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Roar! Roar!! Roar!!!

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Ruby and I take our morning stroll, serenaded by the roar of jet planes. Yea, verily: one of the reasons I hated living in Sun City: Luke AFB, just a few miles to the south and west.

Every goddamn morning: Blasts of jet engines greeted the rising sun.

Other reasons to find Sun City tedious:

* racism
* hatred of young people
* distance from decent shopping
* isolation
* ugly, cheaply built house
* ultra-tidiness
* gravel “lawns”
* no pets: nobody had dogs, though they were allowed.

We did: we had an annoying chihuahua…but my mother preferred cats. And you hafta say: cats don’t yap.

Way over here in North Central Phoenix, a good 20 miles away from Sun City and Luke, we can get the dawn jet blasts. Even though the planes don’t fly directly over the neighborhood, their engines are SO LOUD that you can hear the damn things INSIDE your amply insulated, solid block house with its double-paned windows and its attic blown full of insulation.

What a racket!

SDXB, a long-time newsman and then a PR guy, took a little job for Luke after he moved out to SC: answering the phone to citizens calling to bitch about the jet engine noise. It was a task that kept him busy.

My mother was one who did not bellyache about the racket. “It’s the sound of fweedom,” she used to simper.

No, Mom: it’s the sound of World War III, comin’ our way. 

Of course I didn’t say that to her. She’d have backhanded me into the middle of next week for any such sass.

She did love living in Sun City, you hafta say that. So much so that she not only wasn’t bothered by the ungodly roar from Luke, she even claimed to like it.

Ugh. Never been so glad to move away from a place in my life.

And after 10 years in Saudi Arabia…that’s sayin’ something!

Dawn of Another Dreadful Day

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So, so, soooooo sick! Is this thing EVER gonna go away?

Just now, I’m about ready for me to go away. Spectacularly tired of stinging and burning and hurting and not being able to walk across the room without the hip shrieking (metaphorically, of course).

Dog is fed. It’s a gorgeous morning. Need — want — to take Ruby for a walk. But migawd! It hurts so much I can barely stumble around the house…much less hike two miles around the park and through Upper Richistan.

Or even one mile.

Gotta get that poor li’l dog walked. Can’t leave her snoozing under the toilet all day.

Learned why the ineffable Luz is a cleaning lady and not a nuclear physicist.

:-D
Get this:

Along about the middle or late morning, I’m sitting at the dining table, soooooo sick I can barely wriggle. EVERYTHING hurts: hands, feet, head, belly, teeth, gums….whatever: if it’s part of my body, it HURTS. The racket from the vacuum cleaner and the toilet scrubbing and the general cleaning-lady carrying-on trumps trying to sleep.

Exhausted, I fold my arms on the table top and lay my head down.

Now the brilliant Dr. Luz wanders into the dining room and sees me with my head and arms flopped down on the table. She whips out her camera, snaps a photo, and sends it off to my son!  With a message that I’m falling-down stinko DRUNK!

For.

The.

LOVE.

of.

God!

He comes flying over here in a freaking state. Apparently no brighter than Luz, he also decides I’m shit-faced drunk.

Understand: I haven’t even had half a glass of white wine, because I’m too, toooo sick to get around it. No kidding: I literally cannot drink a glass of wine with a little food: that’s how sick I am.

Like our honored Medical Cleaning Lady, he also concludes that I’m sh!t-faced.

An amazing fight ensues. Would’ve been more amazing if I’d had the strength to defend myself…but it was quite amazing enough.

He charges through the house, tossing everything in all the closets as he searches for Demon Wine. Finds one (count it: (1) bottle, which he steals.

Jayzuz!

I should can that stupid woman. But frankly, I’m too sick — way too sick — to clean the house myself, nor am I in any condition to conduct a search for a new cleaning lady.

Well. You may be sure that if and when I manage to get well enough to drag myself around the house, dear Luz will be seeking a new job.

What next, Lord?

87 berzilliion things….

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I’d druther not do….

Auuughhhh!

Wonder-Cleaning Lady is here, throwing herself around like a low-flying rocket. Forgodsake, it’s after 5:00 p.m.!!! Does the woman EVER come to a stop????

Seriously: she showed up sometime after 4 p.m., all primed to take on the Funny Farm.

This would be fine if she’d showed up sometime after, ohhh…say 8:00 or 9:00 a.m. But at the end of the day? Not. So. Much.

This afternoon M’hijito dragged me to the Mayo Clinic, NOT my favorite place to spend half the goddamn day. Pestered and pestered and pestered some more by doctors and nurses and medical assistants, on and on and on. All I wanna do when I get home is sit down. Then fix some dinner and sit down some more to eat it.

But ohhhhhh no! Here’s our honored (extraordinarily honored!) cleaning lady, banging around and banging around. She showed up a few minutes after I got home. It’s now after 5:30 p.m., and she’s still banging around.

Lordie!  Where DOES that woman get her energy???  

She’s cleaning a bathroom now…having changed the sheets and hauled the vacuum around and…on and freakin’ on. 

Arrgha. 

Okay, so the dishes are in the dishwasher, which is clanking along. The house is more or less picked up (my part of the job). My fingers hurt where the nails are peeling off their quicks. The rags are collecting in the clothes washer, preparatory to an hour’s worth of running through that contraption.

Forgot to turn the hose on into the pool. Run outside and crank up the spigot. Not too badly evaporated…that’s something, I reckon.

This must be the third house Luz has cleaned today. At $80 per shack, that’s TWO HUNDRED AND FORTY DOLLARS A DAY!

Criminey. I never made that kinda money with a Ph.D. and gawd only knows how many years of university & community college teaching experience.

Hm. If she cleans three houses a day, five days a week, that’s…. MIGAWD! That’s $1200 a week!  $4800 a month.

Jayzuz!

Now of course, I didn’t leave the campus at 6 or 7 p.m. after a full day’s work…uhhhhh….waitwait! Yes, I surely did. Often I left at 10 p.m. And then when I got home I had a pile of nitwitted student papers to read.

Hm. 

Truth to tell, when La Maya and I were working out there, we considered — slightly more than halfway seriously — starting a cleaning service. And y’know…we might have had something. We would have earned the same amount we made teaching, only in many fewer hours. And we never would have had to read a bird-brained or plagiarized stoont paper.

On the ‘tother hand…. It does have to be said that I truly, deeply, passionately HATE cleaning house. And you can be sure I would’ve hated cleaning up other people’s filth even more than I hate cleaning up after myself.

Yea verily: when I say there are 87 berzillion things I’d druther do than clean house…I ain’t kidding!

But…hmmmm….. I don’t suppose teaching idiot composition courses is one o’ those things….

Wow! I’m IN!

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One of the joys of dotage is that you can barely remember your name, to say nothing of the 87 berjillion passwords you have to memorize in order to operate your websites and cruise the Internet. But today….ohhh mirabilis! Today I managed to get in to Funny about Money‘s website…and with minimal hassle.

Dog and I charged around the ‘Hood at dawn. It’s hot. It’s humid. It’s ugly. An altogether ugleee dawn.

Walked past the tragic wreck of a house on the southwest end of the park, once a pleasantly middle-class domicile for an apparently normal family. Now it’s a vacant slum property, having been abandoned after the family’s son got crosswise with the law and thereby bankrupted his parents.

One of the most alarming aspects of life in America — or maybe, more accurately, it’s an aspect of humanity — is the tendency for one to be unable to get out of trouble, once one gets into it. As a teenager, the young fella who lived in that house with his parents got up to some kind of mischief. I never knew exactly what his crime was: only that he was arrested and sent to prison. Once out of the slam, he couldn’t get a decent job — and his parents had about bankrupted themselves trying to rescue him.

So he started this laughable business: pruning trees. 

No kidding. He took a class offered by the County for wannabe arborists, wherein he tried to learn how to trim and nurture trees.

Arborists here do charge a pretty penny for their services: that’s for sure. If he’d been halfway decent at the job, he probably could have found his way to supporting himself. Problem is: he wasn’t even halfway there!

He damn near killed one of my front-yard trees, so ridiculously did he butcher it. Eventually the tree did have to be taken out. Now a yellow oleander is growing in its place…and doing surprisingly well.

Hm. Wonder how that human oleander is doing, these days…

{sigh} Their place is actually a nice house, even though it needs to be practically rebuilt from the ground up.

It backs onto the park.

Now I wouldn’t consider that a desirable feature: just what everyone needs, right? A public park as a backyard. 😮  But apparently others relish it. The houses adjacent to the park are (except for that one) handsomely maintained and regarded as prime properties.

Sooo….it was around the park and up a couple of busy local thoroughfares, the dog in search of beloved GRASS to get under her paws, the human contemplating its upcoming breakfast.

Now we’re back at the Funny Farm, pursuing the highest and best goal of human life: loafing. 

Did She Know?

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Did she know what she was doing as she loafed around the house poisoning herself with cigarettes?

Did she know those little pleasure-sticks were, given her family background of cancer death after cancer death, bound to kill her?

Did she know how painful and ugly her exit trip would be?

Oh, yeah. She most certainly did.

If you could read during the late 1950s, you knew that tobacco causes cancer. She may not have understood that she was addicted to nicotine and so would have a gawdawful time trying to stop smoking. If she chose to stop.

  • She did not choose any such thing.

She knew her fog of tobacco smoke was making her little girl sick.

  • She didn’t care.

She knew smoking tobacco had been proven to cause cancer.

  • She didn’t care.

She knew what it was like to die of cancer: she watched her mother die horribly of uterine cancer.

  • She didn’t care.

What she cared about was that passage of minor pleasure, brought to her several times a day by the murdering bastards who grow tobacco and who turn its leaves into cancer sticks.

She saw her mother die horribly of a cancer doubtless brought on by the woman’s promiscuity. So yeah: she knew what it meant to induce a terminal disease in your own body.

One wonders whether she cared about the misery she put my father through, as he tended to her for weeks and months on her deathbed. Probably never thought about it…at least, not until she lay dying.

Well, I can’t be criticizing. Because I do the same thing. 

Not with cigarettes. But yeah: with wine.

As she dared to smoke a cigarette every time the mood struck her (which was often), so I dast to have a glass of wine with dinner every day. And then usually another glass of wine. And sometimes even a third glass of wine.

Horrors!

My cleaning lady (soon to be an ex-cleaning lady, as I’ll be canning her whenever I can find someone to take her place…) grew horrified and beyond horrified at watching me swill wine at mid-day, when I have a serving of meat, a salad, a side vegetable, and a starch (potato, rice, or pasta), accompanied  by a glass of wine. So she pulled a self-righteous little stunt on me.

Come noon the other day, the table was laden with a fine meal and an open bottle of wine. I’d stuffed myself and swilled down a glass and a half of cabernet. She’s slamming around the house, making it impossible for me to accomplish much of anything. So what do I do?

Wouldncha know?

I lay my head on the dining-room table and freakin’doze off. 

This, she takes as proof positive of my unregenerate alcoholism. So she whips out her camera and snaps a photo of me with my head down on the table, snoozing.  And she emails that to my son!

Proof positive: I’m a lush!

My son is abhorred! Not at her sleazy behavior but because I appear to be passed-out drunk at the dining-room table!

So now, convinced that I’m a drunk, he has purloined my car and parked it at his house (so I can’t kill any of my fellow homicidal drivers, right?). He has rummaged through all my closets searching for hidden wine (and stolen all two bottles that he found). He’s taken to supervising my daily habits….which is pretty stupid, because I rarely drink more than a glass of wine a day. Upshot: the only way I can get groceries is to walk to the nearest supermarket, dragging a rolling cart behind me.

***

Yea verily: now I need to get off the dime and find a new cleaning lady. And frankly, searching for an employee is NOT my favorite pastime.

Plus my dear son’s presumptuous superciliousness pushes me toward seeking something other than a new cleaning lady. Like…a new place to live, far far from unlovely Phoenix.

Yeah. I’ve started to think, with something verging on the serious, about moving to Sedona, Wickenburg, Fountain Hills, or Tucson. Or New Mexico.

At this age, the last thing I wanna do is pull up stakes and move far, far away. But on the other hand…this BS makes me mad enough that I’m tempted to do exactly that.

Still thinkin’about it. But thinking seriously….

Holy Sh!t….DUCK FOR COVER!

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KeeeeRAAP! Some ba*tard just shot at our cop helicopter!

The action took place a couple blocks to the north of the Funny Farm…maybe three. But definitely on our side of Main Drag North.

Call the dog — she’s loafing in the kitchen, and she sees no good reason to get up and leave her scrap-scavenging post.

Call the dog.

Call the dog.

Call the dog again.

At last the obedient beast decides to get up and roam over to see what I want. Who knows? Maybe the Human has food.

Coax her up the hallway and hit the tiles. 

Stay down until whatEVER-the-Hell is going on quits.

Cop Copter is hovering over our old house, the noise-collector a few houses in from Conduit of Blight Blvd. That’s about a block-and-a-half from where the Funny Farm stands.  We hunker down on the bedroom floor…and….

ohhhhhh shee-ut, here he is again, roaring over at roof-top height. 

WTF?

Stay hunkered.

At last the Copter swoops around and takes off into the north-easterly distance.

Lift the corgi onto the bed. Check the doors — for the third time! — to be sure everything is locked.

Climb onto the sack with the dog.

Holeeee krap, what a place!