Living out of my car

Living out of your car isn’t so bad, really. I finally have a place to stay, but I miss the car sort of. A day living out of your car goes like this, for me at least.

The first seconds of my day are spent waking up to an alarm clock set for precisely 7:30am. Why 7:30am you might ask? 7:30am is right in the middle of when most hotels offer continental breakfast in the morning. Wait, let me back up. So, my car is parked outside of a hotel, but not just any hotel. It’s parked outside of a choice hotel. If you don’t know what a choice hotel is, it’s pretty much any hotel that you have seen a commercial for. Anyway, so its 7:30am, I’m drenched in sweat, and I get out of my car. My neck hurts like hell, but once I start walking around it’s not so bad. I look at the hotel I’m next to and try to remember what door I’d decided the night before was the best one to go in through. I walk into some side door, find the breakfast, and eat so much food it’s ridiculous. Once I’m done eating, it doesn’t end there. I don’t know how much experience you have eating continental breakfast food, but there are lots of stuff you can take with you. I probably stuff something like 5 apples and 5 blueberry muffins into my cargo shorts before getting the fuck out of there.

Next stop for the day is Starbucks. I drive to the nearest Starbucks and find the comfiest chair in the place and then I’ll open my laptop. Then, I get in line to buy the most expensive caramel mocha monstrosity that Starbucks has to offer. Fuck that, I’m of course kidding, I don’t buy anything from them. I do use their bathroom quite a bit though. So ya, I stay in Starbucks pretty much the entire day and that’s when the majority of my work takes place. Once I get settled I’ll pop an adderall and chase it with bathroom faucet water. I used to dry swallow adderall but I don’t anymore because of this weird feeling I would get in my stomach when I used to do it. Alright, so I’m settled in the comfy chair and I’ve got the wifi going on my laptop. I get on craigslist to cruise around for jobs, watch movies, and listen to music. Also, I read. The latest book I’ve been reading is Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse, it’s been a good read so far. Aside from how convenient Starbucks has become for me, I hate the place and I’d never buy anything from there. Sometimes it gets so cold in there that I just go to sleep in my car for about 20 minutes just so I’m not so cold anymore. After spending like 8 hours or so at Starbucks, I drive a little further on the interstate. Now it might be time to put like $10-15 bucks in my car. I walk into the Valero station and tell them to put money on a pump, but not before I’ve browsed the aisles and snatched a few candy bars.

I find another hotel and exit the interstate. I scope the new hotel out and quickly find out where the pool is and also which side door I think will be easiest for me to sneak into. After 3 weeks with a routine similar to this, I must say that the Holiday Inn is my favorite hotel because they leave the most clean towels out near the pool, and because they also have fantastic cinnamon rolls in the morning. Why the towels you might ask? I sleep in the backseat of my car engrossed in about 15 hotel towels. I always snatch the towels if I can. When I find the hotel pool, I’ll hop the fence and probably hang out there for a couple hours. Once 9:30 or 10:00 comes around, I try to force myself to go to sleep. I pop a couple sleeping pills and bundle up in towels in the backseat of my car. The biggest downside isn’t that it’s physically uncomfortable for me; it’s that the car will get hot as hell. I roll the backseat windows down, but still it’s hot. Once I get to sleep, I’m usually able to stay asleep, but it can be hard some nights.

I would be willing to bet someone that I could live one month out of my car and spend no money other than money for gas. I drink water out of faucets in the hotel bathrooms and at Starbucks, ok pal?

The odd job

Okay, so the first thing I have to say today is this: I now have $78! This is absolutely terrific news and I could not be more excited about this. Whatever. Anyway, I lied in my last post. I’m going to postpone telling you about how I’ve lived out of my car and instead tell you about what I did last night. I made $60 clipping flyers to apartment doors. I found the job on craigslist and figured, hell, what better way is there to spend a Friday night. Whatever. The guy I was supposed to work for spoke on the phone like the job was some really important business. He told me it would take 30 minutes to get to the meeting place but I easily got there in 10.

So, I end up having to wait over 30 minutes just to get started with the job because he was late to the meeting place. This guy seemed like a scumbag right from the start. He dressed like he had money and I’m sure he probably did. He had one of those unnatural crushing handshakes that you could tell had been taught to him by some business partner or something. Once he explained the specifics of the job to me, he started walking over to his car. I followed him without question. Is it a little bit strange that it was implied of me to get in his car without question? I’m a sucker I guess, but hey, I’m still here to tell of it and I needed the goddamn money too, did I mention that? A two mile Range Rover ride later and I’m at the first apartment complex. He was looking at me a certain way before I got started with the job. It was as if he had something else he wanted to say to me but decided against it. I rolled that thought around in my head as I went from apartment to apartment clipping these “Own your own home!” flyers to apartment doors.

I felt like such an asshole performing this job because of the encounters I kept having with the residents. I wanted to avoid them completely, but it was impossible. Some of them gave me looks that clearly said “Really, you’re doing this job on a Friday night?” I felt pathetic and a nuisance to the residents. An hour and 300 apartments later, I’m finished clipping flyers on all the doors of the first complex. I get in the guy’s car and off we go to the next apartment complex. We’re at a red light and he gets a phone call. The ring tone on his cell phone was the weirdest one ever. The light turns green and he doesn’t accelerate right away. This phone call had to be some important one because his voice changed instantly to a more fake sensitive one. It was his ex girlfriend. He proceeds to tell all about his personal life. He met this girl on an online dating site and told me they had broken up 3 weeks ago and that he wasn’t expecting to hear from her. This dude was such a fake; it was so obvious. I felt increasingly uncomfortable in the car with this guy as he continued to tell me about how he felt about this girl. He used the words crazy, spoiled, and mean to describe her. That’s right, he used the word mean. He kept presenting these relationship situations to me that had such obvious answers. Clearly, I was only hearing what he wanted me to hear so that maybe I would take his side or something. “Once you’re fucking somebody, it becomes hard to break it off you know?” he said. “The sex becomes easy and you start making compromises, you know. Plus I’m 45, so you know, it’s hard to move on from someone when you might not meet someone for awhile.” No you weird manipulator, I don’t know, I thought to myself.

Even though I didn’t like the guy, I sort of sympathized with him somehow. It wasn’t because of his situation with this girl, which he obviously skewed in his favor, but because he was unhappy. People that are unhappy have a certain appeal to me. 3 hours and 1000 apartments later and I had become $60 richer. Because I had to climb multiple flights of stairs, sleeping in the back seat of my car felt more refreshing than usual.

Before the meeting

I have to meet this guy in a couple hours that is a friend of a friend. I’m running out of money. It’s going to cost me probably $15 just to drive my dumbass down to the restaurant on the other side of town. I’m in a coffee shop again and I've got another 4 hours to kill before I meet this guy. Setting up this meeting made me feel like such a fuck. Like I said before, this guy is a friend of friend. The kind of friend of a friend that you have no idea what they look like, how old they are, ect. I feel like I’m on some sort of online meet and greet service while I'm texting this guy. He told me to meet him at this restaurant at a specific time and I told him I was a white male and 23. I asked him “How will I recognize you”. He says, “Asian, I’ll be the only one in the place”. Now that’s funny. Either way, I’ll be able to find him. It would be easier if he was the only person in the place, but that also increases the chances that I go to this place and get shot in the face, right? I can’t say I’d mind an experience like that right now.

This is just dumb and I can’t get over it. I feel like I’m going on a blind date. I could not be more uncomfortable about this. I’m going to be presenting myself as such a pity case to this guy. I’m also going to have to explain to this guy why I’m not eating. Hopefully I can find the right time to casually say that I spent a quarter of my money just to drive to this fucking place. So, what’s going on with me you might ask? I’ll tell you what’s going on. I’m nearly fucking broke, homeless, and have no job- that’s what’s going on. If you ever think about taking your money and “starting over” in a new city, go for it. But just make sure you don’t gamble all your money away when you get there because then you are really starting over. So, yeah, that’s what's going on with me. Anyway, so this guy I’m meeting for lunch is supposed to help me. He’s supposed to be able to give me a job and possibly find me a place to stay. Tomorrow I’ll talk about what it’s like to live out of a 4 door car for 3 weeks. You’d be surprised how little money you can spend if you know how to go about it and if you don’t mind thieving a bit.

Let me go ahead and close this post out by talking about how fucking annoying the music is in this place. Every song has this jazzy 80s twang sound to it. It all seems to be some kind of dance-pop post disco bullshit. What coffee shop owner would play this shit, especially in the morning? I shouldn’t even be writing right now. I’m still really tired from last night. I didn’t sleep much in my car and I’m dreading the lunch with this guy more and more. I really hope he can help me. I’m running out of pills and money, what could be worse? 

In a coffee shop

Have you ever looked around a public place and thought that a simple exchange from someone meant so much more? Is there a message in these movements, is there this strong connection made, what the hell is there?

I look up and right away these sudden movements occur from different people. The scratch of a nose, a shoulder shrug, a halfway smile. How crazy is it to think some of these things meaningful? But the timing, it’s so precise! I know these movements are directed towards me, but why? Is this some call to action for me? Am I needed now? Why am I so convinced these movements are so important and are directed towards me? There is something more, there must be. I think about my life. Have I just recently come to think these things?

Why can’t I be satisfied with the day to day life? That is of course what I’m unsatisfied with. I feel like I always have been and that I fixate on my dissatisfaction. So, what happens as a result you might ask? Here’s what happens: You start to think strangely… think, think, think. You start to make things up, elaborate stories, fantasies, adventures. Idle time becomes play time. What you perceive as orderly, normal, or trivial becomes more harmful on your psyche than experiencing physical pain. Your body is of little importance to you. You want to believe that these exchanges tell a story, or maybe rather, that they fit into your story. When these moments occur, it’s as if you’re thinking “Ah-Ha! That movement, I knew it would occur, I knew it. And wow, it happened here and now. I just looked up!” So then come these thoughts: I could go and talk to her. Her half smile and body language seemed so revealing. Her subtle eye contact makes me believe that I am in fact the object of her attention, but it seems equally clear to me that she is trying to be coy. This encounter is the start of something unexplainable. But what happens after, though? The possibilities are so captivating that I don’t even move or maybe it’s that I just can’t. I just think about what could be… think, think, think. After I feel like I should approach her, she’ll leave in haste and I’ll just feel so sorry. I feel like having to watch her leave in the manner she did was her reprimanding me for being such a nothing. I’m sorry for living in my head. Sorry for missing an opportunity for conversation, sorry for not even living. Just sorry.