path: root/scratch.txt

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.


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Sustainable vs regenerative: sustainability is about keeping things as the are, regeneration is about making things better than they are.







Another ancillary benefit (goal?) of traveling in the bus was getting to see all the various regions of the country. Well, we did not get to all of them, but we got to quite a few. We missed the PAcific Northwest, but wet and cloudy is no place for me. I already know that (I am saving the Pacific Northwest for a different adventure many many years down the road). There were unexpected things in exploring the United States. I would never have predicted that we'd enjoy the great lakes, parciularly the regio around lakes Superior and Michigan so much. You could probably argue we didn't experience winter and therefore have a very distorted view of the great lakes, but to me that's just not a factor. I spent three long winters in New England, I know what winter is like and I am fine with it.

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We tossed around possibilities. We considered buying a house. We considered buying a boat. But then we stepped back and considered what it was we liked about traveling in the bus. There are many answers to this question, but some of the big ones are: nature, the lack of modern human noises, cars, planes -- I love it when my kids say the birds woke them -- and the self-reliance.


Just when we were considering packing it in, a pandemic shuts down the country. Just when were thinking of not packing it in, but carrying on for another year everyone and their mother decides to go camping. When everyone zigs, the only smart thing to do is zag.

The joy of living in the bus has less to do with the actual travel and more to do with escaping the trappings of the 9-to-5, suburban, consumer-capitalist world. We're still part of the world in plenty of ways, and propped up by it in many ways -- we wouldn't be able to travel this way without that world -- but out there in the woods we just felt better.

If you put these things in a spreadsheet, as I do, the things that jump out at you are that you don't actually need to travel to get all this stuff. So a confluence perhaps. At the time it's difficult to travel by land in the US, perhaps we don't need to?

One day a house came up for rent not too far from where we were. It was an old farmhouse sitting on a few acres, but more importantly it was surrounded by hundreds of acres of forest. I called and talked to the landlord. We met. We talked. A few days later after he had told us we could rent it, he said he was sorry but his wife had rented it to someone else. 

We shrugged. These things happen so much when you travel you cease to worry about them for more than a couple hours. That confluence maybe wasn't meant to happen just now. Other confluences had me thinking.

It is very hard to do anything other than travel when you are traveling. To create things on the road is a challenge. The updates I post here is the most I have ever managed beyond notes scribbled in one of the many notebooks I lug around. 

If you want to write a book about traveling, you have to stop traveling. If you want to do anything that requires sustained effort over weeks, months, traveling just gets in the way. This is one of the reasons I think long term travelers leave behind very little in the way of written legacy. The flip side of this is that the writers we think of as writing about traveling often haven't traveled all that much.

I always think of *On The Road*, of which the actual time on the road is vanishingly small. The *Air Conditioned Nightmare* is based on a single cross country trip lasting a couple of months. *Blue Highways* takes place over nine weeks. In *Travels with Charley* Steinbeck spends about 75 days on the road. *Wild America* spans barely a season. The only real exception I've found is *Kingbird Highway*, which does record a tremendous amount of travel sustained over many years. 

Do I want to write a book about our trip? Honestly, I am not sure. Possibly. But I have an unrelated book I very much want to write (and am). I have some other projects I'd like to tackle that would be tough to do while traveling.




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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.







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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. 


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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.











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.

















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.

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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.