I'm a character in my own novel

I've been dividing my residence between the Homewood Suites parking lot in Tucson and the BLM Ironwood National Monument land just west of Marana. It's a peaceful hour-long drive between my two residences, meandering through open range, cotton farms, housing developments, road construction, and suburbs, culminating in the land of the unhoused near the Rillito River. I walk on the bike path almost daily when I'm in town. When I'm out in the desert, I mostly hunker in my car out of the wind and blazing sun, only venturing outside to rescue my solar panels when they blow over.

A few minutes ago, a swarm of bees flew past me. I heard them coming before I saw them. I don't think I have ever seen bees swarm. It's easy to forget this is wild land. Although I was in the city when I saw a coyote burst out of the brush and dash across a six-lane highway. It looked confused and a bit desperate as it ducked through the parking lot of a medical clinic. I lost sight of it after that. Wild things come into the city. When I lived in the mobile home park, I saw lots of coyotes, javelinas, myriad birds, a bobcat, a baby rattlesnake, frogs, armies of jackrabbits, and one tarantula. In Portland, we had possums, raccoons, worms, and birds.

My vestibular system tells me when the weather is changing, which is just about all the time. Today I predicted something, and now the wind has picked up. Dust obscures my view of the mountains. I've come to appreciate the rugged beauty of the desert. It's spectacularly unforgiving. Every plant tries to kill you as you walk by. 

I'm making plans to move my stuff to a yet-to-be-determined storage unit somewhere in the Portland metro area. After I get all my documentation lined up the way DMV and the car insurance company prefer, I can get a virtual mailbox service and continue to live life until the next crossroad takes me in a new direction.

I try to approach each person with compassion, unless they are wielding a chainsaw. Then I have a choice to make:  get out of the way or stand up and risk losing a limb or worse. I don't want my blood to be spilled for no reason. I want it to mean something. As if somehow I'll be able to see what unfolds after I'm gone. Ha. I fall into the trap of believing mortality is for others, not for me. 

Meanwhile, I'm learning to handle the nomadic life with ease and grace. Or I was, until the USPS decided it needed to crack down on fentanyl dealers sending product through the mail. Darn, that was a great second job. Oh, well. Now I have one job, ostensibly ushering dissertator wannabes through the dissertation process at a for-profit higher education institution based in the Midwest. I can't seem to get away from for-profit higher education, even though I believe it is pretty much an invention of the devil, designed to suck money from the pockets of people who can't afford it. In the case of my employer, the tuition rates are surprisingly affordable, which means the company sucks money out of the pockets of its contingent faculty. 

Did I mention flies? Got a lot of those. A few honeybees, too, which I try not to kill. I rescued a moth last night. The sky in the desert is a light show of stars. I haven't seen a sky of stars since I was a kid.  

I'm finally making some progress on my book, the third book of the trilogy I began several years ago. This one has been much harder to write than the first two, mainly because I wrote the first two by following the characters wherever they led me. If you want my advice, and I'm sure you do, I recommend you work out a deal with your characters. Give them some free rein, but don't let them drag you away from the outline. When you get to the final book in your series, you will have to wrap up all the loose ends you left hanging along the way. You won't get another chance, and if you let your characters run wild, they will trample your bleeding corpse and disappear over the hill, laughing.

I used to think my writing had to offer something pithy and meaningful. I wanted to write literary prose, use unusual words that make people crazy, and tell deep stories with profound moral lessons. You know, a book that will win literary awards, and maybe gain a review from the New York Times. Now I know that if you want to be a best selling author, all you have to do is write a romance novel that gets picked up by a director and made into a TV series. See, easy peasy.  

That is not the kind of writing I do, so I am not destined to be a best selling author. However, I love immersing myself in the lives of my nutty characters to see life through their eyes. Instead of trying to fence them in, I encourage them to run wild through the meadows. Because I write low-dread stories, they don't rip their clothes off as they tiptoe through the tulips. Neither do they stumble up on maggoty corpses when they take naps in the hollows of oak trees. My characters want what we all want: happiness, love, power, and lots and lots of money. 

Okay. Gotta go. A desert rat just ran under my car. That means I'll soon have a nest of babies eating the wires under my hood. 

Catch you next time.

Tips for coping with reality

Now that I live in my car, I'm a new person. It's as if all the years of art school, business school, teaching, editing, taking care of my mother are artifacts of someone else's life. Who am I now? That's always a useful question to ask, if you want to do a reset in the here and now. I'm not normally interested in being in the here and now (as if I had a choice), but as a seeker, I always enjoy figuring out how to reframe my current situation so it doesn't make me insane.

I still have moments of surreality. The sordid necessities of living in a vehicle tend to outshout my curiosity about understanding it. Worries such as, do I have enough trash bags, water, wipes, and alcohol take over worries about more esoteric considerations (like who am I? Where did I come from, and how soon can I go back?). Mostly, I've come to accept my strange lifestyle. (I know you are going to say, Carol, shelter solutions exist: you can always share housing, get a [real] job, marry a rich person, win the lottery, move to another country . . . any number of possibilities, so quitcher whining.) I will not give your comment any energy by responding, except to say, where did you come from and how soon can you leave?

I hope vehicle dwelling is temporary, but I know it's real. 

Right now, I'm parked on Bureau of Land Management land outside of the town of Quartzsite. You might wonder, why there, Carol? Thanks for asking. Quartzsite is the winter roost for vanlifers, who drive many miles to escape the snow, ice, and cold rain back at home. The winter gathering started a few days ago and will run through the week. I'm not a very social person, but I do enjoy being around other people who are doing the exact thing I'm doing: living in a vehicle. Some are in fancy motorhomes and travel trailers, some are in posh sprinter vans, many are in minivans, and I even saw one intrepid nomad who lives in her Smart Car. I'm going to stop complaining about my lack of space. Compared to that car, I live in a mansion. 

The main thing I like is that nobody here thinks I'm weird, bad, or wrong. In fact, everyone here supports, applauds, and celebrates this nomadic lifestyle. Some are part-timers, some are full-timers, but we all have one thing in common: We live life on wheels. 

I'm a helping person, so in case you are thinking about downsizing into a home on wheels, here are a few tips. 

• If you use something, put it back right away. Odds are, if you put it down somewhere, you will never find it again. If you lose something, check where it's supposed to be (and check again, no, I mean, really check). If it's not there, check the trash. Check under your blankets. Check the space between your mattress and the wall. If you don't find it, you either dropped it at Walmart or you're sitting on it.
• Resign yourself to the idea that you will buy things repeatedly because (a) you forgot you already bought it or (b) you forgot where you put it. 
• Don't be alarmed if sometimes you just sit there, wondering what to do next. 
• If you cook with a portable gas stove, stand upwind, use a wind screen, and don't spray water on hot olive oil if you want to keep your eyebrows. 
• Give some serious thought to the question, how many pillows do I really need?
• Expect to pay three to four times as much as you should have spent on your build as you come to accept how little you really need to have a healthy useful mobile life. Get used to going to Goodwill. You won't have time or space to sell your castoffs on eBay. 
• Get more trash bags, wipes, and paper towels than you think you could possibly need. You will need them. And dump your trash quickly and often, or be prepared to smell poop all night.

There you have it. My tips on surviving life on wheels. Yes, there are constraints to living in a small space, but the upside is if you don't like where you are, you can drive away. Of course, wherever you go, there you are, but that's a different post.

Hope your new year is off to a good start.

Cheers from the Hellish Handbasket.