Crazy to me that they exempted him from the vagrancy laws. Like "Oh we can have one mysterious and entertaining vagrant".
Similar to Leslie Cochran in Austin.
Was that actually a thing? He passed away before I ever met him.
Leatherman (vagabond)
91–100 of 153 posts
Re: Leatherman (vagabond)
#92this kind of freedom, once possible, is now gone.
As long as you don’t litter and cause forest fires nobody cares if you live in the bush/caves. Hell, if you have a birth certificate you can get free health care here while living in the bush!
Re: Leatherman (vagabond)
#93I wonder what it says about me or my life that my first thought was that it sounded absolutely wonderful. I had a good stretch of time between jobs (fortunately voluntarily) a while back and ever since I have had a completely different outlook on life that is, sadly, not quite compatible with modern life. During my time unemployed my pace of life was more like it is when you are on a camping/hiking trip with a group…
This sounds wonderful until the winter. Seems wonderful in temperate or warmer climes.
Re: Leatherman (vagabond)
#94Earlier quoted context omitted.
People with comfortable enough lives sometimes have this attraction to the very romanticized versions of otherwise very hard lives. You see this with the coder who dreams of the farmer's life, or that of a "rover, wanderer, nomad, vagabond", or even that of a soldier. It's probably the assumption that something that can be a nice hobby on its best days, a short escape, must also be a nice life. But it's the dose that…
The romanticized farmer aspect always gives me pause as well. Farming is a very difficult job that requires many hours of work every single day, every day per year. Even if you had enough money left over from some other job to get to go travel, you could never find the time to do so after becoming a farmer
Interestingly, one of my ex-girlfriends from my 20s had a dad that did this. He was an engineer and quit to become a farmer, building his own generators and living off the grid powering his operation with waste vegetable oil he obtained for free from the same restaurants he sold artisan vegetables to. He lived in a different state and I only met him once, but it actually did seem like a pretty great life and he was clearly happy with it.
The problem to me when I see this kind of life suggested as something people should try to do is that it isn't universalizable. There are only so many restaurants in any given city that need artisan vegetables. There is only so much land near such cities that can grow it. Even if all people who try are equally able, very few would succeed in doing this.
Re: Leatherman (vagabond)
#95Earlier quoted context omitted.
Hard, in this sense, does not necessarily mean negative or bad. And the safety nets are often illusions (see: insurance, for one example). There's a balance of course, but I believe most people would benefit from harder lives (in the natural/physical sense). Modern life being more comfortable and easier is actually bullshit. If your life is driving through traffic hours a day to go to a place to sit in front of a com…
> Hard does not mean negative or bad It does when it applies to your life. (Edit to reply to your edit) A bit of physical activity doesn't make your life harder. A lot of it might. And almost only hard physical activity is pure punishment, even literally used as such in labor camps. > the safety nets are often illusions Safety nets are sometimes illusions, they are mostly helping. Like an airbag they only need to wor…
> Insurance saved the livelihoods of millions of people, sometimes many times over. Rebuilding houses, repairing equipment, covering medical expenses, or critical services. Sometimes they fail you.
This one always gets me. I've had 7 orthopedic surgeries in the past decade. I couldn't walk without a cane or tie my own shoes in 2016 and today I can skateboard, run marathons, and squat double my bodyweight. I've had my house flood from a burst pipe on the top floor, had my HVAC condenser struck by lightning, had a city dump truck crush my parked car. Insurance has saved my ass so many times that I could pay a hundred grand a month in premiums for the rest of my life and still come out ahead.
People are so headline fixated that they only ever see the claim denials and think that's all that ever happens.
Re: Leatherman (vagabond)
#96Earlier quoted context omitted.
I have to admit, when I discovered this I was a bit disappointed. For a long time I thought it was just a great brand name somebody came up with instead of the founder's last name.
A good last name is the best kind of brand name though? It’s 100% commitment.
Yes, Li-ion batteries would have been so much better had they been called "Goodenough batteries".
And we already have Galvanic cells and Voltaic piles, so it wouldn't have been the first battery named after its creator.
Re: Leatherman (vagabond)
#97Earlier quoted context omitted.
The romanticized farmer aspect always gives me pause as well. Farming is a very difficult job that requires many hours of work every single day, every day per year. Even if you had enough money left over from some other job to get to go travel, you could never find the time to do so after becoming a farmer
Interestingly, one of my ex-girlfriends from my 20s had a dad that did this. He was an engineer and quit to become a farmer, building his own generators and living off the grid powering his operation with waste vegetable oil he obtained for free from the same restaurants he sold artisan vegetables to. He lived in a different state and I only met him once, but it actually did seem like a pretty great life and he was c…
My grandfather was a farmer. "Out in the fields" or in the workshed practically all day everyday. But he also loved to hunt, had a rental gig on the farm for poor people that wanted to live in shacks "down by the river" (they built the sheds themselves), and would constantly be pointing out to me all the stuff in the house he had built himself (he could have easily gotten them just as cheap and without any additional labor by mail order -- this was post WWII).
Another words, farmers back in that time would pretend they were busy all day. But actually spent a lot of the time "out in fields" bullshitting hunting, hanging with their friends at the river, or having fun building random shit in the workshop out of leisure rather than necessity. I didn't have the heart to tell the women in my family he probably didn't come home sooner because he didn't want to hear nagging or whining children, because it was blatantly obvious to me what the situation was.
Re: Leatherman (vagabond)
#98Earlier quoted context omitted.
People with comfortable enough lives sometimes have this attraction to the very romanticized versions of otherwise very hard lives. You see this with the coder who dreams of the farmer's life, or that of a "rover, wanderer, nomad, vagabond", or even that of a soldier. It's probably the assumption that something that can be a nice hobby on its best days, a short escape, must also be a nice life. But it's the dose that…
I don't know about romanticizing a hard life but I'll definitely get hit with a very strong sense of wanting to escape and leave it all behind. It hits me every summer like clockwork tbh - leaving a nicely typed 2 minutes notice on my VP's desk and just taking my chances as a traveling beach bum. Akin to wanderlust, I'm filled with the urge to just go off into the unknown. In my heart of hearts I know I'm a soft city…
You would adapt rapidly.
I was fired from a city job.
Started hitchiking and living outside. Eventually worked on a fishing boat in the Bering Sea, worked the oil fields in the Dakotas, fought in a civil war in another country, hiked state-long parts of the PCT, hung out with tree-dwelling hippies in the doug-fir forests etc.
I would live that life again in a heartbeat if I didn't have a child to support, which was pretty much the end of my adventures. If you're single you can pretty much work day labor 25% of the year and have plenty enough to live inna-woods. The reason why most 'homeless' people seem so miserable is they are too mentally ill or drug ridden to do some fairly basic things to make their lives living outside 100x better; if you are sober and able bodied and able-minded it is a cakewalk.
Re: Leatherman (vagabond)
#99I wonder what it says about me or my life that my first thought was that it sounded absolutely wonderful. I had a good stretch of time between jobs (fortunately voluntarily) a while back and ever since I have had a completely different outlook on life that is, sadly, not quite compatible with modern life. During my time unemployed my pace of life was more like it is when you are on a camping/hiking trip with a group…
I lived a pretty high life in Los Angeles for 15 years, and when the time came for me to move to Europe (I'm Australian), I had two weeks where I was basically homeless before the flight home - lease expired on the apartment, circumstances with couch-surfing were not ideal - so I tried two weeks living hard, to see what it was like, as I was also going to have a 6 month hiatus before Europe, back home in the Australi…
Being homeless in a city doesn’t sound like fun at all. Being homeless in a rural buffer outside cities seems much more pleasant.
Re: Leatherman (vagabond)
#100Earlier quoted context omitted.
Me too, got excited for nothing. But then I wondered - maybe that's where their name comes from?
The brand's name came simply from Tim Leatherman, their founder. I don't know what is the real origin of his family name, though :)
Tim is still kicking and doing promo events. I ran into him under a tent selling tools in downtown Melbourne!