It’s weird to be back to the regular old grind of school and pretending to be looking for an after-school job. I wish someone would pay me for that. Or better. I wish Jerry would pay me to look after his stupid truck, which I have to do all the time for free.

However, it is cool to know all about making biofuel and running a biodiesel vehicle. The conversion isn’t actually hard, because you can put biodiesel through a regular diesel engine. In fact, the guy who invented the engine, Rudolf Diesel, ran his original prototype off peanut oil.

Rumor has it that Diesel, the man, was killed by Big Oil to keep his engine from catching on, and after his death, the oil companies made a petroleum derivative, called it diesel fuel, and hushed the whole thing about biofuels up.

If you are switching the engine out of an old vehicle, the important thing is to convert your fuel lines and filters, too, because biofuel will react differently with them, as I recently discovered.

In terms of the fuel itself, there’s all this controversy right now, because people are saying that we’re in the middle of a food crisis, and turning crops and land that are needed to feed people into fuel for vehicles is not the solution.

But, uh, hello, who ever told you to use food crops to make biofuel? The way most people, like Jerry, have been doing it since the sixties, is by recycling used vegetable oil, of which there is tons and tons going to waste in landfills every year.

What Jerry did was go around Ring City and strike deals with restaurants that normally throw out a buttload of used cooking oil. Some of them let him pick it up for free, some of them charge like their deep fryers are crapping gold.

Either way, the whole point is to take something that would normally be waste and turn it into something useful again.

The idea is not to turn corn crops into fuel. That is totally insane. Oh, the media. You so crazy.

Anyway, once you’ve got your fuel, you just need a processor set up in your backyard so that you can clean and thin your dirty old vegetable oil and make it into fuel. This process is called transesterification. One of the best resources online for learning how to do this here.

Just be careful. You’re going to be working with flammable materials and fumes, so explosions are possible.

On a brighter note, you’ll be sending about 60% less CO2 into the air with your fuel, and you won’t be supporting Big Oil – one of the most destructive forces on the planet.

The question was: what would scare JoyTech?

What would scare a company that wants people to buy all the useless junk they can possibly buy?

Last summer, Aurora got me reading about this thing called VOLUNTARY SIMPLICITY. It’s basically a movement of people who minimize their consumption to make the world, and their lives, better.The idea is that if you need fewer things, you need less money, and if you need less money, you don’t have to work as much, and if you don’t have to work as much, you get to spend more time doing the things that are really important.

Stop buying junk, stop producing junk, and start focusing on what’s really important. Sounds pretty scary to me.

Voluntary simplicity is also about cutting down your environmental footprint. I like this because I don’t want to be a superhero like Iron Man. He was supposed to be a genius, but he didn’t care how many resources it took to make and use his powered armor suits.

To be fair, Stan Lee did create Iron Man in the 1960s, back when people still thought nuclear power and wonder bread were the future.

Duane Elgin, who writes about voluntary simplicity, describes it as “a manner of living that is outwardly more simple and inwardly more rich, a way of being in which our most authentic and alive self is brought into direct and conscious contact with living.”

Am I the only one who sees the superhero reference here? Because that’s what being a masked adventurer is all about – LIVING, DOING, creating a new identity that makes you the most real person you can be…

I want my disguise to be something that brings out my authentic superhero self, and makes a statement about what I’m representing.

No capes, no tights, no flashy junk – but maybe something made out of junk - all the weird old stuff that I find on the street that can be reused in a cool way.

Something that looks like it came back from the end of the world.

Yeah.