Monsoon stampede creative vertigo head mess

I'm working on my second novel. What else is there to do when it's 110°F outside, I don't have a television, and moving day isn't until August? I'm a writing machine. Who cares if it is any good? The goal is to amass words into an irresistible mass of persuasion, otherwise known as a story.

In a coincidental instance of life imitating art, a couple days ago, I wrote a scene of about a small herd of escaped cows. That same evening, I saw on the news that a herd of cows had escaped from a slaughterhouse and were rampaging through a California neighborhood. My cows were not escaping from a slaughterhouse, they were escaping from a movie set in the hills above Malibu. However, any story about cows running amok in a city neighborhood makes a fun story. I watched the online video to see what a herd of forty cows looks like. I originally wrote thirty cows into my herd but I changed the number to forty. If you need a herd of stampeding cows, forty is the minimum, in my opinion.

I run my errands on Mondays before it gets too hot. On my way to the grocery store this week, I stopped to get gas. I always feel my heart rate go up when it's time to get gas. For one thing, my beast of a car takes a lot of gas, compared to my old Ford Focus. For another thing, here in Arizona, we pump our own gas. I haven't had to pump my own gas in over twenty years. Now they have gas pumps that are computerized. They even talk to you. I don't do a lot of driving so every time I have to pump my own gas, I have to relearn how to do it. This time, the pump screen was showing a news program. How long do they expect me to be standing there? I mean, the thing holds a lot of gasoline, but it's not the Queen Mary, for heaven's sake.

There I was pumping my gas, watching the ticker tick higher and higher, sucking money out of my bank account, when I saw a driver in a sporty white car drive away with the gas nozzle still in his gas tank. He was oblivious. I was like, uh, hey? He had his music turned up and didn't hear my plaintive little voice. And being an older white woman, I already know that I am invisible. 

He took off down the street with the nozzle dragging on the pavement behind him. I was concerned about the gas pump. I went over to look at it. Nothing seemed to be leaking. I finished pumping and paying for my gas and locked my car and went inside to see if the guy at the counter knew that someone had driven off with one of his gas nozzles. He looked at me like I was crazy. I thought I might have been invisible to him too, but finally he understood my pantomime. English was not his first language; I'm not sure what was. My first language is always self-conscious self-deprecation. Still, we managed to communicate, even with masks. He came outside and stood there looking around. Then we both laughed and shrugged our shoulders. 

I wonder what that driver thought when he realized that banging sound was him dragging a gas pump nozzle after his car. Maybe he didn't realize it until he pulled up into his driveway. Oopsy. I wonder if he came back to make amends. I guess drivers drive off with nozzles frequently. Gas stations have breakaway gas nozzles because drivers are stupid sometimes. I'm sure it will happen to me someday. 

It's hot here, but hotter in Portland where I moved from two months ago. Instead of my brother listening to my hour-by-hour announcements (now it's 107F!), I'm listening to his. Looks like today topped out at 112°F where he lives. Tomorrow could be worse. Welcome to the hot new world. We broke it, now we will have to wallow in it while we whine about how it wasn't our fault. 

Monsoon is here. That means the summer wind direction in the desert has shifted. In the evenings, wind comes rampaging up from the south. Sometimes it brings thunderstorms and torrential rain. The sprinkle of rain we had last week was just enough to sluice off the back end of my car. I helped it along with a yogurt container of water. No soap, I just wiped the dust off. As I mopped the dead bugs off the front, I said a prayer that the metal awnings covering the carports in this trailer park are all securely battened down. Awnings that come loose and go flying create bad hair days. 

My writing isn't great today. Vertigo is clawing up the inside of my head. I am pretty sure it's because of the vacillating air pressure; the readings are yawing up and down the barometer as storm systems ride across the land. The little ear crystals in my inner ears apparently want to ride along with them. Yee-haw. I feel like I'm galloping on horseback most of the time. Vertigo makes it hard to think. The waves in my head slow me down some—I have to do some acrobatics sometimes to get things to settle. Still, vertigo doesn't stop me. It's been six years, after all. I just keep writing. 

The myth of attracting what we fear

It seems kind of charming that all I had to complain about last week was the neighbor's wind chimes. I've heard people say what we resist persists. I've heard others say, what we fear will come to pass—in other words, we attract or even create what we fear. Are we really that powerful? 

I whined about how it was really hot in Tucson. I whimpered about how terrible it would be without air conditioning. Meanwhile, the washing machine in the backyard was pumping out cold air at regular intervals, doing its job so I could keep complaining. It's so easy to complain about fearing the bad thing when the bad thing hasn't happened yet. 

Well, the bad thing happened. Last Tuesday afternoon, the machine in the backyard, after being on all day, said, nope, no more, had enough, done compressing, need a break, tough luck, stupid human, you are on your own. That is what I imagined the machine would have said, but there I go anthropomorphizing again. It's a bad habit that is just getting worse the further to the left I move on the continuum between fiction and academic writing. 

The machine was still roaring, but cold air was no longer pumping out of the vent. The air, in fact, was warm and getting warmer. I quickly shut the system off and texted the homeowners. We got busy arranging a remedy. The soonest we could get service, turns out, was going to be Thursday afternoon. 

Blogbots, did I attract my worst fear by focusing on it? No, Carol, (I hope you are saying), you are not powerful enough to create a situation in which air conditioners are more likely to break. After a day of 114°F under a brutal sun, it should not be a huge surprise that air conditioners quit. Case in point, the two-day wait for service. No, I don't think I affected the climate, the weather, or the air conditioner by misplaced projections of fear. 

Like most humans, my life is ruled by fear. Sometime we fear things unreasonably, but we are alive today because our ancestors listened to their fears. I haven't been making animal sacrifices to appease the gods like some of my ancestors probably did (would that help, I wonder?), but like any modern creature living in a dark burrow (AKA a mobile home trailer), I have been doing my best to hunker down and ride out the heat wave. Unfortunately (for me), I won the reverse lottery and spent two days learning about my ability to survive extreme heat. 

As the temperature climbed, I made the mistake of contacting family and friends for empathy. Everyone immediately came unglued. My sister recommended I sit at the mall all day. Her husband suggested Starbucks. My friend in Marana wasn't home but was willing to turn her life into a pretzel to get me a key to her house. My other Arizona friend suggested I hop in my melting car and drive two hours in blazing sun through barren baking desert to get to her house in Phoenix, where the temperature was two degrees hotter than in Tucson.

The homeowners, obviously, expected me to stay and let the service technician in when he/she finally showed up. Thus, they could not tell me to bail, although I'm sure they would have understood. I got the feeling they weren't entirely sure what would happen to me, but no doubt they feared coming home to a slag heap where their trailer once stood. Nobody said, don't worry, Carol, you can do this. Honestly, I wasn't sure I could. But I wasn't sure that I couldn't, and therein lay the source of my secret power. Like the proverbial frog in a pot of tepid water, I didn't recognize the moment when the water started boiling, and by the time the water started boiling, I had figured out a way to survive.

People, it's all about evaporative cooling. I turned myself into a walking swamp cooler. I had only one towel, but I had a dozen tank tops in my bag of clothes. I quickly covered my head with a wet tank top and felt much better. Next I draped wet tank tops on my shoulders and upper arms. By the second day, I discovered I could drench my cotton knit cardigan in water, wring it out, and yank it on (not as easy to do when wet as when dry, try it). With a stylish wet cardigan, a dripping turban, and damp tank tops wrapped around my feet inside my Adidas slip-on sandals, I learned I could endure the heat.

The electronic gadgets in the trailer weren't so fortunate. On Wednesday morning, the modem stuttered during the middle of my Zoom presentation and knocked me offline. It regained its senses immediately, but my laptop balked at rebooting, so I lost a good twenty minutes trying to get things restarted and reminding myself that just staying alive in a trailer with no AC was a significant victory. The Zoom admin covered for me while I was offline, and when I reentered the Zoom room, it was obvious my presence was not missed. Go figure.

I was a bit concerned about sleeping in such high temperatures. At night the temperature outside dropped to about 87°F but it was hard to get that cooler air into the house. One of my friends suggested I sleep wrapped in a wet sheet. I was not willing to get water all over everything. I slept with the front door open and the screen door locked. Wrapping my head and feet in wet tank tops and sleeping with two ice packs stuffed into Mom's white sweat socks did the trick quite nicely. 

I was afraid my family members would not believe me so I took regular photos of the indoor temperature gauge. The highest indoor reading I recorded was 108°F. That was Wednesday evening. The outdoor temperature was approximately five degrees higher at that point. As soon as the outdoor temperature and the indoor temperature were about the same, I opened all the doors and windows to let the hot air blow through. 

Don't forget, I did not lose electricity. The ceiling fans were still patiently spinning. Without the movement of air indoors, I would probably have had to vacate. I'm not a total frog.

When the AC technician arrived around 2:30 on Thursday afternoon, I was feeling rather pleased with myself. It was only about 105°F, inside and out, no problem, so the doors and windows were open, admitting a blistering breeze. I greeted him with wet tank tops on my head and feet. All my tank tops are white—or were white when I bought them—so I probably looked like a dripping mummy not recently risen from the tomb. That is to say, I probably looked like I'd been dragging around some bandages for a while. The technician smiled at my appearance. I didn't care. I'm sure he's seen it all.

He tied a brimmed camouflage hat on his head and got to work. I watched him from the bathroom window, fulfilling my fiduciary responsibility to be a good house-sitter and make sure he wasn't ripping us off. I could see he worked from muscle memory. He'd done this job a thousand times. Job security, I was thinking. He's got it made. Unscrew these bolts, take off this panel, check here with the gizmo, unhook this little silver can thing, screw on a new silver can thing, put it all back together. 

As he worked, he yelled at someone on his phone in Spanish. Sometimes he had video on, so I could see a woman's face yelling back. I forget her name, even though he said it over and over. I have terrible audio memory, even for English words. Plus, my Spanish isn't great, despite a year of Duolingo lessons, but I certainly understood when he said esto es un problema, otra vez, otra vez, y otra vez. They were both frustrated and kept hanging up on each other, or the call kept getting dropped, I don't know which. When I realized it was a personal call, I stopped trying to translate the Spanish and let him do his work unobserved. I mean, really. Sometimes you just have to trust the Universe.

The homeowners kindly arranged payment over the phone. Within a few hours after the technician's departure, the air was back down to a balmy 85°F, my sweet spot. The electronic gear seemed to be back to a reasonable temperature—that is to say, not sizzling to the touch. I hung my wet clothes in the bathroom, and they were dry in twenty minutes. 

I've spent the last two days appreciating temperate indoor temperatures while I write my novel. After dark, I wander around the trailer park in the bone-baking heat, carrying a bottle of cold water and marveling at the sky. 

The journey continues. 

Chime in when ready

 A wall of heat descended on Southern Arizona, and now we are baking inside an oven. As hot as it is, though, it's not as hot as being in a sauna. I looked it up. Whenever I feel like whining, I just remember (a) nobody cares, and (b) I've been in a sauna and I survived. I have my jug of ice water. I'm doing fine. I've rarely been so aware, however, that heat can kill a human very quickly. I think I'll be okay going from the grocery store to my car, but I guess we will find out. Tomorrow is shopping day. 

I've been going outside a few times a day to experience hell. This is the Hellish Handbasket, after all. Just doing a little research. During one of my excursions, I heard some activity next door. The neighbors were apparently hanging another wind chime on the edge of their carport. I'm not sure what their wind chime strategy is, or even if they have one. Probably they made the mistake of telling their family and friends that they liked wind chimes, and now that's all they get for birthdays, anniversaries, and Father's Day. Like when my mom said she liked frogs and ended up with fifty frogs of various sizes, shapes, and materials. Be careful what you ask for. Your remaining family members will have to dispose of all that crap after you are gone.

Anyway, wind chimes. It's breezy here in Tucson, which makes the heat somewhat more tolerable, at least after the sun goes down. The trailer next door has about ten wind chimes hanging on the edge of the front porch and several more dangling from the edge of the carport. Most of the wind chimes seem to be made out of different kinds of metal. You know the kind I'm talking about. They sound like your cell phone is ringing, and you can just barely hear them over the roar of the air conditioner, which means you are constantly checking your phone. The new ones that I believe were added today are made of dangly lozenges of wood, so the sound is somewhat less melodious, more like a dozen wooden coasters banging around in a dryer. 

Last night, to accompany the wind chimes, the guys who drive in circles in the Sam's Club parking lot just over the fence were back doing their stop-start-screech-vroom shenanigans. I'm sure it is a lot more fun than it sounds. What could be more fun than locking brakes and burning rubber in a large parking lot? Well, doing it on ice, but there isn't much of that here this time of year, and I'm sure they figure, well, this big open space ought to be put to good use during off hours, so I'm just going to drive in circles at a fast clip and then slam on the brakes at 2:00 a.m. That ought to give those over-55 oldsters in the trailer park some interesting dreams. 

Speaking of dreams, I dream of the day when my sixty-fifth birthday has come and gone and I've made my Medicare choices. Maybe then I will stop seeing sponsored ads on Facebook from companies warning me not to screw this up. I'm irked that they are taking up space in my feed. I would prefer to watch video of tortoises going down slides. I'm tired of videos of animal rescues. They always turn out well. I don't know why I didn't realize that. Duh. I should have known they wouldn't post videos of animal stories that didn't turn out well. Whoa, maybe they do. I guess the only thing protecting me is clicking like on the tortoise video every time it comes up. Yesterday I watched a video of a man edging and mowing a lawn for almost thirty minutes. I hate Facebook.

The doves are less vocal on these warm mornings. A few days ago, it sounded like their admonition to hang up and drive had turned into hip hip hooray. Maybe they were cheering for the president's trip to Europe, I don't know. I'm not really following politics anymore. It's so boring. 

Now that I'm a prisoner of the desert heat, my world has shrunk to the size of a dot on Google Maps. The most excitement I have these days is when vehicles go by. This trailer is on a cul-de-sac, so it's a big deal. For example, I notice when an Amazon Prime truck pulls into the turnaround. I love it when the Sparkletts truck arrives. You have to admire the confidence of a driver who floors it in reverse all the way down the street. Delivering delicious water to thirsty oldsters is clearly something this driver takes seriously. The mail carrier seems much more laid back, buzzing lazily in a little white truck from mailbox to mailbox, like a bee delivering pollen. I hope the AC is going full blast while the driver leans out the window to put junk mail in our mailbox. Our taxpayer dollars going to good use. 

The AC just settled into silence. It will rest for about five minutes. Now I can enjoy the sound of the new wind chimes. They are actually more melodious than I expected. It sort of sounds like someone is trying to use an old-fashioned touchtone phone. Remember those? Oh, now the AC is on again. The trailer is under assault from the sun. I feel a bit like a critter hunkered in a dark burrow, waiting for dark. If the electricity goes out, I'll soon be a raisin-like desiccated critter. In the meantime, back to writing. 

Can you prove that you exist?

When I planned my move to Tucson several years ago, it never occurred to me that I might have a hard time renting an apartment. There was and still is no lack of apartments in Tucson in my price range. After eighteen years being a model tenant (she said modestly), I really thought finding an apartment would be easy. Who wouldn't want me? I'm like a property owner's dream tenant. Clean, quiet, uncomplaining, and most important, I always pay my rent on time. What's not to love?

Apparently in this computerized world, decisions involving risk depend on algorithms. In the case of rental housing, the decision to rent is orchestrated by credit reporting agencies. You've heard of these outfits: Experian, Transunion, and Equifax. They all collect data on all of us all the time. Unless you live under a rock (which I haven't ruled out if my plans fall through), you can't avoid getting on their radar.

Unless you don't borrow money. I haven't borrowed money for a quarter of a century. That means I haven't purchased anything with a credit card, taken out a loan, or bought anything on time payments for a long time. With no data to report for over twenty-five years, my credit report is pretty sparse. In fact, the only data on the form are the four addresses I've had since 1997. I know this because I asked to receive a copy of my credit report. I can see how a property manager might not want to take a chance. They'd be like, does this person actually exist? Maybe she is just a pile of boxes in a storage unit, ever thought of that? It's hard to evict a pile of boxes. Nah, better pass on this one.

What this means is that I have no credit score. Decisions regarding hiring, housing, and insurance rates are made based on credit score. If you have no credit score, companies might not be willing to take a chance renting to you. They aren't really 100% sure that you exist. 

I emailed a modest property in the neighborhood and explained my situation. It was sort of a message in a bottle. I'd sent a few before. You know what I mean, those contact forms on websites that are prefaced with something friendly like, "You've found your new home at Palm Oasis Desert Canyon Vista Terrace Village! We want to hear from you!" I can hear you yelling at your computer monitor right now. You are yelling, how can she be so naïve? Well, you are correct, yes, I live in my own world. You probably don't remember, but a long time ago I wrote a blogpost about how I'm not really a chronic malcontent. I'm actually an optimist. I act like I'm constantly in despair, but the truth is, I really do believe that people are inherently good and that the world is a benevolent place. I can hear you screaming again.

Anyway, to my surprise, a man named Robert called me back the same day. He was remarkably kind. He asked me some questions and seemed to laugh a lot for some reason. Maybe he was astounded that I could be so naïve too, like you are. My excuse is I'm new in town, haven't figured it out yet. Out-of-towners always get a mulligan or two, don't they? We yell at them when we are behind them on the road because they are driving like idiots, but the truth is, we sort of like them too. Newcomers to the place we know so well and love to hate. Well, I'm guessing that is how it is here. That is how I sometimes felt in Portland, when I was younger and could still remember how to get from SE Portland to NW Portland without driving in circles. Here, I drive in big squares, because the roads are laid out on a grid, which is so helpful for me. I just keep turning right until I get somewhere.

So, here's this nice guy Robert asking me questions on the phone and I'm doing my best to answer honestly without telling him I'm a nutcase. With my luck I'll never meet him. Luckily for him and the company he works for, I'm the right kind of nutcase, the kind that pays her rent on time. He told me he thought they could work with me. He recommended I fill out the online application (only $51.95, including the $2.95 admin fee). After seeing some of these applications requiring a nonrefundable $200 administration fee on top of the application fee, I was like, right on, no problem, I'm on it.

I jumped on that form like a hungry cat on wet Friskies and the next day I got an email telling me I was approved to rent an apartment at XYZ Apartments. I felt like I'd been given an existence permit—you know: You have the right to exist! You exist, therefore you belong! Come live at our property. We accept you, we accept you, one of us!

Later I looked at the floor plan and the Google Earth footprint and realized the place is an overpriced dive on a busy street. The unit I believe I'm renting is in the back, though, so that is good. But it's on the ground floor, so I expect total darkness—but all the units will be dark. Each unit has only one window and the blinds will be drawn all the time. This is Tucson, after all. No sunlight allowed in the habitat. On the downside, instead of a park, there's a car repair shop on the corner of the block. Or is that a plus, hmmm, not sure. For sure a plus, there's a library just around the corner, no doubt placed to serve the middle school that is right across the street. As long as there are no lockdowns or active shooters, I should be okay.

I'm happy that I managed to convince one property management company that I exist and I'm worth taking a risk. They won't be sorry. I might be, but they won't. I'm heartened to think that if one company bucked the algorithm, there might be more. I'm going to get a secured credit card, though, because this level of uncertainty has been hellish.

The apartment comes open in early August, so I have time to obsess over how I will place my boxes in the postage-stamp floorplan. Meanwhile, I'm working on my novel. It's blazing hot here, too hot to do anything else. Enforced creativity while I wait for my little abode in Tucson is not the worst thing that could happen.