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.