I’ve been living in my Chevy Astro for eighteen months now. I think it is the longest I have lived in one dwelling ever, except for the time I accidentally bought a house and was stuck for four years. The beauty of it is, that in eighteen months in one dwelling I’ve driven seventy something […]

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This is the first thing that new van dwellers always ask. Why? What could you possibly have that’s going to use a bunch of electricity? Unless it’s medical equipment, you’ll probably find that you don’t really need it once you’re living in the van. Van’s require electricity to go, and at the same time there […]

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Katies dog, Mutt, is trained in Algonquin. She says the prettiest words to him. Wendiha, mostly. (I’m sure I’m spelling that entirely wrong). She says “coo! coo!” sometimes too. Like an owl or a mama buffalo, but faster. I thought it meant hurry, at first, because she always said it when she was holding the […]

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Sooo many people say to me, “I wish I could live in a van and travel around like you. I just can’t be a stripper and there’s no way to make money on the road.” First of all, van dwelling is not expensive. I think I spent way less than $5k on gas and food […]

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There was a whole dumpster diving culture where I grew up, so much that the stores started locking their dumpsters. It was okay, though, we stole their keys and made copies of them. I lived in a bookstore then. A few of us did, it wasn’t radical or anything, we were just homeless and the […]

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On my way out of that big city I used to hang out in I decided to drive past my old house in the little town outside the big city. The house looked the same, from the road. The woman who’d bought it with me with mighty aspirations of ripping it down and building something […]

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“You can go ahead,” a guy in one of those long trendy coats motions me up to the counter. I’m scanning the menu boards, and I don’t see anything that’s not coffee. I don’t drink coffee. There’s a sign for cheese soup, but I bet it’s thickened with flour and that will make me sick, […]

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You’ll need: An eggplant or two A pound or two of ground meat Onions Mushrooms Whatever other veggies are around (turnip greens and radishes, for me) Tomato sauce Oil Cheese if you’re rich today A big pot First chop up the eggplant into little cubes and brown it with the meat in your oil (I […]

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I used to have a little keychain thermometer that I kept on the door to Bro’s crate. In the desert, I used it to show concerned citizens that it was not really one hundred degrees in the van and that ice + insulation did in fact make it cool where Bro was. Somewhere along the […]

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His name was Red Fox, and the last time I was driving through this area we picked him up hitchhiking. It was when I lived in a bus with my girlfriend and another woman. We’d parked overnight in a WalMart parking lot, and in the morning we took turns getting off the bus and having […]

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