Coffee heat rising

Dispatches from Hell

Lovely Uptown Phoenix

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rrrrrrrRRRRRRRRRRrrrrrrr HONK HONK HONK RRRRRRRRRRR beep beep beep thwack thwack thwack thwhack…. Ahhh, the lovely melody of the ‘Hood! Major wrecky-poo to the west of us on Conduit of Blight, just as Ruby and I stepped out the front door for a doggy-walk.

So we head out in the opposite direction. An hour later, the cop copters are flying away and apparently most of the mayhem is cleaned up.

Hm. This might not have been a wreck. It may have been yet another moment of mayhem: apparently a shooting incident took place over there. Hmmmm… No, don’t think it’s the same episode. The shooting thing took place on or near the freeway itself. This afternoon’s moment of fun looked like it happened on a surface street. Probably.

Then we have this little bit of fun: Apparently the water in our parts is contaminated with lead from the pipes that the city has no intention of replacing. Guess Ruby and I should be drinking bottled water. $$$$

And this one from yesterday…

Starts to make Sun City look good, eh?

One Good Thing!

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Well, here’s a little miracle: FaM let me in on the big desktop computer, a vast and aging Macintosh.

Normally I use a laptop. The desktop is very beautiful and wonderful, but these days it’s profoundly uncomfortable for me to sit in a wooden chair for hours (or minutes….) in front of an office desk. So I use a MacBook — a laptop — which allows me to play with the computer while laying in bed or loafing in an easy chair. The ancient desktop is working here…which is nice for Funny about Money, but not so great for the 87 gerjillion other password-protected sites. The MacBook’s keyboard has died. Hit a key or type a password, and nothing happens.

Plus the desktop isn’t accepting a bunch of my passwords. I can’t get into my bank account, for example. And no, I can’t get through to those folks on the phone. So I’ll have to drive about seven miles (one-way) to the west side to get to the credit union, stand in line stand in line stand in line and stand in line to get to a teller, explain the current fiasco, try to get them to reset my password…WITHOUT A COMPUTER.

Yes. My laptop — upon which I am almost totally dependent because of the current ailment — just died, here at 5 o’clock in the goddamn morning. The desktop is  not well — notice how it just decided it won’t type a single-end-quote? Lovely. It will enter an apostrophe: ‘  But not in a standard end-quote format.

Then I’ve got to come back here and drive another ten or twelve miles in the OTHER direction — through Phoenix’s cut-throat traffic — to arrive at the august Shemer Museum.

And what a fight awaits there!

I’d signed up, at a friend’s behest, for a pottery-making class. Sounds fun, eh?  Well…it would be…

But of late I’ve developed a new ailment: peripheral neuropathy.

This little horror causes your hands, your feet, your lower legs, your lips, your gums, and even your effin teeth to tingle like mad. Tingling like when a limb “goes to sleep” because you had it in some position that cut off circulation.

Welp… When we got to the pottery class, I discovered that it entails kneading and slapping at a ball of ceramic clay. And y’know what? THAT HURTS!!!

So I dropped the class and asked for my money back. They obliged…. Uh huh.

By depositing the refund in what they claimed was my PayPal account.

Uhhhmmmm….. WHAT Paypal account?

If I have a Paypal account, I’ve never used it. I have NO idea how to access any such thing, nor is there any way to reach a human at Paypal to find out WTF. Not that I can find, anyway.

How TF could they deposit money into a Paypal account that I don’t have?  As far as I know, Paypal doesn’t have my legal name: my parents gave me a bizarre name, guaranteed to make a little kid’s life miserable, and I don’t use it. Therefore there’s no way they could have sent me a refund through Paypal: Paypal would not know who I am if the Shemer sent money there under my legal name. And good luck trying to explain that to some functionary — probably a volunteer — at the Shemer’s front desk.

I’ve tried to call them, and I can’t reach a person there, either.  Trying to get them to call me is probably futile: because of the volume of nuisance phone calls I get, I’ve had to block most of the local area codes, plus many in other states. Phone solicitors have software that blocks their outgoing number and makes it look like they’re calling from a number in your area code. After you reach a certain age, you’re assumed to be a soft touch, so the ba*tards just blitz you with nuisance calls. Literally, until I blocked a series of area codes — many of them local — I’d get 10 or 12 nuisance calls a day! Yeah… I’m pretty sure the Schemer is in one of the blocked area codes, and therefore if they tried to reach me they couldn’t get through.

So now I have to get in my car, buy gas (wrestling with a pump handle HURTS), drive way to hell and gone to the east side — on the border with Scottsdale — barge in, demand to see a person, be told no one will see me (dontcha just know it?), leave my email, and beg the morons to get in touch with me that way. Then turn around and schlep all the way back into town to get to the Best Buy, bearing the laptop, and beg them to fix it.

The one minuscule bright point of light in this mess is that I do have a service contract with Best Buy. So…well…they MAY fix it for free. If they don’t, though, at least they will take it in and try to get it working.

MEANWHILE….

I’m clearly very ill. I need to move fast to be sure my end-of-life affairs are in order. But…but…but… My lawyer died. His partners scattered to the wind. I have no idea how to find someone to take his place. So I’m going to have to grovel to my ex-husband, begging him to find someone else to locate the missing will and/or write a new will. ASAP, so that my son will not face some unholy nightmare when I croak over.

I arranged for a burial niche for my ashes at the church, in their lovely, grassy courtyard that they call the Close. But I can’t see a sign that I paid for it. So now I’ve got to go back there, confess to my stupidity, and get the details or re-arrange that. Then go to a mortuary and arrange for my own cremation.

The prospect of trying to face down the Death Industry is just horrifying…and not something I feel safe in engaging just now. I tried to find out if I could retrieve my parents’ ashes from the shelf in the crypt at Sun City and move them to the Close. What a horror show!!!!!

My father had my mother shelved out there after she died hideously of cancer — not an ordeal I’d like to be reminded of and reminded of and reminded of and…

He arranged to have himself cremated and shelved next to her.

Then he moved himself into an old-folkerie.

There he met the Dragon Lady. She spotted him the instant he walked in the chow line’s door, and she went straight for the kill. Understand: my father was a very handsome man, though he apparently wasn’t aware of how attractive he was. He adored my mother and never looked in any other direction, far’s I know.

* *

Well, by the time he gets to Orangewood, his desired prison for old folks, he’s exhausted and he’s deeply depressed. When Dragon Lady flings herself at him, he is understandably flattered and cheered. Before long, she maneuvered him into a marriage that turned out to be truly depressing. It was just horrible.

He refused to divorce her, even though my then-husband could have gotten him unhitched free of lawyer’s bills, because (said he) “She’ll get all my money!!”

He tried to escape her, for short periods, by renting a room at another old-folkerie, where he would spend whole days in front of the TV. He would tell her he was taking the car to be worked on and was sitting in the Ford dealership’s waiting room all day while this work was allegedly happening. {Yes: she was so stupid she believed it!) But…  One of the inmates at the alternate old-folkerie  knew the Dragon Lady and tattled on him — in front of him, in a manner calculated to humiliate him.

So that was the end of that. Not of the horrid marriage, but of his only way to get a break from that horrid woman.

Well.

It turns out that after he died he had his ashes shelved next to my mother…and…and…lordie! Some time later I learned that, without asking me or saying anything at all, the Dragon Lady’s relatives arranged to have her ashes stashed next to my father’s and my mother’s. On the same goddamn shelf in Sun City.

Far as I can tell, there’s nothing I can do about it. The Sun City mortuary thieves CHARGE you to remove a person’s remains from their ash prison. So it would cost me THOUSANDS of dollars to spring my father and mother’s “cremains” from that place and bring them down to my church, where I want to be interred. Then it would cost some more to get the church to stash them there.

***

Well, the sun is up and I’d better get going: grab some chow, walk the dog, and hit the road. This is gonna be a day from Hell…I feel that in my bones. What a thrill — I can hardly wait to dive into it!

 

HONK!!!

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Do some things put you into a rage, when you reflect upon them from the perspective of several years on?

The subject of today’s rage, such as it is, is the memory of my poor ex-husband’s unholy air-horn snoring…and of his S.O.B. doctor who patted me on my little head and said don’t worry, dearie, ALL middle-aged men’s wives complain about their snoring.

Right, Doc.

DXH lost a job with a major regional law firm because he could not stay awake all day to do his work. Presumably when he was (apparently) awake, he must not have been able to focus on the issues in front of him.

No kidding.

One day one of his partners came to me and complained: DXH actually fell asleep at his desk.

Uh huh.

I went to a doctor of my own and said the guy was snoring so violently it was impossible to sleep in the same room with him — or even  in a room down the linked hallway.

He patted me on my pretty little head and went There, there, dear. ALL middle-aged men’s wives complain about their snoring.

Yeah. No kidding: that is exactly what I was told. Honking the ceiling off was a normal manly trait.

Years have gone by since then.

We’ve been divorced for years — partly because, strangely enough, I did need to sleep, not a possibility during the nighttime hours in that house.

Would I blame the poor reckless, sexist doctor for the divorce?

Well, no.

But I’d venture that he sure as he!! didn’t help things. Maybe, just MAYBE if I’d been able to get a decent night’s sleep in that house, I might still be there.

Pisseth me off, unto this day.

Lovely Uptown Phoenix…

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Ah, yes. Three-thirty in the morning and another gunshot rings out.

Sounded like it came from Main Drag North. However, it could’ve been a neighbor taking a pot-shot at another prowler. The other night, one of the locals found some sh!thead standing in his teenaged daughter’s bedroom, gazing fondly at the sleeping kid.

What. A. Place!

If my son were not living in central Phoenix, I would be sooooo long gone!

Where to?

Well, really: no place in the Phoenix area is safe. The entire city is awash in crime. And nut cases. If I had my choice and wanted to stay in this area, I’d probably be…where?…. Hmmm…. Parts of Paradise Valley, especially gated communities. Sun City, if brain-banging boredom and freedom from competent doctors are your thing.

Weird noise hums out. What?

Get up to go check on that. It’s not my pool motor (that’s something, anyway). Can’t hear it out the back door. Probably some car or AC motor reverberating down from the north.

Garden spot.

Urk! Southern California Redux…

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At 3:25 in the afternoon here in lovely uptown Phoenix, it is SO SMOGGY out there that the sunLIGHT shining (or attempting to shine) in through the front windows is ORANGE.

No kidding. I’ve seem some dim days here, but this one takes the sunny cake.

It’s very much like a smoggy day in (un)lovely Long Beach, California. Wunderground tells us it’s 106 out there, with air quality at “moderate.”

LOL! If this is “moderate,” you surely don’t wanna see “gawdawful”! 😀

Y’know, this is why my parents moved here from Long Beach. The smog there kept getting worse and worse. When they learned about Sun City, then a suburb of Phoenix, they thought they’d found Heaven.

And by comparison, it was — at the time. There was hardly ever a smoggy day, and even then, the haze was light and the stink undistinguished.

Today’s haze hereabouts, we’re told, is from the wildfires in California. Truth to tell, though, it’s probably from fires on the outskirts of Maricopa County: one about 5 miles north has taken out some 300 acres (so far). And fires in nearby southern California are supposedly visible from space.

Welp, I need to try to figure out how to get into my bank account online. The credit union declines to let me have access.

Boyoboy, am I tired of all these fine modern conveniences….

Weirder and Weirder…

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¡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…