I've [redacted] people's faces from the photo*, both because of the questionable legality of hanging out and drinking in a truck, and for their own privacy.

As you may remember from this Q & A session I mentioned that a truckwarming party was in the works. Some planning, a little food, a few drinks, and a week of time were enough to bring the idea to fruition.

One of the benefits of living in a truck is that you can have your truckwarming party wherever you desire (within driving distance); we opted for a nice quiet park down the road. It wasn't anything lavish, just a few friends hanging out with some music and card games. There's a surprising amount of space left over (~100 ft²), especially after the bit of rearranging I did beforehand (I'll outline my most recent changes in another post), so it wasn't too cramped. Leaving the back gate open to let the fresh air in made the whole event feel more like a BBQ or camping than anything else. Overall, it was a great time, and I'm grateful to have a group of friends who accept me despite the fact that I'm completely deranged.

A big part of truck life is managing the limited amount of space you have available to you. Depending on what sort of vehicle you're living in, you may have more or less space available to you, but generally, unless you live in a full on tractor trailer, you're going to have less than 200 ft² of space, so you need to be smart about how and where you keep your belongings. As you can see from the picture above, I was able to increase the overall contiguous space available to me (useful, for example, for a truckwarming party).

Efficiently rearranging your living situation requires a little bit of forethought. For me, the following process worked really well:

1. Make a list. Check it twice, find out who's naughty and who's nice. Just kidding. But you do want to make a list of all the large objects you have in your truck. Generally, this list will include anything stationary (beds, storage, furniture, etc), and anything that takes up a reasonable amount of space, even if it can be moved around pretty easily (like a broom or suitcase, for example). For me, the list included my bed, dresser, and coat rack, as well as a small box of tools.
2. Measure everything. Once you've made your list, measure the length and width of each item on it, and write these dimensions down on your list. Then measure the dimensions of the overall living space. I just looked up the dimensions for the twin bed and the Ikea dresser I built (detailed here), and measured the depth and length of the coat rack (build detailed here). I also looked up the dimensions of the box to confirm my rough measurements.
3. Sketch it out. Now that you know everything you need to place, and the space you have to place it, start figuring out arrangements that make sense. My strategy was to put everything at the back, leaving all of the open space in the front. Since I was trying to maximize the amount of free space I had, I decided to put the bed sideways across the truck, leaving enough room for my box of tools at the foot of the bed. It made sense to move the coat rack there too, because that way, accelerating and braking wouldn't cause my clothes to move all over the place, and it meant I could put in a larger rack. Make sure to take into consideration the extra space you'll need for opening and closing drawers, hanging clothes, and just maneuvering around in general. As for the actual sketching part, you can use a normal piece of graph paper, or make a diagram online, like the one I made and included above.
4. Start shuffling things around. Now that you've planned it out, get to moving! Remove all securements you may have built to keep everything safe, and play your own truck-sized version of Tetris. You might want to make sure it won't be too hot out on the day you plan on moving: hard labor in a hot box is far from the most pleasant of experiences.
5. Secure it back down. As detailed in my previous Tips from the Truck post, you'll want to make sure to properly re-secure everything once you're satisfied with the new arrangement. Maybe take a lap around the block as a trial run before you resume your normal driving.

And voila! Enjoy your new and improved, more spacious, Feng shui living arrangements.

In this post, I mention that, upon my arrival, there were already several other vehicles that looked like they could be home to serial killers, the mentally-insane, or otherwise psychologically degenerate human beings. Some of the vehicles, namely a truck and a few RVs, move around occasionally, a sure sign of life. Others, like the hippie van pictured above on the far right, have not moved in the two months I've been here. However, despite these clear signs of organic life, I had never actually encountered any other people who were Livin' La Vida Loca(motive).

That is, until last week.

Allow me to set the scene, as I sometimes do. It's a Monday night, nearly indistinguishable from most others. If anything were to set it apart, it'd be my general tardiness in getting back to the box. It's about 10 PM at this point, well-beyond sunset, a deviance from my normal 9 PM arrival. I've just finished washing up and biking back to my home, and I'm walking across the parking lot when I see someone get out of the truck pictured above, center. I can hardly contain my excitement, after all, I'm finally making contact, a flesh and bone confirmation that I'm not alone in my endeavors. My change in pace or direction must have come to their attention, because they immediately started looking around nervously, which makes sense; they didn't know what my intentions were. I introduce myself, and let him know that I'm the occupant of the truck next door, which naturally brings him relief. Among all of the possible reasons someone would approach you in a parking lot, "wanting to meet the neighbors" is probably the best one.

There was a little bit of a language barrier, but from what I gathered, he had driven here from a few states over in his truck. Once he got out here, he hopped on Craigslist and found a camper for around $1,000, which is definitely an interesting (and even more frugal) approach. He's only interning here, so his arrangement is more temporary. I gave him a brief tour of my dwelling, which he commended on its spacious, open floor plan. We spoke for a few minutes about the various difficulties we've come across and where we park and other normal truck-person conversation, then we parted ways.

So there it is. I've officially met my first real-life neighbor. In the week since, I've run into him a few times walking to and from the box, and even once out on the road. If nothing else, it's nice having some tangible proof that even if I am insane, I'm not the only one.

As a forewarning, this post doesn't ^really provide tips on how to be invisible, it's more of an observation of human nature.

One of my biggest stressors when I was considering living in a van, as is undoubtedly evident from my earlier posts, was my unshakable fear that I was going to be caught, arrested, or otherwise reprimanded. I was worried that I wouldn't be discreet enough, or I'd make some grave mistake one day, or anything but a perfectly executed ninja-esque routine would spell my end. One too many loud creaks at night, not closing the back gate quietly enough, climbing out at the exact wrong time, parking in the wrong place, etc, the ways I could screw things up seemed limitless. But a fortuitous combination of rote observation and apparent realization led me to the following declaration:

The Realization

The realization that I had was that the vast majority of bad things that could happen to me required another person. Someone to see (and subsequently report) me, someone to tell me I needed to leave, someone to be so taken aback by my (in my opinion, untheatrical) actions that they saw it entirely necessary to go out of their way and see that something is done about it, etc, nothing truly bad could happen to me without a definitive, intentional action from another human being. Understanding this, my very survival (as a box-truck inhabitant), hinged on one of the two following things being true:

1. Nobody ever seeing me
or
2. Nobody feeling inclined to interfere

The Observation

If one of those two above-mentioned things were to be true, everything might just work out.

Nobody Ever Seeing Me

If nobody ever sees me, nobody can really intentionally act against me, right? This case falls in line with my initial musings, that if I'm invisible, I'll be fine. If I can ensure that no single human being ever sees me entering, being in, or exiting the box truck, and that nobody ever questions its existence, and the moon and stars align, I might just make it out squeaky clean: a smooth, friction-less experience. However, that seems extremely unlikely. I can do my best to minimize contact with other human beings: I can leave early in the morning and come back late at night, I can take careful, quiet, deliberate footsteps, I can open and close the noisy back gate slowly and tenderly, etc. There are a million things I can do to make myself as invisible as possible, but regardless of how sneaky I am, at the end of the day, I can't control all the factors, or chance for that matter. Even if I listen super carefully before leaving the truck, there could still be someone parked right next to me, watching me get out of my truck. Or maybe a security car rolls by right as I'm hoping in. Or maybe a family on vacation bizarrely takes photographs for ten minutes with me and my half-open tailgate in the not-so-distant background. As you may have guessed, all these things have happened. They're just a product of random chance, and regardless of how careful and calculating I am, they're going to continue to happen.

So if it's impossible to stop people from seeing me, I guess I'll just have to hope that nobody steps in, right? Here's where I start making some useful observations.

Nobody Feeling Inclined to Interfere

Like I said above, I have random run-ins all the time. People may not understand what I'm doing or what's going on, but I'm definitely noticed by strangers on a daily basis as I go about my mundane truck routine. So, knowing that, how do I manage to not get caught, or arrested, or whatever else I was worried would happen to me? I'll tell you how. It's because nobody cares. I'm going to say that again, because it's super important:

Nobody cares.

These are other human beings who are going about their own lives, with their own preoccupations, their own responsibilities, their own concerns. My life's brief collision with theirs barely even registers as an event in their lives, in most cases it doesn't even warrant conscious thought. I'm as relevant to their life as a traffic light, and that's a good thing. They have their own stack of worries to mull over, what motivation do they have to exert a non-negligible energy to disrupt my life. Humans are a lot like the electrons I spent so much of college learning about, in most cases, we're perfectly happy taking the path of least resistance. And in the case of fleeting interactions with random strangers, the path of least resistance is to do nothing at all.

And that's why I'm completely fine. Not because I'm a perfect master of stealth, but because people can't be bothered. At best, they've immediately replaced the experience of seeing me with much more real, pressing issues in their lives, and at worst, I've become a bit of conversation-fodder for a dinner table discussion that night. In both extrema, I'm soon forgotten and nobody is mounting an offensive against me or my lifestyle, and that's exactly why I sleep so soundly at night.

Traffic is a strange beast. Sometimes it comes from nowhere at all, wreaking unspeakable havoc on your itinerary, eviscerating your plans with startling efficiency. Other times it's entirely expected, and entirely unavoidable. In any case, nobody particular enjoys traffic (I certainly don't), it's an environmental tragedy, and it's ruthlessly wasteful. By all accounts, traffic is a Bad Thing^TM.

Call it schadenfreude if you want, but on days when I'm not up at the crack of dawn, there's nothing I love more than rolling out of bed at my leisure, lazing my way to the gym, hopping on a treadmill and watching the brutal commute thousands and thousands of people are enduring. It's especially glorious because a large percentage of these people are, at a snail's pace, traveling to exactly where I already am. And it only took me 5 minutes to get here. My co-worker came in today exhausted because commuting from his house, a 15 minute stroll not during rush hours, took him a whopping hour and a half this morning, for no reason in particular. It's especially tragic because he still has a commute home to look forward to, which will undoubtedly be plagued by the same atrocities. I don't have the constitution or resolve to handle such a soul-crushing experience on a twice-daily basis, but power to everyone who does.

Living close to (read: at) work is certainly nice, especially under the lens of traffic, but don't get me wrong, it does indeed have its downsides, and I'd be lying if I said it was all sunshine and roses. For one, living at work makes it really easy to have a bad work/life balance, especially on weekends. If I'm not keeping busy enough, it's tempting to just go into work and get some stuff done, maybe do some laundry and hang out for a bit. I find that because I don't have a living room to hang out in, I have to keep reminding myself to get out and constantly have activities planned. All things considered though, I think the grueling commute is what burns a lot of people out, and the time and energy and resources I save by not having to endure that play a huge role in keeping me happy and productive as I work towards my larger goals.