Coffee heat rising

aging

Hotter than the Hubs!

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Seriously: hotter than the hubs of Hades out there. At 7:20 in the morning, the shaded(!) back-porch thermometer reads 85 degrees…but you couldn’t prove that by me. Ask me, and I’ll guess 95 to 100.

* Wet.
* Overcast.
* And hot.

A humid day like this is NOT a typical Arizona number. Generally, “it’s a dry heat,” as the locals like to say.

Ruby and I: just back from dragging the human around the park. Sweltered!

This morning M’hijito is dragging me to the dentist, lhudly scream Goddam. A crown fell off a back molar. So won’t THAT be fun!

Frankly, I don’t think it needs any repair work…because when you look closely at it you see it probably never needed a crown to begin with. I suspect a lot of these li’l procedures are actually procedures on your pocketbook.

That is almost certainly the case here. You can see, absent the crown, that the tooth was never cracked and probably never broken, more than at the level of a small chip. If it were up to me, I’d go on about my business and leave it alone.

But when you get old, things are not up to you. The next generation takes over and pushes you around like you were an eight-year-old.

😀  Not that it’s necessarily a bad thing. In some aspects, I probably do operate about on the level of an eight-year-old. After a certain number of decades, you lose patience with all the hassles, all the bullshit, all the unnecessary expenses, all the gouges and just let it go. And frankly: I’m long past that point.

LOL! One benefit of living at McCormick Ranch would be that it would be too far from my son’s house for him to justify traipsing across the city to accompany me to every little event and crisis. And you may be sure that if I were out there today, I would not be trudging to the dentist this morning. 😀

My poor father!

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He would have been trying to save the equivalent of something over a million dollars in today’s money.

I doubt if he would have thought of it in those terms. He surely was aware that a hundred grand (his coveted goal) was a lot of money for a working-class guy. But a MILLION BUCKS’ worth? Probably not a concept that would have presented itself to him.

He did it, y’know. No kidding: He stashed a hundred thousand dollars in savings — that was his life’s savings goal — and then quit his job.

Shortly thereafter, the stock market crashed. 

So much for his hundred grand, eh?

Oh well. He went back to work for another couple years and then…soldiered on.

My mother died: the love of his life killed herself with tobacco sticks. He sent me through college. Then he quit his job, figuring at least to live ever after without having to work his a$$ off.

Frankly…I cannot imagine that he would have kept at his savings goal if he had thought of it as the equivalent of a million dollars. It would have been beyond his comprehension. But to tellya the truth, that is what the man accomplished in his lifetime.

He may have intuited that there was no way in Hell he could ever earn & save the inflation-adjusted equivalent of a million bucks. But I doubt if he actually knew it, at least not at a gut level.

I sure hope he didn’t.

That is what it amounted to, y’know. His goal of a hundred grand, by the time he retired, would have equated to just about a million dollars, in the change of his time.

Shhhh! Don’t tell him, though!

7:00 a.m.: The Moron Hour

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Why IS it that every  moron on the planet turns out of their house at 7 in the morning? With their dog, o’course!

Just back from the morning DoggyWalk. Nasty morning: hot, overcast, and wet. Back porch thermometer registers a mere 85 degrees.

Days like this, sometimes rain just coalesces out of the air. Don’t even need clouds to make it rain!

Welp, that doesn’t seem to be happening today…not yet, anyway. Wunderground predicts a 15% chance of rain and just now registers an ambient temperature of 85 degrees. Not very hot. But yeah: damp, that’s for sure.

Ruby never seems fazed by a soggy atmosphere. Maybe the thick furry coat protects her, to some degree from the elements: whether cold and wet or hot and wet.

At this hour, everybody and their little brother, sister,, and grandmother is out tromping around with their dawg. And they just don’t seem to get it that “they just want to pwaaaayyy” doesn’t apply to your dog. No, stupid… my dog just wants to rip their dog’s throat out. 

After you tell them to please keep their dog back and they refuse to do so, they get all peeved when your dog goes in for the kill.

Speaking of dogs, M’hijito bought a puppy yesterday, to replace his beloved old white golden retriever who croaked over a few days ago.

Oh, my, what a little cutie! And the parents were also white retrievers, so this one will grow up to look a lot like the Late, Great Jake.

I should call him — the kid, that is, not the dawg — and see if he’d like me to bring something over for lunch from the AJ’s deli. That would be pleasant…and an excuse to see the new pup. 😉

***

Meanwhile: ugh!  My hip is spavined and hurts like Hell.

Years ago, the Late, Great Dr. Daley — one of the finest GPs ever to walk the surface of the Earth — told me that someday I’d have to get surgery on that hip. Looks like the Someday has arrived.

Just what I need: surgery, and then weeks in the hospital recuperating and going through endless physical therapy. Whee…I can hardly wait.

Could I even walk from AJ’s to M’jito’s just now? Probably: once I get going, the gait seems to move along OK. The problem, I think, would be trapping a bus, getting down to Central & Camelback, and then hiking to the Kid’s place.

Dunno. A guy across the street has taken up the Uber business. I may ask him to drive me down to the store…and maybe for a few extra bucks he could be persuaded to stick around long enough to schlep me from the AJ’s to the Kid’s house.

The Uber thing looks like quite the little Godsend. I’ve only tried it once, but it really was The Business! The guy showed up at my house right away, schlepped me across the city, and then showed up again at the dentist’s office to schlep me home.

Truth to tell, it really may be that Phoenix has turned into enough of a Big City that you could live here without owning a car. M’hijito would like to get rid of mine — apparently he thinks that at 80 I’ve reached such a state of decrepitude I’m not safe to be driving. And I’ll tellya: if I knew for sure that a car would show up when I call for it — and show up in a timely manner — I’d agree with him.

But…well…that is something that I don’t know. Actually, to the contrary: I do know…a cab is not gonna show up on time when you need it. Period. This ain’t San Francisco, folks: this is Phoenix.

And no: dyed-in-the-wool Phoenicians do not ride cabs.

 

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. 

WTF?????

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Okay, friends…and yes, dear foes: I’m about to tell you something I probably shouldn’t tell you. Or anyone.

Stuff is scaring the Hell out of me…even though it probably shouldn’t.

Weird stuff. Stupid stuff. Even serious rational stuff.

For example…

I lost my bicycle. 

Yeah. Lost it BIG time. Don’t know where. Don’t know how. Have only the vaguest idea of when.

The other day I rode my beloved old gaudy pink bicycle through the ‘Hood and over into the classic North Central neighborhood just to the east of here.

That neighborhood is dominated by two historic Catholic high schools — Xavier and Brophy Preparatory — which are surrounded by staunchly middle-class, boring little homes.

As I got tireder and hotter, I came to light at the home of a woman who was hanging out on her front porch. She invited me to take a seat and rest.

It became apparent, before long, that I probably should not ride my bike home in the heat, especially in the fagged-out state I was exhibiting. She brought out a phone, and we called my son.

Shortly, he showed up in his car, coming to light in front of her house.

He loaded me into the vehicle, and we left: he brought me home and deposited me in the air-conditioning.

Here’s where it gets weird: He apparently forgot to load the bike into his vehicle — or didn’t realize he needed to. When we got home: no beloved pink bike! 

I was very much overheated and not in any state for anything more than tumbling into the sack with a cold washcloth on my head. He drove me over to St. Joseph’s hospital, where, by the time we arrived, I had pretty well recovered and cooled down into a safe status. We came home. I forgot all about the bike…until the next morning, when I realized it is GONE!

I want my bike back! 

Getting weirder now: We can’t figure out where we left it. If we left it anywhere. I thought we’d brought it home and left it in the garage.

But it’s not in the garage. Or inside the house. Or in the backyard. Or…anyplace we can imagine.

Did I actually ride my bike over to the high-school neighborhood and carelessly leave it there, when M’Hijito arrived and toted me off?  Dunno. I have no memory of that. He says not. But…it’s a pretty vague-sounding “not.” Maybe I actually walked into that neighborhood???

If so, where the Hell is the bike?

So… I’m bereft at the loss of a beloved bicycle. But more than that: I’m scared sh!tless at the loss of my IQ points!!!  WTF? WHY CAN’T I REMEMBER WHAT HAPPENED? 

That is what’s scaring me. Really, really scaring me.

It’s hotter than the Hubs of Hades outdoors today: temps over 110. So walking back over into that neighborhood and trying to explore around is pretty much out of the question.

And M’hijito is (quite reasonably) pretty much out of patience with this shenanigan. He has a job (can you imagine??) and cannot take off to wander around searching for a bike that by now has probably been spirited off to Yuma.

Dunno whether he recognizes that a big, scary part of this moment of lunacy is that I genuinely cannot remember what actually happened at that lady’s house, not in any detail at all. So frankly, I don’t know if we left the bike there…or what. Probably did…but at this point anything’s possible.

At 6:00 p.m., it’s 108 in the shade of the back porch. Too hot, by far, to go exploring around North Central Phoenix — not that we’d  be likely to find anything.

Meanwhile, M’jito, deeply alarmed with this weird behavior of mine, has kiped my car and locked it into his garage. So I can’t climb into it and drive it around that neighborhood on a searching expedition.

Soooo… I guess my beloved pink bike is gone. As in GONE gone. Along with a few of my brain cells, presumably….

Jayzuz! Don’t get old, whatever ya do!!!

And Speakin’ of ARGHA!…

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BING BOOONGGGGGGG!

Ohhhh gawd, NOW what? Stumble to the front door.

It’s the CLEANING LADY FROM HEAVEN! Ohhh damn ohhh hell I thought NEXT week was her week….

Stumble out to the living room. Let her in. Start to pick up litter.

And pick up litter….

And pick up litter….

And pick up litter….

And pick up litter…..

Ohhhhh damn oh hell oh damn…I’d put off this mess until next week!

B-a-a-a-a-d Human!!!!!!!

What’s going on in the backyard?

NO! Hallelujah, boys and girls: it’s NOT Pool Dude. Just the wind blowing stuff around. That’s something. I guess…except tomorrow a.m. we’ll have to vacuum up another nice mess.

This place…

This place…

Gotta think about this place…

Am I gonna stay here for The Duration? SHOULD I???

Those apartments on the west side of Conduit of Blight Boulevard…hmmmm…. They ARE going downhill
…and down…
and down…

They were OK when I moved in to the neighborhood. But over the years, they’ve declined. And just now the decline is mighty steady.

If I’m gonna move to a more stable district, I may have to do so soon. Because…  I do want to leave this house (make that a house) to M’hijito…but it’s gotta be a place that will hold its value.

And just now, that ain’t entirely clear to me. If those apartments continue to slide downhill, they surely will pull down the property values in the surrounding neighborhoods.

Maybe…

Maybe…

Maybe…

…I should betake myself to Scottsdale or Paradise Valley or Fountain Hills before that process gets any further under way.

But dayum, I don’t wanna move. I’ve done more than my share of moving in my lifetime — and then some — and don’t wanna do it again. Especially now that I’m old!

My son expects to sock me away in an old-folkerie, in the not-too-distant future. I expect to take a flying leap off the North Rim of the Grand Canyon before that happens…but either way, this shack needs to hold its value so it can get him into a place that will be a decent investment, real estate-wise. That may mean I’ll need to FIND such a decent investment…now…and get into it before much more time elapses.

Ugh. Spare me yet another move!!!