Not feeling so OK at the OK Corral

I keep returning to a theme—the idea that life is neither all good nor all bad. After trying to weigh the good stuff against the bad stuff, I find myself stumbling over definitions. What is good? What is bad? In the end, it's all just life. We muddle along and then we die. Some of the events in my life I classified as bad in retrospect might have been exactly what I needed. Like when I asked my mother for money and her telling me to get a job. Not that I did her bidding, but looking back, I admit, perhaps I was a wee bit self-centered? And that time when a certain someone chose me as a temporary mate. Didn't I feel special! And didn't I discover in short order that we weren't made for each other after all, darn it. Curses! Foiled again.

So, I repeat:  good? bad? It's so dang hard to tell! 

I am tempted to put my battle with the cockroaches on the negative side of this week's ledger. Cockroaches bad, right? Always bad? But perhaps the presence of a smashed cockroach in my sheets is just the motivation I need to change my housekeeping approach, which has tended to be somewhat lax in recent years. In the Love Shack, my former toxic mold-infested hazardous waste dump of an apartment, there wasn't much point. The place was so old and decrepit. On the down side, I had ants but on the plus side, no cockroaches. Mold but no annoying neighbors with booming car stereos. See what I'm saying? Good? Bad? Here, I have seen no ants indoors. I had a fly problem for a while, but the flies abated with the end of monsoon. And I think now that I've gone nuclear in the kitchen, I will start to get the upper hand on the little dudes. If I get cancer from roach spray, oh well. I've lived my life. 

On Tuesday night, I tore the bed apart after finding the smashed carcass of one roach. I'm guessing I probably rolled on him during the night in blissful oblivion. (Had I known! Armageddon! World War III!) I changed my sheets and decided to sleep with the light on, working on the theory that roaches tend to avoid lighted areas. I always wear a stocking cap to bed, pulled over my ears and eyes, so sleeping with the light on isn't so hard. 

A few minutes after midnight, as I was dozing with one eye open, I heard pop pop pop pop, like a string of pops. Fewer than a dozen but more than five. Not firecrackers, not cars backfiring, there was only one thing it could be and it was right outside my window. 

I laid there frozen, wondering if I should turn out the light. I turned out the light and looked out the window. I only have one window. It's big but it's covered by a seriously dense security screen so even during broad daylight, I can't see much. In the dark, I can barely see the front of my car, ten feet from my door, and that's it.

I heard a man's voice muttering something as he moved from west to east under my window. Yipes. He sounded anxious or scared. I waited for a bit, wondering what had happened. A couple minutes later, a large man walked by very quickly going in the other direction. Was it the same guy? No clue. I didn't recognize him but I don't know all the tenants here in the back forty. He looked angry, or drugged, hard to say. Definitely agitated. Things were quiet for a few minutes, so I went back to bed, after checking for bugs, and lay there with my eyes wide open. 

A few minutes later, I heard voices of several people a few doors to the east of my apartment. Next thing I know I hear large engines. That could only be one thing. I got up and looked out the window. Yep. Flashing blue and red lights. I could see the back end of an ambulance. A Tucson police car pulled up, followed by another, lit by the emergency lights flashing. It was really quite festive in my front room. I took some photos so I would remember that intense flashing blue color. 

In short order the EMTs loaded a large man into the ambulance. He was groaning, with pain or anger, hard to say, and off they went. In another ten minutes, all the vehicles were gone. I guess no shooter was on the loose. I checked the news over the next few days but apparently the incident didn't rate any mention. I finally found it on a police blotter page: someone shot in the back, transported to hospital. That's it. Ho hum. Welcome to Tucson.

Bad that someone got shot, right? Yeah. I wouldn't wish that fate on anyone, no matter how annoying his car stereo. The silver lining in this incident is if I had any doubt that I might not stay in this apartment after this year lease is up, that doubt is gone. I just hope I survive.

In other (good? bad?) news, I had the notion to look up the property management company in the Better Business Bureau website. Oh man, why didn't I do this sooner? Because I was desperate for a place to live, that's why. I responded to an approval to rent an apartment in this sleazebag property the way I used to say yes to my love interests. Oh, you want me? Okay, then I guess I want you. I'll figure out how to like you as we go along. Maybe I'll even love you, who knows. The main thing is, you want me. So, no, I didn't think to look up this pesky property management company's BBB rating because if I had, I would have seen they have earned a big fat solid F. What's more they addressed none of the complaints against them. 

It's indicative of Arizona landlord-tenant laws that tenants have few rights. After I realized I willingly got into bed with a snake, I started to feel pretty bad. Foolish, resentful, anxious, scared. Bad, right? Well, after walking around the block a few times, avoiding the cracked asphalt while trying to soak up the wide open blue sky, I realize that here is another opportunity to downsize and get ready for my next adventure. I wanted to see Tucson's seasons. I wanted a full year here, to decide if this is the place for me. Assuming I don't get shot or run over by a speeding SUV, I have time to pare my possessions down some more and figure out where I might want to go next. For now my car seems to be working. I don't have to stay here.

Gaslit by a gas cap

I talked with a friend on the phone tonight. It's a welcome distraction to listen to someone else's problems so I don't have to think about mine. Is that selfish? Immersing myself into someone else's story to avoid reading my own? Today was one of those days I would rather have been someone else. Not because anything bad happened. I accomplished the things on my list. By my usual standards, today was a good day. So why did I feel like crap?

Today I got gobsmacked by grief.  

The morning started out normal enough. I was thinking about getting things done. Tomorrow I have my first appointment with a doctor under the Medicare regime. I'm going to a new clinic to meet a new doctor at a new healthcare provider system managed by a new insurance company. As I fixed my breakfast, I found myself telling my story aloud, rehearsing, you know how you do that? You don't? Hmm, I guess it's just me then. Embarrassing. As if I'm going to be allotted a couple hours with the new doctor to describe what the past year has been like. As if the poor doctor has time or interest. I have to remember to be especially animated with my eyes and hands, because I'm sure I'll be wearing a mask the entire time. 

As I chopped zucchini, I started to feel sad. I haven't told the story for a while. I'd forgotten what I might feel when I remembered the day Mom died. Remembering that day hurt, remembering the look in the nurse's eyes when she gave me the news, how shocked I felt, but what hurt worst of all was remembering the last few months of Mom's life, sitting outside the care home in the cold, trying to keep her with me just a little longer. We bundled her up in fleece. I have photos. She looked like fleece-wrapped bug, six feet away from me, still smiling. We talked about people we used to know, places we used to go. I remember her smiling a lot. She couldn't see me smiling because I was hidden behind my plaid cotton mask. 

Today I chopped broccoli and told the story to my empty apartment, rehearsing. 

Oh man. Time out to cry. I can't tell you the story of me telling my story to myself without feeling things I don't want to feel. I've been so busy moving here. Now I've stopped moving, there's no place left to go, I'm here, it's time to stop running, which means it must be time to start feeling.

I miss her. I miss those few months when she was alive and happy and I still had a mother. I had a purpose, I had a place, even though I itched for it to be over so I could go live some other life. Now I'm in that other life and it hasn't coalesced yet into something I recognize. I don't know who I am, I don't know where I am, I don't know where I'm going. 

Does anyone, really? We pretend like we are the masters of our fates, the grand designers of our lives. We don't know anything. 

Yesterday I ran an errand for a friend. As I was driving to the pharmacy, I heard that dreaded sound, the ding my car makes when it is trying to get my attention to tell me something is wrong. Ding. That horrible ding has meant the car is about to siphon $500 more dollars out of my dwindling bank account. Fingernails on a blackboard. 

I stopped at a light and peered at the dashboard. I didn't see any lights, so I was like, what is up with this car? Is it a existential cry for help? A bit of automotive angst expressed through a plaintive ding? Then I saw in the little odometer window a word had replaced the mileage number. It looked like the message was 9ASCAP. 

You probably see it right away. I did not. After hearing that sound, my brain cells had gone into freefall. ASCAP! Nine of them! Have I violated musicians' rights somehow? 

When I got to the pharmacy, I dug out my phone, Googled 9ASCAP, and started laughing. Right on! Gascap. The 9 was actually a lowercase g. My brain had failed to parse the letters correctly. I blame grief, old age, early dementia, and fear of economic insecurity. Any or all, take your pick. 

I went into the pharmacy and picked up the thing for my friend. When I came out, I checked my gas cap, and sure enough, it was loose. My beast! I screwed it back into place. The light didn't go off right away, but I drove gamely forward, and it went off somewhere between the pharmacy and home.

 

Dragged into the future

Do you ever wish you could freeze time? Shut off the clock, silence the calendar, you know, take a vacation from the daily detritus of life for a while? Before things get worse? I know it isn't possible. I'm just frustrated at stumbling over an endless stream of stupid obstacles. I want things to be easier. Or at least, not any worse. I realize life isn't so great now for most people on this planet. Life is precarious for all but a handful of humans. I'm not one of them, but still, I know I'm lucky. Born in the right place, right epoch, right skin color. Wrong gender, but I cope. My complaints are luxury problems, compared to what some people are facing. Recognizing that fact doesn't stop me from complaining, but it does put my trivial concerns into perspective. 

What are you complaining about this week, Carol? I'm so glad you asked. Some of my recent challenges are easing up a bit. For example, I've just about got the problem with the street address debacle straightened out. No one was making mistakes with malicious intent. It's good to remember, most humans just bumble along doing the best they can in any given moment, which means in the case of the site manager here at the apartment, little snafus like COVID can put a crimp in performance. That's understandable. No point in getting angry.

Another little snafu. My former landlord sent me some mail from Portland, consisting of three pieces of junk mail (Medicare, Carol, the sky will fall if you don't take action!) and two pieces from the IRS addressed to my mother. The IRS letters were duplicates sent a month apart. For some reason, the good people at the IRS thought they needed to tell me twice that they needed more time to figure out how to respond to the letter I sent them in January. Looking back at my files, I believe the letter I sent them was to inform them of her death. Maybe their computers are locked up trying to parse the impossible task of communicating with a dead person. I don't know what their issue is. I communicate with my mother all the time. I told her the IRS is after her. She didn't seem to care, not enough to respond, anyway.

Now the next thing pulling at me is the horrible prospect of upgrading to Windows 11. I still remember the trauma of upgrading to Windows 10. I had to get help from some professionals, who augmented my old computer so it could receive the gift of new operating system software. This time, Windows Update informed me my computer would not be able to handle an upgrade to Windows 11. They weren't particularly gentle about giving me the news. They have no idea the pain they are potentially unleashing in my technological life. I will dig in my heels for as long as I can. Eventually I will need to get a new computer. It seems like I get one problem ironed out and a new wrinkle appears. I really hate to iron.

Last week I took my car in to a repair shop recommended to me by a Tucson friend I trust. The mechanics at this shop are really nice, which somehow made it hurt a little less when they handed me the estimate. I won't tell you how much I paid to get the fuel injectors cleaned out. Apparently this car was ridden hard and put away wet, not once, but many times. I should have sold it to the Dodge dealer when they offered to buy it from me, but then I would be carless. I've been carless before. I can do it, but it seriously dents my self-esteem. It's one thing to say I'm poor by choice, you know, that old saying about we are volunteers, not victims. After a while, though, it's hard to stave off the waves of self-pity.

All that to say, I'm all in on this car. It's a touchy, sensitive beast, but it's my touchy, sensitive beast. I'll keep throwing money at it and when the money is gone, I'll park it somewhere and live in it. No worries. That was always going to be my backup plan if things here in Tucson go gunnysack. I'm the queen of contingency plans.

In other good news, I'm getting ready to publish my second novel. Too bad I can't tell you what it is, this being an anonymous blog and all. In other bad news, I saw my second adult-sized cockroach in my apartment today. Welcome to Tucson. In other bad news, the vertigo continues to pound my head into a sloshy pulp. In other good news, Medicare!

After a while, it's obvious nothing is all good or all bad. It's just life, dragging me into the future, one day at a time.

Growing a pear

The old suburban farmhouse in which I did most of my growing up had a Bartlett pear tree just outside the back door. Every few years we collected bumper crops in cardboard boxes and fought the fruit flies to see who would get to eat the pears first. I remember sitting at the kitchen table with my mother and the neighborhood women, paring and cutting slippery pears and soaking pieces in lemon juice in preparation for canning. To this day, nothing says summer is over, prepare for hell to me like the taste of a perfect ripe Bartlett pear. 

I'm doing a lot of remembering this week, probably because I can. Now that most of the obstacles associated with moving are resolved or being addressed, I have the luxury of letting my mind roam, and it seems drawn toward the past. I'm thinking about my cat. I'm remembering my mother. I'm missing the tooth I lost. And it's pear season, so I'm remembering pears.

There might be another reason I am looking backward. I'm reaching a milestone in a few days: I'm turning sixty-five. 

Yep, thanks for noticing. I'm coming of age—again. This coming-of-age marker isn't quite as appealing as turning twenty-one, or forty, or even fifty. This time I'm crossing the threshold into early old age or whatever they call it. I'm entering the neopleisticine dumpy sagtime epoch. If I'm lucky enough to somehow fall into a pit of tar and gradually be encased in amber, future anthropologists (if there are any in the future) will peruse my DNA, rub their depilatoried chins, and say, "Hola, she seems a bit droopy for someone who clearly subsisted on yogurt, nuts, raisins, and twigs."

Turning sixty-five reminds me of an anxious time when my elderly Mom fainted and fell on her condo patio and didn't tell me for a few days. (She was much older than sixty-five then, more like eighty-five, and I was her sometime caregiver with no idea of what was coming.) Mom mopped up the blood and went to bed with a couple cracked ribs, a banged up ankle, and a scraped elbow. She knew what would happen if she told anyone about her fall: An endless, tedious round of visits to various specialists, which is exactly what happened. She couldn't hide her injuries for long. A heart doctor, a heart monitor, an ankle doctor, and the usual EKG and MRI and CT scans all had a go at diagnosing her problem. The outcome: no obvious cause was found for her syncope. It was just one of those things.

The upshot is now I understand why she left her sliding glass patio door unlocked whenever she was home. She prioritized her fears. She might worry that drug addicts would sneak in and steal her television, but she was more worried that no one would be able to get inside to save her should she fall in the bathroom. 

I get it. Without a key, there is no easy way to break into the Bat Cave. That's good, if I want to be secure, but not if I want to be saved. Now I'm officially old, and coincidentally, I happen to have the luxury to think about such things. Time for another round of Swedish death cleaning.

Speaking of death cleaning, is it fall where you are? Fall has fallen here, I think. I'm not sure. I'm learning the desert seasons in real time. The night-time temps are forecasted to descend to the mid-forties. I hope the sky will settle into a steady blue dome. If it's sunny all the time, maybe the air pressure will stop fluctuating wildly up and down the barometric scale. Monsoon has been hard on my head. The ear crystals in my inner ear canals crash hither and thither, unable to figure out which way is up, or out, or whatever. It's near-constant ocotonia upset in the vestibular maze, which means I'm staggering the decks of the USS Vertigo day and night, under near-constant assault from the salt shaker in my right ear. It's very distracting.

Luckily, turning sixty-five means Medicare, here I come! Meanwhile, I'm eating fresh pears and thinking of home. 

Living a life sublime

Howdy Blogbots. You’ll be happy to hear I finally have fast internet. Fast enough, anyway. What a relief. Being on the wrong side of the digital divide is debilitating in all kinds of ways. I’m sure you are greatly relieved as well. Now you can hope I will stop complaining about it.

Here's the story, thanks for asking. After a massive fail by Century Link, I am now a customer of their Tucson competitor, Cox Communications. I’ve learned so much. For example, I now understand what the Century Link technician meant when he said “Cox uses a different system.” It’s cable, dude! Cox uses cable, Century Link uses DSL phone lines. You are probably thinking, duh, Carol, everyone knows that, it’s like the battle between the evil titans Comcast and Century Link in Portland, have you been living under a rock? In my defense, I say, yes, I have been living under a rock of sorts. A rock I fondly called Mom.

Anyway, after a long trek across Tucson to f*ckall woebegone, I found the only Cox store in town, waited in line, paid a $50.00 deposit, and was granted the privilege of renting a cheap plastic modem to take home and self-install.

If you know me, you know that any word with self in front of it makes me quail.

“Will I be able to figure this out?” I asked the rep who took my money and handed me a white box with a handy built-in plastic handle. 

She stared at me over her mask. I could see her mentally shift gears. She opened the box and quickly described the attachment process. I felt like one of those cartoon dogs listening to their owner, where the dialog balloon is nothing but bla bla bla bacon bla bla walk bla bla, except minus the cue words bacon and walk.

I went outside with my little box. I put the box gently on the seat and took a minute to pour a dinky bottle of mechanic-in-a-can into my car’s gas tank. The beast threw a shoe, I mean, a code, that morning. Ding, the familiar check engine light came on, indicating a problem in the exhaust system. Anything from a bad gas cap to an expensive oxygen sensor problem or an even more expensive catalytic converter fail. The light does not identify the exact problem. It’s like when your property manager texts you there’s a gas leak in the building, get out now. It helps to have specifics, like, which apartment do I really live in? So now I have the fun job of trying to discern whether the check engine light problem stems from the work that I had the dealer do on May 19. It’s unlikely that their work is under warranty but it would be stupid not to ask. If they say bring it in, I know what will happen. I have some alternative recommendations for car repair places, none of which is within easy walking distance of the Bat Cave.

My father told me never to fall in love with a car. That is still good advice.

Two steps forward, two or three steps back, then one step forward, then fall in a hole for a while. That is my life in Tucson. I finally get an apartment, but can’t get internet. I finally get internet, but the car goes gunnysack. The neighbors with quiet car stereos have loud car engines and vice versa. The property manager returns from a three-week COVID-19 vacation (yay, she lives!) but fails to respond (again) to my emails. Meanwhile, the waves of vertigo in my head are a constant reminder that I control nothing and nobody.

After a while, does it do any good to use the words good or bad to describe what happens? It’s all just life. Maybe the word stupid would be more apropos. I could equally use the word sublime. Ridiculous and rapturous. Absurd and . . . hmm, I’m having trouble coming up with opposites that express my dichotomous brain. I found some fun words, though: cockamamie, dunderheaded, doltish, nutty. Humans have many words to express their displeasure with circumstance. Absurd, ridiculous, and nutty have a lot of company in the thesaurus. Synonyms for triumphant and celebratory are sparse.

As I walked in the hot morning sun today, eyes on the cracked asphalt to avoid stumbles, I had time to think about what it means to be alone. No one depends on me, not a cat, not a mother, not a sibling, not a friend. Nobody really knows where I am. A few people have my street address, but no one could rush to my rescue, or ask me to rush to theirs. I no longer live my life in the context of someone else’s. I’m effectively alone.

I can hear you, you know. You are thinking, oh, no, there she goes again. She’s going to do that off-putting grieving thing. She’s fallen into that sorrow-shaped hole in the sidewalk. Now the whining will begin and it will take meeting another horny lonely eighty-two-year-old to get her mind off it so she can find the humor in her nutty, absurd, confounding, ridiculously sublime existence.

In my defense—do I seem to be writing that phrase more than usual lately? Argh. I’ll let you decide if grief is a defense for wackiness. Everything has happened so fast (she whined). Ten months ago, Mom went and died, setting off a cascade of actions and events that propelled me to another state. Bam, in slow motion, I'm thrown into a new life. Wait, let's be clear: I threw myself.

I wake up at night confused. I don’t know where I am. What bed, what room, what city, what year. I hope it is grief and not early-stage Alzheimer’s. Nothing makes sense except for the veneer of meaning I paint onto my experiences, and my mental paintbrush lags a disturbing two or more seconds behind reality. (Hence my confusion when I opened the Cox box and saw a coaxial cable instead of a DSL phone line.)

One of my favorite Monkees songs (yes, I’m still a fan) has a grammatically incorrect line that resonates: Where my foot steps down is where is home. Every time I go walking, I look at the blue sky and think, oh my god, how gorgeous, is this my home? It’s a real question with as yet no answer. I don’t know if this is home. And yes, the sky is sublime.