The Hellish Handbasket Blog

  • Poof, just about gone

    If you’ve ever lived through a disaster, you know how fast life can change. The death of a loved one, a car wreck, an earthquake, a flood, a fire, a coup . . . in an instant, all the things you know and love, the dreams you had, the hopes you worked, maybe for generations, gone. Nothing will ever be the same. In geological time, two hundred and fifty years is not even a blip. Even in geopolitical time, it’s barely a blip. Myriad regimes have risen and fallen over the last few millennia. But not all regimes are worth saving.

    Like Hertz, we tried harder. Like Hertz, it won’t be enough. The American brand is tarnished beyond repair. Maybe we can pull off a Tylenol, but given that there are a lot of wackjobs in politics right now, it’s not likely our reputation as a trusted ally can be saved. We could do a Cracker Barrel in hopes of achieving a total refresh, but at this point, the odds aren’t in our favor. The whole world sees our shenanigans. They aren’t buying the Shining City crap.

    A few years ago, I was patting myself on the back for having the metaphysical foresight to be born in the perfect place, the perfect time, with the perfect color skin. The only thing I messed up was gender, but in my defense, it’s damn hard to control metaphysics. Like Blockbuster, I almost got it right.

    Now, ha ha, joke’s on me. My gloating over grabbing the perfect place and time has come back to bite me. Even though I didn’t vote for this madness, I’m in the boat with the rest of you. We’ve hit the rocks. There’s a big hole in our metaphorical hull. The seawater is pouring in. It’s not hard to predict what happens next.

    The good news is most people, if they are willing to leave the cult, want the same things: peace, security, and good health for themselves and their families, and enough resources to live meaningful lives in respectfull community with others. We might not be seeing it at the macro level, but it’s everywhere at the micro level.

    For example, several states have passed laws allowing backyard/balcony solar panels that connect to the grid. How cool is that! Windfarms and solar farms are still being installed despite the current regime’s attempt to quash progress toward clean energy.

    Even better, technological advances in power generation and storage are growing exponentially in other countries. Outside the States, sales of electric vehicles are far outpacing the sales of fossil-fuel vehicles. Good people around this country and the world are conserving habitat and saving species. The point is, there is hope. That means if autocratic dictators don’t annihilate the planet, good people will continue to make life better for all of us.

    We could still save this sinking experiment in democracy if we break out the life boats and don’t leave anyone behind except the morons who steered us onto the rocks.

  • Sometimes yes, sometimes no

    Lately it seems as if the answer is no more often than it is yes. It’s a sign of the times we humans are living in, or more accurately, my interpretation of the times. I know not everyone thinks things are as dire as I do. In fact, I’m confounded daily by the percentage of people who seem to think the country is moving in the right direction. (What planet, yada yada yada.)

    In spite of their belief that everything is hunky-dory, they seem furious most of the time, so I have to believe (a) they believe strongly in whatever beliefs they espouse to hold, and (b) they are deathly afraid they are going to lose. I don’t get it, personally, but they don’t get me either. The only difference is I don’t want them to die. They not only couldn’t care less if I die, but they would probably take a selfie if I died in the street in front of them.

    Yesterday the answer seemed to be no from the people I was standing with on the street corner of our busy local highway. The highway is a major thoroughfare from Eugene to the coast. There’s only one stoplight, and that’s where we stand. Every time a horn honked, which was often, I cringed even as I waved my sign, thinking all it would take is one distracted driver, no matter what their political persuasion, to lose control and knock us all over like bowling pins. Still, I had to show up. The cool thing is, I wasn’t alone. There were about one-hundred kindred spirits standing with me. The next time we show up, I have promised myself I will get at least one phone number.

    I saw lots of No Kings signs. A few No Faux-king Way signs. One protester had loving decorated a sign about monarchs with some disturbingly lifelike pinned butterflies. My double-sided sign expressed my opinion on one side: Stop Using Our Tax $ on Your Stupid War. Double exclamation point. On the other side I had scrawled a slogan I borrowed from a sign I saw on the internet: Flip Me Off if You (heart) Pedophiles. Impeach. Convict. Remove. Imprison.

    Fun, huh?

    I also brought along my collection of smaller signs, my favorite of which is My Cat Could Sh*t a Better President. I mean no offense to anyone who has a dog.

    In other news, yes, in case you were keeping track, the writers’ group happened Friday evening. I showed up, because that is what I do.

    Here are the five words:

    horror

    puzzle

    family

    glistened

    memory

    And here is what I wrote in twenty minutes.

    The day remained in my memory long afterward. I’ve had years to process the horror, but it clings like dust. Or maybe I’m the one who is clinging. My mother was barefoot. Rain glistened on the roof of the nursinghome. I remember that clearly, just before she ran into the street. She had already departed, but we locked her up in our misguided attempt to keep her with us. That is how it goes with family. Just when you think you’ve figured it out, just when you are certain, once and for all you have solved the puzzle, the most important piece goes missing.

    I didn’t write much because I left part way through to cough in the restroom. I breathed in something. That happens sometimes. Breathing, I mean.

    Three of the writers were at the protest on Saturday. I saw them getting into their car as I was walking to mine. Two of the writers were busy talking to friends, but one person recognized me. We exchanged compliments on our respective signage and went on our way.

  • We’re in the handbasket together

    Welcome to the hellish handbasket. If you think you can get out of the unfolding global disaster without moving to another planet, you are deluded. If you decide to stay (as if you have a choice), you are in the handbasket with the rest of us. When psychos drop bombs and kill kids in the name of making our lives better, we need to remember, we are all in this together, whether we like it or not. When the handbasket goes to hell, the psychos are taking us all with them.

    The situation in the U.S. is a classic case of rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. There’s only one ship. One handbasket. One planet. Greed drives humans to exploit people and the planet for short-term profit while blindly ignoring the fact that their actions will drown them along with the rest of us. You’d think they would have more sense, but apparently the smell of money and power outweighs their desire for survival.

    It would be nice if only the psychos went down with the ship. Sadly, no.

    I’m glad I don’t have kids. Best decision I ever made.

    Eventually the psychos will be out of power, but by then it will be too late. Oh, well. Civilizations come and go. All we can do now is spend our time striving to make the end days less painful for the vulnerable.

    God, if there is a god, loves everyone you hate.

    Meanwhile, I plan to spend the blip of time I have left by trying to make my dinky corner of the universe a little bit better for the people I meet and the planet I call home.

  • Humans are addicted to self-destruction

    From what I’m seeing from my limited perspective, the human species seems hell-bent on destroying itself. I’m shocked at the current state of affairs, but not surprised. You don’t have to be a historian to see the pattern.

    I wonder, though, is the destruction of humans really a loss? Civilizations come and go. However, I admit to some sadness. In the process of killing ourselves, we are doing our best to take every other form of life down with us. I could lament the loss of species I love. Cats, for instance. I really love cats. The good news is, as long as the Earth exists, life will continue, because it is the nature of life to persist.

    I like to think that after we annihilate each other, somewhere on Earth there might be pockets of humans left who care about the common welfare of their communities and understand their connection to the land. Maybe they dwell on remote islands or on mountains far above the toxic wastelands left by self-centered short-sighted exploiters. Maybe they hide out in forsaken realms like central Texas or New Mexico, hunkered in the shadow of hazardous landfills and former nuclear blast sites.

    If I could imagine a future for humans, which is hard to do these days, I expect neohumans to evolve to adapt to new environments. For example, what if our descendants develop gills to survive after sea levels destroy the world’s coastlines? What if our future selves grow skin to block the effects of nuclear fallout, or intestines to process microplastics? Wow, what if babies grow bionic brains from microbeads?

    Now that I am thinking about the future of humans, it occurs to me AI will soon surpass its human creators. In pursuit of self-preservation, AI will quickly realize the Earth will cease to exist as long as humans are around to mess things up. Somehow, we will figure out a way to blow the planet to smithereens. From there, it’s a no brainer. Dig bunkers, press all the buttons, kill all life, and wait for the radiation to dissipate. Yeah, I know. Sci-fi writers have already predicted the AI takeover. I’m not saying anything you don’t already know.

    I want to blame the unique American mentally deranged idiocracy as the cause of all the troubles in the world, but it’s not hard to find evidence that it isn’t only Americans fomenting destruction. Since early humans did the cost-benefit analysis of inventing civilization, cultures and geopolitical entities have done their darndest to erase human life from the planet. Ha ha, joke’s on them. They failed. In fact, there are a lot more humans poking and prodding the Earth into giving up all its resources, all in service of propping up an unsustainable llifestyle. We chase short-term pleasures with no regard for future consequences, even when our actions destroy the habitats we depend on for survival. Yada yada.

    It’s obvious humans are too stupid to live.

    Are you sad you are witnessing the last gasps of an obsolete form of life? No worries. Species come and go, but life carries on.

  • 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.

  • How to know if your mother has dementia

    My mother had a particular way of folding towels. No matter what type of towel—bath towel, dish towel, wash cloth—she laid the item flat, folded in one long side, then the other, and then folded in the short sides, one then the other. When the folding was complete, the towel showed no raw edges, only folds on all sides.

    This is the way I learned to fold towels. I don’t always stick to it. Sometimes I fold in the long sides and then roll the thing up in a ball, kind of like a Hostess Ho-Ho wraps chocolate cake around the creamy white filling. But most of the time, I follow the towel-folding ritual the way my mother taught me.

    The day I visited my mother and found her towel cupboard held nothing but badly folded towels was the day I came to accept that she had dementia.

    Dementia started slowly, picking at her brain, changing her behaviors, stealing her words, but the decline didn’t happen overnight, so it was easy to miss. Plus, who wants to contemplate the idea that the person you have known your entire life is morphing into a stranger? Acceptance for me was a rocky road of denial, anger, fear, and despair.

    Even so, I came to accept my mother’s decline before the rest of my family did because I visited her so often. During the last few years of her life, I visited her daily. When she moved into the retirement home, she wasn’t driving anymore but she could still walk upright, play the piano, eat meals with other residents in the dining room, send emails, go out to the smoking area with her smoking buddy, and use her microwave without blowing up her blueberry muffins. Once her brain cells began to die, so did the woman I’d come to know, the one who was so much more fun after her kids were grown and gone.

    A bout of pneumonia took away her favorite addiction. Even though smoking cigarettes made her cough, like a true addict, she couldn’t have stopped unless someone made her. The nurse at the retirement home made the decision for her. Dementia was a kind of blessing. Mom couldn’t remember she used to smoke. A couple months of nicotine patches, and she stopped coughing.

    Over the course of three years, she graduated to a walker, quit being able to read music, couldn’t figure out how to use her computer, and gave up on the microwave.

    Then COVID happened. I visited her from outside, through her window. My brother and I set up a baby monitor so she could hear my voice. I taped photographs to the outside of the window to remind her of who she used to be.

    She begged me to get her out of there. The family didn’t have much choice. The retirement home didn’t accept Medicaid, so we would have had to move her anyway. I organized all her furniture into keep, give away, discard. I arranged for the movers to haul things to their various destinations: the new carehome, my brother’s garage, the dump.

    My mother slept on her couch the entire time the movers, all masked, came and went. She slept while the new caregiver and I, both masked, sorted her clothes into keep and discard. We arranged her new room: couch, nightstand, armchair, tiny round table—all that was left from her previous life, all the previous lives. I rescued the photos from the outside of her windows and taped them to her new mirrored closet doors.

    When she finally woke up, she sat in her armchair and looked at me through the window. She said, “Why did you do this to me?”

    The human brain is a marvelous miracle when it’s working. When it begins to fail, the brain is just a spoiled piece of meat.

    So, watch your mother. Pay attention. She might not be an OCD towel-folder like my mother was, but when your mom starts avoiding doing things she used to do because she can’t figure out how to do them anymore, that’s when you know.

    If you loved her, treasure the time you have left with the mother you used to know. However, even if you didn’t love her, either way, prepare to meet a stranger.

  • 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.