I’m beginning this late on the Eve, but I’ll finish it on the Holiday proper, just over the midnight line.

Because it’s the right thing, in the currently abiding west-jerzian aesthetic, and also because tomorrow is a travel day, which makes it a whole lot less likely that I’ll spill properly during it.

You know I own a sliver of a lot on the very edge of the town I consider the dream land. There’s nothing on it but weeds and quail and rocks and roadrunners, and it may be so for some time yet, but it lives exactly where I always said it should, one mile from the fully co-operative health grocery on the other side of a casually vibrant little downtown.

Tomorrow I’m going to take the Ró Iezabelle truck down there and introduce it to this land, and the land to it in turn. This trip is an eddy in someone else’s current. I didn’t plan it, but I plan to make the most of it, and to be at least the one in the driver’s seat this time.

In practical terms that means charging the batteries of the pretty new video camera overnight, and being ready to extemporize an episode on the spot. Maybe it’s the first episode, or maybe not. That’s not important. Doing the work and having the footage; that part is.

In the first part of the long journey ahead, the big one that will transcend all day trips, it’s not going to matter that there is only quail on this lot and no adobe casita.

This is because the journey of a hundred thousand miles begins on the back of a steel camel, full-time if necessary. I believe in the short-term future I may live in my car. My radio tuned, to the voice of a star.

There are, still and even at this stage of societal decay, a hundred thousand places to park a home for free for a week or two at a time.

But in practical grown-up terms, just a parking place, no matter how lovely or remote or far from the madding crowd, is a temporary home without amenities or comforts, and so it can never be home in any sustainable sense. It lacks a consistent, reliable, non-flammable source of power, at least the way things are so far. But even with that solved, it lacks a good supply of potable and sometimes heated water, in quantities that would allow for a bath or a shower, or any easy way to run a load of laundry, or run a big fridge, or water a garden even if you somehow onboarded one.

Even if it provides free Rent in the strict Bob-Wellsian sense, in other words, this chimerical free place to park will never include, or be able to replace–the Utilities.

Free rent, in the narrowest sense, does exist. Free utilities … just don’t.

However.

There are a few ways, provided you have the right tools beforehand to make use of them, where the complete Rent-plus-Utils package is available for a couple dollars a night. I’m talking about a modest rolling penthouse apartment with all the comforts of home, that can literally be parked and powered for as little as $135 a month every month of the year, with no landlord, no leases, no tenant’s association, no yappy neighbor’s dogs to dream of shooting, and no need to be locked into the system or a job you hate with every stressed and straining muscle of your hurting body and mind.

If you’re interested in that extraordinary deal, go back to Bob’s playlist that I non-linked in my post of a week ago, on the 18th, and check out the New Mexico State Parks video on that playlist. Honestly this is so utterly amazing when you dig down into the details that I’m afraid to whisper its name too loudly.

But let’s say you don’t like the idea of being limited to state parks in NM for a year or two or three. (I am, quite a lot, but I understand of course.) Maybe a spectacular National Park is more your speed. Please have a look then at:

America the Beautiful National Parks Discount Pass

In this version, you can have your Rent/Utils package set amongst world-class scenery like the kind found at the Canyon, or Zion, or Yellowstone, or Yosemite, or Acadia up in Maine. It’s going to run you a little more than five bucks a night, in large part because the Feds charge separately for electric most of the time. The population density will go up, because these are places everyone wants to see–there are tradeoffs beyond the modestly increased expense.

Indeed there’s nothing stopping anyone from staying at an NM State place for two weeks, spending two weeks roughing it off the grid, and then heading up to have a splurging holiday somewhere fantastically gorgeous and only a little more expensive.

Once, I stayed in the smallest scrap of a room they had inside the historic lodge at the south rim of the Grand Canyon, and it cost me close to $300, ten years ago.

That same cash would last me weeks on end just down the road on the same rim, in my own home, guaranteed to be free of Covid, knocking maids, and the couple ten inches away from your sleeping brain knocking the headboard into yours in a paroxysm of orgasmic delight.

And if a George Bush or a Donald Trump wins again, you can drag your bed across either border and actually make good on that ‘Fuck this, I’m outta here’ thing you said more than once back in the day.

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Listen, my dear.

I have, at this early stage, no intention of living the nomad life until the end of my days.

I have no intention of leaving that pretty lot in that pretty town to the quail alone forever.

But I am intensely motivated, for reasons ranging to the philosophical to the financial, to explore every aspect of it, and to document that exploration in the ultimate creative act of self-expression; in the additional hope that said self-expression itself can economically power the years that remain to me. (No more Deans, no more chairs, no more bosses ever.)

In these few holy days at the end of a year, I find myself feeling that this is my way to make the world, my little slice of it, a better place for myself, my spirit tribe, my kindred and maybe even my species.

This is not a manic phase.

This is vivendi welling up from within my heart, and this is my hand shaking for all the good and bad reasons as it dares to reach at last for something more.