Nowhere Man

Becoming invisible.

2025 is the 23rd year of me not having a physical address. My ex-wife relapsed in 2001 after a long period of sobriety, we separated in 2002, and divorced in 2003. I had some sketchy housing arrangements and when it was time to renew my license I just gave them my business PO box, because I was moving shortly. This happy accident is a good part of why I’ve had such an extraordinary run these last fifteen years.

But if you are new to conflict and don’t have a naturally concealed sort of life, this has become impossible.

Unless you live in California …

Attention Conservation Notice:

Some of you will find the need to make yourself scarce. Some of you will provide safe harbor for travelers. Knowing what to do to avoid hazards in real life will be an increasingly valuable skill. As you will see in this article, an ounce of prevention doesn’t save a pound of cure, it’s more like a couple metric tons.

Existing:

All good things must come to an end; you have to be a ninja to get a PO box license done now, and having a live aboard boat really helps. Prepare to travel far enough to a DMV office that they won’t recognize a UPS store, and understand that a LOT of things, both online and in the meat world, will pick up what you did and refuse access. One of those things you can no longer do is … rent a UPS Store mailbox.

California makes navigating the world as an unperson much easier. Name changes in other states are almost always for divorce, but thanks to Hollywood, adopting a pen or stage name here isn’t so hard.

However …

Stumbling Block:

The new ID requirement for any U.S. Post Office service put a wrench in living in a mailbox. My timing on this was unintentional, but perfect. Given the hazards I face I would be perfectly willing to forge a lease, but no need to walk into that patch of shadows just yet.

I suspect this policy change has to do with undocumented immigrants, but it creates an enormous hassle for those who merely want to live quietly.

State Sponsored Hideout:

California has a program called Safe At Home that offers three different classes of people protection from unwanted visitors.

• Victim of domestic violence, stalking, sexual assault, human trafficking, child abduction, and elder or dependent adult abuse.

• Reproductive health care provider, employee, patient, or volunteer who has experienced threats of violence, violence, or harassment because of their affiliation with a reproductive health care services facility.

• Public entity employee/contractor who has experienced threats of violence, violence, or harassment because of their work for a public entity.

I am assisting someone else who is navigating this path, I can already see that the coverage will need to be expanded, and I have concerns about who might have access to the actual location information the Attorney General keeps. If one is dealing with corrupt, politically motivated law enforcement, as I have since 2010 … the presumption that the state is working on your behalf no longer holds.

Chaff & Flares:

I am active on Substack, on Bluesky, on Reddit, and I regularly sign comments on YouTube.

This is an image I posted this morning on Bluesky. You would need to recognize the source (Wunderground) and then go look through the East Bay locations to see if you could find a match. This has to be done in the moment, the forecasts are ephemeral. This one happens to be for Orinda. I’ve never so much as gotten off BART at that stop.

I hope by now regular readers are not so naive as to believe I live at any of those locations. If you work back through my irregular weather complaints you would find a probabilistic smear from Antioch down to San Jose.

If you were paying attention on Bluesky, YouTube comments, and you catch my occasional live streaming appearances you would find there are a number of times where I’ve said “Here in … (city)”. Like the weather complaints, they don’t repeat.

I recently began posting sets of photos on Bluesky from outdoor adventures. Your task, should you have too much time on your hands, is to figure out when I stopped announcing my destination in advance, and instead began using images taken some time prior to the day in question.

I periodically look at a couple dating profiles I’ve made in this area. They’re obviously me, none of the locations are the same, and they’re either too obscure, or anyone who has found them knows better than to even try.

My cat has a Substack of her own, Fluff Warrior. She complains about not being able to go outside due to coyotes and mountain lions. Sightings of the big cats make the news, but her grousing is purely temporal, not at all physical in nature.

There is, of course, more to this story. Around here it’s turtles all the way down. There are mentally ill obsessives like Ron Brynaert out there, and bipolar/crystal meth fueled cyberstalkers. Doing these things ensures they discredit themselves ny periodically declaring they’ve finally got me, while wasting enormous amounts of time in the process.

I hope all of you take my advice to heart and never have to engage in this sort of performance art. If you catch yourself filching someone else’s discarded Amazon envelope from the trash at a package store with the intent to let a portion of it show in a “random” photo of your room, it’s already a bit too late.

Conclusion:

The United States we’ve known is gone. Anyone who disagrees with our new direction is going to need to develop the wariness and evasion skills typical of the undocumented. Learning more about such things is why I’ve been brushing up on my forty years out of date Spanish, why I took myself to a bracero town up the valley for a while last year, and why I periodically joke about my supply of Peruvian pesos.

I thought hard about whether to even write this, but I think the time has come. The protests against Space Karen’s businesses will set off a wave of repression and the deportation of legal resident Mahmoud Khalil is a worrying sign. I watched Vlad Teichberg go through something similar during Occupy Wall Street. We haven’t spoken since back then, but Google results indicate he is STILL living in exile.