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.