On Being Troubleshot

Beginning in the Middle

A few weeks back, I was going to drive to the pool for some swim therapy. And to take a shower.

It had been over a week since my last shower, and the pool was the best opportunity to have one.

So, I “battened” the truck, and piled the kids in. When I turned my keys in the ignition, the engine turned over with a struggle. And nothing happened.

I tried again. More struggle, but even weaker.

I paused and took a deep breath.

I knew that my truck’s batteries were near the end of their lives, this day was inevitable (I just didn’t want it to be this day). I tried one more time.

Now it was barely doing anything.

No matter how hard I tried to positively think, or LOA my way out of this (not that I believe in the Law of Attraction a la The Secret), the situation wouldn’t change. The mechanics and physics of the moment were stubborn in their recalcitrance. The dashboard of the dead truck just stared back at me, reflecting my hopeless, “I have to re-arrange my whole day around fixing this” gaze.

And in this moment, yet again, I was feeling an acute character-building experience that I’ve since named “troubleshot.”

Good thing I was parked in a spot where my family and I could sleep for the night.

Starting in the Middle

For months now I’ve been trying to figure out how to start telling my story.

There are so many drafts of this (and other pieces) in my Medium account, and as I type this, I wonder if this will also remain unfinished. Lingering in a zombie state: in a way, online, sitting in some server somewhere, and yet also offline, existing in an unpublished state.

I hope it won’t because the urge to write and share is so overpowering: I have a terrible memory, and I worry that I will lose so much of my journey to time. So, know that if you are reading this, you are reading something that has managed to overcome a number of blocks:

• The desire for a finished product. I’ll name this one the “finality block.”
• The desire to have a regular writing practice (nearly impossible in a self-imposed nomad/homeless state). To be able to record as much as I can. To be able to have enough quantity to better evaluate quality. “The writerly block.”
• The dense confusion of interruption and noise that characterizes the experience of being in the middle: “between jobs/gigs” and other “income streams”, between two amazingly expressive and imaginative (read: LOUD) children, between better and worse versions of my self, my relationship with my wife, and so on. “The middle block.”

There are more blocks to note, but to attempt listing them all would fall into the trap of the “finality block”.

And besides, doing so would be impossible given the reality of the “middle block.”

Plus, knowing that a) by having a daily practice I could overcome/mitigate the “finality” and “middle” blocks, but b) I can’t make time and don’t have time for a daily practice right now, because, well… survival. Knowing this truth means that, I have to make peace with the reality of that “writerly block” too.

So, I am starting in the middle, with no promise of immediate follow-up, no promise of presenting a tight little aphoristic gem of finality, no promise of being able to capture most of the story, let alone the “whole story.”

So with that in mind, let’s start from the middle at… the beginning.

The Start of the Story: Everything We Needed and Nothing We Didn’t

Nearly a year ago now, my wife and I quit our jobs and our daily lives, we bought a truck and a truck camper, took our kids out of school, and started living, traveling, and (un)schooling on the road.

In the beginning, friends would ask: “WOW. So you are going to blog about this right?!”

“Fuck no!” I would say.

I have lots of reasons, that I won’t get into here, but I will say this: I had some living to do before I started the sharing.

Too often, folks do it the other way around: they end up starting a daily writing practice, and in a funny way, that productivity gets in the way of living and experiencing. And if they become popular and well-liked, they may never get to the living part.

“if you don’t have experience, go hang yourself and if you survive, write about that.” -Hemmingway (though it’s hard to say what Hemmingway said on the topic, exactly).

So, there’s a lot to say about the months leading up to our decision, the decision itself, and then the mad scramble to have all the pieces in place before we ceased the sedentary 9–5 lives of normiehood.

Before we made the decision, my wife and I would spend long hours at the beach while our children played in the sand, talking about our predicament over coffee. I close my eyes now and think back to it.

The whole world is in a 2018 spasm of fear, anxiety, and depression: so much needs to be done, but so little is being done because everyone is just trying to make ends meet.

We are stuck in jobs that are both exactly what we sought years ago, but have come to learn, over time, have a sour heart and represent a broken promise about purpose, work, and our generation’s place in the social contract (get a job, have kids, get a house, go on vacation, etc.).

And then the phone rings.

My cousin is on the other end, and he tells us: come to the land I’ve bought and build a tiny home out here with me this summer.

Up until this point, we had been planning our exit for months (nay years!) but fell short of actually executing. Now we had a magnet pulling us. All the research about Sprinter van conversions, 10 X 10 micro-homes on wheels, trailers, campers, vans, and so on, now had a place to be applied. So we jumped into the future.

This was the day when we talked with my cousin over the phone — about a year ago.

We put in our notice and handed over our respective golden handcuffs. We gave ourselves lots of time (or so we thought). About three months to sell everything, buy our vehicle, and hit the road. All of which proved to be much, much more difficult than we expected. And then the phone rang.

It was a few months after our call with my cousin, and aside from only having a few more weeks left in our jobs, many other wheels were in motion: we had sold many of our things, and had packed what memorabilia, books, tools, and so on that mattered to us — all ready to go into storage.

But I was saying: the phone rang, and it was my cousin. He sounded totally deflated: a complaint had been lodged about his tiny home on wheels on his new property, and until he had a building permit in place for a fixed home, glued to the land with a cement foundation, he would be fined for sleeping overnight on his property. He effectively wasn’t able to live on the land he owned, and we most certainly were not able to build a tiny home with him that summer.

The magnet had lost all of its strength. Instead of having a pull onto the road, there was now a push: our last days at work were coming, and we had to be out of our place by the end of the month. Oh, and we still didn’t have a vehicle. We had done a ton of research and searching for the right van to convert (but still hadn’t set those wheels in motion, pardon the pun). And now we didn’t even have a place with tools to do a Van conversion at.

With less than a month left before our sedentary lives vanished, we had to shift our already unsuccessful search for a Sprinter van to something that we could live in right away, of which there were many different options: a trailer pulled by a truck, a small RV, a truck camper, our Prius pulling a lightweight pop-up. You name it, we researched it, compared the pros and cons, and scoured the internet for what was available for purchase. We ended up narrowing down our search to a heavy-duty truck — ideally a 1-ton diesel truck, with dual rear wheels (a “dually”) — that would give us as much flexibility in terms of the size of camper that we stuck on the back of it. (And we learned through our research just how many trucks on the road are really just for show: F150s, or Dodge 1500s that could tow and haul, sure, but not as much as you would expect given the masculine bravado exhibited by the folks driving ‘em). We also learned how few people, save for the hardcore RVers out there, actually knew about the importance of pairing the right truck with the right camper. Folks would go ahead and buy a truck and a camper separately, without doing the research, and then (after realizing the folly of their poorly researched purchase) try to sell the two as a package to a sucker. Buyer beware.

In the end, with only two weeks left before we had to move out of our place, and square in the middle of a tremendous downsizing effort, we found a good used truck: a big red 2001 Dodge Cummins diesel, dually, with belly bars, and two-wheel drive.

Oh. Hi!

As I liked to tell folks it was “everything we needed and nothing we didn’t.” Maximum fuel efficiency for maximum hauling capacity, without the heavier rear 4x4 setup (4x4 wouldn’t be as important for us since we wouldn’t be offroading too much, and expected to be carrying a lot of weight on the back to help stabilize the ride). Saying goodbye to a chunk of our savings, we became the proud owners of a big red truck, which we later named Clifford. But we still didn’t have a camper.

With only a week to go, the four of us would be driving around in a truck and the 2015 Prius we still hadn’t managed to sell.

Aside from staying with grandparents, where would we sleep?

Back to the Middle

And back to the dead batteries.

It was the end of the day, so we were going to have to sleep here tonight. Which wasn’t really a problem: we sleep on the side of the road almost every night.

You see, the two batteries that Clifford needed to get going weren’t able to hold their amps anymore. And you need to have enough amps to get your diesel engine started up after the glowplugs have been warmed.

And so here I was again…troubleshot.

Being troubleshot is perhaps one of the most acute character building experiences I’ve ever had.

And I can remember practically all of them in my life. They have a unique quality: you could graph it in an upside-down triangle shape. On the downside (the period of time immediately after having learned of a breakdown, mistake, error, mishap, etc.) I feel shot. Hopeless. Stupid. Inconvenienced. Annoyed. Let down. I don’t know what I don’t know. What I do know is that I’ll have to spend precious time figuring out what’s wrong and how to fix it. My eyes are bloodshot. My head suddenly requires scratching. I am troubleshot. And, of course, my whole day is shot. My day will have to be rearranged to accommodate the time for research and fake-it-’till-you-make-it phone calls with mechanics (they always divulge more info over the phone when I talk like I know something about my problem; when I talk like I’ve spent some time troubleshooting the situation).

I’m squarely in the “complicated” domain of the Cynefin model, but I don’t have the luxury of having a staff of experts I can bring to bear on the problem. Instead, I have to build an impromptu worknet (more about this in a future post) through phone calls, reading online discussion boards, and in-person conversations. At the end of all this I’m ready to make a decision somewhere in the sweet spot of “good, cheap, fast; pick two” with usually a rough guess that my decision will result in a 90% probability of success.

“…I Would Spend 55 Minutes Defining the Problem and then Five Minutes Solving It.” — Einstein (tho we don’t actually know if he said that)

Now comes the upside of troubleshot: having decided what to do, and having solved the problem.

On the upside I feel the accomplishment of having successfully troubleshot a problem: empowered, satisfied, knowledgeable, happy, smart, etc. My tense has gone from troubleshoot to troubleshot. There will be high-fives. There will be a celebratory drink.

In this instance, I knew what had to be done: I had to buy new batteries. But first I had to take the old ones out, trade ’em for new ones. This is basic, right? In a way, yes it absolutely is, but what I’ve learned (the hard way) is that there’s always a right way to do mechanical things (whether they are complicated jobs or not), and if you don’t do it the right way, you end up sowing the seeds for a future problem down the line. You know, measure twice, and all that. So, with the batteries removed correctly, I now had to walk them to the bus stop, and drive across town to the nearest Canadian Tire to swap them for some new ones.

Which leads me to another characteristic of being troubleshot: the bodily aspect.

Being troubleshot usually gives me the opportunity to incorporate heavy lifting, elements of CrossFit, grip strengthening exercises, and other modes of high-intensity interval training into my day. I always try to make it easy on myself, but it never seems to go that way (you know, best-laid plans and all that). This time in the process of transporting the batteries, I broke our wheelie cart (as my wife warned me I would), and had to carry the batteries (like two 35 pound kettlebells) the rest of the way — first the old ones on the way there, and then the new ones on the way back. Lots of sweating, and grunting. Phew. Which leads me to the last element of being troubleshot that I’ll mention here: the you-were-right-about-that-thing-you-said-I-would-break conversation that I would have with my wife.

This is always the hardest part of being troubleshot because it gets me right at the end — right when I’m feeling accomplished, triumphantly standing on the upside of being troubleshot. But this is fair, I suppose. It ensures that the whole ordeal returns the cosmos to the balanced, entropic state that it was in before being troubleshot: where incremental progress was snapped from the jaws of the problem, all is now returned to as it was. Balanced out. No gain. No loss. New batteries. Broken wheelie cart. Sense of manly accomplishment. Sense of manly stubbornness.

Troublshot Triangle w/ Return to Entropy

My Journey’s Troubleshot Beginnings (and Our Collective End)

To end this beginning in the middle, I’ll pick up our story where we left off: the end of it’s beginning.

As I was saying, we had about a week left before we had to move out of our apartment. Our big red Clifford was parked outside, and our house was insufficiently emptied of its contents. It looked like a bombed-out skeleton of its former self.

You see, we had lived in our place for a few years of our children’s early years. Emphasis on LIVED. In secret moments the boys had drawn with felt markers on the walls, the drapes, the carpet. There were various holes in the walls here and there. And so on (there’s a whole other story to tell here about the hard knocks of being a family that rents that I’m skipping over for now). Downsizing their toys was a slow and painful process: lots of arguments about what to keep and why. And so the apartment was still filled with remnants of these skirmishes with our children — random toys that they actually hadn’t played with for months, stubbornly guarded by the littles. Not to mention the half-sold furniture, shelves, kitchen supplies, and so on and so on. We were behind schedule on move-out, in large part because we were behind schedule on finding our mobile living situation. And then my phone rang.

Me and the beans with our half-sold things

It was the lovely folks at a local RV dealership. We had been talking with them for months about the appropriate rig, exploring different options (building out our impromptu worknet). That day, someone had just traded in their truck camper, and it was a good price, but still a bit over the amount we could afford. To keep the price low, we agreed that they wouldn’t put too much work into it for us (just the necessary safety check and cleaning on its gas lines). In the end, they also put two new jacks on it for us, free of charge. So nice.

But they didn’t look at the electrical — which I’ll leave to a future troubleshot installment — and what did we care about that! We were more concerned about a roof over our heads!

As I was saying, it was still more than we could afford, and no bank in its right mind would give us financing now that we didn’t have jobs. We literally needed to make a lifeline call, and thankfully the in-laws came through with a small loan to get us over the ridge. We would’ve eventually found something, but it would’ve been after we left town, and based on our market research in the areas we were traveling through, likely of low quality. I’m still hugely thankful to them for helping us out.

So after we had gathered the last remnants of our meager savings, we went to the dealer to check out our new home: it was a big boxy truck camper from 1999, with the word CENTURION plastered across its front. The interior was “spacious” compared to others we had looked at, but we paid for that in weight, which thankfully wasn’t an issue for us since we had bought the right truck. Everything checked out, and just in the nick-of-time. So we bought it and officially entered the sub-culture of full-time RVing — something I never thought I would do in my life, let alone with a small family in tow.

←This Instagram post captures some of the quality of those first few weeks.

We were on the upside of being troubleshot: from a state of disaffected and lackluster careerism — where we were on the verge of becoming condo (or home) owners, “housepoor” and in equal measure “timepoor” — to a state of nomadic precariat with a wealth of time, space, and possibility.

And over the past few months of living and traveling out of our Centurion atop old Clifford, I’ve come to see how troubleshot my previous life was. The only difference was that we didn’t quite feel how troubleshot we were by conventional, normie life. It was like the sensation of being troubleshot was masked by societal convention: by status anxiety blended with explicit or implicit expectations about what a right and proper family was to do.

But along with every other family we knew, we were tied to an infrastructure that we were all painfully aware was sinking slowly into oblivion. And it is slowly pulling us all down into the mud, where we will surely suffocate and be buried alive.

We talk about how our society has lifted off from the ground, that we are well off the cliff’s edge, that every Earth Overshoot Day (Aug 1st last year) we collectively exceed the carrying capacity of Earth. But here’s another metaphor:

We’re riding atop a well-oiled machine that ran aground decades ago. And it is still plowing into the mud. Accelerating. Digging itself deeper and deeper. The stench of burning oil, hot gears, and steaming mud is unbearable to some of us. We shout: “STOP! You're stuck! We’re stuck!” But others barely notice, and so we keep accelerating, troubleshooting the gears, the fuel tank, the dashboard. Keeping the beast on-course to nowhere.

For years we’ve been updating the mechanical system, but have ignored the navigation system (the economy). It still has coordinates punched into it from the 1700’s and 1800’s. Everything else is top-notch, slick, fully updated. According to the nav, we’re on track, getting more efficient.

But we are stuck.

Either we can stop the engine, or it can grind to a halt on its own. But what a rude awakening that will be for everyone.

So, it’s time to turn the engine off, assess the situation, and decide.

Together.