Coffee heat rising

Dispatches from Hell

Hubs of Hades Central!

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LOL! Yesterday I reported that it was hotter than the hubs of Hades here. And yea, verily: so it was.

BUT…we hadn’t seen Hades yet, by yesterday afternoon. Today it’s handsomely HOT and stickily HUMID. Ick!!!!

Seriously: I’d planned to walk over to one of the three nearby grocery stores and pick up a few food items this morning.

Uh…no. Nope, noooo indeed.

Fortunately, we have plenty of dawg food: enough to last a good week or ten days.

Human food: likewise. Plenty of frozen salmon, pieces of steak, pasta, veggies, and whatnot.

Shouldn’t have to raid a grocer for at least ten days; probably two weeks. Amazon will ship the dog food. Human food also: to a degree….but personally, I like to see and examine my own chow before I buy it. This, however, should not be a problem. Just get out of the house about the time a store opens, and it should be easy to dodge the soggy heat.

My neighbor was out front pruning shrubbery when I trotted past his house. Man of steel, I’ll tellya! You couldn’t pay me to do that in this weather. BUT…it does have to be done…and hiring some hapless wretch to do it for you is likely to bankrupt you.

At any rate, as I frolicked  past, he assured me that he would drive me to a store if need be.   🙂

The supermarkets nearby (three of them!) open at around 7:00 a.m. So if I roll out of the sack at sunrise, I’ll be able to walk over to a nice store and stock up on whatever I need, before it gets too hot. But seriously: I don’t think that will be necessary for awhile.

PLUS: the other day a neighbor invited me to visit the nearby Sprouts with her. She drove us over there. That was nice…AND it was fun. So I may be able to talk her into a repeat trip.

And a variety of professionals and service providers operate within walking distance:

* ophthalmologist
* veterinarian
* computer store (2 of ’em)
* drugstore/pharmacy
* supermarkets (2 huge ones), each with its own pharmacy (a third lurks across Main Drag West)
* hair stylist

On and on and on, actually…. Truth to tell, there really is no need to go outside the Funny Farm’s immediate neighborhood to get about 98% of one’s standard needs done. Especially with Amazon filling in the gaps!

Y’know, this is how it was when DXH and I lived in London for several months, while I worked on the Robert Sidney book. We never needed a car, unless we took it into our heads to go sight-seeing in the country. I suppose that means Phoenix has “grown up” as a city: it now functions as a genuine metropolis.

WhatEVER: just now I feel pretty confident that I’ll be able to live here at the Funny Farm for at least a couple more years — maybe longer than that. Especially if I can hire someone to come in and take care of the house, drive me to requisite destinations, and generally ride herd on me.

We shall see if that proves to be true! 😀

BELAY that Last Post!!!!

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Forgodsake. Look at this morning’s FaM Post. Read that, and then say to yourself, with sterling accuracy and common sense, My gawd! The woman has lost every marble she ever had!  And THEN some!!!!! 

My imaginative little discovery, contingent on my son stealing my car out of my garage — “I don’t need a car to get around here! ” — turns out to be the single stupidest thing I’ve ever thought, said, or written. 

Yeah.

Today, as the sun made its way across the sky, I took it into my thick little head to walk down to the Albertson’s supermarket and pick up some dog food for Ruby the Corgi. While I was in the vicinity, I wanted to talk with a lawyer who practices in that shopping center — no, nothing drastic… Just a business matter. So: grabbed my home-made roller cart and headed on down there!

  • Walked.
  • And walked.
  • And dodged panhandlers.
  • And walked.
  • And fried.
  • And walked.
  • And fried some more.
  • And walked…..
  • Holeeeeee shee-ut!

The business lawyers whose office I’d seen so often in that shopping center were…GONE!!! Their space was empty.

Dayum!

The other lawyers, the ones across the parking lot, said they don’t do business law. But if I ever get arrested for drunk driving…. 😀

Yeah. 😮

By now, I was just fricasseed!

Went into the supermarket; hung out with the security guards for awhile. They put up with me, kindly, while I cooled down a bit.

But…now I had to get home. And that entailed walking block after block after block after block through searing, GAWDAWFUL heat.

Honestly: for a few minutes there, I wasn’t at all sure I was gonna make it.

Got up to the church. No one there; all the doors locked. Just a couple of bums hanging out in the shade.

Stumbled across the vast, black asphalt church parking lot. Staggered into the ‘Hood. Hotter and hotter and hotter….

Trudged and trudged through the residential part of our ‘hood. Hoped my neighbor Tom would be out…he and his wife Carol would let me inside to cool off, and keep me there long enough to be sure I wouldn’t pass out.

Nope. No sign of those two.

Hauled the empty cart along, and hauled it, and hauled it, and hauled it. Finally came to my house…not at all sure I could make it through the courtyard to the front door.

But I did: unlocked the door (clumsily: hands not working well) and staggered into the house.

And now here I yam, parked in front of the wonderful table fan. Dog snoozing on the floor: thank GAWD I didn’t take it into my feeble little head to take her with me this afternoon!

It’s much, much hotter than I’d estimated: 108 degrees, sez Wunderground. That may be an understatement!

At any rate, I made it home (miraculously!) and am now cooled down.

I guess I’m going to have to go out and rent another car — or maybe buy one. Obviously, I can’t get around on foot, not in this heat.

My ears are whistling.

My heart is pounding.

I probably should go to the ER. But without a car and through this unholy heat, how on earth would I get there?

In-fukkin’-furiating!!!!

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Never fails! Sit your tail down in a dinner-table chair, and RINGY-DINGY DINGY!! There’s some a$$-hole on the phone trying to hustle you to buy whatever they’re peddling.

Literally. This happens almost every time I sit down to eat. This morning, they jangled their way into my breakfast…again.

grrrrrrrrrr!!!!

If I had any sense, I’d disconnect the phone before I sit down to eat. But…but…

a) I’m too lazy to remember to do that;
b) I highly resent being forced to disconnect MY phone, for whose service I pay richly, because those a$$holes keep pestering me with ads.
c) Sometimes I want the phone to ring through to me at this hour.

****

Comin’ on to 9:00 a.m. I’m so sleepy I mostly just wanna go back to bed. But that doesn’t make sense: far’s I can tell, I was out cold all night. Slept like the proverbial log, all the way thru till sometime after 7:00 a.m.

So…why do I feel like a zombie?

Thinking about how my mother killed herself. She smoked herself to death.

Literally. She was never conscious when she didn’t have a cancer stick in her mouth or in her hand. Or, usually, in her mouth. Puff puff puffety puff puff puff. You knew when she was awake, morning or night, because you could smell the stench of her goddamn cigarettes emanating from her bedroom. That’s how heavily addicted to nicotine she was. She couldn’t pass more than an hour — if that long — without a murder weapon in her mouth.

Not surprisingly, this habit drew her onward to her death. A peculiarly ugly and painful death.

She managed to time that death just as I was coming up on the deadline for my Ph.D. dissertation.

When I explained to the dean who ran the Graduate College that I needed more time to finish because my mother was dying, she said, effectively, tough nougies, and then announced that if I didn’t complete the book by the deadline, I would be dropped from the program, and no, I would NOT be given a second chance to complete the degree for which I had worked over the past many years.

Evil to the left of you… Evil to the right of you… Evil in front of you… Evil behind you. Every which way you look, there’s another slice of evil. :-0  That’s academia for you!

Okay, admittedly, they didn’t kill her. She killed herself. But she did so with an addictive drug (nicotine) that made countless magnates rich as Croesus, as they killed the far more countless nitwits who were their customers. And in the process, she created an opportunity for the ba*tards at Arizona State University to make me even more miserable than I already was.

And that was plenty miserable!

It’s the primary reason that I would not go back to work there. Nor, very probably, in any major academic institution. People who run those places have no empathy whatsoever with the worms that make up their constituency.

For some time after my mother was murdered, I considered — very nearly with seriousness — a kamikaze run. I would get a job in a tobacco factory or in the offices of a cigarette company. Then one day walk into the place with a bomb or three in hand. Set them off and blow up the damn place. 

Blow myself up, too…which would be OK, because that would be better than spending the rest of my life in prison, should I survive the attack.

Ahhhhh, the Almighty Dollar…

Ohhh yeah: AGAIN!

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Cop copter buzzes the neighborhood, as we scribble. Again.

Goddammit! What a PLACE this is. Every time you turn around: cop copters, burglars, prowlers, sh!theads… Lordie, but I am tired of lovely uptown Phoenix.

Alas, though, as one of the cops remarked after the Great Home Invasion Episode, this sh!t goes on all over the county.

I’d said to him, “Maybe I should move to Scottsdale or Fountain Hills to get away from this sh!t.”

“Don’t do that!” said he. “You can’ t get away from it. We go to these things all over the Valley.”

Ugh. What a world we live in.

Even in somnolent Sun City, this kinda crap goes on all the time. My mother lived in terror out there…and not for no reason.

I need a shotgun, not a mere pistol…

Fried and Fricaseed!

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Just stumbled in the door from a good hour and & a half of traipsing through THE most gawdawful heat!

Temp out there, actually, is just not that hot. Only 94 degrees. But the humidity is at 9 percent. When the temp is at that level, a little humidity feels like a LOT of humidity!  Whew!

Hiked up to the mall to the north of the ‘Hood, where I hoped to talk with a storefront lawyer there about some minor matter. Of course, he was long gone. So was just about anyone else.

Blech! Will have to traipse up there again tomorrow morning.

Oh, Helle’s Belles! I only just noticed this is Sunday!!! Heeeeee! No wonder no one was there!!!!!

Oh well. Got some exercise, anyway.

If the temp had been about 10 degrees cooler, it would’ve been a lovely day for a  nice, long walk. Gorgeous clear skies. Clean, clean air. Kids playing. Sun shining.

Oh, well….

Seven Kinds o’ Hell

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Yech!!!!!!!  It’s lightly over-cast this afternoon and a chilly 85 degrees on the back porch. Mildly humid. And that translates, in Arizona lingo, to hotter than Hell. 

Seriously: it’s a freakin’ sauna out there. Just got back from a hike to and around my favorite local stores. And when we say “hike,” we ain’t kiddin’. I’d say the total came to a good three miles. At least. Down to the ‘Hood’s south border, past the church, downward ever downward to Main Drag South. Through the shopping center parking lot, around and around and around the HUGE supermarket. Finally out the door. Northerly northerly northerly back up to our part of the ‘Hood. Through the church parking lot. Past the apartments where my mother once wanted me to rent, northerly northerly northerly…finally reaching our street. Hiking, hiking, hiking…oh my GAWD!  

Hot? Lemme tellya hot.

About to faint by the time we reach our street, hiking easterly easterly until AT LAST we reach our north-south access road. Northerly northerly northerly, past houses with beautiful young kids playing in the yards <3, past the fine young neighbors’ places, up to the WonderAccountants’ place: straight across the street from the Funny Farm.

Damn near pass out as we reach the front door. Wrestle with two deadbolts. FINALLY get into the (mercifully!!!) air-conditioned house.

Ruby is waiting. She seems OK…uhm…I think. But the Human isn’t: the Human is about to fukkin’ die of heat exhaustion.

Stagger into the kitchen. Fill up a wine glass with ice and…and…oh what the Hell! pour a slug of white wine over it. Serve up half a can of dawg food. Turn on every fan in the room and collapse in front of one of them thar fans.

Thinking how much I miss San Francisco. How much I miss my relatives’ place in Berkeley. Why, dear God, WHY do I live in this Hell?

Oh. Because my son is here!

And oh: because I can’t afford to live in Berkeley. Or Sausalito. Or Richmond. Or most certainly not San Francisco. All the places I came from. All places I imagine I belong.

My gawd, I hate Arizona. Especially at this time of (the overheated!!) year. And this time of year — April — will extend through the end of September. Six richly hate-worthy months. 

What. A. Horrible. Place.