Coffee heat rising

aging

Does It EVER stop? Or even slow down?

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Goodie Gumdrops! Now we’ve got a  new flu epidemic revving up. And the authorities expect it to be particularly bad in Colorado. That’s just across the state line…  😉

Seriously: if we have a flu epidemic in Colorado, we’ll have it here in lovely (adjacent!) Arizona. Tourists will bring it across the state line, and it undoubtedly will spread across the Reservation, too.

Not like I wasn’t already sick as a dawg, eh?

Seriously: I’m inclined to doubt that I’ll survive a really roaring case of the flu just now. Always have been preternaturally susceptible to respiratory infections — when I was a kid, one evening a doctor told my mother I wouldn’t survive until morning.

Huh. He seems to have been wrong about that. Unless I’m a ghost, eh?

Truth to tell, though, respiratory infections do make me sicker than they do most people. What you think is a cold or a mild case of flu will lay me low for three weeks. And that I would like to avoid just now, what with this current mildly terrifying ailment.

Ugh. I can remember those awful brats in grade school teasing and tormenting me because my mother would keep me home whenever I caught a respiratory infection. GOD, but those kids in Ras Tanura were monsters!!! I learned to hate them even when they weren’t actively tormenting me — most of the time I’d just stay away from the other kids.

This was good, in a weird way, because it gave me plenty of time to study. Hence, lo! those many years later: Phi Beta Kappa. But…I think I would rather have had a few friends than a decorative fake key. 😀

***

So, soooo sick. The peripheral neuropathy, while apparently not especially dangerous, is absolutely crazy-making! To the extent that, as ailments go, it might actually be “dangerous,” it’s because much more of this would indeed make you suicidal.

No, don’t panic, please! I’m not about to throw myself off the North Rim. Yet. But I sure can see how, if this goes on and on and on, a person would be mightily tempted to bring an end to it. It hurts. 

And so I hurt constantly. If there were any way to stop it, I’d be inclined to try that way…even if it meant an end to life. An end to life, after all, means an end to pain.

And please: spare me the advice to take an aspirin or an ibuprofen. Both those nostrums — especially aspirin — cause peripheral neuropathy in me.

No kidding. Take an aspirin, and within half an hour or so, it’s bzzzzzzzz…

Yes, I will use aspirin. But only if I’m in a lot of pain. With the peripheral neuropathy lurking at all times, I figure one of those OTC pills will aggravate the hell out of it. And one thing I do not need to do is to make this buzzing and tingling and burning worse! 

Stop the World!
I Wanna Get Off!

Colder than a By-Gawd…

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Yes: It’s quarter to ten in the morning and 55 degrees out there on the back porch.

Now, in the large scheme of things, that ain’t very cold. Especially not for mid-December. But for mystical, unknowable reasons, it seems damn cold! As my father used to say, Colder’n a by-gawd.

What exactly a by-gawd was (some sort of pagan deity???) and why a by-gawd was expected to be extra cold, I dunno. Or extra hot: it was possible for the day to become “hotter’n a bygawd.”

Arizona’s dry air does tend to mess up your perception of ambient temperature. In the summer, 100 degrees doesn’t seem all that hot. But in the winter, 55 degrees seems oddly chill.

The roar from the blasting fighter jet engines at Luke Air Force Base — just a few miles outside of Sun City — echoes all the way down here to our parts. And that’s a good 20 miles. WHAT a racket.

My mother, an inveterate patriot with a capital P, used to sit on her Sun City back porch in the early mornings and simper, over her coffee, “ohhhh, it’s the sound of FWEEDOM!”  

Yeah.

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

Fortunately, WW III hasn’t quite made it to the back yard. Yet…

But that Air Force Base is one of the several top reasons that you couldn’t get me to move back to Sun City. The racket from those bombers. The hatred of anyone whose skin wasn’t dough-white. The dislike of young people in general (no, do NOT move in with your parents over summer vacation!!!). The mediocrity of the grocery stores. (Hey: old people’s taste buds are dead, so why try to sell them decent food?). Horrible place!

SDXB and New Girlfriend are still holding forth out there. The place is just his speed, of course. She was already there when they met, so I assume Sun City must be to her taste, too.

Last I heard, SDXB was mightily sick. N.G. was trying to attend to him, but she’s even more superannuated than I am, so that job may be beyond her. She’s such a nice lady: I hope she doesn’t lose him…now or anytime in the foreseeable future.

***

Welp, pretty soon now I should get off my duff and trot up to one of the nearby grocery stores. Yes: that is one the several ways in which this district excels over (un)lovely Sun City: we have not one, not two, but THREE excellent grocers within easy walking distance of my house.

* An Albertson’s
* A Sprouts
* A Fry’s

Plus an automobile mechanic, a hair stylist, a pet store, a veterinarian, an optometrist, a computer store, a Target, a drugstore, two sit-down restaurants and unnumbered fast-food joints…on and on. WHY would anyone want to live anywhere else?

😀 Okay, okay: it’s true. SDXB refuses to eat in restaurants, so for him, that detail counts for nothing toward our neighborhood’s livability quotient. He doesn’t keep pets….okay: no vet needed. He has virtually perfect vision…grrrr!  So it’s not hard to see why he fails to regard the ‘Hood as in any way superior to (un)lovely Sun City.

As for moi: I feel like I absolutely fell into it when my Realtor brought me to this place. It simply could NOT be better for a middle-class singleton living in a free-standing house.

The apartment blocks across Main Drag West have, it is true, pretty much filled up with some less-than-desirable neighbors. A cop was shot in the hallway of one of those buildings over there. So…yeah: I do have to keep the possibility of moving elsewhere in the back of what passes for my mind.

And…I do think that if I end up having to move because of real estate deterioration, it’ll be closer to M’hijito’s house. He lives within easy walking distance of the beloved AJ’s Overpriced Grocery Market. So I can imagine buying a place down there. Also, a couple of pretty Fancy-Dan high-rise apartment buildings reside in that direction…right on the lightrail line.

So….if I felt like economic & social pressures would dictate that I’d better move before I start to lose a lot of money on this house, I probably would move down into his district…assuming it looks like he’ll stay in those parts for a good while longer. If he moved to some other part of the Valley, I’d prob’ly trail after him. If he left the Valley…???  I dunno: in that case, I might move into one of those high-rises.

Maybe.

Understatement of the Century

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Well, it isn’t at all funny (about money or about anything else), but truth to tell, the first thought that entered my mind after this morning’s dawn flood of undisciplined thoughts was “My father’s marrying That Witch after my mother died must have been an unholy disappointment for him.”

Second thought: “Disappointment? What are you smoking?? It was a horror show. A horror show of the wildest, most terrifying character.”

The poor man. 

He didn’t understand: He could not replace my mother after she smoked herself to death.

A woman is not just a woman
A wife is not just a wife.
The love of your life is not a replicable quantity.

But forgodsake, a harridan surely is a harridan.

Marrying that horrid creature after my mother died and he moved himself to the old-folkerie did one thing for him: it brought him several years of utter misery.

Lonely as he might have been without his wife — his real wife, shall we say — he would have been a hundred times better off without the harridan from Hell who pounced him the minute he walked into the senior citizens’ community where he moved after my mother passed.

Some things are worse than the worst thing you can imagine….

My Father’s Little Orphan Annie

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In effect, my mother was my father’s Little Orphan Annie: an abandoned child with no resources and no future.

A large part of my mother’s life, certainly during her upbringing, was fukkin’ gawdawful. My father came along and rescued her from fukkin’ gawdawful.

His answer to fukkin’ gawdawful was marriage and an escape overseas, to a drudging life in Saudi Arabia’s American oil port, Ras Tanura.

After ten years in that hellish place, they decamped to the San Francisco Bay Area, where my father, an oil tanker captain and navigator, shipped out of the East Bay and my mother and I occupied a series of (quite nice!) apartments in the City and then in Long Beach, in Southern California. Eventually he retired and they decamped again, this time to Arizona.

They sent me to college here. My father worked until he could finally see his way clear to retiring, and the two of them figured to spend the rest of their lives in Sun City, an exceptionally bland retirement community on the west side of Phoenix.

That lasted a couple of years, until a major recession struck and my father had to go back to sea.

Horrible! I can’t even imagine how depressing that must have been — for both of them, but certainly for him. Poor man!

Another few years passed and he contrived to quit the hated job, once and for all. By then I was about through college; moving on to a job in a law firm, and very happy to no longer be living in dreary Sun City.

I went on to marry one of the lawyers (that’s what young women were supposed to do, right? Land someone to support them for the rest of their lives…)

Meanwhile, my mother sat crocheting in front of the TV set and smoked. And smoked. And smoked. And smoked. And eventually succeeded in bringing on a cancer that, predictably enough, killed her.

***

Honest to gawd!  Both of them — my father and my mother — were right-wing crazies, the sort who thought anything they disagreed with that appeared in the news was just bat-brained propaganda from Big Brother.

Yes, that really WAS what they thought.

Unfortunately, Big Brother had the story right this time. And so, not surprisingly, this time my mother puffed herself into the grave.

Okay: so he’s stuck out in the middle of nowhere, on the west side of the Valley. She’s done; he’s bereft.

Now he sells the Sun City house and buys into an old-folkerie, a place called Orangewood. Having lived in institutional settings all his adult life, he thought it was just grand. My mother had refused to go there, and so he’d had to wait until she died to get rid of the shack and install himself in the landlocked version of a ship.

Ugh! I’d have died if I’d had to live there. He liked it, though. I guess to him it must have felt like home. Because, after all, he had lived on ships — institutions — since he was 17 years old.

And I do wonder: did he like it? Was it life on the Bounding Main reincarnated? Or was it what he had envisioned as the ideal retirement?

The latter is my guess — never having been able to read his mind.

He was a handsome man, by any measure. And so the minute he moved into the old-folkerie and walked into the dining hall, a feeding frenzy ensued.

Since he was, as far as I can tell, a staidly loyal married man, it hadn’t yet occurred to him that he was the Catch of a Lifetime…or so it would seem to all the agèd ladies at the old folks’ home.

Within weeks he was snared.

So — again, as far as I can tell — he must have felt he’d hit the jackpot. Not only a dwelling in a hotel-like affair designed to cater to the elderly where someone else would buy the groceries, cook the meals, clean  the apartment, and take out the trash, but now a New Woman! 

He seems not to have thought through that bounty very thoroughly: within a few weeks he had proposed to said New Woman.

Mistake. As you can imagine:

* He was accustomed to living with my mother, who after some 30 years together knew him well and knew how to make him happy.

* He did not recognize the Wicked Witch of the West for what she was. Yes: a wicked witch.

Oh, my. You wanna talk horror show? Lemme tellya horror show! 

At one point I urged him to divorce the bit¢h. But he was having none o’ that: “She’ll get all my MONEY,” wailed he.

I was neither wise enough nor brave enough to say, in reply, “Daddy: some things are more important than money.” Wouldn’t have mattered: he would have ignored that bit of advice.

So he spent the rest of his life in misery, until he had a stroke that carried him away.

What a way to wrap up your life, eh?

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?