Three things I read this week

Driveways, driving a car with no suspension, and Florida land bubbles

I lost the habit of writing in the last three weeks. I bought a lovely if flawed GX 470 and the ownership experience has been all consuming. The rear suspension gave out the day after I got the car home. Have you driven a SUV with no suspension? The ride quality might be best described as rocky. I found refuge in romantic ruminations of conquering unpaved goat trails in a Model T, striking out into the dusty territory with no modern luxuries, like springs.

I’m going to find the habit of penmanship again. The car situation is mostly sorted now, which is an alleviation of mental burden. No longer anxious about how I’ll get back from the grocery store without breaking the eggs, I expect to write more regularly.

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On a moderately related note, this weekend we built a driveway. Here’s our process.

1 - Push up a pile of gravel from the pit

2 - Load the gravel into the dump trailer with the tractor

3 - Dump the gravel

4 - Push the gravel into a driveway shape with the bulldozer

And loh, after eight hours we’ve got the initial stages of a driveway. If you like this kind of work I’ve been documenting it on a side project Substack called Garden State. We’re going to do all sorts of cool stuff outside like building driveways, mulching trees, digging ponds, building a hunting cabin, planting trees, and a hell of a lot more.

And with that all that out of the way, here’s what I’ve been reading recently…

1 - Why We Drive

Chris Bray lost his marbles over Why We Drive. He devoted two posts to it, praising the book for capturing the energy sucking state of modern tech.

And so Crawford says that he’s writing against “technologies that tend to enervate, and claim cultural authority in doing so.” I sat up a bit, because the theme of enervation has been on my mind all the time.

Chris seems to have a good head on his shoulders. He says a book is worth it, I’ll give it a try. I read Why We Drive and yeah, mostly lived up to expectations. The simplest lesson one might grasp is the correlation between driving, the freedom of the human spirit, and the active engagement of our faculties.

How modern tech like lane assist, blind spot monitoring, adaptive cruise control, beeping this, bleeting thing, reduces the effort required from the driver such that our brains mushify into a state of decay. Or alternatively, actually makes the driving experience less safe. A fact I was reminded of as I tried to disable Android Auto a few days ago, paying more attention to the fucking safety warnings than the road.

In totality a worthy book, but I did find the final third to be unnecessary. I had the impression that Matthew Crawford tacked on a few essays for the sake of padding, an all-too-common occurrence in the world of literature. I wish somebody would tell authors: it’s OK to write a short book!

The final act brought to mind Cormac McCarthy’s The Passenger; a fascinating, chaotic and at times bizarre book. The protagonist raves about the evils of a central bank digital currency, even though the book is set in the 1980s, nearly four decades before anyone would have heard of such a thing. The book as a scrapbook for errant ideas, rather than a coherent narrative.

Should you read Matt’s book? If you find modern cars loathsome, Why We Drive is the antidote.

2 - Florida land bubbles

The Power Broker (see my review) is all but mandatory reading for serious New Yorkers. Robert Moses exerted more influence on the NYC’s development than perhaps any person in the city’s long history. You need only drive over the Verrazzano bridge once to appreciate the width of his ambition.

Bubble in the Sun isn’t nearly as long as TPB but the book still achieves the status of mandatory reading for Floridians, and anyone else who has a keen interest in the state. Until the latter half of the 19th century Florida was nothing but bog, mangroves and a few hard bitten families who didn’t mind dying from mosquito plagues. What happened during the next 150 years to transform Florida from swamp land into the decadent domicile of a man known most famously for his use of the term swamp…

Well, men stole entire cities from the wilderness. Famous architects like Addison Mizner erected beautiful mansions, developers like George Merrick created communities (Coral Gables), and swarthy gentlemen like Carl Fisher dredged the ocean to build residences where once there was naught but mangroves (Miami Beach).

Addison Mizner

Many of these Floridian pioneers would end up destitute or dead from too much fire water, but during their peaks years they were the stuff of legend. Of portly Addison Mizner, pictured above, it was said that: “Addison’s idea of a square meal is to sit a foot away from the table and eat until he touches.”

Addison’s morally dubious brother was renowned for his wit, penning such clever phrases as “A fellow who is always declaring he’s no fool usually has his doubts.” And “He’s so crooked, he’d steal two left shoes.”

A Bubble in the Sun is an easy read, as engaging as an average novel. I’m handing it my stamp of approval, especially if you have ties to Florida.

3 - The destitute

A bird in the hand was worth two in the bush, he told her, to which she retorted that a proverb was the last refuge of the mentally destitute.

The Painted Veil

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