Brave New World, Indeed…

{snort!} Living in a place where you need to have heavy-duty deadbolts on all the exterior doors AND, while you’re at it, on the back bedroom that serves as your office is for the birds. Not to say a PITA. This state of affairs is hugely exaggerated by encroaching senility: you can’t remember your name, to say nothing of what all the fistful of keys are for.

First off, I misplaced my key ring, the one with the keys to all the exterior doors, the mailbox, the garage side door, the car’s ignition, the car’s doors, on and on: SEVEN KEYS!

You realize, I have to have all seven keys. Otherwise I can’t get into my house, I can’t drive my car, I can’t get into my office, I can’t unlock the yard gate padlocks, I can’t get into the garage…on and on and endlessly, aggravatingly on.

They couldn’t have gone far. I knew I hadn’t left the house since the last time I saw the monster keyring. But “far”and “near” are basically the same when you haven’t a clue where something is.

Finally found them. Added the mailbox key to the key ring. Put them down. A-n-n-d…lost them again!

I.

Can.

Not.

Remember.

ANYTHING!

No matter how trivial or how significant.

This stuff is getting very frustrating and very scary. What else have I forgotten…well….

• Have I paid the bills this month?
• Have I gone into battle to figure out where a spurious bill of something over 5 grand came from?
• Have I refilled the gas tank?
• Have I fed the dog?
• Have I walked the dog?
• Did I water the plants?
• Where’s my grocery list?
• What groceries do I need?
• Where did I decide to get gasoline, since Costco is now kinda out of the question?

Yes. Get gas. One of the consequences of deciding to quit arguing with Costco over their annoying shopper card is that one has to find some other station to refil the gas tank.

Headed westward out of the ‘Hood , by way of visiting the credit union and thence the high-voltage Sprouts out by the university, I stopped in a Circle K gas station. HO-lee mackerel!

You forget how creepy this part of town is.  A panhandler is stumbling around the gas station — fortunately he doesn’t importune me. A weird guy is also wandering through. The damn gas pump tells me I have to go inside to untangle some kind of mess.

Dodge the weirdos, get into the Circle K, and am told, no, nooo, nothing is wrong, all is well.

On my way, wondering WHAT is going to show up on next month’s AMEX statement.

Trudging across the city toward the ASU West campus and its branch of the credit union, I notice an odd thing: Once I get a couple of main drags past the freeway, I see many, many fewer transients and panhandlers. They cluster around the freeway overpasses and the signals a few blocks on either side, but once you reach about 35th Avenue…well… Nary a bum!

WTF? I never noticed that before. There’ve always been transients along that route…everywhere.

Not today. No one standing at the intersections, set to pester you when you stop at a red light. No one pushing stolen grocery baskets full of their worldly goods up the sidewalk. The mile-on-mile tracts of bland, cheaply built working-class and middle-class housing over there are effectively FREE of transients!

I will say, that has not always been the case. If you’d asked me before today, I’d have told you the population of panhandlers was pretty constant between here and the campus, especially the further south you go on the west side. But today…where were all the bums?

In our neighborhood, that’s where! 😀

Brought back to the repeating rumination that if it weren’t for my son’s strenuous objection, I would would be OUT of the ‘Hood by now. Long gone. The dust shaken from my high-heels. Never to be seen again!

Ohhhh well.

West-side errands completed, I cruise eastward, ever eastward across Thunderbird, a main drag that proceeds all the way west across the Valley from somewhere in Paradise Valley or Scottsdale to the sprawl out by the Air Force base, halfway to Yuma. Drop south on 19th and then, to avoid some of the heavier traffic and also to sight-see a bit, cut through Sunnyslope, a historic slum.

Sunnyslope has always been fairly dank, but as the years pass it merges into dire. More than a slum, it’s a central Mexico barrio brought north. It’s hard to imagine poverty of such depth in this country. Yet…there it is. People living in lean-to’s cobbled together with boxes and old boards nailed together. Ancient apartments that look like crumbling fire-traps. Once cute little houses tumbling down into the dust. And dust is what it is: precious few lots have grass ($$$) or gravel ground cover.

That notwithstanding, the staidly middle-class ‘Hood itself is officially regarded as part of Sunnyslope. This would be the result of canny map-drawing by our city parents, who have divided the burg into so-called “villages.”

Har har! Normal folks would call those “districts.” But whatever works for your PR campaign works. I guess.

Historically, Sunnyslope was a TB refuge. Until antibiotics were developed, about all doctors could do when you developed tuberculosis was advise you to betake yourself to a warm, dry climate. Arizona has plenty of that, and it was to provide the same that Sunnyslope came into its own. But of course, if you’re at death’s door with a lung infection, you’re not in any shape to found and build a business or to take on a steady job. So a lot of that population sank into poverty. And the poverty has remained.

So now it’s where your yard dude and your cleaning lady live.

Gerardo the Yard Dude lives in Sunnyslope…he’s sending his Eagle Scout son off to the UofA this fall. Not bad, eh? He and his clan — cousins, wives, mothers — own a row of houses up there, so the whole clan has cordoned off its territory.

Things, I suspect, could be worse.