Last week sucked. The universe delivered to me a painful reality check, in the form of food poisoning, that drew my attention to the fact that parked cars produce extreme interior temperatures that quickly ruin anything that’s even remotely perishable.

Before leaving Texas, I gathered all my pantry food and put it in a plastic bucket with a screw-on, airtight lid. The included items were mostly organic grains and supplements (e.g. maca root, flax meal, etc.), and of course, my prized 54 oz jar of Nutiva coconut oil–that thing was like 40 bucks, so no way I’m leaving that behind. Last week I was craving some organic oats, so I opened up the food bucket and was shocked to find that my coconut oil had leaked out of the jar and dripped down over everything else. Not to be deterred, I grabbed an unopened bag of organic oats and went back inside my dad’s house, where I transferred the oats to a container that wasn’t coated in delicious coconut oil. I then proceeded to eat said oats with a spoon. Yes, I eat dry, plain, uncooked oats.

Fast-forward a few hours, and I’m jumping out of bed, running to the bathroom, and violently throwing up everything I’ve eaten. Or trying to, at least; turns out raw oats transform into a sticky paste-like substance that has a really hard time coming back up. After several bouts of dry heaving during the subsequent hours, I started drinking water in an attempt to thin out the oat paste and get things moving. It seemed to work reasonably well, since I spent the next 8-12 hours vomitting and shitting.

Food poisoning is a super fun experience all on its own, but for me the fun had only just begun. This is because I routinely ingest various stimulants like Adderall and caffeine, and when I involuntarily quit everything cold-turkey (you know…because I keep throwing it up), it initiates a whole new series of symptoms caused by physical withdrawal. So even though the purge phase only lasted maybe 24 hours, what followed was 3 days of intense headaches, brain fog, physical fatigue, and depression.

The moral of this story is that I’m completely and totally unprepared for the harsh realities of living out of my car. Without a sustainable system for keeping the interior cool, my vehicle is virtually useless in terms of storing food or providing shelter for sleeping, at least during the warmer parts of the year. I might have to park in Alaska.