Coffee heat rising

aging

Gettin’ Old

by

Just climbed out of the tub. Combed the dripping wet hair. Hauled on the jeans and T-shirt. Dog is fed. Thought is devoted to running the laundry…ehhhh…too much like work!

Gorgeous morning. If I weren’t older than the hills and feeling like Methuselah, I’d take Ruby for a walk. Except Míhito is supposed to show up pretty soon to haul me off to the damned Mayo Clinic, there to be poked and punched: subjected to yet another pointless blood test.

That means I can’t have breakfast…and I’m just about to faint from hunger. Don’t suppose the coffee is indicated, either…but fuckkit! Enough is enough.

Or not enough is not enough….

Looks like I need to renew my driver’s license, another fun nuisance to occupy hours of the day.  Nope….that’s wrong! Doesn’t have to be renewed till 2030…and that’ll be long past my driving days!

So…this is what gettin’ old is all about: one petty hassle after another petty hassle after yet another petty hassle. 😀  I guess the reason for that feeling is that after some years you get just plain sick of all the ditz of daily life in modern times. The ditz translates itself, over time, into “hassle,” and the endless hassles become endlessly annoying.

***

And the news becomes endlessly horrifying. Did you see the reports on the latest ungodly plane crash?

Gosh, I used to hate flying on passenger planes when we lived in Arabia. Every two years we had to fly from Dhahran to New York City. My father would buy a new car there (his reward for a two-year stint in Hell) and we would race across the country in that: first to his brother’s place in Texas; then to my mother’s relatives in California. Then straight back to New York as fast as we could sail along in the thing, there to jump on another plane back to the Persian Gulf.

Even after I reached an age to understand that car travel is far, FAR more dangerous than airplane flying, I just hated those hours in Connies and other passenger planes. Crowded. Uncomfortable. Fukkin’ terrifying! And 12 hours across the Atlantic in those good ole’ days.

****

Wish to gawd my son would show up here and let’s get today’s nuisance/horror trip to the Mayo over with!

Can’t complain,, though: it’s only 6:30. Don’t think their lab opens till 7:00.

Naughtily, I’m dasting to swill a cup of coffee. You know what that will do, right? Screw up their damn test results, of course. So then we’ll have to jump through this hoop again.

Uh oh…shoulda looked it up before leaping off that cliff: NO, you’re not allowed to have a cup of coffee before the hateful blood test.

Goddammit! Now we’ll have to go through this hassle again.

waitwait! Here’s a page that says black coffee has no effect on blood tests.

Let’s hope that’s so. I just HATE the medical crapola, and I sure don’t wanna jump through today’s hoop again.

***

Ten to 7:00 and no sign of M’jito. Maybe he forgot?

Awwwww, wouldn’t THAT be a shame!

>:-D

Well, it’s only a ten-minute drive up to the Mayo. So he’s not yet late, quite.

Meanwhile, I’m fukkin’ STARVING and want to get this circus on the road, so we can have something to eat.

Looks like I need to renew my driver’s license, yet another hassle to cope with… Wait wait! The thing says it’s good until 2030!!!

Woo hoo! Now that I contemplate that moment of glory, I recall that yes, I’ve already jumped through the Arizona Department of Transportation hoop.

Thank goodness: One fewer PITA to dodge around just now.

*****

Seven ayem and no Young Dude. He must have forgotten or overslept

Awwwwww! Wouldn’t that be a shame? 😉  not to say 😀

Well. I should call him on the phone and wake him up. But…

But…

Uhm…

Am I going to?

Going to what? I forget….

😀

Okay, let’s wait til 7:30 and then break out the chow.

All this dorking around means the poor li’l dawg hasn’t had her morning doggy walk. Nor has her Human had its morning trek, either. Ohhhhh well….

****

Parked on the front porch, awaiting His Dudeship’s arrival.

If indeed he’s supposed to arrive.

If indeed he remembers.

If indeed he hasn’t overslept.

😀

One can only hope.

****

WHAT a gorgeous morning!!!

More than acceptable…which no doubt will poison the proposed blood test. But we’re now so late (it will take at least 20 minutes to drive up there from here: more at this rush-hour time).

I starve…  Hmmmm…. Will wait till 8 a.m. and then break out the chow. That’s 38 long minutes from now….

Hmmmmm s’more….  Here’s a news flash: Alzheimer’s may be a product of gum disease! 

Who’d’ve thunk it?

Fortunately, I inherited my father’s Superman-style teeth and gums.

My mother had terrible teeth — presumably the result of malnutrition, which she enjoyed as a child in Upstate New York. By the time I was…what? about 12 or 14, she’d had every tooth in her mouth yanked out. Poor thing.

My father, a variety of Superman, had perfect teeth all his life. No kidding: never so much as a small cavity.

***

Urk! Here’s a messsage from The Kid: “See you shortly for the Mayo trip.”

Dayum!

Well, I do hope I haven’t negated the purpose of this junket by daring to swill a cup of coffee. Boyoboy, do I ever hate this kind of thing!!!!

Ohhhh gawd. Here he is!

Darn it!

Roar! Roar!! Roar!!!

by

Ruby and I take our morning stroll, serenaded by the roar of jet planes. Yea, verily: one of the reasons I hated living in Sun City: Luke AFB, just a few miles to the south and west.

Every goddamn morning: Blasts of jet engines greeted the rising sun.

Other reasons to find Sun City tedious:

* racism
* hatred of young people
* distance from decent shopping
* isolation
* ugly, cheaply built house
* ultra-tidiness
* gravel “lawns”
* no pets: nobody had dogs, though they were allowed.

We did: we had an annoying chihuahua…but my mother preferred cats. And you hafta say: cats don’t yap.

Way over here in North Central Phoenix, a good 20 miles away from Sun City and Luke, we can get the dawn jet blasts. Even though the planes don’t fly directly over the neighborhood, their engines are SO LOUD that you can hear the damn things INSIDE your amply insulated, solid block house with its double-paned windows and its attic blown full of insulation.

What a racket!

SDXB, a long-time newsman and then a PR guy, took a little job for Luke after he moved out to SC: answering the phone to citizens calling to bitch about the jet engine noise. It was a task that kept him busy.

My mother was one who did not bellyache about the racket. “It’s the sound of fweedom,” she used to simper.

No, Mom: it’s the sound of World War III, comin’ our way. 

Of course I didn’t say that to her. She’d have backhanded me into the middle of next week for any such sass.

She did love living in Sun City, you hafta say that. So much so that she not only wasn’t bothered by the ungodly roar from Luke, she even claimed to like it.

Ugh. Never been so glad to move away from a place in my life.

And after 10 years in Saudi Arabia…that’s sayin’ something!

Wow! I’m IN!

by

One of the joys of dotage is that you can barely remember your name, to say nothing of the 87 berjillion passwords you have to memorize in order to operate your websites and cruise the Internet. But today….ohhh mirabilis! Today I managed to get in to Funny about Money‘s website…and with minimal hassle.

Dog and I charged around the ‘Hood at dawn. It’s hot. It’s humid. It’s ugly. An altogether ugleee dawn.

Walked past the tragic wreck of a house on the southwest end of the park, once a pleasantly middle-class domicile for an apparently normal family. Now it’s a vacant slum property, having been abandoned after the family’s son got crosswise with the law and thereby bankrupted his parents.

One of the most alarming aspects of life in America — or maybe, more accurately, it’s an aspect of humanity — is the tendency for one to be unable to get out of trouble, once one gets into it. As a teenager, the young fella who lived in that house with his parents got up to some kind of mischief. I never knew exactly what his crime was: only that he was arrested and sent to prison. Once out of the slam, he couldn’t get a decent job — and his parents had about bankrupted themselves trying to rescue him.

So he started this laughable business: pruning trees. 

No kidding. He took a class offered by the County for wannabe arborists, wherein he tried to learn how to trim and nurture trees.

Arborists here do charge a pretty penny for their services: that’s for sure. If he’d been halfway decent at the job, he probably could have found his way to supporting himself. Problem is: he wasn’t even halfway there!

He damn near killed one of my front-yard trees, so ridiculously did he butcher it. Eventually the tree did have to be taken out. Now a yellow oleander is growing in its place…and doing surprisingly well.

Hm. Wonder how that human oleander is doing, these days…

{sigh} Their place is actually a nice house, even though it needs to be practically rebuilt from the ground up.

It backs onto the park.

Now I wouldn’t consider that a desirable feature: just what everyone needs, right? A public park as a backyard. 😮  But apparently others relish it. The houses adjacent to the park are (except for that one) handsomely maintained and regarded as prime properties.

Sooo….it was around the park and up a couple of busy local thoroughfares, the dog in search of beloved GRASS to get under her paws, the human contemplating its upcoming breakfast.

Now we’re back at the Funny Farm, pursuing the highest and best goal of human life: loafing. 

If only she were still here…

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I wish…i wish…i do wish she were here to see it.

The’Hood, I mean. My beautiful ‘Hood. “She”: my mother, gone these past three decades.

She had seen this tract before SDXB and I moved in here. And she thought it was OK.

Today — oh yeah: I can assure you — she’d think it’s a lot more than OK. This place is right up her alley — the alley we traversed  over 30 years ago, when i was a kid and she was coming to the end of her life.

***

Ian the Great: what a hoot she would have gotten out of him, her fine grandson!

And how proud of him she would have been. She would have thought he was about the best thing that ever trundled up the pike.

If she hadn’t been murdered by the tobacco peddlers, she might still be with us…though she would be older than Methuselah and all his sisters by now.

Women in her family who didn’t drink and didn’t smoke — because they were wacksh!t Christian Scientists — lived well into their 90s with no serious ailments. And no medical care. So…that would have taken her past the year 2000, give or take. Gosh! It’s hard to believe that much time has passed.

LOL! It’s a little hard to believe, too, that I’m still kickin’after all those years and all those relatives have passed. 😀

***

Heh! In its way, it explains why I’m so sick. Who knew I’d be kicking around this earth after 80 years!

Sure doesn’t feel like that long. On the other hand, we live in a culture that despises the elderly, and so we try to put our longevity out of mind. That makes sense.

Though yes, I do feel like it’s time to go (and then some), knowing that my great-grandmother and my great-aunt each still had another 10 years to go at this point in their lives makes me feel…well…strange. On the one hand, sorta encouraged that there may be another full decade left. On the other hand, sorta miserable at the prospect of ten more years to spend feeling this awful.

If there’s a God, I kinda wish She’d set me free, along about now…

She’s b-a-a-c-k again…for the nonce

by

The li’l computer is back online…just now. We’ll see how long that lasts. /eyeroll/

Several hours of galloping from pillar to post finally brought us to a store that could fix it: not surprisingly, an Apple store. This one, in a large shopping mall on the northwest side. So now this unit is operative.

When we got back to the Funny Farm, though, the big old desktop was acting up.

My son sat down to it and worked on it and worked on it and worked on it….  Several hours of working on the damn thing left us both short of temper. The upshot of that: a fine shouting match.

Once that got started, we both started getting madder and madder. He just roared out the door in a raging fit of high dudgeon. I, meanwhile, sink into a slough of stupidity…nothing I say helps, because I’m incapable of saying anything that helps.

The laptop still isn’t working right. I have no car, and so I can’t take it out tomorrow. There’s a computer store about six blocks away — my son abominates the place. Abomination or no, I guess I’ll have to take the thing there, even though my son has forbidden me to do so. (He hates the place, because it’s a hole-in-the-wall into which to stuff money.)

Without a car, I’m pretty helpless: if a destination isn’t within a couple of miles, I can’t get there.

What to do next?

 

Now What???

by

In a moment of misguided chumminess, I lent my laptop to a business acquaintance. This is a guy I’ve known for years, outwardly very professional, a successful chiropractor by trade.

Bad move! Among other antics, he contrived to break the computer, rendering it nonfunctional. My son has taken it to a computer store, in hopes of getting it fixed…but that hope ain’t one I hold out.

Can’t afford to buy another one. That unit was tax-deductible, purchased when I used it mostly for the editorial business. Now that I’ve pretty much retired from that gig and from teaching, I get no break on its cost. And my son is more than ever convinced that I’m crazy, largely because of long-standing friendship with Mr. Computer Vandal.

Meanwhile, a few weeks ago my car was trashed, when I rear-ended some woman on a dark, wet, rainy road.

Now I’m banned from driving (by the Kid) and so have to walk to the stores. I do still have a driver’s license…but no vehicle! He has glommed it and stashed it at his house…rather too far to reach without a car.

Luckily, the ‘Hood is richly endowed with neighborhood stores and chains: Sprouts, Albertson’s, Fry’s, Walgreen’s, Bookman’s, and a cute little liquor store in which to feel righteous by “buying local” when scoring a bottle of wine.

Dunno which way to jump just now. I could sneak around and rent a car. But frankly, that seems like more trouble than it’s worth. In the first place, I don’t want to go behind M’hijto’s back, no matter how unreasonable I think his driving ban is. Plus…about three houses down the street, a neighbor has gone into the Uber business. If I would get off my duff long enough to contact him, I could probably get him or one of his colleagues to drive me just about everywhere I need to go.

One damnfool thing after another, eh?

Yet to decide whether to pursue the scheme to convert the garage, now empty, into an art studio. Probably not: sounds like more trouble than it’s worth. Still…hmmmmm…. I do like it as an idea.