The Hellish Handbasket Blog

  • Thinking errors

    I hardly ever know what I’m going to blog about when I start a new post. That means I’m a pantser when it comes to writing. A pantser is a writer who writes by the seat of their pants. Which is very odd expression, when I think about it. I searched for the term and discovered it originated with early pilots who relied on the feel and pressure of their butt in the seat to fly their plane. Good thing I’m only a writing pantser, not a pilot pantser. Crashing into things when writing usually is not fatal.

    Speaking of writing, another episode of writing from prompts occurred on Friday. Only four writers showed up but we made our valiant attempts to weave stories from five words.

    Here are the five words for this week.

    difficult

    communicate

    camouflage

    discovery

    control

    Here is what I wrote, and disappointment warning, it’s not very good. The thread eluded me.

    When you suspect danger is lurking in the bushes, you can thank your ancestors you are ready to run. Ancient humans who ignored the difficult lesson of assuming danger was everywhere failed to transmit their inferior genes to the next generation. In contrast, the superior genes of humans who assumed the dappled shade was camouflage for a hungry tiger survived to communicate the importance of staying in control, which meant their descendants enjoyed a healthy fear of dappled shade, even when the shade was just shade. You can thank your superior genes you learned to run.

    I don’t know what staying in control has to do with anything, but there you go. Not all impromptu essays make sense. Hence my claim to be a pantser. If I did some revising, maybe I could massage this little story into something more coherent, but why bother? Nobody cares.

    Speaking of staying in control (or not), or speaking about caring about soemthing, there is something my family cares about and cannot control and that is a member who has gone AWOL. Last night I called a city police department and asked them to do a welfare check on our family member who may be having some cognitive difficulties. Of course, my siblings feared disaster, but none of us seemed willling to take action. Including me, at first. I am usually inclined to let the chips fall, assuming most adults should be allowed to manage their own lives, even when that means choosing to drive off a cliff, but my sibs were exhibiting signs of manic anxiety, so I made the call last night.

    The police officer informed me the family member was apparently okay, still alive, anyway, but I know from experience that people experiencing the onset of cognitive impairment are experts at hiding behind social norms. For example, our mother was a master at using polite conversation to hide the fact that she didn’t understand a thing and couldn’t have reasoned her way out of a bathroom.

    In my family member’s case, I have a feeling the chips will continue to fall, but if I’ve learned anything from my mother’s mental decline, chips fall whether you want them to or not.

  • I asked the reaper to lunch

    Today I read the first line of the blogpost I wrote last week and felt a wave of pity for last week’s poor innocent stupid blogger, who had no idea how her complaints would sound so pathetic in light of this week’s horrorshow. I won’t tell you how cruddy I feel about the state of the world, but I will tell you, I really hope aliens (and I mean the outerspace kind) will enter our orbit, take one look at the mess we’ve made, and nuke the entire planet to smithereens. The loss of all those butterflies, puppies, and polar bears seems a small price to pay for the galactic relief of annhililating a species that was bound to ruin everything if allowed to propagate beyond our puny solar system.

    Anything I might say about anything other than to report that a wild turkey strolled across my patio on Tuesday seems ignorant, self-centered, and pointless. As cool as wild turkeys are, the thought of writing about turkeys makes me want to take a nap. I’m so demoralized by everything, it’s all I can do to offer up a sigh of gratitude to the housing gods who finally took pity on me and inserted me into a low-income studio apartment in a neighborhood overrun by wild turkeys.

    Last Saturday as I was heading out to protest, I met one of my neighbors, an elderly woman with an unusual name that escapes me at the moment. She is one of the small posse of smokers who carry plastic patio chairs out to the sidewalk because smoking is not allowed on the property.

    I paused to say hello. She looked at the camping chair I carried and asked me where I was going. I told her I was going down to the crossroads to join the protesters and do my part to save democracy.

    Pity seems to be the theme this week. The look she gave me was half pity and half disgust, with a sprinkle of ridicule and disdain and a splash of plain ordinary resentment. She made a passive aggressive snarky comment that my brain has erased from my memory out of self-preservation. I replied something to the effect of “live and let live,” which seems to be my sadly misguided motto these days. Truth, I’d like to bust some heads (slowly, given the condition of my right hip), but busting the head of my tiny old neighbor is probably not the way to express my outrage. I try to remember that everyone is angry, and under all that burning anger is deep existential fear.

    Expressing my fury is futile. My hair caught on fire and disappeared a long time ago. Now pink scalp shows through wispy ash-colored shreds. In the olden days, I would have resorted to ice cream and alcohol to stuff down my feelings. Now there’s not much I can do to soothe my inner maniac other than take a nap.

    You might say, Carol, call your State representatives and express your anger. I will say to you in response, first of all, I hate talking on the phone, and second, sending emails to my Congresspeople through their contact form to ask them to stop whining and do something is not satisfying, especially when ten seconds later I get an automatic response thanking me for contacting So-and-So’s office and alerting me that due to the high volume of calls and emails, So-and-So won’t be getting back to me anytime in the next millennium.

    If you are still here, thanks for reading. I really have nothing to say that hasn’t been said by everyone, everywhere, so I’ll shut up now.

  • Invoking my superpower

    When it comes to living situations, it’s my nature to cope with whatever I get. Rarely have I chosen. Whether I was living with parents, siblings, roommates, partners, whatever . . . I dealt with it. Ten-foot square bedroom? No problem. Give me a few shelves to hold all my stuff, I’m good. Ten-foot square storefront with no running water? Piece of cake. A makeshift cutting table has a lot of storage space under it. A hanging garment rack makes a perfect place to hide a foam mattress on the floor.

    I am a master at utilizing small spaces. All I need are some particle board and a little duct tape, a jigsaw, and a drill. After a year and a half living in my car (which at 4 feet by 8 feet was practically a palace), I am an expert at staying clean, warm(ish), hydrated, and fed, even without consistent access to bathrooms, heaters, running water, and stoves and refrigerators.

    It’s amazing how humans can adapt to survive. For me, as long as I knew living in my car was temporary, I had hope that things could get better. However, now that the situation has drastically improved, the idea of having to live in my car again generates paralyzing dread.

    So I ripped out the build in my car.

    Yep. Stripped it down to its essence. The bed platform, the cabinets, the curtain rods, all gone. The minivan has reverted to a space to transport cargo. That’s what it was built to be. It was never meant to be a home. And now it’s not.

    It’s strange to think I fit my life into that small space. I did what I had to do while I waited for my name to come up on a waitlist. I coped. Every now and then, usually when I was sitting on my makeshift toilet trying to pee quietly in the middle of the night while parked on a Portland city street, I would have a sense of surreality, like the life I was living belonged to someone else. These were difficult moments.

    A couple times, I wondered what would happen if I stopped being able to cope. In those moments, I wondered how people around me would react if I started screaming. Each time, I eased myself back into the present moment, where the simple acts of daily living kept me grounded and sane. “Don’t dramatize. Lots of people are suffering. Millions would be thrilled to trade places with you. Get over it. Go refill your water jugs. Go get apples. Get gas. Dump your trash. Put out your solar panels. Keep going, don’t give up, and don’t be a jerk while you do it.”

    Now that I’m housed, the thought of going back into that small space makes me hyperventilate. That’s how I know how traumatic the past year and a half was for me. I couldn’t admit my fears while I was immersed in them. I would have given up. I’m stronger now, though. I know how to fit my life into a minivan box and survive until the situation gets better. I’ve always had the knack. It’s my superpower. If I have to invoke it again, I can and I will.

  • Still chronically malcontented after all these years

    I’m never satisfied. It doesn’t matter where I am or what I’m doing, I admit, I’m rarely content. I’m not always conscious that I’m not content. Lately I’m just taking life as it comes, but sometimes I wake up and realize things in the world, and in my life, could be better.

    I can’t do anything about the world’s problems, and my only choices to improve my own life are (a) change my attitude or (b) change my situation. I’m ruled by fear, I know. I fall repeately into the wreckage of the future.

    Speaking of future wrecking, this week, I signed a lease on a studio apartment in a low-income senior housing . . . what do you call it? A facility? A complex? It’s not a nursing home, I don’t think. It’s not big enough to be called a complex, whatever that is.

    I’ve seen the apartments from the outside, but I haven’t actually seen the apartment I’m renting. That’s nuts, right? At this point, I don’t care. As long as it has hot water, heat, and no cockroaches, I’m good. Mainly, I’m looking forward to making my family happy.

    So what did I do? I paid my rent, deposit, and the electricity deposit, and immediately left town.

    Actually I had a preplanned gig to babysit the little dog Maddie. I left Portland on Wednesday, stopped in Coos Bay to sign the lease and hand over a large amount of money, and then I hit the road, heading south toward the desert.

    Did you know that California hates travelers? I’d forgotten. California has arranged the rest areas along I-5 to be (a) stuck in endless renovation, (b) limited to an eight-hour stay, or (c) barred to overnight parking. I experienced this lack of courtesy on the drive north, which is why I ended up driving from the Cracker Barrel in Bakersfield all the way to the Welcome Center in Ashland, Oregon.

    This time, I made the trip in reverse. From Medford, I drove south on I-5, assuming I would come to a rest area that would put me up for the night. Closed, time limit, no overnight parking, yada yada. So I kept going south, heading toward the only place I knew I could park without a hassle. Yep. Cracker Barrel in Bakersfield.

    On the bright side, literally: the Beaver Moon. On the downside, I can’t see well at night. Plus, I wasn’t familiar with the road from I-5 to Bakersfield. Lots of irate drivers stacked up behind me. I’m always the pilot car. I put a handmade sticker on my back window: Go around me. It’s probably only readable when the semi behind me is about to crawl up my tail pipe.

    Remind me never to eat at Cracker Barrel again. What was I thinking? In my defense, I know I ate there once before, and I forgot that I had vowed not to repeat the horrors. Second worst coffee ever. I forget where I had the worst coffee. I won’t remember until I go there again.

    So now I’m sitting in my car, which is parked in the desert outside of Quartzsite, where everyone around me is doing the same thing, a hundred yards away in all directions, spread out like galaxies in the expanding universe. The breeze is light, the sun is shining, the sky is brilliant blue, and the temperature is heading up, up, up. Perfect. I’d stay here forever if it weren’t so dang hot in the summer. And if I had proper housing with air conditioning.

    But my life is about to change. Soon I will be housed, at least for the next year. My savings will drain away slowly, as they have since I left Portland in 2021. This trajectory can only go one way, unless I win the lottery, which is unlikely.

    I’m going to take contrary action and refuse to succumb to my chronically malcontented self. Out here, with the dome of blue sky overhead, I almost feel content. Soon I will be loading my stuff out of the storage unit and into my car to make the two-hour drive to my new town. I hope the apartment will not be too dark or depressing. I hope the people are nice, and more important, quiet. I hope I can find some cheap used furniture (the kind that doesn’t come with bedbugs). Mainly, I hope I have enough savings to last the year.

    If it all goes sideways . . . and if I my car still works, and if I can still drive, I can always come back to the desert.

  • What happens if the internet goes down?

    As I was hiking in the forest, I was thinking about life before we had the internet. It seems so long ago, but I remember when Ma Bell was a thing. We had a party line that started with Alpine 4. I memorized our phone number when I was in kindergarten. My mother had that phone number almost until the day she died.

    Now she’s gone, and so is Ma Bell, but we have lots of other monopolies that have insinuated themselves into the fabric of our lives so thoroughly that it is hard to imagine life without them. I’m thinking of Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Apple, Comcast, Walmart . . . I used to live without these things. What would my life would be like if I didn’t have them anymore?

    Or if I chose not to have them?

    Some pundits are recommending boycotts. Boycotting Disney for cancelling one of my favorite late night talk show hosts is one thing. Boycotting Google would be like deciding not to breathe. For one thing, it would kill me. For another, Google would not care. One dead user means nothing. There are a billion more where I came from.

    I’m not an Apple person, but I am a Microsoft person. I’ve researched alternatives to Windows and Office. Learning new software would be a challenge given the unwillingness of my tired brain, but I could do it. If Microsoft went bankrupt, I’d figure out something.

    If Google failed, I’d devise a workaround somehow. Some other calendar system, some other search engine. Email would be okay: I still use yahoo, which is only a few days newer than aol. As long as I have internet access, I could live without Google.

    What about Amazon? I remember when Amazon was an online bookstore. Nobody thought people would buy books online. Look at us now. Amazon sells everything, literally everything. You can buy a house on Amazon. Shopping would be more difficult without Amazon, but it could be done. Imagine going to local business to shop everyday, not just one day a year. I’m not including Walmart in that group of small businesses. If Amazon went down, I personally would be affected: Amazon KDP sells my books. But there are alternatives, as long as I have access to the internet.

    But what if the entire internet collapsed? What would not be affected, considering many sectors of the world infrastructure and economy depend on the internet to function? Electrical grids would fail, causing gasoline pumps to cease pumping. What else would stop working? Communications, banking and finance, air traffic control, modern hospitals, modern schools, and horror of horrors, social media, streaming, and online shopping. So says an AI summary.

    We wouldn’t have telephones anymore, at least not ones that rely on the internet or the power grid. Corded landline phones would work until the phone companies’ backup generators stopped producing power. By then, I expect all the phone company employees would have gone home to circle their wagons.

    Maybe I should consider brushing up on my siphoning skills. Or I could just punch a hole in someone else’s gas tank, assuming they still had gas, of course. I used to watch the Walking Dead, until I couldn’t anymore. Besides running from walkers, the characters spent a lot of time searching for food, water, and gas. Maybe consider watching old episodes yourself, for research purposes.

    I am thinking I need to get one of those survival books that show how we can survive after the apocalypse. You know, how to forage for wild plants, how to grow and process our own food, how to generate our own energy without destroying the environment. Pioneers figured out how to do it, maybe not gracefully but they survived to pass on their genes to us. Of course, they killed a lot of native people in the process, but we don’t have to do that, right?

    One thing that will keep working is guns. Until we run out of ammo, which probably won’t happen in my lifetime, we should be able to defend our gas supplies, our patch of land, our water cisterns, and our food stores. Not to mention our child-bearing women, so we can repopulate after the apocalypse is over.

    You might be saying, Carol, what is your problem? How about looking on the bright side for a change? My response, besides asking you why you care what I think, is to look around and tell me what you are seeing. Because if you aren’t seeing what is happening, then you won’t survive the apocalypse. Assuming you want to, of course.

  • Every moment is a new chance to mess things up

    It’s tempting to let someone else take over. It’s hard to always be responsible, to be nice, to show up, to get it done. Wouldn’t it be easier if we could just ask someone else to take the reins for a while, go back to a time when we were told when to go to bed, what to eat, what shoes to wear, who to hang out with? Life would be so much simpler.

    Children eventually rebel, though. Not many kids would let someone tell them what to do when they figure out they could make their own choices. So they go out and try things, and if they survive, they learn. Then they find out how fricking hard it is to show up to the job, maintain the house, keep the family together . . . and there we go again, ready to let someone else take charge for a while. Not forever, just until we catch our breath, regroup, rest.

    Then we find out the people we ceded our authority to aren’t helping us, they are only helping themselves. In fact, they don’t care about us at all! The nerve. We get all indignant, how could they do this, have they no shame, how dare they, yada yada yada. Do we ever stop to remember we chose to turn the keys to the kingdom over to someone who promised we would not lose what we have or that we would not get what we want?

    Joke’s on us. Most of us won’t live to see the punchline, but our kids and grandkids will be cleaning up our mess for decades. Then they’ll have their little revolution, throw off the reins, declare their independence from tyranny, congratulate themselves, maybe even tolerate their neighbors for a few halcyon years . . . until one group begins to fear they will lose what they have or not get what they want, and they start pointing fingers at the outgroup and say you can’t have the spoils of our hard-won independence anymore. We want it for ourselves. Go play in the corner.

    Not everyone wants to give up their independence, but the ones who do often outnumber the ones who don’t. And so those of us in the margins have no choice but to slink offstage, lick our wounds, and plot our takeover, dreaming of our future glorious triumph.

    Free at last! Until the moment we start pointing fingers at whatever other happens to stoke our fear that we are going to lose what we have or not get what we want.

    And round and round it goes.

  • I love my neighbor, but they don’t love me

    In fact, my neighbors hate me. Well, maybe not me specifically, but people like me, vehicle dwellers. If my skin wasn’t lily white, I’d be in real trouble. As it is, I feel like an outcast, a pariah, a loser.

    Someone on a podcast said Jesus was an advocate for the outsider. I’m not a Christian, but I understand the idea of ostracizing people from society simply because of their lifestyle, their appearance, their income status . . . well, you name it. There is never not a good reason to exclude someone from the ingroup. As I’ve said before, it’s built into the human survival instinct. Preserve the tribe against all encroachers. Circle the wagons around the homestead. Build a fortress, drop a bomb before they can drop one on you.

    I am not a Christian, but each day I pray to something I don’t understand to help me be loving and kind. Kindness and fear are like oil water. They don’t mix. It’s hard to hate someone when you are kind to them. Try it and tell me if I’m wrong.

    I’m pissed off a lot lately, which makes it harder to be kind. That’s why I am doubling-down on my amateur prayer. It’s difficult to be kind to someone when I see them wrecking things because they are haters. It takes a lot of effort to empathize with someone who hates me and wishes I were dead. Not just hate for me but hate for everyone. I don’t understand it. I can only surmise they hate themselves. That’s why it’s especially important to intentionally practice kindness. Even when I want to say kiss my rosy red rump.

    I don’t have to love everyone like family, but I do believe for me it’s important to love everyone as if they were my neighbor. It’s how I would like to be treated, for one thing, and for another thing, we might actually be neighbors one day. Unlikely but possible. I might want to borrow a cup of sugar. They might need a jump. I want to meet them with generous empathy. I know they are scared they are going to lose something they treasure or not get something they want. I get it. I have the same fears.

    In fact, my simmering anger and resentment come from fear. It’s a lot more satisfying to be angry than it is to be scared. Anger is energtic. Fear is passive. Anger inspires action. Fear cowers. I don’t want to be a wimp. I want to be strong.

    Righteous anger is especially seductive. I can feel strong and right at the same time. Nothing makes me feel more powerful than condemning someone from a position of self-righteousness. Self-justification is a part of the human instinct for survival. How else can you explain why people in power refuse to admit their actions harm others? If they realized their attitudes and actions are based on fear and self-loathing, they wouldn’t be able to live with themselves. They would have to self-destruct from shame. That won’t happen. Therefore, they take refuge on their self-constructed hill and lob missiles at those of us who happen to live in the lowland.

    A friend told me resentment is anger coming out a very small hole. That statement always makes me laugh. It conjures up images of buttholes, which by definition are hilarious. Appreciation for anus-related jokes are also part of human instinct, at least for those who will survive the current apocalypse. These humans possess the ability to laugh at the human condition even while they live as humans among humans. It’s so meta and comical at the same time.

    The only way out of this mess is through it. Practicing kindness toward ourselves and others paves some of the potholes on the path to respect and cooperation. I recommend it when you are feeling the urge to kill someone.