The tent makes me happy

8:59 PM 9/5/2016

I feel like I have a lot to say, and I wonder if I touched any drug residues or something, because I feel happy and hopeful. I know from experience that I almost never feel happy and hopeful all by myself.

Things are a bit different now that I am off caffeine. I might actually be able to do more productive work on my days off. I don’t crash as badly on the days off, because I didn’t work myself to death during the week. When I get tired, I slow down. In the past, if I got tired, I drank more coffee to kill the pain and force myself to work faster, using up my body’s resources, making me more depleted at the end of the week. Caffeine gives you a false sense of having more resources than you actually have.

I went out and bought a very small cheap tent for about $18. It’s one of the smallest ones. I didn’t get the absolute smallest one for children, because I’ve had one of those before and it was so short I could not even lay out straight in it, and had to go diagonally. I got the next size larger than that.

I needed another tent because my big tent, the one I used before, I guess last year? When was this? This is September 2016. I camped starting in September 2015, I think, and then came to this house in December. Last year’s tent is big, but it’s filled with my boxes of junk. I didn’t sort through anything and I didn’t throw anything away – I just piled it all in there, and there is no room to lie down and sleep. I really don’t need most of it, and some of it is a bunch of mostly hollow boxes full of air with one or two random objects shoved in them. It just needs to be sorted and organized.

So my small tent is just for sleeping. I will keep my clothes and blankets in it, but not much else, and food. It’s next to the big tent.

I had to chase away three gigantic spiders, but I had no words for them in Spanish, so I called them ‘malos animales,’ bad animals. I had to use whatever words were available.

Both pillows were covered with green mold spots, as they had been soaked with water and left in the tent. Oh well! I just piled some blankets on top of them so that I wouldn’t inhale the mold directly. I’ll get new pillows eventually. The voices in my head cheerfully said, ‘They’re perfectly fine!’ and I decided to agree with the voices. I don’t react too badly to that particular kind of mold, but I have had bad reactions to mold before, when it was inside an apartment I was renting. Moldy pillows in the tent don’t seem to give me problems. I can just get new ones sometime – it’s not an emergency.

I was happy. I was there in the woods, breathing the fresh air. I started to feel happy as I approached the woods on my bike. I started to feel a sense of anticipation. I want to be there.

I really wanted to finish all of the projects I had fantasized about but haven’t had time for, while I’ve been slaving as a dishwasher for 60 hours a week. I had so many projects. I wanted self-reliance. I wanted a workshop, a food preparation area, a place to cook foods and dry foods and keep them at room temperature without a refrigerator. I wanted to buy alternative electrical power sources, such as solar panels, or microturbines to put into the creek.

I wanted to dig holes; however, I am afraid of digging deeply and causing a cave-in, so if I do dig any holes, they will be extremely shallow holes. The first hole I dug, in my first year of camping on Mt. Nittany, I gave up on for a reason. There were millions of yellowjackets that year, insane numbers of them, because we were having a lot of warm winters, and the yellowjackets usually die in the winter when it gets down to the extremely bitter cold temperatures. We had a year or two without any bitter cold. So there were unbelievable numbers of yellowjackets.

I started digging a very small hole in the ground, which was going to be my lightning shelter. It probably wouldn’t work if I got struck with lightning directly, but it might make me feel safer and more grounded if I were just a little bit below the level of the soil in a very small hole. I began to dig that hole, and found out that it’s EXTREMELY HARD TO DIG A HOLE.

You try it, one of these days. Just go outside and try to dig a goddamn hole in the ground. You will find that it’s a huge goddamn pain in the ass and you will wonder how anybody on earth has ever dug a single hole anywhere without using dynamite. The first thing you encounter are these giant unavoidable rocks, and tree roots, and this horrible scratching noise when the metal scrapes on the rocks so you have to wear earplugs because it’s like fingernails on a chalkboard – it’s an unbearable noise.

Well, after several exhausting hours of digging, I had a very small hole that wasn’t big enough for me to crawl inside of. I took a break from it and decided to work on it some other time.

After abandoning this hole for only a couple days, I went back to look at it and saw that yellowjackets had already dug an entrance to their nest, right below the edge of the hole, inside the hole. Apparently this hole looked like an ideal shelter for them.

So I sprayed this all-natural herbal wasp spray that I got at someplace like Wal-Mart, just something normal, I forget where. Well, it turns out that all-natural herbal wasp spray is SO TOXIC THAT I NEARLY DIED FROM IT. I had several incidents of using that spray on yellowjacket nests, only to find that the spray itself made me so deathly ill that I could not breathe. I could not go near the hole and inhale the mint-flavored spray without feeling like I would die, so, I could not do any more digging, and I could not get in it, and I was afraid there might still be wasps in it. I gave up on that hole.

An even worse incident happened with the spray when I had a wasp inside the tent, and I sprayed that stuff inside the tent. I had to abandon the tent completely after that. I tried to sleep, but stopped breathing. I absolutely could not breathe and nearly died, so I just moved my sleeping bag out onto the bare soil outside, and slept out there, as the ants and bugs walked over me since I wasn’t inside a tent. Eventually, I got up and went to the store in the middle of the night and bought another brand new tent and set it up in the middle of the night, just because I could not stand to be crawling with ants and bugs and mosquitoes all night long and could not breathe in the tent where I sprayed the all natural herbal wasp spray.

Fortunately, there were never so many yellowjackets again, in all the years that I’ve been camping. It was only that first year. I have never felt the need to use a wasp spray since then.

Well, now that I am getting ready to go to the tent again, I have all these ideas of things I want to do, all these projects – hunting and gathering, building a workshop underground, partly underground, covered with sticks and debris and dirt so it’s hidden, but not so deep that it will collapse and suffocate me. And alternative sources of electricity, and maybe a sewing machine operated by a foot pedal instead of electricity.

Everything I’ve ever wanted, I am suddenly dreaming of doing again. I need to make it warm enough that the cat can sleep there in the winter. I am thinking of every single thing I ever wanted to do in the woods but never finished doing. I need a shower. I need a way to get water to another location by pumping it. Or I need to build the shower close to the stream, and find a way to heat the water. I want everything, all of a sudden.

I’ll get used to living there and probably won’t be thinking of these things so much once I’m there. I have energy now, but I won’t have as much energy after I’ve been there a while, and after it gets cold outside and all that I ever do is sleep in the sleeping bags and then go someplace to get out of the cold and use the internet and plug in all my devices to recharge them at the laundromat.

There isn’t enough time to actually build anything, because I wasn’t able to get there at the beginning of the spring and summer. If I were there while it was warm, it might be possible to actually do some work, building, digging, dragging sticks around, brush cutting, making it livable and pleasant.

After setting up my tent and getting ready to get on the bus to go home, I felt *happy* again for the first time in a long time. Even though my house is uncomfortable and inconvenient, I have the power to control it. I have control over that tent. I have no control over anything here, in this house, someone else’s house, which I cannot change or organize. I cannot build something or add something when I need it. I cannot change the positions of objects if I want them to be more convenient. At my tent, I can, even though it’s a shabby run-down place, always wet, always cold in the winter, but it’s mine.