Adaptive Curmudgeon

I went camping! Finally!

I’d found a cool new spot but another week passed while I pined to go. I did some research and the canoe landing was legal for free dispersed camping. Sweet!

Plans to camp Friday night (right after work) went to hell. I’d been to a doctor and he’d done doctor stuff. It’s all good and I’ll live and whatnot but I’d been put through a wringer and didn’t have the energy to pack the Jeep-Thing. Obviously, a motorcycle camping trip was inconceivable.

That night I slept poorly. I woke up creaky. While I’d been sleeping it had rained steadily. At this rate, the forest is going to go from spongy wet to flat out slime-mold!

However, by afternoon the rains were fading. I could stand no more. I’d camp even if it was in a downpour!

I started hurling shit into the Jeep-Thing during brief moments when the sky looked even remotely blue. I ignored my un-mowed feral lawn and hoped the drizzle would cease. It did, grudgingly, and I took off at the crack of 5:00 pm. That’s waaaaaay too late for a sane departure. It’s all I could manage.

I got to the location with limited sunlight left and my gear in total disarray. It was only a week after I found the spot and I hadn’t thought over which gear made sense for that particular location. I’d taken some of the stuff I’d separated from motorcycle camping, crammed it back into my Dodge-based Milwaukee Packouts, and hurled the Packouts into the Jeep-Thing. I wasn’t sure what I’d grabbed and what I’d forgot. However, I brought a lot of crap so I’d be OK. I’m adaptive if nothing else, the mishmash heaped in the vehicle probably included some combination of stuff that would work.

Also, I’d brought cold beer and a huge steak. What more did I really need?

There was a Toyota parked at the landing. Oh no! It would be unforgivably rude to setup camp if someone was already there. I’m not sure I’d have enough sunlight to find somewhere else!

Lucky for me, the Toyota was abandoned. There wasn’t a soul in sight. Someone had either parked it here and was merrily paddling downstream away from it, stationed it here and was paddling downstream toward it, or maybe they were only out for the afternoon and would return at dusk. Who knows? The important part was a logistics vehicle meant they weren’t camping so much as positioning equipment.

For those of you who don’t know; “dispersed camping” is a window into varying human interaction in the hinterland. It’s a whole different world. Allow me to expand upon this…

If you go to a State or Federal designated campground there will be dozens or hundreds of campsites. There will be vehicles, people, dogs, bicycles, kids, RVs, campers, tents, and the lively chatter of happy humans. There will also be rules and social norms. You’ll drop $20-$40 (usually through an online reservation system that takes an unavoidable fee for the service) and in exchange get a smallish spot amid a hive of beings. (Off season is a different thing. Once overnight temps drop below freezing, dogs, kids, RVs, and so forth cease to exist. All that are left are a few hardened self-supporting folk, much rarer and quieter.) Your money presumably pays for the services you get; plumbing or pit toilets, Park Rangers who prowl around looking grim but usually (unless you’re at the mercy of the simpleton bastards at Yellowstone National Park) leaving you unmolested, electric hookups, firewood (which you have to buy), mowed areas, and various other shit.

Dispersed camping is free and you get nothing. You know all those people who say they’re libertarian but never stop bitching about whatever service they demand from the Government? Well this calls their bluff with a two by four. Dispersed camping is your chance to experience true libertarian values. Which is why I love it!

Not everyone can roll with it. You need to be a different breed of cat to be fine with nothing. There are no reservations. No prowling Park Rangers. No outhouses (with some exceptions). Etc… Often, the best places aren’t even mapped. Are there bears? Probably. Will windthrown trees block your egress in the morning? Maybe. Is there cell service? Rarely.

“Campsites” vary from awful to majestic. They might be a tiny nook under a single tree or a vast prairie under the skies of God. The unruled, unknowable, absence of people is a wild card. Dispersed sites are often utterly empty, bereft of humans; which is my goal. Camp alone like that and you might learn things about yourself you didn’t know. I think many (most? nearly all?) people have never ever spent much time completely on their own. If you’re of the wrong personality the vast emptiness of the universe might swallow you up. It’s all up to you and who you are. If you’re like me, you might sip bourbon next to a campfire and laugh aloud at the joy of it all.

It’s a bit of a gamble deciding how close you’re willing to camp to someone else. I usually won’t camp within a mile or two of other dispersed people. That’s just my choice but I’m not the only one who thinks like that. People who prefer dispersed camping tend to be independent, self-supporting, solitary creatures or groups of just a few. If I want solitude it’s only fair to preserve it for others. Thus, it’s good form to actively avoid other dispersed campers. (Exceptions are dispersed “campsites” with multiple “camp spots”. Even then, pick a spot and leave the other spots alone.)

One special exception is if you stumble across a super redneck family clan in a dispersed camping situation. This is rare but it happens. You’ll occasionally find a mobilized multi-vehicle encampment in mid hootenanny… maybe it’s a family group… or a group that’s ostensibly hunting (which is basically the same thing but with more guns)… or even a family reunion (which has the same amount of guns but more old folks and kids). In any case, you’re not going to get a nature experience if you rudely camp nearby. Accept the inevitability of what you’ve encountered. Either clear out or wander over and crash the party… which I highly recommend. If you bravely walk in like a Stellar Jay looking for an abandoned crumb of food there’s a good chance you’ll be loaded with delicious food and awful beer in no time. Hold steady! Tough out the shitty music they’ll inevitably be playing and laugh at whatever jokes they’re telling. Soon you’re in like Flynn! You’re going to have all the fun you can survive. Trust me on this; you’ll never have a wilder time than when you crash a few dozen rednecks all camping at once. Unless you’re a bitchy vegan headcase, in which case you should run.

Anyway I was looking for solitude that night. That’s why, if there’d been a single pup tent near the Toyota, I’d have left rather than “crowd” them.

I staked my claim and set to making camp. I was mildly concerned I’d freak the canoers out by my mere presence. People strategically stashing vehicles at canoe landings might be a mite worried to find some bearded weirdo drinking beer next to a rusty Jeep-Thing. Then again, fuck ’em.

A note about leaving your vehicle in a dispersed camping area: If you park a Toyota and come back to find a bearded weirdo with a Jeep-Thing camping in the area, don’t panic. If he was going to steal it, your Toyota would already be gone. Also, this is the forest not the ‘hood, so raise your expectations of humanity. There’s far fewer thugs in the hinterland than you’ll find in an urban WalMart parking lot. Don’t freak out about rural white supremacist Jesus freak maniacs like the gibbering ninnies on NPR and you might meet an actual normal friendly human being.

Anyway, I made camp and all was well. More to come…

This is what a Redcamp Wood Burning Folding Camp Stove with 4 years of very heavy use looks like when compared to a brand new one. The old one still works, I just use it so much I wanted a “backup”.

First use of the new grill.

They come with carrying cases. New one on the left, old one on the right. Both work fine:

I went camping! Finally!

Well not yet. First I had to find a place to go. During a rare patch of sun, Mrs. Curmudgeon and I went exploring in my Jeep-Thing vehicle.

A word about the Jeep-Thing. I own a creaky, rusty, old, 4×4 vehicle. It’s not a Jeep but it serves the same purpose. It’s not particularly valuable or glamorous but it’s uncommon. If I post details, someone will quickly identify it. In our current clown world I wish to retain my anonymity and obscure mechanical conveyances work against that.

Nor do I want to create an attractive puzzle for someone somewhere who’s an aficionado of old trucks. “That’s a 1968 International Swampmaster Travelall Deluxe Camper-Burbuan with optional Armstrong Steering. Only 5,000 were made, of which only 50 still run. Since Curmudgeon parked it next to an fence with double stitch half twitch woven barbed wire we can isolate it to Cancel County in State X.” That might just feed the trolls of cancel culture: “A Google search shows the only Swampmaster registered in Cancel County lives at 54 Dipshit Road in the town of East Cowschitt. Lets e-mail everyone in the county that the owner is a racist, bigoted, doo-doo head who talks to squirrels. Also, we’ll make sure he’s fired and everyone hates his dog… because that’s how we embrace diversity and tolerance.”

So, for now it’s just a Jeep-Thing. Call me paranoid if you want. In my defense, has there been a better time to be paranoid?

I could just call it a Jeep. That would work flawlessly but it would be lying. Nobody would know but I just can’t do it. I may be lame but it’s a personality quirk that I just flat out won’t lie. So I say “Jeep-Thing” and pique everyone’s interest over my shitty old truck. I’d make an awful spy and I’m unfit for our current era of universal deceit.

Back to the story, my Jeep-Thing is pretty old and it had a long period of “storage”. I’m slowly getting it back to “daily driver” reliability but it’s not like I’m done. I’ve had limited time and money to further the process. However, it runs now and it’s wise to drive it around to see what’s working and what breaks. It took a lot of cranking and choke to get her started but once it was running it ran great. I was delighted.

Driving winding dirt roads is always fun. With the Jeep-Thing it’s extra fun because there are no worries. It’s already beat up so I need not fret about damage and (within reason) it’s unstoppable. I don’t have to fret that I’ll take a road that’s too rough.

We set out to re-locate the dispersed campsite I discovered last fall. I couldn’t find it on foot during a brutal failed January attempt. (Read: Walk To The Edge, Then Walk Back: Part 1 and Part 2.) In my defense, in January I was ill and I was on foot with a bum leg at -10f at sunset. Bailing out was the right call. Driving around on a sunny summer weekend is a whole different universe.

Halfway to the dispersed campsite I took a random turn. Why? Because I noticed a road I’d never seen before. Five random turns later I had no idea where I was. I was sure I could backtrack out of where I’d meandered; but I could’ve been in an alternate dimension for all I could pinpoint on a map.

Abruptly, the road ended in a turnabout. There was a small river nearby. Not an easily accessible rocky streambank but a swampy reedy mess. A muddy walking path went from the turnaround to the stream. It was a good landing spot to put in or take out a canoe or kayak and obviously well used for that purpose.

In fact, there was a guy already at the spot! He’d beached his canoe and was rehydrating. Many people go down this little branch of the river. Some for an afternoon, others for multi-day trips. I was reluctant to mess up this guy’s private solo time in nature, but he seemed happy to see people.

“How long you been paddling?” I asked, trying hard to not look or sound like a scary extra from the movie Deliverance.

“Two days.” He looked beat. I’m guessing the swampy area he’d just paddled was hotter than Satan’s armpit. I know it has a million switchbacks so progress must have been slow. “I haven’t seen anyone in two days.”

“Then you need the fruits of civilization. Would you like a cold soda?”

His eyes lit up like I’d just handed him a winning lottery ticket. He gunned the ice cold drink like only a man who’s been roasting for days would. I’ve been there, I know.

Unwilling to further mess up his solitude, I vamoosed quickly. He was all smiles.

After we’d driven away I realized my mistake. That poor bastard is going to have to haul an empty soda can all the way to wherever he’s going. I should have stayed and retrieved it from him. Oh well.

Mrs. Curmudgeon and I agreed the place was pretty cool. It looked like you were in the primordial wilderness but it wasn’t that far out. Also, the access road wasn’t too bad. I GPS marked it on my SpotX for further review.

By now, Mrs. Curmudgeon was looking a little wilted. There’s no AC in my vehicle and it rides like a cement mixer. Once I got my bearings I made a bee line for a small rural “store” not far away. (I try to mentally map every “service” I find in various hinterlands. You never know when you’ll have an emergency. Indeed, it was handy that I knew it existed.) “There’s a grumpy lady at a place nearby that sells good ice cream.” I said.

We pulled in and got ice cream (which was top notch). I setup our lawn chairs in the shade of a tree. It was a fine afternoon. Mrs. Curmudgeon beamed. I was happy too. We’ve been married forever and yet I’m still super happy when I can do something silly like get her a cone. That’s what life is all about; eating ice cream with your sweetie in the shade next to your rusty old vehicle.

The store lady came out and joined us and talked our ear off. She was super friendly. So much for my carefully filed memory of her being grumpy.

We set out for the dispersed campsite but I was already daydreaming of an overnight at the canoe landing. With a few twists and turns we found the spot which had eluded me in the January gloom. I’d probably been within 100 yards when I turned back. (No regrets! Many things could have gone wrong that day and turning around before they happened was a wise move.) The spot is large but hidden in a pine plantation. You don’t recognize it until you’re right there.

We parked and I busied myself making a bratwurst “picnic”. There was a firepit but I prefer my Redcamp Wood Burning Folding Camp Stove. (I get kickbacks from Amazon if you buy shit from my links. It doesn’t cost you a penny. I only recommend stuff I like, own, and use. Lest you think I’m hopelessly biased by the pocket change I get, I’ve given you proper warning of my devious plans.)

I’ve been meaning to do a “long term review” post about that trusty little gadget. Just know that it rocks! I first mentioned it four years ago. (TW200 Mods, Front Rack) It’s a simple little bugger but it’s super handy. I take it on every campout and I’ve used it on a zillion little “cookouts” in my lawn. After 4 years of hard use, it’s still completely functional but a little warped from the heat.

It’s such a handy thing I bought a replacement (or depending on your point of view a backup). I feared they might become unavailable or more expensive or lower quality. Since it’s cheap and convenient and a good deal at twice the cost why not stock up? In fact I bought a replacement, a second auxiliary spare replacement, and still kept the perfectly good but slightly worn original. I’ve got three! Wealthy isn’t just bank accounts and stacks of Krugerrands, sometimes it feels good to have a “lifetime supply” of a $30 gadget.

I set it up right in the firepit, why not? Fires are legal in a makeshift fire pit. They’re legal if I clear debris from under the camp stove. They about as safe as humanly possible if you put one inside the other. Not that it matters after all the rain, but I’m always cautious.

The camp stove is often more practical than a regular campfire. The little box heats up with a tiny amount of fuel; much less than an unconstrained campfire. It also cooks better than a plain fire. In particular, I prefer cooking food on the included grill over holding a stick like when roasting a marshmallow or making a pan dirty.

Campfire food is always delicious. In that time and at that place, basic brats were food fit for a King.

After chowing down we drove home. The vehicle started a lot faster having had it’s batteries topped off by driving around for several hours. I should “exercise” it more often.

Enjoying a story with no depth and lots of happy? More to come…

I went camping! Finally!

This particular campout had multiple false starts. Two weeks in advance I planned to take my Dodge to a basic State Park on Father’s Day weekend. Alas, it was too rainy. (Also the Dodge is ailing. I joke that Detroit surreptitiously contacted the truck’s ECU and reported I was due to dump money into the vehicle. It’s like that beast has a clock to tell it when I’ve gone too long without a mechanic’s bill. I’m avoiding adding unnecessary miles to the Dodge while I wait on getting it repaired.)

Later, I planned for a short motocamping “test night”. (“Motocamping” is the hip trendy term for camping from a motorcycle, or so the YouTube glitterati imply.)

I was committed! My bike was pre-packed and ready to blast out the instant work ended. I’d hurriedly ride as far as I could and setup camp in the late evening after work. I’d return leisurely during Kwanzaa / Junteenth / Toyotathon. “Cleverly” packing the motorcycle in advance turned out to be a mistake. I’d gone through my wisely and carefully arranged “Dodge camping gear” and raided it for a subset of smaller lighter stuff. Thus, leaving my “truck camping preps” in shambles. Whoops.

On the allotted day it rained most of the day (which was expected). The weather report indicated it would mellow out in mid-afternoon. It didn’t. Disgusted, I threw in the towel and stayed home.

I made the right call! Riding a motorcycle in showers sucks. Setting up camp in dusk during rain would suck worse. Then, a brutal thunderstorm hit just after sunset! For motorcycle camping, I have a tent the size of a coffin and a thin sleeping pad. I wouldn’t have gotten any sleep. I’m glad I didn’t spend all night in a wet, fabric coffin, wearing out my back while being woken repeatedly by thunder!

Calling off campouts due to weather is new to me. I’ve been working on this novel concept I call “not beating yourself to death doing stupid shit“. It’s not my default setting and I’m still working on it. Age may encourage wisdom but sometimes I fight it.

The following weekend was still drizzling and I had too much accumulated homestead work to fret over camping. However, it unexpectedly turned sunny on Sunday. I wanted to “exercise” my “Jeep-Thing” vehicle and I elected to completely ignore “adulting” and go play. Mrs. Curmudgeon and I rode off into a humid but not-raining afternoon.

The story continues in my next post…

I went camping! Finally!

A night sitting by the campfire was exactly what I needed. I need outdoor time. Whether you know it or not, you do too. Here’s why; modern society is fuckin’ weird. It’s getting weirder and it wants to take you down with it. Don’t go down the rabbit hole!

Society lacks grounding in reality. It behooves every sane human to interact with the planet from time to time, lest one lose their bearings. Go outdoors periodically and you won’t (can’t!) get as weird as society wants. That’s because we were made (or evolved) for this planet. We belong here. Like it or not, you are doing what you were born to do when you traverse the imperfect, not climate controlled, sometimes difficult, planet we inhabit.

The place that drives us mad is not our home planet with all its dirt and bugs and rain and sun; it’s the mental landscape of the fake that wrecks us. Spend hours awash in an online simulacrum of reality and you begin to believe the bullshit. Spend a lifetime there and you become the bullshit.

Society is drifting as it is because we are living as we are. We don’t sufficiently embrace reality. It’s hard to be a spastic weirdo while tending your own campfire. Even if you are a spastic weirdo, the fire doesn’t care. That’s the point. It does even the most spastic of weirdos a lot of good to realize the campfire, nobody else, and the entirety of the planet itself, doesn’t care about their particular bespoke flavor of weirdness.

More in next post…

Read this: I Will Fucking Piledrive You If You Mention AI Again.

I agree with almost everything the author is saying. This includes the part about physically beating douchebags who aren’t smart enough to run a database but who are getting hot and bothered over AI like it’s the next coming of Jesus. The author differentiates between people who do shit and the vast swarms of bullshit peddlers jumping on the AI bandwagon in hopes of harvesting more money to shove up their own ass:

We have a few key things that a grifter does not have, such as job stability, genuine friendships, and souls. What we do not have is the ability to trivially switch fields the moment the gold rush is over, due to the sad fact that we actually need to study things and build experience. Grifters, on the other hand, wield the omnitool that they self-aggrandizingly call ‘politics’.

I’ll add that AI, as it exists now, is a shitty solution in search of a problem which it won’t address. I’ve seen this before. I’m old enough to remember when personal computers were just entering normal households. I remember idiots suggesting housewives might use dBASE to store their recipes. Yes, that was an actual thing spoken by an actual human. Every era has another herd of idiots trying to shoehorn fancy new technology into whatever orifice seems handy.

“Unless you are one of a tiny handful of businesses who know exactly what they’re going to use AI for, you do not need AI for anything – or rather, you do not need to do anything to reap the benefits.”

It seems to me most of the AI hype is a work avoidance process. Doing a good job with tools that already exist takes effort… and competence. Telling your boss you’ll make straw into gold with the newest buzzword is so much easier.

“How about you remain competitive by fixing your shit? I’ve met a lead data scientist with access to hundreds of thousands of sensitive customer records who is allowed to keep their password in a text file on their desktop, and you’re worried that customers are best served by using AI to improve security through some mechanism that you haven’t even come up with yet? You sound like an asshole and I’m going to kick you in the jaw until, to the relief of everyone, a doctor will have to wire it shut, giving us ten seconds of blessed silence where we can solve actual problems.”

And we all know management is mostly herd beasts with great hair; they’ll believe any dumb thing so long as it’s hip and new. Remember other buzzwords like “cyber”, NFT, and blockchain?

“…some of my friends feel that they have to be in leadership positions, and it is because someone needs to wrench the reins of power from your lizard-person-claws before you drive us all collectively off a cliff…”

The best solution probably is a brick to the face.

“With God as my witness, you grotesque simpleton, if you don’t personally write machine learning systems and you open your mouth about AI one more time, I am going to mail you a brick and a piece of paper with a prompt injection telling you to bludgeon yourself in the face with it, then just sit back and wait for you to load it into ChatGPT because you probably can’t read unassisted anymore.”

Hat tip to 357 Magnum.

Follow-up:

I wanted to add this myself. Watch and you’ll see there’s nothing new under the sun. Whenever you hear “AI” in its current context, just substitute “blockchain”, “NFT”, “cyber-space”, “e-commerce”, or fucking “tulip mania“.

Just one of the many cycles of stampeding midwits I’ve watched in my brief life was the dot com bubble. At it’s height, people would put the words “dot com” after anything, hurl money at it, and assume they’d strike it rich. “Rollerskate sandwich dot.com! It’ll make a ton of money!”

At its peak, someone thought it brilliant to sell dogfood over the internet. Between November 1998 and November 2000 this fucking thing was all over TV. The best minds of Wall Street thought riches would come from using “e-commerce” to “solve the problem of buying dog food”. What sane world would use Superbowl ad money to sell fucking kibbles for Fido?

Less than a year later, Pets.com crashed (everything else in the “dot.com bubble” crashed too). Pets.com never made a profit. It turned an IPO price of $11/share into $0.19/share and not a single business executive was thrown off a cliff! That’s part of the game, the dipshits that vaporizing huge piles of money chasing “the new thing” never seem to pay the price. It all burns down but they’re already chasing the next “magic noun”. Our current AI situation is what happens when business dweebs find a new word and pound it to death.

Whatever circle jerk CNN’s pet sycophants cook up won’t be a debate. Debate is supposedly an attempt to suss out truth, or at least test knowledge. Sigh, ok fine, it’s really just nerds doing word based rhetorical gladiatorial combat. Still it’s nothing of the sort when “officiated” by biased mental nullities like CNN’s staff.

I imagine an ideal situation where it’s better. Join me in a flight of fancy!

I ponder learned men and women discussing issues of great import. I imagine Socrates rocking a Greek toga while Cicero in Roman garb that’s basically a hipper version of an old Greek toga strides about. Everyone there is smart, civil, and intelligent. Any moderator who interrupts gets stabbed. You need to swear on your mother’s grave that you’ve read at least three books per quarter just to watch. If you’re lying, the Oracle of Delphi knows and rats you out. Liars are thrown down a well… which, now that I think of it, should be applied to Congress starting now. We might need to dig more wells.

Socrates is a stone cold asshole who answers every question with a question. The crowd shouts and complains. Thinking is hard. They don’t like it.

Cicero is such a mental bad ass that he can share conjecture with a re-animated a 200 year old dead philosopher. On the other hand, he’s an elitist douchebag.

Cato the Elder seizes the microphone and shouts;  “Furthermore, I consider Carthage to need to be destroyed” and drops the microphone. (The microphone has a function which is unclear to a man from 2,200 years ago but it looked cool when he watched rappers drop theirs and he wants to look cool.) The Republic of Tunisia exclaims “not cool dude” but nothing happens. This is because almost nobody in America knows Tunisia exists and of those only eleven people know Carthage was an ancient city there. Those eleven people are all killed when a single elevator mishap at a Holiday Inn Express kills the entirety of the “East Wichita, Mensa / Carthage Special Interest Group”. However, Cato’s words incite Syria to invade Iran which attacks North Korea which assassinates the Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria, for reasons nobody understands.

Confucius tries to calm the crowd, imploring them to use their greater reason and morality; which seems to work. Then Socrates askes another damn question “Oh yeah? And how do we know you even exist?”. Pandemonium breaks out!

Then, because it’s my imagination, Diogenes shows up stark naked and carrying a plucked chicken. The scene fades as the greatest minds of humanity help Diogenes beat the cameraman with the chicken.

CNN has a 5% boost in stock value that lasts for exactly one day before the whole thing is forgotten. Meanwhile, the United States has the greatest debt ever assembled in all of human existence, so Congress wisely passes laws about transgender street signs.

Would that be worse that what’s going to happen tonight?

Today is the day of the “debate”. Ugh! “The Thing That Haunts Dem’s Nightmares” and “Totally Legit Joe” are going to “match wits”. I think I just got sick.

It’s bullshit and you know it:

First of all, nothing happening in the CNN studio is going to change anyone’s mind. It might be fun to watch “Ow My Balls” on TV but don’t think that makes you a better or more informed voter. Both players have had approximately 10,000 hours of press over the last 50 years to demonstrate what they say. More importantly if you’re not dumber than a sea slug you have seen for yourself what they’ve done. There’s no need to examine words, you’ve seen both do the job for 4 years and you’ve seen both through their long public careers.

Folks who make decisions based on a “debate” (if they ever existed) haven’t been paying attention since JFK’s hair was better than Nixon’s on black and white TV in 1960. In 2024, you’ve either hardened your opinion into granite or you’re a flake who’ll serially agree with whomever you last interacted.

This election is more or less over. What “uncertainty” there is comes exclusively from the 6% of the populace that is either in a coma, stoned, or so clueless they can’t identify the two participants. That and the 2,938% of the ballots that will be found at 2 am November 6th. They’re probably already in the back of a truck which is already idling outside of whichever counting venues have the greatest statistical influence. But of course, such conjecture is de facto illegal in 2024 so I’m just saying it as satire.

The thing that won’t happen but would be cool:

Orange Man Bad is one hell of a showman. I wouldn’t put it past him to use the 11.3 seconds his mic is live to drop the name of his VP pick. That alone would send everyone scurrying for Wikipedia while Captain Depends sought to regain attention.

I picture Biden shouting: “Hey fat! I’m still here and I fought in the trenches of WW1 in Delaware to earn this attention. I didn’t take enough shots of meth to kill a trailer park in Tennessee just to be ignored! I’m relevant gosh darn it!” He begins to shake with anger as Trump’s smug smile shreds his brain until he comes off the drugs like all of Fleetwood Mac going straight in a heartbeat. Biden pictures his signature accomplishments from decades ago; Amtrak. “I like trains.” He mutters. Jill swoops in to shuffle him back to his recliner, while flipping the bird at Trump, who is trying to browbeat the cameraman into voting for him.

But what I really want to hear is this:

“Today I’m announcing my VP pick; Mike Rowe. You know the guy. He did the TV show Dirty Jobs. Very good guy, the greatest really. Our first joint announcement will be the ‘if you aren’t currently wearing scuffed work boots, you ain’t getting shit from welfare’ initiative. God bless you all and would someone bake me a cake with a file in it next week. Thanks!”

I won’t plow with my truck because it’s a Dodge and product of Detroit. It’s hard enough keeping the steering straight. Plus, plows for a dually ain’t cheap. I could easily drop many grand on a plow only to beat my truck to death. In the timeline where I live right now, the truck is irreplaceable. Financing a new truck under current inflation rates and paying it off with Bidenbucks might sink me financially.

It’ll be my tractor or nothing. I didn’t plan on being a plow guy. What would I need to turn it into a side gig? Long term I’d need to get to more customers, which means a trailer I can’t afford. Short term I can lumber down the road to a few nearby potential customers. That’s legal if annoying. I’d need flashing lights to avoid getting creamed by highway speed vehicles. And I’d like a radio so I could monitor weather and (hopefully) not get too bored.

Installing a radio:

My tractor is a Kioti and it’s a fine tractor. It has a few quirks. First of all, they rigged the world’s most inconvenient terminal access onto an otherwise decent battery position. It’s the first time I’ve used a 12mm short combination wrench. What a weird setup.

Tractor cabs are brilliant. So much better than freezing my ass off! And look here, it’s already setup for a radio!

And what’s this? A tiny little antenna! (Note, having tested it a while, it doesn’t get the best reception. It works and it’s small enough I haven’t smashed it into a tree yet, but it’s sub-par.)

I popped off the cover and spent a few brain cells analyzing this ridiculous wiring harness.

Then I bought a radio off Amazon. I tried very hard to get exactly what my tractor needed. This whole “wiring harness” thing seems excessive. The last radio I installed, in a Buick, was from before CDs. It had power / antenna / speaker. No harness at all.

They used to be so universal I could just buy one and jam it in. I think I got one from K-Mart (before Walmart even existed). Does that date me?

Bad moments in engineering, the fuse is in the back of the radio. I’d have to pull the whole damn unit to replace a fuse?

Great moments in engineering. The rear of the radio has a generic wiring harness and there’s an adaptor to match the vehicle I requested. I expected something like that. The radio came with a “pigtail” converting directly to my tractor’s wiring harness. There must be a factory somewhere with a bunch of people creating “pigtails” (possibly on demand, as they are ordered) for every conceivable harness system.

The vinyl (?) on my roof was too tight to allow the mounting hardware. I trimmed it with care you’d associate with defusing a bomb. I really don’t want to fuck up my almost new tractor!

Now the “receptacle box” is installed. Once I figured out the little press fittings it worked out nicely.

It doesn’t look like a gorilla installed it!

I don’t like the six exposed screws. I paid a few bucks extra for the “face plate” and I think it was worth it. To my dismay I had to drill it to fit. Luckily, I didn’t screw that up either.

Not bad eh?

There is even a snap on bezel to really “clean it up”.

I was reluctant to tweak my tractor, given that it was so very damn expensive to buy it. But the install is complete. I like it.

If the world goes to hell, I’ll plow driveways for anyone who can pay more than the cost of diesel. I’ll probably need the money.

If the world doesn’t go to hell, I can happily listen to books on CD while I plow my own driveway.

Win, win!

P.S. The tractor came with a “slow moving vehicle” placard. I kept bending it against tree branches so I removed it. I can re-install if needed. Legally, that’s all I’m required to do. (The tractor came with headlights and all that!) Realistically, I’m not leaving my property without a blinking light. I haven’t yet installed a blinking light. There’s time. Winter is coming, it ain’t here yet.