I started this blog as a fresh-faced, idealistic 22-year-old. I had just started my dream job at Google and was doing my truck thing, living life my way. The sky was the limit. I had a full head of hair,¹ money rolling in, and aspirations to retire young. After six months of living this brave new life, precocious and optimistic at 23, I wrote a post titled Decimals And Dollars: Planning the Next Decade where I talked about financial independence and retiring early (FIRE).

It’s been a minute two and a half years. I left the truck and apparently I left the blog behind with it. Whoops! But the good news is that we’re fixing that right now.

Oh hey, thanks for asking. Not much has changed on my end, same old, same old: got married, my nonprofit excelled at not-profiting, did some start-up stuff, got some very cute animals, and eventually ended up back at A Big Tech Company. My “role of work” chart has aged well in that particular regard.

I spent the better part of six years with a very narrow idea of “home”. My literal home was the boxy, six-wheeled place I slept and stored my assorted garbage. My actual home was, well, anywhere else, as I’ve oh so dramatically written about before. I’d whittled away the utility of my primary shelter to little more than a literal shell, and it’s no secret that I was happy (and maybe even a bit proud) with that.

Hello! It’s been an eventful few weeks months: the job has been quit, the truck has been sold, the California has been left, and the new venture has been started (full-time!).

Selling the truck is probably the biggest and most blog-relevant event. Even though I’d already announced my plans to sell it, having legitimately sold it still feels different. One of those things that doesn’t really register until it’s actually happened. Truly the end of an era. In Marie Kondo-fashion, I thank the truck for its service and wish it the best in its new life.

A quick recap: I’m quitting my job and moving out of the truck/state of California.

As a person who doesn’t like having stuff they don’t need/use, I’m getting rid of the truck. More specifically, as a person who recognizes the utility of money, I’m selling the truck.

I’ve always said that I’ll keep living in the truck as long as it keeps making sense in the larger context of my life. And for the past ~6 years (plus or minus a pandemic), I think that’s been the case. I’m young, healthy, unencumbered by other humans depending on me for survival, and have had access to food, gyms, and other useful resources provided by employers. But now I’ve gone and quit my job to start my own thing, and suddenly the truck doesn’t look quite so sensible any more.

Being back in the truck wouldn’t really be complete without some semi-inexplicable phenomenon causing me troubles (cough cough). And thankfully, the truck hasn’t disappointed. I say this because I came back to the truck a few days ago to several large mounds of thick, sticky sap on the floor of the truck.

This would be odd under normal circumstances, but to make things further befuddling:

• My sunroof was closed, and
• I wasn’t parked anywhere near a tree.

Certifiably odd. But years of strange truck happenstances mean that my first reaction was along the lines of “This needs to be gone now”, instead of just general confusion. I’ve witnessed one too many ant ^{et al} infestations even without any food in the truck, I sure as hell wasn’t going to sit around and find out if they find sap tasty or not.

To be honest, it’s been kinda weird trying to maintain a blog about living in a truck when I haven’t, you know, been living in a truck.

It’s sure a good thing I’m back in the truck then.

Yup, you heard read that right. After a long, long year (and some change), I’ve sloughed off the normalcy of a one-bedroom apartment and slithered back into my truckly digs of yesteryear. And while the amenities and convenience of things like “electricity” and a “bathroom” and “not living in a legal grey area” were nice additions to my life, I’ve got to say that I’m glad to be back.

I can be a completely insufferable person to be around. Part of this is because it took me a long time to learn the difference between someone seeking advice, and just wanting to vent. If I think I see a problem, I tend to look for solutions. Couple that with a bit of obnoxious optimism and an inclination towards simplicity, and the outcome is that I trivialize problems and offer deeply unnuanced “solutions”.

It seems like just yesterday I was switching subsidiary companies at my resident multinational conglomerate, trading in my gig in enterprise business software for something more acutely interesting to me: surgical robotics.

And the three+ intervening years have been not only a grand ole time, but also marked a clear shift in what I actually do at work. The last time I wrote a post like this, my main job was building the things other people told me to build. Over time, I became the person who decides what to build and how to build it, and I’ve learned quite a bit in that process: how to build big (and hopefully useful) systems, how to lead teams and (again, hopefully) not have them hate you, and a whole bunch of more specific things (working with a variety of cloud platforms, building protocols for embedded devices, working with teams across timezones, etc).

I’m a firm believer that human consciousness is a huge cosmic accident. Kinda like Matthew McConaughey’s monologue from that one scene in True Detective. Except far, far less cynical, and maybe without the part about humans choosing to voluntarily go extinct. Great scene though, great scene.

More to the point: not only do people exist, but we’re painfully aware of our own existence as somewhat autonomous entities. We aren’t particularly amenable to going through mechanical, preprogrammed motions as effectively as say, an ant. We get bored easily. To keep ourselves entertained, we ascribe higher meaning to things and give ourselves purpose.

Several eons ago, when quarantine started, a younger and slightly more naive Brandon entered quarantine with a bike, a yoga mat, and a well-intentioned (but ultimately wrong) hope that this wouldn’t last more than a few weeks.

And the biking/yoga combo (boga? yiking?) served its purpose well, but as the days and weeks wore on, it became increasingly clear that it wouldn’t be enough. I was still shedding weight, and while my lower body was in fine shape, my upper body had become soft and sad from a clear lack of stimulation. Not quite “Christian Bale in The Machinist” bad, but bad enough that multiple people independently pointed out that I looked much smaller, in an “I’m worried about you, is this a cry for help?” kind of way. Worse, I could feel that I was physically weaker.

Truck Tenets is a series I’ve been wanting to do for a while. Like, a while — I’ve got draft posts dating back to 2016. It’s only by my sheer inability to see anything through to completion that none of them have seen the light of day…until now.

The idea behind the series is pretty straightforward: there are ideas that I live my life by, why not talk about them? Some are high-level and abstract, like “Less is more”, and others are more concrete, like “Don’t eat gas station sushi in land-locked countries”. Some of them come directly from my experiences with the truck, and others just as a matter of living and doing Normal Human Things™.

For most folks, the past few months have likely looked a lot different than usual. Humans are creatures of habit, and spending 99% of your time stuck at home represents a pretty thorough disruption of those habits for many. As a person who was used to spending more like 0.02% of my waking hours at “home”, things have certainly looked different for me. It feels like an eternity ago that I was gearing up for a life without the truck, gathering my few possessions up and picking places to stay.

^{Note: I stole the title from an email I received, thanks Kevin!}

I’m not usually one to comment on “current events”.

That said, when “current events” are “modern society is looking a little rough around the edges”, it’s kind of hard not to comment. Of course, I’m talking about limited-edition Shrek Crocs the COVID-19 pandemic. Now I’ve never aspired to be a source of information or disinformation, and I’d like to keep it that way, so: get up-to-date information from WHO, the CDC, or your local Department of Public Health, not your friendly neighborhood truck man.

Continuing my new trend of discussing Californian curiosities, let’s talk about water. Speaking with only the slightest bit of hyperbole, it doesn’t rain in the Bay Area from May through September, but it gets decently damp from October onward. And I’m not just talking about rain; some mornings bring with them a thick layer of condensation, which I’ve addressed before, a long, long time ago.

Back then, I thought the condensation was, in large part, just me breathing in the box^{a lot}, which seems kinda silly (and gross) in retrospect. I’ve since learned exhalation only accounts for a small amount of it: less than a cup per night. The majority just condenses out of the air. Normal folks call this ‘humidity’, but apparently the word escaped me when I wrote that last post.

Truckquake is the poor portmanteau (poortmanteau?) I’m going to use to describe earthquakes that I experience when I’m in the truck.

Earthquakes are a relatively common phenomenon in California. According to the California Department of Conservation, there are ~200 “potentially hazardous” faults in the state, and they generate an average of “two or three” quakes per year registering 5.5 or higher on the Richter scale, which is enough to cause “moderate [structural] damage”. Fun, lighthearted stuff.

Oh Christmastime, what can I say about you that hasn’t already been said?

Literally nothing, so let’s just skip the whole “waxing poetic about Christmas” business.

My personal relationship with Christmas is, well, slightly complicated and always changing. I was raised Jewish (as I’ve mentioned before), but I fell off the Judaism-bandwagon pretty much immediately after my Bar Mitzvah. Not to say that my family were particularly good Jews to begin with — we faithfully celebrated Christmas every year, and occasionally lit our Menorah candles and said our blessings. But with the advent of my truckliness, my thoughts on Christmas, and specifically, on giving and receiving gifts, have changed pretty handily.

I want to travel more. It’s a well-documented desire of mine. Specifically, I want to plan my own trips, because I’ve historically been pretty terrible at it. I even made a “process”, which I’ll paraphrase here:

1. Wait until a particularly whimsical mood strikes.
2. Bike aimlessly until you find a book store.
3. Enter the book store.
4. Find the travel/travel guide section.
5. Close your eyes.
6. Spin around, preferably 3-5 times.
7. With eyes still closed, pick a travel guide off the shelf.
8. Buy the travel guide.
9. Read the travel guide.
10. Go there. Optional: Be merry.

Using this bulletproof approach, I had picked out a destination, Taiwan. I don’t want to say I’m giving up on all of that, because I’m definitely still going to do it…I just went somewhere else first. To explain where and why requires the slightest bit of backstory.

This is a story about my poor life choices and where they sometimes take me. It all started when I was a little boy a few months ago. It’s President’s day weekend , and I’ve got some grand plans, at least in relation to how quiet I usually like my weekends.

Friday night was catching up with some friends

Saturday was a holiday party (¿in February?)

Sunday was exploring San Jose

I can’t remember where on The Internet™ I originally saw it, but at some point in the past few months I came across an article about a woman selling her preposterously picturesque home in Canada for the low, low price of $19 and an essay of (at most) 350 words.

The catch here (because houses usually cost more than nineteen dollars) is that you have to win the contest (i.e. have the bestest essay), and the woman running the contest needs to receive enough entries to cover what would normally be the asking price of the house, which happens to be $1.3 million USD. Crunching the (two) numbers here, that means ~68,000 people need to enter to effectively subsidizing the cost of this home for one lucky (and probably Canadian) duck.

over email

Anyway, the question went something roughly like:

×

And by roughly, I mean exactly, given that I took a screenshot of the question.

There’s a few reasons I find this question interesting:

ho·me·o·sta·sis (/ˌhōmēəˈstāsəs/) - the tendency toward a relatively stable equilibrium between interdependent elements, especially as maintained by physiological processes.

Recently, I’ve been more or less MIA, distracted by work trips, holidays, good books, and my random assortment of novelty website side projects. Anyway, I figured this is as good a time as any for a general status update on the state of truck-related things. I’ll try to avoid straying into retrospective/reflection territory, as I’ve already done enough of that this year last year, but no promises.

I’m completely going to ignore the fact it’s been four month since I wrote last.
Writing is hard sometimes.

When I started the blog, I talked a lot about my travel ambitions, mostly about my romantic and hyper-idealized fantasies about perpetually travelling. My thoughts on the topic have shifted a bit, but the core reasoning still stands: I think travel is the best way to expand your understanding of the world and the people in it.

My life may or may not consist of a series of questionable (and sometimes poorly thought out) choices that are ever so slightly outside my comfort zone. Even with a long line of shaky choices to choose from, a recent choice (and the topic of this post) might mark the climax of my personal brand of impulsive opportunism.

Since I’m wholly unable to structure my posts for dramatic effect and gave away the surprise in the title, what I’m trying to say is: I bought a house. Don’t worry though, the house is 3,000 miles away and I still totally live in a truck.

Here we are, item numero dos in our three-part mini-series about my recent (and highly suspect) purchases. Without further ado, here we go.

For some reason I’m not sure I understand yet, I bought a car.

I didn’t just wake up one day (after living here for three years) and decide I wanted a car. No, I bought it on a whim when the opportunity presented itself. A co-worker was selling their car, and it just happened to check all of my boxes:

I’m generally not against spending money. I am however generally against buying things. This is a point I’ve surely beaten well beyond death by now, so I won’t belabor it much further. It’s just to say that I want to be really sure something makes sense within the larger context of my life before I buy it and have to deal with it forever.

I only mention this because I’ve been on a bit of a purchasing spree (by my standards) as of late, which is at least part of the reason I’ve been so quiet on here for the past two months. The other part of the reason is that I’m just generally bad at blogging. Anyway, this post (and the next two), will talk about some of the purchases I’ve made, mostly over the past few weeks. This first one’s not all that contentious, but I promise they’ll get more questionable as we go. Okay, on to the post.

The future scares me.

Not in a “the icecaps are melting” sense, more of a “what am I doing with my life” sense.

I spend a lot of my words on this blog talking about the future. Saving for it. Planning for it. Picking travel destinations.

So imagine my surprise when I sat down one day to think about it, and I found that I had no idea what I actually wanted to do with my life.

This may not be my first post of 2018 (or even my second, for that matter), but hey, better late than never.

Happy 2018!

I’ve said before that I’m not a big fan of New Years’ resolutions. That’s still true. But I am a fan of taking the time to evaluate how my life is going, and course-correcting as necessary. I try to do it every few months, but the start of a year is as good a time as any to take a good hard look in the mirror, so let’s do it.

Obligatory warning: This post is about some of the inner technical workings of the site. If that doesn’t tickle your fancy, you might find this unfathomably boring.

Sometimes, when I’ve exhausted all other interesting or productive things to do, I’ll blow the dust off the code that makes this site hum along, and tweak it in one way or another. I’ve got to say, it’s a pretty thankless task. Brandon in 2015 didn’t really know what he was doing when it came to building web services in Golang, so the core codebase has historically been…unkempt, to say the least. To say the most, it looked like it was haphazardly slapped together by a team of monkeys banging on typewriters in the wee morning hours at the end of a hackathon.

‘Tis the season for belated blog posts! Seriously though, I know my posting track record is terrible to begin with, but it’s especially terrible November to January…which I understand is a non-negligible chunk of the year. If it’s any consolation, most of that time goes to building gag websites of questionable utility as gifts for my friends and family, and traveling to and from the east coast to showcase said gifts. Anyway, I’m glad to be back, now let’s get to the topic du jour: managing truck expenses.

While it’s not an outright lie to say I have a car, it’s probably a bit disingenuous. As recently discussed, calling it a two-seater with some generous trunk space is definitely pushing it (but technically correct).

More accurately, I have an eleven-and-a-half foot tall, four-to-five ton, screaming metal death trap on wheels. From that description (and my past ramblings), it’s not particularly shocking that I try not to drive it, but there’s actually a whole host of reasons I stay away from behind the wheel.

I’m all about consistency, particularly when it comes to my daily routine.

To confirm my own biases, I found some research that agrees with the idea that consistency is good. For example, one study suggests that people with regular routines tend to sleep better, and another study of young children found that regular bedtimes contributed to less obesity and better “emotional self-regulation”. I generally like the idea of sleeping well, being healthy, and having balanced emotions, so I do my best to be consistent.

Don’t worry, I didn’t get rid of the truck.

My home is roughly 16’ x 6’, or 96 ft². That makes it a little smaller than your average bedroom. In other words, it’s in my best interest to optimize how I use my limited space. Two years ago, I talked about consolidating and defragmenting how I laid out my room. The diagram I used looked like this:

×

By rearranging my things (all three of them), I was able to clear up some space. Not that I actually used that space for anything, it just seemed like a good idea at the time. Though as time went on, my tidy arrangement kinda…fell apart. I shuffled stuff around to help people move, I threw things away, I loaded and unloaded everything to make room for repairs, and just generally accumulated some cruft along the way. If I were to draw the diagram again as of last week, it’d look like this:

In the winter, I get questions about how I deal with the cold.

In the summer, I get questions about how I deal with the heat.

Being the more agreeable seasons, spring and fall are generally less concerning to people.

I’ve talked about dealing with the cold already. Just throw on a few of your favorite layers and cozy up with a comfy blanket. But winter is so last season. With Bay Area temperatures occasionally reaching triple digits, it’s as good a time as any to talk about dealing with summer.

I knew embarrassingly little about The Box™ when I bought it. I spent weeks obsessing over what kind of vehicle I wanted, but I purchased my current home of two years after only an hour or so of looking it over.

For example: I had the truck for nearly a month before I figured out it used to be a moving truck. More specifically, it used to be a Budget truck, and I just had no idea. I only found out by chance observation; if you look closely, you can still see the faded “Budget” logo, forever etched into the truck. Let me show you, with the help of my good friend science:

If this is your first time visiting the blog (or you use an RSS reader), this post won’t really make a ton of sense. But the veteran Box Truck Buffs might notice that the site looks quite a bit different today. For reference, the old site:

×

The old layout, in all of its Bootstrap-laden goodness. May it rest in sweet responsive peace.

With the truck getting a makeover, I figured it was just about time the blog did the same. Over the past few months, I’ve been working on the redesign haphazardly and in random bursts whenever the mood strikes me, and I think it’s ready (or close enough) for prime time. But why even redesign the blog in the first place?

Once upon a time there was an ugly truck.

He was a lonely soul, a poor mess of rust and twisted metal, left to idle all alone. While certainly a sad state of affairs, it hadn’t always been this way for him. In his youth as a rental truck, he’d helped families move every which way. Later, he became a work truck, the lifeblood of an independent carpenter. As fulfilling as his past had been, it had also left its fair share of chips and dents and scrapes and scratches, which he wore like badges of honor.

I’d previously mentioned that I had an upcoming work trip to Zürich, and in keeping with my usual blogging tardiness, that trip was two months ago. Actually, I (perhaps ironically) got back from India a few weeks ago, so expect that post soon in a few millennia. But anyway, let’s talk about Switzerland: a country of cheese, chocolates, and armed neutrality.

×

Waiting to leave SFO on a gloomy evening.

As it turns out, Zürich is kinda far away. Like, 5,889.11 miles, give or take a few. Luckily, the Wright Brothers solved this problem a while ago, so off I went on a fancy, new-fangled flying machine in relative luxury. I’ve been consistently impressed with the quality of economy class on international flights (first Lufthansa, and now Swiss), they really put our domestic carriers to shame. Between the hot meals, warm cloths so you aren’t bathing in your own face-grease the whole flight, and honest-to-God leg room, my mind is legitimately blown every time. Fun fact that I didn’t know until recently: foreign airlines can’t operate point-to-point routes within the US. Given that, it makes sense that domestic airlines aren’t really trying that hard, they only have to compete with like two other equally awful carriers on most routes.

Each financial post I do brings at least a few questions about my plan or different investment strategies. Before we get to it, I’ll start with my usual disclaimer that I have no background in finance or financial planning, and taking financial advice exclusively from the guy living in a box truck probably isn’t a sound strategy. With that out of the way, let’s get to the questions.

Do you invest in bitcoins?

I don’t think it rained once when I interned in the Bay in 2014. The summer of 2014, to be specific. Doing a bit of overzealous extrapolation, I came to the ^incorrect conclusion that it never rains in the Bay, which sounded just splendid to me. Before I moved out here to start a full-time job in 2015, I donated my boots, raincoat, and any umbrellas I had. When I actually got here and bought the truck, I didn’t even bother checking for leaks. You can tell where this is going, and anyone from the area knows that I made a grave miscalculation. I found this out the hard way during my first winter here.

New Year, New Me Same Truck-Dwelling Degenerate

Excuse the contrarianism for a second here, but I’m not a fan of New Year’s Resolutions. Don’t get me wrong, I love seeing people take the initiative, work hard, and reach their goals. My qualm is that, if you want to change something about your life, just do it. Don’t wait until we reach an arbitrary point in our orbit around the Sun to better yourself. After all, January 1^st is a day just like any other, nothing makes it any more conducive to success.

Happy Holidays!

I’m going to need a minute to blow the dust off my keyboard here, I haven’t posted in an inexcusably long time. Accordingly, I won’t bother with excuses, I’ll just get along with the post. To start, a relevant question I received:

Hi Brandon, just wondering if you’ll convert your blog into a travel blog if and when you give up the truck to travel?

This is probably in reference to the time I was figuring out when I’m going to sell the truck. Short answer: yes. Slightly longer (and also rhetorical) answer: why wait until I give up the truck to start talking about travel?

I’ve had a few opportunities to learn that I definitely shouldn’t read comments about me (or anything really) on the Internet, but sometimes morbid curiosity gets the better of me. Firmly not learning from the past, I found myself sifting through a hundred or so of these Internet comments earlier today. The general consensus seemed to be that I’m wasting my life and I’m wrong for living in a truck.

But that really confused me, because I don’t live in a truck.

I feel like it’s been a while since I started a new series of posts. Sure, we’ve got Truck Tech and Home Improvement and Tips from the Truck and Q & A, but I’m pretty confident we have room for at least one more. If titles weren’t supposed to be short, I’d probably extend the series name to: Incredibly Obvious Facts About Box Trucks (And Their Implications), just so we’re all definitely on the same page. Anyway, these posts will be all about inherent properties of box trucks, and what that means for how I structure and live my life. Our first patently obvious fact about box trucks: they definitely don’t have bathrooms.

As of me typing these words, my little truck experiment has been going on for over a year and four months. That’s been more than enough time to see a thousand different questions fly through this site and my inbox, and every so often I’ll sit down and answer a few of them. But there’s one question that I haven’t answered, and can’t seem to escape. It’s usually one of the first questions to come up in conversation, and half a bazillion variations of it are sitting in my queue:

It’s that time again, when I realize that I’ve been neglecting people’s questions for too long and they’ve reached a critical mass. It’s time to clean out the closet. Not the literal one pictured above, though I should probably do a write up for how I threw that together too.

I just read your leather strap solution to your drawer problem. Have you considered magnets?

Indeed I had, and in fact I use some neodymium magnets to hold a makeshift screen onto my sunroof. I decided against using magnets on the dresser drawers because of their force characteristics. Basically, I didn’t like the idea that I’d have to Goldilocks my way to the right strength of magnet: too weak and the drawers do as they please when I take turns, too strong and they become difficult to open, not to mention they might rip the super glue off instead of simply separating. Snaps and straps are much easier to reason about: I snap them closed and the drawers don’t move, I unsnap them and I can get at my clothes freely, without a fight.

I’ve gotten into this wonderful rhythm of publishing posts that are tragically untimely. My Spring Cleaning post was five days too late, I’d had the insulation and skylight for weeks before I’d recounted the tale, and I’d successfully picked up and put down my weight goals way before I picked up the pen and put down a post. So it’s only fitting that I’m just getting around to talking about a feature I added to the site over eight months ago.

Staying true to my well-documented inability to write timely posts, here’s a post that I probably should have finished three months ago.

I wasn’t always the truck-faring degenerate that I am now. Reading some of my earlier posts, I can vividly remember a (roughly four percent) younger, more hesitant Brandon, sitting in an airport terminal, running through the plan over and over in his head, making sure he didn’t miss any important details. I’d picked out a class of vehicle, I’d picked out a place to get my private mailbox through, I’d scoped out parking locations. It was all there, I just had to go out and do it. I had some ideas about what truck-life would be like, but no experience to say whether or not my trepidation was justified.

I had a series of strange dreams about spies and nuclear war last night. Pretty dramatic, but I have weird dreams all the time. The problem is that things got weirder after I woke up. First, I noticed a bitter taste in my mouth that I have no explanation for. I ate nothing strange last night and washed up using the same products I’ve been using for as long as I care to remember. That’s not a big deal though. What is a big deal is this:

Student loan debt is, uh…a problem in the good ole US ^of A, to say the least. It has passed credit cards for the number two spot on the list of “biggest things holding American wallets hostage,” behind only mortgages at this point. When millennials wake up in a cold sweat in the dead of night, filled with a deep, overwhelming, and existential sense of dread, it’s probably because student loans are haunting their dreams. Okay, hopefully it’s not that bad, but it’s no wonder student loans get a bad rap, with millions of The Indebted™ buckling in for the long haul, getting ready to work and whittle at the loans for the next decade (or more).

It’s been a while since I last lambasted any of the ideals that keep the American Economic Engine™ chuggin’ along. I’m talkin’ about things like “Exceptionalism”, “Overconsumption”, “Materialism”, and any other ‑isms and ‑umptions you want to throw into the mix. Given my relative reticence on the topic, I thought it was high time I took some pot shots at Uncle Sam. Subsequently, I’ve spent a long time staring at this blank expanse of screen, musing over what edgy and Forced Witticisms™ I can put here. Strangely enough, nothing I put down feels particularly pleasing, probably because I don’t think I have anything useful to say on the matter.

It’s been a while since my last post, and a lot has happened since then. I’ve hit my one-year truckiversary, surpassed $15,000 in monopoly money savings, and paid off the remainder of my student loans. Expect posts for these things in the coming weeks. As for my absence: I’ve been dedicating the majority of my free time to building an app for a small nonprofit to help Syrian refugees apply for scholarships. I like to think it’s a worthy enough cause to excuse my tardiness and general inability to produce new blog content. Oh, and my laptop unceremoniously died on me. With that out of the way, onwards to the (lean) meat of the post.

Looking at a list of unanswered questions people have sent me, I couldn’t find a single reasonable thread that united any of them, save the fact that they all concern my truckly ways. They’re all pretty much orthogonal in the N-dimensional space that truck questions occupy. Let’s get to them.

What does your family think of your living situation?

I’ve kinda been doing my own thing since I was 15 or 16, and my family sort of accepts that I’ll probably figure out something that works for me. That said, they naturally thought I was insane (and still likely do) when I told them about my truck idea, well over a year ago at this point. The more I explained it to them, the more I was able to convince them that I had some semblance of an idea what I was doing, for better or worse. So in short: they probably think I’m crazy, but they’re impressed I haven’t managed to burn the truck to the ground yet and/or get myself Very Arrested™.

Truthfully, I’ve been doing a pretty awful job at keeping you guys updated with what I’m actually doing, truckwise. The last time I even showed off the interior in all its shanty glory was almost a year ago. In the intervening interval since my last Home Improvement update, I’ve completed a few fairly large truck projects. By “large”, I don’t mean anything that requires any real technical competence, but certainly larger than fixing the hole or doing arts and crafts.

This post is less about the “trucks” and more about the “tax-advantaged accounts”, which hopefully won’t offend too many sensibilities. I just figured it’s been a while since I last forayed in my financials, and the several ensuing months have seen some modifications to the plan. The biggest of these modifications is that I added a new tool to my early retirement arsenal: the Mega Backdoor Roth.

The Mega Backdoor what?

Yeah yeah, I know, the first day of Spring was one two three four days ago, these posts don’t write themselves (though with enough imagination, time, and Markov chains, they kinda could).

This probably isn’t apparent for those of you in New England at the moment, but today is the first day of Spring. Well…it is in the United States at least, I don’t actually know how other countries/hemispheres do seasons. Climatic differences aside, I found myself doing a bit of spring cleaning earlier today, before I even realized that the Vernal equinox was upon us.

Way back in July of last year, someone gave me the idea to track how much money I was saving by not having to pay rent in the area. I crunched the numbers (in reality, like two numbers) and wrote the code, and the savings clock was born. When I flipped the switch, it showed a fairly disheartening negative $6,000 because I was still half in the hole from purchasing my Ford-fabricated flat. But in the intervening seven or eight months, I’ve had the pleasure of watching that number dwindle its way to zero (where I hit my break-even point), and as of this writing, work its way up to five digits in our (just as arbitrary as my formula) base 10 number system.

_{Brief note: I wrote most of this on the plane, but it took me a few days to getting around to polishing it up.}

I’ve thought travel, I’ve talked travel, but aside from a few fleeting flirtations with decidedly domestic destinations, I hadn’t really done much of it.

Until now, that is.

I’m currently writing this at 35,000 ft, traveling at 556 mph on my way back from a business trip. By the time I touchdown in San Francisco, I’ll have covered 13,587 miles in the sky and 34 hours and 31 minutes in airplanes and airports, meaning that this trip handily accounts for more travel than any two of my previous trips. Spanning four countries and as many languages, I had the chance to explore what might as well have been new worlds to me and dust off my paltry high school French knowledge in the process, which was actually même pire que je pensais. My genuine apologies to anyone who was forced to struggle through a conversation with me and my rusty, awkwardly accented French.

I know, I know, I don’t write as often as I used to. I have an excuse or two for this week though, I swear. Between helping a friend move, drinking some Puzzled Pints, volunteering with Destination Imagination, trying out (and struggling with) yoga and swing dancing (not at the same time), celebrating the Chinese New Year, and biking 50 miles to watch the Super Bowl with friends, I’ve been a reasonably busy bus bum. I also have a ton of half-finished posts that are just waiting for me to get my act together and polish them off, so stay tuned.

I’ve discussed my homelessness on here before, but between my camping trip a few months back and my early retirement revelation, I now have a whole new lens to examine it under.

So let’s take it back more than 12,500 years: humans aren’t doing anything productive. We’re hunter-gatherers, we set up camp near wherever we think the food (berries, plants, and huntable animals) will be at. We build simple structures to protect ourselves from the elements, but we take them down and start over somewhere else when the food supply dwindles. Most of our time and energy is put towards the highly productive task of not-dying.

This Q&A is a total potpourri of everything I’ve gotten in the past month (or three), but I’ve done my best to group them together.

Do you have a girlfriend? What does she think of your lifestyle?

I don’t have a girlfriend at the moment, so her opinions are nonexistent. If I were to have a girlfriend, I’d like to think that she’d be (at the very least) accepting of my choices. I’m pretty contented with the way my life is right now though, which is to say that I’m not in the market for a relationship at the moment. I don’t want to say that I’ll never have a serious relationship while living in the truck, because I have no idea how long I’ll be doing this. But I definitely understand how ridiculous everything about my life looks From Outside The Box™, from the perspective of a reasonable person who has their affairs in order.

Do you think a female going to grad school could survive your adventure? My daughter is 25 and is going to grad school next year.

Normally I would drop a question like this into a Q&A post of some sort, but I’ve gotten a bunch of similar questions, and even met up with a few inquirers to discuss this exact topic. These things lead me to believe it’s an important enough topic to deserve its own post (not that the threshold for “deserving a post” is very high). The question is a simple one:

Remember when I got a bad speeding ticket, thought I was going to lose my license, and then luckily did not end up losing my license? Well as luck/fate/chance/happenstance would have it, that turned out not to be the end of the story.

Brandon, what are you talking about? You said you called up the California DMV and they said everything was fine, what gives?

I did say everything was fine, because I did think everything was fine. Like the Overly Cheerful DMV Lady said was going to happen, I got a letter in the mail that said, without a doubt, the California DMV had no intentions of taking away my license. It wasn’t until I stopped into the DMV this past Thursday to get my motorcycle license that I found out anything was wrong.

On the last episode of From Inside the Box, we found our pickup truck protagonist in the throes of a struggle for survival: not of flesh, but of his very livelihood. Where will he go? What will he do? Will he ever understand why kids love the taste of Cinnamon Toast Crunch™? Find out on this episode eventually…maybe.

Just kidding. I don’t plan to talk about any of those things today. Instead, we’re going to talk about poor decisions, getting in the holiday spirit, and how any of that relates to truck stuff. Oh, and apologies for my silence and general tardiness with getting new posts out, rest assured that there are more in the pipeline (tech, home improvement, and philosophy, oh my!). But anyway, let’s see what the past two (fairly truckless) weeks have been like.

It’s been two months since I opened my large mouth a little too widely, and things have calmed down considerably. I’ve only received one or two interview requests in the past month (which I’ve dutifully ignored), and website views have tapered off to a fairly consistent 500 truck-enthusiasts a day. I’ve been spending my weekends hammering away on a new home improvement project, and enjoying bike rides to events in the area.

I gave my spiel about such lightweight topics as money, financial planning, and how I plan to live the rest of my ephemeral human life. Naturally people had some questions and thoughts of their own to contribute, and I’m more than happy to bring those into the mix.

Any reason you’re using an ETF instead of a mutual fund? I don’t see the soundness in the incurring fees on a brokerage account.

It’s been long enough.

I took my sweet time getting around to actually doing it, and then almost another month on top of that to start writing this post about it, but we’re here now. And that’s what really matters, right?

So anyway, you might remember “The Hole” from that time that birds always insisted on pecking at it, or that other time that I MacGyver’d a drainage solution to avoid waking up in a truck-shaped rainwater swimming pool. Looking back, I had every intention of paying another human being money to fix this particular problem. That all changed once I received an email from Nancy (over at PK Safety), who, like BoscoBob before her, knows way more about fixing my problems than I do.

Desiccant.

I really enjoy the way that word sounds. It’s like a discount version of decadent, except that it hasn’t been soiled by rampant overuse in chocolate commercials. I was curious as to its etymology which, as you’ll see above, isn’t nearly as exciting as I’d hoped. I had never even heard of the word until a reader, known only to me as “BoscoBob”, brought it up in an email.

It’s been a while (six months almost to the day) since I did my last big Home Improvement post, and I think it’s about high time we changed that. Not only because a lack of Home Improvement posts signals stagnancy on the front of truck-progress, but also because there is much to be improved upon truck-wise, and I should be more proactive and motivated to work on it. This, as is likely evident from the title, is just a “Mini” Home Improvement project, but there are two fairly large ones that I’ve yet to write about, so expect those soon eventually.

I noted early on that I wasn’t the only sketchy-looking vehicle on campus. And the longer I’ve been doing this, the keener my eye has gotten to the subtle, but telltale signs of “unconventional” or otherwise “alternative” living situations: windows tinted a little too deeply, parking just slightly farther away from a building than everyone else, a few scattered blankets on the back seat. It was nothing more than conjecture and supposition until I made contact with another truck-person. Even then though, there were seven or eight cars I was seeing all the time, and they certainly kept me wondering.

What CMS are you using?

What WordPress plugin do I use to make a clock like yours?

You’re using AppEngine right? I can tell by your blog’s IP address.

Brandon, when are you going to nerd out and talk about technical stuff?

Right now, as it turns out. First, a little disclaimer:

This post is more for the technical types. You’ll likely find this post mind-numbingly boring if you don’t have an interest in programming or web development.

Disclaimer: All salaries and bonuses in this post – even those based on real paychecks – are entirely fictional. All financial information is paraphrased…..poorly. The following post was written by a 23-year old man who lives in a truck entirely of his own volition and holds a degree in something wholly-unrelated to both business and finance. As such, its content should not be viewed or seriously considered as advice by anyone.

Note: I’ve never seen Game of Thrones, but I’m pretty sure the title is a reference to it.

When I was a kid, I used to watch my dad plow driveways and parking lots. He’d be out in the middle of a blizzard, wearing a sweatshirt (at most), carving out huge scoops of snow and heaving them over his shoulder. In moments like those, I thought he was a true-to-life superhero. So naturally it’s no shock that I inherited his lust for needless feats of masculinity and macho-ness. As fall turned to winter every year, I’d resist transitioning to a more climate-conscious wardrobe, clinging on to my T-shirts and basketball shorts until it was borderline painful. I chose to “brave” some of the coldest, snowiest winters in Boston history wearing only a UMass hoodie and some well-worn jeans. And even when I wasn’t being unnecessarily obstinate, I still spent four years with a roommate who loved keeping the windows open on frosty nights, and that’s basically like sleeping outside, right? I’m well-aware that these weren’t the smartest decisions, but there is an upshot: I was, without realizing it, conditioning myself for my current situation.

I’d like to start with a eulogy.

We’re gathered here today to mourn the loss of a close friend. His duration in our lives was swift and fleeting, almost ephemeral. His presence was electric, his absence left a hole in my heart, not to mention a deficit in my transportation abilities. Yes, I’m talking about the passing of our beloved friend, my corporate Specialized Turbo.

Before I say anything else, let me just acknowledge that this was entirely my fault. Okay, so remember that awesome electric bike I got through a company pilot program? It turns out that a big stipulation of the program is that the main usage of the bike has to be commuting. Naturally, living on campus, my “commute” doesn’t quite qualify, and so I, with a heavy heart, had to return the bike. In my defense, I was “commuting” to my mailbox (~10 miles away) 3-4 times a week, but that’s still not quite in the spirit of the program.

Insurance.

I’ve ducked and dodged dependence on electricity and other utilities, and I definitely don’t have a home phone or Internet service. Insurance is the one recurring truck-related expense I'm stuck with. Given how little I drive the truck and my squeaky-clean, accident-free track-record, I would totally ditch that too if it weren’t mandatory in California. And while I may have dodged a bullet with the license situation, that frosty Boston speeding ticket was still looming overhead. So naturally I wasn’t ecstatic when I got a letter stating it’s time to renew my insurance policy, until I took a good look at my old policy.

Note: Throughout this post, I use phrases like “yesterday” and “last night”. In reality, it was two nights ago, but I’m slow to get my thoughts onto (digital) paper.

The Bay Area is a fairly dry place. In the past six months of my living out here, it has only “rained” a handful of times. I use the term rain lightly, because it’s barely ever more than a passing drizzle. In spite of the precipitation’s timidity, people have become so adjusted to the area’s micro-climate that they act (and drive) like it’s a flash flood. Yesterday, it rained. But it didn’t “rain”, no, this wasn’t Your Dad’s Rain™ at all. Yesterday, I experienced my first Californian downpour.

I promised a mega Q&A, I’m delivering a mega Q&A. I had upwards of 750 questions, so I took some of the most popular (and least creepy) ones, scrubbed out the personal info, fixed some spelling, did a bit of rephrasing, and tossed them up here.

Why don’t you have ads? / Why don’t you monetize the blog? / Have you considered selling your soul to the highest bidder?

It’s midnight and my flight has just landed in Boston, two hours behind schedule. I step out into a crisp September night; the air never tastes like this in California. It’s refreshing, but despite it only being 9 PM on the coast that I left from, I’m exhausted. It’s been a tiring few days of tying up loose ends before the trip, and staring at a dim screen on a dark plane wasn’t exactly conducive to sustaining my consciousness. After counting out 27 complete revolutions of the baggage return carousel, I find my suitcase. I try my best to muster a smile at the rental car kiosk, but the attendant’s reaction makes it clear I didn’t exactly sell it. The car keys dangling from my index finger, I heave my bag onto the backseat. All that stands between me and sleep is a 100 mile drive down a deserted highway. I sync the car to my phone over Bluetooth, and throw on a playlist. I opt for a “noise rap” playlist, that should keep me awake. A few tolls and I’m on the Pike.

One of the perks of the truck that I always mention is its mobility. Regardless of where on the planet I put it, the box is still my room, and once I’m inside, the details of the surrounding world are reduced to nothing more than background noise. Theoretically, I can just park anywhere and make that my home for the night. In reality however, I very rarely spend the night anywhere other than a corporate parking lot, save a few digressions parking downtown after a late night at the bars. The lack of nearby, easy to access showers/facilities is a pretty strong deterrent for me. Tonight however, I find myself in a mildly amusing situation. I’m currently sitting on my bed writing this post (that’s not the amusing part), but I’m almost 20 miles away from my usual hideout, and I can hear rhythmic bass thumps coming from the Quinceañera happening not 50 ft away (that’s totally the amusing part).

Wow, that was intense. This blog used to just be for my family and friends to check in and make sure I hadn’t died in some horrific truck-related accident, but since I made the highly questionable call to share my story publicly, it’s been a whole different story all together. It’s been a crazy few days, and I have a ton of thoughts on it. This is going to be my longest post by far, and I apologize in advance if it reads like one long rambling truck-man manifesto. I’m going to do my best to sort my thoughts out, so strap in and here we go.

It’s been a while since my last Home Improvement post, which is bad because it means I’m not improving the truck. And trust me, the truck certainly does have areas for improvement. Anyway, I mentioned that I got a new bike recently. This was great but, like every time I get something new, it posed an issue.

I’m now in possession of a large, 50 pound hunk of metal and rubber, which I have to store somewhere. It makes sense to keep it with me, because:

I like to think I’m pretty environmentally friendly. I try to minimize my waste, take quick showers, and not run unnecessary appliances, like heating and cooling systems. I’m definitely not a super earthy-crunchy-Hippie-type, but I’m at least vaguely cognizant of the atrocities I commit against Mother Nature. My main sin against the planet, aside from just being American, is the fact that I run errands in an 11,500 pound tank that gets 8 MPG on a good day. That’s bad for at least four different reasons, in no particular order:

I’ve never really been camping before, so when a friend asked if I wanted to go camping over Labor Day weekend, I gladly accepted. In the past, I’ve mentioned that living in the truck feels like perpetual camping. Think about it: I practically live outside, I forgo a lot of modern conveniences (namely heat, A/C, and a nearby bathroom), and I fall asleep to the sounds of nature every night (there’s a shocking amount of wildlife at the edge of my parking lot). So I expected camping to feel like just another day for me, and I packed for it almost like I’d pack for a normal day: a few t-shirts, a pair of shorts, and my handy dandy battery pack. So, how was it?

People have all sorts of suggestions for how you should spend your 20s, and they land pretty much everywhere on the spectrum. Some say you should work extra hard to provide yourself with a solid foundation for the future. After all, you’re young and void of life’s later obligations, put that time to good use. Others say you shouldn’t squander it toiling your best years away in monotony. As is probably evident from some of my other writings (read: ramblings), I fall somewhere in the middle. On one hand, I recognize that I’m setting up the foundation for the rest of my life right now (little to no expenses, investing early, yadda yadda yadda). But on the other hand, as I’m one to note, I only get to be this young once and I’ll be damned if I don’t make some memories to reminisce about when I’m old and gray. Plus, one of the main reasons I decided on the truck life was to minimize the time until I could start travelling.

In a world where everything is prepackaged, replaceable, and easily disposable, trash is tragically an unavoidable by-product of living. Whether it’s paper towels, tissues, plastic packaging, cleaning products, cardboard containers, clothing tags, receipts, pretty much every transaction you make is going to generate some type of waste. And waste is, like, generally bad, right? It takes up space, serves no real purpose, wastes resources and energy, and most importantly for truck folk, there’s really no good place to put it.

First of all, apologies for the lack of updates over the past few weeks, I've been busy with a product launch and doing a bit of work-related travel, so I haven't had a chance to sit down and polish off any of posts. However, things are starting to settle down, and I have a bunch of new posts in the pipeline at various levels of readiness, so watch for those over the coming week.

Human beings didn’t become the dominant lifeforms on the planet by being rigid and inflexible in the face of change. We’re able to adapt, when we receive similar stimuli over and over again, we react to it more and more efficiently and effectively each time. Naturally, these stimuli come in an endless procession, in innumerable forms. On a physical, nearly tangible level, repeated stresses on our bodies build muscle mass so that we’re better equipped to handle these stresses in the future. Biologically, our bodies learn to handle repeated threats by developing antigens after the first encounter. Socially, we modify our habits to fit in with our habitats. When we uproot our lives and move to other locations we learn local customs over time, and our interactions with our environment become more fluid over time. My situation is no different, and I’m definitely noticing the ways I’ve adjusted, both consciously and unconsciously, to my environment.

I knew the day would come eventually. In one of my first posts, I mentioned a guy who was doing something similar to what I’m doing now. His observation was that security personnel at these large companies doesn’t care how insane you are if you work at the company and aren’t hurting anyone. Last night, I had my first run in with company security. What follows is my experience.

It’s almost 1 am, I just got out of a movie with a few friends. The movie was mediocre at best, certainly nothing special. I drive my house back to my usual parking place at the edge of a company lot, as I normally do. I grab my bag of toiletries and head into a nearby building to brush my teeth and wash my face. As I walk out, I pass a security car. They linger for a minute, and then drive off. I don’t think much of it. After a short traipse across the lot, I hop into my car, put on my pajamas, and go to sleep.

…or at least drive Class B vehicles. Also, as it turns out, licenses have a lot of personal information on them, and I’ve done my darnedest to remove any fun details, like where I “live”.

Anyways, I’ve finally done it. For those who don’t understand why this is exciting for me, let me give you a bit of background.

I drove buses in college. It was the highest-paying job on campus, which is what initially drew me towards it. But it was the flexibility, fun coworkers, and quick promotion to programmer that kept me there. The deal was that they’d pay you while training you to get your CDL license, and in return you’d drive for them for a few semesters at the very least, which as I mentioned in this post, is a pretty sweet deal. So I did my shtick driving buses and writing code for them for four years while I pursued higher education. Overall it was a good time, I definitely recommend it.

One problem that you wouldn’t expect to have in a truck is losing things. It’s a single, small, essentially square room. There are no doors, closets, nooks, crannies, trap doors, false floors, drop ceilings, or hiding places to speak of. Everything should be well accounted for. In spite of this, I’ve managed to lose the following items, most of which I acquired on my first trip to Home Depot.

• Switchblade
• Screwdriver
• Roll of Tape
• Nail Clippers
• Batteries

I’ve spent an obscene amount of time racking my brain over where these things could have possibly gone, checking every crevice and corner and drawer (all four of them). Nothing within the realm of logic and reason can produce an explanation as to what has happened to my various belongs. It’s not like they all vanished at once either. They’re being picked off one by one, like they’re all characters in a horror movie, being tormented by a killer of inanimate objects. Naturally I don’t notice their absence until I need them, the perfectly inopportune time.

Gnat nightmares, spider sadness, moth madness, ant anxiety, bug barrage—ok I’ll stop now.

I’m not a fan of bugs. Generally speaking, unless you’re an entomologist or earthy-crunchy type, you probably aren’t either. I’m not terrified of them by any means, I’m not liable to stop what I’m doing if a bug decides to drop by and say hey, but I’m still likely to exterminate them all with extreme prejudice before going to sleep. After all, nobody is trying to eat spiders whilst slumbering. I’m happy to say that I haven’t had any full-blown infestations recently, though it hasn’t always been the case.

Every once in a while, life will challenge you with a question. Not only does this question require an answer, but regardless of the choice you make, you know that it will have a profound impact on your life. Thankfully, it is infrequently that we are burdened with such decisions, but we must still be vigilant so that we may ponder and puzzle and appropriately pick a plan when the need arises. Recently, one of these decisions was thrust upon my shoulders, and it came to me in the following form:

I enjoy living in a truck. It’s simple and efficient, it’s a choice I made and intend to stand by. I wouldn’t necessarily say I’m proud of living a truck, but I certainly don’t have a problem telling people about it (as evident by the fact that this blog exists). When I meet new people, it normally comes up as a matter of course, and I’m more than happy to talk about it and all the quirky things that come with it. That said, this installment of Tips from the Truck is concerned with knowing when truck talk is not appropriate, namely in the workplace.

Traffic is a strange beast. Sometimes it comes from nowhere at all, wreaking unspeakable havoc on your itinerary, eviscerating your plans with startling efficiency. Other times it’s entirely expected, and entirely unavoidable. In any case, nobody particular enjoys traffic (I certainly don’t), it’s an environmental tragedy, and it’s ruthlessly wasteful. By all accounts, traffic is a Bad Thing™.

Call it schadenfreude if you want, but on days when I’m not up at the crack of dawn, there’s nothing I love more than rolling out of bed at my leisure, lazing my way to the gym, hopping on a treadmill and watching the brutal commute thousands and thousands of people are enduring. It’s especially glorious because a large percentage of these people are, at a snail’s pace, traveling to exactly where I already am. And it only took me 5 minutes to get here. My co-worker came in today exhausted because commuting from his house, a 15 minute stroll not during rush hours, took him a whopping hour and a half this morning, for no reason in particular. It’s especially tragic because he still has a commute home to look forward to, which will undoubtedly be plagued by the same atrocities. I don’t have the constitution or resolve to handle such a soul-crushing experience on a twice-daily basis, but power to everyone who does.

As a forewarning, this post doesn’t ^really provide tips on how to be invisible, it’s more of an observation of human nature.

One of my biggest stressors when I was considering living in a van, as is undoubtedly evident from my earlier posts, was my unshakable fear that I was going to be caught, arrested, or otherwise reprimanded. I was worried that I wouldn’t be discreet enough, or I’d make some grave mistake one day, or anything but a perfectly executed ninja-esque routine would spell my end. One too many loud creaks at night, not closing the back gate quietly enough, climbing out at the exact wrong time, parking in the wrong place, etc, the ways I could screw things up seemed limitless. But a fortuitous combination of rote observation and apparent realization led me to the following declaration:

In this post, I mention that, upon my arrival, there were already several other vehicles that looked like they could be home to serial killers, the mentally-insane, or otherwise psychologically degenerate human beings. Some of the vehicles, namely a truck and a few RVs, move around occasionally, a sure sign of life. Others, like the hippie van pictured above on the far right, have not moved in the two months I’ve been here. However, despite these clear signs of organic life, I had never actually encountered any other people who were Livin’ La Vida Loca(motive).

A big part of truck life is managing the limited amount of space you have available to you. Depending on what sort of vehicle you’re living in, you may have more or less space available to you, but generally, unless you live in a full on tractor trailer, you’re going to have less than 200 ft² of space, so you need to be smart about how and where you keep your belongings. As you can see from the picture above, I was able to increase the overall contiguous space available to me (useful, for example, for a truckwarming party).

I’ve [redacted] people’s faces from the photo , both because of the questionable legality of hanging out and drinking in a truck, and for their own privacy.

As you may remember from this Q & A session I mentioned that a truckwarming party was in the works. Some planning, a little food, a few drinks, and a week of time were enough to bring the idea to fruition.

One of the benefits of living in a truck is that you can have your truckwarming party wherever you desire (within driving distance); we opted for a nice quiet park down the road. It wasn’t anything lavish, just a few friends hanging out with some music and card games. There’s a surprising amount of space left over (~100 ft²), especially after the bit of rearranging I did beforehand (I’ll outline my most recent changes in another post), so it wasn’t too cramped. Leaving the back gate open to let the fresh air in made the whole event feel more like a BBQ or camping than anything else. Overall, it was a great time, and I’m grateful to have a group of friends who accept me despite the fact that I’m completely deranged.

I was talking to someone, who we’ll call Michael (because that’s his name), about the truck life and this blog, and he said, “You know, it’d be cool if you had a place on the site where you could see how much money you’ve saved.” Well Michael, I agree with you wholeheartedly, so starting today, there’ll be a live-updating clock on the right left side (or bottom on mobile) of the page that shows the amount of money I’ve saved by living in a truck. I’ve mentioned on numerous occasions that it’s not entirely about the money, but regardless, it’s an interesting metric to have. However, without an explanation as to how I arrived at that value, this whole thing would be pretty pointless. So here is my magic money formula.

I’m not talking about securing in the sense of safety and making something inaccessible, but rather in making sure something stays static relative to its container.

When you’re setting up your room or a new piece of furniture, generally the last thing on your mind is making sure it stays in place. It’s basically just a given that your various belongings aren’t going to wander around when you aren’t in the room. I knew from the start that I’d have to be careful about driving with everything in the back, and one of the first things I did was secure the bed with some rope. Even with proper securement at the forefront of my mind , estimating the stability and safety of various restraints is apparently not my strong suit, and I’d still occasionally find things fallen over after a trip to the post office. So without further ado, here are some things to remember when securing your very own truck-house.

In Charting the Waters, I mentioned two books that I picked up to get myself in the travel mindset. Last week, I set aside an hour and read through the lighter of the two: How to Drop Everything And Travel Around The World.

Overall, I thought the book was a worthwhile read. As far as actual, concrete information about travel and destinations, it was pretty light (the whole thing is only 56 pages), but it was certainly helpful in orienting my mind with respect to my future world tour.

Back again with another riveting installment of Questions and Answers.

Mountain View has a car show during its Thursday Night Live series of events. Are you in that?

Erm, no. Though if I ever go fully insane and paint the outside of the box with flames and other crazy shenanigans, I’ll definitely start attending some car shows. I could go the full nine yards, get an amp and put a sound system in the back, maybe a disco ball or two. Open up the back gate and have a good old-fashioned truck rager. I could even make a business out of it, call it “Block Party in a Box”. Or I could not do any of those things, that’s also an option.

Okay, that’s definitely a bit of a dramatic title, but I am definitely not happy with this turn of events. This actually happened two weeks ago, but I’ve been busy vacationing in LA (staying in a hotel, with a real room!) and haven’t been posting.

Anyway, as you can see, someone has hit and damaged my front-left blinker, dislodging it from its socket and ruining a perfectly pleasant afternoon. They didn’t leave a note, not that I should be expecting decency from a reckless stranger anyway. After a (very little) bit of sleuthing, I think I understand what happened though.

It appears I have a few prolific inquirers, so here goes Q & A round two.

Is what you’re doing illegal?

There’s two underlying questions here. First, is being homeless illegal, and second, are you homeless if you live in a car. To briefly answer the second one: living in a car is definitely considered being homeless, but I’ll address that in one of the later questions. As for the legality of being homeless, I had trouble finding relevant city ordinances for where I frequently park, but nearby cities like Palo Alto and Manteca have cracked down in recent years. Additionally, there’s an excellent paper that details all of the laws that California cities have regarding homelessness, in addition to providing a bunch of other useful information. Nearby places like San Francisco, Oakland, Sunnyvale, and San Jose all have anti-homeless laws, but there is no statewide ban on homelessness. I might just be missing the ordinances in my specific city, but from what I’ve read, it might not actually be illegal. Naturally, these laws only apply to public property. Since I’m in a parking lot owned by my company, it’s well within their power to “evict” me, if they so chose.

A few days ago, I opened up a question form where people can ask whatever they want about the truck-life. I’ve gotten a few questions (potentially all from one person), and I’m going to copy them in all of their unedited, verbatim glory here, and answer them to the best of my ability.

Will you be throwing a truck-warming party?

Yes actually! I don’t know specifically when it’ll be, or where it’ll be (besides in the truck, obviously), but plans are in the works. Moving into a new place can be stressful, as I’ve undoubtedly alluded to in previous posts. House-warming parties help to take the edge off and ease the transition. I think that the truck-warming party is just as important, if not more of a necessity, than a standard house-warming party would be.

Tips from the Truck is a new series I’m starting now, where I talk about the various little things you can do to make truck life easier.

I briefly mentioned in this post that eating out all the time can quickly cut into your truck savings. Why would you be eating out all the time, you ask? Because you can never, under any circumstances, keep food in your truck. Even non-perishables, you don’t want to keep any vaguely organic, edible substances within like a 100-foot radius of your abode. You might be saying to yourself, “Brandon, doesn’t that seem a little excessive? What if I get hungry at night and want a Clif Bar or something?” To which I say, Too Bad™.

I’m a very judgmental person, I have been for as long as I can remember. It’s certainly not a trait that I’m proud of, it’s just always been easier for me to dismiss people based on superficial observations than to actually try to understand anything about them. If neither software engineering nor driving buses work out for me, I can readily imagine myself becoming a dunk tank clown, because I’m quick to recognize “flaws” with a cursory glance. I’m sure a proper psychiatric evaluation would conclude that it stems from some deep-seated insecurity that I’ve yet to acknowledge, but that’s entirely beside the point.

So I’ve been at work almost a month now, and living in the truck for just as long. I’ve definitely established a comfortable routine, and I’m a lean, mean, code-producing machine on my team, so everything is going good. This means I can focus my non-work hours to the real goal: the big trip.

When I interned in Silicon Valley last summer, I realized a few very important and related things:

Unfortunately, I’m not talking about some more RV/Hippie Van/Truck neighbors.

No matter how well you plan out things, life always has a way of throwing little things at you to make sure you’re still paying attention. For the past week, life has been throwing the sound of jackhammers in my direction. It makes perfect sense that construction crews would work at night, when normal human beings aren’t at work and getting in their way, but I certainly was not expecting the parking lot I call home to be subjected to such perils. Like, they’re actually tearing up 10’ by 10’ sections at a time, something to do with pipes or electricity or whatnot. I’m a computer systems engineer, not a mechanical engineer, I have no idea how any of this stuff works. It makes me think back to when I was considering getting soundproofing installed by that Happy Vans company in San Jose. It’s still not really an issue, the truck actually does a surprisingly good job of blocking it out, and I haven’t had any trouble falling asleep. Still, just goes to show you that there will always be something, whether it’s crows, radioactive waste, or jackhammers.

Something I noticed when I first bought this truck was that it had a special permit in it. A special permit issued by the “Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration”, authorizing it to carry…something? I’m not actually sure what this truck was used for prior to my purchase, some sort of commercial activity, and I know for a fact that it started it’s life as a simple Budget truck. Call it stubbornness or naivety, but I’m not particularly interested in finding out what it actually was carrying. I’ve lived here a month with no adverse effects, and I’ve even noted my improved sleeping abilities. Who knows, maybe my ability to sleep is from toxic fumes knocking me out every night, or maybe one morning I’ll wake up and all my hair has fallen out and I’ll have developed some new, baffling form of respiratory cancer. That would be an interesting one to explain to a doctor. Best case scenario, the truck was carrying radioactive waste and my exposure is slowly giving me super powers. Worst case scenario, the truck was carrying radioactive waste and my exposure is slowly turning me into a character from The Hills Have Eyes.

I occasionally mention how glad I am that I’m able to live the way I do, but it’s definitely not for everyone. In fact, the reason I’m able to do this is mainly because of the benefits afforded to me by the company I work at. Not that I expect many people are envious of my lifestyle, but for all those aspiring to live out of some type of vehicle, here is a list of hard requirements, collected through experience and in no particular order, that your life should possess before you consider trying to live in a box truck.

As I’ve mentioned before, I drove buses in a past life (read: two months ago). That meant that in Massachusetts, I had a Commercial Driver’s License. The bus company that I had worked for over the course of the past four years graciously trained their drivers and paid them, but in the Real World™, obtaining a CDL can be super expensive. Most driving school websites don’t list their prices, but this one has a quote of $225 for a 2-hour private lesson. Considering you need ~50 hours of instruction and driving experience to take the test (which is another $300 on that site), that puts the cost of a CDL at over $5,000. But why am I talking about the price of a CDL? Well initially, I was worried that I’d need one to drive my box truck legally, then after a bit of research in the California CDL Handbook, I found that:

Every so often, I like to apply a simple Litmus test to my life to help me figure out a couple things. The test has a single question, and the way I answer this question tells me a lot about how reasonable of a person I’m being, and if I’m living in a sustainable way. The questions is this:

If everyone acted the way I’m acting, would it still work?

Before you get too worried, the title probably isn’t what you think it is.

I’ve heard some strange sounds at night, things that sound vaguely like dirt bikes, drones, jackhammers, fireworks, people playing Pac-Man, you name it: if it’s unidentifiable and doesn’t belong in a parking lot, I’ve probably heard it from the back of this box. But there has been one sound I’ve heard on several occasions, usually in the morning on weekends, that until recently, has been totally baffling to me.

As you may or may not have noticed, I’ve been slowly rolling out new functionality to the site. What I’ve added so far:

Some posts have a little black box truck icon to the right of the title, which means that I was writing the post from inside the box. Since the blog is called “From Inside the Box”, it’d be disingenuous of me not to say whether or not I was actually in there while I was writing. This post, for example, was not written from within the box, but rather a quaint little cafe in downtown Mountain View.

My parking situation is very much analogous to my housing situation: I don’t quite fit in. One of the most difficult parts of my situation, one that I underestimated during the planning process, is trying to fit the silly thing in parking lots.

Imagine this. It’s Saturday morning, and you’d like to run some errands. No big deal right, just hop in the car and go do them. Think again. There are two ways your scenario can play out.

I’ve mentioned in the past that I believe getting enough sleep is a key component to happiness and success. I also believe that the quality of sleep contributes to these factors. Because of this, I’ve been using an application on my phone that tracks my sleep, for the past year. Basically, you tell the application what time you’d like to wake up, and then tell it how much earlier you’re willing to be woken up. Then, you put it next to you on your mattress while you sleep, and based on your movements, it can estimate what stage of sleep you’re in and wake you up at the best time.

As I’ve talked with more and more people about my living situation, I’ve noticed a few questions that come up all the time. I’m going to answer them here in full, gory detail.

How do you go to the bathroom at night? Do you just pee in the woods?

As cool as it would be, my life is not an episode of Man vs Wild. I do have 24 hour key card access to any building on the campus that I work at, so I could use the facilities in there if I really needed to, but thus far it’s just been about planning. I try not to eat or drink anything after about 7:30 PM, and I wash up and go to the bathroom right before I head out to the truck at night. When I wake up in the morning, I ride my bike to the gym and go to the bathroom there.

This is another post on philosophy, take that as you will.

I went out with a couple of co-workers last Friday, and naturally the conversation eventually ended up on my living situation. I’ve been continually surprised at how receptive people are to the whole concept of living in a car, normally once I explain all of my motivating factors. Mainly, I get a lot of “That’s really great! I personally could never do something like that, but power to you for going through with it!”, and that’s vaguely encouraging for me. Coupling these conversations with all of the time I have for reflection, I’ve come to realize a few things about happiness.

Ok, so I have a confession: this is the first post that I’m actually typing up FromInsideTheBox. By the magic and miracles of modern technology, I’m actually able to access the internet by tethering to my cellphone. I’ve already talked about how this place is starting to feel like home, but I think calling it a dorm room, as someone said to me today, is much more appropriate. It even looks like one (see the picture above for the current state of affairs). The only differences are that it’s larger than any dorm room I’ve lived in, and I’m not sharing it with anyone, which are both pluses in my book (sorry Zach). And while I don’t have any problems with it looking like a dorm room, I do have a few plans to make it a little more “homey” in the future.

Look at that stupid thing. With its silly little drawers and its wooden frame. Pfft.

In reality, it’s just a simple four drawer dresser from Ikea, which I definitely needed because I’ve been living out of a suitcase my mother lent me, and I need to return it eventually. This project was my first two-day project, and in total took me about six hours to complete. Nothing went horribly wrong per se, it’s just that Ikea is Satan incarnate, as it turns out. As you can probably tell from my demeanor, I’ve never assembled anything from Ikea before, but I figured for something as simple as a dresser, it couldn’t be that bad.

My first two Home Improvement Projects weren’t exactly the highest caliber works of craftsmanship. For example, putting more than two or three articles of clothing on the clothes rack caused it to bend, shake, and warp, and the rope around the bed came undone approximately once a day. So my third Home Improvement Project was setting right what I had previously done so, so wrongly. And it’s the weekend, which means that after my workout and shower, the sky was the limit as far as errand-running was concerned.

I’ve survived my first (nearly) whole week of work. Granted, it was mostly filling out forms, hearing about benefits packages and retirement plans, and going to developer workshops to get synced up with various company policies and infrastructure. Not that it wasn’t interesting (it was), but I’m not a fan of how little I’ve gotten to contribute thus far. I understand it’ll take time to get caught up to speed, I’m certainly not unfamiliar with the concept, though I’d like to start actively applying myself to it. Aside from actual work, there are a few things I hope to accomplish, once the orientation presentations start to quiet down next week and I start to fall into a consistent schedule.

Don’t worry, I’m not going to post about every single night I spend in the box truck, but this one was markedly different than the first, and deserves to be noted as such. When it was bed time last night, I wasn’t feeling the same type of anxiousness that pervaded the previous night. I was much more relaxed and confident. I still did my best to be quiet, but I wasn’t stopping every few seconds to make sure that nobody was watching. The overall experience was much more pleasant this time around, and I slept like a small child.

I did it.

And by it I mean sleeping in the box truck for the first time. I still have a corporate apartment until Sunday, but I wanted to try out living in the box truck, because at least I still have the flexibility of normal human housing, and this way, I could work out any potential kinks.

Okay, maybe that’s a little bit dramatic, once I was in there, it really just felt like being home, in my own bed. It was pretty comfortable, especially for a mattress that only cost me $99. The eventual goal is still to get a super comfortable memory-foam, fancy-shmancy bed, mainly because I feel that without a solid sleep foundation, the rest of my day suffers and I end up using caffeine as a crutch. Not ideal.

With the bed out of the way, I was ready to try bigger and better things. The next thing on my list was a place to hang my dress shirts and pants. In a real-world setting, this would be called a “clothes rack”. So I took another trip down to Home Depot, which is quickly becoming the most important place in my life, and I picked up some screws, a screwdriver, some clothes hangers, two mounting brackets, and a 6 foot long wooden rod. If I had done everything correctly, here is how the process should have gone:

One important part of this whole process is turning the back of a truck into a livable, comfortable space. I have a number of plans and ideas on how to do that, and I’m going to chronicle my attempts at turning them into realities in this “Home Improvement” series. This one is a super basic one, but hey, baby steps. If I plan on living in this thing, I’ll need a place to sleep, naturally. So I wandered over to Craigslist, found the sketchiest new mattress and box spring set I could find, and placed an order. Notice the word “new”, that’s super important, because I’m not in the mood for a case of bed bugs or crabs or whatever else you can catch from a used mattress.

So I’ve already laid out my pros and cons of why I’m actually doing this, but there’s another aspect to it that I didn’t really explore in that post, and it basically revolves around the idea of minimalism.

We do things big in America. We love our malls, our big meals, our bigger televisions, and our huge trucks and SUVs. We live in a time of unprecedented opulence and convenience, but that doesn’t come without its own issues. The main one is that it is completely and utterly unsustainable. I remember learning in a high school environmental science class that it would take the resources of four or more planet Earths if everyone on the planet were to live the way Americans do. We’re supremely wasteful and consumptive, and it’s a lifestyle our grandchildren will certainly not be able to “enjoy”.

When you move into a new home, a trip or two to Home Depot isn’t just likely, it’s inevitable. Turns out that holds true even when your new home is a box truck. Below, I’ve detailed the unfocused and wide-ranging list of items I found myself purchasing.

• Graffiti Remover. I didn’t quite find the truck in the most perfect condition. One tire was gouged pretty badly and the left side had been tagged up pretty good. The tire is all fixed, and the graffiti remover is surprisingly effective, but I’ve got a lot of area to clean - by my measure about 37 ft². A couple more trips to an empty parking lot to clean it and I should be all set.
• Work Gloves. To keep my hands from being coated in graffiti remover.
• Step Ladder. To reach the top of the graffiti, though I actually haven’t needed it yet.
• Rags. To wipe off and mop up the graffiti.
• Hornet Killer. Another pleasant feature of the truck, small hornet nests in both door crevices. Haven’t gotten around to taking care of this yet, mainly because hornets are terrifying. They’re like bees, but less fuzzy, more menacing, and can sting you until they’re completely sure you’re miserable.
• Rope. Until I start building/buying legitimate mounting equipment, I need a way to make sure big things (like the bed) don’t move around too much while I’m driving. I don’t want a few sharp turns or hard brakes to mean rearranging the furniture. I’ll post pictures eventually, but basically I tied sliding knots around the rails on either side of the truck.
• Switchblade. To cut the rope, and just generally handy.
• Broom. To sweep up the dust and trash that was in the back. I like to keep my truck dungeon clean.
• Trash Bags. To dispose of the dungeon dust and trash, though I actually need to find a waste disposal place in the area.
• Padlock. To lock up the back when I’m not “home”.
• Tape Measure. Generally useful, mainly for figuring out placement of shelves and furniture in the future.
• Battery Lamp. The truck actually has some built-in lights in the back, but I got an extra one for good measure.

The only reasonable theme to glean here is that I’m a serial killer. Between the rope, trash bags, switchblade, gloves, and padlock, I’m surprised Home Depot didn’t call the FBI as soon as I made it to the checkout area.

So here we are, almost a week into living in California. How have things progressed, you ask? Well allow me to tell you!

Arriving in California was comforting, but also a little overwhelming, and my roommate’s words kept echoing around in my head, haunting me.

Don’t live in a van. Don’t do it.

-Zach B, Roommate for Life

I started to second guess myself. Was this really what I wanted? Was I actually being insane? What if I went through with it and then decided I didn’t want it? I’d have to deal with all the stress of having to find an apartment while starting a new job, and trying to sell the stupid van on top of all of it. Would I actually be alright without truly having a home? I was in full-fledged panic mode, and I’d been on the West Coast less than a day. Panicking is very not my style, or so I like to think, so I decided to do the rational thing, and make a list of pros and cons of living in a van, and then make a well-informed decision based on that. So, ordered from most important to least important reasons, here is my list:

And here is where things start to get interesting. Since my internship last summer, when I realized the only thing I needed was a place to sleep, and company perks could provide the rest, I’ve done a little bit of research into how exactly this whole van situation would play out. In my search, the most encouraging thing I found was this:

Google Security came by very early on, but once they determined that the guy in the mysteriously parked white van was just an eccentric Googler and not the Unabomber, they never came by again.

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Graduation

The weeks leading up to my inevitable departure from UMass Amherst are but a blur at this point, a torrent of papers, finals, and tough goodbyes. I remember having to check the “One Way” box when purchasing my flight, which at the time seemed like exile, or even a death sentence. I remember sitting in Marcus Hall for the last time, frantically typing away at my Machine Learning final, wondering when I’d next see any of the people around me. I remember walking out of my last class, a 4 PM history GenEd about the American family. I remember the strange feeling of seeing my bedroom empty, something I hadn’t seen since I moved in nearly two years prior. Compared to the next steps in my life, these memories are fairly small events, which somehow makes them more important, you know?

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It took me a few days to code up this blog, so I’m going to write a couple of posts back to back just to catch the site up to speed with my life.

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I don’t know exactly when I had the idea to live in a van, or where I first read about people who had done it. What I do remember, distinctly, is finding out how outrageously expensive it was to live in the Bay area.

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