Coffee heat rising

Angst

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!

WHY, Indeed….

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Yesterday Funny asked a rather pointless question: Why is life plagued by stupid people?

No answer to that one, I reckon…

But here’s another variation:

WHY did my mother, an overall intelligent and rational woman, commit suicide by smoking herself to death?

Yes, that is what she did.

She knew that tobacco smoking could — probably would — kill her.

She didn’t care.

She knew the unholy horrors that would be inflicted on her loved ones as they watched her die.

She didn’t care.

She knew how much she would suffer, having watched her own mother die of a self-inflicted cancer.

She didn’t care.

She knew how sick her second-hand smoke could make her daughter.

She didn’t care.

She knew how much her daughter loathed the stench of her stinking cigarettes, which permeated their home and poisoned its air.

She didn’t care.

So…WHY, in the name of God, did she NOT care about any of those life-crushing things?

Because she did know all of those matters, I do not believe for one second that she didn’t understand what she was doing. She smoked herself to death: on purpose. And if it made me sick in the process — well, Alhamdulillah.  Apparently, she truly didn’t care: not only that she was killing herself (which may have been the whole point of the exercise) but that she was sickening me in the process. Possibly even killing me.

Well, obviously she never reached that final goal. But I was sick all the time I was growing up, with one respiratory ailment after another after another. Basically, to indulge her own craving for nicotine, she deliberately made me sick. And she did so over 16 years, until I got old enough to get into the University of Arizona and leave her home.

Why on earth would you do that to your own child?

How to Get Your Revenge on a Nasty Old Bat

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“Nasty Old Bat”: that would be me. I get orneyer and orneyer the older I get. And every now and then, some chucklehead will pull a stunt to get back at me. This one though, is too funny!

My son hired a woman to come to the house and keep an eye on me, here in my dotage. Ostensibly, she’s here as a cleaning lady. But the truth is she’s here as a babysitter. She was showing up at the crack of dawn and hanging around until 4:00 or 5:00 in the afternoon. Watching, watching, ever watching….

As a confirmed lone wolf, this is something I could do without. I do NOT want some stranger underfoot all day.

Although I never said any such thing to her, she must have intuited it. She got increasingly surly as the days passed, and now we have this…

One of her jobs was to make my bed: a double-bed sized number that resides in the master bedroom.

So…a couple evenings ago, I climb under the covers on that bed and…R-R-R-R-I-I-I-I-I-P!!!!

LO! The fitted bottom sheet has been sliced with something sharp, from top to bottom. It has a hole in it that runs from the head to the foot of the bed!

Whaaa????

Well, by now it’s 10:00 at night. And when I tellya I’m SICK, I ain’t kidding. I just do not feel well enough to rip apart a queen-sized bed and remake it. Really: TOO TIRED TO CARE.

Figured I’d have her remake the bed when she came in the next day.

This had the effect of pulling the rip apart even more dramatically.

And SURPRISE! Of course she didn’t come in the next day. Or the next, either.

So now, I’ve got to get off my duff, pull the bedding apart, and remake the bed.

Not that big a deal…unless you’re sick as a dog. And in a lot of pain.

Pisseth me off…big-time.

She hasn’t been back in a couple of days. I figure if she shows up at the door, I’ll send her away. That will pisseth off my son, who went to some trouble find this woman. But I figure what she did was just plain malicious. And I don’t want her around here.