The Hellish Handbasket Blog

  • Being the primary caregiver in my own life

    I’d like to forget my conscious self exists in a physical body (see previous rants). Alas, alackaday, woe is me, ’tis not to be. As previously mentioned, yada yada blah blah blah. The year before Medicare, I got an inkling that all might not be well. Cholesterol medication was the unwelcome harbinger of what was to come.

    Aside from the vertigo, I’ve always been healthy. Well, a bout of walking pneumonia laid me low for several months, but so far that was a one-off. Other than allergies and the aforementioned, I’ve been remarkably healthy. Not even a broken bone.

    After Medicare, though, different story. Is it true ignorance is bliss? I’ve never actually experienced bliss, but I consider myself an expert in ignorance. In my case, not knowing my physical health was declining was emotionally less stressful than knowing.

    I wrote (whined) about my various maladies in the former incarnation of the Hellish Handbasket (no longer available), so I’ll just summarize briefly here: high cholesterol, high blood pressure, osteoporosis, vestibular paroxysmia, vestibular migraine, and a heart condition. Plus, I’m 20 pound heavier than I want to be. It’s that last one that bums me out. When I look in the mirror, I see my mother but three sizes bigger. It’s depressing (but not enough for Prozac).

    All this palaver is leading up to my commitment to be the primary caregiver in my own life. I finally accepted the fact that no one else is going to take on the job. It’s not their responsibility, and anyway, they don’t care. Everyone is ultimately concerned about their own lives. Plus, I’m (ostensibly) an adult. The job of taking care of me is mine.

    So, tomorrow I’m driving into town (11 miles) to meet my new opthamologist (cataracts, glaucoma watchlist). The following day, I will make the trek to meet my new dentist (it’s been a year since my Tucson dentist tortured me).

    I’d like to ignore the whole health thing, like so many people do (my father, my younger brother) and pretend I don’t have any issues, that I can just lift weights or eat pizza and every malady will magically heal itself. Sometimes I wonder how I would be doing if I hadn’t slogged to the healthcare providers even when I didn’t want to. Probably dead of a heart attack. Or dead from a broken hip followed by a heart attack(my father) or dead from a gut aneurysm (my mother). Dead is dead.

    Modern medicine is a marvel, for sure. On the upside, doctors can catch potentially silent killers (heart attack, stroke). Unfortunately, they haven’t yet figured out some of the invisible diseases (vestibular disorders) but I am sure if the U.S. ever regains a robust healthcare system, doctors will stop blaming the patient and finally look for the cure.

  • Write what you want

    I returned to the scene of my debacle on Friday. The conference room had been upgraded with pink naugahyde cushy office chairs. I don’t think I’ve seen pink conference room chairs before. I applauded the interior designer’s taste, knowing they most likely got a really good deal from City Liquidators. Kudos for having both style and frugality.

    When I got there ten minutes early, just about everyone I’d met so far was there already. I took a seat at the end so I could be near the electrical outlet and plugged in my modem phone. As long as I’m at the library, I can use the library wi-fi to do software updates and backups.

    Before the fun began I interrupted a moment of silence between chit-chat to apologize for bludgeoning them with the chapter I read last week. I said I would not torture them like that again. The organizer was gracious and said it was fine, no need to apologize, that’s what we are here for. I suspect she realizes if she accepted my apology for writing a story no one but me could relate to, she’d have to take a good look at the book she was writing. Maybe it would have helped if I were a better narrator but my erratic tongue-twisted style couldn’t have been any worse than her tedious monotonous drone about life on an asteroid.

    We did the five words exercise, which I’m starting to think is really lame. Here are the five words and after the words is the paragraph I wrote in 20 minutes. In my defense, I didn’t want to do the assignment, but felt obligated to be a good sport in my quest to belong to the group.

    fault

    remorse

    rascal (my contribution)

    raisin

    oblivion

    Five words jumped off the page and ran around the dining room. Those rascals. See, there’s one now, skittering around the corner into the kitchen, too fast for me to catch. I tried and slipped. Something snapped in my leg, but Rascal obviously felt no remorse. Darn it! There’s another one! Remorse was something that word had clearly never felt. I tried to smash remorse into oblivion, but that was a lost cause from the start. Oblivion dashed past me and leaped for the stairs. With my  broken leg, well, going after oblivion was a nonstarter. I wasn’t sure what to do—I could hear little word feet running around the bedrooms. They were taking over the house. In my defense, I have to report it wasn’t my fault. Dang it. There goes another one. Just because fault got away this time wasn’t my fault. Next time, I’ll make sure fault and oblivion meet. They are obviously meant for each other. Anyway, before my femur snapped, I was heading to the kitchen to get raisins for the rabbit, and … what just happened? Did raisin get away too? This is completely out of hand.  Words. What can you do. I’m lucky there were only five of them. I’ve seen entire books filled with words. Let me tell you, that can really get your heart rate going. If you aren’t careful, they will lead you right off a cliff.

    They laughed, which is all I wanted.

    Later, I swiveled in my pink chair and asked what projects people were working on. I knew what the organizer was working on: the endless asteroid mining saga. I was trying to ascertain if the other so-called writers were actually writing. In retrospect, I think asking the question was probably a mistake. The woman sitting across the table from me glared and said something about starting a series of essays and then getting blocked, bogged down, something to that effect. She was not happy to be put on the spot. I didn’t regret asking. She could have chosen not to answer.

    She deflected and asked me if I was working on something.

    “My next book,” I said. “But I’m having a hard time figuring out what the characters want.”

    She proceeded to give me a few words of advice about devleoping characters. Wasn’t that sweet? I know, right? I thanked her in my friendliest tone and looked around the table. No one else besides the sci-fi fan was working on anything. She announced her 190,000-word manuscript was done and it has been out to beta readers for two years. I had assumed the book she was reading to us every week was a work in progress, but no. What she was reading was the finished book.

    In other news, I sold one ebook on my new Book2Read platform. As soon as I sell $10.00 worth, I’ll see some money in my bank account. How cool is that?

    I know what you are thinking. Carol, really? We don’t want to be a Debbie Downer, but isn’t that bordering on pathetic? No, and let me tell you why.

    Everything I write is for me.

    Why not? I’m old. I might have twenty more years to live, if I’m really lucky. Why the hell shouldn’t I write what I want? I never made art to order, which is why I never made it as an artist. Now, as a writer, I don’t write to the reader market, which means I probably will sell very few books. Who cares? My life is richer and fuller because finally, after so many years of stifling my writing voice, I am creating characters who say and do things that crack me up.

    What could be better? And let me ask you, my five blog readers, if that is your dream, how come you aren’t doing it?

  • The writer’s price of admission

    On Friday I returned to the writer’s group for write and read night. Once again, we contributed five words (my was regret) and then we read some of our work. I volunteered immediately.

    I pulled out my latest book, the third of the trilogy. I chose a chapter I really liked that seemed to encapsulate the conflict between two opposing persuasions: ridiculous fashion tips versus quack health remedies. My characters faced off to the tune of Barry Manilow’s “Copa Cabana.” What could be more amusing? Nothing, am I right? I thought so.

    The chapter turned out to be longer than I expected and really hard to read out loud. I would make a terrible audiobook narrator. I slurred and stumbled, my tongue gottwisted. My overactive saliva glands overactively salivated. Good information, in case I ever get asked to do a book reading. I digress.

    A few paragraphs in, I knew I had the wrong target audience. One or two listeners made some sounds that I interpreted as chuckles, but mostly there was silence. I am pretty sure had I been able to look up as I sped through my dialog, I would have seen the group pinching their foreheads between their thumb and forefingers with their eyes squeezed shut. The reason I know this is because that is how they listen to the writer who reads from her asteroid mining company sci-fi tome. I digress.

    I ploughed through the chapter and finally finished. Nobody had anything to say. Not a surprise. I bludgeoned them with jokes that would be funny only to someone who grew up in Portland and spent twenty years in L.A. That is to say, me and my one and only fan, who grew up in Portland and now lives in L.A. Yes, I write for an audience of one. I digress.

    I knew these aspiring writers were not going to be my ideal audience, any more than I am theirs. Still, as uncomfortable as it was, I knew I had to do it, just once. To join the group, to be on the inside, I had to show them who I was, which in this case meant I had to reveal to them the kind of work I write. I didn’t want to. But I knew I had to. Better to get it over with up front.

    Now it’s done. I can relax. Next time we have a write and read evening, I can settle in, listen to other people’s endless drivel and never again have to share my own endless drivel. This was my self-imposed hazing ritual. I am now innoculated against the requirement to disclose my writing to anyone who won’t appreciate it. Now I can keep writing for me and my wonderful fan.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • They can’t look me in the eye

    I’ve noticed a certain response when people find out I live in my car. They wince. Their eyes get a little wider, and their spine gets a little straighter. Their muscles tense up.

    They try hard not to appear judgmental. It might be easier for me if they just came out and said what they think: You live in your car? What a loser.

    My PCP gave me some suggestions about nutrition. He assumed I have a kitchen. It’s normal. Most people have kitchens. And bathrooms and a proper bed to sleep in, a place to hang their clothes. I waited until our third meeting before I mentioned my situation. His response, after wincing, was to ask if I’d seen the clinic’s case manager.

    What can a case manager do that I’m not already doing? Put me into treatment for a drug problem? Give me a bed for one night in a shelter?

    I’ve been seeking low-income senior housing for over a year. I’m on three or four waitlists in various cities in Oregon. Recently I came to the top of a waitlist for a studio apartment in Veneta, Oregon. I started to feel a glimmer of hope. After talking with the property manager, I thought chances were good I might be housed by October 1. I started thinking about what kind of bed I would build, what kind of mattress I would buy. Getting my paltry stack of belongings out of storage.

    After our conversation, the property manager left over Labor Day. Another property manager took over. She called me for clarification on one of my references. During the phone call, she asked me what move-in date the previous manager had promised. I said October 1. She asked me where I was currently living. I said, in my car. I couldn’t see her face, but she said, oh! in a way that made me think she might be wincing. Like, what kind of loser old person lives in a car?

    We had a phone conversation last week about my financial situation. She walked me through the form, box by box, line by line, and things were going well, I thought, until we got to the box about other income. I told her I was semi-self-employed and that I had a job as contingent faculty for an online for-profit education college. The process stuttered to a halt.

    “I don’t know how to handle this,” she said. “I need to talk to my supervisor. I’ll call you later today, tomorrow at the latest.”

    That was Tuesday. Today is Saturday.

    She could be out of the office with Covid. Maybe she just went out on maternity leave. It could be she reached a breaking point trying to wrangle elderly tenants who can’t fill out forms and walked out of her job. It takes a lot of patience to work with elders. When I told her she could text me, she sounded pleasantly surprised. Like, wow, an older peson who can text! Maybe unicorns exist after all!

    There’s nothing I can do to make housing happen. I’m over it. Even if something comes through, I have other things to do, other places to be. Scottsdale in November, Quartzsite in January. I’ve got a lot on my dance card. It’s all a lot more fun and interesting than hanging around Portland waiting to earn non-loser status.

    Meanwhile.

  • Only a doomed species eats its young

    I had a blog post idea. I planned to rant about how people (“those people”) don’t have a right to complain about violence in politics if they are willing to accept kids getting shot in schools. I was thinking I’d write about how we as a society broke after Sandy Hook. Pundits were so horrified, they couldn’t handle their feelings in any other way except to deny the tragedy ever took place. And then they found out their public denials could make them rich, and there you go. That was the end of America. It’s been downhill ever since.

    But I’m over it. I can’t dredge up the righteous anger I had last week. It fizzled among the detritus of my humdrum quest for existence. It seemed like a solid idea. I had some words and phrases. Something to do with gerbils. But I didn’t write them down, and you know what happens when you don’t write things down. Banana, sunrise, chair, that’s what. Yep. Dementia.

    Lucky for me, I’m not totally demented yet. But I’m also no longer angry. I think I’ve hit the resignation wall. I’ve gone past anger, past despair, and now I’m in the empty boat. I threw my metaphorical paddle overboard. Sort of along the lines of . . . Calgon, take me away. If I had a tub, I’d be in it right now.

    So what do I write about if I don’t have anything to set my ire on fire?

    If I cared about getting viewers to find my blog, I need to use certain keywords. I know this because I have a Phd in marketing. And what do viewers want? Anger, hatred, resentment, ridicule (toward the “other side,” of course). Not only am I not skilled enough to write that kind of content, I can’t pretend I have anger, hatred, resentment, or a desire to ridicule others. I can’t match the energy. I have no desire to try. I wish everyone would just shut up and go outside.

    I get cranky sometimes. Like, right now I’m cranky that this toy tablet I’m working on is balking at uploading artwork to the media library. That’s why there’s no image for today’s blog post. I think that might be the first time EVER that I have omitted the drawing. This situation upsets me. I’m a creature of habit. I rely on my routine. To soothe my irritation, I want to get a brand new computer and give this tablet to Barbie, because she’s the only person who could find it useful. If Barbie were a person.

    I don’t think I’m depressed, but I feel like I’m acting the way a depressed person would act, if they spent too much time watching the news. Did someone else get shot today? Do we care? Clearly not or we would do something about it.