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Angst

Dog ‘n’ Human Walk, Redux…Update

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So here we are, once again, back from a twilight circumambulation of the ‘Hood.

WHAT a pretty neighborhood! If you have to live in Phoenix — or anywhere in the suburban reaches of the “Valley of the Sun,” you really can’t do better than this one.

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Well, I started to write this a day ago…then roamed off into the twilight of my life.

Oh, my. I’m SO sick. 

Surely it can’t be much longer before I’m dispatched to the next world. Surely hope not, anyway!

Speaking of that horrifying dispatch, my son just called to inform me that he’s dragging me to the old-folkerie of our choice: the place he plans to store me until I finally pass over into the Next World.

That would be kind and thoughtful and all…except…..

Very few things do I revile more than institutional living. I just HATE being crammed in with a bunch of other people. I hate listening to some dimwit’s TV blabbering on down the hall. I hate bad food dumped out of cans and boxes into steam tables.

Honestly: if I’m approaching the end of my life, then forgodsake it’s time. Time for me to go.

And that exit is not something I want to have drawn out.

Yes, I will say: I’m not especially well just now. And indeed, it won’t be long before I won’t be able to stay here in my home safely.

Already, my son has purloined my car (he believes I shouldn’t be driving), which means I have to hike some unholy distance just to go to the grocery store. And no, hiring the Uber driver across the street has proved not to be a very practical strategy.

The awful place where he plans to consign me is less awful than most of them.

My father put himself in a place now called The Terraces. He would have done fine there if he had not stupidly imagined he could replace my mother (the love of his life) with a dimwitted woman he met there.

So… Lesson number one: no love affairs!!!

😀

Seriously, though…you would not believe the horror show that devolved from that episode.

Because he had stupidly married the woman, he was afraid to break it up. He convinced himself (rightly or wrongly, I do not know) that she would get all his assets if he divorced her.

Personally, I doubt that would have happened: at the time, his daughter was married to a partner in one of the most powerful law firms in the Southwest. But he was just simply too scared to take any chances.

So he stayed married to her, in profound misery, until the last day of his life.

As for me, I hate institutional living. Hated every moment that I had to spend in the dorms in college. (Back in the day, unmarried women students were required to live in the dorms, unless they could prove they were living at home). And I just. don’t. want. to. go. through. that. again!!!!

I fail to understand, given what it costs to live in one of those hell-holes, why we can’t use the same amount of money to hire someone to come in and babysit me in my home.

So this morning my son is dragging me to the Terraces, for an introductory tour.

Goodie gumdrops. I can hardly wait. 

Another Beautiful Day in Arizona…

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As a long-ago radio announcer — still fondly remembered — used to intone each morning: “It’s another beautiful day in Arizona…leave us all enjoy it!”

😀  Nothing like a little illiteracy to give your talk show some zing, eh?

Seriously, it was a much-loved maxim that he invented and used for years.

Ruby and the Human have marched around the ‘Hood, at least to some degree. The Human is feeling sick, and so not at all in the mood to gallop from pillar to post.

Back in the house, fed,  and ensconced on the bed, I hope to sleep off whatever this is.

Missing a dear friend from long ago. She and her husband lived in a later-built tract to the north of the Central Avenue area. Ticky-tacky little house, cheaply built in the mode of later architecture. He fell ill — very ill, indeed — and died after a long haul in that house. She moved to Scottsdale briefly; then decamped to the Midwest, whence she came and where her family was still living. Forthwith, we lost track of each other.

I seem to have  lost track of most of my friends.

Maybe I should try to get another adjunct position at the Great Desert University. That, at least, would give me something to do and bring me into contact with new people,

But…without a car — my son purloined mine and sold it — there’s no way I can get out to the campus. I’m trapped here in the Funny Farm, really.

I probably could get down to the church. It would require a hike through the North Central district and then a bus ride — often an annoying experience in these parts, what with the stoners and the panhandlers. More hassle than I’m up for.

And so…what will I do? Sit here and rot away?

Very possibly, as we don’t appear to have many alternatives. Make that “any” alternatives.

  • No job.
  • No freelance opportunities.
  • No volunteer gigs.
  • No friends left.
  • No car in which to venture forth…

Really, when you come down to it, I’m doomed. It really IS time to go, isn’t it?

Yeah. “Sit here and rot away” about defines my future. Hope it comes quickly….

NOW what???

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Is there, seriously, NEVER a dull moment?

Why th’hell not???

Six p.m., Friday evening, October 23. Now I find a weird, itchy rash all over my chest.

WTF???  Chicken pox???

Believe I had chicken pox as a kid. Can you get it again as an old bat?

Hmmmm….  Saith the Mayo Clinic:

https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/chickenpox/symptoms-causes/syc-20351282

Doesn’t look strikingly like that.

Temperature: a little over 100 degrees. That’s high for me: I’m a cold potato. Normal for me is 97. Mayo clinic regards 97 to 99 degrees as “normal.”

Feeling ever so slightly on the awful side. Believe I’ll shut off the lights and try to get some sleep!

Did She Know?

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Yeah, I believe she did. 

She knew exactly what she did, as she quietly and pleasurably and quite deliberately smoked herself into the grave.

She knew her stinking habit would kill her.

And she knew (quite correctly) that it would make her little girl sick.

The connection between tobacco smoking and lung cancer became known in the 1950s.

Forgodsake, I was born in 1945.

So…yeah: when I was five years old, she knew she was making me sick.

And make me sick, she did: one gawdawful respiratory ailment after another after another. 

Yeah. I remember her simpering, one day, “Poor Dee! You’re so susceptible!” (Her nickname for me was Dee Dee. As a toddler, I couldn’t begin to pronounce the wacksh!t name she and my father inflicted on me, so baby-babble became the source of my day-to-day name.)

Gawdlmighty. If you believed your child was “susceptible” to every respiratory infection that came along and then some, WHY in the  name of God would you sit there and puff toxic fumes into her face?

Makes her sound stupid as a post, doesn’t it?

She wasn’t, though. She actually was a surprisingly smart woman — if hugely uneducated. What she was? Addicted, that’s what she was.

She was addicted to nicotine.

Even if she’d tried to stop smoking, she probably couldn’t.

Understand: She was never awake when she didn’t have a cigarette in her mouth or her hands.

You knew when she woke up in the night because as you lay in your bedroom,  you could smell the f**king stink from her cancer stick: she wouldn’t lift her head from the pillow before lighting up.

She even took the damn things into the shower with her.

And — surprise! — they killed her. 

Pretty horribly, we might add. You don’t wanna die that way.

Evil, on an astronomical level: That describes the tobacco industry.  No one who is associated with it can be regarded as anything other than evil. It is an entire, huge industry based on murder.

That’s what tobacco products do: they murder you. In pain and agony and stinking horror.

Don’t let the ba*tards do that to you.

In-freakin’-infuriating!

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Jayzuz! Finally got the grill operating and the associated stuff organized. What a PITA!

And now I should hike down to the Albertson’s (my son kindly having purloined my car) to restock and to replace stuff that was stolen. Not up for that just this moment.

The barbecue grill has been dorked with. Think I got that un-dorked…but we shall see.

What kind of people do that kind of thing?

Right now, I’m under the weather and too sick to traipse from hither to yon to replace and repair things. So most of this stuff will have to wait a day or two.

But we ARE left with the “what kind of people” question. Should I fire my cleaning lady? There really isn’t much of anyone else who could have fiddled with this stuff. So it’s probably safe — or at least in the ball park of “safe,” — to assume that she’s responsible for these handy-dandy PITAs.

Yea, verily: there’s no question that somebody has been in the yard, and they dorked things up with élan, Whoever came a-visiting did so with the purpose of making trouble.

And make trouble they did.

What with the spavined hip, I am in too much pain to hike to any of the nearby supermarkets. Guess I should ask the neighbor — Mrs. WonderAccountant — to drive me to the store the next time she goes. That would be a lot less hassle than wrangling with Uber.

Still….that feels like an imposition on her.

What a mess!!!

Hmmmmm….?

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Idly reviewing recent posts here and…well…thinking holeee shee-ut! 

Pretty clearly, I’ve got somebody working for me who is not my friend. Some of the things that have happened lately ring of plain old-fashioned vandalism. 

Which one of my honored employees has been up to this stuff? Don’t know and, short of setting up an army of cameras and paying someone to review their films, I cannot imagine how to find out. Just now it looks like I have three choices:

* Sell the house and move into an old-folkerie
* Fire everyone who’s working for me now and start all over again
* Select one person that I imagine I can trust (which one???) and fire all the rest of them.

What a f*ckin’ nightmare!

And what kind of person deliberately torments a sick old woman?  

Forgodsake, it’s not like we have that much more time left for me to annoy you and make you miserable. Just because you don’t like me is no excuse to behave…well…downright immorally. If you hate me, fine! Quit you’re f**kin’ job and go to work someplace else!