Tiny Glasses

A long time ago in my first college english class Dr. Bar lectured on surrogate emotions (what he really called it is not fit to print). That lesson has stuck with me through the years and I think it is one of the things that allows us to so easily accept the small roll we have in life with out craving a real purpose in life.

His point was that we often secretly relish other peoples disasters because we can feel the rush of strong emotion without really having lost anything. I think that this applies to more than just tragedy. We have coddled  our self's in the the rush of victory, love, tragedy, heroism, and friendship that is not our own. I would like to say this is just our TV and movies that we use to surrogate emotions (again I am not using the word that really fits) but it is bigger than just that.

Facebook provides us with a thousand peaces of friends that we know only fragments of. It is as if we had one friend that knew all our secrets, fears and loves but this person has been split into a thousand people each holding a fragment of what a real friend would be. While Movies, TV and the internet provide most of this pseudo emotions and relationships we do the same thing in our real lives and this is the worst part.

In the area of romantic relationships most of us would not have an actual "friend with benefits" however most of us have the equivalent on the emotional level. We seek counsel and spend time with "friends" in order to pacify our real logging for companionship. Many of use would never admit to this and would come up with a thousand real legitimate reasons. I wonder if these excuses are all just a front so well constructed that we ourselves do not realize what it covers.

I have recently have taken a very detached view of the news and have been criticized for not caring about things that matter. However my passionate response to most "news" would do little other than making me feel like I had taken a stand on a matter of importance. If a fireman saves a life in New York and i read about and even mentally praise him I feel as if I had actually had a part in the rescue. While I do admire noble deeds and sympathize with others disasters I would rather have the passion to personally help someone or thank someone for a good deed personally than to only empathize.

What is the answer to this problem? Sadly on one of us can solve this problem on our own. If anyone was to cast off all the fragmented relationships, empathy of others pain and heroism and seek to feel and do all these things purely and personally their passion would be so direct that they would be labeled a complete maverick. They would find it hard to interface with the calm content world that we live in. It would be akin to setting a man pulled from the Sahara desert in a room full of tiny glasses of water. Unless we are content to wait and to hope that the world will change we must ask for the strength and grace of God to be the man who is thirsty for the full drought of life rather than the small bits that are safe for us to take.

We Ride!

We ride into the darkness
with word to be spoken that bonds may be broken
may hearts that where bent now be heaven sent
and they ride into the darkness again

Quiet Town

Thanksgiving morning i got up early to get some work done on a shed i was building. While I drove across the town shrouded in fog I had to stop and get a few pictures to share with you.

the shed

my little 300zx

the fog softened every sound and wrapped the whole town in a shifting mysteries

Big Blue A.K.A "The Super Westfalia"

My dad took some road trips with his grandfather when he was a kid and he thought that he should take us on a similar road trip. He looked for a camper for a while and finally got a popup camper. he found that it really hurt the vans gas millage and took a long time to set up and take down.

The problem with this was we drove to a different park every night so we where always setting up the the camper and taking it down all the time and we wasted a lot of time doing this. When we got home he started coming up with a way that we could all travel in the van. the goal of the project was to:
1) fit 7 people comfortably for the trip
2) not change the gas millage very much
3) set up and take down in less than 30 min
4) sleep 7 people at night
5) change back into a "normal" van in less than a week

Here is what we started with this van.

 

This inspiration

then we added a bunch of stuff to it

on the front there when two rails bolted to the bottom of the van that the front rack mounted to. The front rack had a spare tire (mini spare for a van this size, scary) underneath a spot for two water tanks. the front of the rack also folded down into a tow hitch in case the van broke down (another long story). In case we ever need to to for help when the van broke down, we had a old 50cc scooter that also fit in the front rack.

in this next picture you can see the rack with the tanks bike and bug shield removed. just under the van you can see the mini spare warped in a vinyl cover.

on the back we had a the "chuck wagon". it was built on a metal frame and was really heavy and could have been built a lot lighter.

The whole box could be swung away from the van by pulling pin and rolling it back of the trailer jack

once the box was swung away all the inside of it could be accessed. this made the inside much more secure from the pirates of the road... yeah...

The inside of the chuck wagon was quite well equipped with a storage cabinets, a fold down counter, gas range, gas oven and even the kitchen sink. One of the water tanks could beset on top of the box to give running water for washing dishes and things like that.

The back bench was taken out and replaced with a shelf for luggage and a small bench over the wheel well. The spare tire was replaced with the mini spare under the front rack to make room for the ice chest that even has a tube to drain the melted ice water out of the back of the van. under this shelf the parents had their sleeping quarters (the other foam mattress is not shown in this picture)

the front of the van had a few modifications to make it more livable but the only big change was adding a skylight that was the access to the upper level. while the topper was on we had a three panel hatch so we could change the sized of the opening (full open for packing, middle third for more floor in the topper and closed for driving). One of the thing that we had to watch out for is the air pressure opening the hatch up while we drove. we would often put something heavy on it before we closed it to keeping it from opening up.

 The topper was found at a junk yard and was bolted to plywood frame. The plywood frame clamped on the the vans gutters to keep it from flying off. in the from of the topper there where two turn buckles that locked the topper down during travel. when we set up for the night all that had to do was unlock the turnbuckles lift the top (by hand and it was heavy!) and let the prop rods fall into place.

To get the topper off dad put a winch and pulley system in the barn that picked the topper off the van and stored it in the roof of the barn . Sadly wood bees ate the wood that the pulley system was mounted to and so a few years after we put it up it fell  but did not hurt anything.

 As you might have guessed the whole thing was invented built and tested by the only family crazy enough to try it. here are a few pictures of it on the trip.

at night all light up in a camp ground.

breakfast at craters of the moon

Somewhere in Canada! 

belt broke on some lonely stretch of road, fortunately dad has a habit of keeping the old belts under the seat when ever he normally changes the belts so we had an old set that we put on.

Me with the open road in front of me, story of my life.

 Sis waking up after a few hours on the road

this is roughly where the trip took us. There where a lot more stops that are not marked and yes we did drive almost non-stop from Tennessee to Glacier National Park (2k miles just in that leg!)





and when we finally got home the grass had grown and we where ready to stop for a bit (three weeks in a van with seven people will take it out of you).

A great trip that will never be forgotten and in a Van that I have not see anything like