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.