Road Trip to Regeneration

“Tight as a tick,” the friendly geezer said about his RV for sale, multiple times, as he gave me the tour in a Kohl’s parking lot. Looking around as we sat on top of it two days later, a friend confirmed, as we were drinking, celebrating that we’d managed to move the entirety of my remaining belongings inside in a few hours, just hours before I had to hand over the keys of the apartment the belongings, and I, had previously resided in: “He used the good roof sealant.”

Tight as a tick, I found myself thinking last night, as I woke up multiple times—dry—to the sound of pouring, driving rain on Seacliff State Beach. It started before I went to bed. It continues still. The hard-tinkling sound of it hitting the roof overlays the crash of the waves, so close to this (paid) parking spot that I can feel them. Over the course of two days at a redwood RV park that I drove to after spending two nights parked on city streets, three different people randomly told me I had to go to Seacliff, if I could ever get in to its always-booked campground. Probably in eight months or so. All of those people were specially touched by god, which is to say that they were queer, and when I looked online, it was indeed booked clear through next summer—except one surprise opening, just two days out.

There’s a severe weather advisory here now. Yesterday where there was beach, this morning, the highest waves are landing only about 10 feet from where I sit in the back of this RV—10 feet from every single material thing I currently own.

I wonder what I’m doing. Yesterday, on the way here, I ran necessary errands, piloting a whole moving house around the busy streets of Santa Cruz, picking up a steering-wheel lock, picking up levelers to keep said house straight while parked so the fluids that make the fridge work can work (meaning I have more knowledge about how fridges work than I did before, which was zero), and I wondered then, too, what I was doing, and before that, I had to leave the redwood site more quickly than planned and in the haste forgot to unplug from the camp power source so that several men started yelling to get my attention as I drove away still connected to it, a (not needed!) reminder that I don’t know what I’m doing at all.