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Hotter ‘n the Hubs…again

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Not even 7:30 a.m. by the time the Ruby and I stumble back to the house. We left at dawn.

The SMOG! My gawd, the SMOG!

At first I thought it was fog. Seriously: it looks like a San Francisco morning out there. Doesn’t feel like it. It’s 95 in the shade of the back porch. The sky: yellow with crap floating in the air.

Horrid, horrid place.

If my son weren’t here, I’d be soooo gone!

Where would I go?

Berkeley, where my relatives lived for decades. Gawdlmighty, I do miss Berkeley.

The foothills of Tucson. Clean air, relative quiet, fairly upscale.

San Diego, in its more upper-middle-class incarnations.

Paris…parts of it.

San Francisco, where I belong…

oh, Hell: ANYWHERE! Anywhere but here!

Wunderground, that eminent weather-reporting site, predicts 112 degrees with a 6% chance of rain. Hm…observant of them.

Local weather reporters claim yesterday was Phoenix’s hottest July 30 on record.

Uhhh…sure. Yeah. Must be mighty boring to be a weather reporter. 😀

Walking home, Ruby and I passed a house on the little pass-through street bordering our slab of the ‘Hood. And by golly, out in front watering his yard was one of the handsomest Black men I’ve ever met. Quite possibly one of the handsomest of all possible men.

Not only that, but he was friendly. And he had a big ole’ black lab named Olive.

Hilariously, Olive was my maternal grandmother’s name.

Must be Fate, eh?

Olive. She died horribly: uterine cancer as a result of her lively sex life. My poor mother had to take care of the woman on her deathbed (Olive’s, that is…not my mother’s… 😀  )

Seriously: imagine inflicting the care of a wild-assed chippie on a teenaged girl, as said chippie lay dying. What a horror show!!

And what the HELL possesses people?

There’s some question about that episode, though. Years later, I found evidence that Olive had not died when my mother was 16 years old, but in fact was living in the Santa Barbara area at the time my own son was born. Never tried to track it down, though: pisseth me off too much.

Still. Sometimes I do wonder if my mother knew her mother was still living. Or if the crackpot family told her she’d died, either by way of freeing Olive from responsibility for her illegitmate daughter or by way of freeing my mother of having to interact with her…uhh…”racey” mother.

What a bunch!

HOW many degrees?????

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Uh oh…  The local Play-Nooz says it’s 116 degrees out there!

Dog and I haven’t been out there to test that assertion. Aren’t gonna, either: that kind of heat will burn her li’l paws.

……………………..

Eeeek!!!!

It is 116: in the shade of the back porch. Holeeeee doggerel!

Don’t even wanna know the temp out in the full sun, or where the atmosphere meets the pavement.

Jeez. We won’t even be able to go out after it gets dark. The sidewalks and asphalt will stay too hot for Ruby’s feet…or mine!

Don’t Do This to Yourself…

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Mwa hah ha!  The LAST thing a reasonably rational person needs is a mud-bath in sentimentality…

Seriously: The Internet, being a repository of all things remembered, forgettable or not, presents a serious threat to your sanity. It invites you to wallow in memories best left forgotten,

  • We have my friend Bruce Macalvanah, about a year ahead of me at the Ras Tanura Senior Staff School. We were about in the fifth or sixth grade at the time.
  • Next: my father’s hatred of Macalvanah Senior. I do not know why my father loathed Macalvanah with such passion. They worked together on the docks, both of them harbor pilots. My father considered Macalvanah to be a dangerous idiot…what happened to create that opinion escapes me.
  • Then we had the awful, mean, vicious brats at the school, and the stupid teachers who couldn’t seem to bring the little darlin’s under control. With the exception of the first grade and the third grade, I was freakin’ miserable all the way through the six grades I spent out there, until we came back to the States and the kids and my new school had no idea I was the Weird Little Kid.
  • But let us not forget the kid who lived halfway down the block… Ennis Hatch. The only other little darlin’ out there who didn’t create a hobby of making me miserable.

Bruce was one of the three kids in Rasty Nasty who didn’t torment me. Why, I never understood. When we came back to the states, none of the li’l darlings in the San Francisco school’s sixth grade seemed to know that I was cut out to be a pariah. They were all pleasant to me. None of them made it their business to make me miserable. I had friends. We played together after school. No one seemed to think I was weird.

But in Arabia? Dear God, was I hated! Hated and hated and hated and hated. The little darlin’s out there did everything they could to trash my life…and they were good at it. Over some six years, only three kids out there were not just acidly mean to me. One was a little girl named June B. The second, another girl child about my age. And the other was Bruce MacAlvanah. He was a year older than me…but didn’t seem to recognize that meant he wasn’t supposed to have much to do with me.

For reasons I never did know, my father HATED MacAlvanah, Bruce’s father. The guy seemed like a nice enough fellow to me. But my father thought he was a dangerous idiot. Apparently something had happened down on the docks to inspire lifelong scorn in my father.

They were both harbor pilots, steering tugboats to wrangle tankers and freighters in and out of the docks — one false move, as you can imagine, could lead to a grim and fatal catastrophe.

But where our family was concerned, the one who allegedly was a menace was MacAlvanah’s wife, Luella. She apparently poisoned my mother, and I do believe she did it on purpose: deliberately served up contaminated salad greens that gave my mother a roaring case of amoebic dysentery.

My mother very nearly died from the infection. But oddly…none of the rest of the people at that dining table came down with it. I can tell you that my mother would never have served herself contaminated lettuce or cabbage: she sanitized every single bite that went into a bowl, a plate, or a pan.

As we kids lingered in the kitchen, Luella handed me pieces of the leaves she was cutting up for that salad. I scarfed it all down merrily…and I never got sick.

So…wha???  Either the produce wasn’t actually contaminated, or somehow Luella managed to dip specific pieces of produce into some bug-infested water and then drop them into my mother’s bowl. I dunno. What really happened there, I dunno. My mother was damn near psychotic about raw produce while we were out there: most assuredly, she would not eat anything that hadn’t been sanitized. So…I have no proof of what happened there: only the experience of watching my mother get sicker and sicker in a hospital bed, and almost die as she lay in the hospital.

None of the rest of us at that table got sick that night. So as episodes go, it was freakin’ weird.

***

If you were one of the little darlin’s in the Ras Tanura Senior Staff School during the early 1950s: Be assured that I have not forgotten your meanness — and I never will.

Ohhh well. There’s a lot one should forget but never will.

The Evolution of Life in (un)Lovely Arizona…

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Ugh!!!  7:50 ayem. We’re  back from the Dawg Walk. Ruby is perky. The Human is wilted.

I…   Hate… Arizona! Just now it’s a chilly 94 in the shade of the back porch. Still cool out there: we’re supposed to reach 116 today. Present humidity: 19%.

Think of that. almost 1/5 of what you breathe in just now is…water! 

“It’s a dry heat.” If you think that’s dry, you must love steam irons….

Heh! Comparatively speaking, though, it is a sort of “dry heat.” I can remember in Arabia — oh, you wanna talk about Hell-holes!! — when rain would fall out of a clear blue sky.

Things could be worse, though. Be glad you’re not a Yard Dude. As we scribble, one poor wretch is trimming the shrubbery at the house across the street. Jayzus! What a way to make a living!

Daydreaming of the Bay Area, whilst stumbling around the park with the dog. Ohhhh how I do miss Berkeley, and my relatives’ beautiful little bungalow halfway up the hill to the train tunnel. Such a beautiful place. And never, ever 110 in the shade.

LOL! If I had any way to make a living there, I’d shoot up to the Bay Area in a trice. But realistically speaking: not a chance! Couldn’t even begin to afford to live anywhere near San Francisco today.

Heh! My father once remarked (angrily!) that my mother’s entire salary from her full-time job at Parkmerced would not have paid the rent on our apartment.

Well. That was a function of women’s work, not of the company in question.

whatEVER…  Today is hot and humid: no credible sign that it’s gonna get any better.

Meanwhile, sorta in that department, just today I learned that the Albertson’s supermarket down on the corner of Conduit of Blight and Main Drag South DELIVERS GROCERIES! 

Hot Dang!!!

That is amazingly good news. On two fronts:

* Transportation Front: My honored son has kiped my car! Don’t ask…these li’l family quarrels exceed the category of “too annoying to report.”

You realize: if the stores here deliver groceries, that eliminates a major reason to have to drive around in a car. And boyoboy! Freedom’s just another word…

With an Uber guy living across the street (and several similar worthies in the neighborhood), I can get reasonably priced transport to doctor’s offices, dentist’s offices, friends’ homes, and whatnot just about any time. Combine that with the grocery store delivery, and y’know what?

I DON’T NEED A CAR ANYMORE!!!!!

Seriously: There’s no reason to fill up a garage with a hulking hunk of metal and grease. For the rare occasions when I might need a car in my possession to schlep across the county, I can simply walk up to the corner of Conduit of Blight and Main Drag North and rent a car.

If that’s correct, then…seriously: I don’t need to own a car. Ever again!

* Bringing us to the Cash Front: Think of the phenomenal savings in taxes, insurance, maintenance! Holeeee maquerel!!!

Right now the Dog Chariot is stashed at my son’s house, and frankly…I’m thinking I’m gonna leave it there. He can have it. And all the bills that come with it.

Seriously… Has it ever occurred to you that a car is a hole in the ground into which to pour money?

When we lived in San Francisco, my mother and I hardly ever drove a car. We owned one — not to own a Ford would have been an affront to my father’s masculinity. But since he went to sea on tankers, he was hardly ever home to drive it. My mother stashed the thing in one of Parkmerced’s underground garages, and she and I made our way around town on foot, in buses, and by streetcar.

Now that Phoenix is finally turning into an actual city — with amenities like public transport and wahoo! Uber cabs — I hardly need a car. I could easily sell my car and, on the rare occasions when I do need one, walk up to the corner and rent a chariot for a day or three.

Imagine! No maintenance bills. No insurance covering days and weeks when the thing never leaves the garage. No siren songs luring thieves and vandals… HEY! 

Is there something we’ve been missing here, lo! these many years?

Soooo…. I’m thinking I may just leave the tank at M’hijito’s house. If he wants the thing, he can have it. If he doesn’t, we’ll sell it. It’s probably worth about 10 grand. Heeee! Think of how ten thousand dollah could fancy up that garage space! 😀

“The Sound of Freedom”

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She used to sit out there on her beloved back porch, gazing into all the other unfenced backyards of the houses around our home there in Sun City. Perched over her morning coffee, she would listen to the b-l-a-a-a-a-s-t of fighter jet engines, a racket emanating from nearby Luke Air Force Base.

Oh, how I hated that noise.

It bothered the Hell out of me: the ungodly roar of those damned war planes. But I would try to hide that, so as not to pi$$ her off.

She would simper on: “Ohhhh, it’s the sound of fweedom!”

Uhm…right, Mom. It’s the sound of World War III, comin’ our way.

Of course, I dared not say that to her. She’d have knocked me into the middle of next week for showing any disrespect to our honored country and its honored military. The weird thing was, she didn’t seem to care.

She didn’t care that it was the sound of death, damnation, and destruction. Of a war that would denude the planet. Of inescapable hate, fear, and death.

Amazing.

That always puzzled me: that she didn’t appear to recognize that what she was hearing was the oncoming engine of death, destruction, and catastrophe.

Luke is located some miles to the west of Sun City, which itself occupies large residential tracts to the west of Phoenix’s westernmost suburbs. Halfway to California, it sometimes seems.

Though…no: Sun City and Luke were nowhere near the California border.

Every now and again, a plane or a phalanx will fly out of Luke and roar over the city of Phoenix. That’s what occasions this morning’s little scribble: RRROOOOOOAAAAARRRRR over the house. Gawd, but I hate that noise. And yeah, I get it: without it the Russians are gonna blow us all to Kingdom Come.

Right?