Closer to the edge

Howdy from Albuquerque. As I sidled along tidy sidewalks next to cinder block walls and wooden fences in the neighborhood today, cold in the shade and warm in the sun, I pondered two things: the depthless blue of the late fall New Mexico sky and the progressive nature of mental illness.

Wait, Carol, what? Are you mentally ill? Well, what would you call a person who deliberately, almost rebelliously, even compulsively, eschews a traditional safe lifestyle for a path uncomfortably close to self-annihilation? I’ve been trying on the term minimalist. As in, Honey I shrunk myself and now I’m a minimalist! I’ve jettisoned possessions like an aged cat spews gas. If you don’t know me, it sounds plausible. Yeah, cool, Carol’s a minimalist. However, I know me, and I can’t hide behind a claim of minimalism. That would be a bit like spraying poo-pourri in the bathroom. We all know what goes on in there when you turn the faucet on full blast.

It could be that my mental compulsion to downsize is in alignment with the current zeitgeist of decluttering and simplifying. Some of you might say, Thank you, Carol, for living simply so that others might simply live. Right. You obviously don’t know me.

Doing a Marie Kondo on my life might actually be trendy but my hipness factor is unearned—in fact, if I'm hip for pursuing a minimalist lifestyle, it is purely coincidental. I was dismantling my life, or it was crumbling around me, long before it was cool to reduce, reuse, and recycle. Who cares. I’m beyond hip now. I’m out in the stratosphere, way past Swedish death cleaning, on my way to total erasure.

What is “pure” minimalism? Is that a thing? No idea.

As part of my quest to downsize after Mom died, I decided to move from Portland to Tucson. You all know the story. My decision was logical (I thought), based on my knowledge at the time. Now I know there were some things I didn’t know, and I didn’t realize then that I should have known them. For example, I didn’t know I was a credit ghost. That situation made it difficult to rent an apartment. (Embarrassing disclosure: I apparently failed to recall that I may have created that condition years ago myself by freezing my credit after some generic data breach. No recollection.) Second, I didn’t know how expensive car insurance was in Arizona (I could have researched it). Further, I didn’t know that fiber optic for internet is not a thing in my Tucson neighborhood and never will be (could have researched that, too). Finally, I’d heard rumors but didn’t fully understand that tenants in Arizona have almost no rights (it’s right there in the Arizona Landlord and Tenant Act, I could have looked it up and chosen to move to a different state—apparently Oregon has good tenants’ rights. Who knew).

I wasn’t totally ignorant. Some things I knew. Stuff we all know. You get what you pay for. There’s no such thing as a free lunch. There’s a sucker born every minute. Nothing is guaranteed but death and taxes. Blink and you’ll miss it. The early bird gets the worm and then is annihilated by a diamond back rattlesnake. Never fall in love with a car.

I am not all-knowing. I doubt if anyone is, even though some people I’ve known sure act like it. Carol, you should [insert suggestion here]. I’m sure part of the reason I’m standing on the edge of the existential cliff overlooking a fresh new hell is because I deliberately did the opposite of what they all suggested. I'm obstinate that way. Hence, the diagnosis of mental illness. Well, the difference between a suggestion and a criticism is not hard to discern.

At some point, you have to stop peeling back the layers. If you peel too deep, what’s left? There’s just a gaping mouth, waiting for a kind soul to insert worms. Nobody is going to stuff food down my throat except me—at least, not until I’ve had a couple strokes and can no longer lift a fork to my lips. Whenever I feel like whining Oh, no, please don’t make me take care of myself, my mother’s voice rings in my ears. This not the voice of my demented mother, the one I trailed behind, stooping as needed to rescue a dropped glove, a used tissue. Rather, it is the voice of the mother who lived with my father and sneakily thwarted his wishes at every turn. He wanted me living in their basement forever, tied to his twenty-dollar bill gas-money handouts. She wanted me out of the house to sink or swim on my own. To motivate me, she spoke the dreaded words: “Carol, just get a job.”

As I contemplate the pursuit of a life shallow in material possessions but flowing with creativity, I hear her voice daily. Right on, Mom. I hear you. I could get a job, I bet. Probably. As long as it doesn’t involve leaning my head back or balancing on a ladder, there are many things I could do. Probably not driving, maybe not heavy lifting, but I could certainly sell small things to customers. How long before stoking the fires of consumer culture sent me running screaming into the night?

I’m squatting (stiffly, because of arthritis) at the intersection of a few questions. First, what is home? What is it, where is it, and how small can home be before it cannot support life? There must be someplace for me somewhere, probably more than one someplace. It’s a big country and it’s not like I’m moving to Mars. Here’s another question: What is freedom? Is anyone truly free? Where on the planet can you go to avoid someone holding up a book of statutes and telling you No, you can’t live like that?

What if I don’t want to be a tenant or a traditional homeowner? What other options are open to me? Even if I bought an undeveloped patch of land in the desert, there are laws about parking a “home” there. There are laws about parking a “home” on someone else’s land. There are laws about parking a “home” on BLM land, which supposedly belongs to all of us.

You’ve probably heard people say something like “home is where the heart is” and thought, Aww, isn’t that sweet. I don’t find it all that helpful. My heart has been obliterated, shattered into a billion glittery bits that haven’t yet fallen to earth. Maybe they will eventually coalesce and stake a claim in some city I can find on a map. Silver City, my friend says. Bisbee, you would love it there, lots of artists. Sedona, Wickenberg, Green Valley, Ajo, Yuma, Quartzite.

One more truism: If you don’t have a “home,” then you can never be lost.

This ten-day cat-sitting house-sitting gig in Albuquerque has given me some valuable insights. Albuquerque is an appealing city, with its pueblo architecture and civilized sidewalks. Despite the dry air and nosebleeds, I have enjoyed seeing some local sights. For example, the petroglyphs are a twenty-minute walk away, how cool is that. However, if you’ve seen one ancient rock carving, you’ve pretty much seen them all, and the weather, despite the sunshine and blue sky, is colder than a snowball’s dirty brown underbelly, and being cold sucks. It’s not winter yet and the nighttime temps are below freezing. It's not news that I was not made for cold weather. I’ve been complaining about being cold forever. My blood slows to a viscous crawl below 50°F.

Regarding the house-sitting gig, this four-bedroom two-story condo would be great for someone young enough to be on the ascending side of a career trajectory. Owning a house like this says you have achieved the American dream, you have arrived, congratulations, you are finally a viable adult. (We were worried about you for a while.) For someone like me, a nontraditional oldster tumbling in freefall down the descending side of a career trajectory, living in a place like this would be a heavy drag on my quest for minimalism. It’s a lot of space that demands constant upkeep and cleaning for no good purpose except to store and display the trophies of success. I don’t need display shelves anymore. I never achieved success, and I gave what few trophies I earned to the thrift stores.

The best part of any home is the four-legged creatures who dwell within. However, much as I am enjoying caring for this funny little old cat, my heart has not found solace. It is great to feel cat fur again, but petting a cat who is not Eddie does not fill the massive Eddie-sized hole in my heart. 

And, oh yeah, the check engine light came on again. So, if I don’t see you here on this blog next Sunday, I’m stuck somewhere on I-25 or I-10 in the desert between Albuquerque and Tucson. I'd be obliged if you would send a posse.

Every moment is a new adventure

It's 449 miles between here and Albuquerque, a drive of approximately six and a half hours, or more like eight hours, the way I drive. I drive like my father, who coincidentally would have turned ninety-five today. Happy birthday, Pop. Your legacy lives on. I think of you whenever a semitruck blows me off the road. Well, what's the rush, right? I have one pace.

I'm driving to Albuquerque to cat-sit for a friend who is going out of town for the holiday. I'm thinking of this as another house-sitting job. I'm practicing for my new career. Yep. Intentional houselessness, here I come. I think. We'll see. I still have nine months on my lease. After that, who knows? Housing costs are going up everywhere, it appears, and so are Medicare premiums. 

My tentative plan is to dry up and blow away. I've achieved Stage 1 of my plan: contract osteoporosis. (Is osteoporosis something one can contract? I'm not sure. Mom had it so it's probably genetic. Which means Stage 2 will be dementia.)

My Tucson friend E has a dream of creating a hot springs oasis in the desert, a place to grow old soaking in hot water. I'm on board with that dream. I'd happily volunteer to be pool boy. Girl. Whatever I am. When all the hair migrates from your legs to your upper lip, gender tends to blur.

I published my second novel this week. Sorry I can't tell you what it is because this is an anonymous blog. Note to self: In the future, if you want to publicize your accomplishments, don't be anonymous. 

When I get back to Tucson, I have some medical and dental tasks on my calendar. It's not a surprise. I turned sixty-five and the grand vista of Medicare opened up before me. Over the past few years, I postponed my healthcare needs while I orbited my mother, knowing there would one day be a reckoning, and that reckoning has come.  

Is it true that we don't fall apart until we achieve the goal—then we relax and let go and everything falls apart? If that is a thing, then I am in trouble. I kept things together for five years, getting closer and closer to my own personal abyss as my mother inched closer to hers. (No, I did not push her off the cliff, although I thought about it, usually when I was mopping up her messes.) Now she's gone, and now it looks like the edge of my own cliff is crumbling under my feet. Maybe it's more like taking a used car to the mechanic. Fix one thing, get ready to fix everything. I got one tooth pulled and smithereens! 

What does smithereens look like? Thanks for asking. It's a systemic slow-motion mildly tragic disaster.  

My bone marrow, in its quest for sustenance, has apparently cannibalized my muscles, so now I'm a breakable stick with flaccid funbags. My joy at fitting into my old non-stretch Levi's has pretty much evaporated, because the pants no longer support my droopy butt. Now I look like an old baggy version of Mr. Green Jeans. I predict a hip replacement in my future, if I don't fall down and break them both first. 

My hair is falling out pretty much everywhere except my nose and upper lip. I have the beginnings of cataracts. I can't see well enough to pluck the whiskers from my upper lip but I can see my mother in the mirror just fine. This week, I think I somehow managed to contract a hernia. Is that a thing? Germs are everywhere, who knows, hernias could be, too. I wear my mask at the store, but hernias could be spewing out through the ventilation system, how would I know, until I bust a gut lifting my grocery bags into the car? I blame politics. 

On the bright side, I went for a bike ride on the bike path with my Tucson friend E. Luckily there weren't many up hills and down dales; thus, I managed to pedal the whole way and back without falling in the Rillito River or getting bit by a Gila monster. I thought there was a better than fifty-fifty chance either my brain would give out or my body would give up, but neither one came to pass. Once again, I discover I am capable of more than I thought. I am not a quitter in most things, but sometimes I give up on myself too soon.

Well, it's not time to give up yet. However, if dementia is in the cards for me, I have a plan. I hope it is a long distance in the future, because the plan is pretty vague at this point. The plan depends on many factors, few of which are in my control. However, I think it will involve hot springs, warm blue skies, good friends, something tasty to drink, and a few magical pills. 

Meanwhile, I have miles to go, people to enjoy, stories to write, and places to see. Until I reach the end of the road, the road trip continues. 

On becoming a rock star

Have fun staying poor. Apparently that is a meme in the bitcoin world, a member of which I am not, in case you were wondering. Selling virtual art through nonfungible tokens seems like a Faustian bargain. Artists deserve to be paid for their work, yes, maybe. But do we have to sacrifice the health and well-being of the planet (and humankind) in the process? Maybe we need to redefine what we consider art. For example, artists have spent countless hours trying to replicate the phenomenon of sunlight on a lake. Now that art can be turned into an NFT, thanks to the massive computing power facilitated by coal-fired power plants and natural gas, is that really what we should do? What if, instead of auctioning off NFTs of sunlight on a lake, we simply appreciated the actual sunlight on a lake? Just a thought.

I don't have plans to create NFTs. I am on a mission to prove to myself it is possible to have fun staying poor. In nine months, I will be moving from the Bat Cave. I don't know yet where I am going, I just know that this is not the place to stay for another year. I am reframing my experience as a rock star tour, which means I'm some kind of rock star. Stay tuned to find out what kind.

I can hear you saying, rock star tour! But Carol, what is that? Thanks for asking. You know how musicians go on the road with their music? They start out sleeping in Volkswagen vans, occasional motels, and decrepit cab-over RVs and eventually graduate to 40-foot long, 36-ton Prevost mansions on wheels? They travel from town to town, stage to stage, building community and selling CDs? Right? I don't have a community or a CD to sell, but that's okay. You gotta start somewhere. In about nine months, I'll be starting my rock star tour. 

I've got the van, and this week, it's running well, no lights clamoring for attention, no bells clanging in my face. I drove it to Tempe this week to fetch a cheap mattress from IKEA. It was great. The two-hour drive going north was blocked by a traffic jam a few miles from my exit and I didn't even mind. The air was warm, the desert mountains were beautiful, and the radio played oldies from the 60s and 70s. Returning south was even better. I sang aloud until the station faded to static, feeling happy for the first time in a long time. I like the Bat Cave, despite the little dudes, but it doesn't feel like home. I'm just passing through. 

I get the feeling I'm not the only one. Tucson feels like a temporary town, as if it were built for filming a western and will be dismantled after the shooting wraps. Many of the homes here in the west part of the city (at least along the main thoroughfares) are trailer homes, parked in communities on land that belongs to absentee landlords. By definition, these abodes are temporary. Big Tonka Toy trucks move these prefab buildings out of one park and into another. The "homeowners" own the trailer but not the land it sits on, which is how landowners get rich. These landlord landowners farm out the landlording to property management companies, who get rich by pandering to owners and exploiting tenants. 

Some mobile home parks are like little Disneyland villages. The roads are paved, the homes are painted in appropriate desert colors and lined up neatly to the grid, the palms and saguaros are trimmed. White gravel front yards shine in the sun, decorated with ceramic figurines and pinwheels. The main clue to quality is the presence of an iron gate across the entrance to the park.

Most mobile home parks here on the west side look like they were settled by a caravan of squatters running on fumes. They parked their vintage Airstreams in haphazard rows and let the tires go flat. These parks are a mixture of abandoned RVs, travel trailers, and mobile homes arranged randomly as if placed by a blind crane operator. There are no gates or yards. In some cases, there are no roads, just paths of dirt and dust barely wide enough for a pickup truck. Awnings are bent or missing. Windows are broken and patched with tape. Trees are scarce. Some of the little travel trailers look like they are one monsoon away from blowing into Cochise County. 

You can tell who has money. The residents who live in the pristine mobile home parks head north for the summer. Someone picks up their mail and flushes their toilets. The lifers are the ones living in old travel trailers that will never travel again. They are stuck here year-round; summer or winter, going nowhere. 

Life is a temporary condition. Moving on is a time-honored human endeavor. I'm warming to the idea that I am a temporary resident of a temporary town. Blowing through in slow motion. Pausing for a year to savor the wildness of this place, and then letting the wind blow me someplace else. Fun, eh? How many people get to pretend to be rock stars? I'm thanking the luck that birthed me in this place and time. Not everyone has the privilege of choosing how and when they leap into the abyss. 

Creating a new reality

Darkness falls fast in the desert after the sun sets. Twilight doesn't linger. During the day, I imagine the little dudes snoring in their cozy nests under my kitchen countertop. I wash my dishes with an eye open but I feel pretty certain the kitchen is mine. Until dark.

In the evening (I imagine), the little eyes flutter open, the tiny mouths yawn, the little wings buzz, the skinny legs flex and stretch. I imagine the little dudes are eyeing the exits, which are entrances onto the vast stage of my kitchen counter. They probably poke each other: Who is willing to stick out an antenna? You go first. No, you go.

I have laid down some serious napalm in the form of insecticide spray. I have mined the place with sneaky bait traps. My last line of defense is diatomaceous earth spread around nooks and crannies, around the baseboards, and around the bed like a barricade of garlic. 

I don't think the little dudes drink blood, but I think of them as tiny vampires. They are fast and almost invisible if they pose in place. As soon as an audacious dude makes a move, my anxious eye spies it, my hand reaches for the spray bottle of rubbing alcohol, and in sixty seconds, the little dude is on its back, antennae wilted, tiny legs pistoning in the air. 

I don't like killing things. I'm sure I'm going to hell. But my consolation is the little dudes will all get there before me, if I have anything to do with it. I keep my spray bottle near to hand the way some angry people tote their AR-47s. Anything that moves in my kitchen is fair game. I don't care what you are.

This apartment building was built in the mid-1970s, and I think the countertops are original to the 1960s. The architects got a good deal on this stuff, I'm guessing, most likely because it fails to fulfill all the performance obligations of a mediocre kitchen countertop. First, the white background is speckled with dark irregularly shaped and placed spots of various sizes, scattered tightly like a reverse field of stars. Some speckles might even be a little glittery, but most are some shade of dark gray, if you don't count the handful of light brown cigarette burns left by former tenants. What this means in terms of the battle raging for kitchen supremacy is that it looks like the countertops are teeming with bugs. (The speckled counters surround the bathroom sink too but I haven't seen any little dudes there yet. Not much to eat there, unless they get a hankering for Colgate.) 

Second, the speckles aren't flat, they are just slightly raised, almost embossed into the surface, which I'm guessing is some sort of particle board, judging by how it is crumbling underneath the edges around the sink. Particle board and moisture are natural enemies, and moisture always wins. This slightly raised surface means I can never be sure the counters are clean, not without nuking them with bleach, which is really bad for the air quality in the Bat Cave. (Did I mention the Bat Cave has only one window?)

If I were to try to see the battle from the bugs point of view, I would say, wow, how lucky are we to live so close to a smorgasbord of aromas and flavors! Talk about the promised land. The embossed nature of the surface gives us good purchase for skittering. The plethora of crumbs and tidbits and drips left behind by a human with bad eyesight means some fine midnight brunches for us. And if the sneaky human flicks on the light and catches us manging around the stove, well, we can either run for our lives or freeze behind something and hope we don't get caught. How fun is that! It's a little dangerous at times—we lost Uncle Manny last week, and Junior Number Twelve hasn't been seen in a while. But what a life of luxury!

From my human point of view, I am constantly creeped out after dark. I didn't see any action for a few nights and naively thought I might have won the kitchen wars, but then last night I saw two full-sized dudes lurking around the so-called clean dishes, and I realize I'm fooling myself. You can't win this kind of war, not even if you raze the place to the ground. It's like I'm living on stage in an auditorium. During the day, the audience is snoozing, head to toe, spooning in their nests among their multitudes of eggs. As soon as darkness falls, every seat in the auditorium is filled. They are watching me with unblinking eyes, waiting for me to shut off the light. Soon they come creeping out of their hidey-holes to dance on the stage.

My eyes see the speckles on the kitchen counter, bug out, and kick my brain into fight or flight mode. I peer under things and between things, pointing a flashlight, pounding the counter. If I see something move, I launch a frenzied attack. I spray the bug and watch it kick until it expires, feeling just slightly sad and guilty. If it falls into a pile of diatomaceous earth, I let it lie there, covered in white dust, desiccating, a constant reminder to its brethren: This is what could happen to you. Each dead bug is my equivalent of a head on a pike. I don't think it is working as a deterrent, though, and it's really more like I don't want to clean up a bunch of little white-dusted corpses. It's just gross.

I'm starting the downsizing process again. I'm putting essentials in big see-through plastic bins. I know, plastic! Argh. Cardboard boxes are getting filled up with clutter and taken to the thrift store. Cardboard and clutter, both good hiding places for bugs, are now verboten. I'm getting as much up off the floor as I can. I moved the bed six inches from the wall and surrounded it with a dusting of diatomaceous earth. I sleep like a princess on an island. 

While I'm washing dishes and listening to my refrigerator breathing like Darth Vader twenty hours a day, I'm reflecting on my current housing situation. I'm trying to make home not be a geographical place but more like a state of mind. I don't have experience with this. My sister the world traveler does, I think. She learned early how to pack light and settle loosely. Me, wherever I go, I'm always lugging a sewing machine, a power drill, a bunch of art supplies, and ton of other stuff . . . and that's after downsizing and moving to Tucson. I can pare down some more, but at some point, I will reach the dreaded moment where I must let go of all my security blankets and pack what is left into my car. I have until the end of next August to find my new state of mind.