Wednesday, February 27, 2013

Traveling.

          Not only is living in a van just about the most inexpensive form of housing but it's also the cheapest and most comfortable way to travel. Let me explain. Van's are known to get terrible gas milage so it's definitely more expensive in the fuel department, but the amount of money you save by not getting a hotel every night makes it a wash. Van's also kill it when compared to a tent. No wind concerns and far better insulation. I was lucky enough to have a built-in functional propane heater already installed in the van when I bought it. As far as more comfortable, think about it for a moment. You can't compare sleeping in your van to sleeping in a hotel. You have to compare sleeping in a hotel to sleeping in a van you live in. When you're living in your van you probably have the comfy matress situation dialed in and there's nothing like sleeping in your own bed. My van was a 1984 Chevy Camper van I bought for two grand. The mattress was kinda weak so I installed a piece of memory foam I had found behind a dumpster and cut it down to the exact dimensions.
          The foam was certainly a score, it was in a zipper sheet and had no oder or stains and was obviously placed behind the dumpster and not in it because whoever threw it away knew someone could use it. I still washed it out and let it dry on my roof for a day. Rachel and I had just biked 50 miles and in the last mile I got a flat tire so I was walking my bike and spotted it. Even in my fatigue I scooped it up and carried it home (home being the van of course). A good deal is a good deal no matter how small, which brings me to my next tip about traveling cheaply…
          Take advantage of Casinos. No really, don't wager any of your own money and walk out the door with cash you didn't have when you entered, every time. This is a trick I picked up while hitchhiking with one of my good friends who has hitchhiked across the US several times. This particular time, I joined him to Ukiah, California (from Portland) where he was going to work on a Marijuana farm for a month or two. Once in Ukiah I returned to Portland solo and continued to make money at casinos whenever I had the chance, which wasn't a lot because I would be sacrificing my ride if I asked them to drop me off at a Casino. One time I was catching a ride with some hippie kids who had no money and had there own resourceful trick for navigating their van along the coast. They would pull into a gas station and one of them would walk around the parking lot with a giant empty gas can and ask people as they pulled up if they could squirt a dollar or two in their can after they pumped their gas. It usually took them about a half an hour to get a full can. I liked it because when compared to just standing there begging with a cardboard sign it's clear where the person's charity will go towards, it's easier then pulling out a wallet, the perspective gas pumper is already spending a likely $40 or so, and it just get's simple clever points which always makes people smile. Personally, I like to avoid asking for people's charity no matter how clever the plan so I'll leave that strategy for my friendly van dwelling travelers.
          So where were we, Oh yes! Stealing money from Casinos. No just kidding, actually the "trick" is completely legal and more of an exercise in self control than anything. Here's how it works: Not all, but about 95% of Casinos that are peppered throughout the United States give you anywhere from $5 to $20 in promotional slot play for signing up for a "players club" or "rewards club" card. All you have to have is a valid ID. Just walk in, find the counter that says something to do with a club and tell them you'd like a card. First they'll ask if your address is still correct, and you have a couple options here. You can give them a bogus address to avoid junk mail or you can simply ask them to put you on the "no mail list" and that solves the junk mail issue just as well. Next they will hand you the card and explain how to get the free money to play with. Pay attention here because this part is always different from casino to casino. Sometimes they just tell you to put your card in a machine and instructions on how to transfer the promotional money to your card. Sometimes you have to put in a dollar of your own before you get the $20 in promo spins but this is fine because it's almost a guarantee that you'll make that dollar back in wins with 21 spins betting a dollar a spin. Everyone with me so far? Here's the catch. You have to play. You can't just cash out the $20, the cash out stub will say "promo" on it. Once you play the $20 worth of spins then you can cash out whatever you won during that time - or you can keep playing which is what they hope you'll do. The #1 rule to the casino trick is to cash out at this point even if you have only won three dollars because once it's real money, then it's yours and you're not there to gamble, your there to win and leave. It get's tricky because as you win a dollar here and there a lot of times there's no distinction between the real and fake money total on your machine and it's easy to just keep betting and not realize you're betting money you won and are past the promo dollars. The best way to avoid this is to set it up so that it bets a dollar a spin, count your spins and spin it for however many dollars you got in promo money. I got used to just finding machines that allowed you to bet 20 lines for 5 cents a line each spin (20x.5 = $1.00).
          One time when Rachel and I were doing this, the Casino just gave us each a ten dollar bill for signing up….so we left- twenty dollars richer than we were when we walked in having not wagered a cent. It all sounds like small potatoes for a lot of work and possibly not worth it based on the odds of winning at a casino being very low but consider this: When Rachel and I did this while driving from Seattle to New York we stopped at 20 Casinos, spent a maximum of 10 minutes at each one and ended with a combined total of $1,342 -and two free buffets. Granted, we hit a couple of good jackpots to get us there, but if you add it all up that's about 500 spins at a dollar a spin in total and odds are you'll hit something big in that many tries. Slot machines are rigged so you'll lose over time but the odds of winning at them are a lot higher than say lottery tickets. That's why you never see a bus full of senior citizens pull up to a gas station and have them all run in there to buy a ton of scratch-offs. The other catch is that you can only do this once at every casino you go to because the promotion is for new members only and they take down your ID. However, do a Google search for casinos in the United States and you'll see that excluding Vegas, there are literally thousands of them with locations in almost every state.
          Once we went to a Casino and it was one that only gave you the free money after you played at least $20 of your own. Since that was going against our rules we began to walk out. I think Rachel asked one more time if there was anything free we could get and the lady's eyes lit up and she said "Oh, well yes there is actually. There's a free slot tournament going on right now. It ends in ten minutes so if you hurry you might get to play". We raced over to where she was talking about and there was a crowd surrounding a group of slot machines that were cycling people through every five minutes. Basically, it was a promotional event that the casino put on to get people excited about gambling. There were over 600 participants and the top twenty got paid one or two hundred dollars with the first place winner getting a thousand dollars and like I said, free to enter. A relatively low cost for the house but really exciting for everyone there. Rachel and I entered and did what everyone else did and hit that bet button as fast as I could for five minutes during our round and amazingly I placed 1st and Rachel placed 2nd (for that round). When everything was all tallied up ten minutes later I ended up placing twentieth overall which earned me a crisp one hundred dollar bill, then we left.
          There's a few more hoops here and there because every casino is different but you'll get the hang of it fast, and above all- it's fun! Just remember to resist the temptation to keep betting once your promo dollars are up -even if you've only made a couple dollars, and that's really the hardest part. If you don't pay for hotels every night, ate cheaply, and did this trick along the way, It's very possible to drive five states away end the trip with more money than you started with. Even with stiff gas prices.
          Another method I frequently used to cut down on the gas bill is taking on "rideshares" from Craigslist postings. In case you are unaware of what a rideshare is, it's a section of Craigslist under "Community" where people post where they want to catch a ride to, or where they are driving to, and how any seats they have available. It's very cut and dry with the price for the ride almost always stated in the ad along with a phone number for quick organization. It's a fantastic system, way cheaper than bus or train and far safer than hitchhiking for both parties involved. If my friend Jesse were writing this blog (the same Jesse in the Pirate Mike story) he would suggest you ask for their weight as well. He once had two women agree over the phone to each pay $15 for a ride to Portland From Seattle. Jesse had two seats still open in his modest sedan and when he showed up to pick them up, he discovered they each weighed around 400 lbs. Once they squeezed into his car the wheel well was less than an inch from the tires and whenever they went over a bump it screwed up his alignment. I could go a lot further into that story but I'm going to stop myself before I write something too offensive. Let's just say I don't feel as bad for Jesse as I do for the guy he had picked up a stop before that was in the middle.       Despite a few isolated horror stories, I've used rideshares hundreds of times over the last ten years, either catching them or providing them. When traveling in a van the squishing problem is almost nonexistent because vans usually have so much more space. Most of the time my trips to Seattle from Portland had the gas bill 100% covered by the rideshares I arranged the night before. I'm happy and they're happy because they get an affordable ride. I always go the extra mile and drop them each off at their desired location as does almost every rideshare I've hopped on in the past. The reason it's safer than hitchhiking is mainly because the very few dangerous people hitching out there are the ones with no money, no computer, and no phone -three things you must have to participate in the rideshare program.         
          One last tip I can think of concerning traveling is dumpster diving. You've heard it before and what it comes down to is there are people who are willing to take the plunge and people who aren't. To be honest I've only done this on a couple trips in my life but it's worth mentioning especially if your venture is inspired by "Into the Wild" and you burned all your money before setting forth. I ask of you to indulge me for a moment and hear my own personal spin/rational on it and maybe you might change your opinion.
          First of all, it's hard to eat healthy and/or cheap while traveling. Gas station food usually doesn't even pass for food and restaurants are expensive plus you have to tip. Grocery stores are good but your still spending money. When I travel, I usually go to a co-op before I begin my trip and buy a large sack of bulk hummus powder, one that involves mixing with cold water only. Hummus is good with almost any vegetable, an excellent source of protein, you don't have to heat it up, and very inexpensive when bought in powder form (especially since it expands a lot when mixed with water). Along with the sack of hummus powder I also bring a small cutting board, and a knife. Then I look for a dumpster that's not locked. The best odds here are health food stores. This tip works very well when traveling up and down the west coast because almost every little town along highway 101 has a Co-op that does not lock their dumpster.
          So isn't it gross and possibly dangerous to be eating old food out of a dumpster? Well that all depends on the dumpster and the time of day. It's important to consider why the food is being thrown away. Most things are good a few weeks past their expiration date but produce isn't even thrown away for being expired. The way it works is a grocery store gets a delivery of vegetables every few days, so when they do, everything out that is not sold gets thrown away to make room for the newer fresher ones regardless of how old it is because why wouldn't they always be trying to push the freshest stuff they have? Maybe Carrots just weren't big sellers that week. If your lucky, which can happen quite often, all the recently discarded produce will be sitting on top of the pile. When I see this, I'll simply take what I want of the very top, inspect it, rinse it, then cut up whatever I found into little tiny chunks. I add the hummus and I have a dense, fresh salad that's better tasting than anything you could get at a fast food stop and because it's not cooked it's about as vitamin rich as a meal can get. I'm feeling great, full of healthy energy, not a dollar poorer, and I'm back on the road! For this post I'll leave you with a silly video Rachel and I made one morning after waking up in the van.
     

Monday, February 25, 2013

The Story of Pirate Mike.


          Normally I would change the name of the person in the story to avoid any problems down the line but in this case I'm quite certain that "Mike" was never his real name to begin with. I've told this story so many times that "The Story of Pirate Mike" has now taken root in Portland house party folklore and the details have already come back to me skewed and blown out of proportion. So here it is, The Story of Pirate Mike; the second time in my life I had to reckon with a real pirate (The first is the story of Pirate…. we'll say "Jones" and it's one where I came a lot closer to death but I'll save that for another blog entry).
          Our story begins at about nine PM on a street in Portland just outside of a production studio I shared with a few other guys. I had recently been given the keys and the responsibility of locking it up at night if I were the last to leave. My good friend Jesse was visiting from Seattle and we were having a couple beers at my office. We stepped out for one last cigarette and began a conversation about how delightfully unique Portland was. I explained how it wasn't uncommon to see a group of ninjas singing show tunes in perfect harmonies, pushing each other in shopping carts fly past you while you walk to the grocery store. Portland is a town where the not-normal is normal. fittingly, the proof appeared right before our eyes as the conversation came to a close when a man dressed as a pirate limped around the corner and began coming our way. As he got closer I could see that this was no ordinary pirate costume, this man was high-budget-movie caliber pirate. Everything from the gold emblem clipped to his three point hat to his cufflinks was authentic pirate garb. I should mention also that he appeared to be about 35 years old, a relatively young swashbuckler.
          "Ahoy" he said which didn't surprise us. We both said "hi" back just enthusiastic enough to indicate that we were willing to talk to him. I could smell his breath by this point and he was definitely drunk, but he was coherent enough to hold a conversation. So that, plus our curiosity to what pirate themed event he had just come from prompted a conversation. Jesse was probing him with very direct questions as he often does and we discovered quickly that there was no pirate themed anything around town that caused him to dress the way he did rather he was simply "Pirate Mike". He explained without hesitation that he has a boring job where he has to wear boring clothes and do boring things all day. So in the evenings he dresses like a pirate to entertain himself and others wherever he gets drunk or something like that, it wasn't completely clear.
          "Right now, I'm working on my pirate limp" he said which accounted for the way he walked up to us. He then produced a six pack of beer from a sack he was carrying and asked if we wanted to share it with him. He was very friendly at this point and intriguing to say the least so we agreed. That was certainly my first mistake. I invited him in. That was most definitely my second one. Over the next hour Jesse, Pirate Mike, and I ended up having a host of belly laughs as we exchanged funny videos we knew about on Youtube. Pirate Mike introduced me to "The Gathering of the Juggalos" videos which to this day I am quite fond of. Jesse had already stayed later than he had planned and it was time for him to leave for real so we all went outside for one more cigarette, shook hands, and off he went. Pirate Mike said he had to go as well and asked asked where the "pisser" was on his way out. Even though Pirate Mike had gained my trust for the most part, I was still nervous about sending him through the office among the expensive gear. I sent him to the main entrance of the building so he could bypass the office and go right to the bathroom which was shared by multiple offices instead.
          He Limped around the corner to where that door was and returned a second later to yell to me that the door was locked. Of course! After nine PM the janitor locks that door so I told him the four digit code to open it. I went back inside and moments later heard a knock on the door. It was Pirate Mike of course and he asked if he could wait inside with me while he waited for his cab to show up. I didn't see a problem with it. I had sized him up earlier and decided if it came down to it, I could probably take him alone if I had to. I must emphasize that Mike was officially my buddy at this point in the night, he was a fun, fascinating man. I truly liked the guy.
          "Well my cab should be here any minute, I'm going to go wait for it out on the street now, I gotta use the pisser one more time. Would it be alright if I just left out that door I came in earlier?" he asked.
          "Sure" I replied and escorted him through the office and into the public hallway. We said our pirate goodbyes with an "Arg!" and off he went. I sat down and thought about what had just happened and it occurred to me that his exit plan was a tad too complicated but I couldn't figure out what could possibly go wrong. I never took my eye off him while he was in the office. Then it hit me. The "public" hallway at this building doubled as an art gallery for local artists. There were large paintings hung on the wall that would rotate every few months. Although the works were slightly below mediocre at best, the typical price tag was about $500 a piece. I dashed out into the hallway and sure enough, a painting that was about 4 feet by 5 feet large was gone. My heart went up in my throat. Pirate Mike ripped off the painting and here I was on the security camera starring at the blank space at midnight five minutes after he pulled it off the wall. I'm implicated for sure. I'm going to loose this office, My life is ruined. Ok, Ok, he was on foot- but he caught a cab! - but the painting was too big to fit in a cab - there never was a cab, it was all a decoy- he was walking east when we met him- that must be the direction to where he lives - it's only been five minutes he couldn't have gotten far, not with a giant painting at least. I ran east. Sure as Davey Jones' Locker, five blocks away I came across a sea faring thief skipping down the street without a limp holding a man sized painting of a woman breast feeding.
          "Pirate Mike, stop!" I shouted. He turned around and when he saw me he hung his head.
          I caught up to him and carefully pitched my case, "Hey Mike, I'm not going to call the cops, let's just put that painting back and forget about all this." He hesitated and replied,
          "look man, I made sure not to rip you off. I like you, but I'm a pirate ya know? I gotta pirate wherever I go. It's my way. The painting isn't yours how could you get in trouble for it?" he drunkenly questioned.
          I told him about the security cameras and how I'm going to be linked to it no matter what. He saw my point of view and reluctantly walked back with me and hung the painting back on the wall. He apologized for his inebriated logic and eventually told me he was glad that I caught him. In fact our conversation went so well that we ended up going to a bar and exchanged several stories of stupid shit we had each done while drunk. Now we really had bonded, I think he even teared up a little at one point.
          Two AM rolled around, the bar closed, we said our final goodbyes, and I started walking back to the office to sober up before my drive home. I should mention that this was a month or two before I lived in the van, I had an old Buick and an apartment up the street. When I got back to the office I sat down, watched a few more Youtube vids and reflected on the crazy night. It occurred to me that when I saw Mike walking home I had looked way down the street and noticed he made a left turn a block earlier than where I had caught up to him the first time. I thought for a second to myself; there's no way he would come back here because he didn't know that I was going back to the office. I would have seen or heard him or….Oh shit. The code. Way earlier in the night I had told him that damn door code. At this point I was adding up all the mistakes I had made throughout the night and had the feeling that I probably deserved everything that was happening. I dashed into the hallway. As I feared, the painting was gone again. My heart did the jumpy thing again but this time it burned a little hotter when I swallowed. Now I was really mad. I didn't like Pirate Mike at all anymore. I began to really panic this time, knowing there's no way he was going to let himself get caught twice. he surely went a different direction with a better plan, and even more time had passed this round. He had won.
          But wait! we had exchanged numbers back when we were friends earlier in the night. Could he have been clever enough to give me a fake number? Why would he even answer if it was his actual number? With no other plans on deck, I dialed it and waited. To my great surprise he answered. But of course he did! Just like the stupid costume, this is all part of the fun for him. I can't remember everything we talked about but the conversation lasted about a half an hour, the whole while he denied having the painting. I tried everything. I tried pleading, I tried threatening him, I tried offering him money, all I knew was that as long as I had him on the line I had a chance. Once he hangs up, that would be the final nail in the coffin. I knew and he knew that I wasn't going to call the cops. If I had, then everyone at the office would have found out all the mistakes I had made regardless if they caught him or not, and things would have been bad for me. I needed that painting back. It also helped that he was significantly drunk by now and maybe he would slip up and reveal something indicating his location. After a half an hour we began yelling at each other and it happened. He said something like,
          "Look man! I'm sorry your fuckin painting is gone but I don't have it! I'm just standin' outside a 7-11 in the cold waiting for my fuckin cab to show up so I can go home and pass out!" I cussed him out one last time and hung up. I thought about the three 7-11s that were within two miles from my office. I hopped in my car and drove to the closest one. I was putting it all together. The reason he's still waiting for a cab 45 minutes after he left was because he had to order one of those van cabs special so he could fit that damn painting of the breast feeding woman in there. I sped up the street in my old Buick and around the corner to the 7-11 parking lot and Aaaaaaaah! there he was sliding the painting into a van cab at that very second! I screeched my tires to a stop pinning the cab into the lot, almost hitting him and jumped out of the car. As soon as he saw me, he let go of the painting and ran away as fast as his pirate boots could carry him. The cab driver started yelling.
          "No it's ok!", I yelled back at the cab driver, "I need that painting delivered back to my office. That pirate just stole it from me and I just caught him". Two drunk guys standing about twenty feet away who saw the whole thing just started laughing hard. The bewildered cab driver calmed down after I gave him some money and agreed to follow me back to my office where I hung the painting back on the wall. On my way home I got a call from Pirate Mike. In a calm voice he said,
          "Touche. It's not often I'm out pirated. You did a fine job lad. I left my hat in your office, I guess I'm not getting that back" he probed.
          "You are correct sir" I replied, "Now that I have the painting back, I have to admit it was quite the memorable night, I will say this; I do not wish to be friends with you Pirate Mike but if I see you around town you don't need to worry about me trying to kick your ass or anything, but that's only because I got the painting back. Your lucky". He told me that that was very noble of me and hung up. That was the last I ever saw or heard of Pirate Mike. The painting was undamaged and no one ever found out. I later told this story at a monthly open mic at someone's house and gave the hat to the host who still wears it while introducing the next performer every month.      

Sunday, February 24, 2013

The Van Life.


          First off, allow me to introduce myself; My name is Jon Meyer. I am a filmmaker from the Northwest. I've lived in Seattle, Washington and Portland, Oregon for most of my life. A couple of years ago I achieved my dream of making films for a living largely in part by making the decision to live in a van. Living in the van not only helped me to achieve this goal but helped me to realize that I had achieved this goal. The "van life" as I call it, provides a constant daily reminder to what is actually important in life and that the amount of money you have is not a scale to how successful you are, or should I say that the term "successful" is not defined by how much money you have but how efficiently you use it. If you have no money and still make a film you are successful.
          When I was young my father used to say to me, "Find something you enjoy doing for work and never work again". I thought I fully understood what he meant but now I have an expanded interpretation of it. Before I knew I wanted to be a filmmaker I pictured a scientist working on an exciting new formula that would explain how stars blew up and then collect his paycheck at the end of the day, go home to his mansion (because he's a badass scientist of course) and continue to work on his stars project with a huge smile on his face. Now I see the same thing applied to filmmaking only the paycheck only shows up about one third of the time and as long as I'm not hungry or cold and not working a dumb job where I stare at the clock my whole shift then the saying applies. When you spend a lot of time at a job you don't like then there is time of your life that you don't like. I don't like that. Life should be enjoyable no matter if you are rich or poor. you're only the age you are at that time once in your life, might as well not hate it. It sounds like an oversimplification -and it is, but that's exactly what you need to do sometimes to see what's happening to you, oversimplify your situation. Are you satisfied? Are you happy? or are you waiting to be satisfied and happy?           Throughout my childhood and into my adult life I saw a pattern among people around me; as soon as they made more money, they spent more of it and were always struggling. Seeing this, I decided that I would make it a goal that as soon as I made more money I would just keep spending the way I had before and thus always be ahead. Well, easier said than done. My problem wasn't the lack of self control in my spending but rather I just couldn't figure out how to make more money. So I decided to spend even less than I already did and that involved a few serious sacrifices.
          When I first started networking around Portland in 2009 with other people in the film community I learned an important lesson early on; there are many people who want to make films for a living and aren't able to land enough paying gigs consistently enough to pay their bills so they end up being categorized as hobby filmmakers because of two reasons: #1, They have a job they hate that has nothing to do with filmmaking that takes up much more time than they have to make films. #2, their films aren't any good because they have a job they hate that takes up all their time that has nothing to do with making films.
          At that time in my life, I had a job at a doggy day care and directed a comedy web series on the weekends. I was definitely one of these people who sit around at the bar complaining about the lack of good paying film related jobs around town while losing sleep at night full of self doubt to whether I could even cut it if such an opportunity were to present itself to me. How could I gain experience if I'm at my job all day? I could do it on the weekends and slowly get better little by little but that's what the competition does and there's a lot of competition. Everyone I talked to seemed to be waiting for a large sum of money to be invested in them somehow so they could plummet themselves into a project and quit their job. I didn't have any leads to such an event and like I mentioned before, how would I know what to do with the money even if I got it? I already cut down most of my living expenses to almost nothing because the Doggy daycare payed minimum wage but there was one big one that still haunted me at the end of every month: rent. The thought of living in a van to avoid this bill began weighing heavily on my mind. As I began to think more seriously about it, all the logistical problems of making the change in lifestyle began to present themselves one by one. 
          Problem #1: what was I going to do with all my stuff? Answer; sell whatever I can, give away whatever I can, throw away the rest, and never look back. I think back now and I can't even remember what took up space in my old apartment although at the time it seemed very hard to part with a lot of my possessions. I think I had an orange chair I really liked. Who cares about an orange chair? I don't anymore. 
          Problem #2: Where would I shit and shower? (Peeing is easy, there's bushes everywhere). Answer: Gym membership. Yes, it's adding a bill when I'm trying to eliminate them but $35 a month is nothing compared to renting even the cheapest apartment and as a bonus you get a gym! There were times when I reflected on this "bonus" as I stepped out of the Jacuzzi and walked over to the sauna after explaining to my worried mom over the phone how I was able to get through the cold winter living in a van. I chose 24 hour fitness mainly because it was open 24 hours, it also happened to be the cheapest one in town and had the most locations. Of course the gym membership isn't the only place to take a shit at 3 am, there's always gas stations and Subway.
          Problem #3 How will I eat? Food is a tough one. Living in Portland certainly made this easier as there are healthy options for very cheap at local restaurants around town. The trick here is to find the real deals and exploit them. Happy hours, Burritos, a good breakfast sandwich at a coffee stand, are great things to have over and over again to get full for three to four dollars a meal. I didn't go out for every meal. I kept a lot of snacks in the van and had my handy propane camping stove. One pot, one pan, one plate, you get the idea. There's a lot you can do with a little camping stove. The hardest part was cleaning up because water was usually in limited supply. I learned how to wash a dish with hardly any water in the dark. I never had to worry about getting rained on when I did dishes because I learned that if I put the dirty pan and dish on the roof when it was raining, by the morning I'd just dump the water off and they were clean. Thanks Mother Nature, you're my dish bitch. 
          Problem #4 Where do I Park? If you're lucky you have a friend's house with a level driveway who's really cool. I was not so fortunate, besides that's not really living in a van, that's living in a van parked in your friend's driveway. Completely different. One is bold and free the other makes you a cheap mooch. So where was I? Ah yes, "Where am I?" That was the question I found myself asking myself almost every morning. See, the trick to sustaining the van life is to find a new place to park every night. You don't want to wear out your welcome anywhere because after all, it is in fact illegal to sleep in your van parked on city streets. Cops are not something you want to deal with because they will eventually start to remember what your van looks like and then you're really screwed. Worse yet, you'll get a note on your door like the one I got once. I guess I should mention now so my stories make more sense that my girlfriend and fellow filmmaker; Rachel eventually moved into the van with me (which is a whole new blog post about how that works). Rachel and I had the van parked in the same location in a neighborhood for about a week once because we were saving to fix the broken transmission when we got a note on the door. It said "It's time to move on or we'll make you wish you did". A little ambiguous, kinda threatening, definitely not friendly. We pushed the van down the street and around the corner which was not easy and it didn't entirely solve the problem. When the van was running fine (which was most of the time) we moved it every night. We eventually made a mental list of some good spots that were out of the way in industrial Portland or on a street that had houses on only one side for some reason, but even then we kept them in rotation. My favorite spot was overlooking a bluff into a nature preserve with the city skyline just beyond. It wasn't far from a great cheap breakfast place and we never got hassled- I like to think largely because we stuck to our rule and didn't over use it.
          Those are the big four problems to overcome. The list of unique things you have to deal with when living in a van goes on and on but that's why this won't be the only entry into this blog. As you can see, "the life" is not for everyone but it's one that at the end of the day when your full and cozy, you feel quite accomplished. That feeling is something I've grown to treasure greatly because those are things I had previously taken for granted or even entitled to. I'll leave you with a music video I directed for the band "Whalebones" which features the very van Rachel and I lived in. I feel of all the videos that we shot that included the van, this one captures the spirit of "the life" the most which is to me complete and joyous freedom, and like the lyrics, an intentional oversimplification.                

Preface.

          Welcome to my blog. "Live in a Van" is not only the name of my blog but the title of my future book. I've decided to write the entire book as entries into this blog over the next couple of years because the concept is more of a collection of stories than a single plot. Once I feel I have enough content, I'll reexamine everything, edit it down to just the best pieces, and most likely rewrite them as I assume I will be a much better writer by the time I do this. So please comment on anything you read here, just know that I'm aware that the grammar may not be perfect (run on sentences are my biggest problem) but that should all clear up later. The feedback I'm looking for most is which stories are stronger than others and why. The structure will be a collection of short stories about living in a van that includes tips for possible future van dwellers and also anecdotal stories from my past. These stories will usually have nothing to do with living in a van but should provide some insight to what experiences helped shape who I am and why I chose the path I have. Thank you for chillin' out the internet ADD and taking the time to read, I hope you enjoy it and maybe even find something I've written useful.