Surviving The Apocalypse With My Crappy Home-Made Solar Power (And How That Improves Your Art)

Plus a picture of our new dog, Sitka! Say hello, Sitka!

Two weeks ago, a vicious storm swept over Cleveland, knocking over telephone poles left and right. It left 320,000 people without power - that's about 10% of Cleveland - and the power company was saying it might take up to ten days to get my power back on.

Fortunately, I had a solar-powered electrical system installed in my van that could provide regular, clean power to my home - clean power enough to run my Internet and maybe a fan or two to keep away the worst of the summer heat. With it, I could continue to work remotely and keep my job.

The bad news: I had built that electrical system myself with my wife.

It was terrible.

This is, believe it or not, the more photogenic half of our electrical system.

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There's a saying in the van community: "You build three vans: One for your enemy, one for your friends, and the last for yourself." That's a nicer way of saying "The first time you try anything will be a regretful mess, the second time will be decent, and the third is where you really hit your groove."

I wish we'd built the van for our enemy, but alas, we now live with (and in!) the sad remains of our exploratory handiwork. My wife and I cut a hole in the van door and installed a custom window, but its leaky seal dribbles water into the van door's bottom on rainy days. We installed solar panels, and they literally flew off our roof as we were on the freeway between Arizona and New Mexico, 1,500 miles from home.

And the electrical system is the worst of it.

It works, mostly. But even though we bought a professional diagram to lay it out, the big red switch labelled "Off" doesn't actually turn the system off for reasons we don't understand. (We found another way to shut things down.) We put the batteries in an inconvenient place where we need two people with small hands working in conjunction to rewire them. Fuses are screwed to a piece of particle board at weird angles because the wires were stiffer than we thought they'd be and this is the only way we could get everything to fit.

And we have wires everywhere, because we have yet to install walls, and so any wires coming out of the system to supply power to an external system are duct-taped to either the walls or the floor or both.

So when my wife said, "Can't we use the van to power our Internet?", reader, I did not want to. Because we had disabled the electrical system for the winter, it had been a year since I worked on the damn thing, and now I no longer remembered anything.

A comment I left at work

But it was that or shell out for a hotel room for a week - a hotel room that required a pet-friendly space for the puppy we had gotten literally four days ago - so while she looked after the dog, I set to work.

This is Sitka. He is otherwise irrelevant to this newsletter, but I knew if I didn’t show you a picture you would be very mad at me.

Cue four frustrating hours of work getting everything started again.

And the more I looked at this, the more I was ashamed. I could see the tally of all our bad decisions piled up in this cramped space, knew everything we should have done better, thought of all the neat van electrical systems on the Internet where the wires were perfectly perpendicular and the batteries were easy to get to and the solar panels weren't secured by safety layers of Bondo tape.

Part of the reason I had balked at the idea of using our van is that I didn't want to look at this.

But soon enough, I had the camper fridge we'd bought running off of DC current, and then after a run to Home Depot to get some 75-foot extension cords, we had this cobbled-together monstrosity...

And the fiberoptic cable and wi-fi started up again.

And our laptops started charging.

And our drinks were cold, and we had a friend over to steal some internet so he could work, and soon enough we were telling people proudly about our Tom Sawyer-like expedition where, using nothing but know-how and gumption, we had gotten ourselves some power.

All with this electrical system that I called “crappy.”

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There's a couple of lessons here.

The first is for people in general: You don't have to be that good to impress people.

Seriously. To electricians, our van is a joke (and maybe even a little hazardous). But it functions. To the ordinary person, goddamn, Ferrett, you learned enough about electricity to save you taking seven days off from work.

Particularly in hobbies, there's this tendency to compare yourself to the best of the Internet - started whittling? Well, here's a guy who carved a lace doily out of maple. You're learning to sing? Here's someone on TikTok with the voice of an angel killing the Sarah McLachlan covers. Took up painting, oh crap, here's a guy who paints tunnels into mountains so realistically that coyotes crash into them.

But as someone who's built a couple of bookshelves for people who don't build bookshelves, they don't think "What a crappy bookshelf." They think "Wow, I can’t do that." And they are amazed at the delta between their talent in this area - which is to say "none" - and your talent - which is to say "functional" - and you should let them be amazed.

Stop judging yourself by the best person on the Internet! Judge yourself by the average Joe. And for most skills, a year's dedication max is enough to get you into the stratosphere compared to someone who didn't train.

Is what you did perfect? No. Is it even necessarily good? Maybe not. But you've still come a long way, baby, and at this point your skill may even be useful.

Don't let anyone tell you that doesn't count. (And don’t get me started on the American habit of “You gotta monetize your hobbies!” If you’re whittling little rabbits for your buddies, great, you don’t have to rush to Etsy.)

Second thing, for artists in particular: Shut the hell up about the flaws in your work.

I told you up front that I consider my electrical system to be crap. And it kind of is; I wish I could build another solar system for my friend, and then one for me, but ain't nobody got the cash for that. There's so much I could fix had I the time, money, and inclination.

But it would have been just as easy to title this newsletter, "How I Survived The Apocalypse With My Finely-Tuned Electrical Powerhouse," and that too would have been accurate!

Conan O'Brien was on Hot Ones recently, and he said the easiest way for a guest to lose an audience was to make a deprecating comment. People see what they expect to see - and if you tell them it's bad, they will believe you. And the guests who shrug, "Wow, I'm doing terrible, huh?" actually convince people that they are doing terrible, and the show spirals.

If you're an artist and someone compliments your work, it's natural for many to pshaw, to point out that ragged cut or to point out that ink splotch or tell them in some mild way that hey, it could have been better...

And you have broken a spell.

Yes, your work is flawed. In a couple of weeks, my new book The Dragon Kings of Oklahoma will be unleashed upon the world - and like every novel I have ever written, from my perspective it is a stitched-together mass of mistakes. I am a competent enough writer to understand what I was shooting for, what I failed to accomplish, what places I am likely to lose certain audiences.

But in reality, my wife says that Dragon Kings is the best book I've written, and she loves it with all her heart, and when she copy-edited it for me she came out of her office squealing that it was just as good as she remembered it was!

Which will cast the spell you need: "Here is a laundry list of all the ways I fell short of my goal," or "My wife sighs happily when I tell her I can read her the next chapter in the next book of the series"?

You're an artist. Manipulating perception is what you do. So start with that central perception of putting the thing you hate so much out there without your commentary. Don't upsell them on it more than you need to for marketing purposes, don't downsell them on it -

Simply place the art on the stage and sidle off. The art will stand on its own, or it will not; this is not a toddler but a teenager, and at some point it will have to be alone without you anyway.

Let the electricity flow without comment.

Anyway, buy my book.

Psst! BONUS DOG.

I call him “Carpet Shark.”