On What I’m Even Doing

It cracks me up when people ask me what I’m really even doing out here in the RV.

Why of course I am drinking entirely too much coffee, letting it take me to transcendental levels of spatial and spiritual awareness. Training my adrenal for some Olympic level functioning. I am blasting old Avicci and following the samples back to the original songs, paying homage to Gwen McCrae by singing her song as loud as I can into an empty canyon in the Mojave desert.

I’m rearranging the items in my RV drawers and cabinets so that I can take a mental image and inventory them properly in my brain. I’m laying out on a sun-baked rock like a lizard, kayaking down a river in my mind where everyone I’ve ever loved is on the banks waving at me, smiling.

I’m sitting in my camp chair observing a literally gigantic bumble bee fly back and forth for hours from one side of my RV to another. Eventually long enough that the suns angle now allows him to see his shadow on the RV and he seems very amused by this.

I’m unfortunately noticing that there’s a dead sparrow dangling upside down in my grill and I cry and I curse the RV and I think how selfish it is of me to be driving out here where the birds live, hitting them unknowingly and so incorrectly assuming they made it out of the way until I park at a grocery store at the edge of a nice civilized town and see it. I pry it out with gloves on and have a little ceremony.

I’m wondering about the woman named Lisa who I met a few years back at a campsite in Arizona. She was driving a cool OHV and wearing a wool vest despite it being 99 degrees and had a literal wolf with her who was way chiller and larger in her passenger seat than I would imagine a wolf would be.

I’m calculating how hot it will be in a few hours and thusly contemplating if I should voyage to the laundromat or the gym or maybe go see a matinee so I can be in some air conditioning at the height of the Mojave Desert day.

Or maybe, despite that temperature calculation, I put my adventure sandals on with my denim shorts and a camelback with some electrolyte powder and think I’m just going to walk up that first incline from the trailhead and enjoy the view but then there’s burro or tortoise sighting potential and now I’m 3 miles in at 2pm and it’s so hot and I’m sweating and there’s tiny minute cactus spikes under the arch of my food and thank god I have my reflective brimmed hat on because I definitely didn’t put sunscreen on because I didn’t think I’d actually go anywhere beyond the first incline from the trailhead and now I get to walk 3 miles back so that’s nice I just logged a 6 mile heat train elevation hike.

I’m walking through some national recreation area stumbling upon all the informative signs and they’re sun bleached and crooked and completely blank and covered in bird poo. I’m looking down at my sandals and freaking out about how perfect of a choice I made for sparkling silver toenails because they look so amazing in red dirt and lakes and rivers and brown dirt and mud and gravel and sand and the ocean and everywhere I’ve romped around in them where the sun hits them and throws prisms like a disco ball.

I’m hearing a single twig snap and freeze in my tracks because I’m definitely the only creature I’ve seen for hours and certainly that wasn’t just nothing.

I am accepting and/or understanding the decisions that my dad made and makes. I’m accepting and/or understanding the decisions that my mom made and makes. I’m accepting and/or understanding the decisions that my brother made and makes. I am missing my brother so much I start to cry. Remembering on the worst days of my life, like the lowest absolute worst days considering the thing I never ever thought I would ever ever consider, that simply the thought of brother and his sheer absolute preciousness is the reason I was able to pull myself up out of the pit and keep pushing, keep going, keep finding a way through and getting back to surthrival where I deserve to and want to be. I am filling with so much love and gratitude for Dad and Mom and Jake that I start to feel like a scene that would be in an Adventure Time sort of cartoon where I’m like, laying there in the desert and love and energy from their respective places on the globe start flowing toward toward and from me in a beautiful sort of spiritual circuit.

I’m wondering how the fuck there’s nobody else out here charging up in the sun, river, mountains, lakes, sand dunes, etc. but then I remember the whole point was to find myself in some Dixie Chicks level Wide Open Spaces where I feel so surrounded by nature and unperceived by humans that the aforementioned love circuitry starts to flow like it does. And then I remember that there are other people out here doing this, sometimes I pass them on the highway or see them at the dump station. There’s so much space to do this and I’m reminded of that when I get a window seat on a flight anywhere and glue my nose to the window and it’s just mountains and mountains and desert for hours. And I look around the plane and I’m the only one looking out the window and I’m so perplexed how people would rather watch Ryan Reynolds in some sub-par ass cookie-cutter action movie than observe the tributaries and peaks and valleys below and imagine all the animals and ecosystems functioning so intuitively with no disturbance whatsoever in a majority of it. It’s the best show I’ve ever seen.  It fills me up with so much happiness to see nature so undisturbed and perfect. And then I also remember that I like the thought that I bet some people can do this without driving a van or an RV for 26 hours across the country to get out to said places, maybe some people who are totally built different from me can do this nourishing, life-affirming sort of activity from their gaming chair or from a rollercoaster at Cedar Point or on the train on their commute or at the model train store in some town bordering large city limits and modern suburbia. You know that type of town, like the plazas and strip malls are all outdated and there’s somehow vacuum stores and train stores and pet stores with live animals for sale in places where that’s still legal (it’s not in Las Vegas anymore yayyy). I’m out here realizing people can get what they need wherever they get it and in a very Samsara way I try so hard to embrace the yin yang of discrepancy between what’s going on here (on the plane, in my brain) versus other places.

I’m out here feeling how when I’m in my own masculine energy I feel my most feminine. I feel so beautiful when I’m covered in the environments I’ve been in out here and I feel so a part of the nature around me no different from the truly humongous bumblebee I saw neurotically flying back and forth. No different from the muskrats playing in the watershed after a few days of rain. No different from the translucent spider I tried to capture and release outside the van in the middle of the night but kinda of missed with the cup and smashed her leg and watched her struggle and curl up in a ball and frantically try to help herself but started oozing some goo and dying and I cried so hard and apologized so profusely. I spiraled so hard, she was literally minding her own business in the night probably eating the bugs in the RV that actually would disturb me and I barely squished her and it full on killed her. Fuck that really affected me.  I’m out here sealing pipes and seams and flushing out my coolant system and doing really kind of dude things but I feel so activated and happy and proud of myself for doing them. And it makes me feel really alive and thus really very much like a woman because if there’s one thing a woman can really embrace it’s feeling so much Life in, around, and through her.

I’m completely overheating and realizing I’m low on food and my black water tank has gotta be getting really super full of poo by now and I need to go dump it but the dump is like $25 now at the cheapest place but I was reading a subreddit where someone didn’t empty their black tank in the Vegas heat and it fermented and exploded. Yes. Their poop exploded.

I drive on the roads and I think about the (typically) men who make things like roads and pipes and drains and telephone lines and structures and fences and RVs and I become filled with immense gratitude and love and awe at what people can do and how much energy and effort goes into such things that I enjoy so much.

I’m missing my boyfriend so much. I notice how the inside of my backpack smells like him. I left it in his bathroom last visit. He lives by the ocean, he lives on an island and the humid tropical bathroom smell combined with his various soaps and sprays totally infused into my backpack in a steam-room sort of fashion so I can stick my head in my backpack and get a good whiff of him.

I’ve got all the windows open fully and the breeze is really blowing through the van aggressively and I love how fresh and alive it makes the RV seem. We are open for business, warmth and sunlight’s pouring in and I’m eating an orange and doodling and tinkering and stretching and generally moving energy while my JBL plays my downloaded tunes on shuffle. Willow comes on and I am continually mind blown at her artistry and I turn it up loud and I que hover like a GODDESS up to play at least 10 times in a row. I chug it then something like Morgen Wallen comes on next and the variety keeps me alive.

I’m in the Vegas airport looking at Gene Wilder’s face periodically spinning in front of me around the top of a Willy Wonka themed slot machine. A house remix of I’m Too Sexy for My Shirt plays and I’m so happy I don’t have my headphones on so I could experience this. Then like two songs later it’s literally I Get a Kick out of You by Frank Sinatra. I crack up. Vegas is a most hilarious swirl of the human experience and this makes so much sense after spending so much time in the surrounding desert spiraling all around the strip. The airport is half Dead and Co. Sphere goers, half convention attendees, half people playing bingo like my Uber driver had explained once. And I know that’s way more halves than a whole, but let’s not take the fractions too seriously.

Anyway, I think people thought I may be trying to see National Parks, or mountain bike or something. But now you know! That’s what I’m doing!