The La Quinta in St. Augustine is a nice place to be, but something about the pillows, or maybe the box spring, only let me sleep for five hours ’til 5.

I got up and cut yesterday’s footage together in the dark. It took an hour. By then the lobby coffee was fresh and I got some while the final cut was processing.

Outside there was wildlife. I saw two stray cats and a possum that was bigger than either of them out by the dumpster. The mood is wet and and atmospheric.

The video is uploading.

When I first woke I was thinking about some lines from 1990.

“I believe in the future
I may live in my car
My radio tuned to
The voice of a star.”

Images of the 72-year-old woman doing the same accompanied the lines. Images of the Frances McDormand character in Nomadland, too.

I won’t be the first or the last to observe that as long as this thing we call ‘vanlife’ is an option rather than a necessity, it can be fun or even spiritual. But as soon as it becomes less of an option and more of a necessity it also becomes less of an entertaining lark or bodhi path, and more of a poverty grind.

I still don’t think that living in a van, down by the river or elsewhere, is per se a shameful thing or a mark of failure. I still don’t think it’s a cynical joke.

Instead, I believe it’s as close as we can still get to living in accord with those an(archo)-prim(itivist) ideals in a world gone mad with technology.

I do have a website. Over there, I have multiple platforms. Right here, I am wearing corrective lenses, and I wouldn’t be alive right now without a lot of fancy medical interventions.

My being alive doesn’t justify it, or make it right, though. Much less does it make it pretty.

The stray cats are still a tragedy, and in a different way so is the possum who needs that dumpster to make it.

Who am I?

I am not old possum. I am not quite yet the poor sweet homeless kittens.

I’m a mammal trying to make its strange way through this stranger land.