Coffee heat rising

Annals of the Floored & Flabbergasted

In-fukkin’-furiating!!!!

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Never fails! Sit your tail down in a dinner-table chair, and RINGY-DINGY DINGY!! There’s some a$$-hole on the phone trying to hustle you to buy whatever they’re peddling.

Literally. This happens almost every time I sit down to eat. This morning, they jangled their way into my breakfast…again.

grrrrrrrrrr!!!!

If I had any sense, I’d disconnect the phone before I sit down to eat. But…but…

a) I’m too lazy to remember to do that;
b) I highly resent being forced to disconnect MY phone, for whose service I pay richly, because those a$$holes keep pestering me with ads.
c) Sometimes I want the phone to ring through to me at this hour.

****

Comin’ on to 9:00 a.m. I’m so sleepy I mostly just wanna go back to bed. But that doesn’t make sense: far’s I can tell, I was out cold all night. Slept like the proverbial log, all the way thru till sometime after 7:00 a.m.

So…why do I feel like a zombie?

Thinking about how my mother killed herself. She smoked herself to death.

Literally. She was never conscious when she didn’t have a cancer stick in her mouth or in her hand. Or, usually, in her mouth. Puff puff puffety puff puff puff. You knew when she was awake, morning or night, because you could smell the stench of her goddamn cigarettes emanating from her bedroom. That’s how heavily addicted to nicotine she was. She couldn’t pass more than an hour — if that long — without a murder weapon in her mouth.

Not surprisingly, this habit drew her onward to her death. A peculiarly ugly and painful death.

She managed to time that death just as I was coming up on the deadline for my Ph.D. dissertation.

When I explained to the dean who ran the Graduate College that I needed more time to finish because my mother was dying, she said, effectively, tough nougies, and then announced that if I didn’t complete the book by the deadline, I would be dropped from the program, and no, I would NOT be given a second chance to complete the degree for which I had worked over the past many years.

Evil to the left of you… Evil to the right of you… Evil in front of you… Evil behind you. Every which way you look, there’s another slice of evil. :-0  That’s academia for you!

Okay, admittedly, they didn’t kill her. She killed herself. But she did so with an addictive drug (nicotine) that made countless magnates rich as Croesus, as they killed the far more countless nitwits who were their customers. And in the process, she created an opportunity for the ba*tards at Arizona State University to make me even more miserable than I already was.

And that was plenty miserable!

It’s the primary reason that I would not go back to work there. Nor, very probably, in any major academic institution. People who run those places have no empathy whatsoever with the worms that make up their constituency.

For some time after my mother was murdered, I considered — very nearly with seriousness — a kamikaze run. I would get a job in a tobacco factory or in the offices of a cigarette company. Then one day walk into the place with a bomb or three in hand. Set them off and blow up the damn place. 

Blow myself up, too…which would be OK, because that would be better than spending the rest of my life in prison, should I survive the attack.

Ahhhhh, the Almighty Dollar…

Lazy, Hazy, Gauzy Day of Summer

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Well: Day of Spring: it’s only April. But in Arizona, the weather will be summerish by most region’s standards.

What a strange and gorgeous day. Lovely, balmy temperature beneath high, soft gray clouds.

Normally, Ruby and I would have taken off for the park by now. But I’ve spavined a hip, so she and I loaf. She has taken over the foot of the bed, and I’ve repaired to a pile of pillows. What could be better, eh?

A-a-a-n-d…as we scribble, in comes another fake email under a friend’s name. At least two dozen of these have hit my in-box over the past year or two. She’s a fellow volunteer at the church — or was a “fellow” while I was still doing that. Dropped out of the choir and the church phone-answering job when my son started dragging me to the Mayo every Sunday morning: the end of a fun activity and the loss of a bunch of friendly associates.

ohhhh well. Anyway, I haven’t been able to shake the scamming emails, no matter what I do to try to block them. Just now, dozens of these reside on my in-box…it’s gonna take an hour or two to delete them all. What a damn nuisance!

Better get to work on that….

Here’s another one, claiming an auto-payment to Cox will be made…in the amount of $115.

Oh, yeah?  I don’t normally do auto-pays, for obvious reasons. So…scam or no scam? Do I really have to call Cox today and navigate their nuisance-y system to find out WTF this is?  And if it is a scam, how did they get my payment data???

And why would Cox be gouging me for $115, when I don’t make long-distance calls?

Godlmighty, am I sick of this stuff!!!!!!!

Why Didn’t I….?

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Ever find yourself wondering What the dickens was the matter with me that I didn’t {do X, Y, or Z} instead of the stupid thing I did do? 

Afraid that’s not a rare occasion for Funny. Honest to Gawd. I’ve done and said the stupidest things over the years…when if I’d kept my mouth shut at the time — even for a few minutes, to say nothing of a few days — things would have turned out much for the better.

Case in point: My father & his bitch wife.  If, that time when they came mincing up to me and said “ohhhh we want your permission to get married,” instead of uttering a slack-jawed “well, o’course!” (while thinking these idiots are grown adults: why do they imagine they need their kid’s permission to get married?), I had said “Are you kidding? You’re sixty-some years old, not sixteen years old. You don’t need my permission to do anything,” things might have turned out a lot better for them.

Why?  

Well, this is just a guess. And that guess is: if they had stopped and thought about whether they really wanted to marry, rather than getting a kid’s imprimatur, they might have thought twice about it. Or who knows? even three times… They might have slowed down enough to give themselves several weeks or, better yet, a couple of months or three before they waltzed into marriage.

A marriage that turned out to be flickin’ miserable. The LAST thing those two needed to do was get married.

Living in sin would have been infinitely preferable: at least they wouldn’t have had to navigate courts and laws to get un-hitched.

Simply proceeding as girlfriend and boyfriend — keeping their own apartments at the old-folkerie but acting as grand friends — would have more than infinitely preferably. Then they would have no hitching to un-do.

Like all of us, I’ve occasionally made spectacular mistakes. Some of those have had less than sterling results.

The upshot of these adventures, over the years, has been one crucial rule of thumb:

When in doubt, don’t. 

Sounds glib, but it ain’t. Seriously: if you’re not sure about some decision you’re about to make, don’t proceed with it. 

STOP!!!

Stop and wait. Nine times out of ten, you will indeed have time to wait long enough to think things through; maybe to discuss with a trusted friend or advisor, or just to put it all off until your head clears.

And that, my friends, is what you most need to do before making any key decision.

Ohhh yeah: AGAIN!

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Cop copter buzzes the neighborhood, as we scribble. Again.

Goddammit! What a PLACE this is. Every time you turn around: cop copters, burglars, prowlers, sh!theads… Lordie, but I am tired of lovely uptown Phoenix.

Alas, though, as one of the cops remarked after the Great Home Invasion Episode, this sh!t goes on all over the county.

I’d said to him, “Maybe I should move to Scottsdale or Fountain Hills to get away from this sh!t.”

“Don’t do that!” said he. “You can’ t get away from it. We go to these things all over the Valley.”

Ugh. What a world we live in.

Even in somnolent Sun City, this kinda crap goes on all the time. My mother lived in terror out there…and not for no reason.

I need a shotgun, not a mere pistol…

Idle Essay of the Day

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Hmmm….  Apparently SCREAMING into the phone does indeed hurt a nuisance phone solicitor’s ears enough that the word spreads: don’t call THAT number. 😀  It’s almost 11:00 a.m. and I have yet to receive a pestering phone call this morning.

Well. Waitaminit: can’t guarantee that. The phone has been set to block incoming calls. So…some pests may have tried to call and not been able to get through.

This is why I argue that telephone soliciting should be illegal. You and I shouldn’t have to jam up our phones and waylay calls from our friends and business associates to stop jerks from pestering us with unwanted calls.

But…with that feature engaged, my handset says it has blocked dozens of nuisance calls. I gave up counting when the thing showed call #20.

Problem is, it also blocks calls from people I want to hear from. It apparently has blocked calls from my son, for example. And no, I can NOT figure out how to change that.

Yes, I have told folks they need to e-mail me to reach me. But…why would my son have called this number when he could’ve emailed me? That sounds…ominous.

***

Nope: He reports that there are no problems on his end. Sounds like he’s working. His employer escapes the cost of office rent by making all its staff work from home. That, IMHO, is nice enough for the workers who want to make their home double as their workplace. But…not everyone does.

One should, IMHO, have a choice in the matter.

{sigh}  I was not born to live in the 21st century!

G*d-D***ed PHONE

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Y’know, I’m just about at the point where I can imagine not having a phone at all. Not ANY phone!

These days a phone — especially a land line — is more of a nuisance than a convenience. This morning the f*kin land line jangled for the third time — BEFORE 9:00 A.M.! — with a**holes trying to hustle me. Last time, I took a DEEEEEP breath and SHRIEKED INTO THE GODDAM PHONE as loud as I could manage:

G-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-H…..

The convicts hired to hustle you over the phone are wearing headphones.

So when you SCREAM into the phone at the top of your voice, that actually hurts the bastards’ ears. And interestingly, the SHRIEK-a-thon technique has cut the number of pestering nuisance calls. Quite a lot: I’d say by about 80 percent.

Telephone soliciting should be against the law.

But that would put a dent in our “freedom of speech,” right? Free to bug you and me….

Seriously, though: if you blast each ba*tard who calls with the loudest noise you can muster, that DOES bite into the flood of phone solicitations. An air horn would do the job, if screaming is not your preference.

Many of the jerks calling you in the early hours of the day (and all the rest of the hours…) are calling from inside prisons.

Yes. Phone soliciting is a prison enterprise. Check it out: just google phone soliciting prison industry, and you learn all about a gigantic scam tailored for convicted scammers and other criminals.

Hey…you’ve got a crew of crooks. Why not put ’em to work doing what they do best?