Dispatches from Hell

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…