I’ve been pondering in bed a good bit on the nature of sanity the last few days. Laying in my van always brings certain realizations to mind–like that I’m living in a van mainly. And while it’s not such a bad lifestyle I sure didn’t enter it by choice. And it’s been furthered in a way by visiting my old ‘hood and seeing friends. Especially as one of them lives in the building I used to reside at.

Keith Didion and I had a Instant Messenger conversation and we touched into the issue. It was all of ten lines but it triggered some deeper pondering on my part. What will the long term mental effect of homelessness be?

It’s a very differently life, to put it mildly. My last apartment, a 1920s era brick structure, had a closet with probably as much cubic volume as what’s inside my van. The size is radically small and my possession that I get to keep and take with are quite few. Everyday I worry that I’m going to get asked by a cop what I’m doing in there and if I’m living in there. And will people notice? I try to act nonchalant when coming and going, but I’m constantly wary that people will see. And also that if I have a problem I can’t buy my way out of it. I don’t have the money to fix problems with so I need to worry extra hard about how to prevent them in the first place. Even something small like accidently breaking something in a shop with a You Break It, You Buy It policy or a minor illness could decimate my finances.

I’m suddenly living a life of great secrecy, paranoia and inconvenience.

This all started with a conversation on dreams. Since living in my van I’ve found myself increasingly confused over what’s really happened and what I’ve only thought or dreamed about. I spend a lot of time by myself having imaginary conversations and thinking about what I’d say to people–if they were around. But they’re not and thus my brain fill the empty space with internal conversations in imagined settings. And my dreams historically have been novel twists on my everyday life. Like seeing familiar people in settings that are remarkable like, say, my first college or other familiar public space. But they are as familiar as they are different. So as I’m wandering around in my current life everything is different, yet it’s the same. One library is largely the same as the other, same with grocery stores, Laundromats and pretty much everything else we do in the public sphere.

And one of the things I’ve noticed lately is how often I see people who look so strikingly familiar to people I know. Yesterday I saw what looked like an old boss and a friend’s ex-girlfriend. It was uncanny really. Some proportions were wrong so I knew it wasn’t them, but the over all look and the mannerisms were all spot on. And it seems like everywhere I’ve been lately it’s been a familiar yet different area and I seen familiar seeming yet complete strangers.

The surreal life of being homeless has changed my lifestyle rather profoundly and I’ve lost much of my stable footing that I used to take for granted. I feel like I’m on a business trip that never ends. I go places, work all the time, but never have a home to return to–at leas not what I’d historically call a home. The van is my home now but it’s still very much a work in progress. There’s a bed in there and familiar items. Like the princess blanket that’s becoming a Linus’ Security Blanket to me. So there’s a bit of continuity, but for nearly forty years I’ve lived in a proper home–a house or apartment/condo–and have come to expect the conveniences of a regular dwelling. Like being able to stand and not hunch over all the time, to have furniture and rooms, running water, a toilet and running water, to be able to bathe at my leisure.

At this point I’d love just to have lights at night.

Another thing Keith and I have talked about is what we do at night. We often seem to bump into each other rather late on our pilfered wifi connections. He’s playing poker and I’m usually just being an insomniac and writing here or in my personal journal. I mentioned to him that I was laying in the dark one night as my flashlight was nearly died, my laptop was essentially dead and I didn’t want to kill my starting battery too by running the lights. So I decided to doodle in my sketch book in the dark.

It’s an interesting task to draw in the dark. And I do mean dark too, like absolute pitch black were I could have poked myself in the eye before seeing the hand in front of my face. I used the edge of the paper to try and get some sense of where I was in the paper but it still is impossible to start something and retain a relative sense of where it is when you try to match it’s positioning. Like ears for example, they just get all higgledy-piggledy. And you have to remember what you’ve drawn and what’s been missed too as I didn’t cheat and only flashed the van’s ceiling light on for a moment to see what I’ve done.

This is Marcus, a really bad local drummer who tries with great earnestness but just isn’t very good but plays in a fairly prominent band for its genre. I wanted to do a whole bunch of drawings of bad musicians who I felt were overly fortunate in their placement into good and successful bands, but eventually slept crept up and I cut the drawing session short.

Eventually I’ll have my second set of batteries that’ll make my van much more RV like and livable. Then I can power things at night and not worry about starting the next day as it’ll be a completely separate system from the engine.

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