Two weeks ago, vairtere dot com slash Spill, which is this newer volume of a project begun almost seven years ago, logged its one thousandth post. I noticed it and thought about saying something. Then I decided it was a pretty meaning-free milestone.

But today is an other kind. Meaningful? It is. To me.

Two years ago today was my last official day at an official Job. The last day I was what they call gainfully employed, or kept regular hours anywhere I didn’t really want to be.

On that day, I had no plans beyond getting the hell out of Dodge and putting a lot of miles between my consciousness, and that of a creepy venal landlord and a creepier asshole boss, and an unhappy existence on the wrong side of a border checkpoint.

I had shitloads of material crap to haul up out of the hole with me, and a lot of it was totally unsorted bulk baggage that didn’t even belong to me. (The new wife only had a fifth wheel’s worth of room to store anything, and that is hardly any.)

One good thing about all that (beyond the enormous relief I was feeling) was that I had a place to take the crap, with a little room even left over for my large physical person, and almost enough for my introvert’s mind besides. The house I’d left behind had steadfastly refused to sell in the three years I had sojourned in hell. The place this house was in would be hell too, for most normal people. To me it was Sanctuary, and a few clicks south of heaven.

It took three trips. One in a huge truck, one in a smaller truck, and finally one in my crammed sporty little red pearl.

Another good thing, very selfishly defined, was that the pandemic lockdowns and closures and protocols were only just beginning to ramp up then. Thus I came back to find the familiar world altered in ways that soothed my nature, which is even normally antisocial, but especially so then.

And Jesus Christ in a bucket, did I need soothing.

It might be a slight overstatement to say that I was brain-damaged. And it might not be.

I was certainly closer to mental dysfunction and illness than I have ever been in my life. My dreams were tormented and my sleep was correspondingly spotty. The exhausted wakings brought little relief. I was wrecked physically and emotionally and spiritually most of all.

The almost perfect mental quiet of the rough house in the nothing town was the only thing keeping me together. The quiet even had a literal analog–not many trains were running then, so there was far less trainsong–on an average day the biggest noise came from church bells tolling the enervated hours.

I had an earned lump sum of three month’s wages, because they typically pay professors out across the academic year, including the summer months I was only just entering. I had a brief grab at pandemic-enhanced unemployment besides, and after that some few more months of it, unenhanced. So no immediate money worries, and in fact no real current worries of any kind, which was just as well, because dealing with the ones in my rearview mirror chasing me like demon ghosts was everything I could just barely handle.

I found the corner where the outdoor tools had been heaped off the truck and I picked up the scythe first.

I went after the years of weeds with a vengeance, and I banged on them weeds just like they were the bosses’ head: Iiii don’t want to work. I just want to chop on the weeds all day …

I poured off good clean sweat, grabbed the rake next, and piled the tangled yard waste high.

I built a shed by myself from a kit because no one had a driver to spare to bring me one ready-made. That made more room inside.

I had some vague notion about getting another job. The closest I got was hauling Trudy’s cat to Indiana for a thousand bucks plus expenses. That didn’t come with a dental plan. True to my nature, I didn’t care about that, until I was crippled by a giant painful cavity in a wisdom tooth that should have come out decades ago anyway, had I been a judicious and normal kind of human-american soul.

But even an episode of brutal pain and expense wasn’t enough to get me serious about crawling back to employment, because the sweetness and healing of the long quiet hours was just too compelling to break.

At the end of last year it was mostly broken for me. It’s not a story I want to tell right now. It’s edgily fraught.

Suffice to say, the sanctuary is for the most part dust in a wind that’s moved on.

Somewhere in here I also want to make clear that all through this process, I have never for a moment been dependent on the kindness of strangers or anyone else. There’s nobody holding up my end but me. There has been great generosity of spirit and liquid resources amongst my patrons and family, and for that I am deeply grateful every day. And–ain’t nobody stamping the mortgage paid every month but the Bare Terre Hisself. It’s stupid and insecure to need to say it. But that’s fine.

All I’m really about now is re-creating full sanctuary in some form, and that’s where this whole truck and trailer and alt-stove and alt-shower and solar energy thing comes in. Thee Nomadix.

Once I have a mobile shell, I’ll move with that wind. Across to the state park system over the border for a time, perhaps, but …

For four hundred a month, I can park it downtown in my dream town, a mile from the empty lot that is mine, and for another hundred I can have onboard high-speed satellite internet, when Elon gets his shit really together, any day now.

Set up there so close, I will finally get a job. It will be one that I can leave utterly and completely behind me after every eight-hour sale of my labor. Other than that I truly don’t give a fuck what it is. Something at the college or slinging hash or sweeping up–it just has to be serene work with minimal managerial oversight and meddling.

I’ll get this work for the sole purpose of collecting money enough to build strong and legal final sanctuary, on the empty lot. I expect that’s about two years of wages worth.

Living and working right there, it would be easy to straw-boss the construction process too, or even do as much of it as I’m able by myself.

To close this retrospective reflection I want to share what paring is. It’s a very old concept in our ancient common tongue.

https://www.etymonline.com/word/pare

It means so many seemingly different things, but I advance the theory that in essence, to pare is to prepare.

You bring a chili pepper home. But to make use of it, you have to wash it and pare off the ends–strip out the seeds and veins too if you’re a person who likes flavor but not much heat.

Maybe you peel a potato, maybe you make edible rice from dry rice.

It’s all paring, especially if you take something away from the thing you’re preparing in order to fully procure it for the intended purpose.

It doesn’t have to be food.

Trim away at the boxes of unsorted crap.

Reduce your material footprint to the essential things, whatsoever is honestly essential to you.

For the truly enlightened that might be a bowl and chopsticks, a flute slung across a shoulder.

For mere mortals like me, a large blank walled sheltered space, a Le Creuset pot, a computer running Linux natively, a toothbrush that electrically hums. Or even two such spaces, one fixed in a divine geography and one that rolls.

I think the damage to my brain or spirit is mostly healed now, after these two years. Not to say no mark is left upon me, or that there are no scars.

I’ll be alright, for a while.