Join me in the silence

I remember when my family used to visit my grandfather's cattle ranch in the high desert east of Prineville, Oregon. For a city kid, the silence of the open country was profound. At the time, I wasn't sure I liked it. Jets were tiny white dots in the sky, speeding toward Portland International Airport. They left contrails but made no sound. 

Living in silence in an age of constant noise can be disturbing. At times I feel very alone and disconnected if I don't have music or talk radio playing in the background. Other times, I sink into the silence like sliding into a warm bath. Mm. Bath. Haven't had one of those in a while. I digress.

Camping in the high desert of Flagstaff, Arizona, gives me a similar feeling. On a Sunday morning, nobody is up. I'm the only one walking along the gravel road, heading to who knows where, someplace I've never been. A few cars pass, kicking up great clouds of dust (implanting seeds of my future resentments). Before long, more cars, more people, and wonder of wonders, the sound of gunshots. Yep. There's a shooting range not far away.

Nothing shatters silence like gunshots. 

This is mining country. The mining companies moved on and left craters, half craters, slag heaps of gravel. The half craters make really good shooting ranges. I made the mistake of driving in that direction, seeking a better cell signal. I found the cell signal next to the shooting range. Two men were there, one supervising, and one sitting at a folding table aiming a long gun at a target some yards away. Blam! Then a few minutes later, blam! This morning was quiet, but around 9:00 a.m. the gunshots began again.

So there's that. 

On the bright side, I met a guy who addressed me as "neighbor," and we talked for a bit. His name is John. I hope I remember that. He lives in a trailer, drives a red car, rides a bike, goes shirtless, wears a Christian cross on a necklace, and has a mother who worries about his well being. Fellow neighbor, fellow nomad.

It's beautiful in the forest. Last night I dreamed it was on fire.

Walking in the early morning sunshine in a timber forest in the high desert puts me in the here and now. It's the safest place to be when one is homeless. Living today for a better past is futile. Living in the wreckage of the future is crazy making. The only safe place is the present. My demented mother was a Zen master. I learned a lot from witnessing her decline. 

I don't know if I'll live long enough to see my own decline into dementia, and even if I do, there's a good chance there will be no facility to take care of me until I die. My retirement plan is fentanyl. I can only hope my brain holds out long enough to score some and my courage holds out long enough for me to take it.

On that sober note, welcome to a new confounding fresh hell. There's room in the hand basket for you, in case you want some company on your own hellish descent.

High-class homelessness

After weeks of hiding out in Portland, living in parking lots of public parks during the day and trolling Portland streets for safe places to park at night, I finally hit my limit and left town. The weather sucked, as it often does in early summer. The beach was great, but eventually the nice casino security people would have told me to move on, can't stay there all summer, sorry. Portland was not welcoming me. I'd been to all the medical appointments, picked up all the meds, retrieved the junk mail from my brother . . . There was no reason to hang around a city where I was not welcome.

So I hit the road. From Portland I drove through Bend, then east toward Salt Lake City, then south Utah to Cedar City. I stayed at rest areas of questionable quality and a very nice Walmart parking lot, until finally I found a nice forest road just north of Flagstaff, and that is where I am right now as I'm typing this blog post. 

On my road trip, I was reminded of the dubious power of being the "pilot car"on a two-lane highway with few passing lanes. The so-called pilot car is the car that is going slower than the rest of the pack. I can count on one hand the number of times I actually passed a vehicle going slower than me. One was a truck going up a steep hill. One was a truck towing a camper. He passed me later.  I'm slow on the climb, but I'm speedy on the descent. Gravity is still working, even if other things in life aren't.

Like any society, homeless people have a hierarchy. You could say we have a class system. The lowest class homeless person is the person (usually a man) who curls up under a tree on a public sidewalk and throws a blanket over his head. He could be dead, he could be drunk. Odds are he would prefer not to be sleeping on a sidewalk. 

At the other end of the homeless continuum are the people who live in shiny new Sprinter vans, tow enormous fifth-wheel trailers with new Dodge Ram pickups, or drive new Class C camper vans, the ones with the bed over the cab. I would add the folks who drive giant Prevosts but if they can afford a luxury motor coach, they most likely own several houses, so I would not classify them as homeless. They may have been bitten by the wandering bug but they always have a home base to return to when they get tired of driving their entire house along a narrow two-lane highway. 

In between these two extremes are the rest of us, everything from tents and tarps pitched along the freeway verges to broken down motorhomes to minivans and sedans. There are a lot of unhoused people out there. If you know what to look for, they are easy to spot. The problem with stealth camping in a city, as I've previously discussed, is that homeowners (in the nicer areas) know how to spot a car that is not part of the neighborhood. In the bad parts of town, nobody cares, which is why any car can be a target for gas thieves. I digress.

At the Walmart parking lot, a woman pulling a little trailer with a relatively new SUV parked near me. She had a dog with her. She went shopping and came back with a load of stuff. The wind had kicked up, and a man came over to help her with the loading. He told her he was living in his truck and pointed to a nice pickup parked nearby. He asked where she was headed. She said nowhere, she lived in Cedar City. He said he did, too. 

Where do I fall along the unhoused continuum? Glad you asked. Compared to the street sleepers and tent dwellers, I'm definitely high-class homeless. I have a relatively new, mostly presentable soccer mom minivan. I have everything I need with me. I know how to keep myself clean, fix food, fetch water, and take out the trash. I practice leave no trace, I don't wave my arms and yell like a crazy person, I'm nice to dogs and their walkers . . . In short, I try to be a good member of the community.

And still, I'm not welcome. Homelessness is a crime in many places. It's not illegal to park your car overnight on Portland city streets but you'd better not be sleeping in it. Kind of like, you can buy a condo but you'd better not paint it bright pink. There are rules made by cities to keep residents safe. Many of these rules make sense. You don't want someone setting the neighborhood on fire just because they felt like making a decent cup of coffee instead of buying the swill at McDonald's. Homeless people are not considered residents. They are eyesores, pedophiles, whores, beggars, and thieves. They clearly made bad choices somewhere along the way, or else they would not be homeless. 

Humans are social creatures. Whether I want to admit it or not, I feel better when I'm parked near (but not too near) other people who are living the nomadic lifestyle. Some choose it, some are forced into it, but whatever the reason, just like other members of a class, we find comfort in community. Most of us. There are always the ones who find the most remote campsites up the steepest, most rutted road and then drag a big log across the road and hang a sign that says "Space occupied, Keep the Eff Out!" Now that is an introvert.

I may have made some bad choices along the way, but one element working in my favor I had no control over: I got old enough to draw social security. If I did not have my paltry monthly allowance, I would be one of those tent dwellers, pushing my belongings in a stolen shopping cart, sleeping with one eye open, and waiting for the authorities to tell me to move on. I'm a lucky one. I can move on by choice.

My psychic friend says my situation will be changing soon, but she wasn't sure if it would get better or worse. Not sure how to react to that, so I will carry on and wait to see what fate brings me. Maybe housing is in my future. Maybe not. I think I mentioned I've started collecting stickers to put on my windows. No more hiding. I figured out I can buy adhesive sticker paper and waterproof markers to make my own stickers. If you have any design ideas, please feel free to email or text. Or leave a comment. I'm not sure the comment section on Google Blogger actually works, but you could try it.  

Meanwhile, the road trip continues. 

Relentless persistence

Sometimes when I'm walking around the reservoir at Mt. Tabor Park (my old neighborhood), I see an athlete. You wouldn't know she was an athlete just by looking at her. She's at least as old as I am, with saggy cheeks and crepe-skin knees. But after seeing her workout routine, I can only watch in awe.

Reservoir No. 6 is .56 miles around the perimeter. You can call it a half mile. The woman starts out with lunges. Not super deep, but lunges all the same, slowly and persistently, with bicep curls, all the way around the reservoir. How she keeps her balance, I have no idea. She makes a full circuit. 

She doesn't stop there. After a swig of water, she starts around again, this time with high knees. All the way around. She's not fast. I pass her multiple times as I stumble around, head down against the wind. I go counterclockwise. She goes clockwise. Each time I pass her, I feel like a colossal loser. 

After she finishes half a mile of high knees, she turns around and walks backwards, doing butt kickers. She checks behind her from time to time, so she doesn't run into anyone, but her backward glances are kind of pro forma. She can't go far off course. The reservoir is surrounded by a tall iron fence. Still, I wouldn't be surprised if she has eyes in the back of her head. I suspect she has god-like powers.

I walk around four times, just a regular head-down, try-to-stay-upright kind of walk.  Everytime we pass each other, I look at her, but she doesn't look at me. I can't read her expression. It's clear she is focused on the motion. 

Whenever I complain about my saggy butt and flabby thighs, I think of this athlete. I wonder about her story. Is she a marathon runner? I haven't seen her run. She's too thin to be a wrestler. Her bike shorts and T-shirt don't scream fashion risk taker. She's not taking video of herself, so she's not a YouTuber. What's her story?

My conclusion is, she's meditating. She's found a way to connect with something bigger than herself. I called her an athlete, but I could just as easily call her a Zen Master. A guru. A Yoda. I have a feeling if I could just get her to make eye contact, I would see a new way of being.

Meanwhile, I'm caught up in my own way of being, floundering through my days doing the next thing in front of me. The usual, you know: Working with my new PCP to find a medication that will settle my vestibular system. Keeping my car running. Learning how to use Amazon lockers. Waiting on waitlists for housing. Waking up at 4:00 a.m., vigilantly listening for gas thieves. Trying to stay under the radar so homeowners don't call the police to report an old lady  who has the temerity to sleep in her car outside their house. 

I'm really tired of hiding. I have started putting stickers on my car windows:  Artsy fartsy; Wild and free; Take the long way home, shortcuts miss the view; All cultures, beliefs, colors, sizes, ages, identities welcome; and my personal favorite, Jesus loves everyone you hate. I'm going to keep adding to my collection. If I get some money ahead, I will have my own designs printed. I have lots of ideas for stickers, mostly along the lines of How's my driving? Call 1-800-BiteMe.  

After I find out if my new med is going to kill me, I think I'll head east, back toward the high desert of Northern Arizona, where the nomads wait out the summer heat. I met a man at the protest yesterday, who said he loved Portland for its beauty, diversity, and energy. I nodded as if I agreed. No need to start a fight with a No Kings comrade, especially given the no-violence mandate. Besides, I don't need to explain or justify myself, although when cornered, that is my usual response. 

I don't trust my intuition. I believe Portland is not the place for me. I always knew I would leave. It still confounds me that everytime I left, I came back. When I moved to Tucson, I was ready to love the place. For four years, I tried. Eventually I realized Tucson was not the place for me either (see umpteen previous blog posts). 

The country is big. I've live in only big cities. Surely, somewhere in this country, there is a small place that feels right. Family and friends warn me that small town folks might not be like me. That's okay. All my friends are online.  

Having said all that, if my name comes up on a waitlist, I don't care where the place is. As long as it has hot water and no cockroaches, I'm saying yes.

Where is my tribe?

When I'm at the coast, I take long walks on the beach. I aim for the middle ground between soft dry and soggy wet. I walk in the early morning after coffee but before the fog burns off, before the wind kicks up. I have a lot of time to think while I walk, which has debatable value in terms of changing my housing situation. Eventually the endorphins infiltrate my brain and I get to the point where I just don't care anymore.  It's not a bad place to be, compared to living today for a better past or trying to control the wreckage of the future.

Being in the present moment has never come naturally to me, probably because I live my life in constant fear. Fear of what, you ask? Doesn't matter. Fear of everything. Now that I actually do have a lot of danger to face, I think I can say I come by my fear honestly. But nothing much has changed. The only time the fear eases up is when I enter the present moment. To get there, for me, takes about 2.5 miles. I never get to happiness, joy, or contentment, but on a good day, I can get to neutral. 

People I know do a lot to make peace with reality in the here and now. Some meditate, some go to special classes, some join groups and seek mindfulness together. I've never been much of a joiner, preferring to be on the periphery, watching, observing, not in the middle, not on center stage. I am sometimes dumfounded that I was a teacher for so long. I attribute my 10-year career as a college instructor to the revelation that as long as they were on their side of the table and I was on mine, everything would be fine.

As I have grown older, poorer, and sicker, my interest in being around others has waned. I want community, but I can't fake it anymore. 

Part of me wants to plaster my car with bumper stickers. Here are some possibilities:

• Not all who wander are lost. 
• Art is for everyone. 
• Tell your cat I said psspsspss. 
• Hearing impaired, dizzy, half-blind, ancient tired driver, please be patient. 
• If you can read this, come on in for coffee, enter through tailpipe. 
• Hey, NIMBYs, if you want to end homelessness in your neighborhood, increase the flow of fentanyl across the southern border. 
• I'm hungry, and your dog is looking pretty tasty right now. 
• Push if you think it will help; I could use the money. 
• I brake for no reason, get over it. 
• How's my driving? Call 1-800-upyours.

It's not me talking. It's the Keppra.

I always come back around to the futility of thinking and feeling. The Universe, if it responds to humans at all, doesn't give a crap about what we think and feel. Change only comes if we take action. 

Action is not hard to do. The hard part is trying to predict the consequences of the action: Will the outcome be good or will it be bad? Then I have to go through the whole thing of defining what is good and what is bad. What if my actions lead to disaster? What if my actions hurt someone? What if my failure to take action is the wrong path? What if I should have turned there instead of here? What if I do nothing? What if I do everything? 

There I go, back down the rabbit hole. The only way out, for me, is 2.5 miles on a windswept foggy beach.

If you can't help, get out of the way

You know how after you have a run-in with a stupid person who accuses you of something, you get all defensive and start trying to deny their claim or justify your actions . . . And then after your heart rate has settled back to low-grade resentment you think of all the pithy, profound, cutting things you should have said?

That woman who lives in my old neighborhood, yeah, the one in her cute little bungalow house, with her cute pesticide-free yard (she has a sign proclaiming it) and her cute little mop-haired floppy-eared mutt, the one who asked me in a supercilious tone, "Why don't you go to a shelter?" That woman? She's still on my mind and under my skin. I've been trying to figure out what I should have said, other than "Eff you, you stupid b-word, eff off and leave me alone." 

What I could have said, should have said, depends on what I wanted to elicit from her. Compassion? I think she probably is a compassionate person, from afar, that is, just far enough so she doesn't have to smell the stink of human suffering or get her hands dirty actually helping dig latrines. She probably donates to environmental causes, maybe not Green Peace but the Nature Conservancy or Save the Butterflies, if there is such an organization. She might contribute to humanitarian causes, maybe Amnesty International. No, more likely UNICEF or Doctors without Borders. When she's feeling particular magnanimous, around the holidays, she might even send a check to the Gospel Rescue Mission, in hopes that will help erase the homeless population that frightens her so much. God knows, homeless people could use more Jesus. Lack of Jesus is what got them into the mess in the first place. 

Yeah, super compassionate, but not enough to vote to change zoning laws to allow affordable and low-income housing in her neighborhood. Not enough to actually change anything to make it possible to get people out of their tents, their cars, their busted-down RVs and get them into proper, safe, affordable, dignified housing.

Just down the hill from where I park at night (near her house), there's a parking lot behind a chain link fence. Inside the fence are about a dozen sheds, barely bigger than outhouses. These sheds are the manifestation of the liberal solution to the homeless crisis. Give them a tiny box, barely big enough for a bed, not even big enough for their bike, and then admit the qualified (best) homeless people (no addicts, nobody who needs a bath or a haircut or some mental health services), give them a key to their own little hut, put all the huts behind a chain link fence, with one opening monitored by a guard, to keep them in, to keep others out, I don't know. Then you can finally feel safe, even if you aren't actually safe.

If I were a homeowner in a big city like Portland, I would be terrified. Not just for my personal safety and the safety of my belongings, my family, my pets, but also for the value of my asset, my house. It must be a gut-punch to discover all the tent cities down the street have cut the value of your property by a third. What if you want to sell and go somewhere safer (whiter, richer)? Who wants to buy into a neighborhood of tents and trash, used needles everywhere, and feces on the sidewalk? 

Certainly you wouldn't want to add an ADU to your property and charge a nominal rent so some nice senior lady could live a quiet, safe, affordable life. You might build it for your mother-in-law, but not for a stranger. In a big city, it's too hard to be an independent landlord. Tenants are nuts. They don't pay rent on time, they don't leave when you evict them, and when the sheriff finally kicks them out, they've trashed your asset and left you with massive bills. Such disrespect.

It's human nature to circle the wagons when the homestead is threatened. Survival instinct is how the human DNA has managed to make it this far. At some point, though, a civilized society comes to realize that when one person is unsafe, then no one is safe. Segregating the community into in-group and out-group ultimately destroys the very security the haves are trying to protect. 

Let them eat cake. 

Everyone dies. 

It takes a lot to awaken the sleeping giant, but people with nothing left to lose can do a lot of damage as they work toward changing the system to be more fair and inclusive. You can either get on board and lend a hand, or you can stand in the way and watch your house burn down. Metaphorically speaking, of course. I would never condone violence. 

But I wished I'd told her to eff off and mind her own business. 

Oh, well. Next time. 

Nowhere can also mean everywhere

Most of the time I forget that I'm an outcast. Every now and then people remind me that I don't belong. It's always people, only people. For example, weather is neutral. Weather doesn't care where or how I live or die. Whether skies are sunny or gray, no judgment. Trees, grass, flowers, all that spring greenery that makes me sneeze, that stuff doesn't care if I dump my pee jar where dogs pee. Trash cans are neutral, too. They receive my neatly bagged trash no matter what I throw away, be it poop or my ziplock bag of clip-on sunglasses or a hand towel I really liked or a rain jacket that no longer repels rain. I really like trash cans for their stoic receptiveness. I think I'd be a lot happier if I were more like a stoic trash can.

It's people that remind me I'm not safe. 

I've more or less assimilated the trauma of waking up to thieves trying to steal my gas. It was a week ago. The upside of getting old is that traumas fade. However, today I was reminded again that I don't belong, even in my old neighborhood, even parked on a public street maintained by my tax dollars. An irate homeowner came out to see what I was up to. I was writing, just doing my thing, but from her point of view, I could have been shooting heroin and watching porn on YouTube. I mean, who could blame her for being wary of a strange car outside her house. 

I got out of my car and asked her if I was making her uncomfortable by parking next to her house. She asked me why I didn't go to a shelter. I wondered if she had ever been to a shelter. I haven't either but I imagine we've both seen similar images of shelters on the news: rows of cots in a big cold room, no place to store your belongings, constantly having to worry about being assaulted by weirdos and druggies. Why on earth would I do that, given I have my house with me. Her house happens to be stick built on a nice corner. My house just happens to be small and have four wheels. So what?

I told her I used to live in this neighborhood, just around the corner. I could tell she didn't believe me. Why should she? We probably don't watch the same news shows. To her, every homeless person is a lying drug addict.  To me, every homeowner has a stick up their ass. 

I don't really believe that. I understand why homeowners don't want low-income riffraff pulling down their property values, even if the riffraff happens to be seniors scraping by on social security while they wait for their name to come up on a subsidized housing unit before they die. If I had property, I'd probably feel the same way. Circle the wagons, don't let in the other, because if you do, they will destroy you, your family, and your way of life. 

A life lived in fear is a life half lived. Said the person who has nothing left to lose.

Winning the reverse lottery

First off, nobody died. Just want to make that clear up front. Nobody got hurt except my bank account and the environment. I guess if the world decides to bestow personhood on the earth, then I'm going to hell. I'm sure I'll have lots of company. 

Early yesterday morning, just after daybreak, I heard something bump my car. I assumed thieves were going after my new spare tire, which I proudly display on my roof rack like the badass old lady urban nomad that I am. Not wanting to lose my $400 tire, I started yelling, "get off my car, get off my car!"

I looked out the driver's side window and saw a chubby Hispanic- looking guy scrambling to get into the passenger seat of a small silver sedan. He and his driver took off. 

I fumbled around in the dark for my glasses, my pants, and my car key so I could hit the panic button. I'd never pressed the panic button before, so I didn't know what to expect. My horn bleated once, and that was it. Not exactly the alarm I'd been hoping for. My fear was that I would accidently presss the "open all the doors and come on in" button, which might not not have ended well. 

I yanked down all my window covers and got myself over the console into the driver's seat in record time. As I started the engine, the silver car returned from the other direction and stopped right next to me. The driver wore a mask pulled up to his eyes. I flipped him off and hit the gas. As I left, I heard a thumping bumping sound from somewhere near my back left tire. I kept going.

I drove a few blocks on autopilot, found a side street, got out of my car to see if my tire was still there, and smelled gasoline.

Yep. You guessed it. I got drilled. Or rather, my gas tank got drilled. Gas poured out a hole about the size of my thumb, onto the street, into the gutter, all my lovely near-full tank of gas.

I called the fire department. A big red firetruck arrived, lights flashing, but no siren. Three firefighters jumped down and rolled their eyes at what they were seeing. One of the firefighters was a woman. They made her crawl under there with some of that magic plastic putty. She couldn't fix it. In her defense, it was a big hole spewing a lot of gas. One of the guys dumped a pile of kitty litter to keep the gas from spreading downhill in the gutter, in case it reached a storm drain. 

"You got any plastic containers?" asked the guy in charge.

I pulled out some plastic bins I had in the back. He situated the bins under the stream of gas. One filled up. He moved a second one into place. At that point the stream trickled to a drip, probably because the gas had dropped below the level of the hole.

The firefighters got ready to go. I said, "What about these containers of gas? Can't you take them?"

"No, we don't take gasoline."

They left. I called my new insurance company (the one I'd had for thirty years cancelled me because I wasn't able to give them all the names of the drivers in my new Oregon household). While I was waiting, I stuffed my most important possessions into a bag. What are my most prized posessions? Thanks for asking. My phones, my calendar, my tablet, my notebook of important documents, and my medications. Plus my laptop. It was kind of an epiphany to realize my entire life could easily fit into one backpack. All I would need to do is add a toothbrush, and I'd be good to go.

Roadside assistance eventually sent me a contract tow truck driver. He called my cell and asked what color my car was. In a few minutes, a slim young Middle Eastern-looking guy pulled up with a flatbed tow truck. 

"I help you," he said.

I pointed out the two containers of gas under the car. He put on rubber gloves and moved them to the sidewalk. Knowing what I know now, I'm sure he would have driven over them without a thought.

"Did you bring a gas can like I requested?" I asked.

"No, I don't take gasoline. It's not my job," he said as he lowered the back end of the flat bed.

He took my car key, started up my car, and floored it up onto the flat bed. Gas spewed everywhere, all over his truck, onto the street. He secured one wheel. Then he got in his truck and drove away with my car.

I sat on a low wall by the sidewalk, wondering what just happened. I called his number. He answered.

"You left me here," I said.

"You didn't say you needed a ride."

"Come back and pick me up," I said.

"Okay, I do it for you, because I love my mother."

In a few minutes, he came back. I hoisted my crap into the passenger seat, boosted myself up, and didn't bother putting on a seatbelt, thinking who cares at this point. It's a nice big windshield, and I'll have a lovely view of the street while I am being decapitated.

The entire drive, he regaled me with stories of his family. Wife, three kids, and his demented mother all live in one household. Mom has some brain thing, probably Alzheimers. Doctors in Afghanistan couldn't help much. Now she's on a med that is working wonders. 

"I'm so happy for you," I said. "Love your mother while you still have her, because mothers don't last forever."

We made it to the mechanic without mishap. The tow truck driver backed my car off the ramp as fast as he could, scraping both the front and the rear of the car, which doesn't have a lot of clearance, being a soccer mom minivan, for crying out loud. He gave me a big grin as he handed me the keys.

Then the young Afghan tow truck driver gave me a long, long, long hug. 

The rest of the day was just a wait-around-and-see-how-much-money-this-is-going-to-cost-me kind of day. I got to know the mechanics pretty well. They told every customer who came in about my car getting drilled. That's the term, apparently. Drilled. 

"How could they do that to an old lady?" one of the workers huffed. I enjoyed hearing the righteous indignation on my behalf almost as much as I enjoyed being called an old lady. 

Somebody told a story of a woman whose car was being drilled, and she was in the driver's seat. She backed up and ran over the miscreant. He won't be doing that again, although now she has to live with the knowledge that she killed somebody, even if "he deserved it." 

Somebody else told me a story of how it cost $2,000 to replace his gas tank. "I would have gladly have given him gas money, if he'd only asked." 

I had to concur.

Lucky for me, it was a one-day ordeal. The mechanics were able to find a gas tank at a salvage yard. By the time they added their markup and labor, the final price was a third of what I would have paid for a new gas tank from the dealer. Not to mention I got mine in one day, and a new one would have taken a week. I'm counting my blessings. It was a long day, but I survived. 

I filled out a police report today. To do that, I needed to find the location of the scene of the crime. Other cars were parked in that spot this morning. I didn't see any Tupperware bin in the gutter with my tire tracks on it, so I guess they took it with them after I split. If I were truly a badass, I would have gone around the block and rammed them. But you can't really do much damage with a minivan. It's like putting a lightning bolt on the side of a wheelbarrow. I can dream, though.

My car seems to be running fine. It seems that cars get drilled often here in the big city of Portland. Still, people park their cars on the streets all over the east side of town. I'd like to put Kevlar all over it, but apparently that's not a thing. I just have to chalk it up to the annoying phenomenon known as winning the reverse lottery and try not to imagine lightning will strike twice in one place. 

Invisible but still a threat

You know you aren't in Southern Arizona anymore when an older woman living her car feels the need to pull out her stun gun and press it when you walk by her car on the way to your own little house on wheels. I didn't know what it was, having never seen a stun gun or Taser, so I didn't have a reaction until I walked by, got in my car, and Googled what does a Taser sound like? 

The only visible difference between us, besides that her car was a lot nicer than mine, was that she was Black and I am White. So there you go. Usually I am invisible, but not to her. I'm guessing her lived experience was a lot different from mine and possibly not in a happy way, if she felt the need to rattle her weapon when I walked by. 

I visited a childhood friend this week. Remind me not to do that. To some people, I'm an outcast, I'm a pariah. Wrong life choices, yada yada. To others, I'm a curiosity, a specimen to be examined and interrogated. My beloved Arizona friend is the only one who checks in regularly to see how I feel about being unhoused. We figure it out together. To everyone else, I'm shunned, ridiculed, or ignored. 

My new unicorn, I mean, PCP, prescribed a stronger statin to help prevent stroke and heart attack. Unfortunately for me, it enhances diarrhea. I hope the symptoms are on the wane, and I'm glad I stocked up on plastic bags. You haven't really experienced van life until you have diarrhea in your car. There's nothing quite like it. 

My labs show that I'm still slightly anemic, ho hum, old news. He didn't seem to think it warranted any hand-wringing, so I'm not going to worry about it. I spent the past couple years freaking out about health stuff. I'm so over it. I'll try to up my vitamin game but other than that, I will carry on. Everyone dies sometime. 

Meanwhile, rain. More rain. Showers. A little break, followed by more cold rain. A big reason I left Portland (besides that I could no longer afford rent here) was the incessant cool gray wet weather. I have a link to a temperature map on my phone. Today, almost every place in the continental U.S. is warmer than it is here. As soon as my meds are refilled, I'm leaving this slogfest.

I'm not sure where I will go next, because as you know, weather doesn't stay long in one place, whether we want it to or not. I haven't mastered the skill of traveling with the weather, but I plan to work on it over the next few months. Assuming I don't get tased by a paranoid fellow traveler. Or yelled at by a crazed homeowner who thinks the street in front of their house belongs to them.  Or sideswiped by a semi. Or bled dry by car repairs and dental work. Or shamed into nonbeing by my so-called friends. 

Resisting and persisting in slow motion

The theme of the week is persist and resist. Persist at the personal my life sucks and then I die level, resist at the existential cosmic no kings very bad hell bummer level. Maybe I shouldn't try to make a distinction. If the planet goes belly up, whining about persisting at the personal level is like rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.

I tried to find another metaphor but I'm not finding my words today. Uh-oh, stroke, you might say. TIA. High blood pressure. You might be right. More important, who or what can I blame? Too much salt. Not enough salt. Who knows, who cares. Words are meaningless in this new era of name stuff anything you want. Want to call it the Gulf of Your Name Here? Go ahead. Mapmakers might protest, but who cares about tradition?  When elephants are in charge, vegetation is shredded, water sources are fouled, and everyone get trampled in the end.  

I'm sure I'd feel better if the weather weren't so volatile. Welcome to my head. Wherever I am, there it is, rattling like a tin can full of tiny angry pebbles. I hope I can hit the road for a while next week. I'm getting tired of trolling the same old neighborhoods for stealth parking, pretending I am a local (in fact, I was, once) and hoping nobody will see me getting up to pee in my jar in the middle of the night.

Speaking of persisting, I met a unicorn this week: my new PCP. Dr. Mario was nice, but he looked worn out, and it was only 9:30 in the morning. He reviewed my meds and suggested some referrals, but he didn't ask many questions about me. Like, what do you do, what's your life like? I filled out some forms before the appointment, answering questions like how often last week did you feel depressed, and how often does someone verbally or physically abuse you. Wow. Compared to some, I'm living a life of luxury, apparently. In my experience, doctors don't read those forms. They like to hear it from the dying horse's mouth. So the fact that he didn't ask about me made me think he was too tired to care.

One of the mark-a-box questions was yes or no, do you live in an insecure housing situation (e.g., with a friend or with family, in a tent, in a car, on the street, etc.). I could have lied but then what? Sooner or later, I'd be outed as a nomad (i.e., a person who pretends they live in a vehicle by choice so they can live a life of freedom and frugality), and then I would have to explain, justify, defend . . . Ho hum. 

So now it's in my medical records, if anyone bothers to read those forms. I can't imagine how anyone could. The forms I filled out with a Bic pen were essentially unreadable. The line spacing was crammed, the fonts were miniscule, and there wasn't enough room to write much, let alone explain, justify, or defend. 

Nobody cares, anyway. Healthcare professionals don't have time to care. Healthcare professionals are underpaid and underappreciated. Who can blame them for phoning it in? I bet they are still waiting for their award for surviving on the front lines of COVID. They don't realize the rest of us have moved on to the next existential crisis. (That would be the assault on democracy, in case you are keeping track of crises).

Good news, I now have a stronger medication for high cholesterol, so I'm sure the thing that will kill me will not be a stroke or heart attack. It will probably be the daily grinding realization that people (and when I say people, I am referring to Americans) are too stupid to live and will take everyone and everything down with them when they self-destruct. What a waste, but nothing lasts forever.  

Meanwhile, we persist and resist, if we are able and inclined. 

There's lots of room in the handbasket for you. See you in hell.

Normalizing the nomadic lifestyle

Spring in Portland is an on-again off-again phenomenon. Now you see it, now you don't. Now it's sunny, oops, now it's raining. A couple nights ago I parked in a great spot under a tree. Wind came up overnight. Around midnight I heard a monstrous din on the roof of my car. Bam! The roof rack rang like the Liberty Bell. I lay awake wondering if the tree was going to fall on my car and crush me into my foam mattress. 

In the morning, I discovered a pine cone on the roof, and not a big one. Maybe there were more pinecones, maybe even a small branch that flew off when I drove to the park to make coffee. Wind, is what I'm saying. Sun, rain, wind . . . This is spring in Portland.

I grew up in it, but that doesn't mean I have to like it. The weather was the main reason I moved to Tucson. The weather in Tucson is the main reason I'm back in Portland. You see how this works? No place is perfect. I'd have to be driving all the time to stay in good weather. Spring just sucks, no matter which way you look at it. Sure, it's a welcome respite from winter, but the volatility of spring is hard for me. My head won't settle.

Volatility seems to be the theme of the week. The weather, my head, the stock market . . . Ho, hum, who cares about money, la la la. Nothing I can do about it, and we shouldn't trouble our heads over it anyway. Best to leave it to the experts who obviously know better. 

Speaking of knowing better, some of my family members apparently blame me for the housing shortage. I don't know why they give me so much credit. I'm not a land developer. I've never owned anything but a series of used cars. Not a house, not a condo, not even a shed. As far as housing goes, I tend to think of myself as powerless over supply and demand. 

I know I'm in the doghouse with my family member when I text a picture of a walking path in the Sandy River Delta and they write back, "Playing tourist?" What do I do with that? Almost every text I send receives a reply ending in "Any leads on housing?" I understand my family member is concerned, and I'm trying to have empathy for their fear. But sometimes a cigar is just a cigar. I'm done trying to live my life so they don't have to be afraid.

I know I've said this before. 

Speaking of getting old, I went hiking in a nature park I love and dropped my straw hat. A friend phoned me while I was walking, and as we were talking, the sun came out, and I realized my hat had departed my pocket. I retraced my steps, holding the phone over my head when I went into hollows and behind hills. Eventually I'd walked the entire route twice. I headed back to the parking lot. Some kind soul had found my hat and left it on a rock where I would see it. I probably dropped it the moment I left the restroom. 

I knew the hat would return to me. So many things do. But sometimes the Universe decides someone else needs the item more than I do, no matter how much I cherish it. Every time I walk away from my car, I prepare myself for the possibility that it won't be there when I get back.

The reason I mentioned the dropped hat is because when my mother was alive, I learned to follow one step behind her so I could retrieve the things she dropped. Used tissues, of course, but also sunglasses, hats, gloves, scarves, cigarette lighters, and cigarette pouches. Purses. Those little dealies that can hold a pack of cigarettes. I was grateful that someone put my hat where I could find it. And I still feel chagrin that I dropped it in the first place.

On the bright side, I got double my steps in that day. 

I often wonder what I did to create this strange situation. I don't feel responsible for the lack of affordable housing. I know many seniors are in the same boat. Car, I mean. I wonder if I should seek a communal housing situation, maybe a big house of five other women. We'd share a couple bathrooms, share the cooking and cleaning, maybe give each other rides places, and watch old movies together. 

If that sounds like fun to you, you are not like me. To me, that sounds like utter hell. Even one roommate was too much for me. When I imagine the amount of time and energy it would take to find and maintain that type of housing situation, I am more certain than ever that being a nomad (i.e., living in this car) is the right choice for me.

Maybe someday I will stop feeling ashamed and talk about this as if it were a normal lifestyle. Maybe if more people knew that old ladies were living in their cars because the rent is too damn high, the Section 8 lists are closed, and the only way to get an apartment in senior housing is for someone to die, well, maybe then society would see that there are many ways to survive and even thrive while living an alternative lifestyle. 

Meanwhile, I skulk around the streets, troll for parking places, and wait for my appointment at the DMV. Once that happens, I can get my car registered and plated and get the heck out of Dodge. Well, I drive a Dodge, so I don't mean that literally. It's a figure of speech. You know what I mean.

On my way to hell in a handbasket. See you there.

Hiding in plain sight in Portland, Oregon

I find myself driving aimlessly around the city, looking for something that isn't here. Home, I guess, although I'd settle for someplace safe to park and get some work done. Portland is rife with huge parking lots, many unused, surrounded by chain link fences to keep out the bedraggled unhoused. Seeing so much unused space ticks me off. You could put a lot of tiny homes on that acreage, if only the neighbors would allow it.

I'm not bedraggled, so I can sneak around and blend in. I'm the elite of unhoused, living in a veritable mansion compared to some of the tarp and tent contraptions I've seen strapped to trees and buildings. Some of the motorhomes along the main streets haven't moved in years. The only thing holding them together is the piles of trash around their wheels. If you removed all that trash, some of these rigs would collapse into a heap of metal and meth. Allegedly. 

From an unhoused person's perspective, Portland in the spring is a sad, lonely, dirty place with really crappy weather. We had a few sunny days, but the breeze still bites. I got a bit of solar to charge up my batteries. Then the clouds rolled in and my head started churning. The relationship between weather and my vestibular system couldn't be more obvious. I wanted to blame Arizona. 

I have been doing a lot of walking, which is good. I need the exercise, and it gives me time to think. I know what you are thinking: Thinking is a highly overrated past time best left to those equipped to handle it. But I can't help it. I make sure I have my phone on me so my step app can congratulate me or berate me, depending on how I did, and then I focus on where I put my feet while I ponder my plight. 

A few documents have arrived at my brother's house. I could go wait in line at a DMV location, but that could mean sitting all day shoulder-to-shoulder with weary, irritated, coughing strangers and screaming kids (if I'm lucky enough to get a seat), only to have an employee shut the doors at 5:00 p.m., so sorry, come again tomorrow. Well, I'm sure they would not say sorry. They would say, make an appointment like a civilized person. My appointment is May 5. Do I want to take my chances, waste a day as a walk-in nobody, or wait until May 5 and waltz in ahead of the walk-ins and only waste an hour waiting for my number to be called. Decisions, decisions.

Back to walking. I used to live near a large park. If you have been reading my blog for a while, you might remember I mentioned Mt. Tabor, the extinct volcano inside Portland city limits. It's still there. The cinder cone, the tall trees, the steps, the reservoirs, the trails, it's all still there. While I walk, I encounter many other walkers. The older ones acknowledge me, especially if they are alone, and if I smile first, they will smile back. Rarely does anyone say good morning. If hikers are in pairs, they rarely look at me. If they are young, they ignore me completely, except for a few random hippie girls who probably say hello to trees and flowers, too. Nothing against hippie girls. I'm happy if anyone acknowledges my existence these days.

In this city, I lead an undercover life. Street parking is easy to find, but you need to be careful of parking in front of someone's house. Park by a fence, but not an industrial fence, and not too far away from other cars. Park on a street where there are other cars, but not so many you get blocked in. Find streets that don't have steep gutters, else you will end up sleeping in the crevice between the wall and your mattress. Watch out for streets with fast cars. Be careful of neighborhoods that have services for the unhoused nearby. Make sure your doors are locked, your windows are covered, and you don't make much noise. 

And be ready to leave as soon as it's light enough to see. 

It's easy to leave a place, but it's not always simple to figure out where to go. I don't regret leaving Portland, and I look forward to leaving again soon. Where to go is the question. 

That's why I find myself navigating back to the neighborhood, the park, the store, the streets where I grew up, where I lived with my cat, where I took care of my mom, where I packed up and left because I couldn't afford the rent, complaining to nobody, I just want to go home. 

In the broader context of what is happening in the country, my challenges are minor. I'm okay for a while. It could be worse. I could be trying to maintain a life under a mildewed tarp or a tent pitched in tall wet grass. My problem is a luxury problem compared to the existential challenges of so many people in the world. 

In other words, quit whining.

Chop wood, carry water. Speaking of which, I joined the protest yesterday in downtown Portland. Nobody noticed me, but I felt satisfied to be one insignificant drop in an ocean of determination.

Welcome to Oregon, now go away

When did the Department of Motor Vehicles turn into such a bureaucratic pithole? I've been to several DMV locations in the greater Portland metro area. They all seem designed to accomplish one goal: make customers wait so long they finally give up and go away. Why did I think Oregon would welcome me back? How naive. It's almost as if they resent me for leaving. Every DMV face (with one exception, the woman who took the photo for my new license) expressed the same sentiment: We told you so, loser. 

That's me transferring my resentment onto the hapless, abused, long-suffering employees behind the glass walls at the DMV. The first day, I walked in, thinking, okay, maybe a couple hours to get my license transferred and my car registered. Ha. Some locations let you make an appointment online. Walk-ins are "standby" customers, meaning you receive service after the appointments are served. My ticket was S171. The leaderboard said next to be served: S30. I'm not good at math, but even I could tell there was a long line of people ahead of me. 

I hung around for a while, then went out to my car and ate breakfast. When I went back inside an hour later, they were serving S60. It was about 2:00 p.m. The office closed at 5:00 p.m. I gave up and made an appointment. The only appointment I could get that wasn't a month out was at a far-away location for two days hence. I grabbed it.

The kind, patient GPS Lady led me to the place. I got there an hour before it opened, two hours before my appointment. Walk-ins were already lined up on the sidewalk in cold, windy rain, waiting for the doors to open. 

About 45 minutes after my appointment time, my number came up. A530. Yay. The guy behind the glass wall gave me a fake smile. It wasn't even noon. I could tell he was already fed up and burned out. I was able to apply to get an Oregon license (only $64, not a real ID because I didn't have two pieces of ID with a residence address), but I wasn't able to register my car because I didn't have the original title. Arizona doesn't print vehicle titles like Oregon does. I had the mistaken impression it could all happen online. Ha. Joke's on me again. So now I'm waiting for my Arizona title to arrive at my brother's house, so I can surrender it to Oregon and wait for a new title and license plates. 

I confess, there were moments I considered giving up. However, once you've started going over a waterfall, you cannot change your mind and paddle back upstream. In Oregon, your car registration and driver's license have to match. I'm either all in on Oregon, or it's back to Arizona, still with no permanent residence address, still not able to rent a mailbox anywhere.

It's cold here right now. It's a typical Portland spring: intermittently windy, rainy, and cloudy, with rare moments of blue sky. Day time temperatures are mid-50s to low 60s. Nights are just below 40 F. Early mornings are the worst. Waking up before the sun to frigid air is brutal. Getting up to pee in the night is no fun either. 

There are many places to park on the street for a minivan like mine. I blend. But I can't stay in one place anywhere. In Tucson, the nomads in town hang out in a huge parking lot by the bike path. Nobody hassles you when you put out your solar panels. When you get sick of traffic, you can drive an hour to get to BLM land and camp for free, work on your car, cook food, and enjoy the desert scenery with great cell signal for internet. There's nothing like that near Portland. I never thought I would miss Tucson. But for a person living in a vehicle, Tucson is Death Valley. Not possible. It's 90 F there this week, and it will only get hotter. Then monsoon, and the fun really begins. Been there, done that, turn around, don't drown. 

Portland has been overcast, rainy, and windy since I arrived last week. That means my vestibular issue is churning. It also means I can't recharge using solar. Without power, I can't run my fridge, so I put it into storage, and now my menu consists of items that don't require refrigeration. That means small portions I can eat in one sitting. Being vegetarian means no canned tuna or chicken, no chunky beef chili, no chicken noodle soup. Being sensitive to food additives and chemicals means no ramen, no cup o' noodles. I have a little ice chest, but getting small amounts of ice daily is a major hassle, not to mention expensive over time. A 7 lb bag of ice is only a few dollars, but I have to dump most of it on the ground. 

Yesterday I traded four hours of gasoline taking a peaceful trip up the Columbia River Gorge to recharge my power stations. It was a nice drive, but it would have required another four hours to get to 100% power. In Tucson, I could drag my power stations into the mall, one at a time, to recharge at the counter where the unhoused plug in their phones. The mall here has only USB ports, no AC outlets. I did a little reconnaissance to find an accessible outlet. I found one by a bench across from Annie's Pretzels. Another adventure to look forward to while I wait for my documents to arrive in the mail.

This is such a strange way to live.

Being in Portland, the city of my birth, brings up a lot of grief. Certain parts of town remind me of things I'd rather not think about. The death of my father, my cat, my mother. The schools, the parks, the roads. The city looks different, after four years away, but some things are the same: the weather, the potholes, the unhoused.

I don't regret leaving Portland. I do regret moving to Arizona, but now that I'm here, I appreciate what Arizona gave me. In Arizona, I was one of an armada of nomads. There were license plates from everywhere there, Minnesota, Michigan, Montana, on sprinter vans, motorhomes, and trailers. Snowbirds are a thing. Maybe as summer approaches, Portland will start to fill up with nomads from Arizona, and I won't feel like such an outsider. Maybe next winter, I'll sprout a pair of wings and follow the sun south, back to the desert.

Meanwhile, I lurk in the neighborhoods I grew up in, sniffing out parking spots that aren't directly in front of someone's house, on streets that aren't too busy or populated by broken down RVs and tent cities, where I can blend in and pretend I belong in that place, just another neighbor, just another visitor staying with a friend for a night, to be gone at daybreak. 

Waves on the beach

I'm boohooing the blues back in my hometown, Portland, Oregon. Cool but not freezing, raining but not all the time, and relentlessly gray skies. Yep. Home. I remember why I left. I wasn't crazy. I wasn't built for this SAD-inducing climate. Some people seem to like it. I saw a man talking on the phone outside his apartment. He was standing on the sidewalk. His feet were bare. 

I'm parked in a parking lot, as usual. It started out empty on a Sunday morning. Then the restaurant next to it opened and the place got swarmed. Now the brunch crowd is moving on. Security swings by every half hour. If I had my solar panels out, they would have busted me. Ha. Joke's on them. And me, I guess. No sunshine means no solar. No solar power means my fridge will be dead by tomorrow, unless I hit the road again. 

I spent four days driving and three nights contorted in the front seats of my car. I thought I could put the passenger seat back, but the floor was occupied by six gallons of drinking water. I sliced my mattress into sections and put them across the bucket seats. The ancient foam promptly sank into the bucket, leaving my butt marooned on the console. I put the driver's seat back as far as I could without shoving my fridge on the floor and fit myself into the slot between the seats and the steering wheel. I had my blankets, and it wasn't really cold until just before sunrise, so I was warm enough. But it was hard to sleep with the constant fear of hitting the horn. I managed to avoid that, but in the parking lot of a Bakersfield Cracker Barrel I accidentally bumped the lower panel and set off the hazards. Just blinking lights, no horn. There weren't many overnighters in the lot, but I wouldn't want to disturb anyone else who might be fooling themselves they could sleep sitting up in their car. 

Maybe if I were younger.

I spent the first night on my road trip on familiar desert BLM land in Quartzsite. That was only a four-hour drive from Tucson. The next day I hoofed it to Bakersfield. I realized at that point I needed to step it up if I wanted to make Portland in time to offload my boxes into their new storage home. So I hauled my stuff across the Oregon border, where I was welcomed at the Oregon Welcome Travel Center. Well, it was Friday after 5:00 p.m, so actually nobody was there to give me the free coffee the sign in the window promised. I wouldn't have taken it anyway, but it's the thought that counts.

At that point, I was running on empty, so the slog north on I-5 through Medford, Eugene, and Salem wasn't much fun. Seen through my rear view mirror, white cars with black trim look like Storm Troopers breathing up my tailpipe. Lucky for me, my car was loaded almost to the ceiling, which means I didn't have much of a view out the back. Sometimes it's better not to look.

I booked a storage unit standing outside of a storage place near my brother's house. At that point, I didn't care about price. I just wanted to unload and put my bed back together. It took me three trips with the rolling cart to pack my boxes into their new closet. I don't have much stuff left, and probably I could have jettisoned half of it. Should have. Didn't. Easier to just pack it and move it when departure time is imminent. Sort it out later. 

The two crates and miscellaneous items strapped to the roof made the journey intact. I was fully expecting to see my blankets and pillows flying out in my wake to make the driver behind me have to swerve and dodge bedding I should have donated. I did not anticipate the layer of dead bugs on the front edges of the crates. I fear my journey decimated entire populations. I'm not proud that I'm a murderer of insects, just like I'm not proud that my car uses gasoline, that I throw away four plastic bags every time I poop, and that I go through paper towels like they grow on trees.

The weather in Tucson is lovely right now (so I hear), and I might head south again after I take care of my paperwork. Swapping my Arizona driver's license for an Oregon license should be easy. Registering my car should not be too hard. Hm. I wonder if I need an emissions test. The main issue is that I need to get new license plates. Getting new plates after I bought the car in 2021 took four months, but that was during COVID, so maybe this time I'll get lucky. 

Meanwhile, here I am in the city of my birth. Portland streets seem narrower than I remembered. Maybe I got used to the three-lane Autobahns through Northwest Tucson. The streets here seem more congested. Probably Californians, buying up condos on the River and bungalows in the Albina district because their mansions burned down. Maybe Oregon seems like a safe bet when it comes to wildfires. It's raining now, but all it takes is one stupid kid with a firecracker to set off an inferno in the summer. 

As you can guess, I'm winging it. Day by day is all I can do. One mile at a time, one moment at a time. Deal with the thing in front of me, first things first, and try not to think too much about what is happening in the world, in the country. I'm sad I missed all the marches on Saturday. I drove under a couple underpasses where people were waving signs. The signs hanging from the overpass in the Medford area didn't appear to align with my values. The overpass I went under in the Salem area was definitely populated by my kind of people. I was doing 65 mph and could not slow down to wave or honk. 

I have a feeling for the foreseeable future, if we have a future, these protests will be like waves on the beach: If I miss one, I can catch the next one. 

I'm a character in my own novel

I've been dividing my residence between the Homewood Suites parking lot in Tucson and the BLM Ironwood National Monument land just west of Marana. It's a peaceful hour-long drive between my two residences, meandering through open range, cotton farms, housing developments, road construction, and suburbs, culminating in the land of the unhoused near the Rillito River. I walk on the bike path almost daily when I'm in town. When I'm out in the desert, I mostly hunker in my car out of the wind and blazing sun, only venturing outside to rescue my solar panels when they blow over.

A few minutes ago, a swarm of bees flew past me. I heard them coming before I saw them. I don't think I have ever seen bees swarm. It's easy to forget this is wild land. Although I was in the city when I saw a coyote burst out of the brush and dash across a six-lane highway. It looked confused and a bit desperate as it ducked through the parking lot of a medical clinic. I lost sight of it after that. Wild things come into the city. When I lived in the mobile home park, I saw lots of coyotes, javelinas, myriad birds, a bobcat, a baby rattlesnake, frogs, armies of jackrabbits, and one tarantula. In Portland, we had possums, raccoons, worms, and birds.

My vestibular system tells me when the weather is changing, which is just about all the time. Today I predicted something, and now the wind has picked up. Dust obscures my view of the mountains. I've come to appreciate the rugged beauty of the desert. It's spectacularly unforgiving. Every plant tries to kill you as you walk by. 

I'm making plans to move my stuff to a yet-to-be-determined storage unit somewhere in the Portland metro area. After I get all my documentation lined up the way DMV and the car insurance company prefer, I can get a virtual mailbox service and continue to live life until the next crossroad takes me in a new direction.

I try to approach each person with compassion, unless they are wielding a chainsaw. Then I have a choice to make:  get out of the way or stand up and risk losing a limb or worse. I don't want my blood to be spilled for no reason. I want it to mean something. As if somehow I'll be able to see what unfolds after I'm gone. Ha. I fall into the trap of believing mortality is for others, not for me. 

Meanwhile, I'm learning to handle the nomadic life with ease and grace. Or I was, until the USPS decided it needed to crack down on fentanyl dealers sending product through the mail. Darn, that was a great second job. Oh, well. Now I have one job, ostensibly ushering dissertator wannabes through the dissertation process at a for-profit higher education institution based in the Midwest. I can't seem to get away from for-profit higher education, even though I believe it is pretty much an invention of the devil, designed to suck money from the pockets of people who can't afford it. In the case of my employer, the tuition rates are surprisingly affordable, which means the company sucks money out of the pockets of its contingent faculty. 

Did I mention flies? Got a lot of those. A few honeybees, too, which I try not to kill. I rescued a moth last night. The sky in the desert is a light show of stars. I haven't seen a sky of stars since I was a kid.  

I'm finally making some progress on my book, the third book of the trilogy I began several years ago. This one has been much harder to write than the first two, mainly because I wrote the first two by following the characters wherever they led me. If you want my advice, and I'm sure you do, I recommend you work out a deal with your characters. Give them some free rein, but don't let them drag you away from the outline. When you get to the final book in your series, you will have to wrap up all the loose ends you left hanging along the way. You won't get another chance, and if you let your characters run wild, they will trample your bleeding corpse and disappear over the hill, laughing.

I used to think my writing had to offer something pithy and meaningful. I wanted to write literary prose, use unusual words that make people crazy, and tell deep stories with profound moral lessons. You know, a book that will win literary awards, and maybe gain a review from the New York Times. Now I know that if you want to be a best selling author, all you have to do is write a romance novel that gets picked up by a director and made into a TV series. See, easy peasy.  

That is not the kind of writing I do, so I am not destined to be a best selling author. However, I love immersing myself in the lives of my nutty characters to see life through their eyes. Instead of trying to fence them in, I encourage them to run wild through the meadows. Because I write low-dread stories, they don't rip their clothes off as they tiptoe through the tulips. Neither do they stumble up on maggoty corpses when they take naps in the hollows of oak trees. My characters want what we all want: happiness, love, power, and lots and lots of money. 

Okay. Gotta go. A desert rat just ran under my car. That means I'll soon have a nest of babies eating the wires under my hood. 

Catch you next time.

Dragging up on Arizona

The temperature is rising in Southern Arizona. In a month, nobody without air conditioning would choose to stay here, if they could leave. Even many who do have AC and could stay if they wanted to choose to leave if they can. They pack up their Sprinter vans, gas up their giant mobile homes, attach their 5th-wheels to their diesel pickups, and head north for the summer. Snowbirds. 

Southern Arizona summer is hell. I don't believe in heaven or hell, on a normal day, so I can only speculate on the temperature in hell, but I know this: You don't have to die to experience it, if you are curious. The whole burning flaming dumpster fire mess can be yours right now. Come on down. Today it was a pleasant 83 F. In a few days, it will be over 90 F. We're just getting started.

Timing is the hard part when you move with the weather. If the heat wave only lasts a few days, maybe I can ride it out at a higher elevation. The highest elevation near Tucson is Mt. Lemmon. I tried that last summer. It was definitely cooler up there in the mountain town of dry pines, but there's no place to park overnight unless you have a serious off-road vehicle, and the road up and back is no fun. Tried it, won't do it again. Those pine trees are a blaze waiting to happen, just saying. It would take a helicopter to evacuate residents of the little town of Summerhaven.

South of here is Sierra Vista, a slightly higher elevation. They have a decent Walmart parking lot. About two hours away is Globe, higher still. Never been to Globe. To the east is New Mexico, places like Silver City, or even Albuquerque, if I get a hankering for an eight-hour drive. To the West is the Promised Land, also known as California, but to get there, you have to make a frantic dash across terrain that is known to be hotter than Southern Arizona. You've heard of Death Valley. 

If I choose to stay, my only option (besides die) is the mall. 

What's really fun is monsoon, the fifth season nobody warned me about because all the people I knew in Tucson packed up and left before the rains came. I'm from Oregon. I know rain. Nothing prepared me for monsoon. Rain doesn't begin to cover it. Lightning, thunder, haboobs, downbursts, flash floods . . . It's noisy, violent, and shocking. Experiencing monsoon season really makes you feel alive. I'm glad I had the experience. I do not want to be here for monsoon when I'm living in my car.

I can live here for a while in the heat, but it's not pleasant. It's also not healthy. I touched it out last year because I had medical appointments. This time, I have no reason to linger. 

Using the mall as a cooling shelter is a time-tested tradition in Tucson. I don't mind charging up my phone at the power bar with all the unhoused. On some level I can relate, but honestly, I feel like a fraud. I am a snob with a car. 

The prospect of cooling down in the mall day after day, though, is demoralizing. The Tucson mall is cold, noisy, and exhausting. Does spending three months at the mall sound like fun to you? I know what you are going to say: Carol, malls are dead. You should be grateful! You are right, of course. You might be one of those shoppers I've heard about. Condolences on the loss of all your favorite anchor stores.

Based on last summer's experience at the mall, I won't make it through April, let alone May and June. Sure there's covered parking. There are also car alarms, monster trucks, and security guards who drive by and look askance at me if I leave my door ajar for some air. And it's a lot of work to pack my power stations into the mall just to keep my fridge running and my tech powered up. 

Being a nomad is challenging at times.

No, the choice is clear. It's time to drag up on Arizona, for the summer, for sure, and maybe for good. 

Where will I go? I don't know. I think I'll move what's left of my stuff into cheap storage in some obscure town in Oregon, and then take off for parts unknown. There's a lot of road still left to see. 

Here's to you, wackjobs and knuckleheads

This week I got my teeth cleaned. The dental hygienist, let's call her Lulu, led me to the first room, just off the lobby with an excellent view of the parking lot and all the pedestrians strolling by, strapped a bib around my neck, and asked me how I had been since the last time I was there. 

I said the usual bla bla bla that you say when you don't want to disclose your secret traumatic reality to a stranger. Then I said the fateful words: "How is your writing going?"

"I've been working on my dream journal," Lulu said. "My cat came to me in a dream."

"Oh, that's nice," I replied, as she lifted a pointed metal probe. "What was your cat showing you?"

"Not to be afraid." I opened. She went in with the metal stick. "Then he turned into little bits of golden light and ascended into the sky."

"Wow." What else could I say with her hands in my mouth? It came out more or less as "Ow."

"Then my dog appeared and led me up a hill to a beautiful lake." She dug into my gum and then pulled the tool out, leaving it hovering somewhere over my nose. I stared at it cross-eyed as she added, "He was made out of pure love."

Before she resumed her assault, I said, "That must have been really satisfying," or something to that effect. Watching a dental torture tool hanging over my nose, ready to dive back into my mouth at any second, has tampered with my unreliable memory. I'm not really sure what I said. 

Lulu stared out the window and then went back in. "My problem is, I want to put images to my dreams."

"Ungh?"

"Yes, but I can't draw. I can see the images so clearly! I want to publish them in a book, but I don't have the drawing skills."

"Ehh Aay," I said around her hands. "Eeely ice arrr, eeey uhhh caaa ake arrr." I was trying to say "AI. Really nice art. Anyone can make art," in case you were trying to translate my gibberish. 

Her brown eyes examined me through the lighted microscope. She wore a mask, but I could tell she was skeptical. 

I didn't bother complaining about AI scraping art off the internet and not compensating or crediting the artists who created the stolen art. Why get into the weeds with someone who thinks their dreams have cosmic significance?

"All beings are made of light and love," she said, scraping the grunge from behind my lower front teeth. 

Held captive, all I could do was grunt.

She finished picking around and reached for the polishing gizmo. She loaded it up with the gritty minty paste and attacked my back teeth. Rowrr, rowrr, tooth after tooth, with no break, until she reached my bottom teeth. She paused the polisher and held it above my mouth.

"I really think everyone has the power to access the spirit world," she mused, leaving me with my mouth half open. I knew if I tried to swallow, I'd gag, choke, and die in that chair, so I clenched my hands, held still, and tried not to breathe. I didn't nod or blink for fear that would distract her from finishing the polishing task. 

Finally, she finished with the minty grinder (doing a half-assed job, in my opinion), grabbed the water pistol, and sprayed my teeth with cold water for a good minute. 

I resumed breathing and swallowing. 

I felt like I had to say something, so I mumbled, "The world is a mysterious place." To myself, I was thinking, I respect and even admire your interest in the spirit world, and I hope I never see you again. I didn't say it, of course. I try to respect all forms of creativity, no matter how wacky. She wasn't hurting anyone. She was just trying to understand her human experience. 

I used to believe---no, I used to want to believe---that the world was magical and mysterious, that there was some alternate reality in which our animal guides came to us in dreams and led us to new insights. More than once, I meditated in a room full of other meditators, who all seemed to receive something that eluded me. I felt like a fraud, and so I left that group and looked for another path to understanding.

I've come to understand that there is no path except whatever we make up. Who can truly understand reality? Not me. Everything I encounter is filtered through my senses and distilled through my preconceptions and biases. That realization used to bother me, that I couldn't ever know reality. Now I don't care.

What is the human experience? We live, maybe we live a long life, maybe we have a relatively happy life, but in the end, we leave the way we entered, attached to nothing. All the wacky theories we use to explain our experience are left behind, signifying nothing.

Believers are sometimes endearing and sweet, like Lulu. They can also be destroyers, no need to name names. It might be better (safer) to believe in nothing. 

The long strange trip is not over yet

This week I was reminded once again that there are penalties for being a nomad. The USPS, in an effort to stem the flow of drugs through the mail (they say fentanyl but I assume they really mean mifepristone), is requiring all people who rent mailboxes from mailbox companies to produce two pieces of ID that show a residential address, and the addresses have to match. I have neither. What that means is the mailbox I've rented since I moved to Tucson four years ago is now going to be closed at the end of the month. 

I wish the mailbox company would engage in some "good trouble" and stand up to these new requirements, but I can understand their desire not to be put out of business. They will be losing a customer, and I bet I'm not the only one. However, I just renewed for a year last December, so I have eight months left on my box lease. They knew this was coming, and they waited until now to notify me. And here's the bummer: no refunds. Yep. They lose a customer, and I'm out about $250. Plus, soon I will have no mailing address.

What a strange trip this has become. I am having a hard time assimilating the ups and downs of the past ten years. Well, twenty years. Hell, get real. My entire life has been a series of . . . I don't know what to call them. Self-centered fearful choices might be one way to describe them. Safe roads rejected in favor of the most weedy overgrown crumbling cliff-edge trails I could find. 

In other words, I did this to myself.

That's one way to look at it. 

On the other hand, I did not create a shortage of affordable housing. I did not create the tendency for some members of society to ignore, exploit, or abuse senior citizens. I certainly did not vote for the human chainsaws tearing the US democracy into bloody bits. It must be a heady feeling to believe you can destroy a 250-year-old democracy on a whim, and do it in three months. It's a remarkable feat, a breathtaking demonstration of what happens when circumstances place wealth and power in the hands of insane megalomaniacs. I can destroy things, too, but I'm a lot slower. 

Some of my crankiness might be attributable to Keppra rage, but not all of it. There are lots of other reasons to be irritated. I've had some moments of irritation over the past week after compulsively watching the independent media channels I've started following. I know what you are going to say: Carol, why do you watch that stuff? It's almost like you want to be bludgeoned. Almost like you enjoy your simmering rage. Could be you are correct. I always choose the road less traveled. I'm sure you never feel that way.

It's not just meds and politics. Weather is pissing me off, too. Wind and rain are the product of air pressure changes. That means when there's weather, I'm dizzy all the time. My head is like an unbalanced washing machine stuck on spin cycle pounding the wall and making dishes fall out of your cupboards. That would annoy just about anyone.

Consider me annoyed. 

Meanwhile, I'm relocating my domicile to a place where I have the documentation I need to rent a new mailbox. That would be my brother's address. So, back to Oregon I go to become an Oregon resident again, before I hit the road for parts unknown, waiting for the affordable housing shortage to end. 

Wherever you go, there you are

Wherever you go, there you are. It's an old adage, but a good one. Wherever I go, I can't escape myself. I keep trying, but my body goes with me. That means my noisy brain, my vertigo, my aching hip, and my cranky attitude, it all comes along for the ride. There's no escaping the prison, until the final moment when the curtain comes down. Whoever said the body is a temple was clearly having an out of body moment.

I'm writing this from the desert in Quartzsite, Arizona, parked near (but not too near) several large 5th wheel trailers, a toy hauler, and a couple giant houses on wheels, aka motorhomes. The wind just kicked up again. It's been crazy windy the past few days, which corresponds to the turmoil in my vestibular system, so that is how I know I have a new job: barometric expert, not to be confused with a barista, which is more common and way more useful. All I can do with my special barometric prediction ability is predict when the freight train in my head is heading downhill toward a crash. What am I talking about? Thanks for asking. Wind occurs from clashing air pressure systems. Changes in air pressure wreak havoc on my 8th cranial nerve.

I can hear you saying, Carol, what the heck are you talking about? Sorry. I got lost in my mind for a minute.

Speaking of crashes, how about that democracy? Two presidents walk into a bar. It's an old joke. Plus, it's so funny how you don't know what you have til it's gone. Someone ought to write a song about that.

Meanwhile, even a poor homeless person like me (what I mean is, even a broke nomad like me) can't live peacefully under the radar. My mailbox people notified me last week that I need to update the form that allows them to receive my USPS mail. I filled out the form four years ago when I rented the box, so, no problem, right? Well, the USPS has decided that in order to weed out the . . . undocumented? . . . I guess, so the undocumented won't sneak a ballot in a forbidden slot? . . . the USPS now must have two forms of ID with matching residential addresses.

I'm currently between addresses.

I will have to assume my thinking position, which is flat on my back with a pillow over my face. I'm sure by the time I wake up, I will have figured out my strategy.

I'm reminded frequently that it costs a lot to be poor. Everything costs more, takes longer, and feels worse, compared to being traditionally housed. I see only two options: get a job and/or share housing. Given rental prices anywhere in the West and Southwest, I would have to make at least $25 per hour just to earn enough money to pay rent and income taxes. That's assuming I don't eat. And that someone would hire me. And that I wanted to work until I die, to pay rent in a place I don't belong. As far as rooming with someone, , no thanks, been there, done that, survived it, it was grand, don't want to do it again.

Now I'm just rambling. Sorry. The wind is unsettling. The state of the world is unsettling. Some people have the fortitude to unplug, but I find myself compelled to watch the disintegration of civilization. I knew it would happen, but somehow I thought it would be speedier than this. Slow motion train wrecks look so cool on TV but living through one is really tedious. Just crash, already. Let whoever is left pick up the pieces and carry on.

No, we have to have the Sam Peckinpah version of the end of the world. The blood, gore, insults, and humiliations are taking forever, like a Korean romantic comedy. Why make sixteen episodes when you can tell the story in six? Boy meets girl, on again off again, bim, bang, boom, happy ever after. Why drag out the drama when you know how it's going to end? Let's just have World War III and get it over with, the war to end all  stupid human civilization, once and for all. The ratings will suck, but maybe we can beam it out into space. The Muskrats on Mars might enjoy it.

I wish I could see the faces on the aliens who come to excavate Earth. I'm sure they'll be, like, what idiots ruined this lovely place? They'll spend decades trying to decipher the religious significance of plastic. 

Once again, we're on our way to hell in a handbasket. Umbrella drinks all around. See you there.

A tirade for the end of the world

Like most people around the world, I have a hill of beans in front of me. Individually, each one of our little pinto bean molehills is not all that impressive. It's traumatic to us to see our pile of beans, but in the big scheme of things, our beans don't add up to much. Collectively, however, suddenly there is a mountain range bursting up out of the ground. It wasn't there a few months ago. What the heck? Some people are now saying, well, I warned you. We saw that mountain range coming years ago. Others are saying, what mountain range? Isn't it lucky I hate eggs?

I've grown to hate eggs, too, but that isn't the point of my beanhill tirade. The point is, collectively, humans are really stupid. For example, take Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth. Now we have enough evidence to say, well, duh. However, despite ample evidence that humans have wrecked the planet, some of us will claim hoax right up until the moment the polluted air chokes them into silence. 

I heard this quote today (I know, I'm only a century late to the party): "Democracy is the theory that the people know what they want, and they deserve to get it good and hard" (H.L. Mencken, 1916). This quote made me snicker. "Good and hard" is always a funny phrase. "Deserve to get it" says to me be careful what you wish for and you don't always get what you want but you get what you deserve. As a retired idealist, I align myself with the optimistic view that the earth will be just fine without us. All of us.

My rant was inspired by a realization that for once did not flee my brain after it entered, probably because I've had this realization so many times over the years that it's worn deep trail ruts in my gray matter. You could call it the Oregon Trail of realizations. It started in Oregon, so that metaphor works on two levels. 

I came from Oregon Trail people. Pioneers who put their houses in covered wagons and set off across the country to brave the great unknown, searching for land they could take from whoever was there before them. They left Missouri, crossed the Plains, killing whatever they could along the way, and ended up in the fertile Willamette Valley, where they got busy tearing up trees, building farms, and killing Native Americans. It's a time-tested method that not everyone is on board with, but as long as you are White and male, it's grand.

I did a version of that as I grew up. I set off into the great unknown of young adulthood, mowing down anyone who said no, you will never make a living as an artist, and moved into other people's territories to exploit their natural resources in my quest to prove my parents wrong. In my secret heart chamber, buried deep under layers of arrogance and self-will, I knew that everything I did was going to end in disaster. What did disaster mean to my 21-year-old self? No clue. Don't remember. 

I do remember seeing a commercial on TV showing a happy man riding a bicycle with a little house on the back. The tall wooden box must have been no bigger than an outhouse, and maybe that's what it was, I don't remember. It seems to me he was wearing pinstripe trousers and a cut-away jacket, quite a dapper dude. No idea what the ad was selling. I was enamored with the idea of carrying your house on your back. Self-sufficiency to the max, no need to rely on anyone, as you explore what it means to have total freedom. As if having an outhouse on the back of your bike would lead to freedom. Ha.

You get where I'm going with this. I've always liked the idea of the self-sufficient mobile lifestyle, and I always knew that the settle-down-and-get-married life was not going to be for me. So, in a way, you could say living in my car was always going to be my destiny.

The other half of this prediction, though, stems from my relentless compulsion to fit in, to do it right, to play the game, even if it meant giving up my creativity, identity, and freedom. Hence, turning from painting to commercial art and graphic design. Turning from fashion design to sewing clothes for people. Turning from failing at business to getting a business admin degree (so I could figure out how to do it right). And then falling into teaching, and choosing to pursue a Phd in business admin so I could be more "marketable" to my employer, who laid me off six months before I graduated. I can keep going. Using my Phd to become an academic editor and a dime-a-dozen adjunct faculty at a for-profit higher education institution not unlike the ones I criticized in my dissertation. 

I'm like a moth who keeps returning to the stupid flame of societal approval, seeking warmth and light and repeatedly getting singed. 

I hear you muttering, Wow, that's so bleak, does she hear herself? I hear myself, and I hear you, too, thanks for caring. I invite you to worry about your own little molehill of beans. If you turn your back for too long, it could become a mountain range. A lot harder to make into frijoles.

You could say I've given up and I don't care about anything anymore, but you would be wrong. 

The only thing I've given up is the quest to mold myself into something I am not, never was, never could be. It may have taken becoming homeless to finally be my true self, but here I am, sitting in my car in a patch of desert outside Marana, Arizona, expressing myself to my endless patient therapist, Google Blogger. The sunset was spectacular.  

I think I have one blog reader left. Bless you, Bravadita. I started this blog in 2012 when I was struggling to get my dissertation proposal approved. I was a flaming bag of rage. Then the teaching job ended. Then Mom took over my life. Then Mom ended. Then I ended up in Arizona, which might be the end of me if I stay here one more summer. 

One thing I know about myself now: I am not a quitter. This blog is proof that even when I'm cranky, I can fake it, I have faked it, and I'm still faking it. 

For example, I show up for my mentoring gig, even though the chances that the artists I mentor are going to make a living selling their art are worse than their odds of winning the lottery. I don't tell them to go get a job, and I mean, a real job, one that pays them benefits and a pension so they will have something to live on when they get to be my age and they can't walk anymore because they need two hip replacements. I show up for my faculty job, offering encouragement to business people who don't care about extending theory, about adding to the vast body of human knowledge, about proper citation format, or locating robust sources. They couldn't care less. They just want to get the degree in the shortest amount of time possible as cheaply as possible so they can get that job, that promotion, that accolade, and walk in the procession wearing the stupid beret with the velvet-trimmed robe they won't bother to iron. 

Hey, maybe this is Keppra rage finally kicking in! If it is, I kind of like it. 

The truth is, if you know me, you know I care deeply about people, about life, about justice, equality, and mercy. Despite my desire for peace, love, and understanding, I know it is not possible to stop a runaway train if it is heading for a crash. It's like telling a teenager, don't drink and do drugs. It's like telling an artist, get a job so you'll have something to fall back on. Some trains have to crash. Democracy is a runaway train. The conductors are asleep at the wheel. Half the passengers are in the club car fighting over who gets the last piece of pie. The other half are leaning out the windows screaming with their hair on fire. Nobody is right or wrong on this train. We're all on the train together. We are going to get it good and hard.

Excuse me, my hair is smoking. Catch you later.