Another stupid cold holiday season begins

As usual, the holidays stir up mixed feelings in my brain. Beyond the basics of cold, hungry, tired, or leave me alone, I often have no idea what I want or need, and it always seems worse this time of year. Is that normal? I suspect not. You probably love the holidays, am I right? All those songs, those lights, those smells emanating from frantic shoppers. What's more, I bet you go through this season knowing exactly what you want and need. The reason I claim this is because I used to know exactly what I wanted and needed. Or I thought I did. Now I know nothing, not about holiday cheer, pecan pie, or anything else.

For example, once I was positive I would have a career in the arts. Everyone around me thought so, and so did I. Now, looking back, I find I actually have had no career at all. I don't think many people who aren't in the arts can say that. Normal people go to school, get jobs that constitute careers, have families, accumulate wealth, retire, and then die. Oh, sure, they have hiccups, farts, and belches along the way in the form of divorces, deaths, illness, what have you, but those things would have happened anyway, no matter what their career, given that people are codependent frightened amygdalas most of the time. Oh, sorry, this has nothing to do with the holidays, does it? This sometimes happens. It's the end-of-year what-fresh-hell-is-this time of reflection.

My amygdala is running flat out these days, trying to get me to stop, just stop. I seem hell bent on jumping in a handbasket and setting a course straight for hell. I think I can add "as usual," because this is normal for me, this is my norm, this is my M.O. I'm regressing to my mean. I'm trying to be nice about it, but the holiday music sometimes gets under my skin. Misophonic dermatillomaniac. 

What I am trying to say? I'm saying I'm nuts. To really put paid to this season of holiday hell, I applied for a job, and this week, I had a Zoom interview. (No, it's not a Christmas sales job, although that could be a fun form of purgatory for someone who chases misery.) It's just a semi-white collar grant-funded one-year temp gig. Part of me thinks they'd be crazy not to hire me. If they do, there's a chance I might be moving to northern Arizona. However, there is an equal chance I will be moving into my car and parking it on BLM land somewhere to wait for affordable housing to catch up to the senior housing crisis. 

I'm trying to imagine how I will feel if I don't get the job. Will rejection confirm all the negative beliefs I've dragged around like a PigPen blanket all these years? Oh, woe is me, alas, alackaday, they hate me, time for some worm stew. My own private rain cloud will let loose, and I will accept it, because I rarely use an umbrella, but mainly because that is what I'm used to. I land somewhere by accident, I perch for a while, and then a strong wind (usually blown out my own butt) sends me toppling into free fall, until I fetch up on some other ledge or branch, wondering what the hell just happened.

But, holy crapolly momma moly, what if I get the job? Who will I be then? Someone whose skills are in demand? Someone chosen to be part of a team? My brain is like a piece of slimy meat that refuses to wrap around the stick. I need a new brain. I need a new persona, a new self-concept, if you will. This stupid cold season really tends to bring out my chronic malcontent. Kind of like Beauty and the Beast. No, more like Jeckyll and Hyde. Mutt and Jeff. Chip and Dale. Sonny and Cher. Bread and butter. Gay and apparel. Wait. What? 

I can write what I want here because this blog is still (more or less) anonymous and because nobody reads it anymore anyway. Or if they do, they are much too polite to bring up my latest melancholic diatribe about my attempts to live life on its own stupid terms. If I had been writing like this twenty years ago, my family and friends would have stormed me with an intervention. I'd be in rehab. Ninety in ninety, phone it in every day. 

Now, my friends and family are busy, living busy interesting lives. To be sure, some of them are probably as miserable as I am, falling down stairs and losing mothers. But others are busy going on fabulous trips to exotic places, embarking on romantic relationships, worrying about quiche and cats and husbands, oh my. None of them has time for my drama. This is healthy, this is good. Everyone has drama. They just don't barf it out in a blog. At least, not that I know of. Hm. Omigorsh, would it not be hilariously wonderful if we were all blogging anonymously? 

Meanwhile, the alarm clock in my brain is still going off once per minute, 24/7, and I'm still writing and posting a story a day on my non-anonymous blog, where I go on and on and on, simply to practice my craft. And because I said I would, and I am not a quitter. Wonder of wonders! No wonder I'm nuts. Writing a story a day is harder than showing up to write a literature review for a dissertation no one will ever read. 

Sorry to the bots, this blog is the landfill where the garbage trucks dump the crap. 

Welcome to a new season of endless cranky fun from the Hellish Handbasket. 

I need to be sedated

Tis the season during which the residents of the mobile home park dress up in costumes and shuffle over to the clubhouse to drink strawberry lemonade witches brew and eat candy corn and tootsie rolls. Or whatever they were doing in the clubhouse last night. As I limped around the park in the gloaming, I passed a geriatric couple wearing orange T-shirts decorated with pumpkin faces. I took my earplugs out of my ears and said, "Nice pumpkins." I waited for a response but they looked at me with blank expressions, which indicated to me either they hadn't seen me walking around the park at dusk almost every night for the past year and were wondering if they should call security or they had left their hearing aids at home in anticipation of loud music at the monster mash and couldn't hear a word I said.

I passed another person just getting out of a little blue car. I could just see the top of their head, which sported a colorful jester hat, complete with bells. I didn't see the rest of their costume before I had moved on by. Something glittery, dangly, noisy, and backless, probably. One can hope.

Under clear skies and a bright moon, the old folks beelined to the clubhouse, via foot, walker, golf cart, and SUV. I briefly contemplated poking my head in the door for a looksee. Having once been in the costume industry, I have a great love of self-expression through apparel, as long as it is everyone else looking stupid, not me. Been there, done that, a lot, to the everlasting chagrin of my father. Last night, however, I didn't stick around to see what was going down at the Halloween hoedown. My party animal days are long past.

In fact, I am morphing into the opposite of a party animal. My sister gave me a word to describe what I am, which I will share with you and write more about in a future blogpost, if I remember. I am an apanthropist. Go ahead, look it up. I'll wait.

I complain a lot but I can adapt to almost anything, it seems. I was looking at some photos of the room I rent in this mobile home, which I fondly refer to as the Barbie Dreamhouse Without the Dream. I'd forgotten that just last year, I lived a life of abundance. I had two desks and two computers, and a fabulous chair on wheels, which I could drag between the two desks, as if I were two different people. An artist and a writer. What a creative life I had! And how quickly I have adapted to a life with less of everything, in anticipation of living a life with almost nothing.

I felt a twinge of sadness, which I do frequently these days, well, all the time for my entire life, if I'm being honest. I'm just a sad chronically malcontented whiner with a strangely optimistic streak of hope that I will find my creativity no matter what circumstances fall on my head. And so far I think I have. I keep writing, blogging, drawing, mentoring, hoping I'll stumble across the conditions in which I can thrive. Meanwhile, I adapt.

For instance, I'm adapting to the new revelation that my PCP has suddenly retired (or died) and now I have a new PCP, who like most healthcare providers in this system, is booked out until February of 2024. In a new round of righteous indignation, my well-meaning friends and family are berating me to "be my own advocate" and demand what I need. Ha. As if I knew what that was. I am showing up with persistence, patience, and pluck, but I wish they would say something less like "You need to push harder at the healthcare system" and more along the lines of "Gosh, Carol, that sounds stressful and frustrating."

Maybe I am too much of a fatalist. Maybe besides being an optimistic apanthropist, I am also a bit of a nihilist. What is the point of pushing? As if life were so precious. There is no meaning or purpose to existence. The meaning I attach to events is arbitrary and pointless. As if I had any control over reality. Is it a basic philosophical difference? I like living okay, usually, but sometimes isn't it okay to let the Universe have a say in how events unfold? People who tell me I need to fight harder are the ones who are most afraid of losing what they have. Maybe they need to do a little Swedish death cleaning to gain some perspective.

I think I just need to be sedated until conditions are optimal for success. Like, just let me sleep. Put me in a crystal cave and fill the door with a boulder on a timer and post a sign outside: open this tomb when conditions for this creative hothouse heirloom tomato of a person are likely to foster happiness. I haven't figured out all my specifications, yet, but for sure, when I wake up from my long slumber, I want all guns to have been melted down and beaten into ploughshares and windmills.

Time to stop making sense

In my fledgling career as an amateur dogsitter, I can now claim to have cared for three dogs. Juno is the biggest dog, so far. She's an 11-year-old, slow-moving Rhodesian Ridgeback whose head is bigger than mine. She's old and arthritic, which means she doesn't go for walks and she sleeps most of the time. Except during the night, of course, when her bladder or bowels say it's time to go outside (rarely at the same time). 

My schedule is out the window when it comes to taking care of Juno. The dog's 5 am and 5 pm feeding schedule drives the entire show. The feeding schedule drives the poop and pee schedule. I have no choice, unless I want to experience the consequences, which I don't want to do, so I have my alarm set for 5 am. 

It's still dark here at 5 am but dogs' stomachs have their own internal driving force, and I live to serve, so I stagger off the couch and head for the fancy open-concept kitchen and the stainless steel fridge, where I rummage for the frozen veggies that make up one third of this dog's meal. The veggies go into the microwave to thaw. While that is happening, I put my head lamp on my head, click it to the dim setting, and grab a couple training treats, which I use to bribe Juno to go pee. She does, thankfully—like most of us, she'll do anything for treats. I admire the tepid air and the amazing array of stars overhead while she squats in the grass. Then we rush back inside for the main event. 

I get the other two elements of her meal out of the fridge: a huge round flat slab of raw hamburger and a raw chicken drumstick. These two things go into a big metal bowl.

By this point, Juno is going insane. Oh, have I mentioned, I am currently adhering to a vegan lifestyle? 

The thawed veggies get dumped into the metal bowl with the two hunks of raw meat. After a dousing of water from the reverse osmosis filtered water spigot, I feed Juno her two arthritis meds (wondering if they would do anything for my hip arthritis), and then we go outside onto the patio. 

Juno knows to sit, and I've learned to hold the dish high over my head so she doesn't knock it out of my hand. I set the dish on the Mexican tile flagstones, and Juno goes to town. It's a little disturbing to watch her polish off an entire chicken leg in two crunchy bites. She could probably do that to my hand, if she got a hankering for old lady bones. While she eats, I put the raw stuff back in the fridge. I make sure I have enough meat thawed for the next several meals. Finally, I clean up the dark granite countertops with antiseptic wipes, hoping none of that raw meat juice got on anything I care about. 

Juno returns in about 30 seconds. Her dish is licked clean. Juno goes back to bed on her 4-foot wide round cushion, and I wash out the metal bowl, wondering if it's worth going back to bed myself, or if I should just stay up for the sunrise. Usually I just lay there in the dark and listen to the AC system clicking on and ramping up as if we are about to be shot into orbit. 

Speaking of AC, I don't understand how it works, if it's me (residual hot flashes), or if the house is trying to kill me. Sometimes it seems hot in here, and sometimes it seems cold. Yesterday, I couldn't take having freezing feet when it's 108°F outside, so I nudged the thermostat from 78°F to 80°F. It seems better today.

In the evening, at 5 pm, we repeat the entire meal preparation process, sans the pills, and sans me going back to bed to try to catch a few more hours of shut-eye. By evening I'm in a bleary daze, wondering how I got here and where I'm going to end up next. I know that around 1 am, Juno, the pony-sized dog, is going to shake herself and head to the patio door, where she will poke at the glass with one huge black claw. I'm right behind with my head lamp, the beck and call girl for the creature temporarily at the center of my existence. 

I think back sometimes to the arc of this blog. Few of you are around anymore to reflect with me on the vagaries of this journey. This blog started out as a place to rant about the travesties of earning my PhD, oh woe is me, alas, alackaday. After some wandering aimlessly, the blog centered on the decline of my mother into dementia, and eventually her death. After that, what was there to talk about but me, as usual: downsizing, moving, searching for home, healthcare, and hoping to find my balance. It's hard to look back and see not an arc but a line. It all depends on what label I put on the y-axis, though, doesn't it? If I put financial success on that axis, the line descends into negative territory. Danger, Will Robinson! But if I put freedom on that axis, the line shoots out the top of the chart. 

The question remains: Would you rather be safe or would you rather be happy? It's really hard to find the intersection of both. 

July in the desert

July is one of my favorite months. Almost everyone I know was born in July. Well, not quite "almost everyone," but a lot of people, both friends and family. Happy birthday (today!) to Bravadita, friend from Portland. Happy birthday to Phoenix friend C.S., which depending on the day could stand for Crystalline Seeker, Cranium Savant, or Cranberry Sauce. And don't let me forget my big brother R., who no matter how old I get will always be older than me. May you all find peace on your special day, maybe with a little cake or pho or ice cream. My mother's birthday was in July, too. I'm hopeful she is enjoying her favorite dessert, key lime pie, in a heaven somewhere where calories don't set you up for an apple-shaped heart attack. 

If your birthday is in July as well, I hope it's a good one. Meaning memorable for happy reasons, not for stupid hot summer weather reasons. For example, I hope you aren't in Southern Arizona right now. Or parts of California, New Mexico, or Texas. If you are, I'm so sorry, but welcome to the Heat Dome. Again. 

Three years ago, I experienced what happens to a mobile home when the air conditioning goes out. I survived through the miracle of soggy underwear draped over my head and shoulders. So, when the AC went out again last week, I was ready. But you can only take so many days of breathing hot air into your lungs while the wet tanktop on your head drips water all over your keyboard.  Evaporative cooling loses all novelty after the first long searing sleepless night.

When my housemate found out the AC was well and truly broken, we made plans to vacate while we waited for the back-ordered part. In a way, it was a relief to discover that it wasn't a structural problem with the trailer. I'd feared the windows or poorly insulated walls were to blame, but no, it was just the stupid coil leaking coolant. Very expensive to fix, but fixable, eventually, after all the other suffering folks ahead of us receive their replacement coils and get back to the business of living in the desert.

I can understand why people come to the desert. It's pretty nice at certain times of the year. But how many hot summers does it take to make you realize it is stupid to stay here? For me, it's three. But where do you go to escape the summer heat, I ask you? If a heat dome can bring 116°F to the Pacific Northwest, traditional snowbird summer destination, then a heat dome can pop up anywhere. Greenland? The Arctic? No place is safe. We didn't evolve to live underground, but that might be our only hope someday, if you can call that a hope (see the Silo series). Lucky for me, I'm nearing the end of my life, so the amount of time I have left to suffer will be relatively brief. If I were in my twenties, I would definitely be marching on Washington. 

After a week of doing the frog in the gradually boiling pot of water thing, I traded the hot trailer in Tucson for a room in my Phoenix friend's big house. I feel like a critter in a burrow. The walls are thick in this mansion, the windows are double-paned. As long as the power holds out, I'll be cool as a cucumber, spouting my palaver for my anonymous blog and plotting my next novel. It's easy to assume I'm safe here. Do you ever think about the power grid going down? Do you worry that when you turn on the tap, it will be dry? That when you press the thing on the fancy fridge, the motor will grind but give you no ice, neither crushed nor cubed? Woe is me when that day comes. Choosing to live in the desert is like waving a red cape at a bull who is standing three feet away. Like, why would you do that unless you had something to prove? 

Or no place else to go. 

Maybe someday humans will evolve off planet and find paradise worlds with year-round tropical breezes, where the native fauna poops malted milk balls and the rivers run with aspartame-free Grape Nehi and Orange Crush. I hear there are billions of worlds in the Universe that could support life. Maybe we could each have our own, terraformed to our own personal preferences. I know what kind of world I would wish for, and it wouldn't be pink. 

Anyway. What was I saying? Right. Happy birthday. 

My aching back

You'd think I'd be used to change by now, after sixty-six years on the planet. Nope. Still not used to it. Still cranky when things change. Is it masochistic that I keep putting myself into situations that produce massive change? Maybe it's not masochistic. Maybe it's courageous. Did you ever think of that?

Speaking of cranky, I have a bone to pick with Microsoft. They had this nice little program called Picture Manager, really great for editing my drawings. Along with good old Paint, I can take my crummy illustrations drawn on lined journal paper and erase the blue lines, tidy them up, reduce the gray, and deepen the midtones. A few iterations ago, Microsoft stopped offering Picture Manager as part of Office. I have happily used Picture Manager for years on my old desktop but I don't have it on my laptop. 

Picture Manager came installed with MS Office 2010, which is what my desktop system was running, up until yesterday when the graphics card fizzled from dust, decay, cat hair, and old age. In fact, pretty much what has happened to me the past fifteen years just happened to my desktop computer system. Kaput. 

I'm grieving today for my desktop system. I'm also really grateful to the computer gods who kept the graphics card running long enough to finish a massive editing job with a serious deadline. I finished the job at 1:00 a.m. last night, went to bed, and woke up to a dead computer. Talk about miraculous timing. Bummer, my computer is dead, but hallelujah, it picked the right moment to die. Maybe there is a god.

I went to Dr. Google, who has all the explanations for everything, including the answer to the question What are these weird splotches on my arms and legs? and discovered that 2010 Sharepoint has Picture Manager, and I can download it for free. The kind people on the internet showed me what to do, and it worked, and now I have Picture Manager on my laptop. Yay. My laptop is to my desktop as the tortoise is to the hare, so it took quite a while to download (yes, yes, I agree, take my first born), install, customize just for Picture Manager, search for the folders with pictures in them, and then find the image I wanted to use. You can see I didn't get all the blue lines out, but I never do. Now that my desktop system is gunnysack, my printer/scanner will no longer work either. That means no more scanning of my drawings. Now I must use my smartphone to photograph my drawings. No more easy peasy. Everything creativity related now is slower, harder, and grimmer.

Change. You'd think after all this time.

Speaking of aching backs, car camping! When E called it a shakedown cruise, truer words never spilled over the epiglottis. My bed platform was sturdy but hard as only a plastic shelf with a one-inch camping pad and a pile of fleece blankets can be. That is to say, many long moments of wondering, what weird kind of frozen hell is this? Sleeping in a minivan in the middle of a freezing desert? I win the Amana Freezer for insane choices. I was saved by technology in the form of a dinky powerbank, my new boyfriend, Jackery, a 240 watt battery that powered my 70 watt heating pad that kept my feet warm during the night. I would not have made it without that heating pad. I would have been crying long before dawn. 

As it was, dawn was a long time coming. Do you know how dark and cold the desert gets when the sun goes down in the winter? Yeah, you probably do. You probably do your research before you go camping and wisely decide not to camp in the desert during the winter. Not me. I have to learn it all the long dark stupid cold hard way. Darkness comes fast and goes away reluctantly. Those three nights seemed to last forever, with a little bit of daylight in between. A watched sunrise never rises, isn't that how it goes? Something like that. You would make sure you have proper lighting in your car after dark, wouldn't you, you expert camper you. So you could do something productive, like, I don't know, blow on your freezing fingers or something.

I was shaken up good and proper on this shakedown cruise, and now I know I can survive in my car if I have to. I hope I don't have to live a long time in my car, but now I know I can do it. I can sleep (fitfully), cook, eat, bathe (sort of), poop in a bucket (an experience you should not miss for yourself), and stay warm (more or less, with my Jackery) in my car. And it requires much less paraphernalia than I thought. It was strange to wake up, fix coffee, and wonder, where the hell am I? And keep on drinking my coffee.

I understand the difference between low desert and high desert, but I guess I have to experience the difference in order to really get it, if you know what I mean. I whined last week about elevation. I kept trying to pay attention to my head during my road trip around Southern Arizona and into California. My head wasn't perfectly balanced in the low desert, but it went crazy when I got back to the high desert. That should tell me something. 

Okay, enough palaver. My head is reeling, my ear is crackling. That means we are expecting snow flurries tomorrow. 
 

Making it visible

 

Happy new year, Blogbots. I've had this drawing ready to go since 2016. How are you doing so far on your resolutions for the new year? Great, glad to hear it. Me neither. I don't see the point. I don't know if I will get out of bed tomorrow. 

My computer has been warning me all day of sleet and rain, starting and stopping. Sleet! It's chilly here in Tucson, but not that chilly. Now the widget is cautioning me about wind. Heavy rain moved in, taking my head down with it. The sound of rain on the metal awnings at the Trailer de Tesserae is alternately soothing and unsettling. Rain here is rare enough that when it happens, it comes as a shock.

I grew up in rain, probably was born while it was raining (3 a.m. on a mid-October morning in Portland, Oregon), so rain is not a stranger to me. For some reason, though, I missed out on the downy feathers and webbed feet. I got S.A.D. and a desire to head for drier climes. 

I did not factor in this stupid inner ear problem. When the clouds roll in and the air pressure drops, I know the washing machine in my head is going to go full-spin cycle. 

I'm tired of having an invisible disability. Nobody knows I'm suffering unless I complain. From the outside, I look pretty normal, not counting the occasional nystagmus and faltering gait. The noise in my ear is not audible to anyone else, including the ENT, which is why her suggested remedies were for me to stop drinking coffee and allow her to poke a hole in my eardrum. I said no to both suggestions. 

To get the sympathy I seek, I've been working on a facial expression I can use when the symptoms take over my head. This is so you will know I'm suffering. I'm dabbling with a gritted-teeth, squint-eyed sort of look. If I do it right, every 45 to 90 seconds, a look will come over my face. I'll hold it for 10 or 15 seconds and then relax when the ear crackling subsides. I guess I could just wear a sign around my neck. One side would say malfunction in progress, please stand by. The other side would say, talk now and make it snappy.

It probably won't work. Anyone who sees me with that expression will just assume I'm passing gas. That means to avoid social humiliation, I will still have to explain that the model freight train in my inner ear has just roared into the station. It's on a track. It just keeps going in circles, pulling in every 45 to 90 seconds, hissing for 10 to 15 seconds, and then pulling out again, whoo whoo, round and round and round. 

I've trained myself to ignore the hissing and rattling in my ear, mostly. However, it's like those parents you see sometimes in the grocery store checkout line, ignoring their child as the child yells repeatedly and increasingly loudly that they must have candy now. The parent can hold a long conversation with another person while tuning out their child's moans and pleas. The child knows there is a risk in keeping up the demands. Sooner or later, the tone of the child's voice will penetrate the carefully constructed dam protecting the parent's tenuous internal calm. When the dam is breached, all that pent-up fury comes boiling out. It's not a happy sight to see a parental meltdown in a public place. Those things are best left to the privacy of the home, which is how my mother handled it.

This malady is a slow-drip faucet from hell, wearing a hole in my skull. Every now and then, the carefully constructed barrier protecting me from awareness of this incessant ear rattling and pounding vertigo breaks down. That is when I'd like to shove a pencil in my ear while driving my car off a cliff. 

Speaking of driving my car off a cliff, road trip! Coming soon.

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. 

Visualize a perfect life

Howdy Blogbots. Sorry to keep you waiting. I usually post on Sunday evenings, but last night I had a deadline on a work project. I'm trying to catch up today, but the Universe seems to be conspiring to send me back to bed. The morning temperature was below 60°F, which, if you know me, is not in my optimal operating range. My preferred temperature range is 85°F to 95°F. I went out to hunt and gather wearing fleece. One of my neighbors was standing out in the sun waiting for the Sunvan in Bermuda shorts and a no-sleeved blouse. With my hat, mittens, and fleece jacket, I felt like an alien desert Eskimo. She said hello anyway, which I thought was nice. I managed to persevere and get my shopping done for the week. I really dislike shopping, especially when it is cold. 

Shortly after returning to the Trailer of Creative Minds, I was on a What's App call to a friend and the internet went out. Our connection froze and then disappeared. I thought, oh, no, her internet went out. I went over to my laptop to check my email. I was shocked to see the dreaded notice: No internet connection. Oh, no, my internet was out! Lately, it is happening almost daily. Every time it happens I am reminded that I am an addict. Curse you, Universe! I started to Google how to live without the internet and then remembered I had no internet. I took out the recycling to break the broken brain loop. 

The air pressure ebbs and flows like ocean waves here in the desert. The air breathes, and as it breathes, it takes my inner ear along for the ride, up and down, up and down. I usually notice the moments of relative calm after they are over and I'm back in the rocking boat. Then I realize as I'm holding onto walls and chairs, hey, yesterday actually wasn't too bad. I was able to work without the washing machine in my head constantly running on spin cycle.

I don't know for sure if there is a geographical location that might have steadier air pressure, or if being in such a place will actually make a difference for my head, but the only way I will know is if I go look, as my intrepid housemate points out to me. E is undaunted by the challenges of nomadic living. I'm calling it car camping to lessen my fear. Moving at the speed of light, E sees the adventure in overcoming challenges. Life is a puzzle to be solved. Moving at the speed of an erratic heartbeat, I see only my own fears. Life is a spin cycle to be endured.

As my aging body is starting to betray me, I begin to understand why people resort to magical solutions for illnesses. Visualize perfect health! If a dose of licorice is good for what ails me, then certainly cutting that dose into a fraction of the original dose and putting it into a tiny white pill would have to have more power. Right? The remedy doesn't stand up to reason, but it is so tempting to believe in the miracle when a pushy naturopath is saying trust me, it works. (Curse you, Dr. Tony!)

It is so hard to think sometimes with this hissing snake in my ear. I wonder what it is trying to tell me. Probably something like give up, go back to bed. 

I am not a quitter. Maybe I hang on too long sometimes, clinging long past the sell-by date—jobs, relationships, cities, cars. It's what I do, I guess. Drive it all until it drops in a rusty heap. You can learn some interesting things about the power of stick-to-it-ness when you simply refuse to lay down and give up. I complain a lot, as you know. I'm chronically malcontented, after all. But I still get a lot done, for a self-professed pessimist, and I still keep showing up for life, acting as if I were an optimist. Sometimes it actually works. 

Busy getting something done

Do I exist? I'm beginning to doubt my identity. Google certainly does, and I'm pretty sure Google runs the world, so it's no wonder I am starting to think I need a verification code every time I do something, just to make sure it's me doing it and not some hacker from Podunk. I blog every week, you'd think Google would catch on, but no, something shifted in the alignment of the planets and suddenly Google is asking me to verify my identity. Are you really who you say you are? Is anyone, really? How would you know? 

You might scoff but I don't take Google for granted. I've been locked out of two Google properties simply because I can't verify my identity. There's no reasoning with Google, because there is no one there at Google. The company consists of a bunch of bots, rolling up and down aisles night and day blowing dust off servers. You could go and knock on the door, but even if someone came to let you in, you'd still have to prove you are you. What do you mean you don't have that phone number anymore? Don't you know your phone number is more precious than your social security number? No, I didn't know that. Too late for me.

So now I question my existence.

When I used to teach business classes at a career college a long time ago, I ran across a concept that haunts me still: the idea of efficiency versus effectiveness. I think I was the only person really floored by the idea that I could appear to be super busy but never do anything worthwhile. 

I can spend my days doing the things on my calendar task list, showing up for appointments, fulfilling my volunteer service commitments, paying my bills, maintaining my body and my car . . . and the things I think are important don't get done because they don't make it onto my task list. It's an insidious form of self-sabotage, to avoid acknowledging that things I care about don't get the attention they deserve. Whatever they are, doesn't matter. Some things are hard to do, and so I avoid doing them. 

Some people are very effective. They use their time wisely, they manage their resources well, and they accomplish the tasks that are important to them. Other people are very busy getting nothing done. I think I'm somewhere in the middle, most of the time. I ponder this conundrum while I'm watching Facebook videos of baby sloths being rescued by kind humans and returned to their smiling sloth mothers. Baby deer stuck in a fence, rescued by kind human and his companions with smartphones. Baby monkey stuck in a pond. Baby elephant in a hole. Baby moose stuck in the rapids, heading over the falls, oh no. Facebook has my number, for sure. And how many of those videos were taken by humans who created the dire situation and then filmed themselves coming to the rescue? Oh, cynical me. 

I was thinking today as I was riding my bike around the mobile home park in the dark that it really doesn't matter what I do, or if I do anything at all. Effective or efficient, who cares? Nobody cares. I'm not being tested. I'm not being surveilled. Nobody is counting the diminishing words in my vocabulary and going, she lost ten more words this week, assisted living, here she comes. It's kind of a relief to realize as long as I pay my bills, nobody will chastise me if I choose to do nothing. 

It's called retirement, I guess. I've been retired in my mind my entire life. I was born retired. That is, I was born believing I should be allowed to do what I want whenever I want, and that includes the privilege of doing nothing at all. You can imagine how well that has worked out. 

The sunset tonight was astounding. Wish you were here, Mom. 

Time to go crazy

I've been in phone hell this week. My old service provider got bought by a larger tech company and "upgraded" its network. My old smartphone has dementia and forgets how to communicate. It was time for a new phone and a new provider. I thought, how hard could it be? The new provider will magically transfer my phone number to the new provider and life will carry on. Oh, how naïve I was.

I won't mention the new provider because that company does not need more mentions on the internet. Not that anyone would care what I have to say. I have spoken with a dozen people over the past week or so, trying to get this new phone working with the new service. Eventually I realized the effort was futile. I gave up and said, just give me a new phone number. Within five minutes, I had a new number. My new phone rewarded me with a slew of text messages from the new provider.

So now I have two phones, two service providers, and two phone numbers. I'm not sure if I should celebrate the unexpected abundance or lament the way technology has wrecked my life. You know what I'm talking about, right? Without that original phone number, all my Google accounts will be lost. That old demented phone has to keep working long enough for me to access all my accounts that use two-factor authentication so I can either turn it off or update to a new phone number.

I almost had a panic attack thinking about it. My entire life is based on this phone number. Forget my SSN, who cares, that number has been running loose for forty years. One of the universities I attended way back when used the SSN as the student ID number. There's no closing that barn door. My descent into technological hell hasn't been sudden, though. It's been an insidious creep, like noxious weeds taking over my neurons. In my quest for success and money and connection, I've sold my soul to technology. Technology is like fire. Fire can keep you warm. It can also burn your house down.  

I know whereof I speak. I lost access to a phone number when I switched to the service provider who just got sucked into the maw of a larger provider. That was ten years ago, before Google had its modern security measures in place . . . before two-factor, before backup numbers, before recovery emails. I've tried multiple times to get into my old Google account. I still have the password. No dice. Without that old phone and phone number, I can't receive a code. Without that code, I'm toast. Google sneers at me: We can't verify that this is really you. Then it sends me an email to another account that apparently is somehow linked, congratulating itself for "protecting" me from some nefarious unauthorized access. Someone is trying to get into your account! Yeah, Google, you idiot monster I have discovered I cannot function without, it's me, trying to get into my own account. I hate you.

I'm trying to reframe all this disruption as a fascinating adventure, a riveting window into the way an aging brain adapts and flexes—or doesn't. I'm not really flexing gracefully. You know that sound your knees sometimes make when you get off the floor after doing a few half-hearted sit-ups? No? Well, maybe it's my bursitis. Anyway, I can hear my brain creaking sometimes. It's isn't as nimble as it used to be. And when I'm putting pressure on it to perform—even simple tasks like mental arithmetic—my brain cells shred into a tattered mess. I'm reminded of my mother's brain, which I could practically see evaporating in front of me. She lost brain cells the way she dropped gloves and used tissues. I learned to follow a step behind. I rescued her gloves and tissues, but I could not save her brain.

Soon I will be vacating the Bat Cave. You'd think after moving to Tucson, I'd be used to moving. I have less stuff, fewer boxes, fewer attachments. It's a physical chore, yes, but it's the mental chore that wears me down. Worse than the physical act of packing and lifting boxes, transporting them, and unpacking them, it's the wear and tear on my brain. I can't say I've felt settled here in the Bat Cave. I always knew I'd move on after a year. But living a year at a time is not a familiar pace to me. I think people who travel a lot probably get used to waking up in the night not knowing where they are. Me, I used to know where I was. On a map, I had a location. In a city, I had my place. It wasn't much, but I once had roots. Not many, but some. Mom's death severed the few roots that were holding me there in the city of my birth. Like a dandelion seed on the wind, I let the wind blow me to Tucson.

I don't want to go back to Oregon but I don't know where I'm going. Why am I having so much trouble just being where I am? Now that I've relinquished most of my possessions, I seem to be seeking a connection to a geographical place, as if that will keep me safe. I can hear my inner nihilist laughing right now. Maybe I'll be laughing soon, too. Still working on it. Meanwhile, let me offer my grudging gratitude to the technology that allows me to express myself on this blog every week. 

Art and the end of the world

In this isolated new world of video mentoring, I talk with artists all over the country. One of my favorite pep talk mantras is the world needs your art. I usually say this in response to their complaints that they are afraid to put their work out in the world so people can buy it. "What if no one likes it?" they say. They are afraid to set prices. Posting their art to social media is terrifying. Anything but my art! Such tender self-centeredness. As if anyone cares. 

"The world needs your art," I tell them. "We are given creative gifts to share them with others."

Of course, this is total hooey. I am implying that whatever "gifts" we are given are magically bestowed upon us by some sort of power outside of ourselves. Call it the Universe, call it Goddess, call it the Muse, the assumption is that our creative "gifts" came out of the womb with us, like our skin and bones. 

Moreover, it's our job to make our creative gifts manifest. Didn't some old dude say if we don't bring forth what is within us, what is within us will destroy us? So refreshing. Nothing gets me inspired to make art like the threat that I'll be obliterated if I don't.

Anyway, the point is, I tell artists it's their job to make art. 

I think I need to stop doing that. I'm reinforcing their delusion that their creativity is something special. It's not special. Everyone is creative. Not everyone is an "artist," if you are using a strict definition of the term, but every person alive must exercise creativity in order to stay that way. As soon as they learn how to scream, kids are masters at creative manipulation. Adults don't usually resort to screaming, but they are equally manipulative in their efforts to get their way. That sometimes takes ingenuity and innovation. In other words, creativity. So, just because you think you are an artist doesn't make you special. In that sense, everyone is an artist.

A few days ago, I realized I've committed a sin even more egregious. In encouraging artists to produce more art, I am indirectly contributing to an unsustainable pattern of production and consumption that relies on manipulation in order to function. It's a self-destructive cycle. 

Sut Jhally identified this cycle years ago in his film Advertising and the End of the World. I used to teach marketing and advertising at a career college. The marketing program was on its last legs, so usually there was no more than a handful of students in the program at any one time. Sometimes I had classes with only one student. Once every ten weeks, I rented Jhally's film from the library and showed it on a VHS player. I don't remember my students being terribly impressed. The message scared the living crap out of me.

Over the past few years, I have moved from fear to despair. It's too late to save the human species. If there is some sort of rescue coming, perhaps from space aliens or a magical melding of human consciousness into one wise mind, it will likely happen after I'm dead. (I'd love to see what American politicians do with an influx of extraterrestrials.) Meanwhile, what does it matter if millions of mediocre artists create millions of Sculpey animals, acrylic pour paintings, and plastic-bead portraits of Mickey Mouse? Who cares if our creativity ends up in landfills? Who cares if the oceans are more plastic than fish? Oh, poor whales, poor turtles. What's a few species in the big scheme of geological time? Species come and go. Nothing and nobody is special. I find it reassuring to realize the earth will remain until the sun goes pop. 

Artists, I'm doubling down. Go ahead, fill up your garage with oil paintings nobody will ever buy. Promote your crappy art on websites nobody will ever visit. Post your stuff on social media in the deluded belief that you have control over the algorithms. Who am I to rain on your parade? If it makes you happy to believe you will become rich and famous selling your insipid pour paintings, go for it. We passed the tipping point a long time ago. Choose your deck chair. 

Another bug in the life of one day

After a recent Windows update, my computer started giving me the weather report in the notification area of the task bar, whether I want it or not. This week the reports are somewhat unsettling. UV alert! Fire danger! Very hot! in scary red letters. 

Yes. It is very hot here in Tucson. It is summer in the desert, after all. But not as hot as predicted. Yesterday, instead of 110°F, it was only 109°F. Today, instead of 110°F, it was only 108°F. I say, quit whining. I think putting the forecast in a scary red font is click bait. A few seconds later, the alert says mostly sunny, as if to say, ha, ha, got you, sucker. It doesn't matter. I can't parse what I'm seeing. I have the air conditioner cranked up to bring the interior air down to 80°F. The sound of a jet engine screaming in the Bat Cave makes my eyes wobble in their sockets.

Speaking of wobbling, a few nights ago I was getting out of the shower when movement along the floor caught my eye. Even with glasses, my vision isn't great. Without them, I'm half blind. But I can see movement, and movement on the floor can only mean one thing. 

The ammo I normally use to defend my turf was in the kitchen, so I grabbed the closest thing to hand, which was a spray bottle of Clorox. I grabbed my glasses and jammed them on my nose as I sprayed in the general direction of the thing. Now that I could see it, I wished I hadn't. It was the biggest cockroach I have seen in my time here in the Bat Cave. It was built like a fat little tank, more than an inch long, glossy brown, like sort of a warm brick color, and fast as hell.

I sprayed the bleach in its direction and then fell back gasping as the thing spread its wings and took to the air. It flew into the closet and landed on my dad's white plastic chair (the one I tied to the roof of my car when I moved here, don't ask me why, all I can say is, it has Dad's handwriting on the back of the chair). The thing landed and sat there looking at me. If you had been here, you would have seen me stark naked, dancing around with a spray bottle of bleach, screaming, "They can fly? WTF, they can fly?"

Yes, Virginia, they can fly. The adults, anyway. So now I know that the ones I had been claiming were ooh, these big scary adults were barely past their teens. This guy was a grown-up. Lucky for me, they don't fly fast or far. I was able to spray it down onto the ground. It ran like hell under a plastic chest of drawers. I sprayed under the chest, hoping eventually I would find its dead body. Then I dashed for the big guns.

I brought two spray bottles back to the closet with me: the insecticide and the alcohol. Long-range, short-range. Or maybe I should say long-term and short-term. I took the insecticide and sprayed full blast under the chest of drawers. Out came the big dude, moving fast. I scuttled backward as it scuttled forward. We passed each other. I stood in the bathroom doorway, and it headed full speed for the kitchen. I guess we retreat to the places we feel safe.

I lit out in hot pursuit, spray bottle in each hand. I shot it with insecticide as it ran before me, and as far as I could tell, it wasn't a bit fazed. I switched to the alcohol. The critter ran behind a thing, looking for a crevice in the cabinet. There wasn't one, so I let loose a torrent of alcohol, blam blam blam, and eventually it was so soggy, it rolled over on its sodden wings and surrendered.

I was taking no prisoners. I shot it a few more times, just for kicks, and then I finished getting ready for bed. Of course I couldn't sleep for a while. I had to walk around with a flashlight like I was hunting possums in the dark. I didn't see any more dudes, big or small. I am really hoping that was the grandpa or grandma, the last of the line. We can hope.

Meanwhile, more excitement at the Bat Cave. A night later, I was typing and heard a boom. I thought, oh, no, did someone just hit my car? I peered out the window and saw the dumpster was on fire. I opened my door and stuck my head out into the oven-like air. Yep, my eyes did not deceive me. Flames were roaring out the top of the metal dumpster. The dumpster boomed again. I heard sirens. I saw some neighbors come out and take video. I did the same, although I don't know why. I didn't talk to anyone and nobody acknowledged me. The fire truck pulled up. The guy who drives an air conditioning repair truck came home at the same time. He inched past the fire truck, determined to make it to his usual parking spot. He probably just wanted to get into his nice cool apartment and pop open a cold one. He was probably like, so what, a dumpster fire. People wandered around in the hot evening, walking their yappy dogs and watching the firefighters spray stuff on the flames in 100°F heat. It was all over in five minutes. 

I don't hear or see much from my window at the back of the apartment complex. Last night on the news I was startled to see a photo of the sign outside my apartment building. Apparently early in the morning, there was a double homicide in one of the apartments on the street side. The police came, set up a little white tent, and conducted their investigation. I saw photos. I didn't hear a thing. This morning I went out to check my mailbox for the first time this week (empty) and there was no sign two people had died.

This morning the manager sent a text saying the water would be shut off for some emergency repairs. I filled a bucket of water and put it by the toilet, just in case, but for some reason, the water in my building kept flowing.

Life goes on.

If artists ran the world

I thought I could make some money being creative. Not so fast. 

I spent the week whining to myself about how hard it is for U.S. artists to legally sell their work. I'm not wrong. It’s true, many administrative hurdles block artists from starting small businesses, but maybe my whining is overly dramatic. Other entrepreneurial wannabes have to stumble over the same hurdles. Just about anyone who wants to start a small business in the U.S. has to do a few things if they are going to operate above the radar, and when I say “radar” I mean the IRS radar. The IRS thinks you are running a business if you have at least $400 in net profit when you file your annual tax return. Sell a couple paintings, lead a couple workshops, and there you go, bam, you might owe somebody some taxes.

And don’t get me started about the confounding world of sales taxes. The topic irks me so much that I’ve cut off my hair, literally whacked it back to an inch, so I am not tempted to yank it out by the roots. I’ve even toyed with the idea of moving back to Oregon, which has no sales tax, just to avoid the whole headachy mess of charging sales tax.

I'm freaking out on behalf of all U.S. artists. It's my way of being of service. You're welcome. It’s not like I sell my art. I’m not even making art these days, at least, nothing anyone can put their finger on. Earlier this year, I was selling some 99-cent templates to dissertators on my website, until I realized, hey, I should probably be charging sales tax to customers who live in Arizona. Considering the likely number of Arizona-based dissertators (few, I'm guessing), the odds that I would owe more than a dollar are slim to none, but rather than find out the hard way, I now give the templates away for free. I do not want to rouse the wrath of the State of Arizona. In any case, I never collected mailing addresses, so I have no idea where my buyers live. 

All that got me thinking about what artists must go through to be sales-tax compliant. If they sell any tangible art at all, and if they live in a state that has sales tax, then the artist is supposed to collect sales tax from buyers in their state and remit it to the state. I’m not even going to mention the regulations affecting artists who sell digital art remotely into other states. Let’s just keep it simple.

Forty-five of the fifty U.S. states have a state-level sales tax. If you live in one of those states, and sell art to buyers who live in or visit that state, then you should be collecting sales taxes.

It sounds so simple, doesn’t it? Until you factor in the artist’s brain.

Think about what artists are being asked to do. To collect sales tax from buyers means artists must keep track of sales and money. What are the odds of that happening? Artists don’t use Quickbooks. They don’t even use Excel. Artists use napkins and sticky notes, notebook paper, and handmade journals with cats on the covers. Ask artists to produce an income statement or a balance sheet and their eyes will roll back in their heads as if someone had asked them to do math. Right.

Second, to remit those funds to the State means artists must register with their State (unless they live in one of the five states with no state sales tax). One look at the web form would make most artists run screaming into the night. It won’t take long for them to realize if they register to collect sales tax, they will need to apply for a business license. Then it’s one slippery misstep toward opening a business bank account, hiring an accountant, and discovering they owe income taxes. The next thing they know, all the joy and creativity they derived from their artmaking is gone, and now they are running a business. Bummer.

Third, the artists must remit the funds to the State. Dream on. All the artists I know will be using those sales tax funds (supposedly held in trust for the State) to pay their rent and buy their Frappuccinos. This is how I got into debt. Back in the 1980s, I found out too late, from the accountant I hired too late, that I should have been collecting sales tax on the clothing I made and remitting it quarterly to the State of California. Darn it, now you tell me.

Fast forward to now. I could have registered with Arizona. But I know the limitations of my artist brain. I balked after I found out the terrifying fact that even if I had no sales, I still must report to the State or be fined $100. That means $100 in fines for each missed sales report. It's like checking in with a probation officer. No check in, uh-oh, warrant for your arrest. In the face of financial terror, my brain goes gunnysack. Art becomes a burden, and all outcomes favor the State. 

Lawmakers don’t get it. They think artists will prepare business plans, hire lawyers and accountants, install and learn Quickbooks and Taxjar, and file their tax reports with the State on time. As if! Maybe on another planet in a galaxy far far away, where artists are the lawmakers and lawmakers are the whiners. What would a world run by artists look like?

My artist brain is not the brightest crayon in the box but it knows when the system is rigged against it. If you are one of those rare artists whose left brain works as well as your right brain, apologies for lumping you in the crayon box with me and all the other ratty, worn-down crayons. I hope you will run for office. I would definitely vote for you.

Standing still in the stream of time

Yesterday was the day America sprang forward. I'm talking about clocks, of course. People all over the country were waking up and discovering they had forgotten to change their clocks. A few confused souls had no doubt set their clock back one hour (one of those confused souls called me an hour earlier than they were supposed to today, that is how I know). Some other confused souls had confused cell phones (I was one of those souls), phones that failed to update their location and promptly lost their minds.

One of the benefits of moving to Arizona, so I thought, was the luxury of not having to change my clocks twice a year. Most of Arizona remains on Mountain Standard Time, no matter what. Even in the tiny Bat Cave, I have three battery-powered analog clocks, plus one old-fashioned electric digital clock with glowing red numerals. I thought, what a relief, I won't have to go through the tedious task of adjusting my clocks. Woe is me, what a burden. I assumed my phone and two computers would manage the moment successfully, considering nothing needed to change. Standing still, right?

You'd think. 

As I said, my phone lost its mind and required a reboot to reorient itself regarding it's physical location on the planet. Then I discovered Google Calendar tried to update me to the Mountain Time Zone, probably because I had failed to differentiate between Mountain Standard Time and Mountain Daylight Time in the settings. (New to Arizona!) As the day wore on, my brain wore out, overloaded with numbers and well-meaning people trying to set me straight. My friend E said we are the same time zone as Mountain Time. Yes, but E did not say Mountain Standard Time. Apparently my Google Calendar has been on Mountain Daylight Time. That is my guess. 

Stick a fork in me, I'm done. I have spent the entire day trying to understand time. It doesn't help that my caller today set their clock backward rather than forward. Thus, because my phone lost its mind, the caller was calling two hours before our expected call time, which propelled me instantly into a crisis of confidence. (Who am I? Where am I? Does anyone really know what time it is?) That hissing sound you hear is my brain overheating.

I finally figured it out. 

I've been visualizing time as a round thing, like the face of an analog clock, when I should have been visualizing time as a series of rectangles. It's no wonder I'm having trouble. My brain has never been good with analog time. When I was nine years old, I spent a fair part of one afternoon standing in the hall staring at the huge clock on the wall. I was not allowed to reenter the classroom until I could "tell time." Humiliated and ashamed, I stood there staring, until an adult walked by. I cheated, of course, because what nine year old understands that integrity builds character, and I asked the kind adult to tell me what time it was. With the magic formula in hand, I triumphantly reentered the classroom, told my teacher the time, and resumed my seat, still having no clue what made the big hand different from the little hand. 

I eventually caught on, as we often do, we learn to tie our shoes and ride a bike and tell time on a round clock, and since then, time for me has been a round thing. Now, because I moved to Arizona, I know it's a rectangular thing.

Rectangles called time zones divide up the face of the North American continent. You knew this. In the spring, through a magic known as collective agreement (and an illness known as collective inertia), the time zones get off their butts and shift to the right one hour. In the fall, the time zones sigh, heave themselves to their wobbly feet, and move back to the left one hour to settle in for winter.

And what happens to me? I sit still, like a hotspot under the surface of the earth, while the time zones shift above me. Tectonic time zone plates. 

The consequence of standing still as the time zones shift is that I always have to be aware of which time zone is squatting over me. Is it the one to the left of me, or the one to the right? Yesterday it was the time zone to the right of me—those other Mountain Time Zone guys, the ones on Daylight Time, Colorado, Wyoming, New Mexico, those states have been hunkering over the Bat Cave for the past six months. To my confusion, I wake up this morning and find myself squashed by the weight of California, Oregon, Washington, and Nevada. 

I am awakening to the power of geography! Who knew this would happen from moving to Arizona and gloating about not having to change my clocks. I tell you, I would gladly change my clocks twice a year to avoid having to be hyper-conscious of what the states on either side of me are doing. Yesterday I was on Mountain Daylight Time, now I'm on Pacific Time! All without changing my own clocks. I thought it would be so great to sit still while everyone shifted around me. Instead I discover everyone shifted in unison, like a grand flock of swallows, and I'm the lone scrub quail, grousing in the dust. 

Making a motion toward something

It's been a good week. The vertigo bucket in my head has been mostly calm sailing. The salt shaker in my right ear has been mostly silent or just barely hissing. I hardly notice it. Really, I can't complain. Even getting a mammogram wasn't a big deal. Deflating the fun bags used to hurt. Now I barely feel it. I was in such a good mood, I did my taxes! It really was a good week. 

I hope I remember this moment. Tomorrow my so-called part-time job starts. I got hired as a remote dissertation editor for a department in a scrappy for-profit college. I've never heard of universities having editors on staff. I don't know yet what to think. I'll let you know. I don't know yet what my schedule will be. I'll let you know. I suspect whatever happens, the expectations will be ridiculously high and the compensation absurdly low. As usual, I'll let you know. Why am I doing this? What do you mean, at my advanced age? I guess I need something to focus on, something to spin around. Spinning around my next book project isn't filling up the well. I need to feel useful. 

And you'll be with me for all of it, as usual. Lucky you! For more than a decade, I've relied on this blog to absorb my angst. You've been there with me. I started the blog with some rants about my employer, a for-profit career college. I complained about my dissertation program, as I recall. I told you how I felt about being laid off from my job. I celebrated the PhD with you. I shared with you the ups and downs of dealing with my mother's dementia. You were the first to know when my cat died. And when my mother died. And then you came with me to Tucson. You've been with me the entire journey. Thanks for being my witness as the moments have unfolded. 

New moment, new unfolding. I feel as if I leaped off a cliff coming to Tucson, and I'm still falling. I had a picture in my head of what life in Tucson would be like. Peaceful, warm, mild, slow. Tucson is not that. Instead, I found rough, raw, loud, and fast. It's all about the sky here. No matter the weather, the sky dominates. In Portland I was hemmed in by trees. Oak trees, maple trees, ash, aspen, and cottonwood trees, pines, cedars, and spruce, spewing their leaves, needles, and pollen everywhere and covering up the sky. I was smothered in trees. Here, trees are an afterthought, barely a thought. Scrubby beat up things hiding in the washes or ridiculous telephone pole palms that give no shade while shaking their stupid pompoms in the wind. 

After almost ten months, I still don't know what to make of this city. I still get lost. I still don't know where I belong or where I'm going. I still feel like getting in my car and heading west until I run out of road. 

Delinquent neurons are not apologetic

The brain is back. As much as it ever was, anyway, which is good news for me, out here alone in the short branches of the wild west. It's good to have a brain that works when SUVs are coming at me at 50 mph. Last week my brain hiccupped in a weird new way but according to Dr. Google, it is unlikely to happen again, and indeed, my memories are as intact as they were before the hiccup, which is to say, generally faded, tattered, and stored at the back of a dark, high shelf in a closet I rarely can find. All systems normal. 

My mind has been failing for a while. My most recent brain glitch is probably just another notch on the downward spiral into dementia and death. Some years ago I realized that my brain was no longer a reliable partner. Somewhere around the intersection of menopause and my vegan meltdown, which was a rolling disaster that occupied my attention for several years, I became aware that mentally, things were different. 

The names of new acquaintances flew past me into the ether. Phone numbers evaded my retrieval attempts. I started forgetting names of people I'd known from California, people I'd worked with. Whole portions of conversations went missing. Discussions and decisions were lost to vagueness.

I fought the encroachment of incompetence by denying reality. For years, I had prided myself on my near-eidetic memory. That marvelous (unearned) skill smoothed my path from kindergarten through college and beyond. I refused to believe it was starting to fail. Quelle horreur!

My inability to accept the changes in my brain produced some stinging defeats as I doubled down on defending my mistakes. The facts (which mattered back then, unlike now) always revealed my thinking errors. Go back and look at the minutes, Carol! We said this, not that! When it started to become a pattern, I had to accept the sad reality that something in my brain had changed.

Smack someone down often enough and sooner or later they catch on. Eventually I learned to stop claiming to be correct. Out of sheer grief at being betrayed by the brain I thought I could trust, I swung to the opposite extreme and made sure everyone knew my memories were mired in a wasteland far from any known landmarks. 

My friends were sympathetic but impatient. They would only listen for so long before they were like, yeah, we get it, you're human, can we get back to the business at hand? With my family, when it emerged that Mom had dementia, I couldn't really get much mileage on the complaint engine. Yeah, poor Carol. Sad, but let's get back to poor old Mom! I couldn't compete. That was annoying. When I whined I can't remember, she would roll her eyes and laugh. As her brain deteriorated, though, she got more empathetic. Then I felt like a colossal cad for whining.

I learned to write everything down, a habit I employ to this day. If I didn't have Write blogpost on my calendar every Sunday afternoon, I would not be writing this blog post. 

Last week my brain took a half-day holiday and opted not to make new memories for a few hours. Man, I wish I could just opt out and have someone else take the wheel for a while. The rest of my brain muddled through the afternoon, casting resentful glances at the empty spaces the AWOL neurons had left behind. These slackers didn't tell anyone that they were leaving or where they were going or when they would be back, so the rest of us had to soldier on, moving from moment to moment with no breadcrumb leading back to where we'd been. It's definitely a surreal way to experience reality. A taste of what is to come, perhaps.

After lunch, the delinquent neurons came back online and were like, What's up, dudes? Oh, sorry, did we lock you out of the memory palace? Whoops, our bad. 

Those slackers. I'd like to write them up or something. Maybe tomorrow, if I remember. 

Closer to the edge

Howdy from Albuquerque. As I sidled along tidy sidewalks next to cinder block walls and wooden fences in the neighborhood today, cold in the shade and warm in the sun, I pondered two things: the depthless blue of the late fall New Mexico sky and the progressive nature of mental illness.

Wait, Carol, what? Are you mentally ill? Well, what would you call a person who deliberately, almost rebelliously, even compulsively, eschews a traditional safe lifestyle for a path uncomfortably close to self-annihilation? I’ve been trying on the term minimalist. As in, Honey I shrunk myself and now I’m a minimalist! I’ve jettisoned possessions like an aged cat spews gas. If you don’t know me, it sounds plausible. Yeah, cool, Carol’s a minimalist. However, I know me, and I can’t hide behind a claim of minimalism. That would be a bit like spraying poo-pourri in the bathroom. We all know what goes on in there when you turn the faucet on full blast.

It could be that my mental compulsion to downsize is in alignment with the current zeitgeist of decluttering and simplifying. Some of you might say, Thank you, Carol, for living simply so that others might simply live. Right. You obviously don’t know me.

Doing a Marie Kondo on my life might actually be trendy but my hipness factor is unearned—in fact, if I'm hip for pursuing a minimalist lifestyle, it is purely coincidental. I was dismantling my life, or it was crumbling around me, long before it was cool to reduce, reuse, and recycle. Who cares. I’m beyond hip now. I’m out in the stratosphere, way past Swedish death cleaning, on my way to total erasure.

What is “pure” minimalism? Is that a thing? No idea.

As part of my quest to downsize after Mom died, I decided to move from Portland to Tucson. You all know the story. My decision was logical (I thought), based on my knowledge at the time. Now I know there were some things I didn’t know, and I didn’t realize then that I should have known them. For example, I didn’t know I was a credit ghost. That situation made it difficult to rent an apartment. (Embarrassing disclosure: I apparently failed to recall that I may have created that condition years ago myself by freezing my credit after some generic data breach. No recollection.) Second, I didn’t know how expensive car insurance was in Arizona (I could have researched it). Further, I didn’t know that fiber optic for internet is not a thing in my Tucson neighborhood and never will be (could have researched that, too). Finally, I’d heard rumors but didn’t fully understand that tenants in Arizona have almost no rights (it’s right there in the Arizona Landlord and Tenant Act, I could have looked it up and chosen to move to a different state—apparently Oregon has good tenants’ rights. Who knew).

I wasn’t totally ignorant. Some things I knew. Stuff we all know. You get what you pay for. There’s no such thing as a free lunch. There’s a sucker born every minute. Nothing is guaranteed but death and taxes. Blink and you’ll miss it. The early bird gets the worm and then is annihilated by a diamond back rattlesnake. Never fall in love with a car.

I am not all-knowing. I doubt if anyone is, even though some people I’ve known sure act like it. Carol, you should [insert suggestion here]. I’m sure part of the reason I’m standing on the edge of the existential cliff overlooking a fresh new hell is because I deliberately did the opposite of what they all suggested. I'm obstinate that way. Hence, the diagnosis of mental illness. Well, the difference between a suggestion and a criticism is not hard to discern.

At some point, you have to stop peeling back the layers. If you peel too deep, what’s left? There’s just a gaping mouth, waiting for a kind soul to insert worms. Nobody is going to stuff food down my throat except me—at least, not until I’ve had a couple strokes and can no longer lift a fork to my lips. Whenever I feel like whining Oh, no, please don’t make me take care of myself, my mother’s voice rings in my ears. This not the voice of my demented mother, the one I trailed behind, stooping as needed to rescue a dropped glove, a used tissue. Rather, it is the voice of the mother who lived with my father and sneakily thwarted his wishes at every turn. He wanted me living in their basement forever, tied to his twenty-dollar bill gas-money handouts. She wanted me out of the house to sink or swim on my own. To motivate me, she spoke the dreaded words: “Carol, just get a job.”

As I contemplate the pursuit of a life shallow in material possessions but flowing with creativity, I hear her voice daily. Right on, Mom. I hear you. I could get a job, I bet. Probably. As long as it doesn’t involve leaning my head back or balancing on a ladder, there are many things I could do. Probably not driving, maybe not heavy lifting, but I could certainly sell small things to customers. How long before stoking the fires of consumer culture sent me running screaming into the night?

I’m squatting (stiffly, because of arthritis) at the intersection of a few questions. First, what is home? What is it, where is it, and how small can home be before it cannot support life? There must be someplace for me somewhere, probably more than one someplace. It’s a big country and it’s not like I’m moving to Mars. Here’s another question: What is freedom? Is anyone truly free? Where on the planet can you go to avoid someone holding up a book of statutes and telling you No, you can’t live like that?

What if I don’t want to be a tenant or a traditional homeowner? What other options are open to me? Even if I bought an undeveloped patch of land in the desert, there are laws about parking a “home” there. There are laws about parking a “home” on someone else’s land. There are laws about parking a “home” on BLM land, which supposedly belongs to all of us.

You’ve probably heard people say something like “home is where the heart is” and thought, Aww, isn’t that sweet. I don’t find it all that helpful. My heart has been obliterated, shattered into a billion glittery bits that haven’t yet fallen to earth. Maybe they will eventually coalesce and stake a claim in some city I can find on a map. Silver City, my friend says. Bisbee, you would love it there, lots of artists. Sedona, Wickenberg, Green Valley, Ajo, Yuma, Quartzite.

One more truism: If you don’t have a “home,” then you can never be lost.

This ten-day cat-sitting house-sitting gig in Albuquerque has given me some valuable insights. Albuquerque is an appealing city, with its pueblo architecture and civilized sidewalks. Despite the dry air and nosebleeds, I have enjoyed seeing some local sights. For example, the petroglyphs are a twenty-minute walk away, how cool is that. However, if you’ve seen one ancient rock carving, you’ve pretty much seen them all, and the weather, despite the sunshine and blue sky, is colder than a snowball’s dirty brown underbelly, and being cold sucks. It’s not winter yet and the nighttime temps are below freezing. It's not news that I was not made for cold weather. I’ve been complaining about being cold forever. My blood slows to a viscous crawl below 50°F.

Regarding the house-sitting gig, this four-bedroom two-story condo would be great for someone young enough to be on the ascending side of a career trajectory. Owning a house like this says you have achieved the American dream, you have arrived, congratulations, you are finally a viable adult. (We were worried about you for a while.) For someone like me, a nontraditional oldster tumbling in freefall down the descending side of a career trajectory, living in a place like this would be a heavy drag on my quest for minimalism. It’s a lot of space that demands constant upkeep and cleaning for no good purpose except to store and display the trophies of success. I don’t need display shelves anymore. I never achieved success, and I gave what few trophies I earned to the thrift stores.

The best part of any home is the four-legged creatures who dwell within. However, much as I am enjoying caring for this funny little old cat, my heart has not found solace. It is great to feel cat fur again, but petting a cat who is not Eddie does not fill the massive Eddie-sized hole in my heart. 

And, oh yeah, the check engine light came on again. So, if I don’t see you here on this blog next Sunday, I’m stuck somewhere on I-25 or I-10 in the desert between Albuquerque and Tucson. I'd be obliged if you would send a posse.

Creating a new reality

Darkness falls fast in the desert after the sun sets. Twilight doesn't linger. During the day, I imagine the little dudes snoring in their cozy nests under my kitchen countertop. I wash my dishes with an eye open but I feel pretty certain the kitchen is mine. Until dark.

In the evening (I imagine), the little eyes flutter open, the tiny mouths yawn, the little wings buzz, the skinny legs flex and stretch. I imagine the little dudes are eyeing the exits, which are entrances onto the vast stage of my kitchen counter. They probably poke each other: Who is willing to stick out an antenna? You go first. No, you go.

I have laid down some serious napalm in the form of insecticide spray. I have mined the place with sneaky bait traps. My last line of defense is diatomaceous earth spread around nooks and crannies, around the baseboards, and around the bed like a barricade of garlic. 

I don't think the little dudes drink blood, but I think of them as tiny vampires. They are fast and almost invisible if they pose in place. As soon as an audacious dude makes a move, my anxious eye spies it, my hand reaches for the spray bottle of rubbing alcohol, and in sixty seconds, the little dude is on its back, antennae wilted, tiny legs pistoning in the air. 

I don't like killing things. I'm sure I'm going to hell. But my consolation is the little dudes will all get there before me, if I have anything to do with it. I keep my spray bottle near to hand the way some angry people tote their AR-47s. Anything that moves in my kitchen is fair game. I don't care what you are.

This apartment building was built in the mid-1970s, and I think the countertops are original to the 1960s. The architects got a good deal on this stuff, I'm guessing, most likely because it fails to fulfill all the performance obligations of a mediocre kitchen countertop. First, the white background is speckled with dark irregularly shaped and placed spots of various sizes, scattered tightly like a reverse field of stars. Some speckles might even be a little glittery, but most are some shade of dark gray, if you don't count the handful of light brown cigarette burns left by former tenants. What this means in terms of the battle raging for kitchen supremacy is that it looks like the countertops are teeming with bugs. (The speckled counters surround the bathroom sink too but I haven't seen any little dudes there yet. Not much to eat there, unless they get a hankering for Colgate.) 

Second, the speckles aren't flat, they are just slightly raised, almost embossed into the surface, which I'm guessing is some sort of particle board, judging by how it is crumbling underneath the edges around the sink. Particle board and moisture are natural enemies, and moisture always wins. This slightly raised surface means I can never be sure the counters are clean, not without nuking them with bleach, which is really bad for the air quality in the Bat Cave. (Did I mention the Bat Cave has only one window?)

If I were to try to see the battle from the bugs point of view, I would say, wow, how lucky are we to live so close to a smorgasbord of aromas and flavors! Talk about the promised land. The embossed nature of the surface gives us good purchase for skittering. The plethora of crumbs and tidbits and drips left behind by a human with bad eyesight means some fine midnight brunches for us. And if the sneaky human flicks on the light and catches us manging around the stove, well, we can either run for our lives or freeze behind something and hope we don't get caught. How fun is that! It's a little dangerous at times—we lost Uncle Manny last week, and Junior Number Twelve hasn't been seen in a while. But what a life of luxury!

From my human point of view, I am constantly creeped out after dark. I didn't see any action for a few nights and naively thought I might have won the kitchen wars, but then last night I saw two full-sized dudes lurking around the so-called clean dishes, and I realize I'm fooling myself. You can't win this kind of war, not even if you raze the place to the ground. It's like I'm living on stage in an auditorium. During the day, the audience is snoozing, head to toe, spooning in their nests among their multitudes of eggs. As soon as darkness falls, every seat in the auditorium is filled. They are watching me with unblinking eyes, waiting for me to shut off the light. Soon they come creeping out of their hidey-holes to dance on the stage.

My eyes see the speckles on the kitchen counter, bug out, and kick my brain into fight or flight mode. I peer under things and between things, pointing a flashlight, pounding the counter. If I see something move, I launch a frenzied attack. I spray the bug and watch it kick until it expires, feeling just slightly sad and guilty. If it falls into a pile of diatomaceous earth, I let it lie there, covered in white dust, desiccating, a constant reminder to its brethren: This is what could happen to you. Each dead bug is my equivalent of a head on a pike. I don't think it is working as a deterrent, though, and it's really more like I don't want to clean up a bunch of little white-dusted corpses. It's just gross.

I'm starting the downsizing process again. I'm putting essentials in big see-through plastic bins. I know, plastic! Argh. Cardboard boxes are getting filled up with clutter and taken to the thrift store. Cardboard and clutter, both good hiding places for bugs, are now verboten. I'm getting as much up off the floor as I can. I moved the bed six inches from the wall and surrounded it with a dusting of diatomaceous earth. I sleep like a princess on an island. 

While I'm washing dishes and listening to my refrigerator breathing like Darth Vader twenty hours a day, I'm reflecting on my current housing situation. I'm trying to make home not be a geographical place but more like a state of mind. I don't have experience with this. My sister the world traveler does, I think. She learned early how to pack light and settle loosely. Me, wherever I go, I'm always lugging a sewing machine, a power drill, a bunch of art supplies, and ton of other stuff . . . and that's after downsizing and moving to Tucson. I can pare down some more, but at some point, I will reach the dreaded moment where I must let go of all my security blankets and pack what is left into my car. I have until the end of next August to find my new state of mind.