Occupation of Independence

What a bizarre process it is to buy a car! The other day I was at a typical dealer's overcrowded lot. The cars were parked closer together than they are in a Portland OR grocery store parking lot. The salesman was a big guy. He would open "my" van's door smack into the adjacent vehicle, actually dinging a newish vehicle. He didn't seem concerned. That really shows the high regard they have for their product, doesn't it?! I suppose I should grateful for the search engines, such as AutoTrader, Car Gurus, Auto Tempest, etc. But they suck! They over-describe unimportant things like the car having a clock, sun visor, intermittent windshield wipers, 16 air bags, etc. Oh, and it has "a CD player," too. But as for the engine, they will just say, "V8". Apparently it doesn't matter that GM made three different V8 engines for the years in question. The poor customer's time is wasted on jargon, abbreviations, the reckless use of prono

Once this winter I camped near the van tramp bunch, with the idea that it could be thought-provoking. And it was. This occurred near Quartzsite. Granted, it is easy to have a negative attitude towards this bunch. The vaunted "lifestyle" of theirs has become such a formula.  from Kombi Life But I tried to put that aside and see what makes them tick. As luck would have it, I checked out an excellent book at the local library by Jerome Blum, "In the Beginning." It sounds biblical, but actually the book is about the explosion of modernity in the 1840s. Some of what happened then is  relevant to today's van tramps. It only takes a couple encounters with them before I concluded they were urban people. Actually you can decide that in a couple seconds. Just observe their dog-leash and clean-up fanaticism, their diet, music, tattoos, dreadlocks, etc. So I smiled when reading Blum's book about the 1840s:   the revolutions [of 1848] were almost exclusivel

Coming back from a sunset walk with my dog, I had the pleasure of looking at yet another crinkly chiaroscuro of desert mountains. I hope I never get tired of them. In fact it is quite remarkable how some pleasures never wear out.  Why so? We get used to the idea that most things get tiresome and old very quickly. It is even worse in a media-saturated society, because the media is always chasing novelty. It is worse yet in a citified culture, where people live 'fast', and chase the latest fad as if it will raise their self-esteem. Naturally I didn't have my camera along, but even if I had, the result would not have been a noteworthy postcard. The scene was ordinary, but I loved it. As the opposite of hectic, citified, fad-and-novelty chasing, consider breathing. We never refuse to take a breath because it is old hat, repetitive, or un-novel. Perhaps natural cycles of use and non-use are the explanation. Certain things will always give pleasure, but only after they

I must be turning into a sweet little old man. I deliberately drove through Quartzsite, AZ during the madness of its annual crowdfest in late January. Rather than scowl at everybody, it seemed entertaining to me. Anyway, I drove a loop around the town, and made a game out of it: did I know a clever way to get from A to B? The trick to doing this is to renounce certain driving habits, such as left-hand turns. Also, there is a relatively uncrowded freeway interchange on the east side of town. But there is a more fundamental trick: simply renounce excessive expectations about human beings, and your frustrations end.  I used to make fun of the mundaneness and banality of RV travel blogs. But that hardly matters now. It seems that blogs (that you read) have become passé and have been superseded by vlogs, their YouTube equivalent. It might also be that travel bloggers have retired from traveling due to age. Have you watched some of these vlogs? I put one on pause and went to the thes