Friday, June 11, 2010

Another night in the car

I love the car bed and I love my laptop and I love my lungs. Too much inhalation of mysterious particles to which my body doth protest, too many days in a row and here I have landed once more, sleeping in the car tonight with no better option, and this time only semi-prepared—I could stand another blanket or two, to be honest. Nobody wants to hear about suffering, especially due to weird allergic reactions that are incomprehensible to most, even to me, who has had them all my life, following generations of family members with the same. I am, quite frankly, homeless, and this, because of strange and uncontrollable circumstances. Not financial ruin. Not alcoholism. Not war or natural disaster or fire. Allergies in transitional times. Say freakin’ what? And this is not the first time it’s happened. Tell someone you are homeless because of allergies and they will think you are a certified nut-bar. Well, call me crazy, I just don’t give a ---- anymore—
Really.

When you have gone for days and days w/o enough oxygen, nothing really matters anymore except that very physiological fact. It even trumps sleep deprivation, its sidekick, which I have also in my company. To make matters even more interesting, my procrastinated upper left dental project has started to ache and swell in the middle of this crisis. There are seemingly no choices, yet my sexi flexi-mind re-minds me that there always are. Things could always be worse. Seen through the roses, this old car interior is like an upscale tent, and there is the nice bed I built into it. I have laptop luxury. I have clean water and I am rurally parked so I have enough darkness to sleep, no police harassment, and pee freely just outside my four doors. The weather is just right—not too hot, not too cold, and hardly any bugs. I have a jug of clean water. I happen to have a Tylenol in my purse. In a state of acceptance of the now, things couldn’t be any better, and they’re not great but they could be worse. The kids I serve as nanny think the car bed is cool and they are right. Seen at best it’s a groovy studio apartment on wheels. Let’s roll…

The biggest evil in this and any challenging situation in life is the worry monster. The worry monster freaks you out and grabs your calm and flails it about recklessly. The worry monster grips at all your innovativeness, creativity, problem-solving power and optimism. It seizes your soul, robs you of sleep and a sense of humor, makes your symptoms worse. The worry monster is the enemy, and must be shot down by any means necessary. Cool tunes, midnight car-blogging, scribble art on the interior, car yoga, absolute childlike behavior, a dedication to the delightful in the most seemingly awful of circumstances; a refusal to be a victim, and a vicious, vicious dedication to ‘glass half full’ ideology in action, or, failing that, to ambivalence at least.

It’s a starry starry night, I am safe, and it is summer. I have a toothbrush and there is no reason for panic, doom and gloom, depression, tears, or nightmares. In this moment I am both the most threatened and the most protected human being on the planet, my experience spanning a wide expanse of lived realities throughout time and space. The car bed is cool. The car bed is eternal. The car bed could be better but right now, it has to be just fine.

Sunday, June 6, 2010

Somethin' Gotcher Goat

Hello readers. I’m sorry to have abandoned my Wild Wakefield Blogspot for so many months. What can I say? I got housing-outsourced to Chelsea for the winter where there was just not that much to snack on. I perched (and froze) in a beautiful riverfront what-should-be-a-3-season chateau/cottage as caretaker, binged on high-speed internet, and played with the neighbors’ baby. That’s about it, unless you count the four and a half month battle with the H1N1 or some other kind of arctic bonanza virus that is still tweaking at me from the corners of my immune system. Oh, and I also got paid really decent cash to drive a few Chelsea kids around and fry them up some veggie dogs a couple times a week. Not a bad gig. Overall, I would not report any significant advancements of body, mind, spirit or career. But I did survive another Canadian winter, and if you grew up somewhere else, that counts as an accomplishment.

Not two days back in range of the ‘field, and I’ve already slept in my car twice, sat outside the closed library to check my email, skinny-dipped behind the General Store at 5am, jammed Cajun with Claude and Nathan, had a massive 48 hour asthma attack, chased goats out of my neighbor’s living room, and noticed an oily scum on the surface of Brown Lake. The changes that attempt to wring the funk factor out of our village are increasing: the wages and number of affordable, healthy living options are not. But the thing about change is that as it closes some doors, cuts down some forests, re-routes some wildlife corridors, and expropriates some properties, it also creates some new entryways, opportunities and areas for exploration. At least that’s how the goats see it when a crucial barricade is suddenly left open by a forgetful human. They do not hesitate to leap inside, party it up, and shit all over the place. While I scrub away at hippy dirt and feverishly attempt to vanquish allergic smells from my small apartment on the upper level, the goats are rockin’ out to 60’s vinyl and mixing up groovy desserts that are raw, vegan, and organic. They make me feel uptight and conventional, an experience I certainly am hard pressed to have anywhere else.

The fireflies are back early this year, lighting up fresh sprigs of poison ivy along the roadsides. Its dry and the river is lower than I’ve seen in a long time, but the lake is high because the beavers downstream have been busy. Oil is spewing into the Gulf of Mexico while web surfing has never been faster. Elsewhere, sudden sinkholes appear, Apple launches their IPad, and people stand in line to buy them. I move slowly into Hippy Summer Camp and sleep on a yoga mat, because I do not have a bed, and do hot flashes and night sweats while wading through a delayed and exaggerated bout of PMS—post moving syndrome. Life seems full of increasingly extreme paradoxes, and we all might be going to hell on earth. Or this could be heaven. Its hard to know. To the goats, a broken window presents not problem but opportunity. Not that I completely agree, but I’m just sayin’, I’d pull that window shut next time if I were you.