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Colder Than a By-gawd…

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…as my father used to say. Things were colder than, hotter than, faster than, slower than, pricier than, smarter than, stupider than…a by-gawd. 

And no, I don’t know if he knew what the word “bigod” meant. Or even that there was such a word. He wasn’t what you’d call a real eddycated fella.

At any rate, it’s passing crisp out there on the back porch: 40 degrees. For southern Arizona, that’s practically an Arctic freeze!

Was gonna take the dog for her (usual) daily walk this ayem, but decided agin’ it given the chill on the air. So…we loaf.

Actually, Ruby patrols the back yard, ever-hopeful that the beloved Pool Dude will show up. Oh, how she adores that man! 

And why? That escapes me. He looks like an ordinary sorta fella, a guy who got trained to clean pools while he was serving a prison sentence (as indeed is the case with many pool dudes). WHAT has he done to so ingratiate himself with that dawg?

Seriously: she does know when it’s Pool Dude day (how???), and she lurks by the door or by the pool fence waiting for him to show up.

Ooohh well. It’s after 9:00 ayem and still damn cold out there.

Probably should stroll over to the Sprouts or the Albertson’s and restock a few (un)necessaries. But my enthusiasm for traipsing through the ‘Hood and dodging bums to the left of me and bums to the right of me is…well…limited. So is the enthusiasm for leaving Ruby locked up in the house when she really does need a walk.

Occurs to me that I could order up a service dog vest for Ruby, so I can take her into stores and (apparently) even on busses and streetcars. You can buy them on Amazon, no questions asked. Apparently people are not allowed(!!) to ask you for any other evidence or proof that your mutt really is a service dog. If we had one of those li’l costumes, we both could go into any of the five grocery and drug stores within easy walking distance of the Funny Farm. Down at the church, one woman even used to bring her lap-dog sized little mutt to the services, gussied up in one of those vests, and park it next to her on a pew!

Heh heh…not to say {cackle!!}….  Has a certain appeal, doesn’t it?

LOL! I wonder if bums would leave you alone if you had a corgi with you. 😀

Seriously: when a German shepherd would accompany me on a stroll around the ‘Hood, NO ONE would pester me. Lacking such a bodyguard, o’course, the locals will hit you up for handouts, make passes at you, holler obscenities at you…  Blech! What a place.

Maybe I should follow SDXB to Sun City: a.k.a. Mausoleum West. 

[sigh} I truly hated living there when my parents had a Sun City house.

Nice loafing porch, eh? Looks just like my parents' place...At the time they were there, the place was Hate Central. If anyone of a darker persuasion dared to move in, they would be HOUNDED out. And yea verily: I kid you not. That happened, just a year or so ago, to a friend of mine. So I assume Sun City is still as Whitey-White as it was Back in the Day.

What an awful place!

Well. They liked it, though. The constant roar of fighter jets overhead (ooohhh, it’s the sound of freedom! my mother would coo) was a worthwhile trade-off, in their minds, for a housing tract fully free of brown faces.

And one benefit of it would be a paucity of jerks hanging around waiting for women to ogle.

 

 

Day’s End

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WOW!  What an incredibly beautiful evening!!

The sun has dropped below the horizon, leaving a lush, quiet circle of pinks and pale blues and violets surrounding the’Hood. Sooooo pretty.

Kids are still playing outside: what could be better? Cruised up the street past the neighbors’ yards, where fine young people have taken over the landscape.

Yes: I do love this neighborhood! And do love our handsome neighbors and their beautiful children. 😀

Visited with Mrs. Wonder-Accountant. She’s a bit worried about Mr. Wonder-Accountant, who seems to be under the weather. Unclear, so far, whether “sick” is the word to apply, or whether it’s Male Mal-odrama that will go away after some rest and a few nice, solid meals. And a wife hovering about loving him up.

I do hope he feels 100% well in due course. Getting sick is not what you’d call much fun, eh?

We’re all gettin’ old, speaking of day’s end. In the Department of Hoping, I do hope I croak over before my life’s day cranks very far into the night. But in that line, few of us get what we hope for.

My family has indeed been haunted by some serious longevity, especially on my mother’s side.

Her mother died young, apparently because of her…ahem…shall we say high living practices. But relatives who did not fling their lives to the four winds typically survived into their 90s. Hmmm…let’s count them up…

1 great grandmother
1 great aunt
1 exceptionally brilliant uncle
1 father (died in 1992; feels like yesterday)

My mother smoked herself to death. Her mother fucked her self to death. But…well…the others lived on and on and ON. If an ordinary, relatively boring lifestyle helps keep you on this side of Hades, there’s a good chance I’ll stagger on for another ten to fifteen years.

Jayzuz, though!  If what passes for my arithmetic is correct (big IF), I’m in my 80th year.

Since I don’t smoke and I don’t strip off my underpants for every jerk who comes along, we probably can guess that I’ll stagger along for another 10 years. At least.

But since we can’t guarantee that, let us speak briefly to The Deity:

Thank You, your Godship, for this incredibly beautiful evening! If this is my last night like it, then I soak it in and love it and appreciate You for it. If this is one of many more to come…well, Sire…then what can I say? A thousand blessings upon Your amazing creation! 

Yea verily: Creation. It is divine.

Dog as Everywhere Everywhen Companion

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Good grief!!!  Did you realize that…my goodness!  You don’t need to have official, doctor-certified proof that your dog is a service dog to acquire a “service dog” vest that will let you take the critter just about anyplace you can go?

Check this out:  Service Dog Info…

Really, all you need is a service dog vest, which you can order from Amazon.

And if some clown demands to see proof the dog is a certified “service dog”? Well:  You raise your hackles and you get huffy as hell and you tell him to take a flying f*** at the moon.

The likelihood that anyone will bother you is fairly low. But knowing humanity, don’t you just KNOW someone will pestiferize you? So be prepared with a high-handed reply. Practice it at home, even.

Betcha you could get away with it 99% of the time.

😀

Seriously (almost)… If I could take Ruby with me, right this minute I’d get off my duff and hike over to the Albertson’s or the Sprouts, dawg in tow. Dawg would be delighted. I’d get a bottle of beer or a package of junk food. And I wouldn’t feel even the slightest bit guilty over galloping off and leaving the dawg behind at the house.

Strangely Healed…

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The other day I was whinging on and on and freakin’ ON about the aches and pains of Olde Age. And now, amid a gorgeous Tuesday evening richly festooned with Christmas lights? Weirdly, almost ALL the pain is g0ne!

Why??? THAT is beyond me.

Obviously, if I knew what makes it come and go, I might be able to arrange for it to be gone more than here. 

Ohhh well.

Ruby the Corgi and I traipsed all over the ‘Hood this evening, regaled by piles and piles of Christmas lights. What a hoot!

Over in the Richistans, where people have lots of money to diddle away on this stuff, the place looks like Times Square! 😀

Seriously: every house is all lit up. It’s quite the spectacle.

Not so much over here on the po’ folks’ side. But even we have some light festivals.

There’s a little Protestant church down on Main Drag South...a generic sorta thing. Looks like they have a choir. So…hmmm…  I’m thinking about asking them if they’ll let me join it.

Or not. A good choir is a time-consuming thing. And…with no formal music training, I really don’t have all that much to offer.

What the heck..I do need a way to meet and be around people. But…who needs me, eh? ;-D

Seriously: I’m just not that good around humanity. And trying to introduce myself to and join some new group is quite the challenge for me. I’m thinkin’…I don’t want to work that hard.

Let us think about it…

 

And…whaaa? UNdone for????

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WTF?????  After this morning’s whiney whinge, now — come 3:34 in the afternoon — suddenly I’m a whole new person!!! 

Why?????  What on earth would cause a gigantic slug of misery to suddenly evaporate? To be replaced by a calm, almost complacent mood tending (even!) toward the cheerful?????

Seriously: I cannot imagine.

This morning I was truly miserable. Now: back to normal; indeed, even fairly cheerful.  Why?????

Well….I can’t imagine. Unless it was a nice sunny day and a long walk down Conduit of Blight Blvd and through the neighboring shopping centers.

Ruby and I hiked all over the ‘Hood, through three neighboring shopping centers and all around a part of the tract where SDXB and I used to walk almost every day, back when he lived here.

He has moved to Sun City, and so is long gone. Me: I wouldn’t go back there if ya paid me.

But he likes that kind of fustian fuddy-duddery, so he’s very happy there. He and New Girlfriend seem to be doing well enough, though it sounds like he’s pretty damn sick. With my mother (oh, lemme tellya horror show!!), we found the medical care in Sun City was even more substandard than you get in the typical American living space. Just. Gawd. Awful.

Would she have died if she’d had decent care?

Well, yes.

But she sure as Hell wouldn’t have suffered the way she did. And that little Life Passage is one of several reasons you couldn’t get me back in Sun City: not on a bet.

At any rate: free of that place, Ruby and I put some serious mileage under our paws and had a lovely time hiking around the ‘Hood and through the neighboring shopping centers.

What exactly I’m gonna do to get through the upcoming end-of-life years, I dunno. Have to confess that I haven’t the faintest idea.

Seriously: over the next few months and year or so, I do need to make some plans. Maybe confer with M’Hijito about what he wants me to do … yeah, I know: check my idiot self into the Beatitudes, a venerable old-folkerie.

Thanks. I’d rather take a flying leap off the North Rim…  So we do need to confer and think carefully about how to deal with the upcoming (potentially hideous) years. But just now…I get to enjoy life for a few weeks or months!

 

Done For!

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Continuing spectacularly sick. Ohhh well…by now I’ve gotten used to the what appears to be the fact that I’m never going to get well. The best that can be hoped, I reckon, is that life comes to an end in some reasonable period of time.

Though, it must be allowed, we’re well past any “reasonable period.”

This morning — it appears to be a Tuesday — I plan to call a venerable old-folkerie here in the Valley. Well…the place is what I regard as a prison for the elderly. They take everything you have: your life savings, the value of your home, any other cash you happen to have laying around. In return, they babysit you and feed you awful institutional food until you pass into Eternity.

Which, we must hope, will happen soon.

Soon as my mother died, my father signed himself into a similar place, one then called “Orangewood.” His experience was just hideous, but not because of the institution and its operators: he married a woman he met there, apparently imagining she could somehow take my mother’s place.

Well. No one could do that. He was deeply, truly in love with my mother, and she with him. This new broad…ohhhh my gawd! Long story short, that “marriage” promptly turned into a Horror Show from Hell.

For me, it had one advantage: taught me that if you get locked up in one of those places, you mind your own business and don’t get chummy with anyone. And especially don’t marry anyone!

I had hoped to save my assets to pass along to my son. Unless I drop dead in the very near future, that ain’t gonna happen. Clearly, this unholy ailment is going to drag on and drag on and drag on, as I get weaker and weaker, more and more unable to care for myself. Soo….might as well resign myself to the fact that he will get little or nothing from me, because the disease is going to eat up everything I have: the value of the house, the savings I’ve set aside for myself, the small but real inheritance from my father. Gone. All of it.

If I were little stronger, I’d bring an end to the horror show myself, right now. But I simply don’t have the nerve end my own life. Just plain not brave enough. Sooo…that which I have is effectively no longer mine. Shortly, it will belong to a prison for old folks.

What a world we live in!