Hello, this is Manton.
It’s the Timetable Microcast.
Well, toward the end of the week, I decided I just had to get out of this fucking town.
It’s not that I have anything against Austin.
It’s actually one of my favorite places in this godforsaken state.
But it’s kind of like what I talked about in the blog post I wrote the morning after the election.
When there’s a loss, when there’s a failure, when nothing seems to be working, you just sometimes have to change something.
And I find that changing the environment around me is really a great way to kickstart creativity or productivity or just like rethinking about something.
It’s just a great way to get unstuck.
So I drove out to Los Maples State Park last night.
I’m just driving back this morning.
I didn’t stay very long.
So far, so good.
It’s really beautiful out there.
Like I really like to unplug and reset.
But when I talk about unplugging, I don’t actually mean being completely offline.
Because I need to be a little bit online.
You know, what if Microdot blog goes down?
What if there’s a problem?
What if I need to react and, you know, be online and take care of some server issue?
I pulled up to my campsite, no cell coverage.
And I have this WeBoost antenna on my roof.
And I love it because you pop it up, you know, it’s like three or four feet tall.
Once it’s moved up, takes whatever cell signal it can find and sort of amplifies it.
I power that thing on and all of a sudden I’ve got a couple bars.
I thought I could do that this time.
No luck.
Absolutely no signal.
It was actually a great opportunity to try Apple’s texting by satellite feature.
I had never tried this before.
It totally works.
I am super impressed with this feature.
Finds a satellite, you sort of move your phone so that you’re facing the right way.
It resyncs your messages.
Of course you can send text.
If the person you’re sending to has the latest version of iOS, it acts a little bit like iMessage in that it’ll tell you if the message has been sent.
Really nice feature if you’re feeling completely away and need to text someone or need to get a message.
So I’m heading back now.
Of course I’m driving through rural Texas, farms, ranches, small towns.
And usually I like small towns.
There’s something kind of beautiful and tragic about small towns.
You have these old buildings that in their day maybe were something, but they’ve been long abandoned.
A lot of people have moved out of the towns to bigger cities.
New generations are not staying.
And I like taking pictures of things like that because again, you have these old buildings that have been abandoned.
There’s not enough money to remodel it or there’s not even enough money in the economy to tear it down.
So these towns are often just kind of fading away.
And something really interesting about it, but it has a different feel now because I’m driving through these towns.
Of course there are Trump signs everywhere.
There’s ridiculous Trump flags on people’s trucks.
I can’t help but think small towns, you have fucked us in this election.
I’m sorry.
You’re on your own.
That’s it.
Thanks for listening.
you
