Good Tools In Times Of Trouble

Part of my thinking about good tools is that something ought to work well and endure in times when so much is breaking down. Increasingly I demand my tools be designed to avoid obsolescence, free me from electronic connections, and help me do good work.

Last night we took my daughter's failing iPad back to the Apple store. A woman there reset the device, but I suspect we will be back in a month to exchange it. Most electronics are poorly made and we are patsies to believe that they are good tools.

Yet as I waited at the store I felt the desire for a tablet, a new phone, a fresh laptop to make me feel better. I wondered how I had gone so long without new electronics. These half-baked thoughts rose in the overheated oven of my brain. Fortunately, the reset done, we left before I could make any mistakes.

Later, in bed, these ideas forming, I wrote the bones of this with a felt-tip pen on post-its. I thought about my phone plugged in downstairs. Had it have been next to me I could have dictated the note without even sitting up. The ease! The convenience! But my post-it was strictly between me and myself. It was done in solitude without mediation. I was unplugged from the networks — actually, I was listening to Charlie Haden and Pat Metheny on my Google Home, but the writing was at least unplugged — and connected with myself and my ideas.

Compare pen and paper to phone in terms of Wendell Berry's nine rules for new tools. Pen and paper are (1) cheaper than the phone, (2) smaller in scale, (3) do the work better, (4) use less energy (though I dislike the pen being disposable), (5) are powered by me, (6) do not require repair, (7) can be purchased near my home, and (9) do not disrupt my thinking or connections to the world. The pen and paper fail only in that (8) they are not made locally.

Implicit in Berry's rules is the simplicity of good tools. Consider the tools a carpenter wears on her belt: hammer, tape measure, pencil, razor knife, and square. She goes to the truck for more complex tools (sawzall, air nailer, theodolite, and screw gun), but the essentials she keeps at hand. Those tools are likely old because they and endure. In any craft the essential tools are simple and enduring: a chef's knife, an artist's palette, a writer's pen, a tailor's needle and thread, a doctor's stethoscope, and a coach's stop watch.

There are always specialized instruments but these give way to the basics of the trade or art. Jazz guitarist Pat Metheny is a master of the guitar synthesizer but he returns to six strings and exquisitely crafted wood, a purer form that mesmerizes.

I don't need an iPad, new laptop, or "upgraded" phone. I need the constant and regular return to pen and paper, the unmediated experience of creation done with good and necessary tools that open me to my best work and lead me to more interesting places than stores which can't sell anything to fix what really ails me.

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The Wendell Berry essay from which I borrowed the rules for good tools can be found here.

What The Run Was Like

Here is what it is like to run sometimes.

Frustrated with life, I tore off my t-shirt and threw it against the wall hoping it would shatter, disappointed that it merely fell. I pulled down my pajamas and boxers, found running shorts and a wool long-sleeve shirt, and pulled them on still angry. I wrapped my ID bracelet around my wrist and running sandal straps around my feet, capped my head and gloved my hands, snapped the reflective vest, and went out the garage, down the driveway, and onto the road.

I found that I was running.

I haven't run in months aside from the occasional desperate attempt. My wife had suggested that a run might heal me but I wanted to punish myself, hurt myself maybe.

I ran uphill to get myself gasping in the 28 degree air and wind, hoping maybe to blow the frustrations out of my system.

Running wasn't frustrating. Even after a long lay-off I can run slow but steady and keep going. I was only out for two and a half miles or so, something just to shake off my dark feelings and get out of my head, but I was thinking these thoughts as I ran uphill rather than letting my mind go blank. I pushed harder.

28 degrees seems too cold for shorts and sandals but the cold was supposed wipe me clean. At the top of that hill, my breath burning, it still wasn't working. I ran down a gentle grade then uphill next to the house with all the solar panels which reminded me of my frustrations. I looked away and tried to run faster.

Just before the school track I came upon a woman walking her dog. "Good morning!" I said, surprised at how happy I sounded. Why, I wondered, was I so generous in greeting strangers yet so inclined to tell myself to go fuck off? More thoughts. I couldn't run from them.

Past the high school fields I turned down the big hill to the road along the brook. The wind found me there, blowing hard against me, and I was reminded of the cold on my legs, through my shirt, against my eyes now tearing. I straightened my back and lifted my feet. Proper form, I thought. That's what I need. Again I tried pickin up the pace. I don't know my speed having left the GPS watch at home. I didn't need a coach so much as a therapist, though I neither came to me and I was left alone with my awful self.

The flat road home leaves me with a choice of turning two blocks before home or half a block past. I chose the latter out of habit, hoping it would help me be my running self, a person better in nearly every way than my sitting self. I pushed into a sprint to see what that might feel like, but my thoughts were still coming and I've no idea what anything felt like beyond my confusion.

At the corner I slowed and jogged up the incline toward the house. I turned onto our street and at the stop sign slowed to a walk as I have for almost two decades. At the garage I tapped the same old code into the keypad and watched the door open onto the same garage and the same home in which I've been living all this time. Nothing had changed.

Inside I shed my hat, gloves, sandals, and reflective vest. I forgot my ID bracelet until I was upstairs with my family there to remind me who I am. I ripped open the velcro on the bracelet and tossed down the steps where it disappeared into the darkness without a sound. I stared after it for a moment already making it into etaphor and wishing the run had left me blank and open to new ideas instead of still stuck on all the old ones.

That's what it's like to run sometimes. Maybe tomorrow the run will be different.

Sit Still, Open Up

“If I just sat not wanting very much to happen, little things would open up, and I found that just being given this task of sitting can itself be a form of grace.”

— Rachel Mansfield-Howlett, Daily Doses Of Wonder, 129

This is what writing is for me. When I come to the page with huge ideas and expectations I often falter. When I just sit, not wanting very much to happen, I feel the wonder of moving across the page. Little things open up on that page, larger things open within me. Just giving myself the task of sitting in the chair, picking up the pen, and allowing my thoughts to form themselves into written words, that is indeed a form of grace, dependable as the sunrise each morning, individual as each flake of snow.

Tools & Toys

There's a distraction-free writing machine I keep looking at. It's not yet available. If it were, I would likely have bought the damn thing already. I like toys and tools and often don't know the difference. That or I choose not to pay attention to the differences. I know this much: a tool is something I need to get my work done well while a toy is something I usually want mostly when I'm unhappy with my life. A good toy entertains. A good tool transforms. The machine I'm looking at is advertised as a writing tool but I'm not so sure. I've fooled myself about these things before.

I'm typing this on a Chromebook my wife bought for me five and a half years ago. I still loved the old machine I was using but it was dying. If I could have somehow kept it going, I'd be thrilled with it now. It was a tool that felt good under my fingertips in a way few tools ever have, but it died and my wife got me this machine which is fundamentally better in every way: fantastic keyboard, dream screen, and even at over five years old quick as lightning. It is a great tool worth hanging onto.

This notion of good tools has stuck in my head for a few years. I've written about fountain pens, manual typewriters, paper dictionaries, iron skillets, and more, but I can't seem to get the whole idea onto the page or screen. I've chalked that up to inability and laziness, but Annie Dillard provides another explanation:

But you are wrong if you think that in the actual writing...you are filling in the vision. You cannot fill in the vision. You cannot even bring the vision to light. You are wrong if you think that you can in any way take the vision and tame it to the page. The page is jealous and tyrannical; the page is made of time and matter; the page always wins. The vision is not so much destroyed exactly, as it is, by the time you have finished, forgotten. It has been replaced by this changeling, this bastard, this opaque lightless chunky ruinous work. (The Writing Life, 56-57)

Still, this is no excuse not to put something on the page about these things. Nor is it a good excuse to wonder if anyone will care to read it. I worry that no one will like me but the writing doesn't give a damn about that. And the idea simply won't leave me alone.

There is something about these good tools and about the process of separating good tools from ordinary ones. There is value in determining the difference between a tool and a toy and moving from the abstract feeling of these things to the logic and coherence of one word after another pointed at understanding something that feels like it matters.

I'm still considering that writing machine, but probably won't buy it. I'll wait at least until I can decide what it is and maybe come to know a little better who I am here in the kitchen typing on this good tool and there on the page and screen where it's up to you what to think about all that I'm doing.

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I notice that I've linked to articles about the tools I've discussed here and have held back from linking to more. I read these things and they stick with me. I want to think through the tools not as a distraction from the writing (at least I hope not) but as a way to take down some more of the barriers between thinking something and putting it down on the page.

There's no hope of eliminating all those barriers of course and I wouldn't want to. Some of the barrier is the essential process of translation which turns out to be almost magic. That's when the writing itself, not the writer, makes meaning and both writer and reader get to come to something new together. Good tools don't tear down all the barriers, but they make the process more about learning than about the struggle.