The Good Life Lab

by Wendy Jehanara Tremayne

  He smiled and gave me a dirty hug.

  I had not seen Flux since we met in a Brooklyn coffee shop called Fix years earlier. Back then he could still pass for a journalist, go on job interviews, and seem believable when holding up a press badge. Since then Flux had given his life to a media subculture. In the broadcast-center-on-wheels that was his current home, he traveled the country documenting underreported events such as messy union battles in sparsely populated American cities. He interviewed veterans who were denied benefits or ostracized for warning a new generation of young soldiers about what was to come. He covered student protests, the eviction of nonprofits, and struggles in the lives of poor people. He filmed racial discrimination battles that did not have enough marketing hooks for the mainstream media to care about.

  Once Flux’s bus was inside our gate, it did what all buses do when they arrive on our property: it stopped working. As it turned out, Flux had just bought the rig and the WVO fuel system was already giving him problems. Thus the dirty apron and the equally dirty clothes below it. The life of a greaser is a messy one. The complications were many, but Flux was in the right spot. Mikey was more than a little excited to survey the rig and troubleshoot the issues: a sump pump that didn’t have what it took to move the heavy fuel, a variety of clogged filters, not enough heat to thin the fuel, and a bottom-dollar system that just kind of sucked.

  Four days later Flux was on the road again and sputtering down I-25. I believe his next stop was Slab City, in the desert in Southern California. That night Mikey came into the house after an extra-long stint in his shipping-container lab in the yard. He wore a guilty expression for 3 a.m.

  He posed the rhetorical question “Guess what?”

  “What?” I barked, hearing my mother’s Bronx accent.

  “I bought a Mercedes on eBay. A diesel!”

  With fluctuating fuel costs, an energy crisis anticipated, and a waste product readily available to us, fuel was already on our list of things to make ourselves. The day had arrived.

  Get on your apron, I thought.

  With the help of a local mechanic who boasted a gang tattoo inside his lip and worked to the soundtrack of “Sweet Home Alabama,” we successfully installed a grease conversion kit in our “new” Mercedes. Within a couple of months we were burning straight filtered WVO. A couple of years later we added another diesel car to our fleet, an older-model red VW Beetle that has not given us much trouble. Instead of converting the Beetle, we produce homemade biofuel for it; we found that making biofuel is preferable to running a car converted to run straight WVO. Lesson learned.

  If I hadn’t pushed Chance, our WVO-burning car, up the hill, we would have been stuck in the desert all night.

  We named the Mercedes from El Paso, Texas, Chance because there was only a chance that it would get us anywhere. As those chances seemed to lessen, we modified its name to Fat Chance. When it was roadside and waiting for a tow truck to come get it, it was No Chance. Last Chance was what I called the car when I put my foot down and told Mikey that we had to sell it. This came just after an incident that took place many miles from the nearest town, just after I gave Chance a push to get it uphill while Mikey pumped the gas pedal. Once the car was over the crest of the hill, with the passenger door hanging open, Mikey shouted, “Get in!” and it was my task to complete the uphill jaunt and hop into the moving car, lest it lose its steam again and slide backward down the steep slope. We called the car Only Chance when, for various reasons, our other cars were not available and we had to drive it. To Mikey and Chance’s credit, the breakdowns had to do with Chance’s being old and crappy — rarely did they have anything to do with the grease conversion kit or the burning of WVO. Chance is now a beach car that we use almost exclusively to go to the lake and back again. It seems that the threat to sell it caused Chance to pull himself together. Chance is running still.

  But in our main car, the red VW Beetle, we get 30 to 50 miles per gallon burning biodiesel fuel, which costs us only about a dollar a gallon to make. Trips to the grocery, to the homes of friends in town, to the hardware store, to garage sales, to parties, to the bowling alley, to restaurants, are free in our electric car, which we power off our PV solar array. I no longer make trips to gas stations.

  Things of Value

  The secret of madness is the source of reason.

  — Rumi

  Mikey hung up the phone and paced agitatedly in the kitchen.

  He had been talking to someone from his old job who had wanted to know why he was cashing out his 401k account. Mikey explained that he did not trust the stock market. “I’m going to use the money I have to invest in the life I am living right now,” he told the befuddled rep.

  “He thought I was crazy and wanted to help me find equity,” Mikey said as he rolled his eyes.

  How does one find equity? It seemed so abstract. Equity is not unearthed from a tomb on an archeological dig; it does not emerge from a dusty box at a garage sale. You can’t hold it. The banks made it seem as though it could be produced from thin air — as long as you owned something worth money, like a home.

  A trick of the world of capital, we decided. A way to detach money from something valuable and make it, as they say, liquid. I figured equity was a code word that meant “easier to steal.” Bankers were doing this kind of thing with homes all over the country as people were offered giant mortgages and then foreclosed on. “Not us,” we vowed.

  In 2008 the market became volatile. We watched it rise and fall as it had done in years past, only now it was even more erratic, the changes more extreme. Sometimes its fluxuations were due to real circumstances in the world, such as a bone-dry rainy season in Florida causing a spike in the price of oranges. But all too often the swings of the market seemed tied to the mysterious workings of a world to which we were not privy. Financial products too complex to figure out (even, as would later be clear, by those who sold them) shifted and re-formed the lives of real people, making some rich and others poor. Never did the activity make the overall conditions for life any better.

  Since the dramatic game does not make common sense, we opted out entirely: we took all the money we had and made it liquid. No more stocks, no investments. We put it in a plain old savings account that earned 2 percent interest. According to all the experts, the professional money managers, bankers, and the like, we did the dumbest thing possible. But when Lehman Brothers went bankrupt, Bear Stearns collapsed, and the whole economy went haywire, it didn’t seem dumb to us. I thought of something I’d heard the Sufis say: Life lives; only death dies. Well, the nation’s dying banking system had never contained life.

  In addition to getting out of the stock market and cashing in our retirement accounts, we decided to get rid of all the money we had by swapping it for things that we thought would have value in spite of economic conditions. Things that sustain life: land, water, tools, and equipment. Buy things that make other things became our mantra.

  While we still had some money, we asked ourselves, half jokingly, “What do we need for a Mad Max world?” “The best blender!” I decided, one night cozied up in bed with my laptop. Food was on the essential list, along with shelter, fuel, and power. I chose a model with a high-power motor that seconded as a hammer mill so that we could use it to make cornmeal and nut and grain flours. And I got one with a rebuilt motor and a lifetime warranty for half the price of a new one.

  We bought tools and materials to build just about anything: a concrete mixer, a mortar mixer, a welder, levels, a wood planer, electric weed whackers, a scythe, a paint sprayer, impact drills — things that before living in New Mexico I’d never heard of. We got rid of tools that had two-cycle gas engines and replaced them with electric versions that could be powered by the clean energy produced by our own PV solar system.

  We crammed our new investments into a moderately dented metal shipping container that was no longer suitable for carrying international cargo but made an excellent shed, and remodeled a second shipping contai
ner into an electronics lab for Mikey to work in. Dreaming aloud, as we had promised to do from a hot tub under a star-soaked sky on our first trip to T or C, Mikey wanted to bury his metal lab in the yard like Luke Skywalker’s home on Tatooine in the original Star Wars. Our water table was too high for that. He’d make do.

  Our shipping container gave us 160 square feet of space for less money than a flimsy shed purchased at a hardware store. And it will last for decades.

  The Notorious Goblins

  Opportunity may knock only once, but temptation leans on the doorbell.

  — Author Unknown

  During the first two years that we lived in the desert, we earned money here and there from bits of work that promised not to steal too much time from building and developing our property. I began a column that I wrote for Craft magazine that I called Re:Fitted. For Craft’s readers, I reported on creative people who found interesting ways to work with reuse. I taught yoga and shared Sufi meditations with a group of students, and I managed the growing network of Swap-O-Rama-Rama events that had sprung up. Some of these activities brought about small infusions of cash that staved off our going entirely broke.

  Then civilization showed up armed with its most notorious goblins: fame and money. I had already considered Swap-O-Rama-Rama’s future, so I was not entirely unprepared for the temptation the goblins dangled before me. I knew the options: renting huge stadiums in big cities, hiring staff, producing and managing the events, and copyrighting the name. I could make a good living franchising Swap-O-Rama-Rama. Bizarre Bazaar, the Renegade Craft Faire, and Maker Faire were doing this very thing with their variety of what they had to offer.

  Swap-O-Rama-Rama came about as the result of a pledge, a promise to create a remedy for the lust for stuff. To commodify it by turning it into a money-generating business felt like the breaking of a sacred trust. The idea (the pledge) had more value than its offspring (Swap-O-Rama-Rama). Living in Burning Man’s Black Rock City had showed me that the value of what I created could only be secured by making it a gift. The fame and money goblins would have to find another candidate.

  Still, my ego let out a bratty cry: “I want to be successful.” It was a dramatic scene. Network TV producers started to call. The same month, nine publishers called with opportunities to write a book. “Wouldn’t a book and a TV show turn me into a product?” I asked Mikey. At that time, it would have. Then one of the largest utility companies in the country asked me to produce a Swap-O-Rama-Rama with its name on it. The company dangled $100,000, a fee to wash over its bad reputation with my good one.

  With a head heavy with decisions to make, I went into town to grab lunch and think over the temptations. A woman who promoted jazz in Chicago before moving to New Mexico and whom I had seen around town leaned over to me from the neighboring table. Through ostentatious sunglasses her spirit rose up with the cane that she waved in the air. As though our encounter were an undercover rendezvous, she lowered her chin, then raised her eyes over the gaudy frames to meet mine and said, “People think they come to this town for healing and relaxation. That’s what I thought, too, and look what happened to me!”

  As the volume of her voice increased, so did the height of her cane. She lifted her pant leg to expose what was below: a prosthetic foot strapped to a shortened lower leg. An accident? What had happened? The fake was adorned with a trendy sneaker and an adorable lace-edged sock.

  “Don’t forget the name, dearie, Truth or Consequences.”

  The delivery of advice was foreboding. I imagined that if the universe had employees, the one who worked in the department of pledge-keeping was standing over me.

  “Okay, I get it,” I said to the imaginary steward. I must not commodify what I created.

  When I got home I conjured the image of Luke Skywalker in the scene in Star Wars when he has to trust and then use the force to bring about the empire’s demise. With a battle cry, I replied to the TV producers: No. To the nine publishers: No. And to the power company and its $100,000: No.

  After passing through this test I was ready to release Swap-O-Rama-Rama to the world as a gift. I just needed a way to do it that ensured that it remain decommodified. The tools that civilization offered for the task did not seem a right fit: copyrights, patents, and the model of the franchise.

  I turned to nature with the imaginary keys in hand. Sitting between my own two lush garden beds, I imagined the feeling of hot water rising up from the geothermal springs below me and tuned my hearing to the flocks of birds that traversed overhead and were traveling to places as far as Siberia. A blue heron impressed me with the size of its wingspan just before I closed my eyes. The air smelled of nothing in particular. Clean, I thought. The sun shone hot and bright, and I reminded myself that because of it, my sustenance grows. The food I eat lives because of photosynthesis. I am a carrier of the transmuted light. I dissolved the boundary of my small self and broadened my sense of who I thought myself to be until I was the size of the whole planet. Then I brought up the question in order to view it anew.

  What if I build a ship, the first of its kind, a marvel of good design? Before taking credit for it, I would have to admit that the history of shipbuilding had played a part in my success. To build my ship I have to borrow from the knowledge that accumulated over time. It wasn’t I who figured out how to join one piece of wood to another or how to sew a sail. I did not provide the trees that the wood came from. I could never invent a tree or muster one up from scratch. I can’t make wind or buoyancy so that things can float. Creating water is beyond my skill set.

  When I own an idea and take credit for it, my ship, what is it that I am taking credit for? From this expanded view I could see that I ought to give credit, not take it.

  Copyrights and patents are devices of civilization that have creative people thinking, This is my last good idea. After all, if people believed that another good idea was coming, that they were essentially creative and full of ideas, they wouldn’t bother to concretize the one they’d just had with a copyright or a patent. Our culture had us thinking, I’m not really creative — it was a fluke that I had this one good idea. Essentially copyrights and patents turn creators into security guards of their ideas; they transform revelatory experiences into redundancy, and creativity into product. The systems our civilization has conjured prevent the best of our ideas from being released into the world so that they can be shaped and shared by others.

  Luckily a new type of open license has sprung up. People are using the Creative Commons to protect and share their good ideas. For Swap-O-Rama-Rama, I chose a Creative Commons license that enables people, nonprofit organizations, and communities to share and use it, and I excluded for-profits from use. I vowed to be its gatekeeper.

  Nevertheless, with Swap-O-Rama-Rama’s continued growth, the pestering goblins returned. Swap-O-Rama-Rama was starting to look like a strange oracle.

  One day a woman who organized a Swap-O-Rama-Rama in the Midwest presented me with a unique conundrum. In her crew of volunteers, whom she described as mostly struggling and unemployed artists, a woman who seemed well-off insisted on getting paid. The organizer asked me, “What do I tell her?”

  Her situation helped me notice that there is a kind of poverty that is different from the suffering that comes from not having what is fundamental to life. There is a kind of poverty that comes from having enough and not knowing it.

  Some people try to prove that the world is one of lack by asking it for what they know it will not give them. After all, who asks to get paid for volunteering except someone who expects to hear, “There is not enough”? If this volunteer were to experience life anew, she needed a different answer from the one she was expert at eliciting.

  Instead of telling her, “No. Volunteers don’t get paid,” we said, “Yes,” and added, “Here is a little more than you asked for.”

  Months later the organizer called to tell me that the advice had worked: the woman whom she paid at the first event had volunteered at the sec
ond, no questions asked.

  Before I could exhale, the goblins were at my door once more. I heard that a car manufacturer was planning and promoting Swap-O-Rama-Rama events in 14 cities in the United States. The company planned to use the events to market a new car that had mediocre mileage, a greenwash. Unlike the usual Swap-O-Rama-Rama, which created the new out of the donated used clothes of those who attended, the proposed events would let people make things out of new clothing that the company provided. Since the company executives had not asked my permission to use Swap-O-Rama-Rama, they did not know that for-profit entities were excluded from its Creative Commons license.

  This is when I first saw the power of the commons. The car manufacturer had spent over $100,000 arranging for the events. At the same time, Swap-O-Rama-Rama was being produced by communities all over the world on a budget of nearly zero, run on volunteer energy and free materials from the waste stream.

  Shutting the mimic down was satisfying. I could hardly believe I’d won a fight against a giant corporation. But still I wondered how these things happen. A cookie-crumb trail led me to the marketing company and the woman responsible for the sale. I typed her name into a search engine and learned that she was also a textile artist. In the same way that I had set aside what I thought was right in order to succeed at my job, I imagined that her profession had led her to express her interest in Swap-O-Rama-Rama in an inappropriate way. When I invited her to teach a workshop at the next swap in New York, she accepted. When we met there, we did not discuss the car company or the blunder. We made things.

  I turned my gaze to meet the long view of the mountains that, like sturdy grandparents, gazed back at me through the kitchen window. The white light outside bounced off a blue sky and beamed brightly and everywhere. I had no idea how I would earn the income I needed to live in New Mexico, but I knew that it was not to come from fearing a lack of money.