I'm Done

I'm done with music. It seems that nobody in this shithole town wants to work with me. I guess I'm too demanding. Too much of an asshole. How dare I expect people to practice on a regular basis? What fresh insolence of me to presume that musicians would want to write and perform songs on a regular basis! How arrogant of me to want to play gigs on a regular basis in more than one town!

What-fucking-ever.

The bands that have any sort of ambition don't need me. And all the other wannabes and poseurs in this fucking town are perfectly happy to dink about and play pretend rock star in front of their WAGs and a handful of alcoholics. And everyone closer to my own age is burnt out. No time for balls-out rock. Weak, wimpy folk music pays. Flatulent white-boy blues is approved. Inoffensive background noise for senior citizens is appropriate.

What-fucking-ever.

So I'm done. Joy doesn't want me to sell my gear, but came to the realization that she can't stop me from doing it. Part of me doesn't want to do it either, but sometimes it feels like an anchor around my neck. I'm going to be fifty soon. I have a sick wife. I'm up to my eyeballs in debt. And I have no outlet left for my anger and frustration. So why bother keeping things around that I'll probably never use again? So if you're looking for a well-used but well-cared for drum kit with a full rack, a mess of cymbals, the gear needed to convert acoustic drums into electronic triggers, and all the cases and bags to keep that gear safe? You know how to get hold of me.

I don't need it any more.

A Vain Attempt At Maturity, Part Three

I think I've found my groove for booze. I like my hard sodas - my stepdaughter calls them "bitch beers" - and I've found a mixed drink I can tolerate. That said, it's times like this that I still kinda-sorta wish I was still on the road playing with either Powerlight or Steppen Stonz. Why, you ask? Taxes. That's why.

Y'see, when Washington voters approved a measure to allow the privatization of liquor sales, ending the long tradition of State Liquor Stores - which in reality were really no more than mom-and-pop bodegas selling liquor under State license - it did so because of a massive advertising campaign that was basically paid for by the founder and CEO of Costco that convinced the voters that it was a good thing. However, the initiative voters approved added on a whole new layer of taxation to alcoholic beverages. Driving back and forth to Reno like I used to would've allowed me to buy liquor there, or in a liquor store in California before heading home. It's technically illegal to do that - buy liquor in another state and bring it into the state - but it's a rule that's all but impossible to enforce. But the bottle of el cheapo Caliber Citrus Vodka that costs $4.65 at the Walmart in Sequim still has an actual cost north of eight bucks due to WSLCB taxes on top of sales tax. It sucks, but I can deal with it.

So what's my drink of choice? It's a shot or two of said vodka over ice, thoroughly diluted by about half a liter of Sodastream lemon-lime soda, then topped off with some cranberry juice. Joy found these glasses at the local dollar store that are actually vases. They'll hold about a liter of liquid, so that's pretty much fine with me. As it stands, lemon-lime with cranberry juice has pretty much been my jam the last few months regardless of what I augment it with. And with my Sodastream, I don't have to wait for the holidays - I'll make it whenever I damn well want to. And the citrus vodka adds a nice lemony tang on top of the soda and juice, so I can enjoy it nice and easy after a long night at work, or a long night taking care of Joy and Daisy.

Antisocial Media

Just got thrown in Facebook jail again. Some whiny little Trumpanzee bitch didn't like that I compared his (alleged) political philosophy to devolution, and while I'm appealing the whiny little bitch, I'm doing so from the proverbial time-out corner. And it's my third time there. The next time, I'm out for a month. Beyond that, I might even get the permanent banhammer from Fuckerberg. And at this point in time, I don't even fucking care if I do get the boot.

It just sickens me that I get called every name in the book by subhuman Trumpanzee trolls, and they get to walk away without punishment despite my reporting them for being vile and hateful bigots, but stand up to these knuckle-dragging mouth-breathers and it's time out for you, you bad man. Death threats? I get them. I know they don't amount to a hill of shit, so I call the Keyboard Commandos out – I think “Commode-os” might be a better term – and dare them to come get me, because I know that they're bullies. I'm pretty sure that I've been doxxed once or twice as well – I just smile and say “walk it like you talk it and come get me, bitch”. They never show up. Why? Because they're trying to bully me into silence, and every bully is just a coward that acts tough to hide their cowardice. Cowards never show up.

But I'm getting tired of it. I think it's time to just stop dealing with the pond scum. Time to just stop following news sites. Time to stop following anything other than my friends and closest interests – music, certain sports, and so on. Or maybe it's just time to get off social media altogether. When I found out that Fuckerberg hired a known right-wing news site to be the allegedly impartial judges of what is and isn't “fake news”, I think that was a sign for me to consider moving on.

I remember trying to talk my dad into joining Fuckerberg's cesspool, and he told me in so many words that he'd managed to live this long without it, why bother wasting the rest of his life with it? That, and he didn't want to have to talk to his sisters any more than absolutely necessary.

I think he may have been on to something.

Coming To An Understanding Of Alcohol, or A Vain Attempt At Maturity

Sometimes I think that I was too good growing up. But then again, there really is no "good" or "bad" behavior growing up when you grow up largely outside of the social constructs of adolescence. I had few friends, fewer still that could actually trust with anything more than my name. By the time I reached high school there was simply no place within its hierarchical circles - I wasn't anywhere close to popular with any particular group, even the "outcast" groups, and while my years in marching band were certainly enjoyable, even there I stood outside the cliques within the band. I'd been marked as a "narc" by my classmates because my mother worked at the high school as the secretary to the guidance counselors, and because I hid from bullies at lunch in the guidance office every goddamn day. I only learned this several years after I'd graduated. Ironically enough, I've only become friends with many of those in my graduating class later on, at an arm's-length distance through Facebook.

Believe it or not, there actually were advantages to my plight. Because I was a complete outcast, I was never really subjected to the peer pressures associated with small-town adolescence. And because of that, I never acquired a taste for alcohol. I never got drunk, or buzzed. I was too scared to do so, even if I'd been given the opportunity to do so. It didn't help that my entire family either were drunks, or remain drunks to this day. And to be completely honest, I have no contact with those of my family that didn't go on the proverbial wagon. My sister maintains her sobriety well enough, though fears of relapse have meant that she'd never seen me play a gig in her life until just a few years ago, playing in my last cover band with Ron DeFrang and John Eddy in the old back room at Coog's Budget CD's downtown. My dad went with her to those meetings for several years, but eventually he developed a more mature relationship with the spirits than he had in his younger days. In other words, he knows his limits and has the discipline to not exceed them. Too bad that it took him this long to figure it out.

And me? I was straightedge without even really knowing it. I like to say "I invented straightedge - you're welcome". I was just an outcast beyond outcasts, listening to loud and obnoxious music while not indulging in the pleasures of the flesh, albeit more because I couldn't afford them than because I didn't want them. And then I met Joy - a fellow outcast beyond outcasts. She'd have a drink occasionally, but to this day I can still count on one hand every time in our quarter-century together that I've seen her that drunk, and I'll still have fingers left. As she's gotten sick, she's said to me that occasionally she kinda regrets not partying in her younger years - she never got the chance to really have fun because she became a wife and mother too soon. And I wonder to myself if I feel the same way. I remember a wine-tasting tour we took on a brief vacation to Sonoma County in California, and feeling utterly useless. Why? It's not like one sip would turn me into a wino, genetic predisposition to alcoholism be damned! But on my uneducated palate, white wine was acidic and red wine was overwhelming. It was a waste of my time. I cook with alcohol - red wine into burgundy beef or osso bucco, white into my alfredo sauce, a little mirin into my teriyaki or bulgogi. But I don't drink. Ever.

But I'm forty-eight years old. Fuck that. I do feel like Joy - I never got the chance to party, so why not at least take a step or two in that direction. I do know that the road to hell is paved with good intentions, but it's time to stop being such a goddamn stick in the mud. I've worked up the balls to actually try a drink every now and then. But the taste of alcohol is abhorrent to me, which reminds me of what several people have told me when I said as much to them. You don't drink for the taste, they said. You drink to get drunk. Well, I don't want to get drunk. I just want to achieve understanding. Something that I could actually enjoy imbibing once in a while, after a hard night's work, to help me unwind after slugging down a few quarts of Coke through the night just passed.

Fortunately, the adult-beverage industry has a niche for me. Lighter, more flavorful alcoholic beverages have been around for decades now, wine coolers and flavored malt beverages, but now things are getting gloriously weird. As in "hard soda" and "hard tea". We're not talking a bottled Cuba Libre here, we're talking alcoholic soda - in the words of one brand's advertising pitch, so you can live hard. Ish. I'm trying out things in that direction.

First up was Mike's Hard Orange Soda. It tasted good - for about a second. Then it tasted like ass. Eventually I figured out that the only way to drink it was to drink it fast. Then I tried one of Joy's Raspberry Smirnoff Ice drinks. I actually couldn't taste the alcohol in it, and found that I could actually enjoy the flavor of it and drink it at a relatively leisurely pace. I think I'll buy another pack of those this coming weekend. And for shits and grins, I tried making a mixed drink a little bit ago before I sat down to type this out - a kinda-sorta Bloody Mary, a tablespoon or two of vodka into a six-ounce can of Spicy Hot V8 over ice. Yech. Adding a second can of V8 didn't save that mess from tasting like paint thinner. What a waste of perfectly good V8 - my braising liquid of choice for pot roast. I think I'll stick with the raspberry stuff for now. Or maybe that's as far as I want to go. It's time for bed as it is.

Downsized

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I haven't posted anything in what, weeks? Months? I've been busy. And if you notice the title of this post, you should be able to figure out exactly what's been going on. It hasn't been fun, not by any stretch of the imagination. But at the end of the day we're safe and secure, and that's what really matters. But since you really want to know – or maybe nobody's actually reading this other than the occasional bot or meth addict, and the audience I'm being so conversational and chatty with strictly in my mind – here's what's been happening.

Things got rolling about four months ago, when Joy found out that my now former little brother – more on that later - was sneaking into our room to steal things. At first it was little things, paint brushes and such. But then Joy noticed that some of her painkillers were missing. We went to my mother to let her know what was going on, and she ignored us. Joy demanded that I put a lock on the door to our room, and I found one at the local Wal-Mart. A month later, the little bastard noticed the lock on the door and ran to his mother. I got a text message demanding I remove the lock from her, and barely half an hour later another message came, this one calling me deluded for believing my wife's accusations. A third message simply ordered me to move out. Now.

Did I fail to mention that I was in Nevada at the time, in the middle of a gig with Steppen Stonz at the Atlantis in Reno? They've refused to answer any of my phone calls or text messages since. And with me eight hundred miles away and unable to do anything to rectify the situation, I told Joy that I'd do what I could when I got back to town.

She wound up in the spare bedroom of a friend of ours, and I stayed with her there for a week or so, until my next run to Nevada. I spent that time trying to make arrangements for a more permanent place to stay, and we got my father to agree to buy a fifth-wheel trailer for us that we could move to a local RV park. I'd have to quit the band and get a real job, but by now I was angry enough that I was willing to overcome my general antipathy towards the normal workaday world and join in for however long was necessary. The fun part would be actually finding a job in a county with an effective unemployment rate still around fifteen to twenty percent. But more on that later.

I still had one last run to Nevada to make, and ties to sever as gently as possible. A week in Elko came first at the Red Lion, and that went pretty well, other than our keyboard player Chris deciding to bail on us at the absolute last minute. Jef Derderian came back to help us out for a few days before a new player came in to play the last night of that gig. He's a nice kid from Las Vegas named Dominico – sorry, I don't have his last name. He was another friend of Jef's, continuing that strange line of players that have passed through the band since Mike and Arthur sent Cliff packing. Miguel, Alex, Jef, Chris, and now Dominico. That lack of consistency must be driving Mike and Arthur nuts. And my impending departure wouldn't help things any. After Elko, we had a few days off before heading to Minden for three nights at the Carson Valley Inn. I set up the pop-up trailer and settled in for a few days to recover and plot a strategy to break the news as gently as possible to the guys while we were in Minden.

A string of thunderstorms was passing over Northern Nevada the day I headed up to Minden. In hindsight, I should've recognized the omen for what it was and stayed in Reno. Arriving at the CVI, I found out that I wasn't expected – nor were the rest of us. Simply put, we weren't on the schedule. I did my best to contain my shock and anger and told the manager that came down to inform me of the situation that there had to be some sort of error, and I'd let the rest of the guys know what was going on, and I told them that while I was disappointed, I wasn't angry with them and that they were doing the best they could to help a confused drummer. The manager told me that she'd give Stew Stewart a call, and I told her that I'd call Mike to see if there was some way the gig could be rescued.

Mike didn't take the news well. Y'see, he's very neat and organized when it comes to the band's calendar. Stew had given us this particular week on the schedule back in December – something I'd told the CVI – and he wrote the dates down in his calendar as Stew gave them to him over the phone. He called Stew, and the response he got back was either a study in ignorance or pure chutzpah – we were supposed to be playing John Ascuaga's Nugget that weekend. Either way, his response was total bullshit because the Nugget had closed its cabaret, new ownership deciding to move the sports-book into the cabaret's new location while the space that held Trader Dick's would now become a Mickey Gilley's Honky-Tonk, part of said new ownership's goal to move the Nugget to a country-and-western theme. Regardless of the tack of Stew's line of bullshit, we were still out a gig. And this would continue to haunt me – and it still is, and will likely do so for at least the remainder of the summer.

I retreated back to the pop-up and hunkered down for what would now be two weeks off. After some frantic searching and e-mailing, I found a buyer for the trailer. A polite young Hispanic couple handed me a sum of money that I split with Michelle and Bill before driving away with the trailer the day before I started what would be my last gig with Steppen Stonz back at the Atlantis. I informed the guys of my situation that week, and I think they handled it pretty well. I told them that I didn't want to quit the group, but I had no choice. They let me know that should I ever come back to Nevada, my chair would be waiting for me. Maybe I'll be able to take that offer up someday. But I kinda doubt it.

Upon my return to Port Angeles, my father confirmed that he'd buy us a trailer, though it'd likely be an older one that needed repairs and cleaning. The weekend after I got home, he purchased a particular trailer that an old friend of his had for sale, and he and I did our best to clean it up and make it fit for human habitation. Then we found out that it needed a new refrigerator and some work on the floors do to water damage. At the end of the day, he admitted to me that he should've bought a different trailer – any money he'd saved in the original purchase was long gone, and that he'd spent twice the purchase price on repairing the thing. And after a few fits and starts, we found a place to park the trailer.

We're living in the Peabody Creek RV Park now, just above downtown Port Angeles. And our home is an old Alpenlite 32' fifth-wheel. No cable or internet, but we're dealing with that as best as we can. My drums are stashed at my father's place for safe keeping. And after six weeks of searching, I found a job, working for a company associated with Safeway. Eventually I'll be merchandising stores in five counties, working overnight for $12.50 an hour and mileage. I actually start my orientation tomorrow, a regional manager driving up from Portland in the morning to do the deed. It's still only part-time work, but our bills are modest enough that as little as twenty hours a week should cover things nicely. We'll still require government assistance, but hopefully things will hold at least through the winter. By then, we might be in a much better situation.

Joy's attorney here in town was able to get Social Security to hear her case again – though I think a letter to our local Congressman may have helped as well. The hearing is at the end of September, and a positive result could put a not insignificant sum of back SS/D benefits in our pockets by the time her birthday rolls around, and around seventeen hundred a month in our bank account for the rest of her life. And where we go from there is up to us. Staying in Port Angeles is an option, but not my preferred option. After my mother's decision to believe whatever story her drug-addict criminal subhuman child over the truth of his criminal behavior and kick us out of the house, I chose to disown them – and I've even gone to the extent of removing pictures of myself from their house, systematically writing myself out of their history. And Joy and I have a few other surprises in store for them. Nothing illegal or physically damaging, mind you. But it will be painful to them nonetheless.

I've done my best to remain positive through all this. It isn't easy. But nothing worth having ever is, as the old saying goes. But there's a light at the end of the tunnel now. I have a job. I have a home. I have the woman I love at my side. And with luck the future will become a lot brighter in the near future. I should let go of all the anger I have towards my former family. But it's hard to do so. I want to punish them for their stupidity and arrogance. But I think watching my mother and stepfather descend into senility with only a shiftless lazy punk to look after them, a phony hipster with no desire to do anything other than sponge off of them – I think that's revenge enough for me. I have more important things to worry about. I have a family. I have Joy, her children and grandchildren. I have my friends. I'm still trying to get a local band together, though that may never come to anything really fruitful. I even got the opportunity to play a sort-of reunion with Powerlight last weekend, and that could lead to future gigs if my work schedule allows it.

But what's most important is that I need to put my nose to the proverbial grindstone and work hard to maintain what I have in front of me. I have to put the past behind me and move forward.

So Where Will I Sleep Tonight?

One more night before I can start over again. It's been not quite a weeks since I got home from Reno. Things aren't particularly bleak per se, but it ain't exactly beer and skittles here on the ranch. Joy has been holding up as well as can be expected for someone who's basically been forced to couch-surf for the last two months between our friends at the Evergreen Terrace apartments - where we're on the waiting list, by the way - and trying to maintain sanity as best she can. We're both stressed and angry at everything. But we do our best to apologize to each other before we go to bed, wherever that bed may be.

But tomorrow is a new day, and a new and more permanent residence will be waiting for us. Even before I got home from Reno, we'd been scouting out RV parks for the fifth-wheel trailer that Dad bought for us on the cheap only to wind up spending almost double what he paid for it to fix it up - much to his chagrin. We'd pretty much settled on setting up shop at Monroe Estates just east of town, but their insistence that my father co-sign for us pretty much scuppered the deal and sent us scrambling for a new location. On a lark we tried the Peabody Creek RV Park downtown happened to have spaces available and was willing to overlook my temporary lack of employment - more on that later - because of my comparative abundance of cash. In the morning we get the electricity turned on and change our address for quite possibly only a few months.

Why do I say that? Turns out that Joy's attorney has wrangled a new hearing for her Disability case in late September. Given that we're looking at seven years of back SS/D pay handed to us should the judge finally rule in our favor, even the revelation that Joy's medical bills have us $27,000 in the hole is suddenly kinda trivial.

And I doubt that I'll be unemployed all that long. A day or two before I left for Elko, I took a flyer and threw up an application onto Wal-Mart's website for any position that didn't require a lot of customer interaction - mostly graveyard-shift jobs. The day after I pulled into Elko, I got a phone call from the Port Angeles store's personnel office asking if I could come in today for an interview! After explaining the situation to their personnel manager most carefully, he agreed to keep me informed should an opening come up after I got home. The very next morning I got a similar call from the Sequim store's personnel manager, with a similar result. Then the personnel manager from the PA store called me again the following morning, only to remember the conversation we'd had forty-eight hours before and apologize profusely for waking me up from a deep slumber. And then he called me a third time two weeks later as I sat patiently between gigs in my old pop-up trailer - I guess he likes me.

By the way, the trailer is no longer mine/ours. I sold the thing to a nice young Hispanic couple, only for them to wreck the thing on the drive home. And then they had the audacity to demand their money back, claiming that I knowingly sold them a defective vehicle! I offered them my sympathy and nothing else before leaving the scene - we'd towed it down from Washington without incident, after all. I don't think they were being entirely truthful to me. Welcome to Craigslist, kids - everything is sold 'as is', and the moment they handed me the money and I handed them the title, they were on their own. I sold them a functional unit, and they knew what was wrong with it going in. Sucks that they wrecked it, but that's not my problem.

And I'm trying to get a new band started here in town. But it seems that everyone is in survival mode right now - myself included. Nothing is sacrosanct right now, anything and everything can potentially be sacrificed should I need the money. The Wal-Mart job is only minimum-wage, but the hours should be sufficient to keep us in the RV park for the time being. And at my father's suggestion I put in an app at Clallam Transit for a paratransit driver. I think I could do that. And there's always fast-food work or some other sort of temp or part-time job should Wal-Mart not be enough. I just have to bear down for the time being and get us across the finish line - which with any luck should be sometime this fall. I just have to do what I have to do, and hold on for the time being.

Don't Fuck With Me....

Or else the truth comes out.

For those of you that read my old blog, remember Mark Connolly? The allegedly high-functioning methhead who tried being the lead singer of Dirty Joe before abandoning the group after one rehearsal on the grounds that we weren't reliable? Well, for those of you that don't, refresh your memory here. Well, he decided to resurface for reasons unbeknownst to me.

Yesterday (well, earlier today AFAIC) Joy and I were walking into the library here in Port Angeles. There were a few people outside the library's front door enjoying a brief burst of afternoon sunshine. One of them was I guy I recognized from the local karaoke circuit. And there was another guy that I vaguely recognized, but I couldn't remember where from. This little fellow seemed to recognize me though, and he wasn't pleased. He began to threaten me, said that he'd heard about what I'd thought and said of him, but I couldn't figure out why he was talking to me so. Then I remembered that he was the meth addict that wanted to be the lead singer of Dirty Joe. I told him that he could take his threats and put them squarely where the sun doesn't shine, because drug addicts don't particularly frighten me. Especially ones that are quite literally rotting away from drug use and disease. As in the leg he was missing.

He claimed that he would sue me for slander - go ahead and try. You see.... well, go read the original post. In order for something to be considered slanderous, it has to be malicious and more importantly false. Read the post - everything I attributed to him was the actual, unvarnished truth. And that's something I'll stand by until the day I die. The truth hurts, Mark.

Mark Connolly may no longer be addicted to meth now, but he was then - he told me so himself. That is an unassailable fact. His behavior was erratic enough then, and it's still erratic now. And violent. And in an ironic twist, a friend of ours that we're staying with - long story, more on that later - told me that she'd been introduced to him some seventeen years ago, and in that one brief encounter had deduced that he was a potential threat to her and her daughter and told the mutual friend that had introduced them to remove him from her sight post-haste.

At the end of the day, I could really care less about Mark Connolly and his hollow threats. He's a bum, a drug addict (though his current status could only be determined with a blood or urine test and I have no interest in pursuing that), and otherwise a waste of space. Considering that I haven't laid eyes on him in about three years, I see the likelihood of encountering him again to be minimal at best. And considering that I have no interest in laying eyes on him again unless it's through bulletproof glass, I see the likelihood of encountering him again to be that much smaller.

Oh, and before I consign him to the dumpster of history yet again, one last thing: threatening someone with violence is a crime. And doing so via the Internet is a Federal offense.

Goodbye, Mark. I don't have time to play. I have a life to live - clean and sober.

Going Mobile

Well, I figured that the first real post here should be about what's been most important for Joy and I over the last few months: a place of our own.

We'd decided some time ago that when Joy was finally approved for Social Security - Disability, we'd buy ourselves an RV to live in. I think that we were both enamored with the idea of living mobile when we first moved to Reno, and spent five weeks living at the Silver Sage RV Park across Virginia Street from the Peppermill. Being able to pull up stakes just like that, and go where our noses led us. Being able to drive across the country to see her oldest son and his family at Camp Lejeune in North Carolina on little more than a whim. And staying at the Silver Sage for a second time, about five months or so before our return to Port Angeles, only cemented that desire in both our minds.

It all breaks down to a few simple questions, though. The first one is 'what kind of RV do you want?' At first we were only thinking of a large (30 - 35') Class A......

Oh wait a minute. Do you know what I'm talking about? If you do, be patient. Suffering is good for the soul. If not, here's a quick primer on recreational vehicles.

Until recently, there were two main types of RV's - Trailers and actual Recreational Vehicles. Trailers break down into to three basic types - travel trailers and fifth-wheel trailers, and park models. Travel trailers are the most basic form of RV, just a big aluminum box to sleep in, anywhere from tiny teardrop-shaped trailers barely big enough to hold a bed to monsters up to 40 feet long and eight feet wide. Our pop-up trailer fit into the low end of the scale at a mere 17 feet in length (24' when fully extended), and could be towed easily with any truck with either a reciever or even a simple tow ball on the rear bumper. Fifth-wheel trailers require a custom hitch rig (called a gooseneck) that sits in the bed of a larger truck, and are easily identified by their somewhat humpbacked appearance, as the trailer body extends out over the bed of the towing vehicle. Park models are very long (usually 35 to 40 feet), and basically look like a 3/4-scale mobile home, and aren't really designed or built to be moved more than once or twice.

RV's come in three classes. A Class A RV is a full-body RV (a big box on wheels) on a custom-made chassis. Class B RV's are basically full-size vans that have been converted (hence the term 'conversion vans') to hold a couch that switches to a bed, a small kitchen and sink, and little else. In the middle falls the Class C, which has most of the features of a Class A while still being built on a van chassis, and essentially look like domesticated moving vans.

The newest member of the RV family is the 'toy hauler'. These can be either trailers or RVs, but what they all have in common is lots of room in the back for smaller vehicles, like bikes, motorcycles, ORV's or sand-rails. The downside of a toy hauler is that while there's space for your toys, that leaves less space for you.

Okay, we're back. At first we wanted a Class A, and the bigger the better. Then we started to fine-tune our desires, and other options came into play. Our choice then became either a Class A or Class C, and no longer than 35' because anything larger than 35' wouldn't be allowed in National Parks. I would prefer an RV with a diesel engine, for better towing and fuel economy (trust me on this - an extra two or three miles-per-gallon is crucial when you're driving two to three thousand miles with a rig that might only get 10 to 12 MPG at best). We never really gave trailers a look until very recently. My dad got me looking at fifth-wheels, which have a lot of room, but were too big to be towed by our SUV. And anything with stairs - even if only two or three - makes Joy nervous, no matter how much she likes the space. I never liked travel trailers, never really paid any attention to them, but then I found a 38-footer on Craigslist which I could turn into a rolling home-and-office complex with little effort. Now if only that woman would email us back. I've got the financing and transport ready.....

Every vehicle has its own advantages and drawbacks. RV's can go whenever you want them to, but the gas-mileage sucks ass, and insuring them can only be crazy expensive. A trailer might be cheaper than a full-on RV, but then you have to license and inusre two vehicles instead of one. And we have no interest whatsoever in toy haulers. My toy isn't a toy at all - it's my drumkit, and I only need a rig with enough 'basement' storage to hold it all, as well as one door big enough to fit my bass drum through.

But the dream is still there, and shining brightly. RV's depreciate in value rather quickly, so much so that we can budget a decent amount of Joy's SSD money towards a rig and be able to buy a fairly decent one without busting the budget. We look on Craigslist, Ebay, the local classifieds, and find a wide variety of vehicles available at decent prices. We're not all that nuts about going to dealerships - we have no love for the hard-sell, let me tell you - but so far our visits to local RV dealers have been educational, insightful, and generally positive. We think we're getting close to owning one, though at this point in time we don't have any place to actually park one, can't really do so until that SSD money comes in. But we use the time to our advantage, always searching, reading, learning. We want that lifestyle, to be air-conditioned gypsies.....

Well, maybe not 'gypsies', not in the classical sense. But being able to travel to my gigs together in comfort once in a while would be nice. That's a start....