CARSULE: IMMOBILIZED BY THE INANIMATE
This week after Covid but without feeling like doing anything, including writing here, I have been aware of the narrowness of my everyday life and what does or doesn’t motivate me. I am aware of the up and down of my inner motivation, but also the ways in which the outer world also takes me either up or down without my willing it. So looking back on the week I wonder about the contrast between my narrow everyday life in which nothing happens and I don’t feel like doing anything, and my the impact of the world around me through which I am either lifted by the way the world feels to me or depressed.
I’ll start with my everyday world. Several years ago when Kathe was in Germany for three weeks ago I car camped around the my part of the southern United States. What I discovered is that the best camping places for me aren’t private campgrounds but are state parks which are well maintained with clean toilets and picnic tables and often electrical outlets. They often have a reduced rate for the over 60. In these wooded campgrounds there are plenty of other campers and a feeling of security and comradeship. I had a great time on that trip seeing Raleigh, the outer banks, Charleston, Edisto, Savannah, Atlanta, the Smokey Mountain National Park and then Pisgah Campground near Mount Pisgah, close to home.
I didn’t cook and instead bought ready made sandwiches from grocery stores and ate out. It was great fun.
After I returned I dreamed of doing it again, but haven’t yet. And as I dreamed I looked for ways to make car camping even easier. One of the things I realized lately when I shifted from sleeping in bed, where my hips hurt, to sleeping in a recliner where I sleep well was that one of the more complicated parts of car camping, having a comfortable mattress and room to stretch out in the back of my SUV would be solved by simply using one of two front seats, which are wide and comfortable, to sleep on and lean way back as a bed instead of trying to create space in the back of the SUV.
A second part of car camping that is a problem in summer when the nights are hot is having good ventilation and a fan without letting in mosquitoes and other pesky creatures. Screens on the windows would help solve that but simply leaving the hatchback open would help a great deal.
One day I ran across a new tent like attachment that would fit on the back of the hatchback. It was called a Carsule. It was very lightweight and easy to put up and had three large screened windows. It seemed to be a nice place to set up table and a chair so that I could sit at a campground with the wind blowing and write or read comfortably without being bitten. I talked myself into buying the Carsule but when I tried to buy it, it had vanished and was not available.
Then this last week when I opened up a new website selling innovative things there it was again with my attempt to buy it carried over and still there. All I had to do was to enter my credit card number and push a button and it was ordered.
Yesterday it came and I tried to set it up. As with every purchase of something new and a little expensive which is new to me I wondered if I had made a mistake in ordering it reflexively, without being sure it was what I wanted. It looked simple and I set it up without looking at the instructions. This led to to all kinds of trouble with parts flying here and there and one part snapping when I pressed on it.. Cheap junk, I thought, and considered myself a damn fool. But I finally got it up and hooked to the back of my SUV and it looked useful enough. I felt a little better.
But when I tried to fold it back up again into the very compact form it came in of four circles flattened against each other to fit in a circular case, three feet wide and a foot thick I couldn’t do it. I tried and tried. It was a muggy day and I was already tired and irritated. No matter how I tried to fold it, it would break loose and fly out of my grip and flatten itself in two 6×6 flat rectangles on the ground. Finally, just to escape it and keep my embarrassment from being revealed to the world I dragged it into my bedroom and put it on my unused bed where it still is. I finally looked at the instructions where two pages are devoted to illustrations of how to fold it back up. But even when I followed the simple illustrations step by step, when I get to the fourth step of folding the sides back on each other, the whole thing it flys out of my hand, mocking my intelligence both in my inability to follow instructions and my stupidity in buying the thing in the first place.
As my frustration grew I realized that I had been here before, again and again. Everytime I follow the instructions on how to use a digital device and it simply won’t work I’ve had this same feeling. I certainly have it every time a digital device quits with no indication of how to fix it. I even have it when I can’t find something when I know just where it is. Whenever the mechanical world refuses to work I have this overwhelming sense of powerlessness and stupidity and begin to rage. I also see this in my friends when their wifi won’t work or their passwords won’t work. For me it becomes rage at the inanimate mechanical world.
So there it sits until the day when I suddenly feel open the patience it will take to fold it up which is the same thing it takes apparently to feel my way through life without being brought to my knees by things that won’t work. I am open to suggestions about how to do this.
BILLYBABA’S WANDERING 