I like guts.

I like peeling back skin and seeing muscles twitching, blood pumping, stomachs churning. I like knowing that what I see on the surface is carried through to the meat beneath, that that smile is made of skin and muscle and fat contorting, that it isn’t painted onto plastic; that I know what and why it is and how it does what it does. You can learn so much down in the guts, pinching tubes shut and observing what stops working, stretching and tapping and twisting bits and waiting for some reaction.

Exploration, experimentation, whatever you want, the guts have got.

Wait, please do not click off, no, do not call the cops.

I’m talking metaphorically.
I’m talking about technology.

I like machine guts, and I like being able to see them. I don’t really trust anything I can’t get inside. If you can’t open up the cover and see the gears whirring and stick your hand in and feel your flesh tearing how can you trust that the thing you’re up to the wrist in is really a machine?

And how do you know it’s not cheating on you?
How can you be sure you own it if you can’t at least try and understand it?

Taking something apart and not quite but nearly putting it back together again is one of the greatest educational experiences a young boy can have.

It teaches you respect for the machine, and wonder for the world.
It inoculates in you the thought: “If I was just a little more careful, if I just went a little bit slower…”.
It guarantees that you’ll go in there again, and at some point you’ll go in and the patient will live.
Maimed? Maybe.
Scarred? Definitely.
But alive and working for another day.

Access to guts is a human right.

When I was a kid guts were spilling out all over the place. Walkmen, radios, VCR’s, bicycles, computers, torches. You could get into them all, and I did.

Technology used to be bigger, simpler, gutsier.

Tough enough to laugh off a probing 8 year old with a screwdriver and nothing better to do, forgiving enough to withstand a bit too much force and absolutely no reading of the manual. ¹

I was never a very skilled surgeon.

My explorations were brief and primitive, generally unproductive.
But they put something in me.
I knew that guts existed, I felt it in my own.

And I knew that they could be played with, poked and prodded, coaxed back into life.

Dear friend you might think you know about the guts; perhaps you’ve seen them in a magazine, or behind glass at a museum, but if you’ve never been in them you don’t know them.

Knowing something in the intellectual sense isn’t the same as knowing it in your guts. You need to get in there, get your fingers wet, poke and prod and break things.

I think the guts have done me good. Beyond the odd time when I’ve actually managed to fix something on the first try, the mindset the guts have given me has seen me through life.

I’ve never been afraid to tinker, I’ve almost never been upset when I’ve broken something (OK, caveat that, I’ve almost never been upset for very long). I try to do things myself, and when I fail, as I usually do, I’m happy enough to figure out why and try again.

I explore things, break them apart, see if I can smush them together better. I do this at work, I do it in my personal life. I pull my work flow apart and break tasks down to see if I can find some time saving, or make one task from two, I annoy my colleagues with dumb ideas that aren’t actually all that dumb once I’ve stopped rambling and started doing.

I decide to see what making some mad change to my life would do to me and give it an honest two weeks before deciding whether to dump it or continue with it. That’s proper guts thinking: the best guts to mess with are your own.

I learned to sail because of guts, how to navigate because of guts, ran my first half marathon from the guts, this website was born from the guts.

Where would I be without the guts, who would I be?

Love for guts births love for simplicity, love for transparency.

A love for old bicycles, a love for shitty old cars that you could still work on yourself.

When I was a student I sat down on the hallway floor one day and stayed there for hours, trial and erroring my way through repairing and servicing non indexed friction shifting on a bike a few years older than I was.

Later I got a motorbike, and later still I bowed to rural reality and got a car.

On both I changed my own oil, did a little bit of engine work, my own electronics, my own paint patching, I even did my own brakes and suspension (Mum wasn’t too happy about that last one). ²

And the machines were happy to have me in them, happy to let me see their lovely gubbins. There were parts galore, and funny men in small shops to consult for advice. There were extensive manuals, official and aftermarket, with big, clear diagrams and primary school level English, designed for an actual average person trying to fix something in their driveway with cheap tools and no training.

I fixed these things, and didn’t do that great a job, and they worked. They were “worse” than modern alternatives, heavier, wobblier, slower, but they were better in any real sense of the word.

They were mine.
And now they’re gone.
Slowly but surely I forgot the guts.

My rigid ratbike MTB was left in a foreign country, never to be seen again. The bicycle I have now has carbon fibre in it for some reason. The cranks are not cottered, a claw hammer is not a tool that sees much use when working on it. The gears are indexed brand name shite and the parts are super specific bollocks.

My little gutsy car succumbed to peer pressure, the idiot’s disease. “Why do you have a tiny, 20 year old car with only three working doors and a 2 star safety rating?” they said. Because I liked it, because it was unique and fun, so full of wriggly warm guts.

But I got rid of it, and I bought a grey thing.

Reliable. Comfortable. Boring.

Doing anything on this car requires pissing about with computers and hydraulics and endless plastic panelling, put there to hide the guts. This car does not want me in its engine bay, it will allow me in eventually, huffily, haughtily, but really it wants me to take it down to a professional and let him do things properly. There are still manuals, but they don’t include everything anymore.

The guts are shrivelling up.

At this rate the guts will go away entirely. They’re already starting to.

They didn’t disappear exactly, but they got smaller, less discrete, more peripheral. Kids that went poking soon found little beyond the odd RAM slot and maybe a disc motor that could be pulled and replaced.