An ode to the open road and visions of a better highway.

On the road, March 14.

We loaded the truck with a weeks+ worth of food, camping gear, camera gear, and bikes. After morning coffee and making a cooler of snacks we hit the road, southbound. It’s cold, but sunny and clear skies. I love being on the open road. I love taking in the scenery of the American highway system. As you sit back in the seat, ride along the road there is time to think, reflect, relax the mind to let it go where ever it wants.

All week I’d intended to write this weeks Substack, but time kept slipping away from me as I tried to finish work projects before heading out of town for the week, and now that I was driving I had the time to think through it but didn’t have the ability to because I was behind the wheel. But it felt good. My brain had been craving this. The wide landscapes. The sunshine.

The first thing I’d been thinking about earlier in the week was about car keys. Not just car keys, but the technology of cars. The technology of everything. About improvements and false improvements.

Sometimes I wonder if peak society was somewhere about 25 years ago. There comes a point when “improvements” become so laden with intricacy, complication, and sophistication that they are no longer improving anything. Keys might offer an example.

Thirty years the car key was a simple cut piece of metal. The key goes into the cylinder and with the simple motion of a spring movement the user accessed the ability of operating the car.

Then we were introduced to the FOB. What originally referred to a decorative ornament on a key ring now contained a battery and made it possible to lock and unlock the doors without inserting the key. Convenience, but with a catch. If the battery quit, the doors still required the key to open. In the early years, the car still required the key to operate. The next iteration of FOB would require the battery operated signal to communicate to the car in order for the ignition to work. Slowly the layers of complexity were added to this single system of the car requiring an electronic signal to operate the car………….

…….(right here, imagine Utah on a sunny spring day. There is snow in the LaSals but the desert plateau is red with sunshine, warm. Lizards are crawling on rocks. But there is a breeze. It’s almost cold. But the sun wins…..)

Stop. Date change. Now March 26…

It’s a week later. I gave myself a week off. My apologies. I intend this to be more regular than not, in part for readers, and in part selfishly, as this is a great place to hash out words and ideas and veins of thought that I probably otherwise would not write down, and thus probably not find as much clarity to. This space is where I come to share some of the ancillary side notes and distractions that often make up most of our real lives. It also is a great place to warm up my brain for fiction.

And yet, last week came and went. And no words were written in the computer, here in Substack or otherwise. I intended them to be, but it never happened. As often happens on trips to the desert or any short week in the woods, other things got the best of me. And other than some short journal writing and picture drawing, none of those things existed in word form.

But it wasn’t for lack of wanting to write. Nor ideas. In fact if anything I had too many ideas trying to converge on me for this space. It felt like a meteor shower, but I couldn’t make sense of which one to focus on and before I had time to get a good look at how to distill one, it had vanished and another was coming. So it goes.

The week decided to take my mind to the desert with family and friends, and that was a great way to step away. I checked my phone very little as the cell service was bad and everyone at work seemed to have a great handle on things. That was a wonderful delight.

So let’s see where we were: I was talking about a FOB. A key. And I don’t remember where exactly I was going, but I know it was to do with this idea I’ve been mulling for several weeks, months maybe. Related to technology. Related to invention. The human brain. The human wants. Ai, a little, but more, why I’d like to steer clear of it. How I’d prefer to slow down, not speed up.

Technology seems to be coming wearily tiresome. So many things that were promised to improve our lives have only made them more frantic. More unfocused. More involved with the things rather than the experiences. Inventions meant to make life easy often break down more easily. The FOB is the example I was about to run with. But there are many. Electric windows in cars. Any electronics in cars. Things that once were relatively easy to fix are now more expensive and complicated, necessitating not only more time, but more money, resources, which in turn requires more work. Can openers once made in America from workers that took pride in a good tool creation were made of steel and lasted a lifetime once you bought it. I own one. It will outlive me. But when we decided to start making them more modern… adding motors, switching to plastic, making them light and “more affordable” they began to break more easily. Cheap to buy once, but far more costly in the long run. And when adding a motor… it's a can for god’s sake… why do we need a motor for of some sort of professional kitchen?

These thoughts always come into mind as I look at the things I buy. When I look at the things I’ve bought in the past. What works. What gets used. How does it hold up?

I feel very fortunate indeed with how my parents ingrained in me a specific thought pattern that goes into purchasing. My dad’s family was a coal mining family in Kentucky. He was raised without money. He was the first to receive formal education past high school. He was raised to spend money effectively and not extravagantly.

This led to a mentality of saving until you could get a thing that you 1. actually want and has a purpose, and 2. you buy the best one you can and make it last.

Buy once, cry once, is a saying I later heard, but I like the idea of not crying… if you are buying a thing, why not be stoked about it. A vacuum isn’t a terrible thing to own. So get excited about it. Read about them. Dive in. Find the one that is built to last and fits the purposes you have. (It’s a Meile. I can save you time right here and now. Buy a Meile if you can.)

As I look around my house I realize just how much my parents integration of this way of thinking has worked. Most everything I have is rather old. My stereo, one of the first things I saved up for in high school, which I graduated from in 1992, is the one I bought in high school. It is a NAD. It was expensive at the time. I’ve never replaced it. I know people on their fifth, sixth stereo amplifier… they’ve spent far more even though they spend in increments smaller.

Down to little things. Coffee presses. Bodum makes glass French presses. They are fine. But they break. They always break. For about half the price more you can buy a stainless steel French press that 1. makes better coffee (due to its double mesh screen filtration) and 2. will outlive you and become an heirloom to pass to your children. Freiling makes it. It’s aesthetically beautiful, makes wonderful coffee, and lasts a lifetime.

Now some people like to buy. They want things that will break so they can get the dopamine hit of buying it again. This is what is sold on television and the internet. Need newer. Better. But that is the point of what I’m getting at here. We need to start selling connection to people and places, not things. These things are fun tools to life, but they are not the life. The life exists in the experiences. The tools make the experiences available or more accessible. But they do not bring the joy. We bring that with the people, animals, and world around us.

It is why I like a good, reliable car. I don’t need new. I don’t want new in fact. The new cars seem to have added more failure in their “advancements.” I prefer tried and true. It’s not that I’m against the technology of automobile (though I still love riding a good horse as well) but I do think the technology is at a point where it’s diminished the experience of ownership. Perhaps there is a bell curve when it comes to technological experience. I think that bell curve would show the 90’s and early aughts near the top on several examples. Cars for sure. Airplane travel. Shoes (when New Balance was still making their runners in the USA, they were one of the most rugged shoes built.)

A good pair of shoes. A good coffee maker. A good pocket knife. Good tires. A warm pair of gloves. A reliable coat. A good stereo or headphones. These are the types of things that it is worth taking the time to find the right one and a good one. These things will last you longer than you expect. And can bring joy in their solid functionality. They get out of the way, yet are a key part of what you are doing at any given point. And good gear can make moments betters. Camping is very much an example here. A good tent is the difference between a great sleep and no sleep at all when the weather turns sour. My best sleep is lying in a tent in the mountains during a torrential downpour. In a bad tent, this same situation has the potential to be the worst sleep ever.

As I’m sitting here thinking through the inventory of items I’ve acquired over the year, and which ones have stood the test of time, I am reminded that thought and mind space is very similar. When we invest in good thinking, we invest in better outcomes. When we buy shit, cheap space filler for our minds, we degrade the potential experience. Good investment in thought space is as important as good investment in good gear for life. If you throw quick, thoughtless motion into your mind space the experience turns out to be much like being in the mountains during a storm with a tent that leaks… better mind componentry , like gear, leads to a better outcome. Sometimes it takes longer. Feels harder to get. Books rarely go fast. Discussion requires humility. Deeper thought and mental investigations don’t happen in 40 second sound bites. It can take years. But, like acquiring good gear, it makes life fuller, richer.

We are told we need the most updated things. But we don’t. Old things are often better. I have furniture that was given to me from my grandparents. It’s gotten hauled around the country, but as I made a permanent house, these pieces helped make it a richer home. They do make furniture of this quality still, but it would have cost so much more than just hanging on to these already very well built pieces that were in my family. The most widely available furniture now available is made with fiber boards and chemicals and is made to be replaced in a decade. The furniture from my grandparents and parents is built to pass down for generations. And that is a pretty amazing thing really. And an amazing way to reduced resources. And save money for other things.

It is the simple things that bring us the most pleasure in this world. Time spent with our love on the porch in the sun sipping coffee. A walk down a fall sidewalk. A glimpse of snow out the window on a late spring day. While our media tells us a litany of things that are required for happiness it is good to remind ourselves who runs the internet. Like television it is a commercial enterprise, with the emphasis on commercial. It is there to tell us to buy. It’s the frightening thing to bringing the internet into increasing arenas of life. From our always-with-us hand held devices referred to as phones, even though the phone aspect is the least used function, to our cars to even our laundry machines. Everything is becoming connected to the commercial device. And that is the goal of these companies, but it makes me feel a fire for more analog. It makes me want to move back to a flip phone. It makes me want to drive an old car and move towards simpler things in general.

The technology moved past the point of being productive in a lot of ways. In telling us “the new technology will do things so you don’t have to” we’ve all but lost the fact that humans evolved to enjoy doing things. We are told work is hard, hard is bad. But that is not how this life works. There is hard work. And we evolved to find great pleasure in it. We’ve evolved to find great satisfaction in perfecting crafts, in learning new ones, in tackling difficulty and thriving while overcoming challenging things. The lazier we become, the sadder our society becomes. Whoever is selling this “easier is better” is nothing but a snake oil salesman. Evolution means change. We can adapt to that. But there are instilled in us wiring aspects that we don’t really have control over… We are built to create. To explore. To work on and do things. Leisure is very good for the soul, and important to fit into our lives but we are not creatures designed for just that. Just like our bones which build when used, we are designed to use our minds and bodies to interact with the world. When we stagnate we decline. It feels like there is a lot of that in our society today. So much expectation of easy has made our society soft, and slowly begin to rot. But not everywhere. There are craftsmen and women that are tackling work and making things, good things. There are people who still dive deep into craft, thought, and life in general. It is worth taking the time to find them, support them, share their work with others, be it a table, a knife, a beer, whatever.

In general, and this is another meteor that I’ll tackle further on a different night, there is a great need to support people who make good things, be it a physical good, or a mental good. And there is good reason to reduce support for those that make shit. We need more quality over quantity (another ingrained lesson from my parents that I also hope to instill in my kids.) There could be an actual turn around if we willing across the broader society to support more locally made, and quality made things. It would keep dollars in our community instead of passing them to Walmart and its foreign factories. It would provide more quality jobs, jobs in which people are working for themselves, taking pride in what they do. Communities thrive on many fronts when more people own their own businesses and work for themselves or for someone that lives with in their community. It also reduces the disgustingly sterile homogenization that has occurred in the US (and around the world) over the last 40 years in which every town has the same multinational chains that dominate the geography, everywhere.

It’s late. I’ve been moving full speed since getting home from the desert, but wanted to start this conversation on the idea that development and complications can eventually reach a peak and then begin decline. Like keys have done. And that the decline potential can also occur in our own minds if we do not pursue deeper, longer, complex time periods of for thought. (The TikTokification of the mind seems like it’s going to end very poorly.) But we have options. We can invest in things in our lives both physical and mental that last longer, lead to a richer experience, and are tools for our growth and movement through space and time. I’m still feeling a little scattered on the subjects I’ve been trying to tackle the last couple weeks (and only now succeeded to get down on page) but let’s just call it an introduction to the conversation. What do you think? What are some things you have that have brought you satisfaction in the long run? I’d love to hear. I’d love to turn this into an ongoing conversation.