Notes

While my mechanic shop didn’t find out what was wrong with my truck, I certainly did last night when for some reason in a rare moment of clarity I decided to check for a loose shock in my truck and realized it’s time to get the shock bushing changed out again.

The wheel bearing is perfectly fine on the truck, ⚫ it’s just my focusing on the ordinary noise that wheels make on the truck with the tires, probably getting a bit cupped as they always do with the way the lift kit puts stress on the tires that stick out a bit for stability. I wish I had found that a week ago, it’s a simple repair but I probably do need to go to a supplier of BDS parts to get the BDS shock bushing installed – the shock is fine but the bushing has play. Not an expensive part but it will cause a shitty ride especially on rough roads until it’s fixed. Which is most roads, because I swear the DOT never fixes them well locally. I don’t drive every day, but when I do everything feel like shit, and it’s not just my beat old truck.

I can kick myself for insisting in my brain 🧠 that the wheel bearing was bad in my truck – because once several years back now – I burned up a wheel bearing in West Virginia and I don’t want my summer to be ruined by a stupid problem. Mechanic couldn’t’ find any problems with the wheels, except for the axle flexing (due to the shock bushing, which he didn’t catch). Of course, it’s been so hot lately, and I’ve just NOT been thinking clearly at all at TIMES. 🌈 I keep making mistakes typing in commands at work but then again, I am doing so many different things and projects at work, it’s easy to get confused. 😕 And I am drinking way too much coffee ☕ and staying up late but still trying to wake each morning at 5 AM when it’s relatively cool out.

Truth is these days, all I want to do is tune into the flowers and clouds. 🌈 🌸 Listen to the Kaleidoscope and Iron Butterfly and try to tune in. 📻 It’s not like I’ve had any grass since day after Independence Day, and the Dank Diesel I have is crap that doesn’t do much but make me tired, 🌾 but between the advertising and the random click baiter social media crap, all it feeds is my paranoia. And the news 📰 these days is all bad.

Paranoia really is a form of double suffering. 🧠 There is reality, which we all suffer from, but then there is our delusions, which are an additional form of suffering. But delusions are not real. We must always remind ourselves of that fact. 🕯️ It’s not always easy to distinguish between reality and delusions, especially when we are living in a world of fun house mirrors 🎭 where people make billions using advertising to distort our world and make it so trippy to sell us more shit. 📦 Things are so damn confusing these days, but the key to survival is understanding the difference between delusions and reality. But I tell you, it’s not easy – probably the most difficult time to find clarity in decades. 🔎

Last night I turned down going out kayaking with my neighbor as I was worried about my truck until I found the loose shock bushing. 🛶 I just didn’t want to get stranded somewhere with no answers. Then when I found that shock bushing issue, I decided to go down to the Hudson River and lay with the hammock, then hit up Walmart for groceries, 🛒 as I haven’t been there in a week and half due to not having my truck working, or at least believing it was going to breakdown and die. I still can’t believe I didn’t discover that and my paranoia got worse of me. 📰 I think it’s all the news and shit that happening in my country, plus all that advertising that is chewing on my brain much like rats chew on electric wires. Got caught in a thunderstorm ⛈️ rolling down the river so I had to rush to take down the hammock.

So my plan for today is first to run to Lowes and get bolts and nuts 🔩 to hopefully fix the jack, and then go out to Partridge Run. I think I’ll bring my mountain bike 🚲 which is still in my truck, and maybe the tube to float in. I was going to go out to Schoharie to swim, 🏊 and do an overnight but it looks like rain by morning. ☔ Possibly another half inch of rain tomorrow or maybe it will work out to be nothing. I don’t know. I know I’m wasting summer, but whatever. Really I’m just looking forward to next summer when I build my new rig and travel out west to Michigan and Wisconsin. Next weekend I’ll do Schoharie or maybe the Potholers for an extended weekend if it’s really hot and sunny, though it’s not trending that way.

I spend too much time studying money 💵 and how to build a sustainable life, and I feel awful about replacing Big Red 🛻 next year, but even if things aren’t bad now except for my extreme paranoia 🤯 I know it’s the right thing to do. Don’t you know, if you buy a new truck every 15 years, even though you make money as an unit director, you’re forever guaranteed to be living a life of poverty, eating cat food next to a dumpster. 🙀 Not even a trailer on you’re own land with a smoldering burn barrel. 🛢️ Because you rent and have no equity. Sometimes I think the advice of finance experts – while valid – aren’t for one size fits all. I don’t have the cost of hotels and airplanes, if I take my truck to the wilderness, and drive myself to the destination. ✈️ Don’t you know airplanes can get you farther away, to some woke National Park like the Grand Canyon which they’ll send a girl to wipe your ass each time you go to a bathroom in their flush toilets. 🚽

I am actually kind of excited about building my next rig, and doing more traveling next year and in coming years.  🌲🌲🌲 Not to the tourist traps or the hotels and big cities but the wilderness areas out west – which in my defination is everything, let’s say west of Alleghenies. But don’t you want to own a house with goats and hogs and shit? 🐐  Yes, but not your typical vinyl-asphalt shingled-dry wall crap. Out in the country, where I can burn shit, 🔥 and nobody gives a rats ass. 🐀 Maybe at retirement. Seriously, I get for many people they build a lot of equity in their house, but for me the idea of spending so much money forever lost on energy, commuting and mowing lawns and house maintenance seems like a complete scam. 🏡 Why buy a plastic house in a place you hate and want to burn down so it’s no longer your problem? A suburban house with a long commute that smells like cow shit really isn’t that big of an improvement over any other suburban house.

Maybe I’m severely mentally ill because I don’t accept all of the public delusions as being anything but delusions, 😜 while I am too willing to buy into paranoia over stupid shit. I am just more interested in flowers and clouds these days, and traveling while I still can and not owning one of those plastic houses in suburbs that they fill the sale ads on Zillow.  🛻 I just want to get away from it all, dream of rainbows 🌈 and listen to more psychedelic music.