I feel safer without a home. I can finally imagine having a baby now.

I feel more safe, not less safe.

This morning I slipped a ziploc bag with my keys in it through the mail slot of the apartment office.

I slept in the apartment last night.  I had asked my landlady exactly which day I had to be out, and she said by Saturday.

Yesterday I did some cleaning.  First I cleaned the sinks, the bathtub, and the toilet.  Then I started cleaning the vinyl floor of the bathroom.  Then I worked on the refrigerator in the kitchen, and also the vinyl kitchen floor.  This is the refrigerator that had the vapors in it from when I cooked bone marrow.  That was in, I think, December 2010.  It was over a year ago.  I could look at my blog to make sure - I wrote about it when it happened.  That date might be wrong, but it was over a year ago.  The vapors spread around inside the fridge and contaminated any food and drinks I put in there, so I could not use it.  Every time I ate or drank anything, I would get vomit urges triggered by the marrow vapors.

Yesterday I was spraying out the fridge with some window cleaner, just because that's what I had.  As I was cleaning it, I started burping forcefully, the kind of burp where it just keeps pushing upwards and outwards, and it doesn't stop.  That's the vomit signal that I kept experiencing when I ate anything in the fridge.  Merely smelling it and cleaning the fridge was enough to make it start happening again.

Then I started feeling extremely exhausted like I was going to pass out.  I laid down in bed for a while.  I felt like I had very low blood pressure.

I got up and use the kitchen sink sprayer hose to spray out the fridge.  I didn't care that the water went all over the floor, but I didn't want it to leak through the ceiling below.  But it needed lots of water.  I wiped it out with a cloth. I did the best I could.  There are limits to what I can do.  I've already done things like aim a fan directly into it, blowing at the highest speed. It didn't help. It might have helped a little, but not completely.

So after I finished spraying out the fridge, I went out to Fisherman's Paradise and took a walk to get some fresh air and feel better.  I went looking for a huge, palm-sized wolf spider that I had seen last time I was there.  I didn't find it again.

It had been out on the rocks next to the creek, the manmade rock area.  I had picked up a stick and gently touched the spider's leg.  It jumped, startled, as apparently it hadn't seen me crouching over it - perhaps it was asleep, or meditating.  I started laughing and I touched it again, and it jumped and ran under a rock.  This sounds sadistic, but I wasn't hurting it.  I was laughing because it scared the living crap out of me.

So after failing to find the spider, I went home, and continued cleaning.  I wiped off the kitchen floor to the best of my ability.  The landlady will get people to professionally clean the carpet.  I am going to just give up and leave the drug residues, since I cannot prove to anyone else that they are there.  The new tenant will have incurable insomnia and will probably go to the doctor to get prescription sleeping pills because of the ephedra on the carpet.  Again, there are limits to what I can do.  I already tried shampooing the carpet many times at the previous apartment.

I said goodbye to a couple neighbors.  I don't like leaving people - it hurts - but today, I hardly care at all.  I wasn't close to any of them, and I was extremely antisocial and I refused to form any bonds.  My bonds are different.  A bond is an extremely serious thing.  I don't bond casually.

I slept in the apartment, on a new piece of cardboard.  I've slept on pieces of cardboard for the past couple years.  This is nothing new to me.  It's unthinkable to anyone who is used to comfortable beds.  I sleep like an animal, on the hard floor.  I enjoy sleeping in soft beds, but when everything you own gets contaminated with ephedra, you don't want to own anything anymore, and you want everything to be disposable so that you can change it frequently.

I was having a dream that the carpet cleaners came in while I was still here, and I hadn't moved my stuff out yet.  I had to hurry and carry all my stuff out and down to the car while the cleaners were walking around the apartment.  When I was forced awake, at 6:00 AM, I realized that I had no idea when the cleaners were scheduled to arrive.  It could have been today, tomorrow, Monday, whenever.  They might really come in while I was still lying in bed.  The landlady had said 'by Saturday.'  So I carried down the last of my stuff and put it in the car.

I had one cup of coffee this morning.  That's my last cup for now.  I'm past the urgent deadline and I no longer need to hurry, so I can afford to slow down again.  That means I will once again be living at a lower level, intellectually and physically.

So I slipped the keys through the mail slot of the office, and then I drove away.

I decided to go to the dam at Howard.  It was still early.  I had things to do, but nothing was open yet, and I wanted to wait until probably around 9:00.  I need to make some phone calls and go to the storage unit.  I haven't shut off my phone service yet, but the landlady will do that eventually.  Still, I will call them to make sure that I'm not being charged for anything anymore.  And I have to give people my PO box address too.

I was driving in my car and I had this feeling of freedom.  It wasn't a manic feeling.  It wasn't the kind of overwhelming intense energy where you want to do a million things and you can't possibly do them all.  Instead, it was a quiet realization that I was free of an unwanted burden.  I no longer have to go home to that inconveniently far away location and drive back and forth to work every day.  I can sleep somewhere close to work and have a short drive.

I won't have to drive a long way to get good food either.  Bellefonte has horrible food!  They have, like, ten different Italian restaurants and pizza restaurants, and that's all:  wheat flour and tomato sauce and nothing else.  I just so happen to dislike bread and pasta, for the most part, and I no longer believe in eating grains, after reading Weston Price's and Ramiel Nagel's books. So I can stay close to a place where good food is easy to find.

I wandered around the lake.  I visited a couple of boat launches that I had never been to before.  I walked down a path into the woods, and for some reason, I was scared that I would be attacked by a bear.  It's important to be prepared for attacks, and I'm not ready for that.  I had seen a news article about hikers in Alaska who got mauled by a bear recently.  Rick said he and Kim got attacked by wild cows.

I walked around quietly and I accepted that feeling of freedom and happiness.  I felt like I had entered a new stage of life.

And I felt, for the first time, that my baby was close to me.  I felt that it was closer than it had ever been before.  I felt safe.  Safety is what I need to feel in order to be ready for a baby.  I felt safety, and I felt it deeply enough that my body really believed it would soon be okay.  I could actually imagine the baby inside me and I could imagine how it would feel to walk around pregnant.

Money is the reason why I couldn't have a baby.  'Having a baby' was this vague, impossible, faraway abstraction, somewhere in another universe, something that could happen to other people but not to me.  I didn't want to marry someone who I didn't get along with, someone I would fight with, and then depend on him for money, depend on him to pay the extremely high rent, depend on him to get a bigger and bigger house because the government forbids you to put more than a certain number of people into a certain square footage of space.  It doesn't matter that you have tons of extra room and you could fit eight people in there.  It's illegal.  So you have to pay enormous rent for a multi-person apartment, or buy a house.  And the children are forbidden to get jobs and earn money.  So they can't help you pay the enormously high rent.

If I can live without a house, I feel safe enough to have a baby.  I don't mind raising a baby without a house.  In fact, it actually feels better to me.  I don't mind the idea of sleeping in my car while pregnant - or sleeping on the ground.  I see myself moving towards life without a car. I need to get the stuff out of the storage unit first, as that will require carrying a lot of things from place to place in the car.

I've been talking to my coworker who built a motorized bicycle.  You don't need a license to drive it.  You don't need government permission.  You don't need papers and registrations.  He has one that runs on two-stroke gas/oil or whatever it is - I don't know much about it - and it gets tons of miles to the gallon.  It's too noisy though, and I don't want to get hearing damage.  So I need to research quiet engines.   This gas engine is more convenient than an electric one that has to be charged frequently.  If you don't have a house, it's hard to plug in your batteries.  You'd have to borrow someone else's electricity.  I have bad knees, and when I ride a bike too much, or even barely at all, my knees are in agony.  I would have to research other types of bikes, like a recumbent bike, anything that would not put stress on my knees.  But I also will look into a motorized bike.

I feel safer as a nomad.  You'd think that I would feel helpless and insecure and unprotected without a house, but for whatever reason, I feel so much better.

So I am lurking around State College today, and I will run some errands, do some work, make some phone calls, clean up the car so it's ready to live in, and do a few other things, whatever.  I need to be ready to go back to work at McDonald's next week.  I wonder if I really will be able to save more money.  I wonder how long it will take.

I'm already used to sleeping and living in uncomfortable situations with few amenities.  So this won't be that different.  I want to explain it to people, to convince them, you don't need a house.  You will feel better without one!  I want to really be sure, though, before I start trying to convince people.  I want to prove, for sure, that I really can live this way, and I really will save a lot of money this way, before I start talking to people about it.  I myself would have wanted encouragement from someone who was already doing it, years ago - I had thought of living in my car many years ago and read about it on the net.  Many people really want to make changes in their lives but they just need guidance and moral support from someone else who is already doing it.

I'll post this for now, as I'm running out of time at the library.  I have some things I need to do.

As I said, I felt that the baby was closer to me than it has ever been before.  I feel that I will soon be ready.  I need to start eating the diet, and I'd like to drill out my fillings.  I need to get rid of the contaminated stuff in the storage unit.  But it actually seems possible now - it actually seems real.  I can believe it.