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Morning in Aridzona…

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Brrrrr! It’s mighty cold out there come seven in the morning: just 89 degrees.

In fact, even for lovely uptown Phoenix, that’s hot and muggy. The air is so damp it’s practically squishy.

Ruby and the Human:  just back from circumnavigating the ‘Hood: over to the park, down the street that parallels the south side of the park, past the home (uhm…former home) of the folks who lost everything when their son got arrested for diddling some underage chippy, up the east side of the park: northerly, northerly into Upper Richistan.

Lovely neighborhood, that. The Richistans are occupied by folks who can afford acre-plus irrigated lots, big swell houses, and armies of workmen. Personally, I wouldn’t want to live there: been there, done that, don’t wanna do it again. Riding herd on 87 berjillion yard guys, maintenance guys, repairmen, cleaners…and on and on and on… Blech! Never again!

But still: it’s fun to eyeball other people’s overpriced, high-maintenance properties. 😀

The beloved Old Guy is no longer in evidence. He would hang out in a lawn chair parked on his front driveway, his coffee and his newspaper in hand, and greet all us passers-by. I do miss him.

With any luck, he will have dropped dead of a heart attack. More likely, though, this being Today’s Day & Age, he’s locked up in some old-folkerie, waiting for Death to come and get him.

That seems to be the fate of most of today’s denizens of the middle and upper classes. We don’t die in a timely way. We drag out dying, and drag it out and drag it out and drag it out…horribly, hideously. Parked in a dreary prison for old folks, where we rot away like so much unrefrigerated bacon.

Please, dear God: please, just let me drop dead on the sidewalk!

Y’know, before you croak over or end up in an old-folkerie, you should find out what your grown kids REALLY want you to do with your property.

You assume, quite reasonably in its antiquated way, that they will want to inherit your beloved home and its handsome yard and…all that. But consider: it ain’t necessarily so!

A lot of grown offspring have their own homes. Homes with which they’re quite satisfied. Homes they don’t want to move out of. Foist a $300,000 piece of property on them and now they’re burdened with something they’ve got to figure out what to do with. Something laden with emotional overtones that make them feel guilty when they go to sell the place.

If they can bring themselves to sell it, that is.

Now they’re stuck with it. What ARE they gonna do with it?

I’m pretty sure my son wants this house. But…before much longer, I do need to sit down with him and ask him whether he really does want it, or whether it would be better for me to sell it before I croak over and invest the proceeds in some cash instrument he can inherit and do with as he pleases. With minimal hassle, that is.

Of course, that’s one of those conversations none of us wants to have.

And as you know, we’re likely to put it off and put it off and put it off until…well…it’s too late.

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Speaking of selling or not selling the shack…

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ONE RINGY- DINGY! TWO RINGY-DINGIES! THREE….

No, I don’t recognize the caller’s number. That means chances are about nine out of ten that this is yet another goddamn nuisance phone solicitor.

Me: “And what would you be wanting?”

Her (after a brief, awkward pause: “Would you be interested in selling your house?”

Me: “GET OFF MY F*CKING PHONE AND STAY OFF MY F*CKING PHONE!!!!!!!!!

Gawd ALMIGHTY am I sick and tired of morons calling me on the phone to hustle me.

It should be illegal to call a phone number unless you have real, certifiable business with the number’s owner.

Heeeeeeee!  What d’you suppose would happen if, when an idiot phone solicitor gets you on the horn, you were to say, “Did you make an appointment to call me”?

Them: Duuuuhhhhh… Uhm…an appointment? 

You: Yeah. you need to have an appointment to call here. What’s your name and what is your appointment number?

{chortle!} Godlmighty, but I hate these people. Wish there was a better way to bug them than by blowing an air horn into the phone.

I wore out my air horn. Guess I should order another one from Amazon.

😀

Bastards.

Did you know that many of those folks — possibly most of them — are calling from inside prisons?

Phone solicitation is a prison industry. A substantial number of the jerks who pester you on the phone are more than jerks: they’re criminals. 

Bye, All!

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Forgodsake.

Apparently a coreligionist of mine complained to my son about a post that appeared at Funny — she didn’t like something I’d posted. From what I can tell, she imagined it was a threat to commit suicide.

!!!!!!!

So, I’m going to have to take Funny about Money off line. Throw it away. 

So much for freedom of speech, eh? If you’re a little ole’ lady, you sure as f*ck don’t get any of that!

Give it a day or two for me to figure out the logistics. But do figure that by the middle of next week, Funny about Money will be a thing of the past.

Stinks, doesn’t it?

San Francisco: Take Me Home

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…To the place
I belong…

Parkmerced. That’s where I belong.

Oh, my: what a lovely development, down near the shore of Lake Merced, on the southerly end of San Francisco.

My mother got us in there when we came back from Arabia: before my father came back to the States. We left the Hell-Hole ahead of him, about three or four months before he retired.

He must have had the sh!t-f!t from Hell when he found out how much those high-rise apartments cost! You don’t even wanna think about it!

After he went back to Ras Tanura, our lease ran out and she got us into one of the garden apartments. They weren’t especially fancy — nothing like the gorgeous spaces in the towers — but they weren’t at all bad. If anything, I think I liked ours better than the tower. It had its own little garden. And some kids lived across the street from us.

Oh, well. There we were.

Walking around the ‘Hood this morning: ohhhhh gawd! HOT!  HUMID!! And it’s barely dawn. Can’t say I hate this place…but I sure would rather be in San Francisco!

Passed by the vacant, run-down house once occupied by the couple whose son went to jail. That’ll bankrupt you: be sure of that!

Apparently he fucked some girl who was under the age of consent — and got caught in the act. OFF TO THE SLAM WITH HIM! 

This misadventure cost the parents everything they had. They went belly-up. Lost the house.

Who owns it now (if anyone, other than a bank) I do not know. But it is a WRECK.

Ya hafta say this about the ‘Hood, though: Overall it’s well kept up, tidy, tony-looking. A couple of sections are highly up-scale; indeed. the rest of the place is solidly upper-middle-class.

Sooo…. My house should keep its value. If my son inherits it, he’ll have a nice, debt-free place to live or, if he prefers, a salable piece of property that should land half a million bucks in his bank account.

That’s assuming I don’t have to go into the old-folkerie called the Beatitudes, which he has in mind for me. He may not realize: Those places take everything you have. If I can’t stay out of that place, that’s what will happen. Nothing will be left to pass along to my son.

Probably it would be cheaper — and surely more cost-effective — to hire someone to come in to take care of me in my home through the last months or years of my life. I hope he’ll go along with that… Partly for my sake (nothing makes me cringe more than the mere thought of institutional living) and partly for hi$.

At any rate, as this rumination implies: I ain’t a-gunna get home to San Francisco anytime soon. Surely not in this lifetime. Well… unless — Heaven forfend! — something happened to him before it happens to me. If he predeceased me, I probably would move back to the Bay Area. There really isn’t anyplace else I’d rather live.

My cousin found a lovely resort-like old-folkerie in the East Bay, where he deposited his mother for her last years. I’d be lookin’ for something like that.

Meanwhile, with this house paid off and the Cleaning Lady from Heaven in the offing, I probably will stay here as long as I possibly can — with any luck, for the rest of my life. CL from H has worked as a caretaker for the elderly and the infirm, and so maybe she can be hired full-time to baby-sit me during the final leg of my journey to the Next World. But if not, we know there are lots of folks like her, so it shouldn’t be too hard to find someone to come in to care for me.

I hope. 

Hotter than the Hubs & Crazier than a Loon

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Actually, it’s relatively cool out there on the back porch: only 105° in the shade. Which is just NOT that hot.

My son is on his way over here — or soon will be — presumably to scold the bedoodles out of me. Again. Apparently I was rude to one of my coreligionists. Again. Gawd only knows what I said this time!

My mouth runs loose all the time — always has, ever since I was a little kid. And I really never know quite how I offend. Only that I do offend.

All.
The.
Time.

God only knows what I said this time. All M’jito says is that I offended the woman.

He has a pile of other issues to chide me about this afternoon…what those are, we shall soon hear. And hear. And hear.

See, my problem is that I’m fundamentally not a nice person. The upshot of that is that people tend not to like me. And I tend not to like people.

Result: hour after hour after hour of blogging. And other kinds of writing.

This, you see, is why I’m a writer. Because I can’t speak to my fellow humans without setting them off.

The issue only became noticeable in the first grade. We didn’t have kindergarten in Arabia, and so I had an extra whole year in which NOT to make little toddling enemies. But as soon as school started, I quickly had everyone hating me.

That’s OK. Who needs friends, anyway? F**k’em all, I say.

Actually….it began earlier than grade school. The first time I became aware that other kids hated me, I was a toddler. It was before we went to Arabia (I turned three years old when we arrived out there). My mother and I lived in Sausalito, California, while my father, a merchant mariner, went to sea. One day the two neighbor kids and I were playing in the sandbox in front of our house, there in California. We were about two years old at the time.

All of a sudden, out of the blue, the little girl (they were brother & sister) scooped up a shovelful of sand and….WHAM!!!!

She slammed it into my face. Shoveled that sand right into my eyes.

Ohhh GOD! How that hurt!!! I remember it to this minute — one of the only things I do remember from that age. I screamed and screamed and screamed and screamed. My poor mother came running outside, horrified and mystified.

That was, I guess, the first time I understood that other people hate me. 

Why they hate me: that usually escapes me. I have no idea what set that kid off. Only that she did what she could to hurt me the most she could in that moment.

And…well…that’s the way most people have acted, over the years.

You see where I find my affection for humanity, hm?

So: fast forward to 2025. 

I don’t know what I said to my coreligionist, but apparently it wasn’t nice.

Seriously: I cannot recall saying anything that I can imagine would be offensive. But apparently I did. And apparently it was bad enough that she reported it to my son.

Most of the time I have no clue what I say to offend these delicate flowers. But I sure as hell DO offend.

Welp…I imagine I’ll get an earful of it pretty quick. He hasn’t shown up yet. But he will.

He will.

For the Luvva Gawd

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Sooo…, I post a famous poem by Dylan Thomas, and some nincompoop calls my son and tells him I’m fukkin SUICIDAL????????

Holeeeeee shit! What IS the matter with people?

And why the HELL don’t high schools and universities require their idiot students to take at least one course in literature every semester? 

No, dear Reader. I am not contemplating suicide. Literature, yes. Death by self-garrotting (or whatever): not so much.

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This country has GOT to do something about our educational system!

[POEM] "Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night" – Dylan Thomas
byu/w0lvez71 inPoetry

And QUADRUPLE-ARRRRRRGHHH!

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So some long-time workmen who are pretty reliable fellas show up. They’re puttering around…and somehow….

SOMEHOW…

…they get ahold of my front door keys and they fuck them up with élan!!!!!!!

My GAWD!

None of the keys works any of the locks or none of the locks or whateverthehell…WHAT A MESS!!!!!!!!

HOW THE HELL DID THEY DO THAT???

GODDDAMMMMIT!!!!!!!

Now I’m gonna have to call the locksmith AGAIN to come over here and untangle all the goddamn locks.

This guy charges an arm and a leg just to breathe the air inside your house, to say nothing of doing any work. So this is gonna be another $200 bill. Then I’ll have to listen to my son bitch at me for spending all that money on the goddamn locks.

Again. 

Y’know, when I had the first locksmith over (they all work for the same outfit), I asked him to fix ALL THE LOCKS so they work on the same key. So: this would make it hard for me to confuse the keys and fu*k everything up.

Now, NO TWO LOCKS work on the same key. Set one key aside and you are FUCKED until you can dig it up from wherever the Hell you put it down.,

And wherever that is will likely be pretty random, meaning it will be hours or maybe days before you find that key, if you ever do.

STOP THE GODDAMN WORLD!!!”
I WANNA GET OFF!!!!!!!!!