The human Roomba

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The general dissatisfaction of being alive

Nothing is truly wrong, but nothing is right, either. The space in-between has captured me like a sticky bait trap. I’m mired up to my knees in malcontentedness, waving my dead bug arms at the sky: Curse you! What am I cursing? I don't know. Life? When I curse, I curse at everything, just like when I cry, I cry for everything. I’m sensing that the time for whining and grieving is over, like, move on, Carol, and yet when I hear about others’ losses, it refreshes my own grief and I crash all over again.

On the bright side, the sticky in-between place traps my brain but it doesn’t trap my body. I still get out of bed in the morning. I still get busy tackling my to-do list for the day. I show up for my commitments. Even though most of the time, everything I do seems pointless, I still do my best under the circumstances of the day. I don’t expect much from myself or anyone else, and I don’t berate myself or anyone else if outcomes fall short. Expectations are part of the sticky trap.

Sometimes I look in the mirror, see my mother, and laugh. Sometimes I look in the mirror, see how my shape resembles what I remember of her shape, and a sense of rage washes over me. I don't want to be my mother, yet my body seems compelled to mimic hers, five sizes bigger. I hope my brain will fall further from the tree, but the odds aren't in my favor.   

Since I’ve been taking the bisphosphonate for osteoporosis, I am regaining weight I lost over the past year. I hope my bones are rebuilding, knitting back the framework that holds me upright so I don’t fracture a hip the next time I trip on a curb while gazing at the Tucson sky. I’d rather not regain the flab that drags me down, but aging is a neutral phenomenon that does not consider my desires or feelings. I was thrilled that I was able to fit into my old blue jeans, the two pairs I’ve kept in a drawer for twenty years, waiting for the magical day I would be able to wear them again. The day came here in Tucson. Oh joy. After wearing them a few times, I realized, hey, they make denim with spandex now, for a scoche more give in the thighs and butt. I'm not into being restricted by my clothes anymore. Now that I can fit into the jeans, I no longer want to. What is the lesson of this story? Sometimes you get what you ask for, and it’s not what you want after all? Change happens? It doesn't matter how you look, it only matters how you feel? I don’t know, you figure it out.

For the most part, in real life, I don’t care what I look like. I wear men’s pajama pants to the store. I don’t care what I smell like, either. In the past two years, I’ve worn deodorant exactly one time, when I went to the ENT last week. Now that my life is on Zoom, though, I care about what people see on their screen, for those brief moments they are actually looking at me and not at themselves. What is my background, am I tastefully blurred (can they see I live in a basement?), what are my colors (do I blend artistically with the blurred background?), am I wearing my “public” hat (fleece beanie) or my “private” hat (old stocking cap)? I don’t care what they think of me, but I like to enhance their Zoom viewing experience if possible.

Nobody else cares. I’ve “visited” so many homes over the past couple years, and seen umpteen screens showing people’s cluttered dining rooms, unwashed dishes, disorganized home offices, unmade beds, dusty ceilling fans, annoying pets, and prominent nose hairs. Besides me, only the PBS Newshour crew seems to pay attention to their backdrops.

I had two and a half weeks of relief from the vertigo. The bucket in my head stopped sloshing day and night, just gently rippled now and then, and the hissing in my right ear was mostly silent. My mood lifted. I felt reborn. Amazing how everything seems better when you feel good, even though nothing is different.

Then I went to the ENT.

The day after the ENT appointment, the vertigo poured over me like a tidal wave, and I was back to life on the boat. I can’t blame the ENT. All she did was clean the wax out of my ears. I blame the fluctuating air pressure. The day of the ENT appointment, we had a storm. Low pressure. The next day, clouds, the next day, sunshine as high pressure swept down from the north. Then low pressure returned. Then high pressure, and now we’re in for another rain storm. You get the picture. I’m a creature of the barometer, it seems. I can’t figure out what else it could be. I have lived my life the same way, every day, month after month, eating more or less the same thing, going to bed at the same time, watching the same late-night TV shows, spending half my days on Zoom, trying to write my next novel. Same old, same old. As far as I can tell, the only thing changing is the air around me.

Speaking of stuck in a loop, I’m still searching for meaning and purpose. I guess I’m living proof that it is possible to have a functional, productive life without having a purpose. I get a lot done. I’m the only one who decides if what I do has meaning and value. Is it all pointless? Perhaps. In the big cosmic picture, life has one purpose: to persist. In that sense, I’m fulfilling my purpose, although I have failed to procreate, so this line of DNA dies with me. I don’t believe my manifest destiny is to pass on my genetic code to a new generation, so why do I believe I need to believe in some sort of higher purpose to give my life meaning and value?

I would go nuts without this blog. Even if no one reads it, this blog is the one place where I can say what I want, spin my experience into something that makes sense to me, make fun of myself (and others, sometimes), and reveal my absurdities and foibles. I could pay a therapist to perform this function, but I can just imagine how that might go. Tell me about your childhood. I don’t want a solution, I want a witness, and this blog is that for me. Sometimes I have to stay stuck in the in-betweenies until I’m ready to lift my feet out of the muck and move on.