Thanks guys. It's nice to be somewhere I belong again. It's been kinda lonely out here since I've been living in this van. The feeling of isolation and instability are pretty palpable. It messes with your head at first, when you transition from living in a traditional "home", with rooms, and walls and a front door and everything, to living in a van. You don't feel like the rug has been pulled out from under you, you feel like the whole planet has. Your whole sense of foundation and stability are gone... In the early days, it would hit me the hardest when I would get off work. When I lived in a house/apartment, I would always look forward to going straight home after work. I never wanted to make any stops, or run errands on the way. I just wanted to go home. But when your van is your home, you feel like you have nowhere to go. Like you're adrift in space. As such, I've come to think of this van as a spaceship, or a shuttle (like a Type-6 shuttle from Star Trek... yeah, you knew I was nerd.
). After I had been living in the van for a few weeks, I decided to give it a name. I never named any of my vehicles before, but I figured; if this going to be a ship, it oughta have a name. After much deliberation, I decided to christen it the "Rocinante" for a number of reasons...
1) It's the name of Don Quixote's horse
2) It's the name of the ship in "Cygnus X-1" by Rush
3) It's the name of the ship in: "The Expanse" (one of my all-time favorite sci-fi shows/book series)
4) I happened to come across an article about the custom camper that John Steinbeck had build for his GMC pickup truck, in which travelled all over the country in 1962, and he dubbed "Rocinante" as well.
Looked pretty nice on the inside, too.
However, I've read that Steinbeck spent more nights in hotel rooms than he did in the camper, and the book he wrote about the trip (Travels with Charley) was largely fictionalized, but he was nearing the end of his life, so I cut him some slack.
Actually, I debated whether to call it the "Rocinante", or the "Aluminum Falcon" (It really is more like the Millennium Flacon than a Mars Navy gunship - "She may not look like much, but she's got it where it counts, kid... I've added some special modifications, myself".
), but there were too many references to the name "Rocinante" that were meaningful to me to squander the name in favor of a cheap joke.
I still kinda feel like I'm lost in space. Probably always will.
golem wrote: ↑Tue Mar 28, 2023 8:12 am
That sucks. I've known people who lived in vans or trucks out of a sense of adventure and frugality, but that isn't most people.
Yeah, I've watched a lot of "van life" videos on YouTube, made mostly by cute couples and hipsters, who have a ton of money to invest in converting a $50,000 Sprinter van into a state-of-the-art RV for fun and profit, but not a lot (or
any, really), by people who've been driven into homelessness, with a limited budget and a beat-up old cargo van.
andrewsrea wrote: ↑Wed Mar 29, 2023 11:42 am
Great to have you back and glad to hear you are making the best of life's challenges. Sorry about your roommate.
Thanks, Rob. Sadly, I think my roommate (his name was Larry) ultimately got what he wanted. I think he just gave up on life... Larry was in his late '60s. He was an albino and legally blind, so he lived on a fixed, disability income and didn't get out much. He didn't have many friends, or much of a social life, and I didn't even know Larry had any family until he was near the end of his life (he had two brothers - one of whom lived nearby - that I had never met, or knew about, and a son who was doing a long stretch in prison). Still, most of the time I knew Larry, he was a fairly up-beat guy, and pursued his own interests, but that last year, he fell into a funk, and started losing weight and completely lost interest in all of his hobbies and pass-times. I'm pretty sure he withdrew from the few friends that he
did have, as started noticing that he was going out less and less, and didn't go anywhere on holidays, where he would usually spend them friends. After a while, he spent all of his time in the house, parked in front of the television. He stopped bathing, stopped eating,and stopped showing any interest in anything.
It was a while before I realized there was something
physically wrong with him. One day, I came home and found him sleeping on the couch with blood smeared down the right side of his face, and he had a bleeding sore on his ear. Larry had long hair, so I had never seen it before, and when I asked him about it, he shrugged it off as: "just a diabetic thing". He had had sores on his arms and legs in the past, so I took his word for it at first, but when it seemed to be getting worse, I got on his case pretty hard to go see a doctor about it. At first, he bristled at that and refused to go, saying he didn't like his doctor, or "they don't know anything", or "they're just going to tell me what I already know", but when I started pushing harder, he started lying to me (repeatedly) to get me off his back. He would tell me he made an appointment when he hadn't, or that he's: "waiting to hear from his social worker", or that he saw the doctor and he's: "waiting for lab results", etc. All the while, his health kept getting visibly worse, and there was nothing I could do about it. You can't force a person into medical treatment if they don't want it, and nothing I said to him could convince him. It wasn't until Larry started having trouble walking that he finally broke down and agreed to let me help him arrange to get some medical attention - something I had offered numerous times before - but this time he meant it. He gave me his doctor's info and his insurance card, and all his documentation, and by the next day, he was on his way to the hospital. But it was too late at that point. That bleeding "diabetic thing" on his ear turned out to be a ruptured malignant tumor, and the cancer had metastasized. They shipped him off to hospice, and two months later, he was gone.
I don't think he was in denial, or scared to go to the doctor. I think he was just tired of living. He had to know that there was something seriously wrong with him, and he was just waiting for it to take him. In one sense, it's a tragedy that he couldn't find a way to be happy (and nobody could give that to him), but in another sense, I'm glad he's at peace.
Sorry... didn't mean to be a downer. Sabas has heard the story in real-time, but I haven't talked about it at all since it happened.
nomadh wrote: ↑Wed Mar 29, 2023 12:39 am
Good to have. You back. Sorry about the problems. I love those van conversions. Wish my dad kept our old short chevy van w straight 6. Camped in it but never did all the cools stuff to it. The thing handled like a race car inthe mountains.
I had sciatica a few years ago. In a way I was lucky because the only think that didn't drive me crazy was walking. I hiked half Dome w it but even dead tide I had to eat walking around and going to bed had to pretent pedal myself to sleep to get my 3 hours rest.
Had t work at my computer marching and I had to put on metal so I could double bass pedal drum while driving.
I read a book by Pete igosque (sp) lots of great exercises. I remember liking the one where I laid on the floor with my legs bent resting my calves on the seat of a chair. Really felt good and aligned things.
Every case of sciatica is different, it seems. I had known people who suffered from it in the past, but all they complained about was a pain that came from sitting down for too long, and I thought that's all that sciatica was. In my case, nothing brought immediate relief. Even walking was incredibly painful, but I pushed myself to do it, because I would always feel better a couple of hours later. Same thing with the stretching exercises. But I ignored the pain for too long, until it brought me to tears, and I couldn't function anymore.
Mr. Leyvatone wrote: ↑Tue Mar 28, 2023 11:33 am
Welcome back, brother. We missed you. Mat this year be a much better one.
Tiga wrote: ↑Tue Mar 28, 2023 12:57 pm
Welcome back man! Hope your body recovers well and we see/read more from you.
Thanks guys, and you will. I can't say it'll be on a daily basis like it used to be, though... Time seems to slip away from me more quickly these days, and while the pain is mostly behind me, my energy levels are still kinda low. But I'll be around a lot more often that have been.
jtcnj wrote: ↑Tue Mar 28, 2023 8:17 am
Welcome back!
Stay safe and healthy.
The whole wage vs. real cost of living has been worse and worse for working class / lower middle folks for decades.
Wages have been relatively stagnant / don't nearly keep up, since the 1970's.
At least partially by design I believe, but I won't go there.
I completely agree, but I won't get into it here, either.
