My Time as a Human

Everyone used to feel like a brilliant explorer or inventor before the web was devised as a way of crushing our egos. The Buddha is giggling somewhere in a cold server room full of humming, whirring bubble popping machines. There is a new way to innovate now: first, hatch a brilliant and unprecedented new plan or invention. Then, go find the best price and options on one of a thousand different versions of what you thought was your cool new design. I don’t even bother writing software anymore. I imagine what I want and then I go find a copy on a thirteen year old kid’s website and mod it.

So my amazing and daring new scheme for ultralight travel has apparently been kicked around for a while already.

The Extreme

These are the people who are playing like I am: lets see how hardcore we can be.

Neverending Voyage
Some dude named Eslevy
Karol Gajda Ridiculously Extraordinary
One Bag Manifesto
As We Travel They’d be lightweight without the heavy camera gear
Wilderness version (There has been a lot of work on wilderness ultralight travel, this is just one riff on it)

The Moderate

These are sites dedicated to sane, normal humans who might need to look respectable at some point in their travels.

Wiki How 1 Bag Travel
One Bag

We’re All One Big Brain!

But as I pointed out in my encouragement to blog, every contribution to the pool of experiences gives us all more options and data. The first few people who refuse to use shampoo are freaks, but after you can find hundreds of people telling their stories, it seems more realistic and the collective data points draw out a real path for less extreme humans. The kinks get worked out collectively and we all win!

The New System

I’m keeping this in mind as I develop the next version of my ultralight backpacking system. I’m trying to find light new ways to handle more cold, as I’m hoping to make it up to Korea on this next round and the winters in the southern Chinese city of Fuzhou were in the high 30s F (3 C). While not freezing, those temps are a whole other thing when there is no heating. Anywhere. And you have to sit in a classroom for hours on end without moving.

Gear Reviews

In the process of researching new gear, I found some decent reviews, but also a lot of useless complaints like, “This medium sized shirt fit horribly. It was a disaster. I’m 6’5″ tall and weigh 420 lbs…” I also found a lot of people listing their gear without talking about why they made certain choices and, more importantly, how did that work out? I’m going to make an effort to nerd out about the features of things I’m reviewing and talk about how I got to my final packing list, and then post an update after I’ve suffered with it for a while.

Coin Funnel

From reading all of these other sites I’ve also learned that, hey, I should be using affiliate links to gear so that if enough people try the things I like in the end, Amazon will sprinkle some coins on my head and I can buy a bowl of noodles on the road.

I’ve set up a scale. I have a spreadsheet. Let the reviewing begin.

My friend once decided to shave off his eyebrows to see what would happen. Besides freaking me out in a weird way I couldn’t pin down (until he pointed it out) he learned, of course, what eyebrows are for. Behold, without eyebrows, we’d get sweat constantly running into our eyes. Yep. That’s what happened to him.

I’ve had some pretty weird hair colors and styles over the years (and have stuck with the dilbus) but I’ve always washed it every day. The thing is, when you’re home with your parents recovering and not leaving the house… suddenly you have time to try whacky new things. The whole “no shampoo” thing has been going on for a while now. The process takes about a month, it seems, before your head stops freaking out and trying to make up for all the oil the shampoo bubble squad was stealing every day. Once it settles down it is, apparently, quite nice and low maintenance. The bonus is that you don’t dump a lot of questionable chemicals onto your head. Even better, for me, it means that my ultralight travel pile gets one bottle lighter!

Of course, no shampoo doesn’t mean I’ll never wash my hair. It just means I’ll do it with water. There are a number of other solutions to use during the transition time, including apple vinegar and baking soda, but I’m sure that’s just for wusses.

So today it begins: 30 days without shampoo. And then..?

Here is a pile of blogged scribblings about other people’s experiences:

Sean Bonner

Sean Bonner update on Boing Boing

Fulfilled Homemaking

Ridiculously Extraordinary Karol Gajda

Free The Animal, although this guy is too willing to be a freak to make this seem mainstream!

Living the Simple Life

I really screwed this up. One of my best friends, Steve March, and I swore to join one of our favorite freaks, no matter what it took, on the Big Island for the arrival of the end of the world. Terence McKenna had many charms, not the least of which was his weird voice zooming in and out about alien beings and the collective unconscious. He created a mathematical model of the progression of novelty through the course of human history called Timewave Zero and decided that there was a singularity at 2012. When he discovered that this corresponded with the end of the Mayan calendar, he happily declared it the end of the world as we know it… whatever that might mean.

Sadly, he died back in April, 2000. Our plans of dancing beside him amidst some kind of bizarre beach party near his place in Hawaii were wrinkled and twisted and now, here we are, with Terence sliding around through the ether somewhere and Steve and I separated by a continent.

Happy New Years Steve and Terence. I’ll find a way to make this up to you guys.

Watch Terence do his thing: (skip video forward to 2:45 where he appears)

I remember the moment clearly. I was standing with my beautiful little friend Juliett on a bridge on a farm in east Texas. Someone had just discovered that she was going to Italy. “Wow,” she said, “that’s so exciting! Are you moving there?!” Juliett paused and thought about it for a minute, looking slightly puzzled. “Well,” she said, “I have a one way ticket and I’m bringing everything I own. Is that moving?”

People often ask me where I’m from. I tell them, “Austin, Texas”. But I grew up outside of Chicago. Some would say I was “from” Chicago. But of course, I was born in Hamburg, Germany, even though I only lived there for a year. I suppose most accurately I’m “from” my parents.

Both of these questions seek to quickly know a person. When someone asks me, “where are you from,” the core of the question is about understanding what shaped me, what kind of person I am, if I can recommend good restaurants there, and if I might know their brother in law. It’s a conversation piece (in terms of restaurants and brothers in law) but also a way of putting me into a convenient box, the “midwestern” box or the “hippie” box. It’s for this reason that I use Austin as their reference point. Despite traveling all over the world, Austin, like no other place, felt like home the minute I arrived. As a box, it fits well enough. I like natural food and hippie things like yoga, but I also like to throw on a cowboy hat and work hard building things in the sun. The suburb where I went to high school has fewer of those things, and wouldn’t stand a chance at giving someone that visual.

Despite the fact that I’ve spent the last few nights sleeping in a basement in Chicago, and the nights before that in D.C., people still refer to me as “living” in China. It certainly best defines my headspace at the moment. I’m taking a break here to recover, but I have a long way to go learning Chinese and extra pairs of underwear in a garage in Fuzhou. If I really thought about it, I’m not sure I’d say I live anywhere at the moment.

I do believe that places shape us as well as represent us. In all of this talk about “moving”, “living”, and being “from” places it’s interesting to think about what list of places would best give someone a sense of me. If I were going to get a list of places tattooed down my ankle, that would define me to someone who found me sleeping, what would they be? Through my parents I’ve been heavily influenced, and defined, by places I’d never been in Europe. I would have listed China long before I began “living” there these last nine months. Austin and St. Charles would have to be on the list along with the Punjab in India.

What would your list be? Do you wish there were more places on it?