Today is my birthday, which isn’t something I usually even say or acknowledge. But this time, we are celebrating the changes that bring us from one place to the next, another year older and wiser and wanting less stuff and having more memories. Besides, Substack is all about breaking the overly-curated and anonymous wall of other media platforms. We need more humanity and less Artificial Intelligence. Here’s to un-evolving your life a little, today and every day.

“Nobody mows my lawn but me. I like mowing my lawn.”

It’s one of my favorite lines from the seminal first season of True Detective, one of the best mini series I’ve ever watched. Woody Harrelson almost growls as he delivers the line to his partner-and-frenemy, Rust Cohle, played by Matthew McConaughey.

While this specific task is part of an outdated American tradition of watering and cutting plants that shouldn’t really exist at all, the undertone is one of ferocious protection for the chores that make a house a home.

Lately, I’ve traded my dinnertime YouTube consumption from automotive entertainment channels and the occasional Tiny Desk concert to homesteading, off-grid living, and lots of live bluegrass sets. I don’t watch traditional TV, but I still enjoy a bit of human noise while I do the tedious yet bountiful tasks of grating fresh ginger and crying as I dice onions under my clear safety goggles.

I have so much more to say about the foundational shifts that occur when we consciously change what we pay attention to, but for now I am stricken by the recurring theme in all of these amateur videos from DIYers whose work is trimming tomato bushes and shoring up earthen walls for their passive thermal homes: the little tasks take more time when you don’t have thousand-watt machines to do them, but you also have so much more time to do these tasks because you’re not busy paying for the machines and the energy to run them.

When you consume traditional entertainment channels, you’re typically left wanting the stuff they have. When you cook elaborate weeknight meals while watching people walk their acreage with a happy hound, you start to identify all the small ways you’ve built a life to be proud of. It may be humble and laborious, and yet it is liberating. And liberation becomes the aspirational punchline, not the latest-model nor the biggest-show.

* * *

I wonder if healing is a one-to-one effort, if every year of life requires a year of therapy and self-reflection and hard work to repair. Or if it is even more than that. In any case, I am spending the time trying to find liberation in Bad First Drafts and Time Consuming Tasks, because I have the time to do them rather than the ever-creeping lifestyle that requires me to outsource labor to people and machines for a portion of the income I generate from my own excessive busyness.

Lately I’ve listened to the polyrhythms of my scrub brush on dishes and the trickle of water as I try to use the soapy water from one vessel to soak and wash the next. In the noise of these moments and the slight burn of my fingertips in the hot water, I’ve found a bit of poetic magic, a reminder that there is a profound human triumph in guarding our time and attention so that we can cook and clean and think about what modifications we might make to the recipe for next time. Here’s to iterating, to kneading, and to “drinking our mistakes” as baristas like to say.

Dishwasher

I used to lament doing the dishes

Because it takes so much time

The kinds of places i live never have dishwashers

A modern convenience,

A luxury consumer item.

I was helping some friends around their new house this summer

And one asked me

“How much would you pay to have a dishwasher in your house?”

And I said several thousand dollars

Because time is money

And i love to cook

So i’m always doing lots of dishes

The thing is,

I have the time to cook

And that is money

I have the time to clean

Because i’m not too busy making money

To pay for a dishwasher

Or to pay rent in a house that has one

* * *

We were talking about adding a dishwasher to their kitchen

In the context of home purchase prices

And Dwell-Magazine-style

Home renovations

What’s a thousand dollars here or

Ten thousand dollars there?

Especially if you could have

a state of the art

Dishwasher

* * *

Now I know that it is not so simple

Because the time i spent making the money

To take out the loan

To buy the house

And buy the dishwasher

And pay the guy to install the dishwasher

Is time i want to spend

Making my kitchen super messy

Cooking myself multi-course meals on a weeknight

Or maybe making the ice cream cake

I used to have for my birthday every year

Only this time i am older than my mom was when she had me

And i am going to share it with people i hardly know

Yet i love them very much

The thing about not having a dishwasher is

I am finally becoming who i am supposed to be

And that is someone who isn’t pressed about doing the dishes

Because i finally realized that my dad was right

And my college friend with the new house was right

And all the guys on TV were right

Time is money

And i have a lot of it