Idle essays

{grump!} It’s not like I didn’t have enough screwing around to have to do…

Apparently the Post Office lost an envelope sent to the credit union containing three checks, one for my personal account and two for the Copyeditor’s Desk account. It was a printed envelope from the credit union, so the address was correct, and I distinctly remember checking to be sure each item in the the fistful of mail I stuffed in the mailbox had a stamp on it. So I guess all those checks are just gone. Today I’ll have to call the issuers and tell them to stop payment and send me new checks.

Problem is, one of them came from Google Adsense, where it is dead impossible to reach a human being. The only way to make Google reissue a check will be to go to a particularly annoying, frustrating website and claim never to have seen the thing. Doing that will mean

a) I’ll have to lie, because I most certainly have seen and endorsed the damn thing, and
b) it will be another two months before I get another payment.

Problem with using the Google web annoyance is that if I claim not to have received the check and then it arrives at the CU and gets deposited, then it will look like I’m trying to steal from Adsense. Google is notoriously inclined to simply cut off customers it thinks aren’t dealing straight with Adsense. So, I guess the better part of valor is just to eat the $157.

Damn it. The specific reason I did this was that it is a freaking hassle to drive way to hell and gone to the West campus just to deposit a couple of checks. It consumes gas unnecessarily, and it expends pretty close to an hour of my time. The West campus stands in the middle of a down-at-the-heels bedroom community with no commerce where I might get any other errands done while I’m over there. I take that back: there’s a Costco in that general direction, but it’s an extra stretch and more wasted gasoline up the freeway, and a Lowe’s and a Home Depot at the freeway intersection. Not that I shop at either of those places much anymore.

So, to avoid hassle I’ve brought a basketful of extra hassle down on my head.

But the big concern about this is that when I drove over to the nearby post office and dropped that envelope in the mailbox, I also mailed my tax returns. Yesh. Both the personal and the corporate returns. For both the state and the feds. And I sent Tax Lady her payment in the same outgoing mail drop.

It looks like TL cashed at least one of her checks, the one I wrote on the corporate checking account; the second was written on a Fidelity money market account, along with the check to cover the federal tax. So if she got her envelope, presumably the Post Office didn’t lose everything I tried to send that day. I’ll have to get into the Fidelity account online—another fine little hassle—to see if the feds have cashed the check for their pound of flesh.

Where the PO is concerned, I’m afraid I can’t call any kettles black. I add my own extravagant incompetence to everyone else’s. It’s a wonder the human race gets anywhere at all.

Yesterday in my senility I utterly FORGOT that the 101 students were supposed to be at the library hearing a talk from our most accomplished and lively librarian! We blew away an hour and a half chatting about research methods in the classroom, and none of  us, not a one, remembered that we were supposed to be elsewhere. That was because…

a) I had totally spaced any memory of this appointment; and
b) When I posted an announcement to the young things in BlackBoard, I forgot to hit “e-mail to all recipients,” and, as usual, none of them checked the class announcements board.

So, this truly wonderful librarian showed up in the computer classroom and stood around for half an hour wondering where the hell we were.

Arghhhh!

Yesterday, too, I had such a blinding headache I began to wonder if I was having a stroke. It actually made me dizzy…felt like I was listing to the right as I was trying to drive and walk. Wasn’t, though; it just felt that way.

And of course in this general state of misery I had a meeting before classes and then had to drive from North Phoenix to South Scottsdale after spending four hours in front of classrooms full of late-stage adolescents. There Poisoned Pen Press gratefully accepted the novel I’d just finished editing but had no new work for me.

Fortunately I have some paying work to do today…though I will say, I don’t feel like doing any work, much less of the paying variety.

Driving from pillar to post yesterday, I was regaled by Tony Judt’s unholy tale of his trials with ALS on NPR’s Fresh Air. It’s a gut-wrenching story. You’d like to say you can’t even imagine what it would be like to live through such a horror and then die of it. But you can: Judt describes it with vivid clarity.

It’s one of those moments that brings to mind one’s own mortality. Please, God, let me drive my car off a cliff, let me die in a plane crash, let me drop dead of a heart attack. I think if I received a diagnosis like that, the first thing I’d do is pick up my father’s pistol and blow my brains out. Judt at least has his family around him and apparently has the resources to hire in-home nursing care. I have no one but my son, who has to work and could not devote three to ten years to caring for a dying woman. He would have to leave me to waste away alone in a nursing home.

Having chosen not to exit pursued by a bear, Judt—an eminent historian—has written a new book addressed largely to young people, Ill Fares the Land. The NPR site features an interesting out-take from its introduction. Says he:

Something is profoundly wrong with the way we live today. For thirty years we have made a virtue out of the pursuit of material self-interest: indeed, this very pursuit now constitutes whatever remains of our sense of collective purpose. We know what things cost but have no idea what they are worth. We no longer ask of a judicial ruling or a legislative act: is it good? Is it fair? Is it just? Is it right? Will it help bring about a better society or a better world? Those used to be the political questions, even if they invited no easy answers. We must learn once again to pose them.

The materialistic and selfish quality of contemporary life is not inherent in the human condition. Much of what appears ‘natural’ today dates from the 1980s: the obsession with wealth creation, the cult of privatization and the private sector, the growing disparities of rich and poor. And above all, the rhetoric which accompanies these: uncritical admiration for unfettered markets, disdain for the public sector, the delusion of endless growth.

We cannot go on living like this. The little crash of 2008 was a reminder that unregulated capitalism is its own worst enemy: sooner or later it must fall prey to its own excesses and turn again to the state for rescue. But if we do no more than pick up the pieces and carry on as before, we can look forward to greater upheavals in years to come.

Just so.

The news of the day continued with reports of crazed right-wingers planning to murder police officers and foment a rebellion against the federal government. That, to my mind, is far scarier than anything our enemies among the fundamentalist Moslems can do. IMHO, unless something is done about the growing schism in this country, within 20 to 50 years we will be looking at civil war.

To top it all off, I got a truly nasty e-mail from someone on the choir informing me she doesn’t know who I am and does not care to hear anything from me. F*** you very much.

Sometimes I get out of patience with life.