Coffee heat rising

Common sense

Who’d’ve Thunk It?

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I’m gunna say something here that will sound totally off the wall given the L.A.-style city that I live in. Hang onto your hat!

I could probably do completely without a car of my own.

None.
No car.
No wheels.
No insurance bills.
No maintenance bills.
No gas bills.
None. Zero. Zilch.

CAN you imagine?

A week or three ago, I sure couldn’t have.

My son, who grows more paternalistic as the days pass, decided I shouldn’t be driving from pillar to post. Or even from the front yard to the garage door… 😀

So he has pilfered my car, leaving me with…oh yeah: an empty garage. 

After I got over the urge to grab him around the neck and throttle him (that took awhile…), it began to dawn on me:

Y’know what?
If you live in Phoenix, you don’t really need a car.

That assumes you have half a brain and can figure out how to use Uber and how to use the public transit system.

Here’s why:

* The ever-annoying City of Phoenix did one UN-annoying thing: it created a usable public transit system.

* Buses now show up on time and are no longer haunted by bums and lunatics.

* And the city installed, of all things, a light-rail system that passes within a block of my house and will take you to Tempe (where Arizona State University resides) to the downtown commercial district through the mid-town Yuppie precincts through uptown ritzy-titzyville and then onward to the middle-class suburbs to the north and west.

How’s about that, eh?

The present fad for running do-it-yourself taxi services complements that handsomely. A guy who lives right across the street from me(!!!) is doing exactly that. And I think a few others here in the ‘Hood are doing the same. Once I have a list of these worthies’ names and phone numbers, I may never have to ride another bus again. Or drive another car of my own!

Hmmmmm…

Just imagine never having to drop another $20 bill into a gas tank! Never having to haul the contraption to the local repair garage for its regular maintenance. Never having to fart with getting a driver’s license from the state.

LOL! I probably will keep on with the driver’s license nuisance, because a plastic card bearing your photo is a key, standard piece of identification. Can’t cash a check without one, eh?

But otherwise….about 87 gerjillion nuisances and expenses are about to go away. 

How about you? If you could get rid of your car, would you?

Life with…Other Humans

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See…this kinda thing is THE reason I do NOT wanna live in an old-folkerie, elbow-to-elbow with my fellow senile humans, taken care of by folks who can’t get a better job anywhere else:

Apparently, WonderCleaningLady unplugged the microwave, which resides in the garage.

Unplugged it…WHY???? Gaddamm it.

This a.m., I go out there to heat some potatoes for breakfast, and find the damn thing doesn’t work.

Moment of panic: hooooleeee sh!t!!! Do I have to run out and buy a new micro today? And then tote it home or have it delivered…and then get it set up and working right?

AAAUUUUGH!

Well…I finally figured out that WCL must have pulled the plug and then never plugged it back in. Okay. Problem fixed.

But…goddammit! What IS the matter with people?  If you’re going to sabotage something in the course of doing some chore, f’rcrapsake UNsabotage it before you wander off!

grrrrrr grrrrrr grrrrrr grrrrrr grrrrrr

My problem is, I just don’t get along all that well with other humans. I have next to zero patience with Humanity, dammit!

And THAT is why I don’t want to spend the last months or years of my life locked up in an institution with a bunch of other old buzzards.

* * * * * 

Argha. It’s after 7 a.m. Before it starts to get hot, I need to get off my duff and walk up to the stores on Main Drag North by way of buying a few more cans of dog food for Ruby, snabbing some more fresh berries and melon, and roping in some bread and bacon. Blech! Just what I wanna do, the first crack off the bat in the morning.

Well: the second: Ruby and I have already circumnavigated the ‘Hood.

* * * * * 

One thing I need to do — well, plan to do more than need, actually — is to hop on the lightrail train and ride down to 19th and Glendale, where I can visit and explore the dreaded Beatitudes old-folkerie.

That’s the place where my son would like to foist me. The place where, thankyouverymuch, I do NOT want to live out the last months or years of my life.

My father consigned himself to one of those places. It was called Orangewood. And it was a pleasant enough place. It’s just that…well…it ain’t home, folks. It’s like living in a motel.

And no. No, I do NOT like motel living. No, I do NOT want to spend the final slab of my life in a prison for old folks, eating bad food turned out of cardboard and plastic packages onto steam tables.

Ugh, ugh, and ugh. Not to say UGHHHH!

The Beatitudes, in addition to multi-story structures filled with motel-like rooms, also has free-standing, single-story patio homes. These might be tolerable, primarily because they do provide a little space between you and the neighbor.

Whether these little castles are reserved for married couples or whether they’d let an old bat and her little dog occupy one, I dunno. Pretty quick, though, I intend to ask.

oooohhhhh gawd. 
The horror!

The HORROR of having to move into one of those warehouses for old folks!! I just do NOT want to live like that.

Ohhhhhh well…  It’s after 8 a.m. I’d better get a-hiking if I’m gonna get up to the grocery store before the morning gets unnavigably hot. Blech!

And so…AWWWAAAAAAAYYYYY!

She Knew. Oh, Yes: She Knew.

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Dunno why, but for some reason my idle thoughts seem focused on my parents, and on their marriage.

My father was deeply, passionately in love with my mother. She was a good, obedient wife, and yes: I do believe she loved him as much as he loved her.

They met in California, where my father – a Merchant Marine officer – shipped out of Long Beach. After they married, he got a job in Saudi Arabia: a handsomely paid one. He figured the salary would allow him to retire good and early. And so off we went to the shore of the Persian Gulf, where we spent ten years in Hell.

During all this time, she smoked.

She didn’t just smoke. She smoked constantly. She smoked and she smoked and she smoked and she….on and on and fukkin’ on. You knew when she woke up in the morning, because you could smell the stink of her first cigarette of the day. She would light up before she even lifted her head from the pillow.

And all the rest of the day, anytime you were in the house, you would have the stink of her cigarettes up your nose. The AC system, the furniture, the carpets, the walls: everything stank of fukkin’ cigarettes.

He smoked, too. But nothing like she did. He might have taken in a half-dozen cancer sticks a day. She smoked constantly. She was never awake when she wasn’t puffing on a fukkin’ cigarette. Made her kid sick? Tough. Puff puff puffety. Word came down that smoking tobacco causes cancer? Nahhh: that’s just Big Brother trying to control us. Puff puff puffety. Made the walls, the AC vents, and the furniture stink to high heaven? She didn’t even notice. Puff puff puffety puff puff puff…..

I’d say it was incredibly stupid – especially after we knew  that for sure, smoking causes cancer. But no.

No worries: just Big Brother trying to control you.

Not surprisingly, the habit killed her. Hideously, we might add. The cancer those fukkin’ cigarettes induced put her in the hospital and killed her in a slow, ugly, agonizing way.

****

The frustrating thing is that she wasn’t a stupid woman. She wasn’t an educated woman, but she wasn’t at all stupid.

She had simply made up her mind that she wasn’t gonna give up her cigarette habit, and nothing anyone said was gonna change her mind. And it literally was true: she smoked constantly. Nor did the fact that I was sick all the time make the slightest bit of difference to her.. She smoked and she smoked and she smoked and then she smoked some more. The first thing she did in the morning, before she lifted her head from the pillow, was light a cigarette. The last thing she did in the evening, before she turned out the bedside lamp, was puff one last cigarette. All. The. Way. Down. To. The. Filter.

And she apparently didn’t care that her miasma of stinking smoke made me sick. I was sick all the time I was growing up, until I left the house to go off to college.

I’d like to believe she didn’t know better – that she didn’t know she was wrecking my health. But she did. You couldn’t miss it.

No: the facts were published in every magazine, every newspaper, on every TV news show. Smoking causes cancer. Smoking makes you sick. Smoking makes your kids sick.

She just didn’t care.

I’ve long thought her smoking behavior was deliberately suicidal. She might not have understood how long it would take for the habit to kill her. Or how much it would hurt to die of that tobacco-related cancer. Or just how much and what kind of Hell it would put my father through. But she certainly knew that smoking would eventually kill her. You couldn’t miss that. Not even back in the 1960s, when everybody who wasn’t a Mormon smoked as a matter of course.

She had watched her mother die of a different self-induced cancer. She knew the agony that cancer can cause, and she knew that smoking was likely to bring it on.

She knew. Of that, you can be sure.

And we need this…WHY?

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Herein lies the question:

My son, the redoubtable M’hijito, got mad the other day and stole my car. Just now it resides at his house, all the keys stashed inside his shack. In 110-degree heat, it’s too far and too hot for me to walk down there and steal it back. And so…just now I have an empty garage.

Heh! To tell you the truth, a lovely empty garage.

😀  😀 😀

Seriously: It’s clean, tidy, uncluttered, and un-stinky. It extends the house’s usable square footage under roof by about 560 square feet.

No kidding!! That space is 20 feet x 28 feet…yes, that’s 560 square feet!!

Yeah:  FIVE HUNDRED AND SIXTY square feet whose sole purpose is to keep a tin can out of the elements and out of reach of the local thieves.

And…and…we’re doing this…WHY?????

So, here’s the question of the moment:

What if I never took the car back? What if I just left it at his house? Neglected to re-up its registration and insurance. In a word or four: LET HIM HAVE IT.

Well. The what-ifs would be as follows:

  • I would never again have to cough up the insurance to cover a rolling hole in the ground into which to  pour money.
  • Nor would I have to refill the gas tank anywhere from two to four times a month.
  • Or have it serviced every three or four months.
  • Or pay to fix whatever craps out on it next.
  • My son would get a nice Toyota van that he could choose to keep or choose to sell.

Truth to tell, I don’t travel around the Valley much any more. Most of my automotive destinations are actually within walking distance…

  • The Albertson’s supermarket
  • The Sprouts hippy-dippy organic grocery store
  • The Fry’s supermarket
  • Those that aren’t…well, they ARE within easy train or bus-ride distance. Or Ubering distance…

Except for the 110-degree heat, one does have to wonder…WHY AM I DOING THIS?

And THAT question is given some heavy-duty salience by the new presence of Uber cabs run by, of all people, the neighbors. Yeah: for a fraction of what it costs to buy, insure, and run a car, I can get someone else to schlep me to stores and doctors’ offices. When I can’t, I can walk a block and a half up the road and rent a damn car.

So…hmmmmm…..  It strikes me more and more that it’s stump-dumb stupid to keep that car. If Dear Son wants to keep it and pay the taxes on it and cover the ever-more-stupefying costs of maintenance, let him have it. 

What Next, Then?

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Okay…no sign of Pool Dude. That’s not surprising, though. We’ve arrived at a Saturday in one of the hottest months of a Phoenix year. If you were a Pool Dude, would you be busily running from backyard to backyard?

So presumably, it’ll be Monday before the mess gets cleaned up. At the soonest: that calculation depends on the assumption that he hasn’t decided to can his freelance pool-cleaning business. The mess: remains of palm fronds, with their accompanying burden of dust and dirt, dropped into the drink when Gerardo’s boys climbed up there last week to prune the accursed palm trees.

My neighbor drained her pool. It’s been empty since she moved in, several years ago. And y’know…hmmmmm….it’s a thought.

Personally, I like the pool too much to convert it to a hole in the ground in which to breed mosquitoes. If I didn’t expect Pool Dude would show up at any minute, I’d be out there in the altogether, loafing in the cool water right now. Or at least sipping coffee and listening to the birds carrying on in the brush that surrounds the thing.

And speaking of those from whom we have no word: Mijito still has the Dog Chariot and is emitting no sign of returning it.

And y’know what?

Hang onto your hat….

The longer he keeps THAT hole in the ground into which to pour money, the less likely I am to demand to get it back.

No kidding.

I had no idea how easy it would be to get by without a rolling cash-burner. And that is in the middle of an Arizona summer, when it’s hotter than Hell and a bitch to move around outside. Not only that, it’s an assessment that has occurred before I’ve even started to take advantage of the new public transit system here. Two blocks from my front door we have a kewl, shiny, sleek light-rail train, gliding past silently on shiny new train tracks.

So the question arises, like Marley’s ghost slithering through the window: Why do I want to own a car?

Several times a day, that spook materializes and moans again: Why do I want to own a car?

And y’know what? About 99% of the time, I don’t have a good answer to that question.

Truth to tell: as I sit here, only about three or four things that I need to do would be majorly facilitated with a car…and that’s in 114-degree heat. Let the weather cool off, and you can cut that list to two or three.

1. I do need to go by the pool store and get Harvey fixed.

But y’know what else? I’m gonna foist that job on Pool Dude. Let him earn his pay, by gawd. Let me loaf, as I deserve to loaf.

2. I crave another bottle of halfway decent white wine.

But y’know what further else? That object can be had at the local Albertson’s (about three blocks to the south), at the Sprouts (two blocks down the street and across Main Drag West), at our vast Mexican supermarket (two blocks to the north), and at the local liquor store (a block to the north and a block to the east). So…uhm…I should own a $35,000 rolling hole in the asphalt into which to dump money?  Really?

3. If anything happens to Ruby — she gets sick, she eats an oleander, whatEVER — she will need to be seen by a vet ASAP.

But y’know what? M’hijito has a car and always will, at least until he reaches retirement age. In a real emergency, he can schlep the dog to a vet. But why break up his work day, when an Uber driver lives right across the street? Very likely that guy or one of his colleagues could whip us over to the nearest vet in a matter of minutes… Hmmm…for a lot less than 35 grand…whaddaya bet?

See what I mean? There really may not be much of a reason to own a car here in lovely North Phoenix, other than

* ego trip; and
* convenience.

The “convenience” part is balanced away by the repeated (and increasingly expensive) trips to gas stations, by the regular visits to the Toyota place for maintenance, by the taxes on the damn thing… Hmmm….

Really, you hafta wonder: why do any Americans keep their own cars? At the very least, why do any Americans who live free of commuting keep the damn things?

Hou$e-Cleaners!

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Egad! Check this out:

The other day I decided my beloved cleaning lady, Luz, has gotta go. While she was here slamming around, I sat down to the dining-room table to grab a fast lunchoid. That ingested, I suddenly felt very tired — hadn’t slept well the night before.

So there I am sitting at the table, where I fold my arms in front of me and lay my head down. Not really expecting to fall asleep, mind you — certainly not with a vacuum cleaner roaring around the house — but just to rest the very tired eyes.

Yeah: I do fall asleep. And…holeee mackerel! Have you EVER met anyone who can make trouble just by dozing off after lunch? Well…now you have! Online, but here she is….

While I’m sitting there snoozing, Luz takes out her camera and snaps a picture of me and the wine bottle. What she gets is a photo of a woman who looks flat-out, zonkered-out DRUNK, passed out on the dining-room table.

This, she emails to my son! No comment: just the damning photo.

Upshot: he thinks exactly what you would expect him to think: Mom has been sitting there swizzling wine until she has passed out snockered.

He and I get into a very nasty exchange, one for which I have not yet and may never forgive him.

But speaking of forgiveness, one thing Luz ain’t getting is any of that!

I haven’t called her to fire her yet, but I will. Today, I expect.

Hoped to find a new house-cleaner first, but I haven’t been ambitious enough to launch into that kind of search.

I’ll tellya, I do hate cleaning house! And so resent (very much!) having to fire the woman. Sure don’t want to do the job myself. And just now don’t know where to turn to find a new house-cleaner.

But…egad!

*****
o-h-h-k-a-a-y…

Search online for someplace to hire such a person, and you discover the prices for cleaning a house are now just phenomenal!

Lookit this! TWO HUNDRED BUCKS to clean a 1500-square-foot shack???!!?? Actually, no: that’s $164 to $350 for an average-sized house.

Surprising that Luz doesn’t know this. I pay her $80 a hit.

Hmmmm……

Well… Guess I’ll just have to sit her down and have a little chat about professional behavior on the job. Whatever caused her to do such a stupid (vindictive??) thing, she’s still a bargain on four wheels!

Hmmmmm….not to repeat onself. I wonder why Luz doesn’t seem to know she’s vastly undercharging a going market.

O’course,, there’s only one of her. If you hired a service you’d get at least two people in the house; probably more like four. The job would be done faster. And their employer presumably would have insurance. None of those apply when hiring the standard cleaning lady.

****

On the other hand…hmmm… At 80 bucks a hit, I pay Luz $320 a month.

BUT…I do get four cleaning visits a month. Looks like what these formally organized outfits are charging would be more like $800 a month if they came in weekly. Wow!

****

Well…  I guess I’ll keep my mouth shut. Just have to be a whole lot more careful around her. And don’t even think about taking a nap while she’s here. Or eating dinner, either….