Annals of the Floored & Flabbergasted

¡CENSORED!

My honored son disapproves of what I posted an hour or so ago and demanded that I delete it. {sigh!} Not being even faintly in the mood to argue, I capitulate.

Okay okay okay
DELETE DELETE DELETE
{grind teeth grind teeth grind teeth}

The implication, one suspects, is that he hasn’t read enough posts to realize I commit that particular crime every time my fingers flash over the keyboard. And I have yet to be burgled (at least, not by anyone who knows what a blog post is), and yet to have anyone raid my bank account, and yet…to be treated like a grown-up.

SDXB on the phone from lovely Sun City. He’s still having a gay old time with New Girlfriend, even though (shhhhh!!!!!) just now she’s out of town. She’s very lovely, very politically conservative, and perfect for him.

In her absence, he sounds mighty bored, though. That was pretty much how I felt about life in Sun City: b-o-o-o-r-i-i-n-g!

Interesting to note that both my father and his brother moved out of Sun City as soon as their wives died.

My father’s escape was not surprising.

Before my mother fell sick from tobacco poisoning, he had already begun to lobby her to move into a life-care community called Orangewood. She would have none of it, though. She dearly loved their little house in Sun City, and she had NO INTENTION of moving into a holding pen for old folks, thereinat to await the arrival of the Grim Reaper.

He capitulated. But the instant she died, it was out the door with him. He sold that house and moved into dreary Orangewood within weeks after her corpse was disposed of.

Worth noting, though: He had spent his entire adult life living on ships — first in the Navy and Coast Guard, then in the Merchant Marine. He was richly accustomed to a confined, institutional lifestyle, and…well, if anything, he actually liked it. My guess is, he liked it more than he did living independently in one’s own house.

I, on the other hand, simply cannot bear that kinda thing. I HATED living in the dorm. Hated, loathed, and despised it. Soooo…I feel pretty confident that life in a “life-care” community would drive me forthwith to suicide.

However, it has to be allowed: at some point, you’re not gonna be able to take care of a free-standing house. Maybe not even an apartment.

HOWEVER however… Recently I learned from Wonder-Cleaning Lady that the State of Arizona runs an agency that farms out home care workers to the elderly!

She used to work for it.

*****

11 :06 a.m.

Sooo… Here we are at the dermatologist’s, miles and miles and miles and miles away from my shack. Their office used to be right around the corner from the Funny Farm — if I’d wanted to chat with panhandlers, I could have walked there.

Now, their digs are way, way, WAYYYYY out on the west side. A long, long, unholy long drive from the ‘Hood, nestled in a sea of houses.

“Sea of houses” is not an understatement. This place is Southern California Redux. Each time I come out here, I feel more like I’m in Orange County.

Which was not, we might add, ever my favorite place.

Developers have been building (and building…and building…and building) out here for the past several years, producing no mere proverbial sea of houses, but a freakin’ OCEAN of houses. Ticky-tacky cardboard-looking structures packed eave-to-eave, mile on mile on mile

One fails to see the advantage of living in a tiny cardboard house stacked on top of four other tiny cardboard houses over living in an apartment.

Seriously: apartment living looks a lot better to me, for several reasons:

• You don’t have to take care of a miniature “lawn”
• If you have a pool, someone else takes care of that (a biggie!!)
• You probably don’t have a neighbor’s dog yapping at all hours of the day & night
• In some places, you don’t have their brats hollering and running around
• The landlord handles repairs

Why on EARTH would you choose to live in one of those ticky-tacky mini-houses?

A lot of folks do, as we can see: these instant slums sprawl on and on and on and on.

And…one suspects that “instant slum” is no hyperbole. Cheap construction like this is bound to start falling apart within a decade. In fifteen or twenty years, these developments will be vast swathes of junk.

Ohhhhh welll…. That’s the young buyers’ problem.

For me and for M’jito, the practical consequence will be that decently built, centrally located houses will skyrocket in value. That’s already happening: our houses are worth half a million bucks now. In my case, that’s four times what I paid for my first home, one block to the west and two to the north.

So…if the area known as “North Central Phoenix” doesn’t fall to rack and ruin, when I croak over and my son retires, he’ll be able to live like the King of Sheba in some tony suburb of Tucson, Santa Fe, or Santa Barbara — on the proceeds of the sale of our two houses.

***

12:54 p.m.

LOTS more to say. Much entertainment in gadding about West Phoenix. Just now: GOTTA get some food.

Watch this space…

It’s a ridiculous thing to say in hindsight, of course:

My mother should not have had to die from the effects of her smoking habit.

She was in her 40s when the word came down that smoking would kill you. But…by then she’d been smoking since she was in her early 20s — maybe longer than that. She was massively addicted to nicotine.

I understate not:

The poor woman couldn’t pass an hour without a cigarette. In fact, hardly 15 conscious minutes passed that she didn’t have a goddamn cancer stick in her mouth.

The word came down…when? in the late 1950s? early 1960s? that tobacco smoking causes cancer. But by then, she just fukkin’ didn’t care.

First, I think she didn’t believe it: anything Big Brother said must have some manipulative motive, right?

But then, even if she did believe it, I seriously don’t think she cared.

By the late 1950s, early 1960s, she was so firmly addicted to nicotine that she might not have been able to shake the habit if she’d wanted to.

And she didn’t. She’d made up her mind that she liked smoking. That it was part of her daily life (ohhh literally: from before she lifted her head off the pillow until she mashed out that last cancer stick of the day, along about 10 or 11 p.m.). And she was just flat NOT GONNA quit.

And she didn’t.

Nothing would stop her habit from killing her. Least of all her effin’ doctors.

Women in this country, being women and therefore natural-born hypochondriacs, are ignored when they claim to be sick. There, there, dear…it’s all in your pretty little head. And that’s exactly what she got.

If there ever was a time between the time her cancer symptoms surfaced and the moment a quack allowed as to how she was very, very sick indeed — terminally so — it was long past by the time she encountered the first quack who bestirred himself to listen to her.

Cigarettes and other tobacco products should have been taken off the market the moment their carcinogenic effect had been proven.

Yes: then, as today, a poisonous product still would have been peddled on the black market. But my parents, like a surprising number of other humans, wouldn’t have purchased an illegal product even though they were addicted to it.

My father managed to shake that devil from his back.

My mother: not so much. The goddamn cigarettes killed her…in a spectacularly ugly way. And blighted my father’s life, when he had to care for the love of his life as she died hideously in their bedroom in Sun City.

She never saw her grandson (by then I was pregnant with him). Her addiction mattered more.

She never cared how much her husband suffered, taking care of her. Her addiction mattered more.

She never seemed to care that she was dying. Her addiction mattered more.

A tobacco-induced death is not just an ugly way to die. It’s a GAWDAWFUL way to die. And the people who get rich inducing it are not just murderers: they’re torturers.

They tortured her. And they tortured him.