It is not a tiny house!

It is a shack!  Or worse, a trailer.

To commune with ourselves, we must trek two hours to Stanardsville, a town on the edge of Virginia's Blue Ridge Mountains whose population has stairstepped down over the years to 384 people, a country store and this wooded plot, which, before 20 tiny houses arrived this fall, was an RV campground called Heavenly Acres.

The heavenly part is debatable. On the second official day of winter, the tract is a colorless bog, surrounded by tall, barren trees and covered with a blanket of dead leaves. But this, promises Getaway — a start-up that offers these rental not-cabins and this not-camping not far from major cities — is where we may rejuvenate our very souls.

As our car crunches up the gravel driveway, we pass an ominous charcoal-gray box on wheels. A sign proclaims it "Lenore." It is a carbon copy of Lillian, Hank, Felix and Shirley, which is the tiny house we have been assigned, we learn in a succinct text from the company that also feeds us an entry code.

The author is not deceived.

"Idiot," you think. "This is called camping."

Not exactly. Now, in tiny houses that no one will acknowledge are honestly just what we used to call cabins, it's called "escaping."

You are not downsizing, simplifying, or cleansing. You are most certainly not escaping anything.

What you are is BROKE. You made stupid life choices that landed you in crushing debt, you live in stupid cities with stupid high taxes, you work stupid, soul-destroying shit jobs for sociopathic assholes, and therefore you cannot afford a nice vacation.

Accepting that you have a problem is Step One, hipsters.

The Helpful, if Merciless, Phantom