The habitual and forcefully obvious, if we don’t find something in common within the next few seconds this will be awkward, question: “so where are you from?” or “and you live here now?”

The 4ftx6ft box has become my native lair, a lair for sleeping and occasionally eating upon. By night a dark and mysterious disarray of miscellaneous treasures and tri-cams — by day, a mattress, costume box, bag of definitely not clean clothes, a backpack stuffed with climbing gear, a guitar, 1 lantern, 5ft x 1½ft  of food and coffee, 5ft x 1½ft  of ropes and tiny treasures, and one gigantic handle of what may or may not be amazing whiskey. It very well could be chamomile tea, but there is for sure only one way to find out. Labels can be deceiving.

Now, that list of belongings is not ordered in any way correlated to how the 4’x6’ box is, lets say, arranged. I have adopted a well practiced form of organization. Its called, “the things I use most are easily accessible, and the things I don’t use as frequently are theoretically impossible to get to.”

Don’t judge. Look, we live in a world where I’m not trying to waste time making my shit look good. What ever works and is most efficient… eh? I’m just fighting for that hot bath at the end of each month – that I can afford to take, with all the time I’ve saved up being more efficient than the rest of the world. I save that time in the hot bath bank, if you were wondering. They have an excellent roll over minute plan  and cancellation policy.

Its not really a sexy site to see me trying to golden retrieve a needed item from the abyss of my box.  You got to, kind of, vampire your way into the lair. If you can hover, use that to your advantage. Know what I mean? If you can’t, then you get your head in the box first, then it is a push up on tail gate/plank/jump motion in the forward direction. However, my big ass gets in the way most of the time, it likes to hit the top of the camper top. It’s kind of hard to explain, so here’s a picture of me trying to clear off my mattress at the end of the day. Also, I’m trying a new “get in the bed” tactic, its working well as you can see. My traveling companion Riley seemed to think it was funny enough to take a picture of. I think that also says something about the time it took me to retrieve – Riley had time to rummage through my crap, find my phone, figure out how to use it, and take a picture.

Yeah, I have a living room, and a back porch, and a basement, and a bedroom. It’s just like Zoolander though, I might as well be living in a house for ants.

-Jackson

READ MORE: The Houseless Chronicles – Part 4