Coffee heat rising

Common sense

Chaos in Hevvin…

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Well… {ahem}…one wouldn’t exactly call Conduit of Blight Boulevard “Heaven.” But it’s not too bad, as Phoenix-area main drags go.

Apparently some new catastrophe has taken place, though, amid the fine rush-hour traffic. Sirens have been yowling up and down Blight Blvd for the past half-hour. Probably a moron drove or stepped out in front of a train.

Conduit of Blight is one of the main routes for the accursed light-rail road-blocks….uhm, “trains.” They get in the way of everything and slow traffic on the main drags inexcusably.

This being Arizona — Home of the Rabid Driver — morons dart around the things and out in front of them and…HOOOlleee mackerel! You wanna talk about traffic hazards? Egad!!

That’s why I won’t drive on 19th Avenue, Camelback, or Central Avenue: not  along any stretch where the accursed light-rail trains run. Those fine politically correct conveyances have turned all of those main drags into clogged messes.

This adds considerably to the congestion and the frustration factor. Basically, to keep from tearing out all your hair, you have to drive anywhere from half-a-mile to a full mile out of your way to avoid the tangles along CofB .

Hmmmm… Speaking the local road-morons…someone just cruised up the alley behind our backyard. Sounded like they stopped at the trash cans or nearby. So…did they dump their trash outside my gate (again)? Fill up the freshly emptied garbage can with a gigantic pile of debris (again)?

Can’t tell by peering over the wall.

And so…awayyyyyyy!

Nope! If they dumped it in any of the other trash cans, it wasn’t here.

And speaking of trash accumulation:

Arizonans are now required to replace their (perfectly valid…) driver’s licenses with a new annoyance called a “Real ID.”

Jayzus Aitch Keeeerist! If the card with  your photo on it, acquired by taking a test and standing in line a good 40 minutes, does not suffice to show you’re who you say you are, then NOW what is?

***

That notwithstanding…

It’s an incredibly BEAUTIFUL day. Clear, with a few fluffy, cottony clouds drifting overhead, and cool.

Yea verily, I’m even thinking of getting off my duff and trekking around the nearby North Mountain Park.

Maybe.

But maybe not. The last couple of times I went hiking up there alone…well… I swore never to do that again. At one point I had to dodge down into an arroyo, tuck my  bright blue backpack underneath me and lie down on it, and pray the jerk who started following me didn’t see where I went after I ran around a bend.

No kidding. The guy stood on the trail a good ten or fifteen minutes, scanning the landscape and altogether too obviously searching for me.

{sigh} This is why every woman needs a German shepherd…

Still Kickin’…

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…after a fashion.

Nine in the morning:

I’m so tired I can barely hold my head up.

My (elegant! spiffy! beloved!!) walking stick is lost. Must have carelessly left it in the park. Wasn’t there this a.m., so presumably some dear soul found it and made off with it.

Bought that at a crafts fair and have dearly loved it for years. Heartbroken at losing it.

Lo! though… Turns out you can get one like it on Amazon! So…whenever I shake free of my present daze, I’ll order one up.

In other Departments:  They’re jacking up our car insurance. As if it weren’t already stratospheric enough.

If we had decent public transport here, I’d just get rid of the car. But…this ain’t San Francisco, and so no, we don’t have decent public transportation. So I’ll have to draw down money from retirement savings to pay for effing car insurance.

And no: one can’t do without the stratospheric insurance, even if one were foolhardy enough to try that: it’s against the law to drive around uninsured here.

In still other sylvan fields… How glad am I that I passed on buying a fancy new condo in fast-Yuppifying downtown Phoenix? You, too, can live across the street from a pile of po’ folks!

Nothin’ basically wrong with po’ folks, o’course. The problem is, a lot of them are po’ because they’re freshly out of the slam. (Phone soliciting is a prison industry.) Or because they’re too mentally ill to hold a job (and so impose on you for handouts…every time you stick your nose out your door).

***

Today is the Day of Woden, which means we’re comin’ up on Cleaning Lady Day.

And how can I say how much I do not feel like getting off my lazy butt to clean house for the cleaning lady?

Yes: Cleaning Lady Day means you get to clean house:

  • Pick up the litter
  • Clean up after the dog
  • Put said dog’s toys away
  • Find some clean sheets
  • Iron pillowcases
  • Put away make-up, hair stuff, bubble bath, whatnot whatnot and more whatnot
  • Straighten up the office desk
  • Put away the kitchen clutter
  • Move the car
  • Unlock the back gate’s padlock, so she can get in and out with the trash

……gaaahhhhhh!  On and on in that vein….

Hmmm…. Unclear whether she’s over at WonderAccountant’s already. She goes to two or three houses a day, arriving last at my place…the poor creature must be dead exhausted at the end of every workday.

Car in WA’s driveway…but it doesn’t look like the Cleaning Lady from Heaven’s vehicle. It may belong to one of WA’s clients…in which case, I’ll have an extra hour or two to loaf before WCL shows up at my door.

ringy dingy ringy dingy ringy dingy…

Another goddamn phone solicitor. The damn phone jangles with phone pitches ALLLLLL DAYYYY LONG! That’s with the number unlisted, with Caller ID, with Call-Blocking.

I use the Call-Blocking feature to sidetrack calls from California, the East Valley, and various towns around Arizona. This actually helps a lot. But apparently nothing a phone customer can do — short of unplugging the goddamn phone — will block all the nuisance calls.

Apparently the nuisances can communicate with each other, though. I’ve cut a fair percentage of nuisance calls by

SCREEEEEAAAMMMIIIIIING

into the goddamn phone when one of the ba*tards calls. Because they wear headphones to do their job, a whistle or an air horn or even a good long LOUD scream hurts their bastardly ears. They do have lists warning their colleagues off. So if you make it hurt enough to pester you, you’ll get on their do-not-call list.

Unfortunately, there are dozens of those, just as their are dozens of phone solicitors. You have to keep up your blast-the-ears campaign to cut the pestering calls to any degree.

Life in the Time of Nuisancing…

She Done Did Herself In

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Thinking about my mother, for reasons unknown, here in the early hours of a Sunday morning.

She killed herself, the poor woman. Not on purpose…uhm…at least, I don’t think she did it on purpose. At least, not at a conscious level.

She smoked herself to death. Literally: she was never awake when she didn’t have a goddamned cigarette in her hand or in her mouth. She would even smoke in the shower. Understand: she didn’t just light a cigarette and let it burn down. She huffed and puffed on it, all the way down to the filter.

Not surprisingly, she died of cancer.

That cancer may as easily been kicked off by life in hideous Saudi Arabia, where she spent ten years of her (and my) life. Arabia was not a place for humans — least of all for humans of the gringo persuasion. The unholy diseases you could get out there…my God! She caught one of the worst of them — amoebic dysentery.  In those days, there wasn’t much they could do to treat it: they put her in the hospital and ran her through three or four rounds of chemotherapy, each of which made her sicker than the disease itself did.

Evil treatment for an evil disease native to an evil place.

If she hadn’t been weakened by the toxic treatments for the amoeba, would she have died anyway? I’m inclined to think she would have. She was a walking smokestack. You knew when she awoke in the morning — or in the middle of the night — by the stink emanating from her bedroom. She started puffing before she lifted her head from the pillow, and she smoked all day long, until she turned off the light at bed-time. I’m certain that what killed her — the immediate cause, anyway — was the tobacco. As it develops, few substances are as addictive as nicotine.

She was murdered by the tobacco peddlers.

But the thing about it is…it was a kind of self-murder. She knew. By the late 1950s, the word was out that tobacco causes cancer. Not so much emphasis was laid on the fact that it’s an addictive drug…so, she was less inclined to recognize that her passion for the damned stuff was not for pleasure but to dodge the discomfort of addiction.

(sigh) She never saw her grandson. Though I was pregnant before she died, she croaked over before he came into this world.

But you hafta say: she didn’t much care for kids. Why she had me utterly escapes me. Once she’d delivered an offspring to my father (was he the one who wanted me???), she took to a killer regimen of contraceptives. They didn’t have the Pill in those days, so to avoid pregnancy required some elaborate machinations…and no doubt the occasional abortion.

Strange people, those…

Another Day, Another Taxpayer-Funded Dollah…

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Mwa hah ha!  Social Security: what could be better?

Seriously, I do hafta say that I am mightily grateful for the wee Social Security income that trickles in each month. Yes, I do have enough in savings to live on as a retiree…for the time being. But…that’s assuming I do NOT acquire the insane longevity of my non-smoking forebears.

Yeah: the Christian Scientists on my mother’s side of the family lived into outrageously advanced old age — and by and large, they did so independently. They were well into their late 90s when they croaked over…and might have lived even longer if they’d been given to the blandishments of modern medicine.

Would they have wanted to? Ah. Yea verily: that is the question.

My son dragged me out to the Mayo yesterday, an annoying and time-wasting trip. Among the several sillinesses to which they subjected me was this…uhm…Olde Folke’s IQ Test. As it were.

And as it were, it was the stupidest thing you could ever hope not to encounter. Seriously: an unutterable and frustrating waste of time.

Frustrating because I had better things to do of an afternoon.

Unutterable because one probably should not openly express one’s opinion of such stupidity, especially not to the professional who is inflicting the stupidity on you.

When you come away from an encounter like that, you find yourself thinking “Them thar Christian Scientists had somethin’…”

Fundamental Questions of Olde Age

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What am I doing?

What am I supposed to be doing?

Who the Hell am I?

And why am I here?

Yes. There we have the fundamental questions
that confront the aging mind.

😀

Was just about to fly out the door and trudge down to the ever-pricey AJ’s fancy-Dan grocery store, there to buy some swell stuff for the mid-day dinner. Charging around, it occurred to me to wonder…

* Waitaminit! What’s in the freezer?
* Waitanotherminit!! Whats wrong with this spectacularly fancy piece of spectacularly expensive steak?

and…

* Is there some REASON I can’t add this fresh, crisp asparagus to the menu?
* What??? No potatoes? Really??? What’s wrong with a fistful of freshly cooked pasta?

Sometimes I do wonder what’s wrong with me. At least this noon I escape the vicissitudes of old-age brain haze (for once!!), come away with what will be a very nice dinner, and not have to shell out another dime for it.

***

Y’know…ten years ago — even five years ago — it would never have occurred to me to traipse out into the (pricey!!!!) wilds to buy the makings for today’s mid-day feast. I would have known what was in the fridge. I would have known there was no need to go charging out in the traffic and scoop up $30 worth of fancy food and wine at AJ’s.

So…

Now we scribble while we wait for the kettle of water to come to a boil for the pasta. We swill wine by way of passing the time. And we wonder which drain our IQ points trickled down.

<<sigh>>

Worrying about SDXB and NG (New Girlfriend). He says she’s under the weather…apparently seriously so.

This is highly worrisome: first because she’s a lovely person and does not deserve to be sick; and second because he’s transparently in love with her and needs to have her in his life.

***

And in the Department of Weirdness…

Last  night I dreamed of returning to the sweet middle-class Berkeley  neighborhood where the relatives who raised my mother lived. And…

…how much I miss those women
…how much I miss Berkeley
…how much I miss the San Francisco Bay Area
…Oh hell! How much I miss my mother

How dast she smoke herself into the grave?

If heroin peddlers and cocaine peddlers and even marijuana peddlers are regarded as criminals, why the Hell aren’t tobacco peddlers legally recognized as the craven murderers that they are?

Ah well…movin’ on.

Maybe we’re all craven murderers? is that possible?

Daydreaming on in this vein, I found myself remembering Berkeley and the oh-so-long dead relatives, so vividly that they seemed almost real, almost here: and I wondered WTF is wrong with me.

If this is senility, my friends…then senility is freakin’ weird!

Apocalypse!

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Good Lord! Have you been following the nightmare news out of Southern California?

Sooooo thankful that we don’t live there anymore.

We moved to Long Beach, where I was born in another century, after my father changed jobs from Standard Oil to Union Oil. Upshot of that shift was that instead of shipping out of northern California’s East Bay (he was a merchant marine deck officer), he docked in Southern California.

Sooo…if the present apocalypse were going on 20 or 30 years ago, we would be right in the middle of it.

In Long Beach, my mother lived in terror of exactly the kind of conflagrations we’re seeing today. The potential for fires like these has always existed, though it wasn’t anything the normal person on the street thought about.

Arizona presents a similar potential, though as far as I can tell, it doesn’t apply inside the major cities. Well…not to the degree that it applies in Southern California. But that potential is one of the reasons I chose not to move up to the little mountain town of Payson when several of my friends did so. We do get some major forest fires…but because many, many fewer people live here, our fires don’t get the kind of publicity we see coming out of Southern California now.

But gosh, am I ever glad I don’t live in California now!