Fishing in the Bearing Sea.

          One of the two times I blacked out and collapsed from pain was while working on a boat adrift in the Bearing Sea about 200 miles from Alaska. Dutch Harbor, located way out on the Aleutian Chain was our docking point where every 9-15 days we would offload millions of dollars worth of Mcdonald's fish fillets (Pollock). I did this work in 16 hour shifts, seven days a week, with the speed at which I worked dictated by a conveyor belt while rocking back and forth to the raging ocean.
          Our story begins while I was scrubbing off menstrual blood that homeless women would smear on the walls of the Denny's bathroom at 3am. I found myself heavily considering what my cousin Joel had told me hours earlier. Joel had just informed me that he was about to get on a boat headed for the Bearing Sea, work real hard, and make a bunch of money. He didn't sugar coat it and was clear that the kind of work he was referring to was considered some of the most grueling in the world. I knew my back was prone to pain, but my situation in life at that time was comprised of conditions that I couldn't sustain another week of. Pulling the night shift at Denny's for minimum wage was my "escape" from the crazy house I lived in that had random people partying in my room at 7am when I got off work each morning. I once returned to my room to find my closet absolutely drenched in fresh puke, I was reassured that the culprit got "his hair yanked out" for doing it. I didn't ask questions. Working endless hours in Alaska seemed like a pleasure cruise, so I put down my mop and went to the office in downtown Seattle to sign up. They had me fill out a novel sized packet of paperwork and put me in a room by myself with a TV in it to show me a video. The video wasn't like the cheesy, poorly produced instructional videos on how to clean out the fryer with a smile. It was a very serious in tone collection of testimonials about how real and hard the work is that I was about to commit to. I was impressed, a little scared, and more excited than ever.
           The boat was scheduled to leave in a day so all the positions were already filled. They told me that I was being put on the reserve list and that if anyone decided they couldn't make the trip in the next 24 hours, they'd call me. I went home, sat on my bed, and waited with the phone in my hand. The hours ticked by, the boat was leaving port in less than two hours and the woman at the office finally called. Unfortunately, she was calling to tell me that no one had backed out and maybe there would be room in five months. I collapsed on my bed and just stared at the ceiling. I couldn't stand it so I packed my things and drove to the dock. I marched down the pier and stopped at the ramp that led up to the boat and informed the guy at the top that if for any reason someone couldn't make it that I'd be right here. He thanked me but told me that everyone was already there (a crew of 100 people or so) and to please go home. I stayed. Hours went by and the sun had long gone down. The moment came where the last person was done loading on supplies for the journey and on board.
          Right before they pulled up the ramp, I noticed the entire crew had formed into a congested line on the deck. Moments later they began marching down the ramp silently. Everyone emptied onto the dock where they stood in groups and began murmuring to each other. I noticed my cousin and his friend Jordan and ran over to them. Joel clued me in that they were undergoing a surprise drug scan then pointed to a couple of cops holding the leashes of two German Shepherds walking up the pier. They boarded the boat and searched it for about an hour while we stood there in the dark. Once they came off, they singled out three men that were standing away from the rest of us as if they already knew their fate would not be escaped. Everyone else were waved back onto the boat by the captain who then walked up to me and with an approving nod indicated that I board the boat as well. I learned my first important life lesson of my Alaskan fishing experience at that moment. I was proud of myself for ignoring the woman in the office, then the man on the dock who told me I was not going to Alaska. I've applied this principal of determination to a number of subsequent events in my life and almost always have ended up beating the perceived odds.
          A lot of the events that I can remember well from this voyage occurred in the first seven days. That is because there was no work during that time, that's how long it took the big boat to get to the bearing sea where the large schools of fish were. There wasn't much space on the boat for hanging out, most of it was full of complex metallic machinery. It was a processing boat, that means not only was the boat equipped for catching the fish but also for cleaning the fish, sorting them into perfectly weighed out boxes of fillets, and flash freezing them to be ready for delivery. Let's talk about this last step first because it was what I learned about first. The ship was 253 feet long and built into six levels. the top level is the wheelhouse where the captain and four other officers control the boat. The next level is the Galley (where the kitchen is) and a few sleeping quarters. The floor below that is the rest of the sleeping quarters and below that is the two floors of processing where 90% of the workers on board will spend 90% of their waking hours moving fish around on a conveyor belt. The lowest level and the largest was the freezer. It was about two stories high and kept at a temperature of negative 35 degrees fahrenheit so the fish would freeze as fast as possible (flash freezing). This method ensures the freshness of the catch and makes the product more valuable. Before going into the freezer on the boat, the coldest temperature I had ever experienced was 8 degrees on the coldest day I ever snowboarded. That day on the mountain was so cold that most people went home. I was only able to keep riding because I had a large furry hat that covered all of my face with my goggles on. Negative 35 is a whole new level. The few guys who worked down there wore these crazy blue suits called freezer suits that made them look like a cross between an astronaut and someone who cleans up after a nuclear disaster. Even though they always wore the suits, through red snotty faces they complained of being too cold at every meal. One day on our way to the Bearing Sea a group of us were selected to go assist the freezer crew for an hour to help organize something, I can't remember what exactly. What I do remember was I didn't last very long down there. The extra help that included me were told to layer up with everything we could fit on because they didn't have extra freezer suits. I felt like I was lucky because I brought my snowboarding jacket with me. I layered up and climbed down the ladder and the second I crawled through the hatch it hit me. First all the moisture you have anywhere instantly freezes with a crackling noise. My nose suddenly sealed shut because all my snot was now ice. Breathing was difficult because each breath in would freeze the inside of my mouth and then unfreeze with each exhale. Even my eye lids would freeze to my eyeball between blinks so every time I blinked I would hear a tiny crack. Once down the 30 or so foot ladder I realized that no matter how tough I thought I was, I was completely useless because I couldn't feel my hands under my thick gloves. I told someone and they instructed me to get out. I began climbing the ladder which I quickly found out was pretty hard without hands. I began to pull myself up by putting my whole arm into each rung, bending my forearm over each bar, and lifting myself up with my feet. It was difficult and painful but it worked. Needless to say, I never wandered into the freezer again.
          Most of the crew complained of the boredom they were experiencing during the first seven days. I couldn't really blame them, after all, they weren't getting paid for it and the ship isn't exactly designed for leisure. I on the other hand, was loving reading books while looking out the window which for most of the trip was the stunning Alaskan and Canadian coast with enormous glacier cliffs meeting the ocean.
          One of the days I spent a few hours carving the likeness of the boat we were on out of a bar of soap. I showed it off during lunch and people were quite impressed. Later I made a snowman out of three balls of earwax rolled in dandruff. Joel and Jordan were the only ones I showed that masterpiece to who told me that it was unfortunate that the boat didn't have a psychiatric ward.       
          Occasionally there were reminders that caught me by surprise as to where I actually was. Once I was walking to my room and passed an open door to another one and saw five or so Filipino guys watching porn together. I didn't hang around long enough to see what else they were doing in there. There were all walks of life on the boat from ex-convicts to foreigners who were making enough to support their whole extended family for the next year. I guess I shouldn't say "foreigners" as if I wasn't one myself. When the vessel your on is no more than 10% any one race and you're bobbing around in the middle of the Pacific ocean, everyone's a foreigner. Needless to say, most did not speak English well or at all.    
          I made good friends with a very positive Mexican named Alejandro that slept in the bunk below me. He was always smiling no matter if he was in his 15th hour of his shift, or resting in his bunk. He once got real excited and showed me a new Led Zeppelin CD that he had unopened in his bag. I communicated that I loved Zeppelin as well. We hummed a few riffs together from "Black Dog" and made a great connection. Later I watched him open it up and listen to it. He frustratingly cycled through the songs and ten minutes later took it out and put a different disc in. This was very confusing to me, why did his new Zeppelin CD not deliver? Especially since he was in such a good mood all the time already? I thought about it for a while and days later I got a closer look at the disc and discovered it was a two disc set of an interview with the band. Not exactly the best album for a fan who doesn't speak English.
           Joel, Jordan, and I met an interesting guy named Brian. Brian was full of crazy stories about his life and he told them like he was bored out of his mind. Occasionally he would end a story in the same bored tone with an apology; that he was sorry but the whole story he just said was a lie. At first we would laugh real hard because his stories were so detailed and praised him for his creativity. A few dozen stories later Jordan asked him if anything he said at all was true. Brian shook his head in defeat and without changing his tone confessed that he was a pathological liar and that his repressed Mormon upbringing was to blame for it. After this awkward revelation, Joel and Jordan began talking to him less for fear that they were just being lied to, which they undoubtedly were. I felt bad for Brian's condition and just decided to play along when he talked and found that it was better to keep him close than to hear the rumors he started through a third party instead. For instance, he once started telling people that the boat was being turned around because they picked up a dead body in the nets. Knowing it came from Brian I was one of the few that wasn't asking a million questions in the galley during lunch that day.
          Seven days of leisure finally came to a halt and it was announced one morning that a large school of fish had been located and that processing would begin immediately. My Alaskan adventure changed considerably that morning. I went from having the most relaxing stretch of days I had had in years, to the longest shift I'd ever worked, only to get up and do it again the next day and the day after that. Three half hour breaks were scheduled in each day but it took ten minutes to get my gear off and ten minutes to put it back on so I ate as fast as I could in the remaining ten minutes. I figured out that there were two moments of each day that were the hardest to get through mentally and if I could bring myself to get through those each day, I would make it. The first of those moments is when the alarm clock woke me up in the morning after about five hours of sleep. Feeling like you need five more hours of rest and knowing that instead you have 16 hours of hard, wet, fishy work ahead of you is a tough one. The second was after my third "break." 12 hours of my shift has passed at this point and my body feels done. Ah, done ye not! There are four more hours to be a slave to the conveyor belt. The latter moment is probably the tougher one when I really think about it, which brings me to the conveyor belts.
          I remember the first few days being difficult to keep up then after hours and hours I slowly got faster and started developing a more efficient technique. The job is simple to describe; freshly filleted fish would come toward me on the belt in a large pile and it was my job to make each fillet go up and down side by side neatly so the next guy could scoop them up and place them in a box. The machines in there were so loud that everyone had to wear ear protection, so that adds to the monotony of the task. As soon as I felt like I was a fillet straightener pro, out of the corner of my eye I saw the foreman climb up on top of the machine that the belt was attached to. The veteran processor working next to me turned my way with a wicked smile and shouted over the noise: "Here it comes!" Before I could wonder what was coming, the foreman turned up the speed on the conveyor belt to twice the speed it was. Why not? Faster belts means more production. I had to start developing an even faster technique immediately. There was no way I could do the job with only one hand. Rapidly moving both hands and never looking away was the only way to keep up and even then I missed about every tenth one. Once in a while over the noise I would here people start to yell and cheer. I would look up and somewhere along the four belts with people working on both sides of each one, there would be two guys holding hands over the table and straightening their fish using only one hand each. The idea was first guy to miss a fillet would have to let go with his other hand and retrieve it and thus loose.               "Go Alejandro!" I shouted as my bunk mate found himself in such a competition once. They lasted an impressive three minutes or so before he won.
         "Yeaaahhh!" I shouted along with everyone else on my side of the belt when Alejandro's competitor had to nearly dive to catch the rest of the fish on his side. This sort of stuff was pretty exciting given the situation we were all in.
          There were no windows where we worked. None in my sleeping quarters, and the Galley only had a couple. So once every few days I would take five minutes before or after my shift to go outside. Walking out onto the deck before fishing started was a lot different of an experience than doing so after fishing started, because of the seagulls. Let me explain. From nets until frozen there are about 20 or so steps each fish has to go through. It's a game of speed, not accuracy, so fillets get dropped at each step. Furthermore, the fillet only makes up about half of the fish's mass so the head, tail, guts, and skin have to go somewhere too. Finally, although the boat searches for schools of Pollack with high tech fish detectors, there's no way to not accidentally pick up other sea creatures as well. Sharks, whales, sea lions, etc. were among these unwanted species and rarely made it back to the ocean alive. When all was said and done the boat's Pollack take would average around 25% packed and frozen compared to the tonnage pulled in from the nets. I know this figure because they would post it on a wall in the galley every morning to encourage people to be more careful. Since the boat would bring in over a million dollars worth of the cheapest fish in the world at cost price every ten days or so, you do the math. That's a lot of Seagull food spraying out the back of the boat 24 hours a day. In fact, the cloud of Seagulls that showed up once fishing began literally blocked out the sun. There are millions possibly billions of seagulls living in the Bearing Sea who are sustained year round by the endless supply of fresh food deposited from these types of boats. I'm told that sharks are plentiful as well but aren't visible from the deck of course. It might not be very sustainable but it's the fastest method for filling up the boat and that means more money. The irony of it all is this method of fishing is the reason we were fishing in the Bearing Sea in the first place. That small area of the world is one of the last spots left where fishing like this is even possible because the rest of the world's oceans have already been hit with large nets over and over. I read recently that commercial fishing the way we do it now will only be possible for another 30-50 years.        
          About a month went by working like this and the pain in my back increased a little more each day. It never was slightly better, it never leveled out, just consistently worse than the day before. Working on a boat in the middle of the ocean along with some of the most questionable men the world has to offer is an interesting situation. You can't just quit and go home. I've never been to prison but I don't think I would be entirely misusing the metaphor here. Also there was the rule that they warned you about before getting on the boat: If you quit you don't get paid. Furthermore, when they drop you off in Dutch Harbor you have to pay for your own flight back. I had no money and didn't want to have a life as a homeless beggar in Dutch Harbor, Alaska so I worked through the pain. I overcame it mentally until the breaking point. The last thing I remember is pouring sweat and convulsing while standing at the belt and still trying to reach out and grab fish. I woke up lying down in the same spot after momentarily blacking out to three guys checking my vitals. They helped me up and carried me up to the galley. Captain Andrew (He might have been first mate I can't recall) eventually poked his head out of the wheel house and asked me if I could walk. I had rested a bit by this point and told him I could. He invited me up to the wheel house where he conducted a brief test of my mobility asking me to turn my head right which I couldn't do. He was very friendly and caring and told me a story about when he used to work the nets and got injured. I eventually got up enough courage to ask him about my destiny over the next few days.
          "The good news is you'll get paid just as much as anyone else here this month because it was an injury" he replied, "the bad news is most of the guys here know how it works and know you're getting paid for sitting here while they work out the rest of the week. Because it's a back injury, some will think you are faking it. I would recommend that you stay in your bunk during meal breaks. I'll tell the cook to save you some food so you can eat it later. When we dock I'll give you a fifteen minute head start to the airport." I was scared and reassured all in the same moment and I didn't know how to respond.
          "Would you like a cigarette?" he asked. I accepted and looked out over the endless ocean with Andrew for the next few hours before going down to my bunk. A few days later the boat filled up and once again we returned to Dutch harbor. Once we docked, as promised Andrew gave me a head start. I quickly said my goodbyes to the few I had made friends with. I saw Brian coming down the hall and it occurred to me;
           "Brian that Mormon upbringing stuff was bullshit as well wasn't it?" I called out as I passed him in the hallway. "Yep, see ya later Jon" he said in his typical deadpan voice. I saluted him then quickly marched down the ramp. I turned around to give Andrew up in the wheel house one final wave before limping to the airport at the end of the pier.
          A year later I saw on the news that the boat I was on caught fire and everyone was safely evacuated. A couple years after that Joel sent me an article about Captain Andrew. I was stunned to read that the night before leaving for another five months at sea, Andrew tragically took his own life. Out of everyone on the boat, he seemed to have it the most together. I guess you have to be a certain type of crazy to handle Alaskan fishing as a lifestyle. Glad I got out. Rest in Peace Cap'n, you're in a better place now.     

Jon of All Trades, Master of None.

          I have had more jobs than anyone I've ever met. "Jon of all trades, master of none" my dad would affectionately joke. Before I made my living doing what I love (film making) and working for myself on my own schedule, I was a slave of sorts to whatever my task was at the time.
I was not able to hold down a single job for more than 9 months straight from age 15 to 28, mainly because of my chronic back pain -that not one of my plethora of employers fully understood. "Everybody's back hurts!" was the line I hated hearing the most. Yes, back pain is common but blacking out and collapsing from it is not, and that happened to me a couple of times. Back pain is horrible for two reasons: it covers such a large portion of your body that you can't change positions to avoid aggravating it. Even worse than that, it's impossible to communicate to someone just how bad your back actually hurts. If someone has a cast on their leg all they have to do is point to the cast and the boss will surely not request that they start climbing a ladder. When I would point to my back, sweating bullets nearly out of breath from the searing pain, my employer, whoever they were at the time would just think I was "acting" to emphasize how much I wanted to get out of doing my job. It can be completely humiliating. I still have chronic back pain but it's a lot more manageable now that I'm not beholden to the time clock five days out of the week. Sometimes I would end up quitting because the pain was so intense, sometimes I would get fired because I couldn't concentrate on my task because of the pain. It was always a factor either directly or indirectly. Oh, and if someone ever tells you about their back pain in the way that I just did, please don't ask them "have you tried stretching?". Yes I've "tried stretching" as well as acupuncture, physical therapy, meditation, reiki, I've tried it all. They always ask as if they know of this mystical herb that they were lucky enough to have been bequeathed to by a shaman's called "stretching" and that I should probably get my hands on it soon before the DEA bans it.
          Because everything I did involved hurting my back somehow, I was constantly on the look out for something completely new to do to keep a roof over my head which over several years elongated my resume to look like three wandering lives combined. I've been a roofer, I've worked out at sea, I've made pizzas, delivered pizzas, I've picked up dog poop, built fences, I once drove a RITZ moped handing out crackers for 12 bucks an hour, the list is endless but for this blog entry I'm going to focus on three strange work experiences I've found myself doing over the years. Maybe I'll make "crazy jobs" a recurring column here, we'll see how many I can remember. 
          Among the three different times I was a door to door salesman, one of them was cold-knocking doors (that means no leads, just find someone's door and knock on it) and in this case, trying to sell them a forty pound box of frozen meat. There was some bullshit speech I was supposed to deliver about how I just sold one to their neighbor, and they can have this at cost, and it's the same stuff that gets delivered to all the steak house restaurants, and bla, bla, bla, bla. There were three options; the beef collection, the chicken collection, or the seafood collection. I personally wouldn't recommend any of them. I would get $50 at the end of the day for every box I sold. In my week doing the job I sold one box. This was one of the most miserable jobs I've ever had and I officially made the least amount of money compared to hours put in to anything I was ever hired for. For my training day they threw me in a car with a woman who was obviously heavily addicted to some sort of speed and was craving her next fix badly. She was driving around so aggressively I thought I was going to die. Four hours went by of rude encounters with strangers at their doorstep while I stood helplessly about 20 feet behind her trying to astral project myself onto a beach in Hawaii. To my shock, right near the end of a shift of no sales she sold three boxes to some old lady in a trailer who had no idea what was happening. The guy they had me train (yes, they had me train someone even though I only had one box sold in my entire career thus far as a door to door meat salesman) was a kid who apparently had made it to the final 40 or so in American Idol and had delusions that his moment in the limelight was just a few meat boxes away. Studio time is what he was saving for of course. He was one of the most talkative, annoying people I had ever had the displeasure of driving around with for five hours. The worst part about this kid was all the other meat salesman would treat him like a movie star back at the office, further enforcing his enormous ego and idiotic blathering.
          There was the time I worked for a gardener that I'm pretty sure was an escaped convict (he hid behind a bush whenever he heard a car coming). He was a foul man who was constantly itching his groin and wincing in pain when he did so. I don't want to wonder what STD he had contracted and worse yet, what he contracted it from. Although, contrary to the meat selling singing sensation, listening to his endless stories in the truck going from house to house was my favorite part of the day. He once told me about when he and his buddy were shooting up coke (who does that?) and as soon as he had the syringe in his arm, his buddy yanked it out of him on his way down from collapsing into a fit of convulsions. He continued to explain that his buddy was experiencing "some bad shit", understood that it was causing him to overdose, and had the presence of mind in his last second of consciousness to pull it out of my boss's arm just before he shot it up as well. Having avoided the "bad shit" himself, my boss was able to drive his buddy to the hospital where they revived him moments away from death. These types of stories, and ones including details about the different whores he picked up over the years, were a constant flow from his mouth at yelling volume because the truck ran so loudly.
           The way it worked was he would show up at the Safeway parking lot every morning at 7am and choose among a group of homeless dudes who were the two he would take along that day because he only needed two people a day. I wasn't homeless myself but I was having a particularly awful morning having not slept the whole night before because of stress of not having a job. Did I mention I'm also an insomniac? it goes hand in hand with back pain unfortunately. I was walking by at the just the right moment and was "chosen" as one of the two workers that day. I later understood why he developed this method instead of just hiring two guys because he would basically choose whoever were the least two fucked up at that time. There was always one that would be absolutely smashed at 7am and it was a different one every day. I usually got an easy walk on because I was on time, not fucked up, and most of all I had an old pickup truck and on certain days he needed two trucks. Once I was late, and that was the one thing he absolutely couldn't tolerate so when I showed up to the parking lot at 7:05 he was already gone, I knew I had just missed him because there were three disappointed looking drunk homeless guys still milling around. I was driving back to my apartment and to my great surprise a few turns away from my place, I pulled up right behind him at an intersection. I honked and he saw me and indicated I should follow. We drove back to the Safeway parking lot where "Bear" got out of my boss's car. A rarely sober and serious Bear proceeded to give me the stare that said "I will kill you someday". We then continued to the job site. It didn't take me long to realize that I had just replaced Bear for the day, probably because I had the truck. I worked the remainder of that day, got my hundred bucks cash and never went back.
          Another job worth mentioning among the unique jobs list I've made over the years is when I was a traveling Karaoke machine salesman. I got the job by joining a conference call with a few hundred others from all over the country. The number was placed on a Craigslist ad and said to call it if you can sing, sell, and had your own transportation.
         The instructions were simple: during the holiday season, drive from Costco to Costco up the west coast and sing karaoke to people with the machine (that was provided on location) as they entered the bulk warehouse. There were teams of three and while one was singing the other two would convince people to buy them. We rotated like that all day for 12 bucks an hour plus $30 in commission for every machine sold. For most, it was a tough sell because they were grossly overpriced at $300 a machine. The whole "machine" was a just a mic that you plugged memory cards into and then into your own TV and stereo system. The actual music sucked as well. It wasn't real Karaoke tracks, rather cheap midi files that barely represented the song. Even the lyrics were usually written wrong as I assumed they were poorly translated from somewhere in China. They were made of cheap plastic and throughout my two months of singing into them, three of them stopped working for no apparent reason. Despite the shortcomings in product quality, I sold an average of 10 units a day making me the national top salesman and plenty of commission. I only had one problem. The paycheck came months later (of course it did, what was I expecting a 401k?) and I took the job because I was flat broke.
          I forget what I did for gas money at the time, I must have had some cash but I certainly had no money to stay in hotels as well. The car I had at the time was a little Dodge Neon and after sleeping in it for a week with no shower I was ready to quit even though I was killing it with commissions. When I was in Eugene, Oregon I decided to do something about it. I didn't know anybody in Eugene but I knew there was a university there and I knew where there's a university there are fraternity houses. I figured among the chaos that daily ensues at a typical frat house, who would notice an extra dude crashing on the couch? The plan wasn't perfect but I was desperate and I ended up getting lucky. After talking with a few drunk bros on frat row I discovered that one of the large frat houses was recently decommissioned as a frat because of too many alleged rape cases and was now being rented out room by room to college kids that hadn't all jerked off on a cookie together (it's worth mentioning that the same thing happened to a frat house two blocks from the Safeway where the gardener would recruit from in Seattle, I hate frats).
          I discovered that the new shared housing experiment was currently only about half way rented out. The front door was locked so I climbed in through a window on the second floor by using the fire escape. As much as I hate frats, in this particular case I did appreciate that no one around was going to question a twenty something dude climbing a fire escape after dark into one. Once in, I saw two dudes coming my way down the hall with a bong and I just said "wussup". They replied "sup" and we passed each other without any questions asked. I made my way to the basement where I discovered a stack of foam mattresses. I used one for my bed and the rest of the stack as a partition to hide my bed. I stayed there for a week in comfort and quiet. Foam is also a great insulator of sound as well as makeshift fort material. I even got a fresh shower every morning in the large bathroom down there before serenading people preparing for the apocalypse with Blind Melon at 9am. That was the only time I was ever a squatter in the true sense of the term and although it was comfortable, the experience certainly contributed to the way one must think as a van dweller. The mode of thought that appreciates common comforts that the average person takes for granted.

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.

     

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.      

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.