At the end of the world, might as well be nice

In spite of the general and specific terrors of living with other humans, for some reason, I have been enjoying my interactions with people. I think it has something to do with the what-the-heck feeling I've been having at the prospect of my life imploding. I can afford to be magnimous. After all it might be my last chance to live my mantra, which last time I checked was to be loving and kind to others. Opportunities to practice abound.

Last week I bought a slab of foam rubber for my car camping bed. It took about an hour on three freeways to find the foam rubber place way out on the west side of Phoenix. Blogbots, we aren't in Scottsdale anymore! I always feel more at home when there is a pawn shop on every corner. My poor white trash roots showing, probably. Anyway, I pulled into the wayback parking lot of a big square concrete building and went in the tiny door next to the big garage door. It was clear by the looks on the faces of the workers that they didn't see many customers like me. Nevertheless the young woman behind the glass pane spoke enough English to understand my request for the firmest foam they had. She showed me a foot-square sample of 4 inch foam, almost hard as a rock. 

"That's the stuff," I said. 

She figured out the price for the size that will fit my bed platform. I was thrilled. It was a fraction of what I would have spent ordering online. Plus, I got to see the inside of a foam factory while I waited for them to cut my little piece of foam. I stood at the edge of the waiting area (no customers allowed past this line) and perused the big open space with the same delight I might have eyeballed a lovely waterfall or the cliff dwellings of Montezuma Castle.

Foam was stacked to the ceiling in places. A couple of really young women in tight jeans wrapped huge sofa cushions in plastic and stacked them in a pile near the loading door. Two men were running slabs of foam through a giant metal contraption. One of those slabs probably turned into my mattress, but it was too far across the factory for me to see. 

After about ten minutes, a short Latino man approached carrying what was obviously my specially cut mattress. 

"You want wrap plastic?" he said. I could tell he was hoping I would say no, and I did. No plastic for me, I like my slab of foam commando. I thanked him, grinning like an idiot. He probably thought I was mental. I took my new mattress out into the sunshine and loaded into the back of my car on top of the scrap wood I have to return to my storage unit this week. The van configuration is almost complete. 

So now I have two foam mattresses, one firm and dense, the other twenty year old mush that never was particularly firm, even when it was the new cushion for my home-built couch at the Love Shack in Portland. It's lost its mojo, after twenty years, if it ever had any. I'm sitting on it right now, actually. It's not an ideal typing situation, according to my arthritic hip, but it's not terrible to sleep on, even though I've violated it with my bread knife a few times, carving it in stages into something that could travel with me to Tucson. 

More interactions. Today I was at the store picking up a prescription for one of the drugs that makes it possible for my heart to refrain from murdering me. I smiled at the pharmacist and got a mildly pleasant response. I let shoppers with their carts go ahead of me and got smiles in return. I smiled at the cashier at the self-service register and she gave me a wide, gap-toothed grin and told me to have a nice day. 

I got in my car, ignoring the check engine light (my nemesis reappeared yesterday on my drive from Phoenix to Tucson). As I was maneuvering toward the exit, I saw a little car with a flat tire. An elderly woman was at the wheel. I pulled around and rolled my window down. 

"I have a flat tire!" she said.

"I see that!" I said. "Do you have someone coming to help you?" I tried to imagine me parking my car and attempting to help her change a flat tire. Right. I've changed, what, like one flat tire in my life? That was not recently, as you can imagine. 

"I'm calling Triple A," she nodded, letting me off the hook. "I have a car full of frozen food!"

"Oh, no!" I commiserated, adding some appropriate hand gestures to express my sorrow at her plight. 

We smiled at each other. I wished her luck. I pulled my car around in a circle and headed out of the parking lot, feeling like I'd connected with another human, even though I was completely useless as a potential solution to her problem. I offered her empathy rather than actual help, but sometimes just knowing someone cares enough to check and express compassion can be enough to help us show up with courage. She was in no danger. I just hope Triple A didn't keep her waiting too long.

What if I approached all my interactions with a caring heart? Good Samaritans don't always survive their altruism, sadly. But what is the point of living if we are always circling the wagons to keep ourselves safe? Total safety is an illusion. 

Not quite brain dead

The neurologist was everything I'd expected but not quite what I had hoped for. I knew I was setting myself up for disappointment. How could I not? I've been waiting since October for this appointment. It's no big surprise I built up some expectations during these long months of wondering if this person would (a) diagnose my vestibular malady accurately, (b) have a remedy, and (c) give it to me without lollygagging. 

I showed up with my stack of paperwork, hoping I'd followed all the directions properly: no food for at least four hours prior to the appointment, no coffee, no opioids. Ha. I paid my copays, stomach growling, and waited until I was called. 

Before I was allowed into the neurologist's inner sanctum, I had to endure an hour of vestibular tests similar to the ones I had at the October ENT visits but more violent. A perky young woman with long flat blonde hair briskly outfitted me with heavy goggles that were supposed to measure my eye movements. I sat on the edge of the exam table and held on as she grabbed my head in both hands and proceeded to jerk my head up and down, side to side, hard and fast. 

The purpose of this uncomfortable test (which cost me $100 because insurance doesn't cover it) was to see how much my eyes jiggled around as she upset the crystals in my ear canals. After a while, I felt like my neck was snapping, but I didn't come close to barfing. They keep trying, but I've been living on a boat (in my head) for years. I don't get seasick anymore. Plus, my stomach was empty. 

After a long tedious session, she freed me from the goggles. As I tried to regain eyelid function, she looked at the computer monitor showing a close-up of my half-open eyes, caught in a moment of misery, and said, "I saw a few small anomalies."

I waited for her to elaborate. She did not. She sent me back to wait in the hall for the main event, my session with the neurologist. At last I was ushered into a messy office dominated by a big wooden L-shaped desk. I sat in one of the two visitor chairs. She asked me to describe my experience, and when I did, she interrupted every few words with staccato questions. "What does that mean? When did that start? Can you be more precise?"

I tried my best. At one point, I felt myself choking up. Finally, someone was listening to me! I mean, someone who wasn't one of my long-suffering friends. I said, "I told myself I would not cry."

She said, "Go ahead and cry. People often do. Do you have a recent audiology test?"

"You have all my records," I said. "They were scanned a few weeks ago."

She glanced at the stack of paper on her desk. "I never look at them."

I opened the envelope of originals I had brought with me, thinking I bought a cheap Walmart printer just to print out all these records for you, can I kill you now? Lucky for her, my hands were busy searching through the stack of paper. It took a while, possibly because I was having caffeine withdrawals, but I finally located the two hearing tests and handed them over. 

"I'll have my assistant make copies of these," she said. "Follow me."

She had me walk up and down a narrow hallway in various postures: one foot in front of the other, like I was being tested for a DUI. Same thing, eyes closed. Stand on one foot, then the other, then again, with eyes closed. Sometimes I fell to the right, sometimes to the left. Each time, I caught myself against the wall, feeling like a clumsy idiot and wondering if I was passing or failing. 

"Let's go into the exam room."

I followed her tall chunky figure, grudgingly admiring her colorful swirly dress. I don't remember her footwear but I am sure she wore flats. She moved way too quickly and quietly to be wearing heels. Her movements indicated she'd seen a long procession of patients before me. Like, years and years of patients, all no doubt weeping and barfing as they fumbled through her tests. Not a motion was wasted. 

She sat me on the exam table. Then, oh no. More goggles! More head grabbing and jerking and shaking, plus lots of other tests involving eye tracking. And some of the basics. Moving fast, she tested my reflexes, looked in my ears, and listened to my heart. I saw her do a double-take. "Do you know you have an irregular heartbeat?"

I explained what I could about my wimpy case of aortic stenosis.

"I'm going to call your cardiologist. Okay? Now for the hyperventilation test," she said. "Breathe in and out of your mouth, fast, for forty seconds." My neck was starting to wilt with the weight of the goggles, but I held onto the table and gamely started panting like an old dog on a hot day. Pretty soon I was feeling lighter than air, but I kept at it, thinking if I pass out, let's see if she will catch me before I crack my head on the edge of the table. If I survive, I might get rich. "Don't worry, I'm watching the clock," she said at one point. I didn't believe her. My throat started feeling raw. I coughed but kept panting. A memory surfaced of hyperventilating with friends. How old was I? Old enough to know better. 

Finally, she stopped me, took off the goggles, and pointed to the computer monitor. "Your eyes are steady as a rock. You don't have vestibular paroxysmia."

"Really."

"I think you have BPPV in a hard-to-treat ear canal, which is why the Epley never worked well for you. And I think you have vestibular migraines. I want you to get some bloodwork. We have a lab here, if that is convenient."

I could hardly feel my feet as I staggered to the wing that held the lab. My brain was sizzling. I put my name on the sign-up list outside the door, and then saw the sign: out to lunch, back at 1:30. I looked at my phone. Barely past 12:30. Argh. I stood there debating. All I wanted was coffee and food, but who wants to go through all that fasting again? I decided to wait. It was only an hour. Surely I'd reached my misery quota for the day. I found a chair in the mostly empty waiting room outside the lab and the pain management clinic, spread out my stuff, and proceeded to feel sorry for myself.

Eventually the phlebotemist returned. She poked me in a vein and drew many vials of blood. I lost count after eight. I was feeling pretty crappy at that point. Now I get why they have those adult-sized high chairs with the padded bar across the front. Just as I was thinking, bye bye, she yanked out the needle, gave me some water, and sent me on my way.

So there you have it. Apparently the tests do not lie, even when the diagnoses don't match my list of symptoms (although some studies have suggested about 60% of the hyperventilation tests are wrong). Of course, it is possible I have more than one illness. I'm willing to consider the BPPV diagnosis. I think the vestibular migraine diagnosis is misguided. I still think I have a case of vestibular paroxysmia. My symptoms fit, and the MRA shows that it is possible. 

Meanwhile, I have a referral to a vestibular physical therapist and yet another migraine diet handout. 

I'm going to try, I'm really going to try. I'll go to the PT. I'll let them twirl and bend me. I'll do the eye exercises. I'll eat twigs but no more nuts. No raisins, no citrus, no onions, no tomatoes. And in a few months, if I don't feel better, I will go back and beg for one of the drugs I saw on her list of medications, several of which were antiseizure medications often prescribed for vestibular paroxysmia. We'll see who wins in the end.

Surreality on the fourteenth floor

What was I saying last week about suffering being optional? Oh, brother. I stand corrected. Suffering is mandatory. It's the human condition. If it's not an atmospheric firehose, it's a check engine light. If it's not prunes for breakfast because cheese has ripped you a new one, it's dementia welcoming you to hell. Check your expectations at the door, get in, fasten your seatbelt, and keep your head and arms inside the ride at all times, if you can.

I whined about cold dark nights in the desert, but you don't know cold and dark until you've seen your college friend and former business partner being eaten alive by the worst form of dementia labeled by modern medicine. How come we can get stains out of clothes with a spritz from a spray bottle but we can't clean out the crap that infiltrates our neurons and causes us to lose our personhood? It's unfair, wah wah, but then again, what's unfair for the human is a triumphant heyday for the virus or bacteria or whatever the hell it is eating up my friend's brain in great big noisy gulps. 

Last week was one of the most surreal experiences I can remember. My friend's husband paid for me to stay in a guest room at the memory care facility. In some ways the guest room resembled a posh hotel room: a bathroom bigger than my studio apartment, with a huge shower; a fully functional kitchenette with a two-burner stove, dishes, and a full-size refrigerator for my full-size pizza; a queen size bed in front of a king-size flat screen TV; and a sitting room with a loveseat and a round wooden table with two chairs. The only things I lacked were a hook for my bathrobe and functional WiFi. Did I mention it was on the fourteenth floor? It was on the fourteenth floor. The floor-to-ceiling windows looked out over Westwood Village, and in the far distance, yes, I had a view of the Pacific Ocean, glittering in the sun. 

After each visit with my friend, I retreated to this sanctuary to cry, to moan, to berate God for turning my friend into someone I didn't know, and to beg God for mercy, that if this disease should infiltrate my brain that I be given the grace to accept it and the means to locate some fentanyl, stat. 

I've been back in Tucson for two days, and I'm still gobsmacked by the horror of what happens when we lose our capacity to think. 

There were some macabre moments of levity. She managed to tie her shoelaces to each other. Fortunately I fixed it before she stood up. On her birthday, she put a red plaid flannel shirt on inside out, so the chest pockets hung like flacid bags. It looked great on her rail-thin figure—I predict we'll all be wearing our flannel shirts inside out soon. My teariest chuckles came when her old-fashioned red bat phone rang and she answered the TV remote. The TV came on, and the phone kept ringing. 

Another time she tried to answer a flat long paintbox set. In her defense, it did resemble a really big cell phone. The phone kept ringing, so I picked up the telephone receiver and held it out to her. She started mumbling into it. I tried to take the paintbox out of her other hand, but she pulled it away and stood there with a "phone" at each ear, muttering word salad. My brilliant funny friend.

My friend is still in there somewhere—I can see it in the art she makes—but her personality has shattered. She knows something is very wrong, and she's frustrated and scared. She has a minder every morning until her husband comes to do the afternoon-evening shift. She often locks the minder out of her room, paranoid to the point of tears, complaining nobody there likes her. Almost every morning, she packs a bag, determined to escape the prison. In fact, she got out a couple times. The airtag in her purse led to her rescue. She keeps trying. The first day I was there, she'd packed all her shoes into a big yellow bag, along with a couple mismatched socks, two cashmere scarves, and a toothbrush. Whatever it takes. 

Maybe it's some weird kind of blessing that the slow-motion car crash my friend is experiencing is taking so long. The pace of the disease gives us time to accept it, to say goodbye slowly, to grieve in smaller doses that aren't as painful or shocking as they would be if she'd died in an actual car crash. If I had cancer, I would want time to say goodbye. The problem is, her body lives on while her brain is dying. She could live on for several more years before her brain forgets how to tell her throat to swallow. Is it better to be aware or unaware that you are disintegrating? 

This week I got the news that another friend, an older man I served on a nonprofit board with, has decided to have his doctor remove the medical device that keeps his heart going. He's chosen the day and time. Day after tomorrow, 10:00 a.m. ET. He's said his goodbyes. A few hours after they unplug him, he will die. He's running to meet death. How badass is that? The medical system is geared to help us survive at all costs. We compassionately euthanize our pets but we pull out all the stops to keep the hopelessly ill people alive a few months longer, even if they aren't considered "terminally" ill. It's so uncivilized to usher our decrepits off the mortal coil "before their time." 

It's all just random, a slurry of genes, lifestyle, income, and social connections that determine our lifespan. Unless we opt out. Ha. Take that, fate, God, or whatever the hell you are.

As the week went on, stopped trying to understand. I learned to respond to my demented friend with compassion and encouragement, even though I had no idea most of the time what she was saying. I looked for the nuggets of joy. She lit up at the sight of her birthday cake, and for a few moments, I caught a glimpse of the person I used to know. 

I was grateful she knew me. I hated to leave, and yet I could not leave fast enough. On the morning I checked out, I kissed her cheek, told her I could not take her with me (she had packed all her socks), and got someone to let me out the lockdown door into the elevator lobby. I took my broken, raging heart down to the parking structure, got into my musty car, and drove out of that tomb into the California sunshine. Will I see my friend again? Maybe in another year she won't know me. 

That's a problem for another day. 

Today, I live.

Suffering is optional, and your misery can be refunded

The Chronic Malcontent here, coming to you from open desert somewhere between Parker, AZ, and Lake Havasu City. I’m parked on a swath of BLM land that looks a lot like a Marscape. Just over the rocky hill to the west is the famous Lake Havasu, invisible to me because I don’t own lakefront property, a boat, or a willingness to pay for a sardine spot in a campground along the water. I’m cool with it. Seen one lake, yada yada.

Last night I found a spot on BLM land along highway 62 about six miles outside of Parker, just over the California border. More Marscape. I was going to stay two nights, but my power station was running low. Solar generation was out of the question, given the rain pelting the region, so the only way to charge the thing up was to drive. Hence, new location.

I was in a store in Parker and got to talking with a gentleman from Michigan. I could tell he was from colder climes because of his sporty cargo shorts and sockless sandals. It’s not cold here (even by most standards), but by Arizona winter standards, the temperature is just a little below normal. I feel it. My blood is Arizona thin after several seasons. I bundle up, as usual, with hat and fingerless gloves.I’m on my way to Los Angeles tomorrow to see my demented friend. I am not looking forward to being back in L.A. I was just there last April. I seem to remember swearing I would never return. Kind of ironic, given I lived there for twenty years. I suppose the city has changed a lot, although it’s still sprawling and chaotic; more to the point, I have changed. Driving in cities is hard and unpleasant. I have come to appreciate the long vistas and time to think that come with driving on the open road.

The American West has a lot of open space, which is why vehicular nomads tend to gravitate toward this part of the country. In the winter, most flock to southern Arizona to enjoy mild weather. Case in point, the dude from Michigan. He comes down here every winter with his wife and stays in various places. I got the feeling he meant nice hotels and golf resorts, because they weren’t driving a motorhome, just a little van conversion with a bed in the back for her to sack out during trips. Reminds me of my parents. They did something similar, poor-man style. Mom slept while Dad drove. I’m guessing this is in large part how their marriage survived so many years.

What have I learned on my roadtrip so far? Nights are long and dark. Mornings are cold. I need more lights. I need less stuff. The challenges are the basic conundrums of finding new routines in a new environment. Tip: everything needs to have a place, and when you are done with a thing, put it back in its place, otherwise you will not find it for days.

My brain keeps slipping gears as it tries to parse this new reality. I’m searching for meaning where there is none. I’m here, that’s all. It doesn’t have to mean I’m a colossal loser, a moral failure. People who haven’t lived a nomadic lifestyle get judgy, as if being on a continuous roadtrip is a sign of mental instability. I admit, I get mired in self-recrimination at times. This isn’t what I expected, that’s for sure, but to see it as a failure rather than an adventure is just a rut borne out of my upbringing, family concerns, and societal opinions.

I don’t believe I create my reality. Everything is outside my control. However, I do believe I can choose how I want to perceive reality, and in that sense, my choices create my experience. It’s challenging to avoid the drag of outside opinions. Everyone thinks they know what is right, for me, for them, for the world. Good, bad, who is qualified to judge my perception of my reality except me?

Meanwhile, the work of writing continues. What else is there? I’ve decided to rebrand myself as Carol B, Roadwriter. Creativity lives on, as long as there is life and breath.

Wandering but not quite lost

I’m writing to you from Bureau of Land Management (BLM) desert land outside of Quartzsite, Arizona. BLM land out here occupies many square miles. You can drive forever on dirt roads, although the further you go, the more you need four-wheel drive. My city minivan would not survive most of those roads. Being a sedate older person not looking to drive off a cliff, I keep to the flats not far out of town.

I am parked about a half mile from the freeway, near a shallow wash and a copse of scrubby trees, about one hundred yards from a herd of half-million dollar Prevosts towing toy haulers. Earlier they were racing their toys around the desert landscape. Now the happy campers seem to be setting off fireworks. I don’t know why people bring their entire house with them to go camping. On the other hand, nights in the desert are dark, cold, and endless. I suppose it helps to have heat, cold beer, and a big screen TV.

Yes, it’s a bit chilly in my car at night, but I’m not complaining. I hear Portland is 16°F, with snow, freezing rain, and high winds. Other parts of the country are suffering extreme winter weather as well. If that is your situation, I’m sorry. Especially if you are living in your car.

Speaking of living in a car, I am not living in my car. Yet. I’m on my second official roadtrip, on my way to Los Angeles by way of Quartzsite, AZ. I have found my tribe here in Quartzsite, but in true apanthropist fashion, I don’t want to have anything to do with them. I got my name badge at the RTR, saw the interiors of Sprinters, cargo vans, and minivans designed by some proud nomads, and listened to a woman in a long gauzy skirt make noise, oh excuse me, soothing healing sounds, by pounding on some large bronze shields with a fluffy mallet. I left as soon as I could.

I did not grown up in a camping family, so camping is a mystery to me. My mother camped with her parents and brother. Then she married a non-camping enthusiast and had four kids. It’s not that my father lacked an adventuresome spirit. He had a boat for a while, a 24-foot Thompson with a throbbing stern drive. He took me out on the Columbia River Slough once. We broke down. A nice lady in a little motorboat towed us back to the dock. Then on the next outing, he hit a half-submerged log and busted the sterndrive. Soon after, he sold the boat. He never talked about it, but I am guessing he was sad the dream ended the way it did.

I never wanted a boat. Neither have I had a hankering to camp. I like to hike, but not if I have to dodge snakes or climb over boulders. I was born and raised a city kid, which is why being out here in the open desert freaks me out. The quality of darkness outside my covered windows is more than I can bear to think about. When the wind scoots under the car, I feel a momentary change in my heart rate. Every little rustle could be a packrat eating my wires. A couple nights ago a storm blew through and carried my tarp and welcome mat into my neighbor’s campground. Anita from Missouri. She parked way too close to me, so I befriended her in self-defense. Widow, two kids, long-time camping enthusiast. I vacated to a more peaceful location the next day, which is where I am now.

I can see why people buy bigger and bigger vehicles. This minivan is a very small space, crammed with way too much stuff. If I were inclined to claustrophobia, I would never be able to do this. However, I’m fine with MRI machines and small minivans. I will probably wake up in my coffin and go ho hum. Not really. I hope to donate my body to science and avoid the entire coffin thing.

I feel somewhat like a pioneer might have felt. Did I bring enough food? Can my oxen pull this wagon? Will my solar panel charge up my Jackery or will clouds get in the way? Where can I dump my trash when the transfer station is only open three days a week? Will I have enough cell signal to get phone service, and how close am I to running out of my monthly quota of data? You know. Pioneer problems.

Why do some people glorify this lifestyle? It’s homelessness. You should have seen the interiors of some of those rigs. They looked like garbage dumps, festooned with fake ivy garlands, carpeted with Persian rugs and fake vinyl plank flooring, and reeking of incense, cooked onions, and poop.

After seeing all that stuff, I am more determined than ever to continue my commitment to downsize. I sense I am headed off a cliff of minimalism. It’s been a gradual slope at first, but the incline is getting steeper as I am coming to accept that I cannot maintain a life full of stuff. I feel a mild panic attack lurking just out of reach. Time to pee in my bucket, turn on my heating pad, and hit the foam rubber. Happy trails.

I feel a road trip coming on

The end of a year inspires me to look past the daily grind of living to the broader panorama of my life. Maybe you could say I'm looking under the hood to see if my engine needs an overhaul. It's barely eight o'clock in the evening here in Tucson, and already I hear fireworks in the distance. Sometimes people like to set off rockets in the wash behind the trailer. If we're really lucky somebody will set something on fire (preferably not this trailer), and the sirens will inspire a coyote chorus. Nothing says you live in the stupid cold desert like hearing a bunch of howling coyotes. 

The drawing you see here is from 1997, when I was in freefall between Los Angeles and Portland. I was trying to look on the bright side. What did I know about being homeless? Clearly nothing, judging by the insipid enthusiasm on my face (yes, that is a self-portrait, and yes, I used to have hair in those days). I was just as prone to magical thinking then as I am now, but my yearnings these days are tempered by cynicism borne of aging. It's hard to conjure much enthusiasm for adventure (or fireworks) when one is worn out from the trials of being alive. 

Oh, woe is me, I'm alive. What a tragedy. 

Being alive beats the alternative, but it's hard sometimes. The air pressure ebbs and flows, which means my vestibular system is swamped at least once per minute. The noise in my right ear is deafening. My neck aches from valiantly trying to hold my head straight, to keep my sightlines steady. When my eyes are closed, I lean to the right, so I try not to close my eyes when I am standing up. Walking in the dark is difficult. Dangerous, probably, but when you gotta go, you gotta go. I don't think this vestibular paroxysmia malady is getting worse, but it's not getting any better. I am waiting impatiently for my visit to the neurologist in February. Maybe she'll have some answers about this downed powerline in my head. It's just as possible she will tell me to quit whining and send me home. 

Home. I still hope such a place exists. I plan to continue my quest. I could give up, surrender to Tucson, admit defeat, tell myself it doesn't matter if I live in a place that doesn't feel right to me. I could just suck it up, along with my physical maladies. But with the housing situation the way it is, I can't afford even the roach-ridden gun-infested sleazebag apartment I rented the first year I came here. My options have dwindled, and I don't think it's my fault. Rents have gone up all over the nation, and low-income seniors are being hit hard. I feel it. It hurts.

I was forty years old when I left Los Angeles to move back to Portland. I had parents then. I had a long-distance relationship that quickly fizzled and morphed into another quasi-committed relationship. In other words, I had multiple safety nets, the lowest and most moldy of which would have been my parents' basement. I never really worried about being homeless. It was kind of a cool bohemian dream, to be a vagabond. The nomad vanlife wasn't a thing yet (because YouTube hadn't been invented yet), although people did travel and live in motorhomes. I remember thinking it would be cool to live in a living room on wheels. I had a vision of selling paintings of mountains and waterfalls from the back window of my peddler's art wagon. My partner at the time was equally enamored of the possibilities of the nomad lifestyle, probably because he hoped to fly under his ex-wife's radar, maybe avoid paying taxes, skip out on child support, that sort of thing. Me, I just wanted freedom. 

Speaking of freedom, I'm headed out to Quartzsite in a week to hang out with the vanlifers, nomads, RVers, and schoolies. It will be crowded. I will not be alone. I will not be lonely. I will find kindred spirits. Or I will enjoy my solitude—just one small minivan among many travelers—cook food on my butane stove, and catch up on my sleep. I'm not sure what the internet situation will be. I don't really care. 

After that desert rendezvous ends, I'm planning on visiting my demented friend in Los Angeles. She's in a place now for nutty seniors. I complain a lot about my cognitive abilities (and I'm sure I'm dropping typos in my blogposts like my mother used to drop used tissues from every pocket), but I can still think and make decisions. Not great ones, sometimes, but I have autonomy. My poor friend has lost her ability to think, just like my mother did over the last few years of her life. But my friend is not even seventy. My heart is broken. 

Well, whose isn't, these days? If you haven't had some heartbreak in the past year, lucky you. I hope 2024 is better for all of us, no matter what kind of year we had. For those of us who struggle, I offer the familiar maxim, so 1970s but still true: not all who wander are lost. 

Got my oil changed and suvived to write about it

I'm always shocked when my car speaks to me, but I've learned to listen when the horrible chime jangles my nerves to tell me something needs attention. Most of the time it's the dreaded check engine light, the bane of my existence. Once it was an issue with the gas cap not being closed all the way. Recently the message in the odometer window was "low tire." My car plays coy, though. Not going to tell you which tire is low, ha ha, you figure it out. Given the weather had turned cold, I suspected it was all four. I am now the proud owner of a tire inflator machine. So fun. 

I'm glad my car has enough of a brain to tell me when something is wrong, rather than shutting off with no notice and leaving me stranded, as has happened with cars in my past. They did the best they could. I'm sure someday if I live long enough I will have a car that actually talks to me. Not like that car in Knight Rider. I'm thinking more along the lines of My Mother the Car. I can just imagine my mother being reincarnated as a 1994 Toyota Camry. Nothing fancy. She would say "I need an oil change and Jiffy Lube is having a special, but don't let them sell you an air filter because I don't need one yet, and you can do that yourself." 

My car has the brain of an infant savant, more or less. It doesn't speak, but it makes noises that get under my skin, particularly that gruesome chime. I hate that sound. When my car dinged a couple days ago as I was firing it up to go shopping, I was confused at first, because the check engine light was blessedly dark. Then I saw the message in the odometer window: oil change.

According to the sticker dangling in the corner of my windshield by the last oil change provider, I should have had another thousand miles, but I stopped patronizing that shop because I finally figured out, after thousands of dollars, that they had taken advantage, and not only that, they smoked weed as a group in the back of their shop, which is right by the bike path where I frequently walk. Nothing against those who indulge, as long as they aren't working on my car while they do it. Anyway, I found a new mechanic in the neighborhood. So when my car told me it wanted new oil, I went there.

Sadly for me, the gray clouds that had threatened to explode finally did, which is good if you like rain, as we often do in the desert, but this rain was the kind I know from the Pacific Northwest, that is to say, the kind that moves in and squats over the city like a brood hen trying to hatch a cold dead egg. In the desert, I've come to know the nature of monsoon, the weather phenomenon that boils up out of nowhere, destroys the place with lightning, hail, wind, torrential rain, and flash floods and then evaporates, leaving you wondering what the heck! This week's rain was not like that. The radar showed Tucson under a huge green splat, which meant it was going to be raining for a while.

I drove to the mechanic and dashed through the rain to the office. I was greeted by a surly middle-aged man who reluctantly agreed to do the oil change on the spot (well, within three hours) and what kind of oil did I want? Like I would know the answer to that question. I said, "You are assuming I know the answer to that question." He looked at me with that long-suffering look I've seen on countless sales reps' faces over years and years of me not trusting that I know more than I think I do. Finally we figured it out, and pretty soon we were getting along. 

"Are you going to wait or are you going walk around the mall?" he asked. 

"Oh, I'll go hang out at the mall," I said, like an idiot. I had a raincoat. How bad could it be?

I'd forgotten it was a few days until Christmas. I don't pay attention to the holidays, except to be annoyed that they encroach on my routines. I guess I assumed yet again that everyone else was like me but you know what happens when we assume. I headed off in the rain toward the mall and soon realized I was way out of my comfort zone. Even on a good day, malls are trying to kill me. During this Christmas shopping season, a sense of desperation and panic hung over the whole retail neighborhood. The streets were jammed with SUVs all trying to turn into the mall parking lot without getting T-boned by oncoming traffic. Pedestrians had no chance, but what choice did I have? Sit in the waiting room? I chanced it. 

I wandered the edge of the wide parking lot past the empty Sears store, crossing the traffic lanes near JC Penney, and meandered past REI and the Container Store, loathe to actually go inside the mall itself. As I stumbled over curbs and puddles, I got the bright idea to walk up the street to Best Buy. I needed new headphones, and it wasn't too far away. On a good weather day, it would have been a pleasant stroll. Not today.

Between the rain and the speeding cars, I was a soggy ragged breathless mess by the time I got there. Unbeknownst to me, my raincoat had lost its ability to repel water, so I was drenched through my hoodie sweatshirt through my T-shirt through my tanktop to my skin. My sweatpants, so cozy just an hour earlier, were soaked from the knees down. I was half-blind from glasses covered with raindrops. Lucky for me, not expecting to have to walk very far, I had worn my thirty-year-old waterproof Merrell mules instead of my sneakers. Thus, although tired, my feet were warm and dry. 

I made it to Best Buy, found the things I needed, and ventured back out into the slogfest. No letup in the rain, no letup in the traffic. If anything, both seemed to be growing more intense by the minute. At the intersection between me and the mechanic's shop, I made sure to press the walk button. With my eye on the walk sign and the opposite curb, four lanes away, I watched for oncoming traffic making a left turn in front of me. All good. 

Lucky for me, out of the corner of my eye, I saw the huge black monster truck making a right turn as I stepped off the curb. I don't think the driver saw me, at least, I hope that is the case. I hate to think they made that dangerous turn on purpose. The holidays can make people do things they would not normally do. I can be magnanimous now, given I lived to write this blogpost. 

I stopped walking and let the truck blast by in front of me, close enough to touch. I had time to admire enormous rugged tires. I wasn't thinking at that moment, oh, nice tires. In that moment, I yelled and gestured, which felt pretty good, actually, since I rarely yell and gesture. I dashed across the street and made it to the far curb unscathed, calcified heart valve pounding. 

As I continued my walk, I was gifted with more opportunities to yell and gesture, this time at the drivers who sped through the standing water, drenching me as I walked on the sidewalk. If it hadn't been so miserably uncomfortable, it would have been hilarious. I could have been starring in a rom-com. Hapless hero facing conflicts before achieving the goal of happiness, which in my case was getting back to my car alive.

I returned early to the mechanic and sat shivering in the waiting room scrolling through my phone like a zombie. Eventually my car was ready. Now I know the holiday spirits were looking out for me, partly because I survived the walk to Best Buy and back, but mostly because the mechanics didn't find anything else wrong with the car, other than the obligatory notice to get my fuel injectors cleaned. I'll wait until my car tells me its time.

Happy holidays from the Hellish Handbasket. Hope your new year is better than the last.

Happy holidays from the Hellish Handbasket

Here we are again, heading into another holiday season. It's not my favorite time of year, because 75°F is still too cold for this hothouse flower. And because grocery shopping is twenty times more difficult. And because one of my preferred radio stations seems to have sold its soul to the Christmas music devil. And because one of the neighbors here in the trailer park gave me a little loaf of banana bread and a baggy of Chex mix and I ate them both in ten minutes. For all those reasons [urp], this is not my favorite time of year. But what do you expect from a self-proclaimed chronic malcontent?

I'm kind of over the malcontent thing. With all the troubles in the world today, it seems pretty self-centered to act like my little dramas are so important. I may be heading toward houselessness, but at least bombs aren't falling on my head. I mean, we need to keep things in perspective. Yes, I ate the entire loaf of banana bread but that constitutes dinner, and tomorrow I will do better, because the banana bread is now gone. 

I'm learning the only way through these strange days is to keep my head down, focus on what I can do here and now, and not get enmeshed in other people's drama. Some people like drama. Just because I got weary of self-made drama and let it go doesn't mean other people have to do the same. Drama can be fun and exciting. I used to be a drama addict. Now, all I have to do is remember that one of my close friends has dementia, and another friend's mother just died, and I get back to right-size. Good things happen sometimes. It's not all bad. I mentioned last week I didn't get that job I had applied for (which probably would have changed my life, at least for one year), but I had some editing work this week. I keep showing up for life, and somehow I keep on living. So weird. 

Meanwhile, I continue to write a story a day, why, I'm not really sure. You can't really call them stories. More like . . . scenes. Musings. Little upchuckings. Sometimes I have an idea of what I want to write. Stories come to me while I'm out walking. That's fun, trying to see if I will remember them by the time I get home. Other times I open up the page and stare at it. Classic writer angst, right? To bemoan the blank page? I don't really bemoan anymore. As long as it's not the white screen of death, I'm good. I just start typing. Kind of like how I'm writing this blog right now. Wow. So meta. 

Here are a few holiday wishes from the Hellish Handbasket. I hope this holiday season is joyful for you, or at least not miserable. I hope the weather doesn't totally suck where you are. I hope the suffering you might be feeling doesn't drag you down into depression. I hope your family doesn't criticize you too much and if they do, that you have a safe place to hide out with a good book. I hope you can experience the holiday lights, the aromas, the shoppers, the music, without going completely insane and wishing you could hibernate till spring. Please don't poke your eyes out. Please don't overdose on oxy. Please don't eat an entire loaf of banana bread at one sitting. Be kind to yourself, just for a few days., till this thing is over. We'll get through it together. Then in January we can commiserate when winter really hits the fan. 

Geezers gotta get up and go

I'm currently residing in a pretty big mobile home park. I'm not sure how many homes there are here, a few hundred, I think. I got lost the first time I tried to find the exit. Now, after walking this village many times over the past couple years, I know the streets well. I don't know a lot of people, but I wave and smile and chat a moment if they have a cute dog that seems inclined to be friendly. Not all people are friendly, just like not all dogs are friendly. Lexi, for instance, is a poodle from hell, but that is a different story. 

Life in the mobile home park has a rhythm, and lots of things can upset that rhythm. The big upset the past week or so has been a paving project. The management sent around a Google earth map of the village, with streets marked in dingy colors to indicate what part of the park would be paved on what day. Brilliant, right? We were all informed we better move our cars if we needed to go anywhere, because for two days, the streets would be impassable. The first day was for the paving. The second day was for striping. These things take time to dry.

The forecast called for rain, and according to Contractor Google, you aren't supposed to lay down this slurry stuff in the rain. Apparently, these guys didn't get the memo. The contractors roped off the streets, including ours, with flags and cones and put cones in front of everyone's driveways, just in case they got a wild hair to go out for breakfast. The team of guys in their filthy neon green gear got busy with their machines and pretty soon we had a really nice layer of sticky black slurry on our street. 

Just as they finished our street, it rained. The contractors packed up and went away, leaving our street roped off. It was the only street in the whole place that was closed to traffic.

The old folks stuck it out for two days (that was the agreement), but with all the humidity in the air, the black tarry stuff on the street was slow to dry. Pretty soon, the pristine paving job was gouged with tire tracks. Some looked like they might have been left by the mailtruck. The bigger ones were probably FedEx or UPS. But the little ones were definitely left by my neighbors, because you could see the slurry traces in their driveways. Caught you red-handed, Susie. There were plenty of footprints, too, both human and nonhuman. Maybe some were from neighbors walking their dogs, and one little skidmark was mine where I lost my balance as I tried to walk in the concrete gutter, but I bet most of them were rabbits. After all, you can't stop our resident hordes of rascally rabbits from dashing from cactus to driveway and back again. Just like you can't stop Mr. Gimp (the coyote) from giving chase. Fresh paving means nothing to them. 

The management sent around a resentful email chastizing us for wrecking the paving job, yada yada, but here's my take on it. First, everyone knew (or could have known) that it was going to rain, and you can't pave in the rain. Duh. I checked the slurry paving rules, because I'm a meddling researcher, and I checked the radar. When you see a splat of green over Tucson, you know it's raining. So that's the first thing. 

But more important, you cannot trap old folks in their homes and expect them to stay there for long. They have grandkids to see, stores to patronize, pancakes to eat at Denny's. Seniors are like cats. They can't be fully tamed, you can't herd them, and they are mostly untrainable. And why would you expect anything different? Time is a-wastin' when you are old and running out of road. You have to get going now, or risk stroking out before you get to the all-you-can-eat breakfast bar. Fear of missing out (FOMO) is one step below fear of dying before I get there (FODBIGT). 

I can just imagine my wizened neighbors chafing at the bit, staring out the window at the clouds, looking at the slurry mess and wondering when it was ever going to dry. As soon as they saw the mailtruck or whatever it was that made that first long gouge in the asphalt, they were like, lemme outta here. If that guy can do it, so can I. And off they went.

Eventually the street dried. The contractors came back, took down the ropes and cones, and got busy paving other streets in the park, which were soon gouged to the bedrock with tire tracks, human tracks, and animal tracks. I'm guessing the trash truck had a go, judging by the chassis width and tire tread of the most impressive gouge, all splashy and drippy on both sides of the track. I took a photo because it looks like art. 

This whole week, as I've walked the park in the evening, avoiding the freshly glistening asphalt slurry, I wondered what future archaeologists would make of these remants of human existence. The way we marvel at the footprints embedded in a former lakebed, preserved for a million years, would future scientists scratch their heads and propose theories about how we used to live in the olden days? Must have been a religious ritual, they would guess. Or maybe some kind of sacred art? I know, I know! Ley lines, embedded in tar, leading to various spiritual centers, perhaps used for human sacrifice, judging by the many human footprints showing people were running, slipping, and sliding in the muck. 

The contractors are returning tomorrow to redo our street and the rest of this end of the park pushed to the back of the calendar because of the rain. We are expecting good weather. But no matter what, you can't keep old folks trapped in their trailers. Old folks gotta roam. 

By the way, in case you are wondering, I did not get that job. One door closes, the door leading to the vast Arizona desert BLM land opens. More to be revealed.

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. 

Digging to find the brown gopher of gratitude

I read today that writing gratitude lists sometimes can make us feel worse rather than better. I find that news a great relief. Now I don't have to feel guilty about (a) not writing a list and (b) not feeling grateful. 

Gratitude means judging. We need to figure out what's worth being grateful about before we can decide to feel gratitude, am I right? Maybe you have a clear sense of good and bad, but the older I get, the more I fail to grasp the eithor/or-ness of the whole idea. I get stuck on the judgy part, trying to parse good from bad, and getting lost in the space between. My Jungian friend would call that the liminal space. I call it a mild form of hell. Life would be so much easier if I could clearly differentiate good from bad. 

It's a continuum, bla bla bla. I'm not going to debate whether it is bad to commit murder, for example, or steal a lint roller from Walmart. Those cases are not under consideration when I might be contemplating being grateful for something. I'm grateful I haven't committed murder, is that a thing to put on the list? I'm grateful I don't care if my clothes have lint on them, so a lint roller holds no appeal. 

I've maundered far and wide in this blog on the topics of creativity, success, and bad decisions, so I won't bore you with all that again. I can't remember what I've written before, but I know a few of you actually have functional memories, and I don't want to annoy. Ha. As if it were possible. But I can seek to minimize the annoyance. You are welcome.

I'm reporting today that it is possible I've made a bad decision. Oh, I've made a lot of bad decisions, and I've told you all about them, but this one might be right up there near the top of stupid things I've decided to do, worse maybe than the decision to move to Tucson. 

I decided to see if I could write a story a day. For a year. 

Not only that, I decided to publish daily on my personal website. For a year. 

I must be nuts. After eleven posts, I'm beginning to realize I might have bitten off something that is going to break all my teeth and choke me on my own spit. Not that it isn't fun writing, but writing for an audience as if no one is reading? That gets the heart rate going. Lucky for me, my heart can take it. My stomach is in knots, though. 

I think my ego is getting in the way. I just realized posting as if no one is reading isn't all that much of a challenge when no one is actually reading. 

Oh, poor me. I'm adopting a woe-is-me posture, claiming the pressure of writing and posting daily is so intense, I can hardly stand it. Truth, I don't have a subscribe option on my website. Nobody can sign up to get notified of my daily contribution to the infinite pile of stupid, poorly written stories. Whew, that's a relief. And with my mom now dead, there goes one-fifth of my readership, which was spotty even on a good day, a good day being when she could remember how to turn on her computer. What's more, my one timid foray posting on social media was like a grain of sand dropped into the Grand Canyon. My vague post was more of a practice run, really, just in case someday in the far future, when I feel like I might want to pop my head out of my isolation hole and sniff the air. 

You might ask, why put yourself out there like that, Carol? Aren't you afraid of what people will think? Friends (if that is what you are), I am not longer a perfectionist, as you will surely see if you are one of the lucky half-dozen who know who I am and can find my website. Typos, repetitive dialog, missing punctuation . . .  it's all there, like cakes that failed to rise in the Betty Crocker test kitchen, except these cakes, I mean, stories, are on full display. 

I am not a quitter. I signed myself up for the long haul. Only I will know if I failed to meet my goal. We'll see, I guess. I will try to keep you posted. 

All I can hope for is that the internet goes out. 

Appreciating the murmur

I would like to think I’ve evolved to the point where I live to serve, but it’s entirely possible I’m simply desperate for human company. Despite being an avowed apanthropist, I enjoy being around people once in a while. Not too close, and not for too long. I am protective of my solitude, to the point where people call me antisocial (ask me if I care; the answer is no). I can't always tell what I am feeling. Still, I don’t actually hate people, even though I sometimes act like it.

This week, speaking of people, I visited my cardiologist at the cardiology clinic at the hospital to discuss the results of last week’s echocardiogram. I admit, I might have been overly eager to see him, to see anybody really. I smiled at everyone. Nobody was wearing a mask in the hospital, so I took mine off, too. I trudged up the stairs to the second floor with a stupid grin on my face, hoping I wouldn’t pay for it later by getting Covid.

I really like my cardiologist, for so many reasons. First, he’s a short round guy with a thick beard, curly gray hair, and a handshake that resembles a spatula swooping in to flip a pancake. I like that he sits heavy on the padded wheely stool. He doesn’t pretend to be thin. Second, he looks me right in the eye. Even when we were wearing masks in the exam room, he really seemed to see me. Maybe he’s perfected the doctor stare, but it works on me.

I could hear the muffled voice of my doctor through the thin walls between exam rooms. Hey, he's my doctor, I thought, as he greeted somebody, who answered in a quavery old lady voice. I fidgeted and tried not to feel possessive. Finally, a quick knock came on the door. Before I could say "enter," the door opened to admit a slim young man I’d never seen before. Definitely not my cardiologist.

“I’m Xavier, the doctor’s assistant,” he said, blinding me with straight white teeth. He couldn’t have been more than thirty, and he was perfect. I could find no flaws. Perfect white teeth, perfect black hair, perfect figure in a perfectly tailored clean white lab coat. I welcomed him and his laptop, glad to have something other than the heart failure chart pinned to the back of the door to stare at while I was waiting.

Xavier proceeded to ask me a long list of questions about my physical and mental health, my meds, my vitamins, how much I exercise, plus more I’ve forgotten. He didn’t check my cognitive function, by the way. I did my best to answer truthfully, being careful not to indicate the slightest hint of depression or anxiety. I will check his report later and probably find he thought I seemed depressed. I consciously tried to be perky, but I have a hard time pulling off perkiness.

When we got to the topic of exercise, he brightened when I mentioned my intention to jog. Big hopeful smile. His shoulders sagged with disappointment when I complained the summer had been so hot.

“You should get a gym membership,” he advised.

I nodded. “I could, but I’m nervous about Covid, a little.”

“I know what you mean. I go early in the morning when there’s no one there,” he said.

“Yeah, good, early . . .” I trailed off to indicate early, no, not really my thing. “What time do you go?”

“Between four and five,” he said. “You could use the treadmill.”

“Right, I used to do that,” I replied. “I’m afraid with this imbalance thing, I might . . .” I left off the rest of the thought: I might fall on the floor and break a hip. Or my neck. Which would be a relief in some ways.

“They have stationary bikes.”

Feeling kind of like a bug wiggling under a microscope, I was relieved when the doctor entered, trailed by two other people.

“You met Xavier? I hope you don’t mind, I brought Sasha and Roberto too? They are students. Roberto will be our scribe today.”

I practically quivered with excitement. No longer alone with the pushy Xavier, lots of company, plus a teaching opportunity! What could be more fun!

I perched on the edge of the exam bed table thing. The doctor put his stethoscope at various places around my chest and appeared to be listening intently. Then he invited Xavier to listen. Xavier took the stethoscope in his ear, put the round end on my chest somewhere near my sternum, and leaned toward me for a couple seconds. He stood back with an expression I couldn’t read.

“What did you hear?” the doctor asked him.

Xavier shook his head in embarrassment. “I did not appreciate a murmur.”

My mind worked on the word “appreciate” as the doctor took the stethoscope, put the round end in a different place, and beckoned him to listen again. They stood there together, student and teacher, joined by a stethoscope, apparently appreciating my murmur.

“Ah. Two out of six,” Xavier said with some satisfaction.

The doctor motioned to Sasha, who up to this point had been watching silently. She approached and took one end of the stethoscope in her ear.

“Hear it?” the doctor said. “Whoosh, whoosh.”

I don’t know if she heard it or not. She acted like she did. I’ve been a student. Performance pressure in front of one’s peers is a terrible thing. In a few short years, she will be treating patients of her own. We can only hope she can detect a murmur that is a two out of six on the murmur scale.

I was released with an order to have a followup echocardiogram in one year, which was the outcome I’d been hoping for. My sticky leaky calcified bicuspid valve has not deteriorated appreciably over the past six months, so I might dodge a heart attack for a while longer. Not sure about all the other stuff, but at least the ticker is still ticking.

The doctor herded his charges out the door. As I waited for the medical assistant to fetch me and escort me to the appointment desk, I reflected on the weirdness of my life. I still keep trying to make sense, to find meaning in my experiences, which I suppose means I have enough curiosity to see what might come next. 

 

Autumnal terror in my cold old bones

I know we are supposed to like fall, the time of harvest, first frosts, shorter days, and piles of golden leaves. In another world in another time, if I were another person, maybe I would enjoy this season, but to me it's just a stupid cold prelude to the stupidest coldest season of all, which, of course, is winter, my eternal nemesis.

I hate being cold. 

I'm blogging today from Scottsdale, wrapped up in fleece, sitting at a long imitation farm table in the wooden-floored kitchen (wooden floor real, not fake) looking out the open patio door at a blue pool. The pool has a fake rock fountain that comes on for a couple hours every morning around 8:30. It's a little too loud to be peaceful. It sounds more like a dam has burst upstream and the flood is coming. 

The sky is blue, the sun is shining. You'd think I'd be happy. For a chronic malcontent, there's always something not quite right. Today, it's the wind. The forecast calls for a "breezy" day. The wind is whipping up the trees and bushes, howling above the sound of the overly loud fountain. Tiny yellow leaves are flying like dead gold flies onto the rippling surface of the pool. Underwater, a weird black robo vacuum cruises the pool bottom for what, algae? I don't know. It resembles a slow moving shark. This place is like the set of a horror film. It looks enticing on the surface, but when you look more closely, you see danger lurking behind every overly manicured honeysuckle or potted palm. 

It's never a good sign when the sky is so blue and the wind is so relentless. It's a form of cognitive dissonance, that nature could be so beautiful yet so unsettling. I feel ancient terror in my bones. Right now, I want a cave. A nice dark quiet cave with a roaring bonfire at the entrance to ward off the evil spirits.

A pool guy comes to clean the pool. Yard guys come to mow the lawn and trim the hedges. House cleaners come to clean the house, which is probably why I can find no spray bottles of cleaning fluid anywhere. Apparently they BYOB. Bring your own bleach, something I failed to do. When I was packing to drive here, I thought, I won't need my bottle of Clorox, right? Surely someone who owns a house with a pool is well-stocked with bleach in a bottle. 

Early this morning around 3:00 am, I woke to find Juno's enormous head snuffling on my leg. She rubbed her drooly jowels on my leg, my blanket, the couch. I shoved her away. I knew what she wanted. She was trying to see if I would cave and feed her early. She's cunning in the way dogs who are food motivated learn to induce sleep deprivation in humans. But for me, the long-suffering, easily manipulated human caregiver, I can't be sure that she isn't feeling a need to go outside to pee. Even though she went three hours before, I know how unpredictable my bladder can be, and neither Juno nor I are young pups. So I get up, put on my slippers and bathroom, grab the USB-rechargeable light wand that I carry to illuminate six feet of the yawning dark expanse of backyard lawn, and I go stand by the patio door, waiting for her to follow. 

Juno flops back on her plush round bed, smirking. I flop back on the couch, resigned to being gaslit by a dog. This is my final dogsitting gig. I never imagined it would be so debilitating to live the life of a dog. It's hard enough living my own life. 

Ah, finally, the fountain has subsided for the day. Now all I hear is that relentless desert wind. It's nice to sit in a proper chair to type. However, the chair is too low for the table. Even sitting on two pillows is not enough to keep my shoulder muscles from screaming. My leg feels better, though. Pain is like body hair in the way it travels around, from back to butt to leg to rib. Pretty soon Juno and I will go outside and sit in the sun to warm up. I'll sit on a fancy patio chair, and Juno will lay across one of her many big fleece dog beds. We'll listen to the wind in the trees, soak up some sun, and catch up on our sleep.

I am thankful this house and yard are not my responsibility. As long as the dog is alive and well when I leave tonight, my job is done. I will clean the bathroom and kitchen sink and take out the trash I have generated over the past four days. I will pick up the most recent pile of dog poop. I will replace the cushions on the couch that has ruined my back. As soon as I know the pet parent's plane has safely landed at Sky Harbor, I will put the key under the mat and head off into the night. 

What's in your closet?

I count myself lucky to have a relatively safe, comfortable place to live while I figure out what is coming next. My landlord and I have a wonderful agreement. I pay rent, and then I get to live here. It's a fantastic setup. What's more, my landlord has used their handyperson skills to make this room quite habitable, within the realm of what is possible considering we live in a single-wide in a mobile home park populated by equal numbers of spiky saguaros and white-haired octogenarians. I mean to say, it's great, with a few caveats.

One of the upgrades my landlord installed while I was dogsitting elsewhere was a motion sensor light in the closet. Seems like a wonderful amenity, right? You could always use more light in your closet, so you can admire all your . . .  whatever you store in your closet. Light is a wonderful thing, especially when it comes on automatically, like magic, without you having to yank a string, hit a switch, or push a button. 

This fabulous light is not just automatic. It is also very bright. Unfortunately for me, it just so happens the best place for my bed is in front of the closet door, which means the closet door must remain closed at night if I don't want to be constantly blinded. In fact, the light is so sensitive that even with the door closed, any motion in the room will set off the light, and it will remain blazing brightly for twenty minutes before it decides its work is done and it can go back to sleep. I placed a large object in front of the closet door to block the gap at the bottom as soon as I returned from dogsitting, and I haven't opened the door since. 

Fortunately for me, I don't store anything in the closet. 

So, imagine my shock when a few nights ago, around midnight, that closet light suddenly came on. The narrow door was outlined with a glowing yellow light! I sat up on my foam rubber mattress, feeling my heart go into hyperdrive. I stared at the glowing outline. It didn't flicker. I rubbed my eyes. Was it a mirage? Was I dreaming? Nope. Still glowing. All kinds of thoughts raced through my head. Was there someone in the closet? Was there a critter in the closet? Perhaps a moth? A mouse? A packrat emerging from a nest under the trailer? Dust motes piling up into bunnies big enough to set off that hair trigger light? 

There was no way I was going to open that closet door to find out. I eventually lay back down on the mattress and stared at the glowing outline of the door in the wall past my feet, waiting, watching, listening for the slightest sound, a breath, a rattle, a flutter, a scurry. Nothing. Of course, I got bored and fell asleep, and the next time I got up to pee, the light was off. I examined the door from a safe distance, but in the dark, I can't see much. I boldly waved my hands a few times, thinking I could set off the light. Nothing. It was as dark and quiet as it had ever been, up until it wasn't.

You might think the next day I would have opened the closet door. You would be wrong. I think I've figured out what is beyond it, something I wasn't expecting to encounter in a decrepit prefab trailer. I believe that narrow fake wood closet door is a brand new doorway to hell. Yep. That's the only explanation. Nothing else makes sense. Somehow, creatures from the underworld found a thin spot in the veil and built a staircase into my closet. It's a good thing I don't store anything in there. I don't have many possessions left, but what I do have, I'd like to keep a while longer. I don't want to have to go to hell to chase after my stuff. 

Now my question is, what do I tell my landlord? Uh, you might not be aware of this, but I now have a lot more square footage than we originally thought. I can just imagine, they would probably say, Well, Carol, you've doubled, maybe tripled, your living space. Surely you can see that the rent would have to go up a little bit, too, right? To compensate for the wear and tear on the closet rug, if nothing else. And probably the utilities would have to go up some as well, considering we are now illuminating some portion of hell. And by the way, I wish you'd warned me that you were going to be remodeling. 

And then I would protest, I had nothing to do with it, it was that confounded motion sensor light you installed in the ceiling to light up a 15-square foot space. A regular light would have been perfectly adequate. And twenty minutes! Who spends twenty minutes in the closet? Well. Hm. Forget I asked that question. I suppose I would, if I were trying to escape the noise of cars cutting donuts in the Sam's Club parking lot next door. Anyway, somehow, some demons or something noticed how brightly lit the space was and decided to move in. I don't have control over demons. In my limited experience, they do what they want.

Since then, the doorway has remained dark. Each time I stagger off my mattress and stumble into the bathroom, I give the door a wary glance, but I don't go too close. You never know. I could get sucked into hell. I hope I'll have a little advance notice, so I can bring a handbasket with me. I might need some water or some ibuprofen on that trip. Hopefully, there won't be any dogs that need walking or feeding at 5 am. I hope it's nice and warm and quiet in hell. I could use a break. 

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.

Living life on the floor

I have one small victory to report. With a little help from my friend, I managed to replace the support struts on my minivan's liftgate without braining either one of us. It's always great when DIY car repairs don't kill or maim anyone. There's enough killing and maiming going on in the world without my car adding to the carnage. In addition to the satisfaction of accomplishing one thing on my endless list of tasks, I saved quite a bit of money. I would have saved even more money if I hadn't had to go to the dealer for a replacement bolt that sheared off when I was about to embark upon my camping trip to Flagstaff. Remember that? That was a fun morning. Not. 

But now the liftgate is working, which is more than I can say for my right butt muscle. I have a severe hitch in my gitalong. In other words, I can barely walk. The pain is excruciating, radiating from a knot in my gluteus . . . I want to say maximus, but I don't actually know. I've stared at the anatomy drawings and all I see is a mushy red version of Autopia, with roads of muscle overpasses and underpasses and the whole thing looks like the Santa Monica Freeway in rush hour. 

I chalked up the pain to arthritis, and I'm probably diagnosing myself correctly, considering my mother had a hip replacement and my brother somehow managed to dislocate his hip while stretching in his sleep. Ouch. Mom got a metal shank in her shanksmare, and my brother got a new ball and socket. Thus, it wouldn't surprise me if my turn was coming soon, even though I'm just barely sixty-seven. This is not the kind of precociousness I admire. 

Anyway, I got to thinking as I was stumbling around my room with my mother's cane, which she never used, having leaped straight over the cane to a metal wheeled walker, figuratively speaking. This pain does not seem to emanate from the actual hip ball and socket joint. I have been consulting with Dr. Google and it won't surprise you to know I now have multiple diagnoses, ranging from benign to dire. Dr. WebMD was equally creative. What did we do before internet doctors, I ask you! Go to real doctors? Ick.

I refuse to quit going out for my evening constitution around the mobile home park, despite the fact that every step burns and despite the fact that the vestibular spasms put me off balance as the waves sweep through my head every thirty seconds. I know I'm a broken hip waiting to happen, but that doesn't stop me. This evening my walk took on a meditative tone as I placed my feet carefully on the uneven asphalt. I would not have seen a snake or javelina or coyote until I was right on top of them, I was so intent on watching my feet. Besides managing the pain, I was determined to follow the directions of my favorite YouTube physical therapist. Apparently, my gait is partly to blame for hip flareups. 

For instance, he advised me to walk with my toes slightly splayed. In my adolescence, I preferred to appear somewhat pigeon-toed, thinking that made me look more like Twiggy. I'm not pigeon-toed now, although I currently walk like a drunken sailor so there's no telling where my feet could end up. But tonight I really tried to turn out my toes, especially my right foot, while I minced along the road with my shortened stride. I'm not sure, but turning out my toes seemed to ease the pain somewhat. I had my head down, so I couldn't tell if people were watching me through their windows and wondering why I was walking like a duck.

More important than the splayed toes, the PT said I should pay close attention to my glutes. Specifically, I should squeeze them alternately while I'm taking each step. Left, squeeze, right, squeeze, so that the muscles support the inflamed hip. Well, I quickly found out I no longer have anything resembling muscles in my butt. My butt is flat as a board (but not as hard as a board, sadly), so there's nothing there to squeeze. I did manage to coax a little you want me to do wha—? from my left glute, but my right glute was MIA, nowhere to be seen. Just a floppy pile of jello. Now I can truly claim to be half-assed. Ha. 

I made it home and collapsed on my foam rubber bed. My mind wandered into the past, as it is wont to do when I'm trying to figure out a medical mystery, and it occurred to me that I have felt something similar before. Not exactly the same, but similarly immobilizing in the buttocks region. Back then, I was both post-menopausal and vegan, which is not a combination I would recommend, but there I was, trying to maintain muscles on little more than soymilk and tofu. Plus, I was jogging almost daily, trying to tighten up my loose quads. It's no wonder my back and leg gave out. My muscles had atrophied from lack of adequate nutrition. That painful time led me to Dr. Tony, the wacko naturopath, which was another painful time, mainly in a financial sense. He flummoxed me with mumbo-jumbo, but he probably saved my life by telling me I'd better get more protein or else head south with the geese. 

Now I'm going to do that thing that doctors hate so much and diagnose myself. Why not? I did it before with the vestibular issue, and they are starting to get on board, so why not diagnose my butt? Here's what I think. I don't think it's hip arthritis creating this stabbing burning pain. It's either a nerve problem or a muscle problem, brought on by sitting for extended periods of time on a $11.00 IKEA plastic folding chair in front of my laptop, which is sitting on a $17.00 Walmart wooden folding table that is just about two inches too tall for the height of the chair. It could be that lack of protein is playing a role, considering I don't get much these days and I'm not willing to eat animal flesh just yet. However, I think the precipitating trigger was my chair and table setup. The writing life is killing me.

That is why at this moment, I am sitting on the bed with the laptop on my lap, like any sensible sendentary computer user would do. My bed is on the floor, and now my desk is on the floor too. Maybe my hips will loosen up a little and enjoy life if I give them the job of getting up and down off the floor twenty or thirty times a day. Like they have a choice. I can always crawl to the bathroom if I have to. It's not very far. 

The annoying choice between safe and happy

I had a birthday this week. To celebrate, I treated myself to the trifecta. I don't mean I went horse racing. I mean, I sidled on down to my pharmacy and got the COVID-19 booster in my right arm and the flu and RSV shots in my left arm. Then I went home and descended into the misery I so righteously sought and deserved. I can hear what you are saying right now. Just because your friend E got all three and bounced back like a Bobo Doll doesn't mean you can do the same. E is six years your junior! Come on, Carol. Get real!

Clearly, even at this ripe stinky old age, I still have a lot to prove. 

What did I prove? I am a superhero. After a day and night of fairly intense suffering (it's all relative, isn't it?), I emerged stronger, straighter (in a postural sense), and buoyed with optimism. Invincible is how I feel. Confident enough to keep my tube of Preparation H in the same jar as my Crest Cavity Protection. That's pretty darn cocky for someone on the glaucoma watch list.

As is normal for a chronic malcontent, my unearned sense of optimism wore off fast. Now I'm back to my usual gloomy self. The alarm clock in my head relentlessly chimes once or twice per minute of every waking hour. I can't say for sure what happens after I finally fall asleep, but judging by the amount of time I spend awake and staring out the bathroom window at the stars, I'm guessing the alarm rings while I'm sleeping, too. During the day, like for instance, right now while I'm typing, I can tune it out. But when I'm lying on my foam rubber mattress on the floor, the noise in my head is deafening. I wish I were deaf, but I have a feeling this kind of sound is the kind you hear through your eight cranial nerve. Sort of like the way trash truck noises travel through the floor of the trailer at 4:00 a.m. and permeate my bones. Oh, the humanity.

It's so fun to hear other people express righteous anger on my behalf. I have to remind myself, though, that they might possibly be right. I'd rather not consider that possibility. Some of their suggestions are downright annoying. For example, people give me suggestions (advice) on everything from eating to dressing to finding a home to managing my healthcare. Some of it I've heard since I was a kid, so it's easy to tune it out—get a job, wear a bra, grow your hair, learn to type, draw flowers and fairies. Lately, I've been told to apply for senior housing, move closer to family, put my art on t-shirts, be more assertive, sell on BookTok . . . The list goes on and on. I suppose I do the same to them, so I fair's fair.

I usually fall into the trap of trying to defend myself and justify my choices. Later I berate myself for once again falling into the trap of trying to defend myself and justify my choices. It's futile, yet I still slip and fall right in. More like I dive in headfirst. I'm self-trained to defend first and self-berate later. And of course, because I live in constant doubt, I wonder, are they right? Is the problem that my hair is too short? Or I don't eat the flesh of dead creatures who would prefer to still be living? Or that I should just accept where I am, even though I don't like this town, and focus on being safe, forget about being happy? 

I've done so many things wrong in my life, it's easy to nod and say, you're right, I'm sure you are right. Everything would be different if I just put on a bra once in a while. Or stopped picking my teeth with toothpicks. Or yelled at my doctors instead of sucking it up and whining to any friend who will listen. 

In the end, with all the noise in my head, I can't hear my own voice among the voices of all my well-meaning advisors, mentors, and fixers. How much of my predicament is the product of a lifetime of thoughtless choices, and how much is attributable to a structural problem in the U.S. affordable housing market? I read an article today about someone who works in Los Angeles but has to live 100 miles away to find affordable housing. That's a 2- to 3-hour commute! I did not create this housing shortage. Neither did I create the fiasco that is the U.S. healthcare system. I just happen to be caught up in the vortex of ill health, age, poverty, inadequate housing, and a deep desire to rest in silence. 

A good friend's mother is dying. Another friend just found love for the first time in many years. The refrigerator is working. My check engine light went out. My sister's cat finally pooped after days of constipation. Lives are cut short from war, earthquakes, sea-level rise, gun violence, and COVID-19. The world is busy. I want to be busy, too, writing. I don't need much to do that. Maybe I can find my own version of Walden Pond. Is it out there? I won't know unless I go look. One thing I am sure of. It is not here.