The Future is a Parking Lot Behind Starbucks

I don't pay rent. I pay cubic feet.

The U-Haul was cheaper than rent. Nine hundred bucks up front. No credit check. No landlord asking where my last three pay stubs were. Just the smell of cardboard and gasoline.

I did the math. One hundred and fifty square feet. Twelve feet long, six and a half wide, six and a half tall. Nine hundred bucks divided by one hundred and fifty. Six dollars per square foot. Cheaper than any apartment in town. And the ceiling was higher.

I sleep in the back on a foam mattress I cut down with a steak knife. The walls sweat in the morning. At night I hear the fuel pump ticking. Sometimes I think about putting a plant in here. A cactus, maybe. Something alive.

The U-Haul doesn’t smell like freedom. It smells like a stranger’s garage sale. Like an old lawn mower leaking gas next to a box of your dad’s old Playboys. Every time I climb in, I wonder how many meth-heads slept here before me. How many panicked moves at 3 a.m., hauling couches out of bad marriages.

I try not to decorate. Decoration means permanence. You hang one poster, you’re stuck. You put up Christmas lights, congratulations, you’ve admitted this is home. I keep it bare. Mattress. Backpack. A tote full of laundry that smells like vinegar and loneliness.

The insulation isn’t real insulation. It’s just thin aluminum panels vibrating when trucks roll past on the highway. Every sound in this box is magnified: rain becomes gunfire, wind becomes a dying breath, silence becomes another kind of rent.

I tell myself I’m saving money. That one day I’ll have a down payment, or at least a deposit for a place with plumbing. Truth is, I don’t even look at apartments anymore. Zillow is porn for people who want something they can’t touch. I scroll through listings the way some guys scroll OnlyFans: twenty minutes of pretending I could afford it, then slamming the laptop shut before the shame sets in.

Sometimes I go to AA meetings. I don’t even drink, but they don’t need to know that. I tell them about my rock bottom, some bullshit about vodka in a Gatorade bottle to get me through the work day. Everyone nods like they’ve been there. The only people my age are the ones carrying paperwork from the court.

The rest are all Boomers bitching about how they ruined their third marriage and had to sell their boat because they can’t stop pickling themselves at Applebee’s after a hard day spent supervising the youth they blame society’s problems on. At the end, I pour bad coffee into a Styrofoam cup and load my pockets with cookies from the folding table. Dinner. Twelve Steps to free calories.

I learned the trick at Costco: free samples on Sundays. Pretend you’re interested in an air fryer, circle the same aisle twice, change your hat and take another round. One summer I lived on nothing but microwaved dumplings handed out by retirees in hairnets.

Library air-conditioning is cheaper than Starbucks. So are their bathrooms. If you lean back in a plastic chair, crack open a paperback you’re never going to finish, and pretend to be a student, no one asks questions. The hum of fluorescent lights is almost comforting.

Charity events, community potlucks, church basements—everywhere’s a free buffet if you keep your head down and don’t make eye contact. People talk about hustling like it’s some Gary Vee grindset bullshit. Hustling is eating stale sheet cake in a church multipurpose room and nodding along to a sermon you don’t believe in.

What keeps me alive isn’t hope. It’s the math. Every day I calculate what I’ve saved by not paying rent. I convert dollars into days survived. $30 saved is another tank of gas. Another week of instant ramen. Another sunrise I get to witness from the inside of a truck that was never supposed to be lived in.

Sometimes, late at night, I wonder if the people walking past can hear me breathing. If they can sense me, hiding in plain sight. If they’re jealous, or if they pity me. Then I remember: no one cares. Everyone’s trapped in their own box. Mine just has wheels.

Digital nomads call it freedom. They show off high-end converted vans on Instagram with teak countertops and solar panels. They sit cross-legged on beds in the desert, typing into MacBooks. They call it mobility. I call it hiding. My Wi-Fi is the parking lot behind Starbucks, my solar panel is the foldable kind you charge your phone with when you’re camping.

I time my showers around the routines of normal people at Planet Fitness. Sometimes I just sink-wash in the bathroom at work. I rotate parking spots: Walmart, hospital lot, church, Cracker Barrel. A 24-hour cycle. Never the same place twice. The truck is big. It’s a target. Everyone can see it. Everyone can guess what I’m doing.

People talk about “minimalism” like it’s a lifestyle. Minimalism is when you own one towel because you can’t afford two. Minimalism is when you stretch one jar of peanut butter across a week. Minimalism is leaving your dirty laundry in a Hefty bag in the cab of a truck because the laundromat eats quarters faster than you can earn them.

In the morning, I crack the back door an inch and watch the sun slowly turn the asphalt pink. People drive past on their way to jobs they hate. They sit in traffic listening to podcasters ranting about the economy. They send rent checks to property managers who don’t remember their names until they need to send an eviction notice.

Maybe I’m ahead of the curve. Maybe I’m the future.

At night, when I park in another lot, I calculate cubic footage again. I tell myself I got a bargain. I tell myself this is only temporary. But I keep thinking: if the economy gets any worse, they’ll probably start renting these out on Zillow. “Micro-studio, great location. Cozy, open-space floorplan.”

And someone will pay.