Coffee heat rising

Angst

Ah hah! First Thing to Go Right This Morning!

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LOL! Here we are at Funny about Money…After only three tries to get online. 😀 By 5:30 a.m., this morning had already revealed itself as the start of One Of Those Days. Ugh! Whatever you touch goes wrong. Touch it twice, and it goes wrong with a vengeance.

This morning will start with a major misadventure: I have to WALK to the grocery store, way to Hell Gone halfway to frikkin’ Yuma.

Why? Because my son has stolen my car. 

Why? Because my idiot cleaning lady convinced him I was passed out drunk at the dining-room table.

No kidding!

When she was here the other day, banging around from pillar to post, I was feeling very sick. The peripheral neuropathy was driving me nuts; I hadn’t been able to sleep all night; and I hurt from the top of my head to the tips of my toes.

So while she was roaring around the house, I sat down to the dining room table to have a bite to eat with half a glass of white wine. That accomplished, I stayed sat, folded my arms on the tabletop, and laid my weary head down.

She, in all her wisdom, decided this indicated I was passed-out stinko drunk! 

So, the Soul of Concern, she whips out her phone, snaps a photo of me with my head laid down on the table next to a half-empty wine glass, and emails it to my son!

He freaks. Charges over here. Even though I’m clearly not plastered, he thinks I must be — how could a genius cleaning lady like Luz be wrong, eh?  So he decides to confiscate my car! 

No kidding!

It’s now parked at his place, too far away for me to walk, and impossible to retrieve anyway because he no doubt has it locked inside his garage.

So now, the only way I can get groceries is to HIKE to one of the grocery stores around here, dodging drunks and panhandlers every step of the way.

Hey! It’s good exercise: adds an extra mile or two to the mile-long daily doggy-walk. But how am I supposed to haul a week’s worth of groceries two miles through 100-degree heat?

In an old laundry cart, that’s how.

Well, it’s 6 a.m. The Sprouts doesn’t open until 7:00 a.m., but the far less desirable Albertson’s will be open now. Wunderground predicts a temp of 105 degrees today…so I’d better get going before the sun rises any further.

What the fu*k IS the matter with people?????

Wow! I’m IN!

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One of the joys of dotage is that you can barely remember your name, to say nothing of the 87 berjillion passwords you have to memorize in order to operate your websites and cruise the Internet. But today….ohhh mirabilis! Today I managed to get in to Funny about Money‘s website…and with minimal hassle.

Dog and I charged around the ‘Hood at dawn. It’s hot. It’s humid. It’s ugly. An altogether ugleee dawn.

Walked past the tragic wreck of a house on the southwest end of the park, once a pleasantly middle-class domicile for an apparently normal family. Now it’s a vacant slum property, having been abandoned after the family’s son got crosswise with the law and thereby bankrupted his parents.

One of the most alarming aspects of life in America — or maybe, more accurately, it’s an aspect of humanity — is the tendency for one to be unable to get out of trouble, once one gets into it. As a teenager, the young fella who lived in that house with his parents got up to some kind of mischief. I never knew exactly what his crime was: only that he was arrested and sent to prison. Once out of the slam, he couldn’t get a decent job — and his parents had about bankrupted themselves trying to rescue him.

So he started this laughable business: pruning trees. 

No kidding. He took a class offered by the County for wannabe arborists, wherein he tried to learn how to trim and nurture trees.

Arborists here do charge a pretty penny for their services: that’s for sure. If he’d been halfway decent at the job, he probably could have found his way to supporting himself. Problem is: he wasn’t even halfway there!

He damn near killed one of my front-yard trees, so ridiculously did he butcher it. Eventually the tree did have to be taken out. Now a yellow oleander is growing in its place…and doing surprisingly well.

Hm. Wonder how that human oleander is doing, these days…

{sigh} Their place is actually a nice house, even though it needs to be practically rebuilt from the ground up.

It backs onto the park.

Now I wouldn’t consider that a desirable feature: just what everyone needs, right? A public park as a backyard. 😮  But apparently others relish it. The houses adjacent to the park are (except for that one) handsomely maintained and regarded as prime properties.

Sooo….it was around the park and up a couple of busy local thoroughfares, the dog in search of beloved GRASS to get under her paws, the human contemplating its upcoming breakfast.

Now we’re back at the Funny Farm, pursuing the highest and best goal of human life: loafing. 

She’s b-a-a-c-k again…for the nonce

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The li’l computer is back online…just now. We’ll see how long that lasts. /eyeroll/

Several hours of galloping from pillar to post finally brought us to a store that could fix it: not surprisingly, an Apple store. This one, in a large shopping mall on the northwest side. So now this unit is operative.

When we got back to the Funny Farm, though, the big old desktop was acting up.

My son sat down to it and worked on it and worked on it and worked on it….  Several hours of working on the damn thing left us both short of temper. The upshot of that: a fine shouting match.

Once that got started, we both started getting madder and madder. He just roared out the door in a raging fit of high dudgeon. I, meanwhile, sink into a slough of stupidity…nothing I say helps, because I’m incapable of saying anything that helps.

The laptop still isn’t working right. I have no car, and so I can’t take it out tomorrow. There’s a computer store about six blocks away — my son abominates the place. Abomination or no, I guess I’ll have to take the thing there, even though my son has forbidden me to do so. (He hates the place, because it’s a hole-in-the-wall into which to stuff money.)

Without a car, I’m pretty helpless: if a destination isn’t within a couple of miles, I can’t get there.

What to do next?

 

Now What???

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In a moment of misguided chumminess, I lent my laptop to a business acquaintance. This is a guy I’ve known for years, outwardly very professional, a successful chiropractor by trade.

Bad move! Among other antics, he contrived to break the computer, rendering it nonfunctional. My son has taken it to a computer store, in hopes of getting it fixed…but that hope ain’t one I hold out.

Can’t afford to buy another one. That unit was tax-deductible, purchased when I used it mostly for the editorial business. Now that I’ve pretty much retired from that gig and from teaching, I get no break on its cost. And my son is more than ever convinced that I’m crazy, largely because of long-standing friendship with Mr. Computer Vandal.

Meanwhile, a few weeks ago my car was trashed, when I rear-ended some woman on a dark, wet, rainy road.

Now I’m banned from driving (by the Kid) and so have to walk to the stores. I do still have a driver’s license…but no vehicle! He has glommed it and stashed it at his house…rather too far to reach without a car.

Luckily, the ‘Hood is richly endowed with neighborhood stores and chains: Sprouts, Albertson’s, Fry’s, Walgreen’s, Bookman’s, and a cute little liquor store in which to feel righteous by “buying local” when scoring a bottle of wine.

Dunno which way to jump just now. I could sneak around and rent a car. But frankly, that seems like more trouble than it’s worth. In the first place, I don’t want to go behind M’hijto’s back, no matter how unreasonable I think his driving ban is. Plus…about three houses down the street, a neighbor has gone into the Uber business. If I would get off my duff long enough to contact him, I could probably get him or one of his colleagues to drive me just about everywhere I need to go.

One damnfool thing after another, eh?

Yet to decide whether to pursue the scheme to convert the garage, now empty, into an art studio. Probably not: sounds like more trouble than it’s worth. Still…hmmmmm…. I do like it as an idea.

 

Ohhhh Most Brilliant of Web Gurus!

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Well, our wonderful Grayson, the guy who keeps this site online and functioning, got me back in after I forgot (lost??) the password.

God bless him!!

Geez. I must be Alzheimering out. The more I fool with computer hoo-hah, the more opaque it gets to me.

Even when I print out this kind of ditz and tape it to the computer monitor’s frame, I still cannot get reliably in to this website, that website, or the other.

{sigh} I’m awfully afraid this is part of memory loss associated with aging. As the days go by, I recall less and less. Eighty-seven gerjillion passwords? F’geddaboudit. Due dates for bills?  Gimme a break. Who borrowed my laptop? I dunno.… Nothing is distracting me. I’m not sick. With no job, I’m never harried by work tasks, office politics, and general b.s. It looks alarmingly like the brain is simply wearing out.

Then we have mundane questions like…oh, say…what time is it?

  • The computer says it’s 8:47 a.m.
  • Clock on my desk: defunct. Can’t find it.
  • Bedside clock in the other room: 10 minutes to 2:00 (huh???)
  • Timer on the kitchen stove: 8:47
  • Clock in the dining room: 8:55
  • Best guess: HUH??????

 Figure out that it’s quarter after 9:00. Reset clocks, changing battery in one of ’em.

Cute li’l clock…wonder where I got it? Oh well. If only it didn’t have to be reloaded with batteries and dorked with to show what is apparently the current time.

Seriously: I can NOT keep track of all this ditz, much less make sense of six conflicting blobs of data.

Please, dear God: next time you bring me back to this planet, would you drop me on a desert island? One with no clocks? No computers? Maybe even no other humans???

But coffee, Sire. Plenty of coffee. Pleeze…..

Moonset

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Ten after three in the morning: the quiet, dark morning. As we scribble, a brilliant three-quarter moon makes its way down the clear black western sky toward the horizon.

What a thing to see!

It’s sublimely beautiful. Truly: one of the most subtly gorgeous sights I’ve ever seen. Made more so, I’ll say, by knowing this is one of the last times — maybe the last time — I’ll ever see such a thing.

If that’s the last scene I get to see on this earth, well then… Thanks, God. It’s a magnificent gift!

As you may guess, Funny is very, very sick indeed. Beyond “funny,” we might say. The peripheral neuropathy, which never takes  pause, is endlessly painful: hands, feet, legs, lips, teeth: everything hurts. Pretty clearly this ailment is never going to heal: we’re coming into the last stage of a life that does not want to step aside and get out of the way. So the darned life is putting up a fight!

Ohhh well. Nothing I can do about it. Except wait until it goes away.

Meanwhile, in these last burning hours and minutes of life, let us enjoy what we have around us.

  • Let us relish the beauty that immerses us.
  • Let us comprehend the brevity and fragility of that beauty.
  • Let us love those who love us.
  • Let us pray for the future of our species.
  • Let us be grateful for life, for the living, for what has come before us and what will come after us.
  • If there is a God — as some of us believe there must be — let us thank that Creator for the beauty of Creation, for its glory and for its horror, for its intimacy and its strangeness, for its past and its future.

Onward. Ever onward!