Fight for your right to be stupid

Actually, we don’t have to fight hard to be stupid. Everyone is doing it, in some shape or form. If you don’t mind a little weak-willed nattering from a few bleeding hearts, you can pretty much do and say whatever you want. Hardly anyone will push back on even the most egregious act of stupidity, the most ridiculous assertion, especially if it happens to align with their worldview. It’s sad that women may give up their bodily autonomy, and it’s tragic that our school kids buy our freedom to be stupid with their lives, but that is how it goes in the wealthiest country on earth. I’ve said it before and recent events seem to support me, humans are too stupid to live. The demise of the human species can’t come too soon. The planet will be much better off without us.

Meanwhile, my heart keeps beating, sometimes hiccupping, sometimes swooping, the ticker takes a licking and keeps on ticking. It’s working harder than it should, though, which has precipitated a condition with an interesting name: a predominantly opening snap. My primary care provider offered me a choice: (a) get on medication or (b) have a heart attack or stroke. Nice of her to offer me a choice.

I made my choice. Despite the terror and sorrow of living, I still want to live. I want to see how things turn out, until it’s curtains for me. Therefore, in a brazen bid for survival, I’m getting medication to lower my blood pressure.

That brings my total medication list up to three prescription meds. It feels a like a moral failing. I think I should be able to just tough my way through it. And I could try, it’s my right and privilege to be stupid, remember. Curtains might come sooner than statistically expected, but nobody lives forever. Then I think of my departed maternal parental unit, who was taking a dozen meds and didn’t think anything of it. Maybe it was the dementia, but she seemed really at peace with the reality of her failing health. She bemoaned aging, saying things like getting old is not for wimps, but she always took her meds. The only time she really got pissed off was when we took away her car keys.

I wonder who will be brave enough to take away my car keys?

In other news, I’m feeling a bit lonely these days. I haven’t seen a little dude for almost a week. Maybe they’ve all gone north for the summer. Maybe spraying poison weekly convinced them this is not a good hotel and they’ve packed the aunties and kids into the minivan and headed up Mt Lemmon. Nice to imagine. I hope the reason I’m not seeing many little dudes, alive or dead, is that I’ve killed them, but pride and hubris go before an invasion. They could be watching from the baseboards and cupboards, waiting to strike. They could be planning World War III, Bat Cave edition.

I am starting to get organized for my move back to the Trailer. Notice, it’s the Trailer now. I’m giving it the proper-noun status it deserves. It’s not really a trailer, it’s a mobile home (also known as a manufactured home, depending on when it was built). It’s a single-wide thing, long and narrow, made of fake wood paneling, Fiberglas, and plastic, and wide metal awnings on both sides to ward off the blazing sun. It’s utilitarian, clean, and safe, and it will be a good place to hunker down and figure out what comes next.

Intermittently deteriorating

Like an automaton whose internal clock is winding down, I find all systems are no longer go. My brain likes to think it is in charge. It’s not. In this cowardly new world after Medicare, it’s every body part for itself. My parts have discovered they are autonomous and thus emancipated, which means they are no longer communicating with each other, or even with me, sometimes. Each part seems to have taken the position of, it’s my system and I’ll go if I want to.

Is it possible that past a certain age, when one’s life is notoriously small, there’s nothing left to talk about except one’s physical ailments? So-called normal people with normal-sized lives can always pull out the grandkid pictures. I don’t have any of those. I have lots of photos of my dead cat, my dead mother (before they died, I mean, ew), and my distant siblings whose lives are so much more interesting than mine. In fact, the photos take up a significant amount of room on a 2-TB external hard drive. What am I going to do with all these photos?

Digital property is a thing nowadays! Did you know? If you are a prolific and greedy creator of digital files, like me, some dispensation for the mountain of bits and bytes needs to be made in your last will and testament. So I hear. I had started writing my will, and everything was going swimmingly until I hit the digital property question. We will not regret the past? Right.

Yesterday I spent much of the day organizing and transferring my many thousands of electronic documents to two external hard drives. It quickly became apparent that I need more storage. I need another device just to hold my photos, something that can be mailed to one of my siblings, as if they would ever care about my photos of Tucson. I need another device to hold my scanned and photographed artwork, which I would mail to the hapless soul who has agreed to be my digital property executor, my kind friend in Phoenix who doesn’t really know what she signed up for.

I need to sort through all this crap. This is overwhelming. It’s bad enough I took a billion photos, bad enough I made all this art and then had the temerity to think it might be worth documenting so I scanned and photographed every stupid painting and drawing before I threw them all in the trash. What have I learned? This lunacy is the opposite of humility.

There’s possibly not a moment to waste.

This week I invited a housecall doctor from my insurance company to enter the Bat Cave. I can hear you yelling, Carol, what the hell? I know. I was aware of the risks. However, I was also aware of the benefits. I saw firsthand how beneficial having another opinion was for my mother. I sat in on her housecall sessions. I credit those nurses with keeping her independent in her condo much longer than we would have expected. They suggested eliminating several drugs and adding a memory drug, which I think slowed the progression of her dementia.

Having a second set of eyes on me, even if those eyes represent the insurance company, is not a bad thing, especially given my not totally unfounded feeling that my primary care nurse-practitioner person doesn’t have time for me and my tiny health crises. Osteoporosis is not a health crisis until I fall and break a bone. Vertigo is not a real thing if the healthcare provider can’t see it to measure it. It’s a well-known phenomenon that people who complain of health issues that can’t be measured are assumed to be insane. I’m lucky my skin is white. It could be so much more fraught.

Anyway, the insurance company makes housecalls once a year for free. The appointment was for 9:00 a.m. He was late. At 9:20 he called and apologized and said he could be there at noon, if I could meet then. I said sure. At noon he called and said it would be closer to 1:00 p.m. I said fine, call me if you get lost.

At 1:20 p.m., there was a knock on my door. I opened the door to a real live M.D., a big, blonde-haired, teddy bear-shaped guy wearing pale blue scrubs, a surgical mask, purple gloves, and an ID card around his neck. I offered him a choice of chairs: Captain Eddie’s office chair on wheels or my grandmother’s straight-backed sewing chair with a pillow to hide the frayed seat fabric. He chose my grandmother’s chair, after lifting the pillow, probably to see if it was okay to sit on it. I watched him lift the pillow. With masks on, so much nuance is lost in nonverbal communication, but we muddle along.

Actually, not much muddling happened. He was completely professional, friendly, not overly chatty but interested and patient. He asked questions, I answered them truthfully. I had done my homework. I could tell him the dates of my vaccines, my shingles shots, my latest mammogram, my most recent flu shot . . . all the dates and major events. There were a few things he didn’t bring up and a few things I didn’t mention. Then he took my blood pressure and listened to my heart.

“You have a little bit of a heart murmur,” he said. No one had told me that before, but given that my father had some sort of heart defect, which probably precipitated the heart attack that killed him, I wasn’t totally surprised.

“It’s a small one, a 2 on a 6-point scale,” he said. Oh, I thought, only a two. Whew.

“And your blood pressure is very high. Do you have white coat syndrome?”

I was actually feeling pretty happy that he hadn't asked me to pee in a cup. I don’t pee on command very well these days. I am not aware that I’m twitchy around doctors but who knows. Like I said, my parts aren’t really conversing.

So you see my urgency at getting my digital property squared away, right? I could be nearing the end. Odds are, it won’t be soon, but you never know. My cousin Dave ended up on the roof at age 61.

I don’t have to engage in proper file management. I could just say eff-it and let someone else deal with the mess. Certainly, if I lollygag long enough, I won’t have to worry about anything. I just hope someone finds my dead body before I totally stink up the place. Although, here in the desert, we have a dry heat, which means I’ll probably be a pile of bone and desiccated fat cells by the time the landlord unlocks the door. Ew.

For some reason, I have a lot of anxiety over leaving a mess, to the point at which I find myself regretting my creative life. If I had a partner or lived near family, I could say, oops, sorry, and let go. But I’m alone here. Who will come into the Bat Cave and sort through my stuff? Who will box up my hard drives, my laptop, my cell phone, and mail them to my family? Who will recycle-bin  the gazillion photos from my gigantic solid state desktop-system hard drive? What crew of elves will erase the physical evidence of my presence on the planet? Who will hire said elves? There's no 1-800-LF4-HIRE. I checked. (Although, hey, you can work as an elf at the North Pole for minimum wage.) 

It’s not something I would want to dump on anyone, let alone someone I love. My family cannot afford to fly down here to take on the task, especially during COVID. My scant handful of Arizona friends might be able to help in their free time, but they are all busy leading rich lives filled with meaning and purpose. I admit, I made a mess. I didn’t mean to, but I did. Who will clean it up when I’m gone? I need to figure it out before I die. 

Anyhoo, I sent a message to my primary on Friday. If I don’t hear back within a few days, I’ll see if I can find another practitioner in the healthcare system who is taking new patients. Meanwhile, I’m sorting through the files. I may decide to chuck it all. It’s either all precious, or none of it is precious. In a few years, I bet nobody will be using a USB external hard drive. They will probably have computer chips implanted in their brains and operate their Netflix via a skin-based control panel, like a modern Dick Tracy. Either technology will have moved on, or the death of democracy and the environment will have rendered civilization unviable. We are a blip.

The human Roomba

Greetings from the desert. It’s been another typical week of chasing cockroaches, editing dissertations, dodging bullets, and poking pencils in my ears to block out the boom cars. Ho hum. I call myself the human Roomba. I aimlessly wander half-blind through my activities each day, picking up cosmic detritus. At the end of the day, I swallow my misgivings, sluice off the sweat, and park myself on my foam rubber mattress to recharge my batteries in preparation for another aimless day of wandering. What is the purpose? To get things done. What is the point? What is the point to life? To persist, until it’s time to stop.

Summer is on the horizon. We’ve hit triple digits here in Tucson, not the earliest on record for the season, but not the latest. During the day, creatures lay low, unless they have air-conditioned SUVs, then they are out barreling from Target to Lowe’s to Fry’s in search of I don’t know what. Company, I guess. 

Covid loves company. I still prefer to isolate, and when I go into a public indoor space, I still wear my trusty KN95. I’m one of the few. I don’t care. They can’t see my face, which means I’m invisible. Their eyes slide right off my mask as if my entire body is not there. That’s not new for me. Menopause precipitated my secret power of invisibility.

Speaking of growing old, I went to an ophthalmologist this week to see how my cataracts are progressing. Nicely, it appears, thanks for asking. A slow-growing problem, too soon to worry.

I sat in the waiting area with a bunch of other elderly folks (middle of a week day). Most of them watched the big screen TV. I reminisced about sitting in a similar waiting room with my mother, reassuring her every five minutes that yes, they would eventually call her name. She hated to wait. Time waiting in a waiting room must seem endless when you have dementia.

I got my prescription updated. I hope it will be accurate, given that my breath kept leaking out over my mask and fogging up the lens machine. Is A better? Or is B better? I don't know, who can say. Next, I endured the stinging yellow eye drops and didn't feel any of the pokes and prods. Then an energetic masked man stormed into the tiny exam room, peered into my soul through my dilated eyeballs, and said hmmm, come back in four months. I paid for my prescription and I stumbled past the oldsters and out the door into the blazing desert sunshine, mostly blind, wearing two layers of sunglasses. There should be a law that you can't drive in direct sunlight when your eyes are dilated. It’s a miracle I made it home without running my car off the road. I was useless until the drops wore off, six hours later. 

Speaking of useless, early Wednesday morning (4:05 am) I was awakened abruptly by the sound of gunshots. They sounded very close to the building. After a moment of panic, I rolled onto the rug, hoping I wasn't disrupting the party of roaches entertaining their young ones there. (Save the children! Run for the corners!) I grabbed my phone and called 9-1-1. Or I tried to call 9-1-1.

After this experience, I now know what happens when you have a VOIP cell phone provider. I have an area code 503 number. Thus, my call was bounced to Portland. The nice man on the phone tried to put me through to Tucson police but dialed the wrong number, then dialed another number (“no one seems to be answering”), before finally connecting me with Tucson Dispatch, who took the info and said, “Why didn’t you just call 9-1-1?”

After five minutes of kneeling on the floor, I was over it. It was clear that nobody was coming out to investigate. There had been no more shots and I heard nothing outside in the parking lot. I’d stopped shaking, and I could now see the humor in the situation. I hung up the phone and went back to bed.

In the morning, I checked the news: Homicide a block away. I read a little more about the incident over the following days. Some guy shot at his on-again-off-again girlfriend and her friend as they were driving away from him in a car. They thought he had a gun, and turns out, they were right. That happened several blocks south of here. 

He didn't realize his shots had nailed his girlfriend in the neck. He followed them in his own car. When they stopped, I guess he saw the blood and thought his girlfriend had been fighting with her friend in the car. So he shot at the friend. I think those were the shots that woke me up. His girlfriend died in the car a block up the street. Somebody called it in at 6:00 am.

Police caught the guy. He’s 21. His girlfriend was 18.

Meanwhile, there’s a lunar eclipse tonight. I’m working on my last will and testament. No connection, just thought I’d mention it. 

A not-so-modest proposal

Happy Mother's Day. If you aren't one, you had one, and even if you hated her guts, you can't deny you got birthed. It's not for me to say whether that is a good thing or a bad thing. All I know is, I exist, thanks to my mother. 

I got lucky in the mother department. As moms go, she was a pretty good egg. She had a challenge raising four kids who barged into her life in stairstep fashion and destroyed her independence and autonomy. A product of her times, she had little choice. In her day, after you got married, the job was all about cooking dinner and birthing babies. She did what she could to eke out a life in the thin spaces around ours, but it's no wonder she was a cranky resentful person most of my childhood. 

Which could be why I opted to remain childless. I saw the physical and psychological damage four self-centered kids could do. 

Later, after we all left home, she got busy joining book clubs, leading knitting groups, volunteering at the library, and growing green beans. For such a shrimp, she had strength in abundance. In nursing school, they called her Mighty Mouse. I used to be proud of her muscles, like, my mom, the superhero. 

Now she's gone, and I'm old, tracking in her footsteps, seeing her face in the mirror. I realize how lucky I was to be born in that time and place. To suddenly appear in that place, in that time, with that skin color—man, how lucky could a fetus get? It could have been so much worse. I grimace to see people acting all entitled, as if they somehow had any control over being born in a particular place and time. Stupid sods.

Speaking of stupid sods, you know what I'm going to say, so I'm not going to say it. Instead, I'm going to go out on a probably somewhat distasteful limb here and wave at you from the short branches as I state my support for a new policy, sort of my version of a modern-day modest proposal. I call it Mandatory Abortions. 

Yes, it is what it sounds like. No more babies. Not for you, not for me, not for anyone. I've come to the conclusion that humans are too stupid to reproduce, and it's time to shut the whole thing down. 

I once tried to give a speech in front of a large audience, a long time ago, like, in the early 1990s, when I was in college (the second time around). It would have been a funny speech. It made me laugh, anyway. Unfortunately, I arrogantly assumed I didn't need any notes. Thus, I forgot my speech partway through the delivery. I don't remember much of the speech, but I do remember the feeling of utter, abject, stomach-dropping horror at the realization that my memory had failed me and my words were gone. I still get cold sweats when I think about it, proving the adage that fear of public speaking is possibly the worst of all human fears.

The opening line of the speech, though, was something about babies being a plague upon the land.

Besides a surfeit of babies, I could point to a few other plagues upon the land, but I don't want to get too nuanced. My brain is pretty much locked in an either/or mode these days. I'm either alive or I'm dead. People are either good or they're bad. I'm half-blind and not seeing shades of gray very well, and shades of gray aren't safe anymore anyway, or so I have heard, not that I would know. One of the plagues, I can't help but notice, is men. I read something from a historian about the origins of Mother's Day. I had no idea that the day was originally proposed as a response to the stupidity of men killing each other off in the Civil War. Unfortunately, that was before women's suffrage, so . . . back to the kitchen.

For some of us, it's the kitchen, for some of us, it's the burqa. It never seems to end. My mother didn't get to create her own life until after us kids grew up and went away. I witnessed her anger and frustration—I was partly to blame for it. As a young adult, I was observant, and far too selfish, to fall into the trap of birthing babies. And how lucky I was to be able to cavort through my child-bearing years under the kindly umbrella of Roe v. Wade! 

In case you find my not-so-modest proposal appalling, remember, I'm old, this is my blog, I'm a smartass, and I can say what I want to. I've done my part to end my line of DNA. If it is any comfort to you, nobody will follow me on the family tree. The bud stops here.

Going in circles

Howdy Blogbots. I'm a day late on this post and utterly shocked that anyone noticed. I am grateful to all six-sometimes-seven of you for caring enough to read this self-centered miasmic pile of palaver. Blogspot doesn't know what to make of me. I used to write about career college education. Then I wrote diatribes on dissertating. Then I fell into the black hole created by the baby planet nucleus I fondly called my maternal parental unit. I wasn't sure we would make it out of that black hole alive. Mom didn't, but I did. In fact, 2021 ejected me from my humdrum life like shooting a clown out of a cannon. Whoosh. Suddenly I plopped down in Tucson. A year later, I'm still dizzy and going in circles.

I really do go in circles. I have a cosmic hitch in my git-along. Walking, thinking, driving, navigating, it seems I frequently retrace my steps. Is this an artifact of aging? The glitch is most obvious when I'm driving. I've completely given up the idea that I can get anywhere in a straight line. I would like to say I'm a lazy bumblebee, wandering from flower to flower, immersed in the beauty of the present, but the truth is, I'm always half-sure I'm going to drive off a cliff at any moment, that the road will suddenly end in a great big sign—Road Closed—and I'll be miles up a dirt road with no place to turn around.

I've accepted that I'm not a brave person. Notwithstanding the fact that twice I've packed up and moved everything I own to a new town, sight unseen. That isn't exactly a wimpy thing to do, I have to admit. Maybe it's more a continuous case of mild terror while I'm doing that risky thing. Driving in circles, certain I will end up in Tijuana when I was aiming for Tucson, muttering the Serenity Prayer constantly under my breath, and squinting at a map I screenshot and printed from Google Maps (won't ever do that again; I almost ended up in Salt Lake City). 

The funny thing is, it doesn't seem to matter how many detours I take along the way, I always seem to arrive at my destination in the end, and almost always on time if not early. I have no idea how it happens. It's like my brain is in an alternate universe, bracing for disaster, but my body (and car) are chugging along, homing in on the end of the journey, one mile at a time.

The circles in my brain are a little different but no less confounding. I am aware that my brain goes in circles but there's no destination and I seem to be orbiting nothing. There's nothing in the middle. I keep trying to imagine what giant gas planet, what amazing project, what essential person will appear to inspire me to jumpstart my mojo with some ambition. I come up empty.

That doesn't mean I sit around moping. I have a list of tasks and I get them done. For the past couple days, I've been editing a dissertation for a candidate at the education college I ostensibly work for . . . I'm more like a contract editor. I still haven't figured out how the workflow flows. It's very similar to working for the editing agency, which I still do from time to time. Projects appear in my inbox. I work on them and send them back. Money eventually appears. Magic. I don't know yet how much I will be paid for the 30,000 word dissertation I submitted last night. It's good to have some surprises once in a while, don't you think? Daily life can get so stale when you think everything is planned out.

Maybe that is why I go in circles. My brain is subconsciously trying to entertain me. Would I wither from boredom if I always knew the correct route to my destination? Hm. I always assume my mind is trying to kill me. 

The doves are once again wandering around and proclaiming "Hang up and drive!" and "Live and let live!" Outside my window, lizards soak up the sun and then vanish so fast, I am not even sure they were there. The neighbors bring their boombox outside and enjoy the warm evening air. Someone told me that is a cultural thing—meaning, that is a Hispanic cultural thing. I would feel more tolerant if they were playing mariachi or Banda music. I like that stuff. I am getting really sick of hearing top-40 rap songs. Yet I smile and wave and say hello to their little girl as she pedals unsteadily under my window on her pink two-wheeler. Then I go back to hunting my skittish little roommates with a spray bottle of alcohol. 

Four more months in the Bat Cave.