I really value studies like this. Even if it's a personal science experiment, the reason for doing it is a symptom of the world that has been created around us. It is my view that we have created a society of noise, and we pile music on top of the noise to try to hide, or obfuscate, it. But if the music isn't sound you want to hear, then it too becomes extra noise on top of the noise. Music used to be listened to as entertainment, as well as an art-form. Although that still exists, music is available at any time, and anywhere, and often in the spaces we might not want to hear it (the beach, or a forest walk, for example). We become accustomed to hearing music all the time, and then we become unable to separate ourselves from being able to listen to music - not being able to deal with silence, for example, because it's a strange and unknown environment.

Recently I was asked to write a 1000 word article about living in my car as an author. For publication, the article was edited down to 868 words, cutting out one of the best sections of the original piece for two basic sentences:

• 'Oh and I gew a beard. I began to look like someone who lived in their car.' [sic]

Regardless, thank you to the editor for accepting and publishing - the article generated much interest and I received online booksales as a result. Truly grateful.

You can read the published version in the link below.

Here is the full piece as I submitted with editing help from my publicist acting as a pre-submission editor:

This Wasn’t a Lifestyle Choice

Earlier this year I attended a music gig at the Ruby Bay Theatre in Mapua and struck up a conversation with someone during the intermission. When I told them that I live in my car because I can’t afford rent or power costs, their candid response took me a little by surprise: “You don’t look like someone who lives in their car.”
       What is someone who lives in their car supposed to look like?
       Perhaps a born-again hippy with retro ‘60s bell-bottoms and groovy peace signs all over their denim jacket, or maybe of a ragged-clothed homeless person.
       For me, deciding to live in my car was not a lifestyle choice. It was born out of necessity. I had two options: Take a room that was more expensive than my current income could afford and hope my job hours would increase, or move into my car and dispense with the struggle to pay rent completely. The year was 2018 and I was at a point in my life where the renting treadmill was beginning to creak very loudly. I no longer wanted to repeat the experience of the last 20 years: moving from house to house, getting frustrated with flatmates, getting kicked out of my paid residence because the owner didn’t want me on the property during the daytime. None of these flats, rooms, or sleep-outs, ever felt like a home.
       I made a snap decision. “I’m going to start living in my car.”
       There are people who choose this lifestyle because it represents a throwback to a simpler life; others who have been made homeless out of rising rental costs that outstrip their wages; some through retirement dreams of travelling. Others, like me, who just find it cost-effective and are finally able to save money.
       I made my new home on the side of The Motueka River, 10km out of town, where the initial struggles to stay warm during winter were overcome with many layers of blankets and clothing (there were mornings I actually woke up sweating). I did not have a house-bus, a motorhome, or a van: I had a Nissan Cefiro 4-door sedan. Initially, I could only put the passenger seat partway down to sleep on because my belongings took up so much space in the back seat.
       One of my first goals was to get valuable items like my stereo, computer, and PlayStation out of the car – anything that would tempt thieves to break in. I managed to palm these off to friends. Once that was achieved, I began organising the car (honestly, like any kind of housework, something that never ends) and got a basic setup in the back seats and boot worked out with an op-shop fry pan (still going strong), cooking equipment, and clothing tucked into their own space.
       I didn’t know camping gas-cookers even existed, so was forced into doing something I had never done before: build a campfire (if only to get me started with a morning coffee). It took experimentation and lots of failures to get something capable of frying up potatoes, broccoli, and kumara over a fire.
       For the next six months, I walked and walked, wrote and wrote, talked to locals who came down to the river, bought food from foodstalls at the end of driveways – experienced life like I had never imagined I would. This was something completely different and unexpected, and proved just how capable I could be when plans are thrown out the window.

Having said all that, once I was on the riverside without a job to maintain a respectable appearance for, I did make one other snap decision: With a click of the fingers and a determined swing of a balled up fist, I said out loud to the swallows and fantails “I’m gonna grow me a beard!”
       And I did! A big bushy, unkempt bed that managed to attract only the most true-hearted of women. And thus, the adventures of W.F. Stubbs and Miss Sherlock began...
       So, at least for a while there, maybe I did look like someone who lived in their car.

Since 2018, I have upgraded to a stationwagon and can lie down in the back with my legs stretched out. I have a reading-light above me with two or three books at my side to choose as nightly reading, or a laptop for watching films on. I have enough storage space sectioned off alongside my bedding for two plastic clothes boxes, and at the end of these are the fry pans and cooking equipment. I cook over a hand-built campfire made from river rocks, and if it is wet or raining and I have shelter, I cook from the back of my car with a gas-cooker. If there is no shelter, then I will happily book a room in a motel or hostel (and do look for house-sitting options as well).
       Every night when I snuggle into my duvet and blankets with layers of soft bedding beneath me, I feel pleasantly satisfied and filled with emotional warmth that I have finally created a home that is my own. It may not be a house with room to stand or roam around in, but that is what outside is for. This is what I love the most about my living arrangement: that when I need to stand up, I am outside. And I have never spent so much time outside in the beauty of the natural world since I was a child growing up on farms.

Has this style of living, after six years of committing to it, finally become a lifestyle choice? Would I choose a house if I could? I have wrestled with these questions, and I can honestly say that yes, when those months of cold weather arrive each year, I would choose a house. But once Spring and Summer return to the lands, I welcome this life of living in a car I have created.


    • 07th August, 2024; Richmond

The Nelson Mail featured a profile and interview of myself and my choice to live in my car as a front page article in the local Nelson Mail Newspaper, and the same article featured with a video interview can be seen online:

Read the full article and watch the video here:
www.stuff.co.nz/home-property/350368941/i-was-over-renting-author-who-chooses-live-his-car

Listening to music doesn't have the same appeal that it used to when I was younger. I feel, as I get older, that music is an intrusion on my sense of self. Where once it was the soundtrack to my emotions, now it is a bombardment of noise demanding I pay attention.

And I want to pay attention, but my ears don't want to hear.

Perhaps I have gained a great deal more sensitivity towards sound volumes - understandable, to some degree; although, some grow less sensitive as they continue to gain hearing loss. I have not sustained a great deal of hearing loss from my days as a solo acoustic musician and a rock/metal guitarist. While I was working as an assistant book-buyer in Highland Park Paper Plus, I noticed my ears becoming extremely sensitive to the sound of coins dropping against one another in the till, to the sound of trolleys clanging against one another in the supermarket next door, to the point where I felt like I was in immense pain from these noises, and I began wearing cotton in my ears to reduce the decibels, otherwise the extreme sensitivity I was experiencing would bring a great deal of stress. I was also going through the lowest point of my clinical depression at the time, which may have have been a potential cause. Regardless, I had spent years hunched over my acoustic guitar with my right ear being pummelled with sound waves. Years later, after moving from Auckland to Invercargill, and the rock/metal band I was in drawing to an end, I had a hearing test done and it turned out that the hearing loss I did have was negligible (that's approximately 7 years of wearing hearing protection by plugging my ears with cotton in every day!). What I was experiencing, I was told, was 'in my head'. This was somewhat of an unbelievable statement. Years of hearing sensitivity was just something my mind was conjuring? The audiologist suggested that I would simply have to work on getting used to normal levels of sound again. I went back to my flat, mind reeling from this news, heart beating with anxiety at the thought of having to suffer through this excruciating pain all over again; but within a week of not wearing hearing protection, I was starting to get used to normal sound levels again.

Like a lot of musicians, I also suffered tinnitus. I have made efforts to reduce noise levels to assist with the reduction of tinnitus, and over the years this has reduced also.

Since 2018 when I moved into my car, I have sought peace and calm along riversides, through forestry tracks, and over ranges, searching for those peaks or rapids where I can rest and enjoy the natural sounds around me.

Music isn't natural. It is a constructed sound put together by humans. It is my firm belief that animals do not make music. Even birds. We liken their calls to music because we can pitch them to a musical scale, but we can also pitch construction machines to a scale as well - but we don't! (as far as I know no one has, but to be fair, someone probably has!). If birds make actual music, it is unknown to us; we can only hear what they produce and interpret it as music. But music is something that we humans put together out of natural sounds that can be produced. We force these pitches together with rhythmic impulses, and music is born.

Rock music has a noise quality to it - loud for the sake of being loud. Electronic music is produced into digital loudness. Compression destroys all the highs and lows. I first started turning away from loud rock music, but many a morning I have woken up and while driving to my job, have not even wanted to listen to my beloved Mozart.

The silence of morning.
The rumbling of the car engine, the scraping of wind against the windows - all these are noise enough.

I was once accused of being someone who listens to music as background (my god! I don't know how anyone could accuse any musician, let alone someone who has written 200 songs, performed acoustic and metal music, composed for orchestras, and listens to all the best music from all but 2 genres, of being someone who listens to music as 'background'!). I have studied Mozart and Beethoven scores, I learned almost every Led Zeppelin song, learnt every song on Undertow by ear - music has never been a background, and it never will be. I have to HEAR music. I have to hear what's going on - what those flutes are playing over the violins, what the bass is doing when its not following the six-string guitar, what drum patterns are being played as a contrast: all the counterpoint and interesting harmonies will forever fascinate me. Whether it's Mozart or Tool, what those musicians and composers are doing to make music will always bring an interest beyond just the emotional moment that got me first listening to the piece.

But if I don't want to hear noise, I turn music off. All of it.
Because even Mozart, performed by the greatest orchestras ever, is still a noisy presence when I just want as much quiet as I can possibly find.

In the city, where noise reigns supreme, unwanted sounds must be matched with wanted sounds: this day I may want to bring Helmet up on the stereo and help block out those other intrusions, or maybe Page Hamilton's riffs just fit with this day's city-mood; this other day I may want Beethoven's 6th Symphony to bring me some joviality while I drive through the centre of town.

But when I am down on the riverside with water passing through rapids, cicadas in the bushes, swallows dipping and diving, and the occasional cow mooing for attention over in the paddock, the last thing I want is someone to bring constructed sound into the mix. Not even Delius, who of all the composers feels the most 'natural', because even his music is constructed from constructed instruments. And that which is constructed doesn't fit naturally into the landscape.

Let these noises be still,
And let those voices born from the earth have their say.
I will listen,
And let this peace momentarily reign.

• 7th April, 2024; Upper Moutere

Come and sit in my chair – this seat is warmed for you. The cold plastic has no cushion but it has the long-seated warmth of loneliness – a time-honoured tradition of looking out the window and wondering what to write.
      Come and sit in my chair and watch the world rotate through collective memories, the recycling of the past to renew the present. The ghosts of our former masses have risen from their bodily graves to haunt our waking days.
      Come and see the sorrow pretend to be new; come and see the complaints pretend to be virtue; come and see all hopes rise from the same grave that our ghosts rose from.
      Come and watch the sparrow falling into laughing leaves and whispering death trivials on a staged renaissance.

      Autonomy is not spirit. Autonomy is living.
      Autonomy is trudging up a hill raising the flag of independence to bitter winds that carry your voice across empty oceans.

* * *

Mr Aghast, come sit with me. Here are the keys to your future, this loneliness of being. Are we two afraid of dying, or are we just afraid to stop living? How addictive is this breath of life – it never wants to give up, even when thoughts think otherwise.

I slumber onwards, head sunk low, trapped in walls.

I miss the stars.

By the end of October, 2022, I had returned to the freedom camping domain where I originally parked up in May prior to heavy rains closing the domain and I moving into a caravan for June and July while working before house- and animal-sitting for the couple whose property the caravan is on. The domain is a fantastic open space with two long-drops and 4 rubbish bins, and doubles as a night star-gazing location for any astronomy enthusiasts (though I have never seen any turn up).

When I originally returned a month ago, I walked down to the riverside that runs alongside the Great Taste Trail for cyclists (mainly) and found a perfect spot to build a campfire: two stones adjacent to each other (or one stone broken in half!) that created a gap in which I could drop sticks and twigs into that would boil my water in the morning. Here would be my new spot for a fresh cup of coffee every morning (weather permitting). And it was made so.

By the end of 2018, Annie's Park had changed: Rains had come and gone, the river had risen and swept my campfire away, someone had come and stolen my dish-washing liquid and similar items while I was in town (immortalised in my poem 'Liquid Dish-wash Thieves' from The Tasman Journey), a council member had driven 10km out to where I was and questioned me about living in my vehicle, despite the fact that the park had no official council designation and the 'no camping' sign had been put up by a man across the road who lived right next to the man who actually looked after and named the park in honour of his mother and whom I had approached when first arriving and told him what my plans were, of which he had no problems with, and neither did any of the other surrounding neighbours in the community who I met!

My life moved on as well, as I met a woman and we started our own adventures together, travelling south (forthcoming poetry & prose collection Two Left Feet), and then North to do house-sitting. When that relationship ended, I stayed in the North Island for some time working to gain funds for my distribution drive of The Tasman Journey, only to have that interrupted on my way back to Tasman by The Kapiti Coast last year (of which makes up the entire second half of what will be my third collection of poetry & prose, currently titled as A Crook in the Elbow).

I revisited Annie's Park and it still felt welcoming (apart from the sandflies), but it was time now to be somewhere new, and Wai-iti Domain was that place. The walk to the riverside, however, is, at least from where I park my car all the way over on the other side of the domain, about 120-200 metres away, and it seemed a bit of a distance to take all my cooking gear and food for one cook-up and then return. So my first two campfires served as morning coffee trips.

What happened to the first campfire?

Ahh, the first campfire. Nature happened to it [fig. 6].

But I did not fret! When the rain ceased, and the river lowered, I went back looking for anything that might remain. I did find one rock still showing the sooty burnt face, and so, I set about rebuilding.

And then the council interfered [fig. 7] and left a wake of destruction right where my campfire had been [fig. 8], and all for the sake of reinforcing the opposite side of the bank that time will eventually erode away regardless.

Disappointed as I was, I did not give up. And I built a third fireplace, even better than the first two, and even better than any of the ones I attempted at Annie's Park. Once I had spent a few mornings making coffee on the riverside, I took my grill down and set up a cooking spot, and now I pack a frying pan (first one that replaced the original fry pan from fig. 1) into the same bag that I store all my collected sticks and broken branches, hand axe, paper rubbish, and matches in, and make my way down for an evening meal watching the sun fade into clouds on the horizon....