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.