Finding the thank-you-god ledges along the journey

My friend E told me about the Thank You God Ledge in Yosemite. I looked it up and saw photos. No thanks. It's a long narrow ledge almost 2,000 feet up the face of Half Dome. Just looking at the photos makes me want to cower in the closet. However, the concept of a ledge providentially placed when one needs a respite is useful for describing my double stint at Trailer Tesserae. That's one of the names for this mobile home I'm currently living in, in case you have forgotten. Art Trailer. Artmobile. Art Box. 

I've been in Arizona almost two years. April 24 will be the two-year anniversary. After a three day 1,500 mile help-me-god trip through the desert, I landed on the ledge of Trailer Tesserae. That was before it had that name. For three months, this mobile home was a safe spot from which to learn the neighborhood and find my next perch, which turned out to be the roach-infested Bat Cave. After a year in the Bat Cave, I landed back in the Trailer, to regroup, to reconsider, to plot my next move. The plotting is starting to take shape. Last week, I told you about the shakedown cruise I took with E, who showed me how to live in my car. Camp in my car, excuse me. Let me not get ahead of myself.

For my next help-me-god trip, scheduled for mid-April, I'm driving to California and then north to Oregon to meet my siblings at the end of the month. We plan to find a nice cozy beach somewhere near the confluence of the Columbia River and the Pacific Ocean where we can scatter Mom, who for two years has been peacefully resting in ash form in a cardboard box on my brother's shelf. Sorry if I've told you all this before. I'm sure your memory is much better than mine.

I have this vague idea that along the way, my next perch (home) will manifest, and I will no longer be destination-less. I can hope. I found the Love Shack in Portland by driving and looking. Most of the great apartments are never advertised. One must troll the desirable neighborhoods looking for red handwritten for-rent signs. Miracles do happen. After successfully using a mechanic-in-a-can product last week to remedy my check engine light, I am now a believer. I just have to figure out in what general area I want to live, go there, and look for vacancies. Easy. I feel a tiny bit giddy, like a kid in an ice cream store. Do I want the Rocky Road or the Chocolate Chips Ahoy?

It's possible I'm deluding myself. Housing costs in California are far beyond my meager means. It's not likely I will have many options. Still, I'm not the boss of outcomes. It might seem exceedingly unlikely I will find affordable housing (I only need one place), but it's not impossible. I'm holding onto hope.

Meanwhile I've discovered mal de debarquement syndrome (MDDS), which is easily the most fun diagnosis I have entertained for my inner ear disturbances, just for the name alone. You have to say it with a French accent, to really get the most enjoyment from it. I give myself a new diagnosis weekly, just for the hell of it, because why not? The ENT took the easy way out by slapping vestibular migraines on my chart before she offered to poke a hole in my eardrum. I'm not saying I don't have vestibular migraines, but I also have symptoms that align with other vestibular maladies, of which there are many. While I'm thinking of it, riddle me this: How come there are so many vestibular illnesses identified and named but not studied and treated? Do researchers get paid by the name? Where's their incentive to actual find the cures? Just asking for a friend.

Another fun diagnosis I entertained last week was called persistent oscillating vertigo. I mean, what's not to love? It's chronic, it's energetic, and it's mysterious. Just the word oscillating itself conjures images of egg beaters inside my inner ears, whipping up an ocotonia omelet. Before that I was into another interesting diagnosis, known as Triple P D. PPPD. Persistent postural perceptual dizziness. That's a mouthful. It's elegantly all-encompassing. I like theories that really pull everything together. PPPD is like the theory of relativity for vestibular malfunctions. So fun.

I still don't understand the mechanisms that make my right ear crackle when the waves of whatever the hell this is roll through my head. It feels mechanical, but I have a hunch my ENT, whom I will visit in early March, will tell me it truly is all in my head and I should start seeing a therapist. And taking a benzodiazapine of some kind. Not going to happen, but thanks for the suggestion, Doc.

Guess what I've been doing in my spare moments? Since yesterday, I've been staring at a video of vertical black strips rolling slowly from right to left across a white computer screen. The instructions are simple. Make the image big, get close to the screen, stare into it, and slowly bend my head from right to left and back to center, six times per minute for five minutes. Do this eight times a day for five days, and relief is all but guaranteed. I feel as if I'm in an old episode of the Avengers and any minute now, Mrs. Peel and Mr. Steed will be swooping in through the skylight to rescue me from the Hypnosis Crime Syndicate, who seek to control humanity by altering our brain waves while we think we are watching reruns of Welcome Back, Kotter. 

When I say relief is guaranteed, that assumes I actually have MDDS, which is far from certain. I don't care. To cure myself with moving vertical stripes is free, painless, and kind of cool. I find my eyes crossing, like they do when you stare into one of those 3-D Magic Eye pictures trying to find the chipmunk in all the multicolored dots. Just when you think, man, this is totally bogus, there it is, the squirrel suddenly appears, so real you could almost pick him right off the page. After you let your eyes go back to normal, for the rest of the day you feel just the slightest bit high. 

These vertical stripes are sort of like that. Eventually my eyes cross and I can see into infinity below the edge of my screen. When I move my head to follow the instructions, the lines seem to slow and stop briefly before starting again, even though I know they maintain a steady pace for the entire video. This is evidence of how my brain is messing with my eyes, and vice versa. Throw in my inner ears, my Eustachian tube . . . and apparently my spinal column, too, and no wonder I'm on a wild ride. 

I'm so over it, but I guess it is not yet done with me. The adventure continues.

My aching back

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

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

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

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

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

Change. You'd think after all this time.

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

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

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

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

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

Elevation is not the same as transcendence

Who knew elevation matters? Maybe you know all about elevation and air pressure. I'm a slow science learner. The experts tell me air pressure decreases the closer one gets to sea level. I associate low air pressure with S.A.D., clouds, wind, and rain. In most places I've been (which isn't all that many), air pressure drops when crappy weather moves in, which is why I prefer not to stay in places with crappy weather (like Portland). So should I head to sea level or not?

I don't understand the mechanics of vestibular disturbance. When the air pressure decreases, subjectively my inner ears sometimes feel more stable. However, when clouds roll in and rain starts pouring, my emotional health tumbles. (I think probably Hawaii is the place for me, but where would I park my home on wheels?) 

Last night around 11 p.m. a strange thing happened. I had a five minute respite. It took me a couple minutes to realize what was happening, so I missed enjoying the entire five minutes. Five minutes of not being off balance, of not hearing the crackling in my Eustachian Tube. It was a surprising phenomenon, to be set free. I felt normal. I couldn't believe it. I had to test it, of course. I bent over. I moved around. My head behaved normally, that is to say, I was not dizzy or off balance, and my crackling ear was silent.

Ah, blessed silence. 

I could hardly believe it was while it was happening, and I knew it wouldn't last, because why would it suddenly resolve after all this time? I hadn't done anything to warrant a miracle. That would definitely be evidence of god, and I'm not going there. Thus I was not surprised or disappointed when a few minutes later, as soon as I went to bed (which means getting horizontal), the pressure and noise were back, my old nemesis, the recurrent chronic oscillating freight train in my head. 

Oscillating is a new word I found to describe the intermittent recurring pattern of this chronic affliction. There is a thing called persistent oscillating vertigo. It is associated with mal de debarquement syndrome, which is a vestibular malady some people get after traveling by plane or boat. I don't have that, because I haven't traveled for years except by car, but apparently it's possible to have POV without having traveled, so maybe I've diagnosed myself. Kudos to me. According to Dr. Google, ETD and MDD are both rare and poorly understood disorders that ENTs would rather ignore. Which is probably why my ENTs proposed solution was to poke a hole in my eardrum. 

The remedies for almost all the vestibular maladies are the same. Drugs, therapy, and vestibular rehabilitation. For now, I'm choosing to soldier through on my own, doing my best to ignore the whole annoying mess.

You might say, well, Carol, you clearly aren't ignoring it, because you write about it every damn week in this stupid blog. Well, you would be right. I complain here in this blog because I'm not taking drugs, getting therapy, or doing physical rehab. I think if I were doing any or all of those things, I might be a happier (but poorer) person and therefore less inclined to complain here (about vestibular issues, there's always more to whine about). 

Speaking of complaining, the road trip to Quartzite has been delayed a day due to inclement weather. The storms destroying California are moving into Arizona, bringing high winds, rain, and chilly temps. I'll get there eventually. I have to find out for myself what it looks and feels like in other places. Quartzite is about 1,000 feet lower in elevation than Tucson, so it is possible my head will be happier there. I doubt it. I don't want to assume anything. However, the five minutes of respite I had last night gives me reason to hope.

One way out

As I walked along the bike path next to the Rillito River this afternoon, dodging bicyclists and enjoying the winter sun baking the back of my neck, a bicyclist rode by and said, "I saw a prairie dog." He could have been talking on the phone using invisible Blue Tooth earbuds, but I assumed he was talking to me, so I said, "Prairie dog?" He was long gone but I looked around to see if I could spot something poking its head up out of a hole in the ground. The dry riverbed was wide, full of sand and scrubby trees, probably good habitat for a critter who burrows, at least until monsoon floods sweep it into the next county. 

Not five minutes later, another bicyclist rode by me and asked, "Did you see the pigs?" She sped on by before I could ask, "Do you mean javelinas?" I assumed she wasn't from around here, maybe a newbie to Tucson, unlike me, the almost two-year resident to whom javelinas are as common as possums. Ho-hum. A couple days ago, I saw a dead one on the side of the road as I was driving by. If you see one dead javelina, you'll probably see more. They travel in squadrons. After the bicyclist had gone by, I thought, there is a possibility the woman was talking about pigs on the phone with someone in Nebraska, not addressing me at all. 

I always make everything about me.

Speaking about making everything about me, yesterday was the second anniversary of the death of my maternal parental unit. The whole day had a bit of a gray tinge to it. I try not to think of her last hours. I try to remember her from before 2016, but it's as if I'm conjuring two different people. Before she moved into the retirement home, she was strong, independent, and opinionated. Dementia was chipping at her brain, though, and soon the foundation of her independence crumbled. Now the mother I remember is the one I moved into the care home at the end of October 2020, the one I saw every evening after dinner, the one I bundled up in fleece so we could sit outside six feet apart, the one I tried to keep alive even though we were both trapped with only one way out.

I went to the care home every evening, thinking to myself, someday I won't be doing this, also thinking, god, I hope I don't have to do this for the rest of my life. 

And then it was done, and now I'm here, and I need to be someplace else, but I don't know where yet.

I used to welcome the new year, but not anymore. Tomorrow is the third anniversary of the death of my beloved cat Eddie. That day scrapes a hole in my heart every time I think of it. I guess I should be thankful Mom and Eddie didn't die the same year. That would have been the end of me.

No wonder my heart stutters. No wonder I can't get my balance.

After the latest heart scan, I'm ignoring my heart, even when it swoops and pounds. I don't want to fret about it anymore. I'm not imminently dying so what else is there to do but pretend like it isn't happening? Works for me. As far as the balance problem goes, the remedies seem to be the same, no matter the diagnosis. Do I have BPPV, PPPD, MD, VM, or something else? Who knows, who cares (not the ENT, that's for sure). The usual treatments are changes in diet (for migraines), medications (for migraines, seizures, depression, and anxiety), vestibular rehabilitation therapy (to retrain the brain, eyes, and ears), and cognitive behavioral therapy (for depression and anxiety).

Adjusting my diet seems to have no effect on my disequilibrium, unless I eat processed food, which gives me migraines but doesn't affect the vertigo. As for the second option, I'm not willing to add to my meds list, period. I already feel like a drug addict. Third option: Am I depressed? I don't think so. Am I anxious? Sort of, but not to the point of panic attacks. I think anyone contemplating moving everything without knowing their destination would be entitled to feel some anxiety. As for therapy, I'm always happy to dump my problems on someone who gets paid to listen to them, but it seems like a lot of work, and I don't think it would be all that productive. What would they tell me? It's okay to feel anxious, your life is a mess? Thanks, I already knew that. The only option worth pursuing in my inexpert but essential opinion is vestibular rehabilitation. I might try to get a referral but each session with a vestibular therapist will cost me, so I'll probably stick with Dr. Google. You can bet I've been reviewing all the videos I can find, and there are thousands. 

Meanwhile, I didn't think I was much of a gambler, but maybe I was wrong. I'm putting all my money on location, location, location. I recognize that packing up and heading west might not produce the desired outcome. What I mean is, doing a geographical might not make my spinning head feel better. What is Plan B? Thanks for asking. I have some ideas, but for now, let's stay out of the wreckage of the future. 

Making it visible

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Happy holidays from the Hellish Hand-basket

Another year plods to a close. How do individual moments seem to drag when days, months, and years speed by so fast? The moments of 2022 blend together into a big blur of terror and boredom. 

I'd recap but memory fails.

My friend asked me if I was depressed. I said, I don't think so. After our call, I looked up the symptoms of depression. While I was at it, I looked up the symptoms of anxiety. You'll be relieved to know, I don't have either one. I might have signs of dementia, but it's too soon to know for sure. 

I'm pretty sure, though, that I am still grieving.

Just plain old garden variety grief, not so much for what I’ve lost, although that lingers, but more like grief for the idea of home that didn’t manifest for me since coming to Tucson. I sought a safe affordable home in the desert, and I got a temporary fix, which is grand, but long-term, Tucson did not turn out to be the answer for me, and that makes me sad.

As long as I'm grieving, I might as well add other losses to the list. I’m sad that suddenly I have to take so many meds. I’m sad that my heart is glitchy. I’m sad that my ears won’t settle. I’m sad I will end up joining the vast numbers of "car camping" nomads while I look for my new home. It's going to take a miracle. In other words, luck and persistence.

As long as I'm sad for myself, I might as well add my tears to the universal mix. I’m sad that so many people around the world are suffering. Near and far, life is hard and people suffer. Life has always been hard. People have always suffered. On a suffering scale, is it better or worse now, compared to decades past? I have no idea. How do you define and measure suffering? Can I say I suffer more than you suffer? To me, being cold is suffering. Hothouse flower.

Today is Christmas day. Two of my siblings got on the Zoom today with their respective significant others to do the obligatory monthly family Zoom, which just happened to fall on Christmas day. One sibling was absent. He has always blazed his own trail. Even as I send him texts (where are you? Family Zoom happening now!), I envy him his detachment. There's freedom in remaining unattached.

My family detached from Christmas years ago. When the parents were alive, we'd go out to eat. No cooking, no cleaning. Then we detached from the season by adopting a round-robin secret Santa gift-giving exchange among the immediate family members. Before long, we stopped giving gifts all together. Dad died, Mom became demented, I was broke, my younger brother was busy, and my older brother didn't care. 

Only my sister seems interested in carrying on any sort of family tradition or ritual. Channeling Mom, she sent me a toothbrush for Xmas 2021. This year I asked her not to. I can buy my own toothbrushes. But I think she was trying to hold family tradition together. As we get older, traditions have tattered. Memories have faded. We are widely scattered with no parent to glue the family dregs together. Interest and energy are circling the drain. 

Speaking of family rituals, next spring I'm planning to take a road trip to Oregon. If all goes according to plan, my sister will fly out from Boston. We will drive down to the coast and scatter Mom's ashes on the Columbia River at the same place we scattered my father's ashes, if we can find the place. It might have been washed away by time and tide since 2005 or whenever we did that ritual. Mom's been in a box for almost two years. It's time we set her free. Not that she would care—Elf on a Shelf, Mom in a Box—but I suppose my brother could use the shelf space.

It's possible that I will discover my next home somewhere on that road trip. Fingers crossed.

Free falling in slow motion

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It looks like the end, but it's not

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

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

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

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

What is success?

The question of the day: What is success? Go ahead, take your time. I'll let you ponder the question for a minute. It's not a trick question, but answering it could be tricky. Maybe write a list. Okay, time's up. What did you come up with? More important, whose version of success did you channel? 

 

Was it the definition of a long-dead ancestor? I pose the question because someone tried to impose their version of success on me today. After the conversation concluded, I realized it wasn't even their own definition. It was really a dead person's version of success. May they rest in pieces. 

The supposed implication was that if I aspired to that definition of success, I would be happy. Or safe, which some might say is more important than being happy.  

Did you make a list? What do you need to have in order to feel successful? Safe, secure, affordable housing and a good job? Maybe a committed relationship, a pet or two, a reliable car, a big-screen TV? Good health insurance, money in the bank, and a 401K? A predictable present and a future with no surprises?

Occasionally, I've allowed someone else's definition of success to influence my decisions. I've discovered the more I pursue someone else's dreams, the less I know who I am. Sometimes I feel guilty that I'm not measuring up to another person's definition of success. I feel ashamed for wanting to succeed on my own terms. That doesn't stop me, though, not for long. 

Success for me is living a healthy creative life of service on my own terms within my means. It's a construct of moving parts. I've had to flex at times. Rarely have I been able to accomplish all parts at the same time. Some parts can flex temporarily but other parts are not negotiable. 

I don't think I was meant to walk the well-trodden path. Sometimes the riskier road calls.

Searching for a feeling

As I was shuffling along the bike path by the dry Rillito River riverbed, I came to a realization that has helped me put another piece of the puzzle of my life into place. Let me set the scene. The riverbed is an energetic entity in this desert town. Its dry sand, green trees, scrubby bushes, and plastic garbage are home to all kinds of wildlife. For instance, last night at 1:25 a.m. I heard a coyote howling close by. It was probably in the wash out back of the trailer but it sounded like it was outside my window. Four husky cough-like barks followed by a perfect-pitch howl, five times in a row. I almost got up to go outside. Then I thought, are you nuts? I did that last time a dog barked in the wash. Do you know how cold it is in the desert in the middle of the night? I don't either, but it's not warm.  

Anyway, the riverbed is an amazing landscape. I enjoy walking on the bike path, dodging bike riders, skateboarders, and runners. During the day, the sun is warm for about two hours. The air feels great, especially if the wind is calm. Toward sundown the temperature starts dropping back toward the upper-30s, so I'm learning to walk while the sun is still high in the sky. The downside is, UV rays. The upside is, warm. I will always seek warmth. I'm somewhat like a lizard in that respect.

So, what did I figure out? Thanks for asking. 

First, let me insert this funny drawing that sums up the week. I drew this in 1998, as if I knew that today would be the day I would need it. 

There you go. Yeah, that seems about right.  

So, okay, thanks for waiting. I am going to tell you my little epiphany. 

But first, a little back story.

When I left home in 1977, I knew my destination. My friend Jenny had preceded me to Los Angeles, and there was no place else I wanted to be. So off I went to L.A. I stayed there for twenty years. 

In 1997, I moved back to Portland. Again, I knew my destination. Where else would I have gone? My family was there. It made sense to return home to clean up the mess of my young adulthood. After some time, I was recruited to be my mother's caregiver. You know the story. 

When I was set free in 2021, once again, I had a destination in mind: Tucson. I'd visited this city once thirty-some-odd years ago. I had a friend here. Actually more than one friend, it turned out, which was a good thing for me, because the first friend died. The second friend gave me a place to land, and now as luck would have it, we are housemates. Pure miraculous divine chance. (Is that a thing?)

Unfortunately for me, my inner ears aren't happy with the desert climate. The relentless fluctuations in air pressure keep me constantly unbalanced. I'm very careful, but I recognize that out here in the desert, I'm a perpetual fall risk. I don't care where I die, but this is not where I want to break a hip. There are other reasons Tucson is not the ideal home for me, but the air pressure variations are the main culprit. I've been researching almost since the day I arrived, trying to figure out where I should go next.

So, here I am, walking along the path, wondering where my next destination will be, and it occurs to me that what I seek is not a destination. What I seek is a feeling. Two feelings in one, really: A physical feeling (inner ear equilibrium) and an emotional feeling (call it . . . serenity). I can't choose a city on a map and move there, hoping that the city will give me the feelings I desire. I need to go out into the world in search of the feelings and then look around and see where I landed.

I'm not starting from total scratch, in case you are wondering. I mean, I could just hang a map on the wall, close my eyes, and throw some darts. I've heard of people doing that. It sounds like fun, but what if, once again, I end up in a place that upsets my inner ears and doesn't make me happy? I'm too old to waste time moving the possessions I still possess from place to place, as if affordable housing were hanging on trees. 

Darts on a map won't work but I do have some data, as I've shared in this blog before. Sea level is least likely to have huge changes in air pressure (except for Florida hurricanes, East coast nor'easters, and Pacific Northwest wind storms). My best bet is Florida (sans hurricanes) and southern California. I bet you can tell which way I will let the wind blow me. 

There's no predicting where exactly I will end up. It's very tempting to look at a map, study the housing opportunities in a city, and say, there, that place, that is where I will go. It worked out when I moved to L.A., but it didn't work when I moved to Tucson. I can't know how my inner ears will react until I go to a place, so choosing a place without visiting first would be . . .  I was going to say nuts, but let's just say, it would be inadvisable. 

I can hear you saying, Carol, nobody in their right mind would choose a city and move there without checking it out first. You are no doubt correct. I never claimed to be in my right mind. I'm getting nuttier by the minute. As a person who up till now has planned long, pondered hard, and taken action much much much later with great caution, I can barely fathom the idea of packing up and leaving without a destination. Who does that? Me, apparently. 

Destined for greatness

Howdy Blogbots. I'm happy to announce, my glitchy heart keeps chugging along, dragging the rest of me with it. I guess I follow where the heart leads me—haven't I always done that, isn't that what making art is all about, following our bliss? Who knew I was supposed to take it literally. Like, my heart is pounding out the beat of my life. When it stops, I stop.

The good news (according to my cardiologist) is my heart is misfiring but not so often or so badly that there's anything to be done about it yet. The other good news is that my upcoming CT scan was postponed until after Christmas because the machine was broken. I'm over it, this whole IV needle in the arm thing, this let's shoot you full of iodine dye thing. Probably I'll be fine.

Now that I'm probably going to live a while longer, I have had the luxury of thinking about other things.

I was thinking the other day that I have paid a high premium for the privilege of eschewing a "normal" working life for a life of creativity. At each major crossroads I encountered, I said no to money and yes to creativity. I never found a road that led to both at the same time. For me, it was always one or the other. 

Oh, sure, I had jobs, as do we all. I've had many. Among my many jobs, I've been a waitress, an administrative assistant, a gardener, a bus driver, a graphic designer, a seamstress, a warehouse worker, an activities assistant in a nursing home, and a teacher. Any one of those jobs could have been a career. But nope, not for me, I was born retired, which is to say, when a career opportunity crossed my path, I ran in the opposite direction. I said no, not to be stubborn, but because I knew I was destined for something else. I could have gone into marketing or marketing research. I could have pursued a teaching career. I could have worked my way into nursing home administration. I could have been an executive secretary for some dude in a suit. Crossroads that would have most likely led to a much different life: nicer cars, maybe a house, some money in the bank, and a healthy retirement fund.

Back at those crossroads, I would have said I was destined for a life of fulfilling creativity, as a painter, most likely, or as a famous fashion illustrator or clothing designer. Now, years later, with not much road left in front of me, I can say all those refusals have produced a life of poverty and struggle. I admit, I am a little sad. I can't say I regret my choices. I would probably do it again, if I had a do-over. I chose it, it chose me, who knows? They aren't kidding when they say do what you love and you'll probably starve. 

I can't tell if I'm simply addicted to poverty or if this is just what happens to some creative people in a society that doesn't value or support creative low-income earners. I've never made the kind of art that sells, and I wasn't willing to adapt my art to suit someone else's esthetic. I guess you can say I chose this life because my brain made me do it. That makes as much sense as anything else people have diagnosed me with. I always wondered if my brain was trying to kill me, but maybe it's just life with a thousand tiny knives making a thousand tiny cuts.

I'm too old and tired to whine about it (except here, sorry). There's nothing to be done. When I find myself wading into a pity puddle, I stop and get busy writing. It beats all the alternatives.  

Stop making sense

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

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

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

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

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

That kind of nut.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Life's little losses still linger

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

Truthfully, I would rather be left alone. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Let me give you some examples. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

Let me give you an example. 

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

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

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

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

Visualize a perfect life

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It's all about balance

I sense some sort of adventure is lurking over the horizon. Right now, I'm too tired to chase it, but I think it is close by. I hope once the iron pills kick in, I will have a little more ambition. And color. My friend S said I'm pale. I thought it was just my Zoom lighting. It's important to look good even if you don't feel good. I learned that from my father. Nobody cares how you feel, but everyone cares about how you look. Thanks for everything, Pop. I'd give you back your funky heart valve if I could.

Speaking of looking good, I'm glad my housemate is back, and I'm really glad E didn't have to witness my week of starvation prep for the procedure, now two weeks in my hindmost of rear view mirrors. Some things are better suffered in solitude, massive liquid diarrhea explosions being one of them. It wasn't just a wild goose chase up a colon with a camera. They did find something that might account for my iron anemia. Biopsies indicate it is something benevolent, but it's unclear what if anything comes next, besides take iron pills. 

The heart thing had me a little worried, I admit. However, after a chat with my primary care person, I've feel reassured I can live with this, whatever this is, at least for the immediate future. The cardiologist isn't precisely sure what he's working with (am I a two-leafer or a three-leafer? We need another test to tell for sure). That will happen in November. Another IV. Ho hum. 

In any case, I'm over it. All of it. I'm over everything. I just wish I could regain some equilibrium and get the hissing in my ear to stop, but maybe it's all just part of the new balancing act I'm being called to execute, now that I'm officially old. 

I've never been good at balancing. In high school we had to do a couple weeks of gymnastics, which included torture sessions on various intimidating pieces of equipment. The parallel bars, the horse thing, the mini-horse, what did we call that little thing, the Shetland pony? I can't remember. And of course, the balance beam. I was terrible at all of it. I had no strength, no grace, and most of all, no gumption. About all I could manage was a respectable handstand. I've never had any poise. From elementary school onward, gym class was endless humiliation and embarrassment. 

It hasn't improved with adulthood. I used to be able to run, well, jog, let's be clear. I was never a sprinter. I liked to think I had potential as a long distance runner, but I lacked discipline. I didn't care enough to train rigorously. I ran one marathon, slowly, and called it good. Now I can barely trot twenty yards before my heart is hammering and my lungs are wheezing. Maybe when the iron pills kick in . . . 

I'm dwelling on all this because I just had a birthday. Fall is a time of reflection, and having a fall birthday invites self-reflection. My self-reflection does not include mirrors but it does include a hefty dose of self-criticism. I am not used to thinking of myself as a sick person. Even though I have never been graceful (my sister was the ballet dancer and figure skater, not me. I played softball and volleyball), I never thought of myself as physically weak. Emotionally frayed, yes, but I could always throw a ball if I had to. Now I have to find a new equilibrium. I don't know how close I can get to the cliff edge before I fall into the abyss. I used to walk that cliff edge, metaphorically speaking. Now I can't see it because my eyes are filming over with cataracts. I can't hear the hiss of empty air over the hiss of my dysfunctional Eustachian tube. I can't even enjoy chewing my food from fear that osteoporosis and bisphosphonates have given me necrosis in my jaw. 

You are probably thinking, oh, what's the use? Why do we keep going when it is so obviously futile and fatal? Right, I get you. It's all about balance. When the heart isn't pounding, when my ear isn't crackling, when my eyes are closed, and I'm leaning securely against something so I won't fall over, I can feel the cold evening desert air coming in the bathroom window. Today it was so humid, I almost thought I could smell the ocean. 

You know what parts of the U.S. have the least amount of air pressure fluctuation? Along the southern coasts at sea level. Southern California, southern Florida. One of these days it will be time for a road trip. As soon as the iron pills kick in. 

Stuff piling up in the rear view mirror

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

My heart is broken

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

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

WTF, Universe!? 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Don't get up in my undercarriage

 

I have an ongoing quest to lighten my load. To that end, I have offloaded more kitchen stuff to my housemate. This trailer easily absorbed a microwave, a rice cooker, and a toaster oven. I brought the microwave from Portland. It was Mom's microwave, the one she had at the Cottage. It's got two dials and it dings. The rice cooker and the toaster oven I bought when I moved into the Bat Cave. I don't know why I thought I would suddenly start eating rice and toast. Probably for the same reason I thought I'd buy orange slacks and flowered shirts, now that I'm in the desert. As if moving would make me a different person. Nope. I still eat nuts and twigs. I still wear grungy pajamas. I've regressed to my personal mean. There's no budging me now.

I have a short stack of cardboard boxes ready to offload to the thrift store next week. I can't believe I'm still downsizing. On this round, I'm jettisoning some coffee cups. I only need one. I'm letting go of a clear glass dish good for baking banana bread, or meatloaf, if you are so inclined. I think it might have been Mom's. My old beat-up $20 blender is going. My little waffle iron, so long. The coffee grinder. I'm not buying beans anymore. I'm now mixing Sprouts French roast with Yuban. It's just a matter of time before I'm stirring instant coffee with a plastic spoon. 

I doubt I will miss any of it. If I haven't used the stuff in a year, it's unlikely I ever will. Besides the kitchen gear, I boxed up a couple desk lamps I bought when I moved here, when all my stuff was still in storage and I needed to have light in the Trailer. I'm letting go of my light therapy box. Brain fog is the least of my worries given my affliction with vertigo or whatever it is. The ENT doesn't think it is vertigo. It might have been at one time, but untreated, now it's disequilibrium stemming from vestibular migraines. She made up the diagnosis based on what is popular in the medical literature, I'm pretty sure. Vestibular migraines is all the range right now. Who cares? If it can't be measured, it's not really happening. Just stick a fork in it and call it done. 

I'm in a downsizing contest with myself, it seems. How little do I need to live? I remember reading about that guy who has all his possessions in a backpack, something like forty items. He showed a photo of them all spread out on a small picnic blanket. What he didn't talk much about is how he relied on the generosity of others in order to live. He could afford to mosey around without the basic accoutrements of American life because he was borrowing the accoutrements of others. 

What are the basic accoutrements? A bed, I suppose, or something to sleep on. I didn't see a bedroll or sleeping bag, so he must have been sleeping on other people's beds. Did he have a way to store and cook food? He had a dish and a spoon. That seemed overly optimistic. I didn't see a method to keep clean, a mechanism to handle waste. He had his feet for moving from here to there, but I seem to recall people gave him rides. You can get rides when you are a social media celebrity. And beds. And cooked food. I want to be a minimalist, not a moocher.

Did that guy feel as if he had a place to be? Was that one of his basic accoutrements? 

I guess that is the part I still find confounding, that place-to-be thing. Where does a person go when they have no place to go? My worst fear used to be that I would end up living in my parent's basement. Oh, how naïve. At that time, they had a very nice basement. I've lived in basements, they aren't so bad. I'd live in a basement now, here in Tucson, if anyone had such a thing, which they don't, because the entire city rests on top of caliche, which is cement, in case you didn't know (I didn't). Not many basements here. Or lawns, either. This is such a weird place. The sunsets are amazing, though.

With climate change shaking up the globe, it might make sense to be a nomad, if I can still buy food, water, and gasoline. No guarantees on any of that, but what is my alternative? I can't afford to buy a home, I can't afford to rent an apartment. When the next viral pandemic arrives and turns us all into mindless zombies, I guess I'll just go with the crowd. Why fight it? I might be able to outrun the plague if I'm mobile, assuming my car still runs and there's still electricity for pumping gas. Well, if it isn't the virus that takes me down, it will be a fire or a flood. Or maybe an old-fashioned boring car crash. They have a lot of those here in Tucson. 

I don't have a lot of years left in me, so I don't expect my suffering to last long. Besides, suffering is optional. So they say. 

Busy getting something done

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

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

So now I question my existence.

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

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

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

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

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

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