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So…What would you have done if…?

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LOL! Ever look back on earlier years and contemplate what life would have been like if you had done y instead of x? 

😀

Undoubtedly an exercise in futility…because o’course you did NOT do y. Probably  for the best, come to think of it. But it’s entertaining….

What if I’d moved to Sun City when SDXB went out there?

What if I‘d insisted on going to UC Berkeley, instead of letting myself be lured into enrolling at the University of Arizona in exchange for the privilege of skipping my senior year in high school?

What if my father hadn’t taken a job out of Southern California and moved me and my mother away from San Francisco?

What if my father hadn’t discovered that Sun City’s cost of living was so cheap, he could quit his job and move us to Arizona…thereby dooming me to the UofA instead of Cal Berkeley?

What if I’d never seen SDXB, back in my freelance writing days?

hmmmmm…..What if, indeed?

a) What if I’d moved to Sun City when SDXB went out there?

Probably I wouldn’t be living there now. I loathe Sun City: the bigotry, the whitey-whiteness, the racket from the airbase, the dreadful excuses for grocery stores, the…on and effin’ on…

b) What if my father hadn’t take a job out of Southern California and moved me and my mother away from San Francisco?

I almost certainly would have gone to UC Berkeley, the university I craved to attend from the moment I learned there was such a thing as a university.

In that case, if I’d gone on to the Ph.D., I would have ended up, very likely, with a decent academic job. Probably would have married another academic. And just now might still be living in California.

Or waypoints.

c) What if my father hadn’t discovered that Sun City’s cost of living was so cheap, he could quit his job and move us to Arizona…thereby dooming me to the UofA instead of Cal Berkeley?

Well….  Assuming I finished the Ph.D. at Berkeley (not here in unlovely Arizona), I would have had a much more negotiable degree. By now I probably would have retired from a reasonably high-paying academic job. And very likely would not be living in Arizona.

d) What if I’d never seen SDXB, back in my freelance writing days?

Who knows, o’course. I probably would still be married to the corporate lawyer, though. Chances are I’d still have had an academic job — probably tenure-track, or at least a higher-paying trudge through a Maricopa County community college.

LOL! How silly!

Seriously: “what if” has gotta be one of the most futile lines of thought ever invented by the human mind. Because nobody can second-guess — or even first-guess — what would have happened if circumstances had been just slightly different than they turned out to be.

Life…just is. 

Too Silly for Words…

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Did I tell you folks this story?  I think not. It concerns a little incident that really WAS too silly for words.

So I’m loafing here at the Funny Farm, watching Wonder-Cleaning Lady work her butt off. While she’s thrashing around, two jerks….uhm…guys show up at the door, followed shortly by my son.

The pair, it develops, are from a grown-up baby-sitting agency whose mission is to ride herd on the elderly. And, when possible, consign them to institutions like the Beatitudes, a kind of ambulatory nursing home for the old and the infirm. Apparently, my son has sent these fine gents, whose mission is to demonstrate that I can’t take care of myself.

😀   😀   😀

Well, so I (stupidly!!) let them in the door, and they take up their position in the living room — little knowing that a high-powered cleaning lady is lurking in the back of the house.

The conversation soon turns to evidence that I can’t take care of myself.

No kidding!

Luz has just cleaned the living room and the kitchen. The place is fukkin’ SPOTLESS. The bookshelves have been dusted, tables dusted, the leather furniture dusted, every piece of litter or dirty dish picked up and thrown away or stashed in the dishwasher…on and on and on.

Really: the conversation just got sillier and sillier and sillier. NOTHING the two clowns could see or say indicated the house was less than ideally clean.

So…they weren’t able to use their little visit to lock me up in an old-folkerie. What it did do was warn me and let me know what was up. So you may be sure: I’ll be a whole lot more careful to pick up the clutter and make the bed each day, between visits from Wonder Cleaning-Lady.

In fact, I may move to Sun City, simply by way of getting out of reach…so little stunts like this can’t be pulled on me again.

The very thought makes me cringe: I hated living in Sun City every minute I had to be out there with my parents. But better your own home in a ghetto for the elderly than a noisy apartment in a prison for the elderly.

Can you imagine?

Five Days Later!!!

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SURPRISE!!!! The ole  bat actually survived any number of days after the last time I was posting in Full Glum Mode. 😀

Can you imagine? Who’d’ve thunk it??

I sure wouldn’t’ve, a week ago.

Welp. The teeth still ache. The gums still burn, The fingers and the feet still tingle. But just now they ache, they burn, and they tingle one HELLUVA lot less than they did when last we visited here. So…maybe, just mayyebeeee whatever the hell this ailment is will go away.

One can always hope, eh?

This evening, the Human was feeling well enough to dodder around the neighborhood with the energy-laden corgi. 😀

What a pretty little neighborhood it is! Truly, I lucked MASSIVELY into it to have found this place and bought a house here.

Amazingly, it has NOT gone downhill in the decade or so since SDXB and I bought in here. If anything, many of the houses have been much upgraded, and their fancification has spiffed up the ‘Hood.

The outrageous lightrail, roaring up and down Main Drag West, has not, after all, emitted so much noise and hauled in so much trash as to downgrade the living conditions. If anything, it has fancified the place even more: Californicating it to the taste of  younger adults.

Affluent younger adults…

This place is getting fancier and pricier by the day.

When I croak over, so it appears, M’hijito will inherit a house worth a chunk of dough in a centrally located urban neighborhood, one that may even be a place where he will want to live himself. Whether he does or not, he surely is gonna come out on top of the deal.

😀

Boyoboy, am I glad  didn’t move out to Sun City with SDXB, who fled the oncoming stampede of upgrades as soon as he saw it coming. I might’ve gone with him, if I hadn’t been there and done that, thanks to my parents. They were among the original buyers out there. And…as a younger, pretty much unwelcome resident at the time, I learned to un-appreciate the place.

More recently — just over the past few weeks — my feeble li’l mind has turned back to the possibility of decamping back to Sun City. But…y’know…don’t think so! 

  • Don’t wanna live in a mausoleum for old folks, not ever again.
  • Don’t wanna be serenaded all day from 6:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m. by the roar of fighter jets out of Luke AFB.
  • Don’t wanna live in a place where Black and Brown folk are uniformly hated and reviled.
  • Don’t wanna live in a place where you can’t buy fancy gourmet foods because vendors assume old people mostly want to eat frozen dinners they can microwave.
  • Don’t wanna live a million miles from a decent department store.
  • Don’t wanna live a million miles from a Mayo hospital.
  • Don’t wanna live a million and a half miles from M’hijito’s house.
  • Don’t wanna live where you never hear the sound of little kids playing in the street near your house.

Don’t wanna…don’t wanna…don’t wanna! Just wanna live here in my drab li’l middle-class tract house, smack in the middle of the Big City. 😀

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.

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!