Don't whine. Advice from the chronic malcontent: Get busy

Today as I was slicing a bulbous slippery yam, the knife slipped and chopped down on my left pinky. Afraid to look, I wrapped a wad of paper towel around my finger, gripped it hard, and did a little dance of pain. I had visions of the decision in front of me . . . would I prefer to lose the tip of my finger or would I prefer to pay the cost of going to the doctor? Hmmm. Finger . . . money. . . So hard to decide. For a few more months, I think, I still have health insurance, unless the Republicans figure out how to get along. Luckily, two band-aids did the trick, and now I'm typing, woohoo, look at me go. Dodged that bullet. Knife. Whatever.

Do you worry about losing your health insurance? At first I was worried, but now I am resigned. Soon my health insurance plan will be once again don't get sick and be careful with knives. I remember surviving years with no health insurance, with just the L.A. Free Clinic as my medical provider. Of course, I was a lot younger then.

The reservoirs at Mt. Tabor Park are full of water. The wind comes from the west and ripples the surface, reflecting the sky. We haven't had rain in over a month. Two nights ago, as the sun was setting, I was striding around the reservoir, enjoying the cool air. Suddenly I spotted a duck marching along the path ahead, followed by a brood (paddle? army? platoon?) of five barely fuzzy ducklings, trucking along in the gloaming, looking for a way to get down to the water. Runners and walkers went by, barely noticing the duck as she marched in a zigzag pattern toward me. Whenever she stopped, her kids would plop down on their fuzzy butts, hunkering until Mom started moving again. I didn't move, and she waddled right by me. She looked like any young mother with five infants: thin and frazzled.

As I was walking along the park trail last night, I had a disconcerting thought: I have passed my peak. My prime has come and gone. My best years are most likely behind me. If I was ever going to succeed, it most likely would have happened in my 40s. If I was going to be a great painter, a great writer, it would probably have happened by now. I don't have the energy to feel bad about it. Now I'm 60, and I no longer care about things like career, ambition, making a difference. I just want to survive until I can start taking social security. If there will be such a thing when I'm 62.

Like many cities in this new bizarre era, Portland is having a housing shortage. Decrepit motor homes and campers line many city streets. Tent cities mushroom around freeway interchanges. Residents are furious. Some houseless people aren't good neighbors, apparently. At the behest of irate taxpayers, city officials are passing laws prohibiting camping, parking, sleeping on sidewalks. Where are these people supposed to go? I feel like I'm about three months away from living in my car. I can't move into my mother's spare bedroom anymore. The sale of her condo is pending.

I've decided to stop dreaming of my future after I move to some hot, dry desert town. It's making me crazy to imagine moving but not be able to take much concrete action. While I am slowly downsizing, I am trying to enjoy my mother while I can. It has to be enough, to just be here now. That is how she is living these days, fully immersed in the moment. I call her the Zen Master.

I feel like I'm holding my breath. I'm waiting for the signal that tells me it's time for a change. Meanwhile, I'm in a slowly degrading holding pattern. My resources are draining out of my leaky life, drip drip drip.

Well, the good news is, I don't have to care about anything. I don't have to believe in anything. I just have to show up, one day at a time, and do the work. Time to get busy.

Nothing left to lose

Yesterday as I was watering the wilting mini-roses at my mother's condo garden, I thought about how I would like to die, if I have a choice. Not too many people get to choose the time and place of their demise. I doubt I'll be the exception. Still, it doesn't hurt to set some parameters. For instance, if I knew I would end up in a nursing home where there's no Internet and nothing but gummy string beans to eat with my parboiled chicken, I would definitely opt out.

My mother isn't dead, but wishes she were. “I'm no use to anyone,” she said. “I don't know why I'm still alive. I'd rather be dead.”

I have mixed reactions when she says things like that. My inner two-year-old wants to scream, No, you can't die! Who will take care of me? My terrified inner demon wants to find the nearest cliff to shove her over (the longer she lives, the less money she'll leave behind). My inner adult wants to treasure every precious moment with my scrawny maternal parental unit. I could be wrong, but I sense she is winding down toward the end. I try not to think about it. I don't want to feel my grief yet.

It's strange to watch her decay. The river of life was carrying her along, and she was staying afloat, more or less, until about six months ago. She knew her mind was eroding; hence, the move to the retirement center in early April. In the past few months, she's grown increasingly fragile, like a little boat made of twigs and sticks. The current is moving as fast as ever, but her vintage craft is listing and taking on water, coming apart at the seams. It's her brain, mostly, that is disintegrating, although her body is weakening too.

She may yet surprise me. Somehow despite intermittent uncontrollable diarrhea attacks, she's managed to gain two pounds since she moved into the retirement center. I don't know where she put them, she's as skinny as ever. We are all applauding her, clapping her on the back (gently), congratulating her achievement. (I wish people would do that for me.) It is pretty great that she's gained some weight. But at what cost, I wonder? No dairy, no wheat, no coffee, no orange juice... no cherry pie. No wonder she feels like life is not worth living.

Tonight I met my brother over at her apartment to meet with the real estate agent and go over the two offers that came in on my mother's condo. I know nothing about real estate, but I managed to glean some knowledge after Googling prepaids, reserves, and closing costs. I don't think the real estate agent knows much more than I do. My brother bought a house about twenty years ago, so I consider him the expert. My mother's formerly extensive knowledge has gone to that great landfill in the sky. She sat passively on the end of the couch while the real estate agent, my brother, and I discussed the merits of the two offers.

I hope the Universe treats my mother gently as she goes down with her ship. That is what I want for me. I don't have the funds to move into a fancy place like Mom's retirement home. I doubt if Medicaid will be there for me should I need it. So my alternative is to die in place, wherever that may be. Apartment, motorhome, sidewalk, park bench. I will attempt to make sure my footprint is super small and easy to toss in the trash for whoever finds me, if I haven't lost all my marbles before then.

The chronic malcontent takes a vacation

I took a weekend off and visited Albuquerque, NM, for a reunion with some friends. Traveling was sufficiently stressful to distract me from the miasma of my normal life. I got to think about something other than my mother's diarrhea. Instead, I pondered airports, security lines, screaming babies, irate travelers, hotel pillows, and yummy but indigestible food. All in all, it was great to get away, even though it will take three days to recuperate from the trip. Worth it!

On Sunday, two planes, a train, and a bus later, I walked into my apartment, which smelled like mold and neglected cat. On Sunday, Portland was just starting a far-too-short heat wave. I threw open the windows and reveled in the warm air. My cat lolled on his blue cotton rug, ecstatic at my return, showing me (almost) unconditional affection in exchange for tummy rubs. It doesn't get much better than that.

Today the temperature dropped 30 degrees, compared to yesterday. My feet are freezing. If I close my eyes, I can just barely conjure the feeling of the plush hotel pillows, the smooth sheets, the sound of the pesky fan that intermittently shattered the silence. My vacation memories are receding quickly into the past, muscled aside by the demands of the maternal parental unit.

I visited my mother on Sunday evening. We are developing a ritual. I show up just after dinner (they call it supper at the assisted living place). Mom is either sitting outside in the smoking hut or stretched out on the couch, watching television. On Sunday, she brought me up to date on the state of her bowels.

The blue skies of Albuquerque were fading fast in my mind as I listened to my mother's tale of intestinal woe. We discussed the menu. She couldn't remember what she had eaten for lunch. I asked if she'd eaten anything the night before. She couldn't tell me. I'm pretty sure her late night snacking wasn't helping.

“We won't be able to figure out if certain foods are causing this diarrhea problem if you are eating all this junk,” I said, looking at the cookies and crackers in my mother's cupboards and fridge.

“I know,” she said. She agrees with everything I say these days. Sometimes I see a look on her face that indicates she may be hearing a foreign language coming out of my mouth.

On Monday morning, she called me.

“It was bad today,” she said morosely. I knew what it referred to.

“I'm coming over tonight,” I said. “That's it. No more dairy. No more wheat. No more junk food.”

That evening, I raided my mother's cupboards and fridge. I took everything except two boxes of saltine crackers, which I placed on a shelf high beyond the reach of her skinny bent fingers. I took her Mint Milano cookies. I took her generic cheerios and rice krispies. I took her chocolate muffins. I took the crackers that her friend Tiny had given her, and the lactose-free yogurt. I took the graham crackers. And I took the last bit of her cherry pie that had been sitting on her counter for two weeks.

I packed all the food in two bags and put it in my car.  Then I went to the store and bought gluten-free bread and Cheerios (the real thing), gluten-free wheat-free crackers, some vegan substitute butter, some frozen fruit popsicles (with no high fructose corn syrup), and two bananas. I took it all back to Mom's apartment and unloaded the loot.

We took the Cheerios and bread down to the dining room where residents can use a big refrigerator to store things. Mom already keeps her rice milk there.

The night cook was cleaning up after the evening meal. She saw the box of Cheerios and said, “Don't put that in there. It goes here.”

Finally we got everything stowed. Mom collapsed on the couch, worn out from the walk.

I went home, tossed the pie, and saved the cereal for the birds, squirrels, and rats. I ate the crackers for dinner. I stored the Mint Milanos into my own refrigerator. After one day of eating Mint Milanos, I gathered up all the cookies and muffins, put them in a trash bag, and walked them out to the big garbage can. Thank god I'm not so far gone I will dig in the trash for Mint Milanos. But I confess, it did cross my mind. I'm a little stressed out.

I have this recurring fear that my mother and I will end up in adjoining rooms in some linoleum-floored Medicaid facility far from friends and family, slobbering into bibs, unable to recognize each other. And the food will be parboiled crap, full of gluten and sugar. And I won't be able to protest.

The vertigo scrapes the inside of my head constantly. Tomorrow I am taking Mom to the doctor. I fear I will fail to tell him everything that needs to be said, because I can't remember things anymore. Being a caregiver is hard. A weekend vacation isn't enough. I can't imagine how parents do this everyday for 18 (or more) years. All I can say is, It's a good thing I never had kids.

Getting down and dirty with the Chronic Malcontent

My maternal parental unit has got the squits. Ever since she moved to to the retirement community, she's been plagued with explosive . . . well, gosh, I don't know how else to say it. Diarrhea. There, I said it.

Few things are funnier than the human digestive process, but when it's your scrawny stick of a mother whose 87-year-old sphincter can no longer hold back the surging tide, well, it's not quite as funny anymore. My nose scrunches as I write this.

I visit her every other day, usually right after lunch or dinner. I walk out to the smoking area with her, and walk back inside with her as she hustles to make it to her toilet. Last night we made the trip twice before her stomach would let her settle and enjoy her cigarette.

I make feeble jokes to lighten her mood. She's bored. She wants to go for a ride, but no way am I letting her get in my car. I try to persuade her to consider wearing adult diapers (she isn't against it, she just forgets).

A couple weeks ago, I got a call from Nurse Katy: “Your mother had a fall. She's headed to the hospital in an ambulance right now.” Mom had passed out and ended up on the floor outside her bathroom with her pants around her knees. That is the way she was brought into the emergency room, half-naked with a flowered sheet wrapped around her tiny skeleton.

As stints in the ER go, it wasn't bad. The techs and nurses were patient and kind. By the time Mom had some fluids in her, she was feeling better. She motored to the bathroom three times using a walker, head down, hospital gown flapping in her wake. Three hours later, she walked out under her own steam, wearing little orange skid-proof socks they give people in the ER who have somehow managed to arrive with no shoes. The tech said, “So long, Slugger.”

Since then, we've been doing tests, trying to figure out why the food she eats runs straight through her. Well, when I say we, I mean, she poops in a bucket and the staff at the retirement place send it to a lab, where some poor schmuck (probably a graduate of the healthcare program offered by the barely functional for-profit vocational college I used to work for) pokes around in the poop, looking for the pony (germs). I don't know, I'm guessing.

The lab tests came back negative. No pony.

My brother, who has lately been experiencing some diarrhea of his own, blames it on “a bug” going around. How Mom managed to get the bug when none of her neighbors have is a stretch, but whatever. We all have our theories. My brother's is a bug. I blame the food. After my five-year slow-motion train wreck with Dr. Tony the Naturopath, it is understandable I might see food as both the culprit and the remedy.

The only person who has no theory is my mother.

She can complain of feeling bad, but she can't form a theory or undertake a regimen to address the problem. That mother is gone. In her place is this new mother who lives completely in the moment (or sometimes in the past). Thoughts are heavy things to carry into the future. She prefers to leave them behind. She's like my cat. Whatever is happening right now is her reality. Don't they say we should all try to live more in the moment? Instead of trying to live for a better past or trying to control the future? So Zen. Who knew all you need is dementia!

Happy Earth Day from the Chronic Malcontent

As a long-practicing dermatillomaniac, I assess my mental state by how many raw open bloody wounds festoon my cuticles on any given day. A few nights ago I noticed all ten of my fingertips were devoid of wounds. I was astounded. The pressure was apparently too much; the next day I counted six open wounds and two hangnails I hadn't yet been able to yank. Sigh. As my cuticles go, there goes my serenity.

Why am I so anxious? Thanks for asking. As a self-described chronic malcontent, I always have a tenuous relationship with relaxation, peace, and serenity. My normal state is morose discontented fretfulness, as evidenced by the deep vertical furrow between my eyebrows. (Today I met a man who has a matching brow furrow! I didn't say anything to him about it, of course, but I felt better, somehow, knowing I'm not the only one who wears a sure sign of malcontentedness for everyone to see.) Anyway, fretful anxiety is my default state.

The past two weeks have been unusually unsettling. First, we've had one day of sun to five days of rain. Portland is waterlogged. Not flooding, just saturated. Sun breaks happen, and I turn toward them like the hothouse flower I am, but within minutes the clouds roll back in and it's pouring. We had a crap winter—way more snow and ice than usual, and so far spring has been wetter and cooler than average. I dream of Arizona daily.

Second, my maternal parental unit chose an assisted living place to move into, and thus on April 7 we made it happen, me, my brother, and two hired movers—professionals who had all the equipment, a fancy truck, and knew what they were doing (minimum charge $300). I arranged the furniture, hung the paintings and photographs. I got a senior-friendly microwave. I built her a dinky round wood-top table to replace her kitchen table so she would have someplace to eat her Cheerios. I'm still fetching things from the condo. Today it was gardening tools.

Her brain works intermittently. She has had a few good days. One day last week, she said she took a shower and only sprayed the aide once. We had a good laugh at that. I brought her some of her old sheet music (stored at my house for the past year) and she tentatively picked out some tunes on the grand piano in the common room. I sat with her in the outdoor smoking area, talking about nothing in particular, as rain drops fell on the rhodies behind us. The air smelled like spring (as long as I was upwind).

Most of the time, though, my mother is depressed and cranky at losing her independence, even though it was her idea. She knows she can't get mad at me, because then who would fetch her cigarettes, but I can tell she sure would like to get some resentment off her chest. I'm the one that sent her to that prison. She hates the food; she can't figure out the schedule; everything is in the wrong place... she copes by going to bed. I don't think a whole lotta gardening will be going on, but she's got her clippers now, just in case. I hope I don't hear any complaints about Mom whacking the rose bushes.

Third, last week, my cat's eye got infected, and now we have the thrice daily ritual of me trying to hold his twisty body still for the few seconds I need to rub ointment on his cheek in the general vicinity of his eye. It's a battle I'm not winning, but his eye is looking much better, so some of the goop must be finding the mark. I call him Squint Eastwood. I'm just grateful I don't have to give him a pill. If you have ever tried to pill a cat, you know what I mean.

A few days ago, I went for a walk around the Mt. Tabor reservoirs (.56 of a mile in circumference). The walk started out sunny, ended up rainy, ho hum, what's new. Someone had dragged an old well-used black leather office chair up the path to the reservoir and left it there in the walkway, where runners and walkers detoured around it. Maybe whoever donated it to the park thought people would like to sit there to watch the sun go down beyond the hills. Ha. Joke. What sun?

I walked past the chair a few times as I made my circuit, hunkered in my rain gear, watching it get wet. On my fifth circuit, the rain was pelting down and no one was nearby, so I grabbed that old chair and dragged it to a spot next to a park bench. I felt quite satisfied as I walked around the reservoirs one more time. I felt I had beaten back a tiny bit of the chaos, now that the seating was arranged to my liking. I hope no one saw me indulging my inner OCD tyrant.

As I was driving to my meeting today in my fossil-fuel burning car and remembering picking up trash in front of my elementary school on the first Earth Day in 1970, I thought about how hellish old age really is. People don't talk about it much. People don't talk about the food that goes through you so fast you don't have time to make it to the bathroom before it's dripping down your leg. Nobody wants to think about how it feels to see your contemporaries pushing wheelchairs and walkers up and down the hallways, heads bent, eyes dull. In the morning, you hear the hollering of Bingo numbers from the activities room. In the evening, you hear the droning of prayers over the dying woman in the room next door. You hear the chatter of the aides (the jailers) swooping by in their colorful scrubs, and for a moment you think, what weird hotel is this place? Then you remember, this isn't a hotel. This is where you go to die.

I am becoming more and more certain that if I am able to make the decision and execute it, I will opt out sooner not later, rather than wait until it's too late. I don't want to end up warehoused in a barracks for old people. Sure, maybe I would have some of my furniture and pictures around me—my Mom's place looks strangely familiar with her old flowered couch and chair, but you can't fool her. It's still a prison, and she knows it.

Don't jump

Howdy, blogbots. I'm taking time out of stressing about my mother's impending move to assisted living to reflect on my morning adventure. Today I took a bus downtown for a SCORE workshop on social media marketing. I signed up over a month ago, not realizing it would happen in the middle of one of the more hectic weeks in my life. But I have trained myself to show up to the tasks on my calendar. So off to town I went.

I think the bus driver was new. He meandered sedately from stop to stop, easing the bus to the curb with care. He greeted every passenger with a bright Good morning! Traffic was bottlenecked at a construction mess around SE 33rd. The driver inched the bus between parked cars and oncoming trucks. At any moment, I expected to hear the side of the bus take off a parked car's left-side mirror. I held my breath until we came out the other side. At 12th, the bus driver traded places with a new driver, who adjusted his seat and mirrors and took off in a roaring cloud of dust. I guess we might have been running a few minutes late.

The bus filled up as we headed toward town. I enjoyed the view from my window seat. No rain today, yay, but not much sun either. Just a sky of hazy white clouds, the kind with the capacity to surprise: burn off to clear blue sky or sprinkle rain all day. Traffic slowed as we neared the Hawthorne Bridge. Trucks and buses haven't been able to cross the Morrison Bridge for a few years because the deck is crumbling. This summer, our city plans to fix the mess, so as of April 1, most car traffic is now diverted to the Hawthorne Bridge until next fall. As you can imagine, there was quite a traffic jam.

The bus crept across the bridge. I had a great view of the boats moored along the river's edge. I wondered what kind of people could afford the condos built along the river. I wondered how many people have been living on their boats since the housing crash in 2008. The river was calm but murky. March was the fourth wettest month on record, so the rivers are all running high.

Suddenly I heard several passengers' crying, "No, oh no, oh no, no, no!" People along the right side of the bus began energetically popping up in their seats. I was on the left side of the bus. I thought, is a bicyclist trapped? A pedestrian fallen in the road? What is happening?

The bus driver stopped the bus. "Open the door!" Some passengers pounded on the back door. They burst out the door and then I watched through the window as they grabbed a man who was attempting to climb over the railing of the bridge. One rescuer grabbed the man in a bear hug, and I caught a glimpse of a face—red cheeks, grizzled chin. I thought I saw shame and chagrin. The man twisted away from the men who were attempting to restrain him and marched unsteadily along the bridge sidewalk toward the pedestrian off ramp.

Meanwhile, multiple people were calling 911 on their cellphones to report a suicidal man on the Hawthorne Bridge.

Eventually the bus continued into downtown. I got off at the next stop and hiked up to the Courthouse at SW 6th and Main for the workshop, which was pretty much a dud for me personally. I will probably forget to blog about it, so in case you are curious, here are the highlights: no breakfast, no coffee, memorable bus ride, old courthouse, three attendees, no refreshments, obese presenter obsessed with food, mediocre PowerPoint, sales pitch for Constant Contact, ended ten minutes early, caught bus, home by noon.

The real story (besides the suicidal man) is how I could take a morning off from the job of orchestrating my mother's move to assisted living. Like I said, I do what is on my calendar. I signed up for this workshop over a month ago, long before we found the facility and started preparations to move.

Last night Mom's brain was mush. She'd stayed up to 3 am going through stuff to keep and sell in a yard sale. She was barely coherent when I brought her six more empty boxes. I was worried. Taking a morning off seemed a bit irresponsible, but hell. I can't manage my mother's brain. This morning I called her and she sounded much better. I guess she got some sleep and ate some food. I am hopeful that she'll survive this move and thrive in the new place. Stay tuned.

#where'sthebarf?

I've been wearing the same tired old pair of winter shoes for five years. I love my beat-up Merrills. They've taken me through mud puddles and ice puddles, across cement sidewalks and gravel driveways all over NW Portland. These shoes are shaped like torpedoes, which means these shoes aren't great for running, but I can kick things with them, like falling trees, attacking dogs, and marauding children, although I haven't actually had to do much of that. The black suede is gray and crusty with dirt and dust. Sadly, the soles are wearing down. I estimate they might give me another five years of service.

I know what you are thinking—five-year-old shoes, and you think they will last another five years? Are you nuts? More to the point, are you completely outside all bounds of respect for fashion?

I can hear your incredulity. I'm amazed you can conjure so much incredulity, considering the state of our national politics, but hey, more power to you. Whatever gets you foaming at the mouth. It takes more than out-of-style shoes to get my heart rate up, but I respect your indignation, whatever prods it to the surface.

I used to be a slave to fashion. To be precise, I was a slave to other people's ideas of fashion. I used to make custom clothing for a living, back in one of my former lives as a . . . well, let's just name it what it was—seamstress!—in Hollywood. Yep, the one in California. My clients brought me pictures of gravity-defying outfits (inevitably designed for a size zero) and demanded I make the outfits for them (in polyester satin, sans beading, in size 16, for my daughter's wedding, which by the way is next Saturday). I know I don't have the right to use the word slave, considering my skin color and life of lower-middle class blue-collar privilege, but maybe some of what I felt in those days was a ghost of slavery. I certainly felt trapped in a horrible job, bent over hot machines doing the bidding of harsh judgmental mistresses.

I guess I have associated fashion with pain, embarrassment, and resentment, which might explain why my current modus operandi is to use things till they disintegrate. It's how I treat my automobiles: drive 'em till they drop. It's how I treat my clothes: wear them until they shred into tiny pieces. So it's no big surprise that is how I treat my footwear.

All that is the long way to announce, in honor of spring, I bought a new pair of walking shoes. I bought them online, which is always a crap shoot, I'm sure you know—the convenience of purchasing in my pajamas is often outweighed by the disappointment of shoes that don't fit and look stupid.

In this case, when I opened the box and saw my new all-black walking shoes, I thought, hmmmm, these look like . . .  old lady shoes! They might as well be Easy Spirits! Humph. Even I have my fashion limits. I'll wear bell bottoms or pegged trousers, I don't care what the shape of my pants is, but I draw the line at wearing Easy Spirits. Probably because they were my mother's preferred brand, before I sold her on the style benefits of Merrills.

I tried these new style-less shoes on with my thick running socks, thinking, well if they don't feel perfectly awesome, I can wrap them up and ship them back, no questions asked. I trotted around the carpet, testing them, tuned to every rub and pinch. My right foot is wider than my left, don't ask me why, which means I must compromise between loose fit on the left and tight fit on the right. I guess my left foot is a 6 1/2 but I buy a size 7 to accommodate my wider right foot. When I buy running shoes, which I wear with a thicker sock, I usually order size 7 1/2s. That means I occasionally look down and experience a shock at how long my feet look.

I trotted around my living room for three days, wondering, should I send them back, should I keep them? Finally, I decided to send them back and try again. I got out the box and checked the soles of the shoes to make sure they were clean . . .  oh, no. What? Between the grooves on the left shoe was smashed an all-too-familiar sight: cat barf! No way!

Well, you know what they say: you step in it, you bought the shoes. Resigned, I took the shoes out to the store yesterday for a little spin and was pleasantly relieved: no blisters, no pain. Today I took them out for a 2-mile hike around the reservoir in the rain. The shoes warmed right up and melted to the shape of my foot. By the time I got home, they fit perfectly.

But I have looked all over my place and I still can't find the pile of cat barf I stepped in. I guess if my sinuses weren't so clogged with allergies, cat hair, and mold spores, I might be able to sniff it out. Maybe someday, or not. I never claimed to be a great housekeeper, a fact I hope my sister remembers when she comes to visit this summer.

I don't care how I look anymore. My shoes might look stupid, but they feel great. I'm greatly relieved. Freedom from pain is worth looking old and foolishly out of style.

It's almost spring . . . time for a little networking!

I've hunkered in my cave long enough. It's almost spring. Time to do a little networking! If you've read any of my blog posts from 2015, you know I think networking is highly overrated. Especially when the facilitators hand you a “Networking Bingo” card with stupid questions like, Find someone who wasn't born in Oregon, and Find someone who was! But tonight I was ready to get out of the house, so I waited on the corner in the freezing rain for twenty minutes for a bus to take me downtown to a networking event.

The event was billed as a speed mentoring event, a chance for entrepreneurs to meet some so-called experts to pick their brains about marketing, strategy, finance, and legal issues. What could be more fun? Thirty entrepreneurs in a new age concrete and wood conference room, milling around trying to avoid eye contact with each other. Ho hum. So been there done that. But I was ready! Let me at that Bingo card!

I was easily the oldest person in the room. I guess I should start getting used to that. The upside to being old, though, is that I don't care what people think about me anymore. I can say anything to anyone. I'll never see them again. And few of these people were likely to be in my target market, so la la la.

The six mentors had to take us two at a time; each entrepreneur was supposed to get fifteen minutes of one-on-one time. Oh boy!

My first two sessions were with marketing experts, a couple of smart, confident women I could have talked with for a long time over coffee. They both valiantly gave me what they could before the bell rang and it was time to move on to the next table.

Actually, my first session lasted only about ten minutes, because my partner hogged the time. I mean, hogged the time. She even came back and gave the mentor a swatch of her unique (and pungent) geranium aroma-therapy oil. I tried not to be resentful.

My third session was with a “strategist,” Josh, a young man with a diffident air. No one else had signed up for that time slot, so I sat alone as I handed him a postcard for my recently published book. He asked me some polite questions, trying to get a feel for my business direction.

I was just drawing a breath to begin waxing poetic about my dream of establishing a small publishing empire when a young woman sat down in the chair next to me and heaved an enormous sigh. My session partner had arrived.

Josh's eyes left me and settled on her. We both stared. She was dressed in a rumpled vintage get up that I might have worn when I was in my twenties, back when I cared how I looked. Her skin was smooth, her lips were red, her eyes were shadowed, her hair was fluffy and pulled up into some kind of shape. She looked messy but real, coy but accessible, and within seconds, I was pretty sure I had her figured out.

“Well, let's let that percolate,” Josh said vaguely, setting my postcard aside. To the newcomer, he said, “Hi, what brings you here?”

“I had a business. Gardening. With my boyfriend. He signed me up, and then he left me. Now I have this business, mostly contract work for walls and walkways, and I don't have insurance, and I don't know what I'm doing,” she said breathlessly, eyelashes fluttering. Her lips were mesmerizing, I had to admit. Josh was certainly mesmerized. The temperature between them ratcheted up a peg. I sat back in my chair and watched.

Her name was something like Nora, and she was on the prowl for attention. Josh was bored and ready to comply. Nora described her business in a self-deprecating way, casting sidelong glances at Josh, and occasionally at me, because I was there, after all. Nobody could deny that I was there, watching. Finally, she ran down, and Josh seemed speechless. Without thinking first, I asked, “What could go wrong?”

“What?”

“What could go wrong? If you don't have insurance...?”

“Yeah, good question,” Josh said.

Nora said a few things, I said some things (devil's advocate is my best role), and Josh pretended to agree. As I listened to Nora talk about her landscaping business, I could tell her heart wasn't fully in it. I know what that feels like, and I've seen it many times in my former students, who were struggling to get associate's degrees in fields they didn't care about.

“It seems like you aren't really into this business,” I said respectfully. “What would you rather be doing?”

Nora took a deep breath. A smile lit up her face. She sat up straight in her chair and waved both arms. I thought, wow, this will be good.

“I want to build a huge garden, twenty acres, with a sauna hut in the middle, in the hills outside of [some town I didn't recognize] in Massachusetts!”

Then she slumped. “But I love my clients!” she moaned. “Their gardens are my babies. The vines and flowers . . . I can't leave my babies.”

“They won't love your gardens the way you do,” I said unsympathetically. “They'll forget to trim those vines and let them grow all over their houses . . .  You'll never get away. Your clients will drain you dry if you let them.”

Nora made a pouty face. I thought, whoops, maybe that was a bit harsh, so I smiled disingenuously to ease the sting. I used to be afraid of young women like Nora, I realized. Looking into her vapid, self-centered eyes, I realized, she doesn't want to be in business. She just wants attention. Then I realized that I was actually talking about myself, about my editing clients draining me dry, and suddenly I couldn't breathe.

I said to Nora gently, “Think about where you want to be in five years, ten years... Don't wait until you are old like me to pursue your dream.”

Josh said, “I know what it's like to detour away from doing what you love.” I thought, hey, something is going on with him, too. I turned my earnest gaze his way and asked, “What detour did you take? What would you rather be doing?”

“I play the upright bass in a jazz band,” he said sheepishly. “I like doing this business thing, but . . .”

“It's hard to make money doing music,” I said. He nodded.

“I have a family to take care of. But I'd really just like to be shredding my bass.” We all sat quietly for a moment, pondering detours and shredded basses. Then Josh shook himself and turned to me. “What about you, what's your dream?”

I reflected for a split second and said, “I'm closer now to my perfect life than I've ever been before. Writing, publishing, making art. It's what I've wanted to do since I was nine years old. And now I'm doing it.”

A few minutes later, the bell chimed, and it was time to move on to the next table.

The chronic malcontent points out some landmarks on our trip to hell

A few days ago, as I was scrubbing just the white squares on my black-and-white checkerboard linoleum kitchen floor, I pondered the possibility that we are past the point of no return on our trip to hell, and the hand-basket seems to be crumbling around us. The journalists and reporters are not reassuring. The earth may have reached a tipping point as the climate changes, not good for us little humans scurrying around on the planet's surface. Democracy has sprung a billion leaks and threatens to founder as possibly the least bad form of government. A few days ago my car wouldn't start. I mean, all the signs seem to indicate we are on a one-way trip to hell in a hand-basket.

So, what if everything really is falling apart? Like any journey, I suppose the trip to hell will happen in several stages. Here is my guess about what the stages might look like, if you are a crazy wackjob like me.

It wasn't my fault. When something goes wrong, the first thought is, well, whatever it is, it wasn't my fault. Like mistakes were made (but not by me). Pass the buck, avoid responsibility, hide under the rock, don't admit there's dirty laundry. Pretend like I wasn't even there. That sometimes works for awhile.

Who can I blame? The next stage starts with admitting I was there, but it was someone else's fault. I'm just a hapless victim, those lousy liberals or those confounded conservatives are really to blame. Or how about those people who don't look like me, they look suspicious, with their unsettling voices and funny skin. It must be their fault!

Let me at 'em! Now that I've identified the source of my troubles, I'm one breath closer to wanting to beat the crap out of them. Or at least deny them any civility and respect. Let me take away their rights or something, keep them from being happy and healthy. That will make me feel a lot better. That's all they deserve, anyway, those people who have the gall to be different from me. They are lucky I let them live. If you want to join me, we can beat them up together. Nothing like being part of a mob to make one feel empowered and righteous, am I right?

I've got mine and you can't have any. As soon as we've trashed the other, you and I will start to eyeball each other and realize, the more you have, the less there is for me. So, no, we can't be friends. We teamed up when we had to, but now that the threat is gone, I'm building a wall. A really yuge wall.

I'm bigger than you, so give me all yours. And now that I'm safe behind my wall, and I've hoarded a bunch of stuff to make me feel wealthy and worthwhile, I realize I don't have enough, I need all your stuff, too. Plus, because I'm bigger and badder, I deserve to have more stuff. Your stuff. All the stuff. So give it to me. If you don't, I'll take it. Because I can. Don't whine.

At this point, the path forks into two options: urgency or resignation.

Option 1: I don't care about you, I've got to survive. Get out of my way! I don't care what you say, I don't care what you feel, I don't care if your children are shoeless or the planet is dying. You mean nothing to me. The future of your grandchildren means nothing to me. The only thing that matters is my survival, right now, in this moment. At this point, hell is just around the corner, but of course, I can't see it.

Option 2: I don't care what happens anymore, what's the use. If I get to this point, I've accepted my fate. I can see hell ahead of me, clear as day. I resign myself to the vagaries of the universe. I realize there is no meaning or purpose to existence, that the whole thing was just a stupid, futile dream. You can have my things. I'm giving up.

Yikes! After writing this, I have a knot in my stomach not unlike the knot I feel when I've watched the news for the past four weeks. I'm making up the stages of a journey that seems all too real. I can't get my tiny brain to accept the events and statements I see and hear daily. (And I can't stop compulsively watching and listening! Argh!)

Part of me thinks, wow, I should have been a journalist! This new world is a journalist's paradise. Another part of me thinks, isn't that a bit like rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic? Nero fiddling while Rome burns? Waving my hands like I'm on Space Mountain while I'm going to hell in a hand-basket? Even journalists will go down with the ship, busily commentating as we sink beneath the waves.

Where did this alternate reality come from, and how soon can it go away?

Today as I was holding a dinky flashlight over my landlord's shoulder so he could attempt to rewire the thermostat of my electric heater, I wondered what drives people to hate other people. All I can figure is, it's fear. A big burning hemorrhoid of fear, too horrible to even acknowledge, let alone deal with. Fear has plunged us into an alternate reality. I would like to wake up from this bizarre new world.

My landlord came over today to fix my thermostat, which went kapooey yesterday. I was on the phone last night, talking to a friend. I heard a hiss and a fizzle coming from the wall. I looked over at the thermostat and saw wisps of gray smoke floating away from the little box. I knew that probably wasn't good. I turned the heater knob all the way off and as I kept murmuring uh-huh and you don't say to my friend on the phone, I strolled into the kitchen and liberated my ancient fire extinguisher from its plastic holder on the wall by the back door.

No fire seemed imminent, but I took my important papers into the bedroom when I went to bed last night. I also took the fire extinguisher with me. I pictured myself putting my cat into a pillowcase and lowering him out the window to a neighbor below, before I jumped and brained myself on the concrete. I didn't sleep very well.

Today the landlord came over. He took the little box apart.

“Shouldn't we turn off the power?” I asked nervously.

“I'll turn it off at the breaker box,” he said and went to the basement. I heard some banging. He came back. We stood peering at the defunct thermostat. I wanted to tell him I knew he could get a lot more money if he evicted me and rented to someone else, but I kept my mouth shut. This didn't seem like the right time.

He pulled out a device and tapped the wires with it. Then he tapped a wire to a lamp plugged into another outlet. Nothing happened. He shook the device. Finally, a red light came on and the thing started beeping. He went back to the thermostat and tapped the wires. Nothing happened. We both heaved a sigh.

“Your wife would not forgive me if you turned into a crispy critter,” I said.

“I bet that box is older than you,” he said. I told him how old I was. “Well, darn near,” he added.

He fooled around with the wires for a bit. “Darn. I got the wrong thermostat,” he said. “I need one with four wires. I'll be back pretty soon.” He went out the door to his truck and drove away.

Three hours later, he came back.

“I had to go to six places to find the right one,” he said. He didn't sound angry.

I held the flashlight again while he worked some magic with a plier-like tool and some little yellow plastic cap-like thingies. He twisted the old wires with the new wires with the yellow caps. Then he shoved all the wires, old and new, back into the metal box in the wall and put the cover on.

“Okay, let's turn on the breaker,” he said. He went to the basement and came back. I was standing directly behind him as he turned the knob. A large bang ensued, followed by some sparks.

“Are you okay?” I said, imagining the worst.

“I'm okay.” He was clutching his hand to his chest, more out of shock than from injury. We looked at each other. I'm sure my eyes were as big as his.

“I'll call the electrician,” he said as he packed up his stuff.

So now I sit in a cold room with my feet ensconced in my dry-rice foot warmer, wondering why people are driven to hate. All I can figure is, it's our old friend, fear. We get so wrapped up in fear we can't even stop to ask what we are afraid of. Right now, I guess we're afraid of people who don't look like us, coming to kill us. It's irrational fear. We should fear our cars or our bathtubs—those are the real killers.

Sadly, you can't reason with someone who is afraid. Facts don't matter. You can't tell them, shut up, quit whining. You can't say, what's your problem, get over it. It does no good to say, your fear is irrational and you are behaving like idiots. People can't hear logic when they are mired in fear. I don't care what side you are on. Scared people are deaf people.

Of course, nobody wants to admit they are afraid, so they mask their fear with anger. That's what I do. I'm sure I'm not alone, judging by the number of angry people that seem to be out on the streets. I handle my anger and fear by hiding in my apartment and compulsively checking the news. Other people handle their fear and anger by yelling loud, nasty things about and at the people they don't like.

I'd like to say I'm on the side of the righteous, but I'm beginning to wonder what side that might be. Both sides seem to use similar tactics to express their fear and anger. We've lost our American mojo, that glue that held us together. Maybe unity was an illusion, like prosperity. Like a mirage. Now we're just tribes of monkeys, throwing rocks at each other because we've lost something we had or we didn't get something we wanted. And thus the human species regresses back to the mean. Thanks, Mr. Obama. I miss you terribly. It was great while it lasted.

The chronic malcontent marches to a different drum

Yesterday was the historic women's march in downtown Portland. I wanted to go, but I had meetings in NW Portland, 2 miles away from the action. The march was supposed to last until 4:00 pm, and my last meeting ended at 2:00 pm. I thought, hey, I'll just leave my car here and take the bus over to the route, maybe walk the last leg with the crowd. What could possibly go wrong?

After waiting impatiently at the bus stop for about 10 minutes, no buses in sight, I thought, hey, I'll just walk down and intercept the protesters somewhere near the waterfront at the end of the route. Action is the magic word, after all. I like to walk.

I'm not much of a joiner, but I wasn't going to miss out on history in the making, even if I only caught 500 yards of the route, skulking at the end of the pack. So I trudged on down to the river, equipped with hiking boots, a long hooded raincoat, an umbrella, and my old intermittently functioning Sony Cybershot digital camera. The rain was steady but not terribly cold, just a typical winter day in Portland. After the snow, ice, and 20-degree days we had last week, the air felt almost balmy. I was glad to be on the move toward something.

As I got closer to the route, I saw groups of people and families coming toward me, dragging waterlogged signs and wearing funny pink hats. They were talking and laughing, clearly done marching, signs forgotten. I crossed under the Burnside Bridge in Old Town, at the site of the Saturday Market, now vacant for the winter season. On one side of the MAX rail line, a horde of people were lined up to catch the train. On the other side, sheltered by the bridge overpass, was a line of sleeping bags and makeshift tents: a small contingent of our very large homeless population, wrapped like mummies, most likely too exhausted and demoralized to protest for better lives.

I caught up to the marchers as they walked east on Pine, a couple blocks from the river. I found some vantage points off to the side to take some photos. Then I walked with some other loners through parking lots, not of the crowd but with the crowd, so to speak. Moving in the same direction, anyway. I carried no signs. As I stopped for a light at a street corner, a young girl with blonde wisps poking out from under her hood gave me a wide grin and said "Hi!" Somewhat surprised and not a little bemused, I returned her greeting and crossed Naito Parkway to the Tom McCall Waterfront Park.

The fast-moving Willamette River was the color of a day-old McDonald's latte, punctuated with floating branches and logs. By now I was pretty done with crowds, and my feet were killing me. I took some pictures to prove I was there. Marchers milled around in clumps, proudly displaying their signs: Women's rights are human rights, Not my president, and my favorite, Viva la vulva. Some marchers were still on the move, headed south toward the Morrison Bridge, where some kind of stage was set up. Music and voices boomed over a sound system. I skirted all that by walking along the river front, heading toward the bus line that would take me back to NW Portland and my car.

At the bus stop, I commandeered the butt-sized bus bench to rest my aching legs and feet. I would have given up the seat to someone else who needed it. A woman with a walker joined us, but her walker had a built-in seat, so I stayed put. Someone with a smartphone said buses were delayed because of heavy loads. I waited a few minutes. Then I thought, I could be here all day. Maybe the streetcar would be a better bet.

I heaved myself up and started walking away from the river, toward 10th Avenue, where I knew I could catch the streetcar to NW Portland. The rain slowed. I heard a drum beat and realized I was watching the end of the marchers, the last walkers moving slowly north on 4th Avenue. I took some photos of overflowing garbage cans and piles of discarded protest signs and kept moving. By now my right ankle was bruised from the unforgiving ankle support of my right boot. My left heel burned with a blister. My step was neither lively nor steady at this point.

At 10th Avenue, I found the streetcar stop flooded with hopeful wanna-be riders and no streetcar in sight. I walked slowly along 10th (downhill, thank god). I contemplated going into Powell's Books to see if the giftcard I'd carried in my wallet for two years was still good, but I feared if I stopped moving, I'd not be able to start again. By this time, I knew that my chances of catching the streetcar were slim to none, so I put my head down and decided to power on through.

The rain stopped. The wind came up, but the breeze refreshed me. As I trudged over to Johnson and turned uphill to head back to 24th Avenue, I wondered what if anything I had learned about marching, protesting, and political grievances. If I were a truly evolved human being, probably I could have transcended the murderous pains in my legs and feet and focused on the meaning of life and the pendulum that swings us from love to hate to love to hate. But the untrained human mind is easily distracted by pain. Nothing much came to me except... shoes. I need better walking shoes.

Eventually I spotted my car halfway up the block. I plodded to it, opened the door, and sank wearily into the driver's seat, wondering if my feet would ever forgive me.

Today I looked up my route on Google maps to see how far I actually walked. I'm embarrassed to report, my route was two miles long from my car to the waterfront. I walked another half a mile south to the Hawthorne Bridge. Then I walked back to NW Portland, more or less along the same route. All together, my trek was easily five miles long. The march itself was only 1.3 miles.

I'm ready to go Donner Party on my cat

Today is Day 6 of the... what are we calling this? Snowpocalyse? Snowmageddon? I don't know what people are calling it, but I'm sure I'm not alone in wanting it to be over.

The snow, once fluffy and pristine, has melted and been packed down multiple times, every day and every night as the temperature hovers between 20° and 35°F. The mush in the road is a grimy, rutted, whipped-up mess of snow, ice, gravel, and de-icing chemicals (which as far as I can tell, didn't work). I want out of here, but not into that.

Weak sunshine looks festive from my window, but the air outside is dry, brittle, and frigid. The roads are too slick for my little tin can Ford Focus—I fear gravity would take over if I tried to get down off this hill. It's too cold and slippery to walk down, a recipe for a broken hip. The good news: buses are running, albeit infrequently, because today is a holiday. But they are running. And that's a relief, because I am running out of food.

I wasn't built for this weather. I was made for warm, dry, sunny climes. I was made for California chaparral, Arizona cacti, dusty yards made of decorative rocks and desert flowers, blue skies and sunshine. My bones are rotting as I sit here with my feet buried inside a homemade foot warmer made of uncooked rice packed inside runnels sewed into an old pillowcase. After being microwaved umpteen times, the cotton is scorched. Today one of those scorched areas sprung a leak and a shower of tiny broken pieces of rice scattered across my desk and floor. I guess four minutes on high, every hour, is too much. I'll sew up the hole and try three and a half minutes, see how that goes.

I visited my car a couple days ago, just to make sure it was still there. It was, buried under a foot of snow, a car Popsicle. My brother warned me I should try to get the door open and start up the engine. Apparently batteries don't like cold weather any more than I do.

People in other parts of the country think we Portlanders are wimps and whiners. They are not wrong. Winter here rarely consists of more than rain, rain, and more rain. This big Arctic air bubble sitting over us happens from time to time, but it is rarely accompanied by a firehose of moisture. The last time I remember this much snow was almost ten years ago. I bought snowboots after that horrific experience. I dug them out of the back of the closet. That is how I blazed a path to my car.

I thought the weather would shift during the early morning hours tonight, but the NWS forecasters are now predicting freezing rain tonight and all day tomorrow. That means if I want to go get food, I will have to hike out or take the bus today, because once the freezing rain starts, the buses will stop running up here on the hill. My refrigerator is looking a bit bare, and my cat is starting to look oddly tasty.

When it starts raining, it is not expected to stop. In fact, temperatures may rise into the mid 40s on Wednesday. You know what that means, right? Oh, you don't? Well, it means that some of that snowpack in the mountains will start to melt, filling our local rivers and streams with a whole lot of water. Add to that the snow on the ground in Portland, clogged sewer grates, and saturated thawing ground and you get flooding and mudslides. The NWS has issued a flood watch. Luckily, I live on the shoulder of a hill. I am sure I won't get flooded. I am less sure that the road down the hill won't be subject to a small landslide or two. Unlikely. The trees that might have slid are mostly still lying in pieces in the parking strip after the previous ice storm.

I'm resenting weather today. I was hoping I would get out of here today (meaning, get my car out, drive to the store, see what is happening in the neighborhood), but it looks like that might not happen until Wednesday. I rarely am called to interact with this much weather. In an attempt to be grateful for my first-world problems, I tried to imagine what it would have felt like to be snowbound under nine feet of snow in Donner Pass. I'm sure I would not have survived. My ancestors who came from South Dakota and Wisconsin weren't wimps, but somehow over the generations, my ancestors' genes produced me, a hothouse flower with a built-in resentment against inclement weather. I'm so over winter.

Happy apocalypse from the Hellish Handbasket

I'm feeling anxious. It's pouring cold rain outside. At 4:00 pm, it's already dark. When winter solstice arrived, I got happy, sure that the days were finally lengthening, until a self-righteous friend pointed out to me the days don't actually start lengthening until about January 6. After that news, I sunk into a pit of seasonal affective disorder. When I get S.A.D., I worry about the failure of important forces like gravity. Suddenly I'm aware of how tenuous is my connection to the surface of the earth.

Everything gets under my skin. The holiday TV season is a desert wasteland. (How many times can you watch It's a Wonderful Life before you puke?) My inbox is overrun with emails begging my help for refugees, bees, and the rights of women to keep control of their uteruses. I'm worried about global warming and nuclear war. I keep thinking more chocolate is the solution, but my cupboards are bare.

I'd like to help every refugee, bee, and uterus, really, I would. If I could be sure my donated dollars would prevent Armageddon, I'd be happy to contribute. But everything will have to wait until spring. I'm mired in the dog days of winter blues.

I've washed the breakfast dishes. I've folded a pile of laundry I did days ago and lost an hour I'll never get back surfing Facebook. I guess there's nothing left to do but binge-watch episodes of TrueBlood.

This month has been a bad ending to a year that started out looking pretty good, for some of us, anyway. I miss the good old days of last spring... Apart from the election madness, the closing of this year seems especially sad. Some of my favorite musicians and actors have exited the stage for good. I still can't believe Bowie and Prince are gone. And Emerson and Lake. And now George Michael and Carrie Fisher. It's like everyone decided to opt out of 2017. Like rats from a sinking ship.

I don't feel much joy contemplating the mayhem that I fear is coming. Of course, I don't know what the future holds, nobody does. But do you get the feeling we are all sitting in a kettle of rapidly heating water? Will we be able to jump before we end up on China's dinner plate?

When I started this blog, my conception of “going to hell in a handbasket” was personal. I was slogging through dissertation hell and I wanted to share my misery with anyone who might listen. In my postdoc life, my idea of a dystopian nightmare future is no longer just my personal hell—I fear I'm not alone in this apocalyptic journey. Welcome to the Hellish Handbasket. To avoid serious injury or death, keep your arms and head inside the basket at all times.

Don't pretend like you know what is coming

We are barreling into a new year. This year, I'd really like to put the brakes on. Can we just freeze time before we get to January 21? Then I could pretend I've been watching a particularly gruesome and disgusting reality show. I would like to change the channel and return to sanity. Where's the BACK button on this thing?

Clearly I'm still in shock. I'm not ashamed to say it, I feel like I've been bludgeoned by stupidity. My own stupidity. All my yammering about empathy and listening, yada yada, and still I'm shocked when unhappy people express their needs in unskillful ways. When will I learn? I'm just as unskillful as the rest of us. I include you, sorry, readers. We are all in this hand-basket together, and you know where we are going.

Guilty, again! I make cynical pronouncements (like that one I just made) as if I know what is coming. I spout nonsense as if I have the inside track on knowledge about the future. It gets me every time. I act like if I just say something enough times, and loudly enough, that by itself will make it true! We're all going to hell in a hand-basket! There I go, wallowing in the wreckage of the future! I'm masquerading as a person who knows what the future holds, when in fact, I have no clue what's coming! Argh. I hate not knowing. (Not to mention the small detail about defining my terms... is there a hell? And what is a hand-basket, anyway? Whatever it is, how will we all fit into it? I have no idea.)

I hate not knowing even more than I hate my fear that good things could actually come from stupid decisions, and then I won't have the perverse pleasure of saying, see, I knew it! I told you so. Sometimes it happens that "bad" outcomes ensue from "good" intentions, and "good" outcomes manifest from "bad" actions. Despite all the stuff written to the contrary, we humans don't have a Magic 8 Ball that allows us to peer into the future, except by using past outcomes as a predictor. And if you have ever lost money in the stock market, you know that past performance is no guarantee of future results.

I get lassoed by my fear of uncertainty into believing I know what is coming. Besides the certainty of death (and taxes), does anyone know what is coming? No. That doesn't stop us from prognosticating about the future as if we have a hotline to fate. As if we are inside the mind of Secret Santa. As if we know what is in our stockings. Let me guess: a toothbrush and a Hershey's chocolate bar. Whoops, that was 45 years ago. (Good news: at least I still have teeth).

We are having a little snow day in Portland. One inch of snow and a half inch of ice and the city shuts down. The electric trains can't run with ice on the wires. The buses can't get up and down the hills. I can't get my car out of the parking lot, and walking on this ice is likely to result in a trip to the ER with a broken hip (I'm not certain, I'm only guessing, based on past experience). So here I am, hunkered down in the Love Shack, waiting for the ice to melt, bored and trying to avoid the tedious task of turning my print book into a Kindle book.

I guess it's good I don't know the future. If I knew that writing this book would be a waste of time I probably wouldn't have spent two years writing it. Even now, I can hold out hope that soon people will find it, buy it, like it, talk about it. Hey, it could happen, right? Nobody knows the future.

Coming soon: A future without facts or truth

I don't know what is real anymore, with all the falsehoods flying around the zeitgeist. Americans can't seem to agree on the facts. Can I trust the calendar posted on the Internet? Is it really almost the end of 2016? Maybe, maybe not. I'm sure if I forced enough fake news on Facebook, I could convince some people that it's still October. Or that we have a new month now, the month of Terrorary. The month of Muck. The month of Run Them Down. We all know who "them" is.

It's not a great time to be anything but rich, white, and male. I want to lament, but what good does that do. It just makes me one of the whiners. And we all know, nobody likes a whiner.

The next four years will be good practice for weathering the apocalyptic effects of the many impending disasters looming on the time horizon (earthquake, solar flare, cyber hack of the electrical grid, sea level rise, volcanic eruption, tsunami). I need to learn to suck it up. It would help to have a tent, camp stove, and sleeping bag, I suppose. And some MREs stashed in a tote bin. What can I say. I'm not ready. I've never been a prepper. I worry a lot, like a prepper, but my fear paralyzes me, so I'm unable to take action. I sit in paralysis like the proverbial frog in hot water, too scared to leap out before I'm parboiled. I won't be a survivor. I can't say I'm too sad about it.

But I'm not ready to go quite yet. I need to survive just long enough to see my mother exit the world stage. I wouldn't abandon her, not by choice. Fear of the future makes me gag sometimes, but we all know what is coming. She's going to die, someday. I don't know how or when, but I know it's coming.

After she's gone, I don't really care much what happens to me. Depending on how much money I have left (if the banks aren't belly-up by then), I'll probably move somewhere where it's warmer, just in case I end up sleeping outdoors. I don't expect to see 80, but who knows.

Maybe when the Chinese-Russian alliance takes over America, we will all finally relax. Let someone else be in charge for a while. The nursinghomes will be full of old white American prisoners of war clamoring for organic gluten-free dinners and internet access, even though we won't remember in five minutes what we've eaten or how to access the future equivalent of Facebook. Torturing us will be useless: What can you learn from people who think they deserve to have whatever they want without paying for it?

You can't reason with Americans. Most of us don't care that our activities for the last 50 years have destroyed a good portion of the planet. Have I stopped driving my fossil-fuel burning Focus? No. We don't learn. Don't bother picking our brain, Russia. There are no state secrets among us except how to get the best deals on Black Friday.

Whole lotta raging goin' on

Each night since the election, Portland's young (mostly white) people have marched in the streets, stopping traffic, blocking bridges, annoying tourists, and generally wreaking havoc as they bemoan the sad fact that democracy failed to meet their demands. Emotions are high after the unexpected election outcome. Before the election, half the population was bursting with rage. After the election, the other half is now bursting with rage. Some of that rage is being expressed as violence.

Violence is a tragic expression of an unmet need. (Credit Marshall Rosenberg with that pithy observation). Unmet needs create some powerful emotions. It's clear the protesters are scared. Fear makes them angry. I get it. Nobody likes to feel scared. We would much rather feel rage than fear. These negative emotions are visible on the surface, but it helps to remember that negative emotions are always driven by unmet needs.

Last week, geographically speaking, a large swath of the country's voters gave the Democrats the finger. Clearly the voters were expressing anger, hope, maybe some payback? What were their unmet needs? I'm going to guess recognition, respect, and consideration. Safety and security, maybe. Control and autonomy.

In the American heartland, they've seen the "browning" of America. They've seen the loss of their ethnic and cultural supremacy. In their grocery store checkout lines, weird people who don't look like them are buying weird things that don't even resemble food. In their children's schools, their kids are getting into fights with kids who don't speak English. On the streets of their neighborhoods, they see "hordes" of women "hiding" behind robes and headscarves as they "take over" the sidewalks. They see change and understandably get scared. Change is scary. Who can blame them if in the privacy of the voting booth, they voted for the person who looked like them?

Some voters may be uneducated, but they aren't stupid. They know their high-paying manufacturing jobs aren't coming back. They voted for the promise, but more than that, they voted as an expression of their rage at being forgotten. They are angry because their needs for respect, recognition, safety, security, control, and autonomy weren't being met. When we aren't skilled at expressing our rage, we get expressions of violence. Smashing windows or voting Trump into the White House are both tragic expressions of unmet needs.

Some of the "winners" heard the promises and bought the dream. Others just wanted to express their rage and frustration at being ignored. Some probably hope that the "good old days" will return (i.e., when white men were in charge, women knew their place, and minorities could be exploited, disenfranchised, or killed). Time is not on their side. Sadly, time is not on anyone's side, considering the ongoing demise of the planet.

Two steps forward, one step backward. I hope for the best, because I have no idea how to prepare for the worst. I am not strong enough to be a survivor, not mentally, physically, or emotionally. I want to see what happens, but I have to accept that no one knows the future. We can predict, but we've seen how good our predictions are. We do pretty good at weather, not so good at election outcomes. It's funny, though—all these emotions were there to be seen. The Democrats didn't identify and address the unmet needs of the forgotten voters in the Midwest and Rust Belt and paid the price.

Here's to creativity at the end of the world

Almost two years ago I started writing a book about helping dissertators get their dissertations approved. Dissertators face many challenges in the process of earning their doctorates. I ought to know. I have blogged extensively about my own sordid and gruesome doctoral journey—in fact, that is how this blog came to be. If you have read my blog, you know I often have a lot to say, and this new book was no different. Within a few months, the chapter about getting the dissertation proposal approved ballooned into a mushy amorphous monster. To keep from losing my mind, I whittled the project down to focusing just on helping dissertators get their proposals approved. And now, almost two years later, I'm pleased to say, I've published that book.

Sorry, I can't report that it was published by one of those snappy academic publishers like SAGE or Taylor & Francis. No, because I'm a DIY kind of gal (control freak), I decided to self-publish through Amazon's Createspace. Wow. Am I glad I lived to see the day when artists, writers, and musicians can send their work out into the world without the interference of those pesky intermediaries (galleries, publishers, record labels). Anyone can publish, and they do! The Internet is clogged with creativity. It's so exciting.

Because I am a Word expert (more or less), I can format the heck out of a document and make it look like something someone might actually want to buy. I hope. And through the magic of the digital on-demand printing revolution, Amazon can print my book for anyone who might want a copy.

I sent away for a proof copy so I could see how it looked and felt, expecting to be disappointed. I opened the cardboard box, feeling a little sick. Inside was a miracle. It's so thick! (Did I write all that?) I paged through to find the screenshots I had inserted to show dissertators how to use Word. Oh joy, the screenshots (low resolution images, red flag!) were perfectly acceptable. The color cover (low resolution, uh oh, look out) was shiny and bright. The book (500+) pages felt hefty and substantial in my hands, definitely something I would have bought back when I was struggling to get my proposal approved. I can only hope others will feel the same.

So, with one project off my plate, it seems appropriate to tackle another seemingly impossible task: NaNoWriMo. That's where people commit to write a 50,000-word novel in one month. Starting exactly five days ago. I'm a little behind. So far I've got 600 words.

I committed to it to support my good friend Bravadita, who has a lot to write about it, if only she would start. I wasn't sure how far I would get, to tell you the truth. I'm expecting an editing job tomorrow with a short turnaround, not much time to do anything else but eat, sleep, and watch TV.

I told my sister about my writing commitment, and she brilliantly suggested I take portions of this blog and write a book about our mother. Is that not brilliant!? I think it is. Thanks, Sis.

Last night I downloaded all the content I've written for the past two years. In Microsoft Word, I can search on keywords, so I highlighted all the instances of Mom, mother, and maternal. Next, I'll cull through the posts and see if I can make some sense, maybe glean some structure. I'll put on my editing hat and look for the bones. Maybe I'll actually be able to finish a first draft by November 30. Maybe not, but at least I can say I tried.

It feels a little odd to be focusing on my creative endeavors when democracy could be on the verge of falling apart. People are apparently prepping for the end of the world. Whether it's a bizarro nutjob in power or an earthquake on the Cascadia Subduction Zone, I have resigned myself to be one of the casualties. I just don't have the energy or gumption to go out and prep for disaster. Prepping would mean, what, buying a tent, a sleeping bag, a propane stove? A year's supply of ready-to-eat meals that are full of chemicals, sugar, fat, and salt? Is survival really so important that I would eat garbanzo beans straight out of a can?

I suppose I'd eat just about anything if I got hungry enough. That's one of the perks of living white pseudo-middle class in America—At least until my savings run out, I can pretend I have nothing but luxury problems. My fridge is full of fresh food, because I try hard to eat healthy. When all that fresh food is gone, though, my cupboards are bare. If the earthquake (or the coup) happen to occur on the day before I go shopping, well, I guess I'll be eating squirrels. Lucky for me, they are used to eating at my bird feeder so they might be easy to catch. Some of them look very plump and juicy. And there's a big gray rat out back, too, if I get really desperate. But he might be harder to catch ... he's a loner, like me.

The chronic malcontent comes clean

Tonight, I'm listening to old Monkee songs, feeling old, decrepit, and irrelevant (pirouette down palsied paths with pennies for the vendor ... really? Sounds like something my nine-year-old self wrote in secret journals.) I admit, silly as they are, the old songs are comforting to me. I turned 60 this week. I knew I was old, but now it's official. I just don't understand how on the inside I feel like I'm still twelve.

I guess there's a presidential election going on? What's that all about. I feel like I'm living in some weird parallel universe, where up is down, and mean is nice ... all I can say is, I hope my missing socks are around here somewhere. All these weird looking-glass people have some 'splainin' to do. I'd complain, but I'm afraid to open my mouth and let people know I'm a bleeding heart liberal, for fear I'll be run over by a gun-slinging, mud-throwing, SUV-driving maniac. Oh, hey, no offense to SUV drivers, jeez, what am I thinking. It's so hard to figure out what to say and what not to say these days, and I'm sure I'm not the only one who feels that way.

I'm glad I'm not a politician in today's political minefield. Imagine trying to thread the needles that seem to keep popping up out of the haystack of complaints, hacks, innuendos, and lies. I'm glad I'm not a politician, but in a weird way, I confess I'm glad I lived to see this circus, just to say I did. Kind of like experiencing other 100-year events like the Columbus Day storm and the Northridge earthquake. I can say with some awe, I was there.

I voted, just so you know. I always vote. It's so easy to vote by mail in Oregon, there's really no excuse for not voting. The voter's guide appears in my mailbox, and a few days, my ballot follows. I fill it out enthusiastically with a bold black ballpoint pen, because there are no wrong answers on this test, there are just my answers. I love vote-by-mail, but even if I had to stand in line at a polling place and wait my turn to punch dinky holes in a piece of paper with a stylus, I would still do it. It's all part of my American experience.

Now I'm listening to old Bowie songs from Heathen (2002). Funny, I'm starting to feel more grown-up and sophisticated. Hmmm.

I don't discuss politics with many people. I carefully tiptoe around the topic until I'm pretty sure we are on the same page. I don't want to make anyone feel bad. But if I'm feeling particularly frisky, I might say something like, yeah, I can't wait until we have truly open borders, one global nation! Come on down, all you tired and poor! and then cackle as my lunch partner's eyes bug out of her head. I don't get invited out much.

I don't understand why people dislike Secretary Clinton. Maybe they really like her but are too shy to admit it. Maybe they just say they dislike her because that seems to be the popular position, the way a horde of third-graders coalesce in a mob to bully the hapless nerd of the day. I don't care what they say, I like HRC. All that lack of transparency, all that sneakiness, in a man would be considered an asset. Am I right? If she were a man, they would call it strategic thinking. Talk about threading an impossible needle. Well, I am pretty sure that Mrs. Clinton will put her strategic skills to good use on behalf of the nation. She may not always explain what she's doing, but that's okay with me ... sort of like when my mother didn't always explain to us kids why she was so pissed off all the time, but I had no doubt that behind the scenes, some serious stuff was going on that the grownups were handling. Go back to bed, scram!

Speaking of my mother, she's still slowly circling the drain in la la land, muddling through from day to day, propped up by cigarettes, TV dinners, and frozen cherry pie. I know this because I'm the one who fetches and carries. Every few days, I buy an odd assortment of groceries. One banana, a round of red jello, two cartons of vanilla flavored rice milk, a bagful of generic cheerios, two mushrooms, four chocolate muffins, and a carton of the cheapest cigarettes on the market. I am looking forward to the day I turn 85; mark my words, on that day, I'm throwing out the food plan. I don't care if it cuts five years off my life span, I don't care if I get fat as a brick house. I'm going to plunge my face into a gallon of ice cream and slurp until I put myself into a coma.

Meanwhile, to all twelve of you die-hard fans, thanks for sticking by me, even though I hardly blog anymore. I'm hanging on by a thin thread (but aren't we all, really). The good news (I hope it's good news): I finally finished my first book. Next week I'll be entering the brave new world of print-on-demand (can we say vanity press?). I won't disclose the particulars because you probably aren't in my target market, but I hope you'll cross your fingers once or twice on my behalf. Maybe that ship that has been hanging offshore for 60 years will finally mosey up to the dock.

How to wash your mom's mini-blinds

A few weeks ago, Mom told me she wanted her mini-blinds cleaned. In her 3-bedroom condo, she has three medium-sized blinds (like 4 to 5 feet wide), four dinky blinds about a foot and a half wide, and one monster blind about 7 feet wide on the living room window. I called around and found out to have someone fetch, clean, and deliver would cost $3.50 a foot plus a $60 delivery charge. If I took them down and brought them to the blind place myself, the cost would be $2.50 a foot. I thought, maybe I can clean the blinds myself. How hard can it be to clean mini-blinds?

I had a one-day window: no papers to edit and good weather. I assembled my gear: pretty much the same stuff I would use to wash my car, were I so inclined, which I'm not. Bucket, ragmop glove thingie, and an old piece of chamois to soak up the water. I used a cleaning solution consisting of a dollop of rubbing alcohol, a dollop of ammonia, a bit of dish soap, mixed into water. The only other tool I needed was a hose with a sprayer device on the end. I was set.

Mom abandoned her cereal bowl to watch.

I started with two small blinds to see if this was actually something I could do. The condo has two narrow windows on either side of the fireplace. I chose the blind on the left, figuring I'd work my way from left to right. On a previous visit, I had figured out how to release the blinds from the wall: lift the metal tabs at each end that hold the blind in place. I pulled the strings to shorten the blind as much as possible, pulled the blind out of the sockets, and carried it outside to the patio. I awkwardly used my right hand to let the cord loose to stretch the blind to its full length. Then I turned the stick gizmo to get the slats to lay down flat and spread the blind on the patio, trying not to step on it.

“Go finish your breakfast,” I told Mom, who was hovering in the doorway. I could tell I was a huge disruption in her routine. She disappeared.

Next, I sprayed the blind with the hose. So far, so good. I soaked my ragmop mitt with soapy water and rubbed the slats. When I finished mopping the blind, I sprayed it down with the hose. I was getting pretty wet by this point, but the sunshine was warm and bright. I tucked my baggy plaid pants into my socks to keep them from dragging on the wet patio and turned the blind over. I soaped up the other side, sprayed it down. I lifted the blind in my left hand and sprayed it down with my right. Then I stood there wondering what to do next.

My mother's patio is enclosed in a six-foot tall wooden fence. I thought, hey, maybe I can hang the blinds on the top of the fence. That actually worked, sort of. I balanced the top of the blind precariously on the top rail of the fence and attempted to squeegee the excess water off with the chamois. That worked not at all, so I left the blind to air dry, hanging atop the fence. I started in on the next blind. When two blinds were hanging drying in the sun, I went inside and washed the windows.

When I went inside, my mother was nowhere to be seen. I went along the hall, thinking I'd better get the blind out of the bedroom before she took her afternoon nap. I found her in her little office, playing Castle Camelot.

“I want to get the blind out of your bedroom,” I said. She continued to stare intently at the screen, which was making bleeping blooping noises as she clicked on cards. The soldiers on the castle wall raised their swords and shouted, Hey! I could tell she hadn't heard me. I repeated myself, a bit more loudly. She jerked up out of her chair in surprise, as if she had forgotten I was in her house.

I got the bedroom blind down and went back outside to continue with the narrow blinds. Pretty soon, the first set of two seemed marginally dry, at least, they were no longer dripping, so I brought them into the living room and hung them back up. Not bad.

I headed down the hall to her office. It was empty and her bedroom door was closed. Naptime. I brought the 4-foot blinds from the office and the spare bedroom out to the patio. They were heavier, harder to manage, harder to avoid stepping on. The office blind was filthy with 10 years of cigarette smoke, permanently stained yellow. Some of it came off, not all, leaving the slats tinted a pale grimy yellow.

Finally, I was ready to do the living room blind. I should have gone for the step ladder, but I thought, hey, her couch is right here, surely I can use that to reach the ends of the blinds? I stepped onto a cushion and almost fell over the end onto a side table. The cushions were so soft my foot went all the way down to the frame of the couch. I had to stand on the hard back of her 1980s flowered sofa to reach the two ends of the blind, leaning against the window for support. Seven feet of aluminum blind is heavy and awkward. What could possibly go wrong?

Luckily, I succeeded in getting the monster blind down and out the back door without breaking anything. The huge blind took up most of the patio. I sprayed it with the hose and scrubbed it down as best I could, hoping that there wouldn't be knee marks to show where I knelt on the blind to reach all the parts.

I won't bore you with the details of how long it took me to re-hang that 7-foot blind or how I almost fell through the plate glass window I had just finished cleaning. I eventually triumphed, I didn't fall and cut myself into shreds, and now my mother's blinds are as clean as they will likely ever be, and her windows are spotless (on the inside, at least). I accomplished my task.

I cleaned everything up and left her napping.

A few days later she said, “We should get your brother to take down that living room blind and clean it.” She didn't realize I'd managed to clean that big blind. When I modestly claimed victory, she was suitably impressed. My reward was a little bit of cash (“for gas money”) and a grocery list for things to buy at Winco. There you go. The reward for doing service is the opportunity to do more service.

I'm trying to enjoy these days, because I know they are limited. I think I will look back on this time as the golden months (hopefully maybe years) when my mother was still mostly managing to live her own life, her own way, with a little help from her kids and friends. I'd want the same for me, when my turn comes. Wouldn't you?

Put a frame on it and call it art

In honor of the end of summer, I took an extra long walk tonight, hiking around the north and south reservoirs four times. That equals 2.24 miles, but who is counting. As I walked along, I felt my left cheek twitching. My face cheek that is, although other cheeks have been known to twitch from time to time. My left cheek has been twitching for a month or two now. I'm pretty sure it's a sign of stress, but then I didn't need an extra sign to know I'm ready to spontaneously combust.


The sun was descending over the west hills as I strode along the path, being passed by old men on bikes, old ladies walking, and mothers walking with little kids. A snappy breeze gave my baseball cap a bit of a lift. I noticed the paddling of eight ducks had moved from Mt. Tabor Park's south reservoir to the north reservoir, not sure why. Uptown water, I guess. These are your historic reservoirs! No longer Portland's drinking water, thanks to the EPA.

I brought my digital camera with me tonight. It's an old dinosaur of a silver box, sluggish shutter, feeble focus... it seems to prefer three dimensional objects. Old posts, rocks, sewer gratings. Those are the photos that look the most interesting when I get them downloaded to my computer. The images of faraway downtown Portland are hazy, gray, and flat. I don't know much about photography, but I'm pretty sure if I had a better camera, I could take really good pictures.

It doesn't matter, though. Because I know the secret to making art. Whatever you have—photo, crayon drawing, pen-and-ink sketch, finger painting—whatever it is, all you have to do is put a frame around it. Whatever it is, if you are wondering if it could possibly be art, but you aren't quite sure, I tell you, just frame it! Framing any two-dimensional object automatically elevates it to the status of art. Take it from me. I used to be an artist. I know what I'm talking about.

Hey, ask anybody, if you don't want to take my word for it. I know, you don't even know me. Talk to one of your artistic friends, I'm sure you have a few lurking in nearby lofts and basements. If you can get them to take a break from making art, show them two pictures, one framed and one unframed. Ask them to point to the one that is art. I'm sure they will pick the one in the frame every time.

The nice thing is, it doesn't even have to be a fancy frame. Any crappy frame will do, even one that your niece made out of cardboard and dry macaroni. Even a frame of seashells. Hey, I once made a frame of red hot tamale candies! I kid you not. I glued the hot tamales on a box frame, painted them glorious jewel colors, and sprayed the thing with clear lacquer. What a shining thing of beauty. I actually forget what was surrounded by this wondrous frame, but it was art, let me assure you. The frame hung on my wall near the ceiling for years. I would show you a picture of the frame but last year the ants found the red tamales and started hauling bits of candy into the molding around the ceiling. That was the end of that frame. The ant trail remains, embedded in the off-white paint. If I could figure out how to put a frame on that ant trail, I bet I could call it art.

The world seems to be going to hell in a hand-basket, as usual. Maybe we are falling toward hell a little faster these days, it's hard to tell. It might just be the stinky election season making me feel like life is spinning out of control faster than usual. Probably not. It's hard to have perspective sometimes. I try to imagine what the 2010s would look like from the 1940s and I think, well, probably it's about the same in some ways, better in others. Don't let me complain about never winning anything! I breathe a sigh of relief every day when I realize I won the white American lottery.

Up close, my mother continues to disintegrate in slow motion, one molecule, one day at a time. I haven't quite figured out yet that I can't stop it, hence the cheek twitch and the persistent vertigo. I'm taking time out from editing a boring dissertation to write this blog post. From 30,000 meters up, it's all good, right? And then we die. From an altitude of 30 centimeters, it's an endless grind of pushing pebbles up a tiny hill. I'm trying to put a frame on my experience, thinking I can elevate the status of my life to art. Is it working? Hmmm. I don't think so. Wait, let me get out my glue and pasta shells! Where's my glitter?