Coffee heat rising

Dispatches from Hell

Icky Sticky Day!

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What a nasty Arizona summer day!

So humid that it’s overcast. And hotter than a three-dollar cookstove, as my father used to say: at 4:15 in the afternoon of a summer day on the shore of the Persian Gulf. Feels a whole lot like that, right now.

Just back from a brief perambulation of the ‘Hood. It was WAY too hot for that stunt! Whatever possessed me to go out strolling around in that swamp?

Gosh, how do I miss San Francisco?  Let me count the ways….

Wait! I can’t count that high!

Well, thank goodness for Amazon! They carry the type of crunchy brown sugar I like. Like it or not, you may be sure that I do NOT feel up for trudging through this heat and humidity to buy it at the grocery store.

Ordering it online, of course, means I have to wait for it. But that’s unlikely to kill me. The stuff is supposed to be delivered tomorrow. Somehow I guess I can survive that long! 😀

Seriously: this is one of the ickiest days I’ve seen here. Back porch thermometer reads 90 degrees in the shade of an overcast day. Not all that hot, for Arizona — far from it! But sticky and gray and gummy. Just ugly weather.

Not fond of Arizona, really. If Ian the Great didn’t live here, you couldn’t drag me across the state line…  For sure, I’d be…where…?

* The San Francisco Bay area
….or
* Western Colorado
…..or
* Parts of Nevada
…..or
* Mars…

Anyplace but here, really.

Honestly! I thought my parents had lost their collective marbles when they moved to Sun City and dumped me into school at the University of Arizona.

Forgodsake, I was set to go to UC Berkeley! I assumed that was where I would go to undergraduate school and possibly grad school.

But oooohhhhh no. It was off to, forgodsake, Tucson for their little darlin’.

Okay, they weren’t educated or sophisticated people. To my father, a college degree was a college degree was a college degree. He surely would have understood the quality of a degree from Harvard or one of the elite women’s schools. But otherwise: there wasn’t much difference. Not in his mind.

Certainly not enough difference to pay a ton of money to get a degree from a decent public university.

Anyway, that’s how I ended up with not one, not two, but three degrees from Arizona universities. Because I myself, lacking close family with degrees from private schools — Cal Berkeley was our highest mark — I had no idea what the gradations between degrees from public schools might have been. If I’d known, of course, I’d have insisted on going to a California undergraduate school. Or to a private college. But…well…I hadn’t a clue. No more than my parents did.

Hmmmmm….?

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Idly reviewing recent posts here and…well…thinking holeee shee-ut! 

Pretty clearly, I’ve got somebody working for me who is not my friend. Some of the things that have happened lately ring of plain old-fashioned vandalism. 

Which one of my honored employees has been up to this stuff? Don’t know and, short of setting up an army of cameras and paying someone to review their films, I cannot imagine how to find out. Just now it looks like I have three choices:

* Sell the house and move into an old-folkerie
* Fire everyone who’s working for me now and start all over again
* Select one person that I imagine I can trust (which one???) and fire all the rest of them.

What a f*ckin’ nightmare!

And what kind of person deliberately torments a sick old woman?  

Forgodsake, it’s not like we have that much more time left for me to annoy you and make you miserable. Just because you don’t like me is no excuse to behave…well…downright immorally. If you hate me, fine! Quit you’re f**kin’ job and go to work someplace else!

Next Step Along the Way?

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Gawdlmighty, what Looney Toons around this place!  It’s beginning to look more and more like I’m going to have to move into one of those horrible holding pens for old folks. I’m not going to be able to live in this house or take care of the property without having someone HERE, with me, to deal with the unending slew of stupid little crises.

Now the barbecue is on the fritz, apparently as a result of some bird-brained cleaning lady’s ministrations. Naturally, today is Sunday, so I can’t get anyone out here to work on that.

And if that weren’t enough, something on the roof — presumably one of the whirling vents — is going BANG BANG BANG BANG…. 

Don’t want to ask my son about that, because I really don’t want him climbing around the roof.

Ohhhh Gawd!

I’m afraid it’s time.

Time to move into the old-folkerie. 

What a horror. 

Few things do I abominate more than institutional living. Just HATED living in the dorms at the university. And that is NOT how I want to spend the last few months or (God forbid!) years of my life. Frankly, before things reached this point I hoped I would die — of a natural passing; don’t panic, I’m not talking suicide here.

Jeez. I just CANNOT BELIEVE one of those nitwit women wrecked my barbecue. What the f*ck is the MATTER with people?

WHY, Indeed….

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Yesterday Funny asked a rather pointless question: Why is life plagued by stupid people?

No answer to that one, I reckon…

But here’s another variation:

WHY did my mother, an overall intelligent and rational woman, commit suicide by smoking herself to death?

Yes, that is what she did.

She knew that tobacco smoking could — probably would — kill her.

She didn’t care.

She knew the unholy horrors that would be inflicted on her loved ones as they watched her die.

She didn’t care.

She knew how much she would suffer, having watched her own mother die of a self-inflicted cancer.

She didn’t care.

She knew how sick her second-hand smoke could make her daughter.

She didn’t care.

She knew how much her daughter loathed the stench of her stinking cigarettes, which permeated their home and poisoned its air.

She didn’t care.

So…WHY, in the name of God, did she NOT care about any of those life-crushing things?

Because she did know all of those matters, I do not believe for one second that she didn’t understand what she was doing. She smoked herself to death: on purpose. And if it made me sick in the process — well, Alhamdulillah.  Apparently, she truly didn’t care: not only that she was killing herself (which may have been the whole point of the exercise) but that she was sickening me in the process. Possibly even killing me.

Well, obviously she never reached that final goal. But I was sick all the time I was growing up, with one respiratory ailment after another after another. Basically, to indulge her own craving for nicotine, she deliberately made me sick. And she did so over 16 years, until I got old enough to get into the University of Arizona and leave her home.

Why on earth would you do that to your own child?

How to Get Your Revenge on a Nasty Old Bat

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“Nasty Old Bat”: that would be me. I get orneyer and orneyer the older I get. And every now and then, some chucklehead will pull a stunt to get back at me. This one though, is too funny!

My son hired a woman to come to the house and keep an eye on me, here in my dotage. Ostensibly, she’s here as a cleaning lady. But the truth is she’s here as a babysitter. She was showing up at the crack of dawn and hanging around until 4:00 or 5:00 in the afternoon. Watching, watching, ever watching….

As a confirmed lone wolf, this is something I could do without. I do NOT want some stranger underfoot all day.

Although I never said any such thing to her, she must have intuited it. She got increasingly surly as the days passed, and now we have this…

One of her jobs was to make my bed: a double-bed sized number that resides in the master bedroom.

So…a couple evenings ago, I climb under the covers on that bed and…R-R-R-R-I-I-I-I-I-P!!!!

LO! The fitted bottom sheet has been sliced with something sharp, from top to bottom. It has a hole in it that runs from the head to the foot of the bed!

Whaaa????

Well, by now it’s 10:00 at night. And when I tellya I’m SICK, I ain’t kidding. I just do not feel well enough to rip apart a queen-sized bed and remake it. Really: TOO TIRED TO CARE.

Figured I’d have her remake the bed when she came in the next day.

This had the effect of pulling the rip apart even more dramatically.

And SURPRISE! Of course she didn’t come in the next day. Or the next, either.

So now, I’ve got to get off my duff, pull the bedding apart, and remake the bed.

Not that big a deal…unless you’re sick as a dog. And in a lot of pain.

Pisseth me off…big-time.

She hasn’t been back in a couple of days. I figure if she shows up at the door, I’ll send her away. That will pisseth off my son, who went to some trouble find this woman. But I figure what she did was just plain malicious. And I don’t want her around here. 

My Mother Was Murdered

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The question returns to haunt: How could they have killed her like that? 

Next question: How could she have allowed them to kill her? She knew…she knew!

Well. The answer rolls into one: my mother was murdered by the God-damned tobacco industry, whose acolytes got her addicted to nicotine.

Craving, craving, ever craving…she puffed her way to the grave. By the time she died, she was going through two or three packs a day. She couldn’t have stopped, even if she had wanted to — which she did not. Puffety puffety puffety…chugging right into the grave.

A thousand curses on everyone who works in the tobacco industry. More than a thousand curses on any legislator who ever agreed to keep tobacco peddling legal.

They murdered my mother. Every goddamn one of those killers, from the tobacco company employees to the bastards in the legislatures that have kept tobacco legal, every single one of them is a murderer.

They’re all complicit in the murders of the SEVEN MILLION PEOPLE A YEAR. And one of those victims was my mother.

A horrible way to die, the cancer brought on by tobacco smoking. My mother suffered monstrously. So did my father, as he struggled to care for her during her hideous final months and weeks.

He chased me off from her bedroom, as she lay dying: didn’t want me to watch that show. Neither, I expect, did she.

But finally the show did end. She died: in vast pain until the last couple of weeks, when she was mostly unconscious.

It’s hard to understand why her death and the thousands of deaths like hers are not regarded as murder. Actually, the world-wide the toll is far larger than that: eight million murders a year. 

Why, my friends, do we tolerate this constant, ongoing mass murder?

Yeah, I know: money.

But money doesn’t make it right. Money doesn’t make it not murder. It just makes the murder even more immoral than it would be if someone weren’t getting rich from it.