Coffee heat rising

Angst

LOL! NOW what new neurosis???

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Just don’t get old, especially if you’re female. It’s a recipe for escaped marbles! 😀

Seriously (…well…almost…) !  Just roamed out into the backyard, on the trail of the Dawg. So there we are out in back, puttering around. Nice and quiet. Clear sky. Balmy afternoon…

Balmy is right!  😀

Suddenly, weirdly: I’m horrifically scared!  

WHAT the DICKENS brought that on? 

  • Nary a coyote in evidence. (Coyotes don’t especially scare me, anyway.)
  • Nice, clear sky.
  • Dawg in attendance is calm, sniffing around cheerfully.
  • Distant kids are playing and laughing.

Ghosts, right? That’s gotta be the only explanation!

Dart inside with the hound on my heels. Find all is calm and quiet inside the Funny Farm. Dog seems not to have noticed that a marble or two slipped out my ears.

WHAT ON EARTH was THAT about??????

She killed herself. Why, why, WHY the Hell????

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I fail to understand how she could have done anything so stupid. 

It was as though she deliberately incubated the cancer growing in her gut so as to inflict as much suffering as possible not only on herself but on those around her.

She knew.

She knew because she had been through the same horror with her own mother.

She had watched her wild-assed mother fuck her way into a terminal reproductive cancer. And, half a lifetime later, she drank her way and smoked her way into the same damned thing, calculated so as to cause as much suffering as possible for her husband and for her only child. And for herself, while she was at it.

Because she clearly knew what she was doing. I would suggest that what she did was not stupid. It was calculated. She knew she was gonna kill herself. She knew it would cause as much pain and suffering as possible to those around her. And that was her strategy.

So…well…I have to say that what she did was not stupid. It was malign, maybe. Because it was deliberate. Purposeful: she knew.

My poor father! He attended her through just about every moment of her hideous terminal illness, caring for her, feeding her, washing her, medicating her, dragging her to (useless!) doctors…God help him.

No question in my mind: she knew what she was doing.

We had known since the late 1950s that smoking causes cancer. She died while I was pregnant with my son: in the middle 1970s. A good 20 years after the cause and effect were identified. The more she heard of the science, the more she puffed away. I do think she truly believed those reports were Big Brother trying to control her life.

Why, why, why are people so stupid???? 

Oh well. Can’t fix stupid, can you? And you sure can’t undo its results.

The horror of it, though, is pretty straightforward: one’s sense is that what she did was not stupid. It was deliberate. 

She knew what she was doing would kill her, and she engineered the process to create as much suffering and as much stress as could possibly be inflicted on herself and on those around her.

Just. Plain. Evil. 

Key Hell

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LOL! Went to find a key to unlock one of the exterior screens and… Voilà!  a half-dozen goddam different keys!!!! 

It’s taken almost an hour to unjumble that mess, and it’s still not straightened out. Just now: counted NINE keys, a couple of which I don’t even know what they go to.

Part of the problem is, different doors bear different brands of locks. So you can’t just have one or two keys made to work all seven (!!!!) exterior doors. Plus, because these houses back onto public alleys (which call in legions of bums and burglars) which require their own deadbolts, we end up with…hmmm….let us count…

11111 11111 1

ELEVEN LOCKS! 

At one point along the line, as I recall, I did ask a locksmith to key all the locks the same. But, for reasons I do NOT recall, he couldn’t do that. He was able to key a few of the same, but not all of them.

And that leads to an even more confusing mess!!

ooooohhhhh gaawd!! i have gotta have some breakfast. where the hell is that coffee?????????

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….

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?

Done For!

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Continuing spectacularly sick. Ohhh well…by now I’ve gotten used to the what appears to be the fact that I’m never going to get well. The best that can be hoped, I reckon, is that life comes to an end in some reasonable period of time.

Though, it must be allowed, we’re well past any “reasonable period.”

This morning — it appears to be a Tuesday — I plan to call a venerable old-folkerie here in the Valley. Well…the place is what I regard as a prison for the elderly. They take everything you have: your life savings, the value of your home, any other cash you happen to have laying around. In return, they babysit you and feed you awful institutional food until you pass into Eternity.

Which, we must hope, will happen soon.

Soon as my mother died, my father signed himself into a similar place, one then called “Orangewood.” His experience was just hideous, but not because of the institution and its operators: he married a woman he met there, apparently imagining she could somehow take my mother’s place.

Well. No one could do that. He was deeply, truly in love with my mother, and she with him. This new broad…ohhhh my gawd! Long story short, that “marriage” promptly turned into a Horror Show from Hell.

For me, it had one advantage: taught me that if you get locked up in one of those places, you mind your own business and don’t get chummy with anyone. And especially don’t marry anyone!

I had hoped to save my assets to pass along to my son. Unless I drop dead in the very near future, that ain’t gonna happen. Clearly, this unholy ailment is going to drag on and drag on and drag on, as I get weaker and weaker, more and more unable to care for myself. Soo….might as well resign myself to the fact that he will get little or nothing from me, because the disease is going to eat up everything I have: the value of the house, the savings I’ve set aside for myself, the small but real inheritance from my father. Gone. All of it.

If I were little stronger, I’d bring an end to the horror show myself, right now. But I simply don’t have the nerve end my own life. Just plain not brave enough. Sooo…that which I have is effectively no longer mine. Shortly, it will belong to a prison for old folks.

What a world we live in!