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.

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).

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).

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:

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.