easy. Easy because it's a different world. It's the world of imagination. There are other worlds too. Depending on which tradition of thought you find best describes your experience there might be three worlds, or five, for ten. The model that's always made the most sense to me happens to have five world, but it's just a model. 

Borges said the map is not the territory, and, while that's true, it should bear some scaled down resemblance to the territory otherwise it's not going to make a very helpful guide to the territory.



## On Writing

What I love most about writing is the thinking that happens first, it frees your mind from itself, it gives your mind something to turn over and over, it becomes like an old friends. You look at it this way, you look at it that way, you try to figure out why it's there. For a long time it's just there. It's there when I'm putting the coffee in the moka, it's there when I stand in the shower, feeling the water on my back, it's there when I walk up the hill, threading my way around concrete telephone polls and women selling nopales and tortillas. 

And then some part of it, suddenly you know why it's there, you know where it leads, you know what that bit is going to do and you move on to the next part. 

Some times unfortunately it can take years to figure things out, which makes it hard to feed a family writing. I have done it, but I have done it by writing terrible, terrible things. Book summaries for something like Cliff's Notes, which would have been a find job if it had paid more than $.03 a word, to blog posts for people trying to get people sliding down some slimy mailing list funnel. It was all unpleasant work, but in some ways it made me a better writer. Not at craft, but at volume. If you want to feed your family using words, plan to use a lot of them. One month I wrote 80,000 words. I averaged 60,000 for an entire year and nearly starved to death.

You have to love to write, and you have to have the disciple to write even what you don't love. If I were you, I would get a job. If anyone had hired me, I would taken a job, but no one ever did. So I kept writing.

## Work

"Well, it depends on how much you love your work. 

After all, we’re really dealing with two separate things: 

The purpose of work is to create. It is to fuel your soul.

Whereas the purpose of earning money is to have enough of the stuff. How much is enough? Whatever you need to max out your happiness potential. After that, more money will not make you any happier." -- MMM


Greek Proverb which says, “A society grows great when the old people plant trees, even when they know they will never get to enjoy their shade.”


## An Invitation


In 1993 I headed off to college to a quiet little town called Redlands, CA, which had a college of the same name. It was at the base of the mountains and edge of the desert. At the time all I wanted to do was spend as much time hiking, climbing and skiing as I could. Redlands was a good base camp for all that. It was also one of a handful of colleges around the country that allowed you to write your own major. I originally went because I planned to write a major that was half studying photography and half writing about nature. Basically this was when I concieved luxagraf, I just had to wait ten years for the technology that would make it possible to become widespread.

Before I dropped out of Redlands, which I did after two semesters, my advisor mentored my first class in my self- written  major, which was a kind of Nature Writing 101, reading and reacting to authors I'd mostly already read and reacted to, all the usual American suspects, Thoreau, Abbey, Dillard, Lopez, Stegner, and so on. My professor was more knowledgable about this area than me though and he threw a few authors I did not know on the list. The one that's relevant now is one that remains largely overlooked by the canon of American nature writing, Mary Hunter Austin.

Austin traveled and lived in the Mojave desert for 17 years, studying native life, as well as spanish-american immigrant life in the region and writing defenses of both long before anyone else. But she is probably best known for a book called <cite>The Land of Little Rain</cite>, her <cite>Walden<cite> with the Mojave desert playing the role of Thoreau's pond. 

It's a good book, one that made me appreciate the Mojave much more than I did at the time. Since I lived in Redlands, not far from the Mojave, I was able to go out and explore quite a bit of what she wrote about. Recently, in searching for new books for the kids I discovered that Austin also wrote a children's book, called simply <cite>The Trail Book</cite>. Imagine Night in the Museum, but with Native American tales and you've got the idea. Finding this sent me off searching for more Austin, and somewhere in the early hours of the morning, bleery-eyed and half asleep at the keyboard, I ran across a digital copy of a collection of Austin's short stories called <cite> Lost Borders</cite>. What caught my eye was the dedication, "to Marion Burke and the Friends of a Long Year." 

Who were the friends of a long year? What were the friends of a long year? When were the friends of a long year? It's hard to tell from the typesetting if Austin capitalized Friends of a Long Year or not, but I like to think she did, I like to think it was some kind of club. I did a little research before I dragged myself to bed and dreamed of a the friends of a long year.



## Hard Times


It was a hard time. My wife took a job teaching English to Chinese five year old. It was a degrading business for someone with a master's in education, dancing like a monkey (I mean that literally) for tech companies whose "training materials" had more typos than a teenager's messaging logs. It was a dark time, but one you have to put somewhere else so your children don't realize how thin the line between having food and not can be because that's stress you try to keep your children from, even if you ultimately can't. Better your child be hungry than be hungry and have to wrestle with why. There's a surface level of why, the obvious, the because we have no job, that's easy enough to explain and we did, what's harder is to look the whole system in the eye and consider it, this thing humans have built where in fact there needs be nothing of the sort. Why force people to earn paper tickets, really electronic tickets these days, not even real tickets, that can be exchanged for food, shelter, etc. Why allow such a small number of humans to own all the land? Why allow anyone to own the land at all? These are much harder questions for children to face, for anyone to face. The rest of us have time and effort already invested in ignoring these questions, in pretending that the way things are is the only way they could be, that we don't have to face them the way children do, we simply look the other way and hang our heads and dance like monkeys for the foriegn kids and collect our digital tickets and buy food for our children, or try anyway.

The stupid thing is we know this isn't the only way. The status quo only seems inevitable if it's all you know and we, creators of a culture that is obsessed with past cultures, know for absolute surety that there are other ways. Pretty much any tribal society for instance -- which is a huge negative value judgment in that phrase that I'll be coming back to --




## Meditation

Like many people who practice meditation, it has been transformative for me. I don't talk about it much because who the hell wants to hear their friends talk about how meditation has been transformative? Even I don't want to hear that. But I'll put it here for total strangers on the internet. Weird. But anyway.

I have experimented with many different forms of meditation, Vipassanna, mindfulness, zazen, transcendental, and others, but the one that actually did something for me, and which I continue to practice today, is discursive meditation. This is different than the mind-emptying meditation popular in the west just now. It's not mind-emptying, but rather focused, purposeful thinking (usually the full systems of thought from which the mind-emptying meditation techniques have been lifted have this sort of meditation as well, often under the name "contemplation" or similar).

Discursive meditation does not require anything, but a comfortable place to sit, which might be part of the reason it's not very popular in this gear-obsessed age. A nice wooden chair works well for sitting, but anywhere you can get comfortable and relaxed works. I live in RV and don't have a nice wooden chair, so I can tell you with some authority that you need nothing more than a comfortable place to sit. No expensive retreats, no fancy buckwheat-filled pillow cushions, no special pants. Just sit down, breathe and call up whatever image or theme you're meditating on.

What you meditate on varies by tradition and person. I recommend using some form of established tradition in the beginning, this will give you a place to turn when unexpected things happen. And they will. Eventually. The tradition I follow is that of hermeticism, which includes spiritual, ritual and other components as well, but discursive meditation was once [a big part of Catholicism](), and [druids](http://aoda.org/publications/articles-on-druidry/discursivemeditation/) practice it as well, which should give some idea of the range of appeal.

The ability to think deeply and purposefully is one of those skills that, once you have it, you'll wonder how you ever got by without it.


## family in mexico


I've never lived in a culture that was so hard working an so devoted to family. These are things that I grew up hearing people talk about -- hard work and family -- but I've never actually seen it like I see it here. Which is not meant to denigrate people in other places, hard work is not a zero sum game, but here work and life flow together with no real strong boundaries like you'd find in the States, for example.

My favorite example of this is bus drivers. In the United States if you drive a bus, you wear a uniform and, aside from your face and body shape, you are largely indistinguishable from whomever is driving the next bus. Chances are, when you get off you park the bus and go home. It's not in any meaningful way, your bus or even your work, you are by design an meaningless cog in a profit wheel where most of the profits go to someone other than you. I could make a good case that this is an awful way to live, severely limits your humanity, leads to depression and dissatisfaction with your work and life, and is one of the more profound and overwhelming problems in American culture, but we won't get into that here.

Instead consider the Mexican bus driver. His bus is his bus. Her bus is her bus. The dashboard is given over to shrines of La Virgen de Guadalupe, or whomever their patron saint might be, along with photos of family, friends, wives, children, what have you. Usually there's a crucifix and some pithy quotes about god, country and most importantly, family. Mi familia, Mi Trabajo, Mi Vida, was one I saw. I don't know where the buses get parked at night, but I do know that the next day the same person is driving the same bus. Mi familia, Mi Trabajo, Mi Vida. 

For me this helps to make sense of 





## doing nothing

I'm not going to pretend to know what Wallace Stevens was referring to by the Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is, but it has always reminded me of the fact that there are myriad complex worlds around us to which we are wholly ignorant. Not because we don't pay attention, though that may be part of it, but because we can't pay attention. There are vast existences too small to see with the naked eye. Ponds full of pond scum that have their own version of stressful jobs, political and social situations, and whatnot just as we do. They're just having it all on a very different scale, from us and happen to use chemicals instead of words to communicate. 

For all you know that puddle you didn't even notice on your way into work this morning is home to a population of microbes undergoing an extremely stressful existence which they would desperately like to escape just as much as you would desperately like to escape your cubicle. 

By the same token, the nothing that is has also always reminded me that it's entirely possible, likely even I would argue, that there are some beings out there to which our existence is about the same as the pond scum. Not insignificant or unimportant, just too small to really pay any kind of meaningful attention to. After all, pretty much everyone and everything has its own set of problems to worry about.


Staring at nothing isn't doing nothing. It so happens that watching the world in silence isn't something our culture considers valuable and so you and I have been trained to casually dismiss it as "doing nothing". But the more I've done it, the more I realized that sitting, "doing nothing" is actually, possibly, the secret of the world so to speak. Whatever it may be, I can say from experience that it's incredibly valuable to me now and has helped me grow by leaps and bounds as a person.

I also think it offers a practical, easy way out of many of the social messes we've created for ourselves.

There's a lot of windbags out there criticizing the internet, especially social media, for fostering narcissism, consumer culture, intellectual bullying, and whatever other social ill gets their particular goat as it were. But it's rare that said windbags have any good ideas on how we can counteracting these forces beyond turning off the TV and internet. 

To be fair, that does work. Especially turning off the TV. Few things will improve your life so dramatically as throwing your TV out the highest window you can find (making sure there's no one below). 

The internet though is more neutral in my view. It can be good, it can be bad, it all depends on you and how you use it. In my case I have to use it, it's how I make money to live this way. And sure I can say oh I'm only going to look up whatever technical thing I need to look up to solve a particular problem, but that ideal is very different from the messy relaity that the internet is full of interesting stuff to stare at. 

\l

Observing nature is not nothing. 

Which is to say all the things we as a culture don't want to talk about right now.

You and I find ourselves born into a declining culture. A culture that is what Spengler would call the end of an abstraction phase that will soon start swinging toward 


is a bit more complex than that. If you want to still use social media, try first developing humility. One easy way to do that is to create an active practice cultivating humility, for example, pending time in quiet observance of nature. Spend some time realizing that most of life care not at all what humans think, say or do, is helpful in 

seems like it would require an active practice.

## quotes borrowed


But as we struggle through this crisis of legitimacy, what is left over when the abstractions start to wear thin? When I decide I don’t want to become an opiate addict and need to find something else? What about when it’s more serious than just a headache – what if it turns out to be cancer, and I don’t want to follow the standard ‘cut, poison, burn’ protocol? For me, it sometimes feels like there’s only a smoking crater where my brain should be. My mind often feels like it’s just a collection of Other People’s opinions and regurgitated sound bites. Even if I do try to pay attention to my own experiences, what I am able to perceive is limited by my analysis of the information coming in to my brain, which is itself conditioned by the habits of thought I learned from other people and my society. I filter out the information to which I am exposed. So there really is no objective truth out there! -https://www.ecosophia.net/the-truths-we-have-in-common/#comment-17128

It’s when you realize that most of your opinions and ideas belong to other people that you can begin the central work of an age of reflection — the work of learning how to think your own thoughts, and assess other people’s opinions and ideas and your own with a set of critical tools that don’t depend on checking their fit to some collectively approved set of abstract generalizations. JMG

ipalm fronds, whirls, fans, crisp browned tips, peeling trunks as if the whole tree were some giant alien flower, other with trunks smooth and stalk straight leading up to bunches of fronds that look like pineapples on stilts. The can be so absolutely still when the ind doesn't blow.. The slash pine mixed in, it too has a very stright trunk, shedding its lower branches as it grows so that the long, delicate needles grow in tuffs and clumps of needle fans near the top of the tree. Here and there an oak, never a big one in the palm-dominated areas, but vaguely sickly looking oaks scratching out an existence in this sandy soil.

Twilight is soft yellow that gradually fades up to a cool white that gets cooler and cooler blow as it climbs up the sky until it reachs the rich coblant I see up through the faint waiving of pine tops in the wind, the deep rich blue of twilight, the spirit who guides the stars into the night. The sand looks gray and soft when the sun is gone, the coean grows dark and seems to settle it's restlessness a bit as the light disappears.


Moo Krob Nam Ma Prow

having grown up in mid-twentieth century suburbia — and then escaped! — I have a very low tolerance for the kind of boring world that comes from excess conformity and obedience to authorities. As for ways to sort through the abstractions — ah, we’ll be getting to those. - ecosophia, greer


> In a home I need walls, roof, windows, and a door that can be opened and closed. I also need a place to cook, a place to eat, a place to sleep, a place for a guest, and a place to write. More space is not better... more space attracts more stuff which eventually means less space. 

> Some things make life easier, but more things do not make life more easy. More things mean more things that can break down and more time spent fixing or replacing them. 

> Comfort is freedom and independence. Comfort is having the sweat glands and metabolic tolerance to deal with heat and cold. It is not central heating or air conditioning which may fail or be unavailable. It is not plushy seats but a healthy back. Luxury is not expensive things. It is a healthy and capable body that moves with ease with no restraints because something is too heavy, too far, too hard, or too much. It is a content and capable mind that can think critically, solve problems, and form opinions of its own.

> Success is having everything you need and doing everything you want. It is not doing everything you need to have everything you want. If so then you do not own your things, instead your things own you. I do not need to own a particular kind of vehicle. I need to go from A to B. I do not need fancy steak dinners, rare ingredients, or someone else to prepare my meals whether it is a pizza parlor, a chef, or an industrial food preprocessor. I need food to live. Food to fuel my body and brain. Luxury is not eating at 5 five star restaurants. Luxury is being able to appreciate any food. Comfort is eating the right kind and the right amount of food. Not whatever I want. Eating and moving right prevents diseases, pains, and lack of functionality. I am what I eat and I look what I do. Everybody is. It is the physiological equivalent of integrity. To say what I mean and mean what I say. This too makes life more comfortable. Money is opportunity. Opportunity is power. Power is freedom. And freedom means responsibility. Without responsibility, eventually there is no freedom, no power, no opportunities, and no money. More importantly, freedom is more than power. Power is more than opportunity. Opportunity is more than money. And money is more than something that just buys stuff. It is simple to understand but hard to remember, but do remember this if nothing else.

http://earlyretirementextreme.com/manifesto.html

The Labyrinth of Solitude
Juana Inés de la Cruz. Her superb book "Poems, Protest, and a Dream"
Mariano Azuela's "The Underdogs"
## Podcasts

podcasts are great because you can do other things while you listen right? Like you can be doing the dishes or gardening or working on your car and listening to a podcast and that's like giving you that time that you would have spent in a book or video and now you can spend it doing two things. Now is that divided attention as good as the focused attention? probably not. so for me, I tend to combine two low lift things. I listen to a podcast on tk when I'm doing the dishes but something that requires a good bit of focus I might save for a drive. But either way this opens up a way to kind of double time your life. You want to learn about something new, but you need to weed the garden right? Well, now you can.

## Monohull must haves
Here are *my* must haves for a monohul, if you want to live aboard for extended stays:

Head and galley right down at the companionway.
You don’t want to go halfway through the boat, let alone pass through cabins to reach their ensuite head, with dripping wet oilies in a heavy seaway. It has to be right at the bottom of the stairs.

If you like to eat in the cockpit, it’s very nice to be able to pass food directly from the galley without walking around with it.
Also, the area in front of the companionway is usually the most stable one of the boat. Best for cooking at sea.

A separate shower stall.
Usually we like to wash from the stern but when anchorages are crowded or the weather is a little cooler it’s very nice to be able to wash inside without splashing all over the head and the sink.

Seats 4 at the indoor table without having to unfold table leaves or hampering mobility inside.

All lines, especially reefing, lead aft to the cockpit so you can do the heavy weather sailing without ever leaving the cockpit.

Walk through transom to facilitate boarding from the dinghy with your hands full of groceries. Also the nicest way to take a swim, or for washing yourself as mentioned above.

One of the smallest boats corresponding to the above whilst sporting 3 cabins, is the Beneteau Oceanis 361 that I’ve owned and loved very much. Crossed the Atlantic twice with it. You may want a Jeanneau Sun Odyssey 40 from around 1999 (the 3 cabin - 1 head layout) for a bit more payload and space in the forward cabin and twin cockpit wheels that facilitate mobility to and from the walk through transom. Otherwise a very similar boat. These are two ‘budget’ options, which seem to be the prudent choice given the description of your means. Better spend far less on the initial acquisition cost than you think you can afford. 

### Forward Wind Scoop 

Forward wind scoop: a bit of triangular canvas strung over a forward hatch between two scasions, sloping down to the deck as you move aft with a tension line to the rigging above to keep it taunt. Doubles as forward windshade and forces air down into the hatch to keep below decks cool. Keeps the air moving through. Saw this on Allied Seawind 30 on YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hRHskbdRFFs
## CC

When I first saw you I was just trying to get a cup of coffee. But then I decided I'd rather have you. 
That proved more difficult that I thought. Once You sat in my lap once at Jason and Christy's house
but I was pretty sure you were dating someone else and I was positive I was so that didn't go far
but I found I rather enjoyed you in my lap. Another time we went to prom and you made out with me
I know I was dating someone else then too but I didn't care. For years I made you many a spinach salad with salmon on it,
even when you were eating with someone else. Then you became a picture on my refrigerator for 3 years. 

Once when I try to meet up with you you ditched me. Then you decided to marry someone else I went traveling the world for years 
I didn't think about you very much for a while, but when I got back I met you again at Nancy's house
I spilled Sangria on your dog but still you said it could be okay for me
to visit you in Charleston. We ate lots of seafood without going far
We went skinny dipping in your pool, in hindsight I'm surprised you did it.
the first night was a little rough, I had to fight the dog, she didn't want me, she wanted you.

And then I considered once what I would do without and found I could not imagine life without you.
As Donne wrote, "All joys are thanks to you" and somehow I convinced you of it
I might redo them now, those standard vows we read, or listen to out back of our house
If I could do it over I'd tell you I'll love you forever, forever ever, years,
even beyond death, for I've walked many of the happy roads that take you round the world and far
away and have found them good, so long as you are with me.


---


From "Valentine" by John Fuller

The things about you I appreciate
May seem indelicate:
I'd like to find you in the shower
And chase the soap for half an hour.
I'd like to have you in my power
And see your eyes dilate.
I'd like to have your back to scour
And other parts to lubricate.

I'd like to find a good excuse
To call on you and find you in.
I'd like to put my hand beneath your chin,
And see you grin.
I'd like to taste your Charlotte Russe,
I'd like to feel my lips upon your skin
I'd like to make you reproduce.

I'd like you in my confidence.
I'd like to be your second look.
I'd like to let you try the French Defence
And mate you with my rook.
I'd like to be your preference
And hence
I'd like to be around when you unhook.
I'd like to be your only audience,
The final name in your appointment book,
Your future tense.

---


Have you forgotten what we were like then
when we were still first rate
and the day came fat with an apple in its mouth

it's no use worrying about Time
but we did have a few tricks up our sleeves
and turned some sharp corners

the whole pasture looked like our meal
we didn't need speedometers
we could manage cocktails out of ice and water

I wouldn't want to be faster
or greener than now if you were with me O you
were the best of all my days