h. Play

It was making some noise, recently. So I went to see my mechanic.

“When was the last time you did an oil change?”

Me: “Uh… Years?”

Him:

No oil gauge to find, he opens the oil tank:

It’s not oil. It’s like pudding. The engine is probably clogged like crazy, hence the noise and shaking.

And so I go on my bicycle to go buy some oil flush that he doesn’t have in stock. He did almost three flushes.

He kept repeating “that’s insane that it didn’t break. You’re lucky.”

Suzuki Gang! Sorry, it’s just that there are three identical cars like mine around and we wave at each other sometimes. Anyway, the car is now back to purring nicely. And yes, in six months, oil change. I’m so sorry.

(I think I avoided the worst by driving rather smoothly on surface streets, stressing my engine the least possible basically)

Japanese KitKats! My reviews:

Black KitKat
Unctuous. Rich. Strong.

Milk Tea KitKat
Surprising. Violet. Smooth.

Green Tea KitKat
Whimsical. Bamboo. Quick.

Cookies&Cream KitKat
Amusing. Summer. Exciting.

Caramel Pudding KitKat
Soothing. Vibrant. Light.

There’s a Lemon & Salt Kit Kat that I’m trying to taste, but I’m reaching and being a bit greedy here.

Those above were delicious though.

I looked at that hill and village over there so many times when I was a kid during summer vacation. Anxious of the future, of my future. Kind of knowing already that it would be quite different from my cousins, his/her friends and others.

I’d be proud and yelling if I knew then what’s going on for me now.

From our bed and breakfast a couple miles away from that first picture. One of the rare hour of sun I had while in France. That was nice.

I’m wondering about how they dealt with customers going from a world without smartphones to a world with them. How did it change their lives, habits, patterns? Going through the pandemic?

I’m wondering about how it feels like to move a giant vehicle, empty most of the time. Just driving around over and over. How does it feel at the end of the day or of the week? Do you feel like doing a bullshit job? How do you feel about people after dealing with customers and cars all day?

It is so exciting for me to see that what I imagined and pondered on, is real.

Seeing a brother living in a 3D printed house, as I plan to do, makes me feel so giddy. That my layout can be printed just like I printed it at small scale, makes me smile to no end. Game changer.

I also have optimized the use of built-in furniture (those will be 3D printed as well) so much that the only things I’d need to move in would be appliances, electronic devices, mattresses and pillows. Dassit.

Meanwhile the more I talk to homeowners the more I realize that yes, I am right to go for a rather small house and few rooms. That yes, attics and basements (for storage) are a waste of everyone’s time. Sell that shit. Give it away. I can’t believe my parents and I were sweating in the attic to remove 50 years old paperwork a couple weeks ago. That stuff should have been burning in the fireplace at least 20 years ago.

Don’t dream big, you’re going to be disappointed. Dream small, and execute.

I’m rather big on driverless cars.

Waymo averages over 10,000 trips a week in Phoenix now. Cruise and Waymo are all over San Francisco. I see them mapping Los Angeles all the time these days.

Like I predicted in my post above, people are having sex in those cars, which is super cool except for the next rider I guess but we’ll figure out some social protocol.

Sure, slurping on this and that, but I can only imagine the beautiful romance of a couple meeting through a driverless car, going away from families, just looking at each other and smiling while cruising to a safe haven at 35mph, safe. Knowing that they can order a ride back anytime, 24/7. No questions asked. Just hop and go.

That is magic and completely new to humanity.

I feel like people are going to understand how ugly all those high rise buildings are. It’s so much better to see the sky, trees and humans in between.

I also feel like this is a reality here in America, but never really will in Europe. Those roads are brutally small and convoluted. Roundabouts are chaotic as hell. I almost did 1000 km (600 mi) in France in the past two weeks, analyzing. It’s so much easier to drive in America. The grid system is perfect for robocars, no doubt.

That is going to create another divide in the world, I’m afraid.

The news:

The book open on my table:

We know how to sustain life and live nicely in triple-digit weather without A/C, y’all. We’ve been knowing this for hundreds of years. In Phoenix, you need to basically live in caves with 50” thick walls to be well in summer. It’s known.

The inertia between knowledge and use of knowledge, hacked by capitalism and its money-focused goals, drives me fucking nuts. Same with the greed of people not understanding that living in a desert in a room chilled at 23°C/74°F with the help of a machine and barely any insulation, can’t last forever and should have never happened in the first place.

One more time, filthy rich moguls: forget about the moon and Mars. Please make prefab sustainable, passive A/C-less habitats customized by weather and start deploying those, goddamn.

A/C is unsustainable, burning a huge amount of energy while heating up every single roof running engines 24/7. It’s complete madness. It is a juicy business for all the wrong reasons.

You should move up north if you can’t take the heat, have kids and want to leave them an OK planet.

I’m playing basketball and I see this man walking through the courts with this young, grey male pit bull on his side.

As the court next to mine had just been used by a couple with two dogs, the grey puppy stops and sniffs around. The man keeps walking and turns around a corner.

I figure that he’s waiting on his dog. The dog keeps sniffing and after five minutes I’m wondering what the owner is thinking, but OK!

I kind of forget about all that as I’m focusing on my physical activity.

The dog comes closer to me, but stays at bay, still sniffing. I’m done and packing. As I leave the court this dog comes right by me, walking as if we’d been together since forever. Mmmh.

I don’t give and didn’t give him anything. No eye contact, no petting, no calling. I’m about to turn the corner, looking after his owner but I don’t see anyone.

The dog goes on a tangent and toward some parking lot, while sniffing more. I’m relieved. I’m thinking this is over.

I’m walking on the sidewalk with my music on, knowing that the dog went the opposite way towards some people and activities. I start forgetting about him. He doesn’t.

I hear a little dog gallop behind me and I’m thinking that he’s well groomed, has a collar and that this is getting really weird.

Again, he gets right by me and we’re walking toward my car together as if we’d been doing this for a minute. All I can think of is that I’ll need to be smart about opening the door because I have a feeling that he’d jump in the back in a heartbeat.

Again, no eye contact, no energy given to him. He’s just quiet, trying to get my attention looking up with his ears pointing out to the back of his head, relaxed. No whining, no barking. I’m stretching next to my grey car and he’s sniffing the back of my hand now. He’s waiting by the door, patiently.

I have to fake a walk away from my car to go back to it and enter quickly. The dog stays on the sidewalk, a bit confused. I’m sorry, man!

I drive away looking in my rear view mirror, seeing him being a good boy, going back to sniffing around. I like to think that he had a sense that I would take good care of him, that he could feel it. Because I would, except that it’s not the right time for me to have a dog.

May you find a home that takes care of your cute face, boy.

The view from my childhood bedroom window these days.

I used to sit there every night to reflect. Trees and vegetation were not that thick. As the house sits on a small hill, I could see pretty far out.

The wild thing is that although it looks secluded, traffic in the street right after those trees has increased so much that it feels a lot less private than before. Cars every second.

Today sometimes there’s traffic jam right there. It used to not even be a possibility.

When people pompously say “change is inevitable” I’m always thinking “well if it implies losses reassess that stupid change, how about that”.

• Picked up by a super fly 73 year old black woman driving like me that is, turning her neck to the right to check that blind spot.
• The closer I get to France, the more French it becomes. Check out is literally two minutes long. At the gates where America is already left behind after a long walk, French kids are running around and the hostesses are way too confused about the usual?
• I have a KN95 hugging my face. A child is coughing every 20 seconds not far from me. Turns out, she does that for 10 hours. A few folks started coughing when we landed. I feel OK.
• It’s raining and 15°/59° in Paris. Summer rain could have waited a day or two I think.
• Picked up by a not so super fly 70+ year old white man but he’s my dad and pretty damn awesome.
• Summer road work ahead, it takes us one hour instead of 30mn to get back home.
• Sipping on coffee like a vampire on a cute neck.
• Quiet room plus insane amount of sleep missing: slept like a bear in winter.
• France and not being cold. I had completely forgotten about the feeling and it is noice. Oh, and it’s so green.
• Morning in grandma’s attic moving out 50 year old invoices, just a gazillion boxes of those. My nose is stuffy from the dust but a few gems were found, like a vintage Sony Transistor TV Receiver 9-90UM in its leather case, yessir.
• I go back to my adolescence mall to swap a sim card for a nano sim card for my French phone. Not much has changed. Same Sephora, same place, different scents I guess.
• The density of construction and the number of buildings in the suburbs stay insane. You simply look at walls and windows all the time. There’s no void, no breathing. It’s insane.
• Hitting the road to go to my uncle’s birthday party. It’s raining, duh.
• Four straight days with mom and pop. They can’t stop talking. I’m in the back of the car and put music in my ears.
• Four hours in I take over driving. I have 3 GPS: the car, pop with his memory and mom with an old paper map. It’s a mess and we keep getting on the wrong path yet in the right direction.
• Running out of gas right before hitting the city we’re supposed to hit. We barely make it to the gas station.
• But we’re there! We finally recognize our landmarks and proceed through winding roads up and down the beautiful French countryside. It is warm and humid. I haven’t been here in almost twenty years.
• I finally see my cousin Anne who jumps on me and we hug for long minutes. It is so good to see everyone. I missed all the funerals in the past ten years.
• Catching up with all the kids and kids’ kids. We’re about to be 50 at the table.
• My uncle is overwhelmed and can’t finish his speech. He finds a way to give me a special shoutout for answering emails rapidly. We all laugh and take pictures, grabbing shoulders and touching backs.
• Our airBnB is super dope. Walls are 48” thick. Quiet and sleep are supreme here. I feel refreshed even though I didn’t sleep much, had too much food and too many drinks.
• It’s time to leave. A few tears and long hugs (which are rare in France).
• Time to go see my foster mom. I’ve never done the trip from one family to the other in a single day. Emotionally super wild.
• She’s 86 and she is chilling in front of the TV when I arrive. She can barely walk now and this is concerning. Her kids and grandkids around are tired of her being so goddamn stubborn, not listening to nothing.
• Anyway, I take her and her daughter and half sister for me, to the restaurant in Sancerre. I want to order everything on the menu.
• We make her walk a bit to the car and she is going way too fast with her cane, like she’s a Formula 1 at Magny-Cours.
• I leave the next day after lunch at 11:30am. We take a couple nice pictures together.
• Back on the road, direction Touraine. It’s grey and it rains, and it’s windy as hell.
• I take a freeway, which doesn’t have any gas station on it. The light comes on as I pull over in a gas station, on the next freeway. Not stressful at all.
• In front of me a couple from the Netherlands tries to make sense of where to select diesel on the touchscreen. They can’t and I cannot either. It feels good to speak English with them.
• I finally arrive at the New Passivehaus Crib. Under construction. I visit and explore with my sister. It’s going to be great!
• Emotionally exhausted, I sleep through the wind blowing like crazy outside.
• We leave the next day. Three hours later we are back in Paris suburbs. More invoices to get rid of, I mown the lawn.
• I go out to go see an ex. Stuck in traffic, taking 45mn instead of 20. I’m a little sick of driving those tiny streets at this point.
• We’re at a brasserie and it is dope. Catching up and smiling.
• One last day doing nothing besides going through the blues. Starting to pack, etc. It’s pouring regularly outside and I’m giving up on seeing another friend. Family time.
• Mom is not great at goodbyes. She immediately looks away after I give her a hug. I understand.
• Dad drives me to the airport an drops me off. He is sad and I am too, but we hug, smile, and say nice words. It’s hard to travel alone in those moments. I observe him driving away, until I see the back of his Toyota.
• CDG. Here we go ‘gain. Security is a whole mess, the plane takes off one hour late, which makes me miss my shuttle at LAX. I have a bunch of drunk French mfs who never did this trip next to me and it is tedious.
• LAX’ smell when you get out. Yikes. But on a parking lot 5mn away, the breeze is good, the sun is good and now I feel like I’m on vacation. Except that I’m not anymore.
• I’m on the phone with Supershuttle and Supershuttle orders a Lyft for me.
• Fly ass ageless black woman shows up. Yes, she drives like me too. Friend texts me to ask if I’m back. I am. I take the wind, the sun, my beautiful hills with SUVs and trap music all in. 16 hours of travel, I’m home.

And now everything feels like a giant dream I had recently. A trip, indeed.