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Beautiful Dog-&-Human Night

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Ruby the Corgi dragged her Human all over the north part of the neighborhood this evening. And what a beautiful evening it is! Really one of those incredible Arizona nights…just gorgeous.

We walked northward, past my old Arizona Highways colleague’s place: Jerry Jacka, one of the great landscape photographers of the Southwest. Then up past our now-absent friend Marge’s house.

She, we assume, must either have passed or have been consigned to The Beatitudes, a skin-crawling prison for the elderly. She appeared to be well into her 80s…maybe even older than that.

Her house — a classic Southern-California style 1970s ranch house — has been swarming with workmen. It’ll be interesting to see what transpires…

She told me she wanted to leave it to her son, who lives out of state. She wanted him to have it as an outpost to use when he’s here on business, which is apparently every now and then.

Our grown kids, though, usually do NOT have the same ideas about large and expensive investments as we do. My guess is, he’s cleaning it up and fancying it up so he can put it on the market.

It’s really not in an ideal location: only a block or two south of Main Drag North, one of the most hectic surface streets in the city. When you live next to a busy road like that, you get used to the racket from the traffic. But…whaddaya bet Sonny hasn’t done any such thing? He probably thinks it’s a zoo up there, and has no intention of hanging onto a piece of real estate pasted to the edge of that unholy road.

Ohhh well. Nothing stays the same, eh?

 

A Day Not QUITE from Hell…

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But close. Very close. 

Why?

Well…where on earth to start?

Let’s start in the neighborhood computer store.

My laptop crapped out; needed the attention of a computer tech.

My son has my car, so I can’t drive the computer across the city to the Best Buy, where I have a warranty that covers it.

Shee-ut. So I pick up the gadget and hike the six blocks to the neighborhood computer store, down at the corner of Main Drag South and Conduit of Blight. Haul it in. Explain the problem. “Oh…” says the ninny at the service desk, “We don’t fix that issue.”

Wonnerful. I do have a warranty at Best Buy. But taking the machine to that august computer dealer entails a half-hour or forty-minute drive through nauseating traffic, plus a good 15 or 20 minutes of standing in line. “Know anyone nearby who can work on it?”

She sends me across the street to the electronics store over there.

Hike across six lanes of homicidal traffic. Stand in line stand in line stand in line stand…

“I dunno what the problem might be. You need to take it down to the Best Buy.”

Yeah: the one I just passed over because I didn’t want to make the half-hour drive in each direction.

Hike back into the parking lot, mightily pi$$ed.  A military jet ROARS over, emitting a terrifying racket.

Reminds me of how much I hated living in Sun City, just down the road from Luke Air Force Base, which sent its ROARING jets over our homes every morning starting at about 6 a.m., and serenaded us for the rest of the day.

That reminded me of Sun City’s other horrors, not the least of which was its incompetent, misogynistic doctors. The bastards who made my mother’s final suffering ten times worse than it had to be.

Or maybe a hundred times worse. When does stupidity morph into outright evil, anyway?

By now, as you may have intuited, I was having a just LOVELY day.

Circled back to the Funny Farm. 

Here at the house, I stumbled across an ancient computer power cord. And LO! The damn thing fits in the laptop’s plugs!!!

We’re now attached to an outlet, and it looks like the critter is going to keep on working. Apparently the problem, such as it was, had to do with the present power cord, which must have broken or worn out.

Do miracles ever stop?

* The palms of the hands are still buzzing.
* The upper gums over the front teeth: still buzzing.
* The soles of the feet: still buzzing.
* The ears whistling at high volume, nonstop.

Somehow, none o’ that seems to matter much.

* Computer breakdown
* Idiots in computer store
* Roaring jet
* Sun City memories & horrors
* Persistent peripheral neuropathy

WHAT a wonnerful day!!!!

Scam-a-Bat

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My poor son was mightily peeved this morning when I interrupted his work by calling him to ask if some marvel of an offer that arrived in the mail was, as suspected, a scam.

Yes. Of course it’s a scam. Quit breaking into my workday with that stuff!

Uh  huh.

Well, what happens when you’re old is that it gets harder and harder for you to distinguish the Fake from the Real. That’s even when you know very well that about every third person you encounter wants to rip you off. 

Yes. Even when you know that 99% of what comes in the mail is a scam. Yes. Even now that virtually every phone call comes from a crook. I no longer even answer the phone. Leave me a message, and maybe I’ll call you back. If I know you personally…

Even ordinary adults in their working years get quite enough nuisance calls! Now add to that the calls for help from elder relatives who have been pestered by this, that, or the other scammer, and you get…overwhelming!

Today I got a snail-mail from what looked like a legitimate creditor telling me that I’d better pay up some late bill or it would be off to jail for me, by golly!

Uh huh.

Well, on some level I knew that was BS, because I don’t buy things on time. If  can’t afford to pay for it now, I don’t get it.

But that’s not 100%. Yes, of  course I do have some creditors. Don’t we all?

Well…yeah. That’s what the scammers are counting on.

My son was enraged when I broke into his work morning to ask if today’s telephoned demand for money was something real…or what. This made me feel like a sh!t, of course. But…what would I have felt like if I’d fallen for the caller’s scam?

Honestly. I think a person could make a living by hiring out to answer people’s phones and screen the incoming trash. No kidding: at this point, I would seriously consider hiring someone to answer my calls. MOST of the calls I get these days are hustles and scams. Hiring someone to screen incoming would relieve me of a fair amount of tooth-grinding!

Same with the mail. It’s getting to the point where I won’t open an envelope unless I recognize the sender’s name & address. ANY envelope. But that means that occasionally someone I do business with is not gonna be able to reach me by snail-mail. Or by phone. In other words: they can’t reach me at all. 

Probably the trick to that would be to insert some sort of code into your return address.

Jane 324 Doe, Esquire
1234 Erewhon Road
New York, N.Y. 23456

But these edited return addresses would, over time, be collected by the hustlers, so that eventually you would no longer be able to tell the difference between legit correspondence and hustles. And of course, to the extent that such a maneuver works, it will waste your time as you dork around with the coded addresses.

The older you get, the tiresomer it gets!

What happened next…

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Yep: that appears to be what we have next on the agenda. My son is on his way over here to pick me up and drag me to the physical therapist’s gym, there to be pestered and exercised no end.

UGH!  How could I do without it??????

Well. Actually…I have no business bellyaching about this routine.

The spavined arm hurts like the dickens just now — and has done so all afternoon. Some supervised exercising should loosen up that shoulder and, with any luck at all, ease the hip pain, too…ohhhhhhg helle’s belles!!!!  Here he is!

*************************************
WOW!!!!!
*************************************

Did that PT guy make a difference?  Or DID he make a DIFFERENCE????

Oh, my goodness. It feels like I have a whole new body!

Well…not quite that far out in Left Field, but close. Very close! Seriously: the pain is SO much better, it’s hard to believe!

My splendid son has been schlepping me over to the therapists’ gym: a MAJOR hassle for him, as he has (of all things!) a job. Now that we’re home and back in the house, the hip pain is almost gone, and the shoulder pain: on the high side of tolerable!

WOW! This is the first time in weeks that I’ve been able to walk around without hurting!

By golly. Now I’ll have to stop bellyaching about these procedures. (Never can have any fun, can I? 😮  ) Seriously: if this kind of improvement continues over the next few weeks, before ya know it I’ll be walking around normally…and getting up from a chair without groaning in agony.

Really: I seriously DO hope this improvement continues. If it does, it’ll be some kinda miracle!

Well. If this is what you get from an evening in Hell…BRING IT ON!

So it goes…and goes…

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…and goes.  

As I mentioned in my latest scribble here, the bastards at the Mayo Clinic have, for no good reason other than my age, nullified my driver’s license.

This, in my opinion, amounts to your basic discrimination. And if I had a little more energy and a little more sense of outrage, I’d hire my lawyer to sue the ba*tards and undo that mess.

But y’know what?

I don’t give a damn. 

The truth is, here in this part of town one scarcely needs to drive.

First off, my house is within easy walking distance of not one, not two, not three, but FOUR major grocery stores. And a doctor’s office. And a beauty salon. And a dentist’s office. And a hardware store. And a computer store. And a light-rail train.

So: irked though I am, I’m not about to expend the energy to demand JUSTICE, by gawd.

Second off, the place is crawling with Uber cabs.

Yeah: the Uber fad has taken over the ‘Hood, and we’re inundated with folks who hope they can quit their jobs and spend the rest of their pre-retirement lives driving old folks around North Phoenix.

Fine by me, folks! 😀

Thinking about the Uber inundation led me to recall…ohhh gawd!…the horror of my father and his wife’s sojourn in the old-folkerie called Orangewood. It’s an apartment complex for the aged and the redundant, and overall…well…depends on your taste. He liked it. I thought it was Chez Pitz.

Bearing in mind that my father had gone to sea all his adult life and so was accustomed to — and comfortable with — institutions, Orangewood gave the two of them a fine array of benefits.

* A nice little apartment that gazed out upon the rolling greenery of a pleasant, golf-course-like lawn

* Central location: walking distance to bus stops (if you didn’t mind waiting an hour for a ride…)

* Constant supervision

* Accomplished staff to help you deal with bills, doctors, taxes, and whatnot

* An army of workers to see that you haven’t fallen or set fire to the kitchen

* And on and on…

To my taste, it was pretty awful. I can handle those things myself, and do not need to be treated like a child locked in a playpen to get them done. But…if you don’t want to be bothered or you no longer can handle that ditz, it was great.

And…well…I suppose even I will have to admit (sooner or later) that a point in life comes where you ARE essentially a child locked in a playpen.

* You’ve fallen behind the prevailing technology to the point where you find it difficult to operate the present array of household gadgets.

* You really (in reality, not in some moron’s estimation) shouldn’t be driving.

* You’ve become decrepit enough that walking even to the nearby stores is becoming a challenge…especially in bad weather.

* You forget everything and then some…

Yeah: at some point you DO need a younger mind and body to usher you along toward the final exit.

I don’t believe I’ve reached that point yet — and sincerely hope I drop dead before I do reach it. And so what I most want is to be left to get on with my life’s chores without Big Brother’s interference.

At any rate, back to the point formerly at hand: what does this have to do with whether senior citizens should be imprisoned in old-folkeries? Not much, except that it brought to mind this episode:

My father and his wife, the redoubtable Helen, had taken it upon themselves one morning to go to a doctor’s appointment. But by this time, they were no longer driving. So they took a cab to the doctor’s office.

Whenever they were finished yakking with the doc’, they called a cab to come pick them up and drive them back home. Parked themselves in the doctor’s waiting room and…waited.

…and waited

…and waited

…and waited

…and waited

Some time later that afternoon, I caught wind of this. Drove over to the quack’s office and found them sitting in his lobby.

Waiting

….and waiting

….and waiting….

They had been there something like FOUR HOURS and no cab had shown up. And no, it wasn’t because they hadn’t called. The doc’s staff had called the cab company several times.

Hey. It’s just old bats, eh? Who gives a damn about them?

And that is the attitude toward the elderly in our culture. We live in Old Folks’ Hell, my friends.

That’s why I don’t want to live in a prison for old folks. And why, in general when dealing with service people and other strangers, I try to obscure my age and my situation. The more they know about you, the worse for you!

Welp…if I were a snappy Old Folk just now, I’d jump in the pool & get some exercise. But…I ain’t snappy and my hip hurts and the dog and I walked for an hour this morning and soooooo….this old bat is on her way to hit the sack. Again.

♥

 

New Post? Nothin’ Much New…

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Gorgeous morning! Nothin’ new for October in Arizona.

Great doggy-walk, from one end of the ‘Hood to the other. Nothin’ new for Ruby the Corgi.

Yard dudes down the street ripping up the place with their LOUD goddamn hardware. Nothin’ new for this time of day.

Pool Dude in and outta here before I could catch him. Nothin’ new there, either.

E-mail all f**ked up… Well, yeah. That IS something new. Something that will consume about half the morning and probably cause me to grind my teeth halfway down to the gum line.

Yeah. TWO HUNDRED AND TWENTY unopened message in the in-box, 98% of them junk. So now I’ve got to scan those and delete the hundred and ninety-nine that are trash. No idea what brought that on. And without a car, I can’t schlep the machine to my usual computer dudes to get them to figure out the problem.

This is, actually, one of the few occasions where an owned car really is NEEDED. Most of the time, I’m finding (to my astonishment!), you can get by without one just fine.

More than fine, actually.

Exquisite hip pain this morning. 

Dayum! It was about gone by yesterday evening. So I thought hallelujah brothers and sisters, i’m CURED. 

LOL! Not so much, eh?

I’m slated to accompany M’jito to the physical therapist this afternoon. His appointment, not mine. But since I’ve come to know those folks, I may work up the nerve to ask them what I can do to ease the current excruciation. Otherwise, it’s half a day wasted schlepping to the doctor’s office (again!), several days wasted waiting for an appointment, 30 or 40 more minutes wasted driving to the therapist’s gym and waiting around and waiting around and waiting around.

One of the signal fixtures of old age is the doctor’s office. Ohhhhboyyy! Am I ever SICK of visiting doctors’ offices. And since my son rests his faith in the august Mayo Clinic, a “visit” to the doctor’s office means a traipse to the far side of Scottsdale: 30 or 40 minutes on the road, each way. 

Old Age: what a bizarre land!!! 

This morning I was horrified to discover that SDXB does not remember the accident we were in a few years ago. I was driving & he was the passenger.

We were cruising through a dangerous slum, in the rain and in the dark. As we approached the freeway underpass — we were headed south on a six-lane road (seven, if you count the left-turn lane…) — the light changed.

The idiot ahead of me, seeing a yellow light, SLAMMED on her brakes. This caused her to screech to a halt in the middle of otherwise normal traffic. And that caused me to rear-end the moron.

And because I was the one who hit her, I was deemed to be at fault.

You can imagine what this exploit has done to my auto insurance — years later! Despite the fact that it was a minor fender-bender.

And now — years later — the frikkin’ Mayo is using it as an excuse to nullify my driver’s license!

WTF?????

I’ve about had it, and am beginning to think about moving to another state, just to get away from this BS. But of course — as you know — insurance companies follow you wherever you go. This means there’s probably no escape from my criminal driving record.

So I’m profoundly infuriated. Really, there’s no excuse for this crapola. Move to another state? How about Sinaloa?

Seriously: I may need to decamp to Mexico to get away from the bullsh!t attack. And frankly…that comes under the heading of “More Trouble Than It’s Worth.”

In brighter realms… Ohhhh my! I wish, Dear Reader, you could have been with me and Ruby on our morning hike. We passed a house where a young father had his toddler out in front. The kid was having a gay old time in a stroller. And…hoooleee maquerel! You have never seen a cuter, more adorable, more awe-inspiringly gorgeous little kid in YOUR LIFE!!!!! 

What a delightful young fella!

See, this is one of a jillion reasons I would never wanna decamp to Sun City. How can anyone live without the glory of little kids? Without the ever-entertaining lunacy of teenagers? Without the harassed joy of young parents?

This is life in the’Hood. And, in my opinion, it’s what makes life worth living!

♥ ♥ ♥ ♥