Coffee heat rising

aging

Renovations

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The young(ish) couple who bought my neighbor Sally’s house are over there madly renovating. Sounds like a buzz saw — or maybe a floor sander — whirring away.

Hm. While we think of it…let’s go on a li’l doggy walk and poke our nosy schnozz into their business as we stroll by…

****

So we’re ARF! ARF!  out the door. Around the park. through the south side of Lower Richistan. Ruby: beside her canid self with doggy joy.

And it’s ROAR! ROAR!! ROAR!!! from Luke Air Force, off to the southwest side of Our Fair City. Holy mackerel, what a racket!

That racket is one of the several reasons you couldn’t pay me to live in Sun City: the melody of jet fighter planes soaring overhead, taking off from an Air Force Base just down the road from one’s backyard. That’s about as far from what I wanna hear over morning coffee and evening cocktails as you can get.

Hilariously, my mother claimed to love it. She would sit on her screened back porch, swill her coffee, and listen to those blasting jets’ engines as the sun came up.

ohhhh, she would coo. It’s the sound of freedom!

ahhhh…no, Mom. It’s the sound of World War III, comin’ your way….

WHY are humans so fukkin stupid?????

Ohhh well…

The pair who bought the Beloved Sally’s house behind me: nicest neighbors you could hope to have. A yardful of screaming kids: maybe not so much. But only a  couple of kids in sight just now…and that makes for a reasonably QUIET occupancy.

They may have bought the place on spec, though. We shall see. I hope they last a good long while.  But whatever: for the nonce, they’re about as ideal as you can get.

Secretly, I even enjoy and am happy to have Tony the (Amazing!) Romanian Landlord as a neighbor. Forgodsake don’t tell him, though! Who knows what shenanigans he’ll get up to if he hears that bit of apostasy! 😀

Meanwhile, the young people behind us are  busy fancifying Sally’s shack.

* On the one hand, I hope they spiff it up and extract a nice profit from it.
* On the other hand: I rather like that bunch and would  be pleased if they hung around a few years.
* On the third hand, soon it will be time for me to move into an old-folkerie or some such horror. And I surely would like either to leave this house to my son as a fine investment or to be able to sell it and add the proceeds to the pile of dough I hope to leave to him.

Please, God: let me exit, stage left before that third exigency comes to pass.

ROOOOARRRR!

Is that another F-15? Or is it Cosmic laughter?

She Done Did Herself In

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Thinking about my mother, for reasons unknown, here in the early hours of a Sunday morning.

She killed herself, the poor woman. Not on purpose…uhm…at least, I don’t think she did it on purpose. At least, not at a conscious level.

She smoked herself to death. Literally: she was never awake when she didn’t have a goddamned cigarette in her hand or in her mouth. She would even smoke in the shower. Understand: she didn’t just light a cigarette and let it burn down. She huffed and puffed on it, all the way down to the filter.

Not surprisingly, she died of cancer.

That cancer may as easily been kicked off by life in hideous Saudi Arabia, where she spent ten years of her (and my) life. Arabia was not a place for humans — least of all for humans of the gringo persuasion. The unholy diseases you could get out there…my God! She caught one of the worst of them — amoebic dysentery.  In those days, there wasn’t much they could do to treat it: they put her in the hospital and ran her through three or four rounds of chemotherapy, each of which made her sicker than the disease itself did.

Evil treatment for an evil disease native to an evil place.

If she hadn’t been weakened by the toxic treatments for the amoeba, would she have died anyway? I’m inclined to think she would have. She was a walking smokestack. You knew when she awoke in the morning — or in the middle of the night — by the stink emanating from her bedroom. She started puffing before she lifted her head from the pillow, and she smoked all day long, until she turned off the light at bed-time. I’m certain that what killed her — the immediate cause, anyway — was the tobacco. As it develops, few substances are as addictive as nicotine.

She was murdered by the tobacco peddlers.

But the thing about it is…it was a kind of self-murder. She knew. By the late 1950s, the word was out that tobacco causes cancer. Not so much emphasis was laid on the fact that it’s an addictive drug…so, she was less inclined to recognize that her passion for the damned stuff was not for pleasure but to dodge the discomfort of addiction.

(sigh) She never saw her grandson. Though I was pregnant before she died, she croaked over before he came into this world.

But you hafta say: she didn’t much care for kids. Why she had me utterly escapes me. Once she’d delivered an offspring to my father (was he the one who wanted me???), she took to a killer regimen of contraceptives. They didn’t have the Pill in those days, so to avoid pregnancy required some elaborate machinations…and no doubt the occasional abortion.

Strange people, those…

Another Day, Another Taxpayer-Funded Dollah…

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Mwa hah ha!  Social Security: what could be better?

Seriously, I do hafta say that I am mightily grateful for the wee Social Security income that trickles in each month. Yes, I do have enough in savings to live on as a retiree…for the time being. But…that’s assuming I do NOT acquire the insane longevity of my non-smoking forebears.

Yeah: the Christian Scientists on my mother’s side of the family lived into outrageously advanced old age — and by and large, they did so independently. They were well into their late 90s when they croaked over…and might have lived even longer if they’d been given to the blandishments of modern medicine.

Would they have wanted to? Ah. Yea verily: that is the question.

My son dragged me out to the Mayo yesterday, an annoying and time-wasting trip. Among the several sillinesses to which they subjected me was this…uhm…Olde Folke’s IQ Test. As it were.

And as it were, it was the stupidest thing you could ever hope not to encounter. Seriously: an unutterable and frustrating waste of time.

Frustrating because I had better things to do of an afternoon.

Unutterable because one probably should not openly express one’s opinion of such stupidity, especially not to the professional who is inflicting the stupidity on you.

When you come away from an encounter like that, you find yourself thinking “Them thar Christian Scientists had somethin’…”

Fundamental Questions of Olde Age

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What am I doing?

What am I supposed to be doing?

Who the Hell am I?

And why am I here?

Yes. There we have the fundamental questions
that confront the aging mind.

😀

Was just about to fly out the door and trudge down to the ever-pricey AJ’s fancy-Dan grocery store, there to buy some swell stuff for the mid-day dinner. Charging around, it occurred to me to wonder…

* Waitaminit! What’s in the freezer?
* Waitanotherminit!! Whats wrong with this spectacularly fancy piece of spectacularly expensive steak?

and…

* Is there some REASON I can’t add this fresh, crisp asparagus to the menu?
* What??? No potatoes? Really??? What’s wrong with a fistful of freshly cooked pasta?

Sometimes I do wonder what’s wrong with me. At least this noon I escape the vicissitudes of old-age brain haze (for once!!), come away with what will be a very nice dinner, and not have to shell out another dime for it.

***

Y’know…ten years ago — even five years ago — it would never have occurred to me to traipse out into the (pricey!!!!) wilds to buy the makings for today’s mid-day feast. I would have known what was in the fridge. I would have known there was no need to go charging out in the traffic and scoop up $30 worth of fancy food and wine at AJ’s.

So…

Now we scribble while we wait for the kettle of water to come to a boil for the pasta. We swill wine by way of passing the time. And we wonder which drain our IQ points trickled down.

<<sigh>>

Worrying about SDXB and NG (New Girlfriend). He says she’s under the weather…apparently seriously so.

This is highly worrisome: first because she’s a lovely person and does not deserve to be sick; and second because he’s transparently in love with her and needs to have her in his life.

***

And in the Department of Weirdness…

Last  night I dreamed of returning to the sweet middle-class Berkeley  neighborhood where the relatives who raised my mother lived. And…

…how much I miss those women
…how much I miss Berkeley
…how much I miss the San Francisco Bay Area
…Oh hell! How much I miss my mother

How dast she smoke herself into the grave?

If heroin peddlers and cocaine peddlers and even marijuana peddlers are regarded as criminals, why the Hell aren’t tobacco peddlers legally recognized as the craven murderers that they are?

Ah well…movin’ on.

Maybe we’re all craven murderers? is that possible?

Daydreaming on in this vein, I found myself remembering Berkeley and the oh-so-long dead relatives, so vividly that they seemed almost real, almost here: and I wondered WTF is wrong with me.

If this is senility, my friends…then senility is freakin’ weird!

Argh! With the Perps on Our Tail

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Lordie! Ruby and I, winding up this evening’s dog-and-human walk, shoot up the street, across the yard, and into the house, cop copters hot on our tail. Dunno what’s goin’ on out there, but whatever it is, it’s got the cops all riled up.

Dart in the house. Check the exterior doors:

Front door:

Screen door secured.
Heavy interior door locked, with deadbolt.

Side door:

Screen door flimsily locked
Sliding glass door securely locked (we hope)

Back door:

Screen door securely locked
Interior door securely locked.
Butcher knife in hand

Dog door(s)

Interior and exterior doors secured
Doors hidden behind outdoor chairs

Bedroom door

Securely locked

Dog on full alert
Human on full alert

Dog & human climb onto bed to sorta relax
Cop helicopter flies off

What
A
Goddamn
Place

Does start to make Sun City look good, hm?

Well. Actually, no. IMHO nothing makes Sun City look good. BUT….it does make Fountain Hills look good. It makes Moon Valley look sorta good. It makes the Biltmore district look real good, if only one had a few million bucks to drop on real estate.

Why, again, are we still bere????

S