Should We Fear Doors

I have been waiting in a room as the Plague swirls and cast shadows outside. Six weeks of growing a beard and ordering things off Amazon while drinking whiskey and binge watching series. Optimism embraces fear embraces hope. Life will never be the same.

What Peace Means to Us comes out in a week. In a marketing sense I am completely unprepared. In a “work of art” sense, I believe in it and know it’s good. This is just a crazy time for all of us--the Plague, the economy crashing like a drunk on a bicycle. Who is going to have money to buy books, anyway? No idea. This is what I do so you just sort it out.

As I prepare for What Peace Means to Us coming out I am also embarking on 40 Square Foot Life--turning a 2010 Honda Odyssey into a home on wheels. This is why Amazon deliveries show up on my friends’ porch every day: Water containers. Lanterns. Portable toilets. Tow straps--everything you need to survive as a nomad.

Hopefully.

It’s been a life I’ve been obsessed with for eight years; all it took was my marriage and job imploding to do it.

I would be lying if I didn’t admit there are moments of fear: What if I get sick? What if I am accosted by desperate hillbillies while camping in the middle of nowhere? What if I burn through all my money? What if--

Should we fear doors? There is sunlight and all hues of beauty in nature, but there are also wolves and vipers lurking behind rocks.

Vanlife has become a cliche: You have influencers and beautiful people putting up thousands of videos and snapshots of themselves doing yoga and eating avocados in gorgeous locations.

And you have detractors pointing out all the flaws in living in a vehicle, especially during a pandemic.

The truth is more a combination of the good and the bad from what I had read.

From what I have read.

Important sentence. I’ve lived out of a vehicle for a week. It felt good, but that was a week. When the week was over I went back to the duplex where I lived that had plumbing and electricity. There is the chance I could hate van life after a week--

Or it could be fulfilling and I could be my element.

Won’t know until I am doing it full time and for real.

The long term goal is to buy some rural land and build a cabin, maybe have friends and other like minded people stay with me. A home base for however many years I have left. For now, there is the road and sorting out how I will pay for that cabin and make that rural life feasible. All our old plans are fucked; they were written on Post-It that has been kidnapped by a hurricane and carried far away. But we’ll make it, you and I, in this new world. It may not be easy, but life can still have moments of beauty and happiness. Should we fear doors? No, but we need to understand that the world outside is imperfect and sometimes throws perils and misfortune our way.

Be safe, be happy, and for the love of God wash your fucking hands.

Cheers, Izk

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