“the luck of the goodness arrives with accepting the unwanted”
—Charles Bukowski
🎵 Song: Ready for More by Sea Girls
📰 Update: So far, 16 states. We’re in Washington now. We started in Florida, went up through the Southeast, into the Midwest, hung out in Colorado, then headed West. Drove up California from San Diego to Crescent City. Then onward to Oregon: up the coast, over to Portland, and now we find ourselves in the beautiful state of Washington.
📷 Photo: Going into New Mexico, at the Four Corners monument
IT WAS REALLY HOT. 10 more seconds out there and my skin would have erupted in flames. It tends to do that. Freckles are combustible. Be careful out there.
🎵 Song: decide to be happy by SUPERBLOOM
🍴 Food: Clam chowder. GIMME ALL THE CHOWDER.
So we were spending the night in a little town on the Oregon Coast (Reedsport, if I remember correctly) and one of the local restaurants was a combination pizza house / chowder house. I’m immediately IN. Pizza is always a Yes. Chowder—in the right places—is always a Yes. A HOUSE dedicated to these two items? SIGN ME UP. We already had some delicious fresh-baked rolls from an earlier stop (you may, at this point, sense a theme in the various places we stop) and some freshly picked blackberries from the side of the road, because OREGON.
The hotel was cramped and we were all tired and the van was messy and we needed to do laundry and everybody was a bit cranky and arguing over who got to shower first but then: Clam chowder, and rolls, and a decent salad, and fresh berries and all was well in the world.
I expected the kids would tolerate the clam chowder and focus on the rolls and berries and salad, but they loved it so I guess we’ve done something right and now they’re chowder freaks like me.
📷 Photo: Somewhere in Oregon, being pretty stoked about berries.
📖 Book: The Sovereign Individual by James Dale Davidson and William Rees-Mogg.
“While the attention of the world is riveted on dishonest debates and wayward personalities, the meanderings of megapolitics continue almost unnoted.”
Ooooh, good one. Here’s another:
“Understanding the way the world works means developing a realistic intuition of the way that human society obeys the mathematics of natural processes. Reality is nonlinear. But most people’s expectations are not.”
📝 Note: In the dark places, sometimes strength is a liability. You can hold on much longer than you need to. It takes a lot to break you open. A lot of pain, hurt, burdens, pressure, disappointment, failure over and over, time after time. And you think, “What is wrong with me?” And determine to be better, be stronger.
It takes a long time before you quit being strong and resisting, before you quit holding it all together, until you finally start falling apart and letting go.
Of course that is when shit gets really good. But it gets really bad before it gets good. All those conditions and expectations and specifications. They keep us locked in, trapped, limited. The stronger we are, the longer we hold on to our own traps. It’s okay to let go. Surrender is its own strength.
🔗 Links:
😓 Difficult thing: Making a thousand logistical choices with your significant other… without killing each other. We set it up this way (the unscheduled/unplanned nature of the thing) partially because we’re idiots and partially because we wanted to work on this aspect of our relationship: communicating well, understanding each other, saying what we want, and dealing with conflict when we want different things.
Basically, learning how to make decisions together. Not one of us giving up, being passive, and/or fuming in silent resentment while the other makes the decisions. But talking it out and figuring it out and working it out and choosing, together, what we want the next step to be.
Still a work in progress!
One point learned: Making a decision means taking action and trusting the outcome to be whatever it needs to be.
You can discuss all you want and hypothesize how things will work out; at some point, though, you have to decide and do and see what you get.
🎵 Song: We’ve Got a Good Thing Going by lady lamb
❤️ Thanks for reading! You’re the best!