Welcome Back To CrazyLand

I ain't got it no more. Never had it, really.

I may be a dick but not a crazy one. Some are. Lots here, it seems. I don't like this country any more.

I parked at Margaret McKinney Campground early enough to go for a hike, even with the short days we have here now, getting on toward the end of November. I parked and then went for a hike.

At the last minute I decided to grab my canister of bear spray, to have it in addition to my pocket tube of pepper spray. Almost immediately after getting onto the trail here comes a woman with a huge dog. She was different though. Her dog was on a leash. Attached to the center of her chest with some kind of harness. Odd, but I was grateful.

A couple of weeks ago I was returning from a Sunday hike on this trail when I saw a dog aim itself at me and then launch full-tilt down the trail. Happy, happy dog. Not me though.

I had time to yell "Get your dog under control!" about three times before the dog was on me. So happy, it, to put muddy paws all over me. Not so much happy, me.

The owner's comment was "Most people don't mind."

After the dog jumped all over me a second time I pointed at the owner and yelled "FUCK OFF!".

"I'm so sorry was what I heard as I walked away." What? Makes no sense.

I put on clean pants and headed for the laundry the next day. Not much harm done but discouraging.

Day before yesterday was somewhat less fun. A guy threatened to shoot me after I pepper-sprayed his three dogs.

See three dogs on the trail. See them see you, alone. See them begin barking and watch them fan out as they come at you, Jurassic Park style to surround you, all barking, as two people on horseback bring up the rear.

Back off the trail as far as you can, both to avoid the horses and to get as far back as you can from the dogs. No good. Not enough.

As a last resort, pull out the pepper spray and hit the button, fanning across all three of them to keep from being bitten. Get a dog bite and then you've got weeks of hell being vaccinated for rabies and filling out criminal reports and all the rest. Pepper spray at least keeps the teeth a few inches from your skin.

That part worked, but then the owner, the guy, looming over me on the top of his horse, told me that he was armed and if I did that again he'd pull out his gun and shoot me.

The woman of the pair kept yelling at me about how I couldn't mace her dogs.

Etc.

I managed to get past them and backed up the trail in the direction that they'd come from, then continued up to the top of the ridge where I grabbed a late shot of Mt Rainier, which wasn't worth the price.

About then I began wondering about the state of my car, the only vehicle in the vicinity besides the two pickup trucks with horse trailers, fantasizing about all the windows being broken out, or worse.

That didn't happen, but I left the campground and spent the night at an undisclosed location, in relative peace, just to be sure.

I'm not liking life in the USofA much any more.

 

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You Can Trust The Cold

I'm not freezing any more, and I hate it.

I got back to Washington State on October 4, bought a car, and began living in it. According to plan.

According to hope, but not hopefully, I caught a spell of fair weather, which is like free bags of gold dust handed out on street corners in western Washington in November. Rare. Unheard of.

Usually the rain doesn't start until the third week of October, sometimes earlier. But November is dead set on rain. It's always there, no avoiding it.

Except for 2002, when blue skies, sun, and calm air prevailed pretty much through the whole month of November, when I made one of the greatest day hikes of my life up the west slope of Mt St Helens. And except for 2019, which is now.

First, I got back here. Then I got the car. Then the rains began and I went nuts.

The bad part of buying a car is that you have to wait for the registration and the title and the plates, which takes about six weeks. You can't avoid that.

So there I was, here I was, in the rain, and looking at another five-and-a-half-weeks-of-it, so I bugged out for eastern Washington and got away from it for four or five days. And by then?

Well, by then a high pressure zone floated in and western Washington also got clear and sunny. And cold. Very cold some nights. Hard cold. Hand-freezing cold.

I managed.

It hurt, but it was only pain. Pain isn't always bad, because this was clean weather. Dry weather. Cold weather. Almost a month of it in total, combining eastern and western Washington locations.

If you're cold, you warm up, by going inside somewhere, by putting on more insulation, or by exercising. That's it. Wet does not work that way.

Get wet, and you stay wet, sometimes for days, even indoors. It used to take two full days for my bicycling clothing to dry after I washed it in winter, in the cool air and the humid air inside my apartment.

Cold isn't like that.

If you're cold and you do something about it, you get instant results. Period.

Cold is predictable. It cooperates. Fight it and it yields, not lingering forever, not hanging around inside your shoes, making your skin feel slimy. Cold really is clean. I like it, a lot better than wet, but now things are wet again, and I've been having troubles with the dealer where I bought my car. Things are slow. Dragging on and on.

Maybe today, maybe tomorrow. I should finally have my plates, and then I can leave, can take back control of my life and tour. I want to head south to see the deserts and the desert winter sunshine. I can hardly wait.

Maybe in a day or two. Maybe I'll be free by then.

Meanwhile, I'm wet. I hate being wet. Time for sun.

 

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Ruffle my fur, see what happens. I dare you.
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Showertime Fun

Lovely. Bathing.

Not much fun sharing that bathing space.

I abandoned the state park yesterday and showered in town today. A different experience. It is.

Millersylvania State Park south of Olympia, WA is nice. The facilities suck. They look like they were built with CCC crews in the 1930s. I'm sure that they were at least inspired by that period.

Last year, early on, the main restroom was closed, leaving only one "bathhouse" open as a shower location, and it too often was still locked in the morning when it should have been open. Later on it was working but someone vandalized it. Even later there was more vandalism at other points in the park. Someone seemed to have as life's mission the destruction of shower facilities in the park. Whoever it was hit the coin machine parts: where you drop in your tokens and it turns on the hot water. Looked like the person had a pry bar, the way they were ripped off the wall.

This year the main (i.e. in the RV area) bathhouse has one of its two showers working, and it was fine. Fine, considering the location. At Sportsman State Park in Yakima, WA, they clean the restrooms three times a day during the summer months, and the showers at least once, maybe twice. At Millersylvania State Park the schedule seems to be by phases of the moon, if anyone feels up to it, possibly only when the howling grows loud enough.

And anyway, the facilities are old and shaky. Shoddy. Sad and rundown. Even the one working-and-available shower began balking a few days back.

I found this out when the water stopped about three minutes into a six-minute shower, leaving me covered in suds with only a slow trickle of cold water emanating from the shower head. Not a good sign. Not usually. Not this time either.

I tried banging on the meter, which procedure did not work, and tried rinsing in the drippy-drops of water coming out of the plumbing, which did not work, and tried more banging on the meter, which produced hot water.

After this, I decided to put in one token at a time, which also did not work, though adding a third token after the second one failed, seemed to be the solution, for the time being, which wasn't really quite good enough, and banging had no effect either, and so.

I had my last bath there yesterday.

Today I was back at the Olympia Center downtown. Three naked guys were there. Fun. One seemed agreeable when I asked what the fare was these days. I think I used to stuff in four quarters, so that's what I did. He said it was two minutes for each. Four quarters seemed a safe bet.

Then another guy with a hooting voice came over and started flinging verbality at me. His is the kind of voice I cannot hear (being mostly deaf these days), but it sounded like he wanted me to give him a towel, and then soap, and then money, so I gave him two quarters. Generally speaking, I'd rather give a wet naked guy a couple of quarters than my soap and towel.

I think it was rinse-and-dry-only day for him. After he finished with the water part, he went under the forced-air dryer and rubbed himself a lot and got mostly dry.

One guy left and it was just him and the other guy I'd talked to and me then.

I finished and toweled-off and dressed while Noisy Man made some phone calls begging people to send him money with the third guy's phone. I didn't want to be there but I was. Too bad for me.

About the time I was ready to go we were down to Noisy Man and me in the locker room, and he hit on me again, starting with a couple of things I could not catch, followed up by him asking in his extremely loud voice what my favorite color was. Truly.

After that was something I don't remember, but I gave him "I don't have one" as a color answer, and he hooted a few more things before I scuttled out.

You never know.

We seemed too close to the edge of an aggressive moment for my taste.

I'll be back again tomorrow, but maybe a half hour later. It could be that if he's a regular he'll be gone by then and I can still slip in and be done by the 9:00 a.m. deadline while entirely missing him. I hope.

Yeah. Real fun, but I did tell myself before leaving Ecuador that I should seek out colorful characters during this trip. So at least I'd have something to write about.

Yeah. Real fun, and today I got one. Didn't really like it though. Here's hoping for quieter times, starting Real Soon Now.

 

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Clean but annoyed, me. How's by you then?
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Forks: Let Us Praise Metal

I did. I bought a fork. It's a good one and it's mine now.

First it was a knife. Knives are essential. How else would you stir your peanut butter? See?

You need a knife, and it has to be strong, so that's steel. You need a steel knife. That's what Wally Mart is good for. They have table knives, of which one can buy one, individually. For us singletons. So I bought one.

The peanut butter is yet to come, but I can feel it in my future. I never get far without reverting to peanut butter, and it is sure to arrive on-scene soon, expecting my knife to stir it. I am so ready, now, but having only a knife left me feeling incomplete, so I went back to the World of Wally.

And there I found Spoon. Spoon-ness. Became spoonified, with two. Had to get a package deal, but I'm set in case I bite the head off the first spoon, because I have two. Or I can commence lunch armed with one spoon in each hand, which works at times, and is mandatory at others.

So, the score: One knife, two spoons, and a box of plastic ones, plus plastic forks.

Plastic forks are amazing, but not for eating with. Likewise the knives, spoons, and so on. Amazing. But try to eat a can of cold Spam with a plastic fork. Iffy: bend, break or catapult are all conceivable outcomes.

The bendy part should be obvious, because plastic. Get over-bendy and you have breakage, which is disappointing at best, and breakage is always better than a bit of slippage resulting in catapulting food in every direction, to stick all over the inside of the car. And the cold Spam?

You were probably wondering. I understand.

Spam. It's food, even if you don't think so, but it is. Meat, and other things, packaged nicely. Keeps forever in its can until desperately needed.

A life saver if you haven't eaten in 36 or more hours and need fat, and can buy the "lite" sodium version which still has more than enough salt in it if you eat the whole can at one go, but lacking refrigeration and being hungry, you do. Do buy. Do savagely eat.

So I've eaten three cans of Spam as the major part of a meal in the last week-and-a-half, and damn-well worth it. Lifesaver. Did I say that yet? Miracle food. Better sauteed but hey. If you gots it, then eat it and be full. And you will be.

Fat. It has fat and once it's on your inside you're set.

But you need a decent fork for it. Plastic is entirely iffy. Entirely so. Therefore I bought a steel fork. $1.78 and worth it. It's amazing how sturdy a steel for is, which I realized when I used in on dill pickle spears. Wham. Jam it. Just jam it in, no worrying about bending or breaking or anything. You see a pickle you want, stab it and then bite. That's it. No more, no less. I love it.

So now I have flatware good enough to survive World War 3, and am content on that front. Envy me, for I am satisfied.

 

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Currently wondering where to sleep tomorrow.

Why Am I Here?

My problem is that I'm alive. Being dead is easy compared to this — you just lie there and rot. Anyone can do that. Even I, I think.

Probably. I may try it some day, but not quite yet.

Which leaves me wondering. Wondering "Why am I here?". Which is what I began thinking at the Cuenca, Ecuador airport (Mariscal Lamar), waiting for dark, and then waiting for my plane on Tuesday, October 1 of this year. Why. Why?

In other words, what am I doing, if anything? And why?

Still don't know, and now it's October 16 and I've been back in the U.S. for a whole two weeks. Two weeks and I still know not.

I have been busy though. That's a change. I might not know why I'm here or what I'm supposedly doing, I've been pretty busy doing it. Because doing it is better than doing nothing, which is not an option at this point. Not now, and definitely not here.

I spent the first few days fretting about missing my tidy and simple life in Ecuador, wherein I arose at about daylight and had coffee and read the news and sent a peevish reply to the local idiot gringa food blogger, a Mediterranean Diet™ proponent. (And also a low-process proponent, and a strident no-added-sugar campaigner. Who loved to sing the benefits of chocolate candy as a healthy food. And also wine, though it contains alcohol, a proven human carcinogen. And so on.)

Anyway, a quiet life, full of fine coffee (one cup a day), and going out for lunch, and walking five big ones a day, and not being responsible for anything else, all while saving up gobs of money because I didn't need to spend it on anything. Quiet, boring, safe, well-defined, predictable. Yeah.

Not much to do, and no schedule, and every day a day of fine weather.

Not the same weather every day, but fine. Agreeable. Mildly interesting, and then home by dark, because I had nothing to do after dark and a single (sane) person would not be found alone on the streets after dark. Or more likely would be found, but only by someone best never met. So I was always locked in by dark.

Well, that was my life and is not my life now, and I am still wondering "Why am I here?", but a little less than last week.

I've been busy.

First with buying a car, and then with buying lots of outdoor things that I need to re-buy because I dumped everything I had a year and a half back and have to replace all of it, and then with searching all the stores for things I need to customize and cozy-up the car, and things to wear and so on. Busy.

Been busy but not with importances. Busy with many little things requiring lots of thought and much careful shopping. They kill time.

What I'm really waiting for is my car's license, registration, and title. Should be here by November 18 at the latest, the last day I can legally operate with the temporary documents. Meanwhile the rain is closing in.

The last two weeks were good. Lots of sun after a little rain. Monday afternoon was even uncomfortably warm, given the layers of insulation I've been wearing. Rained last night. More this morning. Eighty percent chance for tomorrow, and so on for another week, after which it might let up for a day or two, but winter, you know. The Big Inevitable.

Lovely weather in its own way, this wet stuff, but I am living in a car. Living in a car means that your space is always over-populated. There are fights. Swearing. Spills. Lost goods. All kinds of things. And you are always in public. Always, even while parked out in the woods. Because you never know. Really. You never do. People come out of nowhere, at all hours, doing every variety of odd thing. Though usually, in the woods, it's quiet, if a long drive from town, and I don't have my car fixed up so I can sleep in it unobtrusively while in town. Not yet.

I am working on it. It's a thing. One of many things. One of the many things that are keeping be busy and not wondering "Why am I here?", which I still do anyway, in every odd moment.

Well, it will either get better or it will get worse, or it will stay the same. Pretty much like the price of real estate, so there's no real progress on that front, is there?

Maybe I'll know more later.

 

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Currently making the transition from old creepy guy to creepy old guy.
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How's It Going Then?

Yeah right. Am I happy? Am I having fun, yet? Are things going, and well?

Sure, why not. I am my own happy meal. I sit, endlessly gnawing at my leg, and one day it may finally come off. Until then my life is a set of oscillations between despair and boredom. Gnawing helps pass some of the time.

Most days when I wake up I don't see any reason to keep breathing either, other than that I'm doing it because the alternative is worse. Pointless. It all seems pointless. But that may be a personal thing.

I expect that my level of exuberance may be due to getting here at the end of February, in time for two months of heavy rain with nothing to do. I lasted through the wettest April on record in Western Washington, followed by the warmest and driest May on record in Western Washington, while still not being able to go hiking let alone backpacking because most trails are not even close to being melted out until mid-July, oh happy days.

As William Least Heat-Moon said in "River-Horse", the price of life is death. I'm feeling it.

Coffee helps. I haven't brewed a real cup since February when I personally made my last cup of Café de Loja. (How short a time it has been since I forgot the name of the grindery, which, no, has just come back to me: "El Tostador". Well, no loss either way — El Tostador will be there when I return to Cuenca, whether I remember its name or not, and because coffee.) But I have a large-size container of Walmart's best Syntho-Feine in crumbly form. Coffee crumbles. I sleep next to them.

Mornings, I fill my mouth with those crunchy bits and push them down my gullet with cold water as soon as I get out of the car, and then wait. When things go well my mood lifts. This is no substitute for coffee but at times it works. Sometimes my bowels also start dancing.

Then I both feel better and feel better while running for the bushes. I leave the valuable part of my effort in the forest as a thank-you to the trees, and take away the white paper puffs and donate them to one of several dumpsters in need of them.

Am I happy? Am I having fun, yet? Are things going, and well? Sure, why not.

I have only five months to wait until I return to Cuenca, where I was endlessly bored, and where lunch was good, and cheap, like the coffee, and the season was always spring.

Time marches like ants on a string, but ants never sleep, do they?

Living In Public

I got here too early. Way too early, at the end of February.

I wanted to get a good deal on a used car at a time of year when car sales are slow, and to pick up one from at least a year ago rather than a few months ago. Via Hertz Car Sales, anyway, more reliable than Bob's Random Car Sales Lot or a private party.

I have no home here anyway, so I needed to make a transaction happen within a span of days rather than of weeks or months. That part worked. And then what?

I sat. In the rain. In the rain inside the library. In the rain inside the car. In the rain, sleeping, at night, in the car, listening to the rain pound down. For a long time now. Like a week short of three months, although the rain let up about a month back. Despite that, I still have to wait.

First I waited for the rain to end, and now I'm waiting for high-country snow to melt.

I've checked. Anything above 4000 feet (1200m) still lies under snow. Can't walk there. Can't drive close enough to walk there. The backcountry is closed, the roads are. Even some low places I could go have washed-out roads, so I can't go there either. And now the Memorial Day weekend is here, and all sorts of nuts will be out driving around. Have to wait that out.

Maybe in a week. I will get out. I will. That's why I'm here.

Right now, though, I'm waiting. Still waiting. Waiting is harder than it sounds, partly because everywhere I go, I'm visible. Out there. A fixture of any public place I happen to be in, and there are no private spaces for me here.

I used to live here. I had an apartment. I liked it. I was in my apartment a lot, and when I wasn't in there, I knew that I could return to it, go through the door, shut the door, and be home. Alone. Alone and quiet and safe and private. I can't do that now, not here, not at this time.

I have a car. I can move, I can drive, I can go, but I can't drive home. I can't be home. I have none. I can be a guy sitting in his car eating in a parking lot, or a guy parked, sleeping in the back of his car, in what I hope is a place that no one will investigate.

Everything I do is public now — sleeping, eating, bathing, pissing, shitting, traveling, cleaning house, making my bed, reading, sorting, packing, unpacking. Everything. All of it.

Even if I'm out in the woods, privacy is temporary, if I happen to be in a place where no one else is, at that moment, then I am alone for that moment only. When others are around my privacy is partial — screened from one side if I'm on the other side of my car, which just leaves me open and visible and vulnerable, at least to being seen, on the side I'm on, anyway. There is no resolution, no absolute, as in closing the solid front door of my apartment and shutting out all the world without exception.

Now I'm out there, out here. I'm here, and if you are too, then you are too, and all I can do is to put up with it, or drive away. Meanwhile I have to do only those things that are allowed in public, and not do the others, and try not to look too "suspicious", which is a description these days.

It gets stale. It does.

If I do any more of this next year, and I might, or might not, I'm doing it in a van. It would not be glorious or luxurious but it would be private. That's all I really crave. I could sit on the floor of a van with a squirt bottle and washcloth and bathe. I could do that, with the cover provided by even a small van, and be satisfied, in my own little way, but I can't do that in the vehicle I have now, which is too small even for me, and all windows.

So later then. We'll let things stew for now. I have months to go. We'll let things stew and later on I'll decide yes or no, or stay or go, but I won't do things this way again. I am not a public person and need to live up to that

In Case Of Problems, Steal

One of my recent problems has been walking into a supermarket and forgetting to bring my own bag. You have to do that around here now.

I moved away at the end of 2012, and when I came back six months later, bags cost 5¢. If you wanted one, which duh?

And then they give you one of those old ⅙-bushel brown paper bags that begin to rip as soon as you touch them, like what we got every time we went grocery shopping in the 1950s. Progress, eh?

But they really expect you to bring your own, and if you walk out of Al's Sooper Markit without a bag, carrying a few goods in your hands, then they want to see your receipt. Unlike if you walk out of Al's Sooper Markit with a bag, carrying a few goods in that bag (which you got at Peggy's House-O-Valu, and carrying Peggy's logo), no one blinks.

Well, pisser anyway. So what do do?

Q: What to do about what?
A: What to do about going into any and every store and forgetting to bring my own bag.

Ah - I finally figured it out: Steal one.

I buzz through the produce section and grab a couple of those clear plastic bags they have hanging there. Some stores even have more than one size/weight option. They're small, but if I'm not buying much, I can use one of those.

Then, on the way out, I also drop my receipt into it, with the store logo facing outward, and don't have to get searched for not carrying my stuff in a $20 "sustainable" heavy cloth shopping bag, or a brown paper one which if I'm really lucky will mostly hold together all the way out to my car.

But wait - there's more. A better idea is to steal some of these produce bags every time I buy something. Then I hang one from a small 3M Command Hook I've stuck onto the passenger side of my car's dash, and use it for trash. Being plastic, albeit lightweight, they're good for both dry trash and wet trash.

I also bought some larger bags for random larger cruft I accumulate, and I can put several of these small bags into one of the larger plastic trash bags, and get the effect of double-bagging if I have something really messy, like dripping food cans, or used toilet paper/wet wipes. (I clean up after myself.) Or worse. (In case I need to do something while squatting inside the car. It happens.)

Neat. This works. I get the bags I need, and since I grab these produce bags only when I buy things, I'm sort of paying for them anyway.

One online vendor chosen mostly at random sells 2000 of these produce bags for $45, which is 2.25¢ each, retail. Wholesale is probably a tenth of that price, so three seconds of the cashier's time reaching for a paper bag to sell me costs more for both of us.

I'm not worrying.

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Privacy Curtains

How to do it. I think.

Step One: I bought a car that was not a van, so then I needed to come up with a way to block views of the inside.

Step Two: I tried stuff. It didn't work, so I tried other stuff. That didn't work either, so I kept trying. Now I think I have it.

Conclusion: Every iteration has ended with a simpler, easier, cheaper solution, so that's good. Maybe I can quit now.

Why: Invisibility.

(1) When the car is parked, and I'm inside, there are times when I will need not to be seen, such as when changing clothes, having a sponge bath, pooping, peeing, sleeping, or metamorphosing into a glorious winged flutter-by. Since the car has 360° windows, I uh, I have to block them.

(2) When the car is parked, and I'm off somewhere, like backpacking for days on end, I will want the interior of the unoccupied car to be invisible, because my valuables are in there, and because I can't just put everything into a 40-ton vault.

Invisibility in this case will be a stand-in for security. I'm hoping that if things are not visible, then anyone nefarious will tend to try being nefarious elsewhere, because of being uncertain of the payoff of breaking into a car that does not have valuables in sight (and might just possibly have someone inside, though you can't really tell, but just might). And like that.

Definition: Invisible. Here it means "not able to be seen", and does not mean being transparent.

Transparency would be nice, since then no one would know there was anything to look at, but invisible in the sense of "a blocked view" is the best I'll be able to accomplish, and will work.

My first pass involved two layers of black bug netting backed by a sheet of what they call "clear" poly film with a thickness of 2mil to 3mil. "Poly film" is dropcloth material — polyethylene.

My thinking was that the bug netting would give the curtain a no-gloss surface and sort of fuzz it out, and in a way, from a distance, it all would not look too different from professionally-tinted glass, while the poly film would be partly transparent, but since it's actually milky (the genuinely clear stuff is no longer sold for some unknown reason), it would blur the view to the point of obscurity, though on a bright day I could still sort of see out a bit from the inside. Plus, since it's sort of white-ish, any light inside the car would bounce around inside the car, and help with visibility when I was in there doing something.

The problems were that this required cutting three pieces of stuff, attaching the pieces together, and then hanging this thing, and getting it all right. Didn't work.

The concept was fine, but without a really good place to work (i.e., somewhere indoors with a decent work table), it wasn't possible to do the measuring, cutting, and assembly with enough precision to make it work. And then there was the problem of how to hang these curtains.

Wandering around a Fred Meyer store I had come across 3M Command Hooks. I'd used these before, in apartments, and realized that the really tiny ones might be a good bet for the narrow spaces inside a car. I bought some and mounted them. Everything seemed fine until it was time to hang the curtains, which turned out to be misshapen and wrongly sized.

So next I decided to try using cut-open trash bags, the dark green ones. In lightweight bags, this material is really thin, and naturally translucent, so it does let some light pass through, but also does obscure the view well.

I put tabs of duct tape where the material would need to be held by hooks, and used a hole punch to make a proper hole. I also placed the holes just a tiny bit too far apart, so that the material would need to be under light tension, so that it wouldn't hang limply, or hang with wrinkles. All went well enough.

I didn't have to actually cut anything, just use a scissors to cut open a bag into a long and narrow piece, put the tape and holes where needed, and hang it.

But.

At some places in the car, the interior plastic lining where I was putting the hooks is unaccountably slippery, as though it's been waxed. I couldn't clean these areas well enough, short of using a nuclear-grade solvent such as acetone, which might well permanently damage the car's interior. Hmmm.

So. Next I went looking for different hooks.

I decided to use badge straps. Or "ID badge strap clips", or whatever. (They have several names.) There is a spring-loaded metal clip on one end, with a narrow vinyl strap attached to it, and a pair of snaps.

Take a look at what Office Depot has...

I already had duct tape, and the vinyl strap would offer a decent place to anchor the clip with the tape, and so on. Didn't work, for the same reason: Some of the car's interior was just too slippery.

So. Next I tried something completely different — I skipped adhesives and stuffed the clip's strap and its two snaps sort of behind the wall. I pulled the hard plastic interior lining of the car out a bit, just enough so I could slide the strap and the two snaps behind it, and then let go. What I ended up with was the metal clip protruding into the interior of the car. Once the clips were placed, I verified that I could hang cut-open plastic bags from them.

This method is awkward because I can't put a clip just anywhere, and hanging something from the clips takes three or four hands, but it does work. There is no adhesive involved, so there will be nothing to clean, ever, and there is no damage done to the vehicle. There is a line inside the car where the headliner meets the "paneling", and I can stick a hook (mostly) anywhere along that line. There are one or two places where this technique will not work well, or where I need to use some tape, but I'll be able to get by.

Success.

Photos:

---

Comments? Send email to hoofist@nullabigmail.com

Hacking Through It

Living is a hack these days. I like it better this way. It's better than living with bags of regret and no remedies.

I won't say what I have to regret, but there is something almost daily. If I didn't care I wouldn't care, but I've always been reflective and it's not going to stop this week, or next, so out of desperation I guess, I found something else to do besides hate myself for what I've done in the past out of ignorance, or shyness, or inexperience, or laziness, or wrong-headedness.

Now I hack. Hack myself.

Maybe this approach started due to the influence of Craig and Lucy. They are retired dairy farmers. They now own a cafe in Cuenca, Ecuador, the Windhorse Cafe. They follow Tibetan Buddhist practices and lead meditation sessions at the cafe. It's a thing for them, a big one, and also apparently for others.

I heard a woman in her 60s gleefully exclaim "I'm a Buddhist!" Go for it, gal. Done in the tone of the Smothers Brothers' "Streets of Laredo" parody: "If you have an outfit you can be a cowboy too."

Point One: Being a buddhist (in, if I may say, the real sense), means that you don't claim to be one

Point Two: If you're a Buddhist you don't get there by buying a t-shirt and wearing it around town.

Point Three: Diet isn't a thing. Claiming to be a Buddhist and being a vegetarian and using one to prove the other doesn't prove anything.

Point Four: You're grown up. You should know better by now.

I taught myself to meditate beginning back in 1964 or 1965. It took 10 or 15 years before I started to catch on. I wanted to be a Buddhist too, but I'm not a joiner. There was no one to join in Bismarck anyway, but still I don't play well with others, so I had to do everything the hard way while being honest with myself.

The years tell. As decades go by, a person matures and gains perspective on things simply while continuing to breathe. Things stick to you the way lint sticks to a shirt. Things have stuck to me. I now claim that there is no magic. I will never be a Buddhist, and don't want to be one. I still have sporadic episodes of meditation, but that's my private deal. It's not going anywhere. Meditation doesn't go anywhere.

I can say that the single most important thing I've learned is how to meditate. I'll stand by that.

However, I'll also say that there is no enlightenment — it's a brain hack. Meditate and you hack your brain.

Keep hacking and eventually you change the way your brain operates. That's it. No magic. No religion needed. No rituals. No secret handshake.

Hack harder and longer and you will probably get bigger changes sooner, but there is no guarantee, and no matter what you'll still get old and ugly and then die, unless you die sooner, in which case you'll still die, but with less oldness and less ugliness.

Meditation does change how you think about things and how you feel about things, and overall it's a good deal, but going around squeaking about how advanced you are or how Buddhist you are this week or how much you know that no one else knows is not a sign that you have the real item. In fact, you never have anything — you change a bit here and there, subtly, and maybe take a more nuanced and helpful approach to life, and don't get your shorts tied in so many knots.

That's about it.

And then for the rest, I'm extending the hacking idea to my life in general.

When something happens I try to figure out out why, or to figure out what could have made it work, if it possibly could have worked but didn't, and then yell into my internal ear "HACK!", and remember it. Then do the hack next time, to get things right, rather than doing the same dumb wrong thing over and over. Or feeling nasty about myself.

Now, currently, I'm in western Washington state. I arrived February 27. I wanted to come early to get a good deal on a used car, at a time when there was still a good supply at depressed winter prices, and little competition. That worked.

What hasn't worked quite so well is that, once I accomplished that, the weather turned especially bad, and there has been nasty rain for the last month. Mostly I've been spending days at the library and nights sleeping in my car in the rain. Heavy rain. Rain and wind. Record rainfall. Waiting for the car's paperwork to grind its way along. That took the full 45 days, oh joy forever.

But, there is a hackishness to this too. I am tired of waiting, and am way behind on such projects as modifying the car's interior to make it more amenable to living in and to sleeping in, but I know that the weather will catch up to the calendar. I know that things will improve. I know that spring will really come, and then that real summer will be here, and then that I will forget what I'm going through now, and that I will be doing a lot of fun traveling and fun backpacking.

But not yet. Not today.

Today, as in weeks previous, and for some (small) time to come I will be moving slowly and will continue to be frustrated by weather. But the deal is that I'm hacking the hiking season. I'm living outside, though (gratefully) protected by the hard shell of a car, with plenty of money for fuel, a car which supplies mobility and heat and electricity to power what devices I have, and all that, and I have two places where I can shower up any day I need to (each). I'm OK here, sitting but sitting alertly, just as though I'm some goddamn meditation master smirking at the universe and watching it unfold.

"Gimme shot — gimme best shot, you. Hah! You call that shot? Piss on you, eh?" That's me, sort-of.

I'm getting to see the hiking season develop. Getting to see my opinions change, my plans change, my gear closet fill up, my thoughts about where to go and when and where to go first, and second, and later some time, and then maybe where to go at the end of this season, and what to do with my car and my clothes then, and what about next year, if there is a next year. I'm learning. I'm watching the lotus blossom.

Which means that I'm hacking my life some more. I'm gaining perspective. It's like a meditation retreat, except while sleeping in my car. And eating in my car, and urinating in my car, and changing clothes in my car, and (although not yet, not yet this trip), defecating in my car (into a plastic bag, of course).

Yeah, so lucky me. I could be in Cuenca now, watching fall arrive. There now, in Cuenca now, the season is the equivalent of mid-November, because Cuenca is south of the equator. In truth, Cuenca is deep into winter, winter being the rainy season, when not huge amounts of rain fall, but when rain falls regularly and when the temperature overnight is in the low to mid 40s (°F) and the day's high might touch 55°F. It gets effing cold with no heat and almost no sun. But still it's more pleasant than what I'm in now. But still, this here-and-now stuff is what I wanted. Go figga.

So, nothing especially to do now, at this moment, but to continue observing, learning, and updating my approach, i.e., keep on with the hacking.

Which sounds good. Not that bad. OK. Tolerable.

I hope I'm as smart as I sometimes think I sound.

Rainwet

No — not yet. September. September, 2016.

Friday, then Friday night, then Friday night rain.

I'm a turtle, inside my shell, sleeping while the rain beats at it. Let it beat. I'm down for the night, shelled in a car.

Then I'm up, and it's Saturday. Another day, another day at the library.

So that's Saturday, then there is Saturday night, and then Saturday night rain.

How familiar by now, and back to Turtle Island, my car, floating, dreaming in the rain. Turn the good ear up and it's pain. Turn the deaf ear up and it's an endless long hum.

A hum caught in the sky's throat. The sky takes long nighttime showers, takes the full night, goes all in. I dream of Frenly Denwa, of Fulsom Honeydew, of Mindy Fresh. Know them? I don't think so either. They only passed by once, full in their beam of portable sunshine, while I loitered in the darkness.

Then Sunday comes. Hope. Should be better, no?

Better then? No.

Off to the park for my own washup, needed. How bad can this state park shower be by now?

Shitbucket.

The hygienic equal to diarrhea soup, served cold. Like a deep bowl of cold diarrhea soup to stand in.

One test token turns the shower on but twirling the knobs only bounces it from off to full glacier. By mistake I tune it to variably tolerable. Someone failed here, so why not, and leverage their oversight, enduring the warm to hot to warm to chilly cycles and bathe anyway. Ha! Beat you! Sorta.

...Dave's qwikwash interlude...

Then back to my car in a solo umbrella parade. Sunday. What a fine day for laundry. So I do that.

But the weather itself fails later, and dies, and weak sun burns in. Yeah. Always later, isn't it? But sun.

Monday then, today, and how is it? Partly to mostly sunny. For now.

And tonight? And tomorrow? How about? Oh.

Rain.

How Is Car Living?

"How is car living?" you might ask, if you knew me. (Although you don't, but I can pretend).

If you did, and had too much time in your life to deal with on your own, and needed to kill some of it in probably the worst possible way, then you could ask. Why ask is your problem, because you won't, so then I will never have anything to do with this question, like answering it, but you still have to deal with the why of it all, because you're thinking about it, aren't you? Eh? Or would be if you existed.

So anyway, if I know one thing, that's it right there. I'm on my own.

Yes, and living in my car. What separates me from the rest of the homeless population around here is that I have a car. I make sure to remind myself to remember that. To remember that I left my warm cozy life of waking up late and only trying to make it to lunch by noon and then doing nothing else all day except possibly buying some fruit and going for a walk, for this. I spent a bunch of money for this. For this living in a car, which has around two thirds the floor space of my former bathroom, which was in turn just large enough that if I turned around exactly slowly enough I would not bump into myself. Slowly. Not faster.

Counter, toilet, and half the bath tub. That's my car, but without the headroom, or the plumbing. I'm living in my bathroom without the washup option and can't also flush away what needs to be flushed away.

A plastic bag, paper toweling, and a bunch of those wet wipey-wipes do work, but your aim has to be accurate right up front, assuming that you do have room behind the driver's seat. And no one is looking. And after that, The Disposal Routine. Problems that it doesn't even occur to a normal bathroom to think about.

But that's life these days. Free as a bird.

A bird named Ed, for example. A bird with a cigarette-stained beak, one leg, a bad cough, graying feathers, a limited time horizon.

Or not. Maybe some other Ed.

The watchword is carefulness. That's it for now: Think first, then act. Move slowly. Don't spill. Especially don't spill. Anything. This car needs to be resold at some point. If that's in a few months then Pay Attention Now, Hear? But if I keep it and continue breathing for two or three more years, then it doesn't really matter unless I miss the bag, and lay my secret right on the floor. Probably best at that point to pull a cap down around my ears and burn the car and hitchhike back to Ecuador without saying anything.

That's where carefulness comes in. I'm practicing it.

Carefulness is like mindfulness but not dressed in black leather or moving to the music. Mindfulness is trendy now, and sleek and slim, but "carefulness" is barely even a word. It's doesn't go to parties or get its name dropped every 10 seconds. It means "Don't eff up, then, putz-face", and means to mean it, and will give you a slap across the forehead right now, not even one second from now, no time to even begin thinking up an excuse, just Whack! if you forget and let your attention wander and do something you shouldn't.

So, yeah, I'm having fun. Life is real fun now, sleeping inside a damp car 25 miles out of town, listening for engines in the night, remembering to wake up by 6:30 so I can get into town and have a shower before it locks up a 9 a.m., having a cup of coffee, buying food from the refrigerated section, and spending the day at the library, inside of which is has not rained. Yet. And then going in reverse in the evening and hoping I won't need to use a toilet until right before tomorrow's shower, and waiting for the car's title and registration and plates to arrive, and drier weather and all that so I can tool around and remain being a homeless guy but one out hiking in the summer.

Something like that.

Exciting to think about if you're the right kind of person.

---

The story of Ed: I rescue this dog. He rescues the bird. The bird rescues all of us in a weird sense and it's just a miracle. A different Ed.

Helicopter toilet

Good Enough

Overnight.

Parked in the woods, at my hilltop stop. As the car door closes and locks, the rain begins.

I am inside alone in the wet until until dawn, listening to drops tapping their dances atop my car. Cozy sleeping but cramped. Little air but enough. I can manage.

My facilities are reduced. I have an empty jar, if I need it, and I will. No reason to go out, to stand in the rain. Better to stay dry, inside, to bleed pressure from my bladder. As long as I don't spill.

"If you live long enough, everything is possible," they say, so one day I will urinate my car. "But not tonight," I hope.

The moon is with me, above, but it hides. I know it is watching behind its curtain of clouds. We are separate tonight, cannot see each other. The moon has been keeping me company for days now. Nights. For nights. We will get past this and resume our conversation directly, but not this night.

The moon itself is always dry, you know, but cold — the eternal tradeoff. Wet or cold, pick your pain. The moon is dry but I am wet. We both suffer then, in our separate ways, and talk later.

In the morning after showering with the other homeless men I visit a laundry to let a dryer have at my towel. It will never come dry otherwise, today, not inside the car inside the rain all day. I have money, and it is well spent. The towel revives.

Then, surprised, hours later, the following evening, last night, parked again at the same spot, there is no rain, not all night, and I see stars while outside, not needing my jar, or chancing a spill. I see stars, and tonight was due the deluge. Later, I guess. It will still come, I think. It will. The year is still too young to be dry, and the storms still range free.

Very well. I have to accept all outcomes because there is no choice among them. At least I have seen stars again. They are still doing fine, and the hazed moon was only slightly hazed. Beyond the clouds, but only slightly out of reach.

This is good. Good enough, I guess.

What Place Is This America?

I'm back inside the United States. I have observations, made on-the-fly.

Random.

They don't necessarily follow a sequence, add up, or fall into a hierarchy. Nevertheless, some things have struck me about this always odd land.

In a supermarket checkout line, I noticed that the people ahead of me, evidently a mother and nearly-adult daughter, had a lot of packaged foods. Among them five or six tubes of potato chips. Tubes. Chips packaged in plastic tubes that may outlast the pyramids.

I used the restroom at Millersylvania State Park one morning. The gent walking out ahead of me went from the restroom to the parking lot, got into his large SUV, and drove 200 feet back to his home-away-from-home, where he exited the truck and went back inside.

About half the land area here seems to be parking lots. There are no free-range people at large on the streets. Everyone is in motorized wheelchairs (Ford, Toyota, Mazda, Jeep, Kia, whatever).

The streets are desolate. (See previous item.) We are all isolates in our steel cans, drifting separately. Most afoot these days are homeless.

No one has children. In supermarkets, you see a few infants sitting in the grocery carts pushed around by Mom, and occasionally see one carried in a harness (usually on Mom's front side), but you don't see children walking with their parents. The three to 10 cohort is missing. There are no family groups walking around together anywhere, holding hands.

People are afraid of contact. Two years ago, out of practice from being away, I crashed my grocery cart into someone else's. The guy apologized, to me. It seems that one of the worst things a person can do is to get close to anyone else. Within two feet you hit the warning zone. People stop, jerk upright, look around, brace themselves for evasive action.

Within two feet things go critical. People begin actually taking evasive action, say "Sorry!", "Excuse me!", "Whoops!" in hopes that they won't under any circumstances actually make physical contact. Closer than that and anything can happen. If you actually touch someone they may erupt in anger and get in your face (without getting any closer), or erupt in an abject apology and slink away. Or do something completely unpredictable.

But on the road it's all close calls. While I'm driving safely and not holding up tens of vehicles behind, or any, I have people floor it and roar around me so they can slam on their brakes and screech to a stop at the impending stop sign just ahead — but ahead of me. That's the important thing. It's those two or three critical seconds that Americans will not let get away. Or will die trying to hold fast to.

Speed seems to be the most important thing in life.

Back to the supermarket: You get an apology from the cashier if the transaction of the person ahead of you takes more than 30 seconds. As if that mattered. On the road: The speed limit is seen as a minimum, especially so if the road is familiar and the person roaring out to pass from behind you has been over this stretch a couple of hundred times without crashing or murdering anyone's children, so hey, if the speed limit is 30 then it should always be safe at 50.

Aggressive, uncompromising moralism applied to random events: As I stood in the supermarket aisle reading the label on a can of beanless chili, a guy passing behind me yelled out "There's a lot of salt in that!" There wasn't, but he couldn't help it. He had to warn-criticize me in public for being so perverse as to buy chili in a can, possibly containing some of this week's evil edible. And why was it his business? Because he was moral and I wasn't. So there, guy, watch your salt.

The stores are full of the crippled. Especially food stores. They travel in motorized carts. Those able to walk do so but hobble. These are people who have never walked farther than from the cab of their giant SUV to the restroom door and back. They are stiff. Their spines no longer flex. Their knees hardly bend. They rock from side to side as they walk, and quit as soon as they can.

Obese. There are huge numbers of obese people here, growing all the time. They take up so much otherwise beautiful space. When I was young a fat person was a rare sight, something to wonder about. Now they are an ever-present shuffling obstacle course.

Packages. Nearly all the food is in packages, each fulsomely decorated with clever graphics. The raw meat, fruit, and vegetable sections continue to decline. They are not trendy, and at best represent yet more work to do once you get home. Instead of ripping open a convenient package and just stuffing the contents into your head, which is what God intended, after all, isn't it?

Shiver Me Nubbins

I can't say that I'm enjoying all of this. Not all of it.

I've been spending nights at a trailhead parking lot. It got expanded since I've been here last. The original was sort of a drive-through place: a loop at the end of the road with space for a dozen cars, if everyone was friends and played nice.

Now they've extended the road up a hill and have carved out a new lot. It's big and broad and flat and above the trees. There must be room for 500 cars up there, and the gravel is easy.

Generally, I've been using the lower lot, the old one. Hardly anybody goes there.

I park, go to sleep, get up, and leave. Anyone hiking or biking uses the upper lot and never even sees me. Most everyone. It's been good.

But it has been cold. The last clear night must have taken me down to about 20°F. Even wearing lots of fleece and hiding inside a 25°F bag, inside my car, I was still cold. Not last night though.

Last night was rain. I dreaded it but it was benign. I needed to get up just once during the night and that was during a gap in the rain. I have the windows covered so I can leave them open a bit for ventilation, which in this case, now, isn't freezing. And the weather was warm — around 40°F, which is a huge improvement.

Two mornings ago I had to scrape frost off the inside of the windshield. Not today, though I did have to wipe the fog off it with paper towels. I am not complaining. It took only seconds and did not immediately freeze over.

Now I'm waiting for the arrival of goods I've ordered, and trying to figure out how to register a vehicle and update a driver's license in Washington while not having a fixed address. Tricky

Jumping through hoops. That's what I'm looking at.

I queried the Department of Licensing about how I could do this without having to leave the state and become a resident of some other state.

As a result I got back a reply that said I could not become a Washington resident without living in the state. That sort of thing is why I quit working for government. I refuse to associate with idiots.

Wetless (Bath-Wise)

Closed.

Which is always fun. Even more fun than you can imagine, shower-wise.

I've been camping at a Capitol State Forest trailhead. It's really a day-use area but there are no signs prohibiting overnight parking so I'm going with it.

I arrive somewhat late in the day, keep a low profile, and burrow into my nest inside the car at dark, which is usually after everyone else has left.

So far Saturday night and Sunday night have been busy times, as expected, but my first night there, last Thursday, was totally quiet. This isn't surprising since Thursday, Thursday night, and early Friday were rainy. Friday night was clear and intensely cold, at least for around here. "Here" is Western Washington, which recently had a hugely atypical cold spell. But also totally quiet.

Spring is coming, and buds are out, but though heavy frost, and snow, are done with for the year (we all hope), the rain will continue for over two more months. I can handle it.

Sometime today I'll have my "side window deflectors" for the car. Once they're installed I'll be able to sleep in the car with ventilation in even heavy rain. That is only a matter of time.

The issue now is bathing.

Millersylvania State Park is my bathing home base.

The main restroom is open as usual, as it is all winter, but the shower is undergoing maintenance. There is a shower available at "Bathhouse 1" down by the lake, from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m., so the sign says.

It works, the shower. That is in fact better than a lot of the showers at this park, but the issues don't end there.

The problem is that the one available shower at Millersylvania State Park is not open when it should be. I've used it as late as noon, and as early as 9:30 a.m., but so far it's never open by 9:00.

If I wait around, or try to find staff, I waste time.

I was hoping to be at the library, working on things, by 10:30 today, a half hour after it opens. Well, I made it by noon.

I killed almost an hour waiting to see if the park shower would open, without luck. As a second and last resort, I went out of my way to buy a small bottle of soap that would fit in the tray at the Olympia Center. It has public showers. After buying soap in a small bottle then, I reluctantly went to the Center to see what the ground rules were these days.

Homeless guys wash there. True, I am one now, at least for a while, but it's not a great place to hang out, nor are most of those people.

The showers in this place used to be available from 8 a.m. to about noon, or until 10 a.m. on Saturdays. That was in May 2014. Now the hours are 8:00 a.m. to 9:00 a.m. (10:00 a.m. on Saturdays) I can't even get into town that early. Fun, fun, fun, but no woots.

No bathing for me! Kinda. Unless I have nothing else to do on that day, and can hang around Millersylvania all day.

So today I tootled on up to Priest Point Park in Olympia. I already needed to tank up on water, and today is dark, so even though I was there at 11 a.m., it was like dusk.

I wheeled around to a little-used part of the place where there's a shelter but no water or playground equipment or anything — the kind of place that people use as a last resort. The shelter was full of picnic tables standing on end, keeping dry until spring. Perfect. (If you have low standards.)

If not perfect, then usable.

I wet my head, soaped it, and rinsed. Done with that.

Next up: crotch.

I wetted a paper towel with rubbing alcohol, sidled backward, in and among the stored picnic tables, dropped my pants, and went over my pee-pee, then used the towel on my backside, which needed a good cleaning because of what I did with it earlier this morning.

Done.

Next, I took off my shoes one by one and with a fresh towel dripping with rubbing alcohol I went over each one.

After that I actually felt good.

The cold water on my head was a shock but nothing you don't get used to while backpacking. The alcohol wipes were quick and effective. My feet feel great. But the rest of me is still old and greasy.

Unless I knock off early and try the state park again, I won't be able to bathe until nearly another 24 hours from now, but hey. I have a partial solution for now, on days when no rain is falling — just trail-bathe. It mostly works, and anyone seeing me won't be able to tell: my hair won't be matted and greasy-looking. My crotch and feet will be cleaned off and disinfected. That's something.

Not enough, but something. Quite a bit, actually.

Anyhow, for today, I hereby declare adequate happiness and contentment.