This morning, I woke up and pooped in a truck

“You,” my ancestors said in a dream thirty-five days ago, “don’t feel alive.”

They were right. I am often quite bummed to get messages about my Great Soul Purpose in the middle of the night, because while I could be grateful to receive information I might otherwise spend my whole life flailing for—what the fuck am I doing here?—what I’m supposed to be doing here usually turns out to be a pain in the ass, or a pain in the dick, like getting divorced, or getting a dick, or, in this case, following another bit of guidance I didn’t want to hear at all: Simplify.

I didn’t want to simplify. I wanted to keep paying my ridiculous rent and spend all my energy trying to figure out how to make the money that would pay my ridiculous rent, which I was approaching the neighborhood of being unable to do. I wanted to sit amongst my meticulously chosen comfortable furniture and wait to feel better and be richer, passing free time until that time came with subscriptions to six streaming services.

Today, I woke up before dawn in the parking spot of the apartment I’ve been renting for a year, in a bed over the cab of a Ford truck with a twenty-four-foot house built around it. Right now, I’m drinking a cup of tea from a little shelf the friendly geezer I bought this RV from screwed into the wall of the back lounging area, tea I made—to my great, astonished amusement—on the burner of the very first stove I have ever owned. On a stove inside a car. Today is the first time since September of 2000 that, barring overseas travel or domestic catastrophe (like Hurricane Katrina), it’s the first day of a new month and I didn’t pay rent.