New Book of Short Stories

This is a first draft of one of my short stories about RV living I was going to put in my new book of stories.

Minimalism and The RV Life
Stories of the Road
First I started reading about RVs in books. I posted information about it as book reviews for a book review blog. Then I started posting on the Internet my idea for a book on RV living. When I first started posting on the Internet that I was writing a book about RV living I asked for stories, and Googled online blogs about having an RV. The response was overwhelming. Everyone wanted to share their stories of RV life, and the ideals of Minimalism. Why was this topic becoming so popular? Not just older retirees, but young hipsters on their way to Burning man could not wait to show off an RV. Why was this idea so popular?
I write books of short stories and poetry to sell. At first my research on the topic led to the short story I like to call “The Ballad of the Cliff Fall of John and Ray” the tragic story ending in joy. It is a Ballad because it is short enough to be a long song. It is a composite story of many of the RV origin stories I saw on countless Internet blogs on the subject.
RV is an abbreviation of Recreational Vehicle a popular form of transport. Minimalism is an idea gaining popularity that simplifying your life to the bare necessities can be liberating.
The Ballad of the Cliff Fall of John and Ray
John and Ray are two brothers who were honor students in school. Both graduated University with grades of A and B honor roll quality. They got equally great jobs.
John took out a huge house lean for 500 thousand dollar property. He bought furniture with credit cards and loans. He spent all his weekends shopping. He bought the fancy vehicle of his dreams with the most expensive car loan he could get. His closet was filled with fashionable cloths he changed out every two months bought with loans. He saw every new line of credit as a Christmas present from Santa Clause to be used at the extreme.
He showered his girlfriends with expensive gifts, and so he only dated the hottest models. Long lines of them competed to date him. His phone was never silent. He even managed to make one his wife. He lost sleep to work extra jobs to pay for it all.
Ray worked a modest schedule and did not spend his weekends shopping. He bought a very small house and an RV, and could almost pay them off completely out of pocket. He paid cash for the durable clothing he wore for decades. He did not buy the most expensive car. He was frustrated that it was hard to meet girls who were not scared by his tiny house. Worse yet he chose to live next door to his mother in an unfashionable area. His phone did not ring constantly. Yet the girls he met and got to stay were nice. They understood his environmental and minimalist goals. He managed to get a wife. He did not shower girls with gifts, and so had a more modest wife.
“Your life is pathetic!” John would say as he visited Ray. “That RV you use looks like a TRAILER! You work a good job like me! Buy GOOD stuff! Look at me! Look at ALL my great things! They are ALL my things to use! I’ll give you the number to my bank you could get these loans in two hours tops! You still live next door to our MOM! You should have seen the celebrities I saw at this SICK party I was at last night. My Instagram blew up!”
John was joking and laughing. However John turned and looked at Ray with sad pity in his eyes. It was so sad that he, John, was the smartest brother with all the gold, diamonds, fast cars, and pretty girls that came with it. It was the American dream. All the TV shows, billboards, product placements in movies, and webpages said it was the dream.
“I don’t like it.” Said Ray. “I don’t like the way you have central AC and heat in your huge home. It uses power to heat and cool rooms you don’t even use most days!”
Johns eyeballs rolled as he prepared for another one of Ray’s environmental rants. He was sick of these.
“Over 60% of the power from power plants in the United State comes from fossil fuels.” Ray said. He went on to quote ‘2018 the U.S. Energy Information Administration reported the U.S. electricity generation by energy source. Burning fossil fuels still powers the bulk of our energy in the United States. Fossil fuels including coal were part of U.S. electricity generation at a rate of 63.5% with 2,651 billion kwh of power from that source. This produces deadly pollution. In contrast Hydropower makes up 7% of all power plant power, and wind 6.6% at 275 kwh of power. Total solar power used was 1.6% of on grid power. This utility power “Includes utility-scale electricity generation, which is electricity generation from power plants with at least one megawatt (or 1,000 kilowatts) of total electricity generating capacity.’ (2018, FAQ, U.S. Energy Information Administration https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=427&t=3) Do you know what this is doing to Global Warming? If everyone in every part of the world used energy like this we would be dead in a few months. I saw this great documentary called “Before the Flood” on Netflix. Sunita Narain of the Center for Science and the Environment in Delhi said at great quote. ‘Electricity consumed by one American at home is equivalent to 1.5 citizens of France, 2.2 citizens of Japan, 10 citizens of China, 34 of India, 61 of Nigeria. Why? Because you’re building bigger, you’re building more, and using much more than before. The fact is that we need to put the issue of lifestyle and consumption at the center of climate negotiations.’ I love that quote. I don’t want a super big house.”
“Oh Ray, always the dippy Hippy.” John laughed.
Then one night tragedy happened to both John and Ray. They went camping with ten of their best friends. John and Ray were talking and not watching where they were going so they took a wrong turn on the way to the camp ground bathroom. They fell in the dark off a two story tall cliff onto rocks and jagged tree trunks below. Ray was not as tired and overworked as John, and so he managed to grab a few tree roots on the way down. Both had punctured lungs, broken legs, and were knocked unconscious into comas. They screamed as they fell, and so the other campers called 911. Both would live and return to work, but not for a while.
They awoke from their comas in equal three month intervals. They would be stuck in the hospital for 8 months unable to work. They found very different lives waiting for them in and out of the hospital.
Ray had picked a wife to live with based on her ability to care for people not a love of gifts. She visited the hospital daily bringing flowers. After the second week of not getting gifts from her sugar daddy husband John’s wife got a divorce lawyer and ran off to San Francisco with someone new. She did not visit him once before she left him. She had been given the key to his house, and she began to pawn everything. All the items made of gold and diamonds were soon gone. However she had very little to pawn after a couple of weeks, and this was because John was unable to make payments on everything. All of John’s things were not really HIS things. They belonged to the banks who had given John credit. The fancy house, the amazing car, all the furniture and the clothes were all LOANS bought with CREDIT. John was unable to work to pay for these things now. John had AFLAC insurance for accidents. He had a savings. Unfortunately, he had badly miscalculated how much he needed to survive a long hospital stay. In addition he had been hurt suddenly, and could tell no one policy numbers and locations in the house for the insurance forms. Bankruptcies due to medical bills are one of the most common reasons for bankruptcy in the United States.
Ray when he recovered would quote this statistic. “The number of debtors who cited medical issues as a contributing reason for their bankruptcy actually increased slightly after the law’s implementation (Affordable Care Act) — 67.5 percent in the three years following the law’s adoption versus 65.5 percent prior. ‘The culprit for the lack of improvement was inadequate health-care insurance, according to a co-author of the research, Dr. David U. Himmelstein, a distinguished professor at Hunter College and founder of advocacy group Physicians for a National Health Program.’ Said the article “This is the real reason most Americans file for bankruptcy” By Lorie Konish by CNBC (https://www.cnbc.com/2019/02/11/this-is-the-real-reason-most-americans-file-for-bankruptcy.html)
It is common for people to think that insurance will cover everything, but it often does not. It does not even begin to cover the expenses in most cases.
Ray’s wife worked part time, but was able to ask for more hours in an emergency. She and Ray’s mother asked friends and family for donations for the injured brothers. Times were tough, but a few people could give. Since the tiny amount of things Ray owned were not expensive and were mostly paid off the house, RV, and cars were not taken. They tried to do the same thing for John, but the payment amounts on his lifestyle were huge. Very few things were able to be salvaged before the bank took everything locking the doors so no one could get in. The bank quickly re-sold the house. Ray’s wife got into a slap fight with John’s wife, and somehow managed to grab a couple of boxes of papers from John’s house. He was not there at all, and could not haggle with them for any of his belongings.
Ray was released from the hospital early for the roots he had grabbed had broken his fall. He had not worked double shifts before camping so his quick reflexes left him less injured. He went home to his unchanged life. He waved at his mom next door who had helped clean his house and pay his bills in the hospital. It was great to have family roots.
Everyone dreaded taking John home. A look of shock on his face would not go away. He was going to stay with family on a ragged basement sofa. It was that or a homeless shelter. “I loved it… It’s gone…” The phrase was he could say over and over again that day. He was clearly very depressed and traumatized.
As he drove past Ray’s house on the way back he looked with envy at Ray grilling by his RV. A look of euphoria was in his eyes as he looked at his yummy grilled dinner cooking on his environmentally safe cooker. After hospital food anything tasted amazing. He had not missed payments on what he already owned. It was Ray who had been the “smart” son after all.
The cliff is of course a metaphor in this story. As we get older we all see many versions of John and Ray over and over again. Perhaps one of you has even been a John or a Ray. Many of us are going to have cliffs in life. Maybe your cliff is s car wreck that was not our fault leaving you in the hospital. Or a cliff is an illness and did not have symptoms until it suddenly incapacitated us. As politicians let companies spill pollution everywhere with light regulations cliffs are becoming more common by the day. The loan specialists at banks don’t want you to know there are cliffs. The car dealerships don’t want you to know there are cliffs. They want you to think they sell the American dream. All the TV shows, billboards, product placements in movies, and webpages say it is the American dream. They say you can be John before the cliff forever. Living an amazing life way beyond your means is a balloon doomed to explode.