Moments after learning storms were about to pass just west of the metro, I did what anyone would do -- threw some food and my laptop bag into my van and drove west until I was parked directly in the path of the storm.
I've learned some things over the past couple of years. One is, most friendships are pretty one dimensional. Most of the people I discuss retrogaming with don't like talking about, say, horror movies. My movie friends don't like talking about making music, my writing friends aren't interested in talking about technology... and absolutely none of them are interested in talking about my van or vanlife in general. 99% of all conversations I start about vanlife end with a reference to Chris Farley and wanting to live in a van down by the river. (The other 1% end with references to Uncle Rico from Napoleon Dynamite.) Nobody thinks it's interesting; everybody thinks it's weird.
Another thing I've learned is to stop caring so much about what people think. Technically, to say I "learned" it wouldn't be true. Around the time I hit middle age, it just started happening; so slowly at first that I didn't recognize it. Those random online jabs and YouTube trolls just started to blur into the background. Those little jabs I used to obsess about for days (weeks... months... years...) just washed away. It's a bit like seeing the Matrix for the first time -- not the movie, but the little ones and zeroes that make up everything. I wish I could get all the time back I spent arguing with people or even caring what they thought.
i forgot what quiet sounded like. From the moment I awake, the phone is on; the TV is on; the internet is on; the world, is on. There were twenty years of waking kids up, getting kids dressed, getting kids to school... and then, a hush. A few years ago we had a workshop built. I never understood why people preferred building things to buying them. I went through $100 in lumber, screws and paint to build a cabinet that I could have purchased for half that price from Ikea. You might think building a cabinet would result in higher quality, but not mine. Mine's flimsy and heavy. The only part that looks fancy is the trim I added. It fell off. But I'm learning. The tools make it impossible to hear much of anything else. It's easy to lose track of time. When you're staring at a saw you can't stare at the news.
I'm so afraid of silence that in my van I installed a television. I added Roku to it, which, when connected to my phone, allows me to stream anything from my server, anything from DirecTV, and anything from Netflix. I also added one of those digital TV antennas, so I can pick up television stations that way, too. For laughs, I tossed in a Raspberry Pi loaded with more old videogames than anyone could play in ten lifetimes. Usually when I hit the road I grab my laptop and my tablet too, ensuring me I boredom is never more than a click away.
Tonight, I'm kicked back on the van's bed when rain begins to tinkle down on the windshield. I turn the radio off and the lights off and eventually, the television. I leave the rear doors open so I can watch the lightning; it's behind the clouds which are behind a tree. The sky is purple with pink clouds. Mostly the lightning appears as flashes of white light behind the clouds but occasionally I catch a glimpse of it. A drop in temperature rides in on the wind -- gusts of it blow around my empty water bottles and trash wrappers. The rain is so light that I don't need to close the doors, and yet I can smell it. A good Okie can tell the difference between a good rain storm and a tornado and this is just the former.
The lightning flashes for hours as I lay there in the van, in the dark, in silence.
