Things that don't heal by themselves

I've heard time heals all wounds. That sounds nice, but time doesn't heal everything. A few things come to mind. Cars. Teeth. Hearts. Money can heal some things, though. Cars, for example. If you have enough money to throw at the problem, you can definitely get that dreaded check engine light to go off. For a while. 

A business person once said something like, "I know half my advertising is wasted; I just don't know which half." I feel that way about car repair. When Charlie the mechanic says things like "Well, first we'll replace the coil, and if that doesn't work, we'll replace the fuel injector," it makes me suspect I just got a new coil for nothing. Not that you can't always use a new coil, but generally, I try to wait until I really need a new thing before tossing out the old one. It's the guess-and-by-golly approach. You guess, and if it works, you say, well, by golly! If it fails, you say, golly, sure screwed that up. The approach works, either way. After $2,300 worth of new everything, my car is running great. 

Another thing that doesn't heal by itself is teeth. Repairing teeth chews up a lot of money (ha, see what I did there). As I lay stiff as a board in the chair, with a drill, a water pick, a suction hose, and four hands in my mouth and the whine of the drill blasting my eardrums as it ground #3 and #26 to smithereens, I had a solid two hours to really savor the feeling of money being siphoned out of my bank account. I kept picturing the moment when I would be sitting at the receptionist's desk, pulling out my debit card. While I suffered in the chair, I couldn't wait for that moment. Once I survived the grinding and was actually pulling out my debit card, I felt somewhat less enthused. However, my deal is, I pay as I go for services rendered, even if they render me impoverished. How could I refuse? I got two new crowns for the bargain (Medicare) price of only $1,500. Such a deal. 

Speaking of dental deals, I hear that my insurance company has denied the $1,550 cost of last month's root canal re-do. I'm going to call them and weep into the phone, but I don't have a lot of hope. You can't petition the insurance company, not with prayer or anything else. The root canal had to be done, though, to save the tooth. So they say. Do we have to save teeth? I'm starting to think I'd look pretty good with dentures. I wonder if the dentist would let me customize them. Could I get them sharpened to points, maybe? That might come in handy in the upcoming zombie apocalypse, when I might be called upon to bite the throats out of water thieves. 

My bank account is starting to resemble Lake Mead—that is to say, a lot going out and not much coming in. I am not good at math, but even I know that is not sustainable. 

I knew this was going to happen. I was mentally prepared. Cars and teeth do not repair themselves. As long as I have the money, I will pay to maintain them. After that, it's baby food and bicycle. 

The other thing I'm thinking of that doesn't heal on its own is my heart. I don't mean that I'm grieving the losses of the past three years, although I am, and I probably always will miss my mother, my cat, and my sense of "home." I am actually referring to the actual meatball beating in my chest. Taking up yoga and jogging won't fix the valve that is gradually calcifying. My father used to lift weights to "muscle" his way through his maladies. It seems likely that I have inherited his genetic heart condition. I doubt if lifting weights is going to save me, any more than it saved him. But I understand his motivation. After a long walk, I feel a sense of sweaty accomplishment, like, yeah, take that, you stupid meatball. I'll outlive you yet, you just wait.

Speaking of dead, I'm pretending there will be a tomorrow, and I'm making plans accordingly. In a couple months, I'm going out in the world to seek my new home. Am I too old to go on a quest? I haven't heard that there is an age limit. This might be the adventure of my mediocre mundane lifetime. Or it might be the stupidest thing I've ever done. It's so hard to know ahead of time. Most of my bright ideas fall into the second category, but I've been lucky a few times before. It could happen again.

Free falling in slow motion

Remember when Alice fell down the rabbit hole, and she fell for such a long time, she got bored and fell asleep? The lesson of that story is that waiting for any impending disaster gets tedious after a while when the disaster fails to manifest. I've been in free fall almost from the moment I arrived in Arizona. In April it will be two years. I'm still free falling. 

The descent into the unknown is shaped partly by the imbalance in my inner ears and partly by the declining balance in my bank account. I don't know what the trajectory of my inner ears is going to be, but it's not hard to do the math on the money. I need to go someplace easier on the head and cheaper on the wallet.

I'm planning a reconnaissance road trip in April. Meanwhile, I'm using my free fall time to prepare. I don't know what I'm preparing for, exactly. 

I used to scoff at the preppers. I had an acquaintance who was sure the banking system was disintegrating. Now that I think back, it might have been around 2008. Dang it, she was right! Well, I had another friend who was prepping for the end of the world in the year 2000. Remember Y2K? No? Well, I do, sort of. I have a hazy recollection that I bought a couple extra gallons of water. I did not purchase bins of food to last me twenty years and a gun with plenty of ammo. People did, I heard. I guess their bins of food are nearing their expiration dates.  

In 2021, When I was packing for my move to Tucson, I ordered some camping gear from a survival company. Now I get emails reminding me to prepare for impending doom. After January 6 of last year, I am no longer a skeptic. This survivalist prepper lifestyle thing is somewhat associated with the van life movement, which has a certain appeal to me these days given I might be doing some "car camping" of my own soon. 

I've watched enough Walking Dead episodes to know how to take down a zombie but rioting humans are a different kind of mindless monster. Would I fight to stay alive? I'm not sure. You want my house? You want my identity? It's so important to you to destroy it? Okay. Go ahead. I'm nearing my sell-by date anyway. I had my fun. I grew up in the 1960s! No polio! It doesn't get much better than that for a little lower middle-class white girl. 

I want to shift my perception. It's going to take daily practice. Instead of seeing free fall as a scary negative experience, I want to reframe it as a grand exciting adventure. The trajectory of my life has never been linear. This is just more of that. Instead of criticizing nonlinearity as a failure, why not celebrate the organic nature of creativity? I don't have much linearity in my life but I have buttloads of creativity. 

If I can achieve the spartan lifestyle I am seeking, I'll be able to pursue my creativity and do it within my means. There won't be pressure to "get a job," the single most fatal phrase an artist can hear. I hear the voices of my parents clamoring in my head right now: You can't do that! What if you get sick? How will you live? 

Begone, all you voices. I've done my job caring for others. I've spent enough time and energy trying to fulfill someone else's idea of abundance, prosperity, and success. I'm old enough to make my choices and accept the outcomes. Hi ho hi ho, live or die, it's the creative life for me. 

It looks like the end, but it's not

I am compelled to evaluate everything. I come by it naturally. My ancestors survived by constantly evaluating their environment for threats. Is that a snake or a stick? Is that a tiger or is that just the pattern of dappled shadows among the trees? My compulsion to evaluate everything is hardwired into my DNA. I can’t not. That is what a compulsion is.

Evaluation leads to judgment. Judgment almost always leads to resentment or despair. Rarely does it lead to self-administered attaboys. Whatever happens to me, in me, around me, or by me, I have a continuous stream of chatter in my head: this is pretty good, this isn’t so bad, this is bad, this is really bad, this is the worst. 

My scale is a little skewed. I'm missing the points on the positive end of the scale, the ones that might be marked this is fabulous, this is fantastic, this is the best. I can’t bring myself to type exclamation marks. Consider them implied.

I’m so used to settling for mild resentment, I can’t let myself feel anything above that point on the scale. A good day for me is when I achieve neutrality. When my brain turns off the evaluation wheel and just listens to the wind.

Stop making sense

If I could sum up my primary problem in one sentence, it would be this: I can't stop trying to make sense. Sense of my life, sense of others, sense of life in general. In other words, I keep trying to figure it all out. If I would just stop trying to make sense of everything, if I could stop trying to manage and control everything, maybe I could relax, maybe I could take things as they come. 

Do I want to relax? Thanks for asking. Apparently not, otherwise I would stop trying to make sense of everything.

The gentle yet brutal vacuum known as Swedish death cleaning appears to be sucking up the last dregs of my past. In my ongoing quest to make sense of my current so-called life, I spent part of the day purging a few more of my possessions. I persevered, even though I felt a little short of breath today. Either my heart is not pumping right or the air here in Minimal Town is growing more rarified. Am I rising in elevation as I jettison unneeded ballast, like a human hot air balloon? No wonder my inner ears are going crazy.

Today the item on the death-cleaning chopping block was my old mailbox. You might think, Carol, really? You dragged a mailbox with you all the way from Oregon? What kind of nut are you? 

Thanks for asking. I'm the kind of nut who paints mailboxes and then enjoys receiving mail in them for eighteen years and then decides when it is time to move away, that maybe there will be a place in my future life for my hand-painted mailbox. 

That kind of nut.

When I got to Tucson, it was pretty clear there was no place here in the desert for my hand-painted mailbox. Most apartments already have mailboxes. Even if I had needed a new mailbox, the colors definitely reflect a Northwest vibe—no Southwest desert colors on this thing. It's mostly orange blobs on a green-blue background, with some purple in there to make it pop, somewhat faded after eighteen years weathering Portland weather. I don't actually remember painting the mailbox, although they are definitely my colors, but I remember building the hand-painted wooden base with which I installed it on the metal railing outside my door at the Love Shack. It was a cantilevered contraption built of wood and bolts (also painted purple, orange, and greenish blue). The base kept my mailbox in an upright position until the day I dismantled it. I threw away the base and packed up the mailbox. Yes, I dragged it with me all the way from Oregon to Arizona. 

Today was the day I decided to let it go. I took a photo of the mailbox and put it into the give-away pile. 

As it turns out, there might be a place here for that mailbox after all. My housemate rescued the mailbox from the give-away box. With a stencil and a little green or blue spray paint, the number on the front can be revised to reflect the address of the Art Trailer. The Love Shack mailbox will live on.

I can't really express how happy and relieved I feel about the repurposing (I call it the resurrection) of my old mailbox. I have berated myself multiple times for bringing so many ridiculous and useless possessions with me from Oregon. Looking back, I realize I was out of my mind with panic, grief, and fear. It's no wonder I made some foolish choices. Some of the possessions have been easy to let go. The mailbox was one of the last pieces that had no purpose here, other than to remind me of what I've lost. 

I think the mailbox represents a time in my life when I had things more or less figured out. I wasn't exactly thrilled with my life in Portland, but I knew my place in it, and things made sense to me. I knew whose daughter I was. I knew whose employee I was. I had plans, and I was getting things done. 

I always knew that time of my life would eventually end. Employers go bankrupt, cats go to heaven, mold infects apartments, and old people get dementia and then die of an aneurysm. Life (and death) happen. I guess that is the only sort of sense I can derive from my experience. Life and death happen. I experience things, but I do not control them. For reasons I can't explain, it gives me hope that my old mailbox will live on after I'm gone.

Life's little losses still linger

I don't have much to say tonight. I don't have time, either. It's crunch time for my Spanish dissertator. In any case, when work falls into my inbox, I usually jump right on it, unless I'm already booked with other work, which was the case this week. I can only work on one project at a time. First come, first served. 

Truthfully, I would rather be left alone. 

There remain many unresolved threads in my mind. Are my neurons getting mired in sticky threads? I fear so. I sense time is closing in on me. How do they put it? I think I may be running out of road. I need to get out there and see some of it before they take away my car keys.

To that end (escape), I feel compelled to minimize, downsize, death clean. Despite my intentions, I still slip up from time to time. For example, I bought two things this week: a heating pad to keep my feet warm while I work and sleep and a new seat for my bicycle. (Can I say "my" bicycle now? I still think of it as Linda's, even though she is dead now and she hardly ever rode it anyway.) 

These two things are immediately and measurably improving the quality of my life. I guess most people would say that is money well spent.

The heart monitor results are in. I'm not trained to read an EKG but even I can see that some of those squiggly lines look like an earthquake on a Richter scale. Is that normal? I suspect not but I'll find out for sure when I have a sitdown with my cardiologist. 

I'm not used to thinking of myself as a person with a heart problem. That is someone else's problem, not mine. Dad's problem. My cousin Dave's problem (he's still on the roof). 

Most of my friends have had Covid-19. My New Mexico friend just tested positive today. I feel some anxiety for her. It's hard to predict how sick someone will get. One friend was down for two weeks or more. One friend bounced back pretty fast. I worry all the time.

So far I have managed to dodge the Covid bug by staying away from crowds of people, which is not hard for me, given that I don't like crowds of people. I don't travel except alone by car. I don't go to family gatherings because I have no family here. I don't socialize with more than one friend at a time, and that almost always occurs out of doors. I wear an N95 mask to shop. I shop fast, like a guerilla in the jungle. I don't lollygag, I get in and get out. 

Besides not getting Covid (yet), I also have the superpower of invisibility. Nobody notices an older poorly dressed woman wearing a face mask. 

It's great to be old and invisible. However, even though humans don't see me, Covid can. I guess people are over it. I'm stuck in an endless loop. I go through the litany of losses to explain why my brain and body are failing: cat, Covid, Mom, moving. My little life losses still linger. So tired. 

If they can do it, why can't I?

I'm delinquent again on posting my weekly blogpost. My apologies to my five readers. I noticed I have written 606 blogposts. Jiminy crickets. I wonder what would have happened if I had decided not to post anonymously? Probably I would have been fired from my teaching job and thus would never have had the income to get a PhD. I would never have been in a position to take care of my mother for five years. If I had chosen to write under my own name, I would probably have been living in my car since 2013, that is, if I had one. Hm. On the bright side, maybe Mom would have gone to live in my brother's basement, derailing his career instead of mine. Well, I never had a career, so that's not fair. Derailing my descent into whatever the hell this is.

Anonymity can extend to erasing one's preferences. I can hear you asking, what do you mean, Carol? Thanks for asking. I will tell you. While I was riding my bike (or the deceased Linda's bike, I hesitate to claim it as my own) around the mobile home park in the gloaming this evening, it occurred to me that I perhaps don't know myself very well. I mean, when I'm immersed in other people's environments, I start to forget what I like and what I don't like. I take on the culture of my surroundings.

Let me give you some examples. 

When I was dating a runner, I took up running—well, jogging, in my case. When I was living with a surfer, I hung out on the beach (no, I never surfed, not once; apparently even I have a line I will not cross). When I was living with a golfer, I learned how to play golf. Do you see what I am doing? I'm blending in. 

Now I'm in the mobile home park. A bike happened to manifest (thanks to Bill's dead wife, Linda). I was content to cycle around the Park wearing my straw hat. However, my housemate is an avid and competent bicycle rider. This means I am now fitted out with front and back blinking lights and a bike lock. It was also brought to my attention that if I wanted to survive I should wear my bike helmet and a neon yellow vest. This is so the old drivers will see me and hopefully not run over me like they do the lizards I see flattened everywhere. And if I do get squashed, maybe the helmet will leave my head intact so my family can identify my corpse. 

Here's another example. Given that I may soon be living in my car (I mean car camping, don't freak out), I mentioned to my housemate my interest in getting a folding bicycle, thinking, you know, how handy a little bike would be for getting to the campground pit toilet in the middle of the night. Next thing I know, a Craigslist post appears in my phone: folding bike for sale! My housemate is a dynamo.

Do you see what is happening? I'm morphing into a bicyclist! 

Besides knowing all things bicycle, my housemate is skilled in the kitchen. I have been advised to consider eating seaweed and natto. I know what seaweed is, having stabbed many kelp bulbs on Oregon beaches, but natto was a new word to me. Japanese in origin, I was told. I have a rather dreary history with Japanese food, beginning with a MSG-laced quail egg in 1988. I won't bore you with the details. Suffice it to say, that quail egg ushered in a decades-long episode of food additive aversion that lingers to this day. Name a food additive, I react to it. So you can understand my inclination to nix the natto. However, I can't say I'm not intrigued. Will the promised benefits outweigh the risks? I predict I will soon be foraging at the Asian grocer.

Mostly I try to keep my life simple (and therefore ostensibly under my control). My food plan is somewhat spartan. I continue to pare down my possessions. However, I do get impulses to binge and buy. My impulse to buy things is slow-moving but it is powerful. 

Let me give you an example. 

I ride around this mobile home park at dusk. I look into the bright windows. What do I see? Big-screen TVs showing the Kardashians or Survivor or football. Poufy little dogs barking at me through the window (and a few cats, who don't bark). Old women who resemble my mother sitting on flowered couches playing solitaire or knitting. Shelves full of stuff. Lots and lots of stuff. What happens in my brain? I think, hey, I've been deprived for so long, I need some stuff of my own. From there, it's a nanohop to believing I need shelves to store and display that stuff. Then I think, I might have enough money left to buy a mobile home, not in this fancy place, but maybe in a less friendly, more decrepit trailer park in another part of town. 

This thought runs through my head every time I ride or walk through this mobile home park. Even though I know these so-called homeowners don't own the land their manufactured homes sit on; even though I know they are at the mercy of the landowners, who can raise the rent, set the rules, and sell the land at any time; even though I know most of these trailers would crack and crumble if the owners tried to relocate them to another park; even though I know I don't have the income to maintain a car, let alone a mobile home . . . even though I know all that, I still in my mind think, if they can do it, why can't I?

That is how my brain is constantly trying to kill me. I look at people who spend money and think, if they can do it, why can't I? I look at people who drink as much as they want and eat granola, pudding, pancakes, and potato chips and think, if they can do it, why can't I? 

Truth: I could do it. I could do all of that. Nobody would try to stop me. The consequences would be painful and debilitating for me and disgusting to witness for my friends and family, but I could say, eff it and jump off that cliff. If I knew I had three months to live, I would probably do it. Mm, pancakes. 

Stuff piling up in the rear view mirror

I'm listening to some old Pablo Cruise on YouTube while I undertake another round of Swedish death cleaning. Today I packed up my collection of academic books into one small but heavy cardboard box. The music is making me sad. I'm remembering the 1970s. Love will find a way. Ha. Overly optimistic sentiment. I'm sad because in the 70s, I didn't know what I was capable of, good and bad. My brain was still forming. Now I look at these books on factor analysis and structural equation modeling and marvel that my brain was once capable of comprehending their content. I peaked in 2013. It's been a messy downhill slide ever since.

Lately I seem to dip in and out of jettison mode. Today this is what is on my mind. I had planned to write about my exciting adventure preparing for and undergoing an endoscopy and a colonoscopy (I got the twofer deal), but I'm over it. That is so last week. I can't find the energy to even think about it. Even though few things are funnier than having a camera rammed up one's butt, suffice it to say, I have nothing new to offer. Most of you have probably already had to suffer the indignity one or more times. All I can say is, thank God for my friend S and praise the Lord and pass the Propofol. Lying there trussed up like a Thanksgiving turkey, with a plastic gizmo holding my mouth open and my privates flapping in the wind, I was never so glad to exit stage right in all my life.  

So that's done. No polyps, no cancer, I got the ten year warranty, so this entire surreal experience is fast receding in the rear view mirror. I've already forgotten the week of starvation and the night spent scrolling through Instagram while parked on the toilet. It's all a hazy blur best left on the side of the road. 

Now that I'm eating food again, I have the luxury of resuming my anxiety about my heart. It keeps thumping and bumping along, but with the exception of the first few days of monitoring (during which I was starving), I actually feel pretty good. I don't have a lot of energy (iron anemia) but now that the colonoscopy is done, I can start taking the iron supplement. I hope that restores my superpowers. I am looking forward to channeling my inner Popeye. 

I'm chagrined that I still have so much to jettison. I dragged along pieces of my former lives with me when I moved to Tucson in 2021. My academic books. My art supplies. My sewing machine. Who do I think I am? A person who still knows how to do statistics? I think my editing days are over. My brain cells and my patience seems to have run out at the same time. It's time to say goodbye to the books (so much money spent on those books, argh). I will donate them to the library foundation. They were happy to receive my DVDs and music CDs. I fear their eyes will roll back in their heads when they see these obscure academic titles but who cares. With my donation, I amputate, exorcise, erase, I don't know what word to use, I release that part of me that is atrophied and useless. 

Same with the art supplies. I dismembered the three framed acrylic paintings I brought with me into their separate elements. The canvas will go out with tomorrow's trash, to start a new life in the landfill. The frames and the stretcher bars will find a home with some as-yet-to-be-discovered Freecycler, who will also be thrilled to receive an almost full pad of vintage newsprint, two (expensive) birch drawing boards, a dozen large tubes of (still good) acrylic paint, and fifty-plus artists brushes in all sizes and conditions. All the stuff I dragged with me from Portland, thinking I can't claim to be an artist without a box of art supplies. Ha. I still draw. I drew a picture today. There you see it, hot off the whatever you call lined paper in a composition notebook. I was sitting in a Zoom meeting, drawing while listening, channeling my inner curmudgeon, as is my wont.

My sewing machine will be the last to go. It's such a practical tool, unlike statistics books and art supplies. I might keep it for a while longer, at least until I decide to hit the road. Even then, I might pack it on the roof of my car, in one of those roof boxes. I might want to make car seats and curtains, who knows. With Popeyes on them. 

It's hard to let go of some of these things, not because they are intrinsically valuable but because of the parts of me they represented. I don't have those parts anymore. It's likely the statistician in me is gone for good. The artist in me has morphed into a writer-slash-illustrator or cartoonist, caricaturist? I don't know what to call myself. I'm still an artist. I'm just not a painter anymore. I had a gulp when I saw my easel go away, but ripping up my old paintings was surprisingly easy. I have photos.

So the question is, who am I now? I'm still figuring that out. My brain and body have changed. I'm no longer capable of doing some things. Maybe I can't do math anymore, or find the right words to describe what I am feeling. Maybe my writing is mundane and silly. Maybe my drawings are trivial and idiosyncratic. Maybe I only have the energy to putter slowly on a bike around the trailer park. It's okay. I can still make myself laugh with my stories. The jokes are for me. As long as I find joy in the creative process, I will keep creating. When it stops being fun, I will go do something else.

My heart is broken

How many times over the past couple years have I said "my heart is broken"? Haven't you? More times than we can count, probably. We've all had losses. My cat died at the beginning of the pandemic. I still haven't recovered, I doubt I ever will. Then Covid swept us under. So many people lost loved ones. Mom dodged Covid but died of an aneurysm in her upper GI tract almost a year to the day after Eddie died. Then wham bam, four months later, I find myself in Tucson, just in time for monsoon and wondering what the heck happened.

After a bizarre year at the Bat Cave, finally I come to rest here in the Trailer Del Arte. I thought, finally, a place to breathe, to catch my breath. A place to regroup and figure out what comes next. Not so fast, the Universe seems to be saying. This week I got the unsettling news that my heart really is broken. Not just emotionally and metaphorically, but also physically. 

WTF, Universe!? 

The "small murmur" turned into a rather alarming diagnosis of aortic stenosis. "Mild to moderate" calcification of the aortic valve. Better than "severe" I guess, but any amount is not good. Apparently my valve has an amount of calcification that would typically be seen in a person in their 70s or 80s. The question is, what type of valve do I have? Is it a two-leaf or a three-leaf? Nobody knows, which is why I have a referral for a CT scan. Lucky me. Ho hum. Another scan. 

Meanwhile, I am now the proud wearer of a little white box attached to the left side of my chest. It's about an inch and a half square and it sits in a blue plastic casing that is permanently attached to a piece of tape that is glued to my chest. Inside the piece of tape some electrodes are embedded. This strange limpet communicates with a slim shiny smartphone, which must be within thirty feet of the sensor at all times or it throws a hissy fit. The sensor communicates with the smartphone, and the smartphone transmits my EKG in real time 24/7 to some company somewhere, God only knows. Far as I know, there is no GPS, so I am not being tracked. Not that I'm going anywhere. 

So this thing has to cling to my chest for thirty days. I can shower with it on. Every few days or so, it needs recharging. I did that yesterday. It felt so good to peel that thing off me and get my skin back. I plugged the sensor into it's charger and waited for the light to turn from blinking amber to green. And waited. And waited. Finally I decided to plug it into the USB port on my computer. That seemed to do the trick. Then I had the fun of figuring out how to put on a new patch. The med aide put it on me at the doctor's office. She showed me the process but my audio memory, well, my memory in general, is not great. I have since referred to the instruction booklet multiple times to tell me what to do. 

The smartphone needs recharging every night. It wakes up randomly and beeps. The day after I had the device, an alert on the phone said it wasn't sending data and to call the 800 number. I called the 800 number and got a nice person who spoke excellent English and who told me how to fix it. Since then, the phone seems to be happy. I wear it strapped around my waist in a stretchy piece of cloth. Apparently the battery in the sensor will last longer if the phone is in close proximity. I feel like I'm carrying two electronic infants, one strapped to my waist and the other glued to my chest. Like Giga Pets, they need a lot of attention. 

Sorry if I'm boring you. It's easier to tell you about the details of the barnacle clinging to my chest than it is to describe the thoughts going through my head at the news that my heart doesn't work right anymore. This all happened very quickly. I'm still in shock and denial.

I admit, it did occur to me that I might have brought this on myself by all the times I moaned, "My heart is broken" over the past two years. What do they say, be careful what you wish for? No, that's not the adage I want. What you resist, persists? Um, no, that's not right. Something about if you say something, it will happen? I don't know. The assumption is that our minds have control over our bodies. That if we got cancer, we must have wanted to for some unknown reason. Some sort of cosmic lesson. 

Besides being colossally unhelpful and cruel, it is also not true that if we say something, it will happen. How many times over the years did I state an intention to lose a few pounds, or get more exercise, or turn my art into a business? Right. As if my mind had such power. I'd be thin, wealthy, and living in the Caribbean if simply visualizing my success means it is going to happen. It's the "do what you love and the money will follow" idea, which is the worst advice for artists ever given. 

Do I take the blame for my broken heart? You might say, well, Carol, weren't you raised on Wonder bread, Froot Loops, Crisco, hamburger patties, and canned green beans? As an adult, didn't you drink, didn't you smoke cigarettes, eat red meat and lots of saturated fat and processed foods? Yes to the first one, no to the second. I was vegetarian for a long time. I have never smoked cigarettes. I haven't had a drink in years. My worst vice is coffee. Black, no sugar.

Compared to many Americans, I eat a spartan diet. Maybe it was too spartan, who knows. I don't blame my environment so much as I blame my genes. The cardiologist asked me if I had kids. When I said no, he said that's good, because they would have the risk of the same problem. This is largely genetic. Maybe a defect that went unnoticed until now, I don't know. My father had a heart problem, not enough to keep him out of the military but it caught up to him eventually. By the time he was willing to do something about it, it was too late. He was too weak for heart surgery. He fell off the front porch and broke his hip, but it was his heart that killed him. 

Today I feel pretty good, given I've been on a starvation diet for three days in preparation for a colonoscopy tomorrow. I assume the technicians will read my chart and take all necessary precautions. It would be pretty embarrassing to have a heart attack while I've got a camera up my butt.