Coffee heat rising

Idle essays

Brrrrrrrrrrr!!!

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Not to say Grrrrrrrr!

Thursday, November 7

It’s amazingly cold out there on the back patio: down to a bone-shivering 45 degrees.

😀

Dontcha wish you lived in Arizona, where people think 60 degrees is too cold to get outta bed?

At 9 a.m. — well before it, actually — Ruby and I have circumnavigated the park. The neighbors fall all over themselves when they see her: ooooooooohh!!! CORGI!!!!! Which is kinda funny, in a weird way. Tony the Romanian Landlord is out shortly after dawn, proselytizing: he’s become a Seventh-Day Adventist and wishes to spread the Word. This project has vastly mellowed him, to the extent that it looks like he and I are in danger of becoming friends again.

****

Friday
November 8

This never got posted…and… Now it’s a day later & a dollah short…and… Ohhh well.

Still cold here, but overheated in California. The news media, Masters of Drama, make it sound like the whole damn state is burning down. Got all worried about La Maya and La Bethulia, who are hanging out in their luxurious beach-side trailer home in the vicinity of Monterey.

They say, though, that there’s nothing to worry about: the fires are a good distance from them and not headed their way.

Sooo we’re told…  and…

Soooo glad not to be living there anymore…. 😀

Actually, when we weren’t in San Francisco, my parents and I lived in  Long Beach, the garden spot where I was born, lo those many years ago. That place, being mostly block and plaster walls and asphalt roofs, is not at all susceptible to burning down the residents’ ears.

Could shake down, though.

We had a pretty serious earthquake in SoCal while I was in high school. It sent us all scurrying under our desks. Totally terrorized my mother.

***

Friday

Looks like this never got posted! That’s weird. I’m fairly certain, in my senile way, that I did post it.  Ohhh well….

Another day has passed, and again the grey hours of the early morning are extremely cold. Uhmmm…well, for Arizona, that is.

My feet are frozen. The dog is starving. Neither of us has been walked. Need to get off the bed and start charging around. And so, AWWAYYYYY!

A Balmy Afternoon in Lovely Phoenix

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Speaking of garden spots where you duck for cover as the local F16’s blast by you (as we were this morning), jet planes have been roaring over the back yard half the afternoon.

Bored with that racket, I got in the car and went for a real-estate-ogling drive. Frankly, I didn’t see much that interested me — a few districts in North Central Phoenix are better than this one, but none of them outrank it significantly. Did find an area in the shadow of the North Mountain that I’d never noticed before. Drove around and around…kind of a nice spread.

But not so nice that I feel any interest in looking at the real estate offerings there. Certainly not to the tune of another hundred grand…

Like Southern California, North-Central  Phoenix is gifted with a monotonous sameness. The houses are much the same, the road layouts are much the same, the neighborhoods are much the same, the schools all look alike. Ugh.

* Berkeley, this place is not.
* San Berdoo, it is not.
* San Francisco, it is not.
* Hollywood, it is not.
* San Jose, it is not.
* Santa Barbara, it is not.

One could go on and on. Any city that is not like any other city: that’s a category into which Phoenix will never fit. The boredom factor is astonishing! 😀

By and large the whole place is monotonous, dull, middle-class, and boring.

It’s four in the afternoon, and jet airplanes are still roaring overhead. Most of these are now passenger planes, coming into or flying out of Sky Harbor Airport.

I’ve been home less than an hour and the phone has jangled three times, bearing exciting messages from phone solicitors. How can I say how sick and tired I am of jerks who call me on the phone trying to peddle stuff?

They must be able to sucker people in…otherwise, their employers wouldn’t waste money hiring them to dispense phone hustles.

Yes, the damn phone CAN be turned off or disconnected. But that means I’ll miss calls that matter — a call from my son or a friend, for example. How do I resent having to disconnect a service that I pay for to block the constant hustle? Lemme count the ways….

WEEEEEEEEUUUUUU! WEEEEEEEEUUUUUU! WEEEEEEEEUUUUUU! WEEEEEEEEUUUUUU! WEEEEEEEEUUUUUU! WEEEEEEEEUUUUUU! WEEEEEEEEUUUUUU! WEEEEEEEEUUUUUU…. HONK HONK HONK!!!

Another ambulance or cop car roaring up Conduit of Blight Blvd…on and on and weeeuuuing on and on…

What a place!

Duck! Cover! Or something….

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Pour a cup of coffee; prepare to sit down on the back porch to take the morning air; and you get RRR-R-O-O-O-A-A-R-R-RRR!!!!

Cop copter charges over the house. Circles around the ‘Hood,. Roar roar roar….

Meanwhile, twenty miles away, out at Luke Air Force Base, a squadron of fighter jets practices take-off and landing: rrrRRR-O-O-O-A-A-A-R-R-R-R-R-R!!!!!

My mother, who used to take her morning coffee on the back porch of their little Sun City house, professed to love the sound of fighter jets taking off and landing by Dawn’s Early Light. All very patriotic, no doubt…but definitely not my favorite symphony score.

The atmosphere has quieted down a bit now. Whenever it gets to be after 9:00 a.m. — at which hour I can turn left out of the ‘Hood — I’m headed to AJ’s, there to buy some more coffee. And melon. And bread. And dog treats… and… Argha!!!  The endless grocery list!

The Sprouts, which carries far more fake-gourmet items than the Albertson’s supermarket across the street, leaves enough to be desired to make the 20-minute trip to the overpriced AJ’s worth the journey. For one thing, I do NOT like being pounced and panhandled in the parking lot — pretty much inevitable at the neighborhood Sprouts. The Albertson’s has posted an armed, uniformed guard out front, which makes one feel safer there. Now…if only they’d carry a larger array of yuppified products, they’d never get rid of me. 😀

But they don’t. To get the fancy treats and overpriced dog food, I have to travel to the AJ’s. To get the rich black coffee: AJ’s. To get a piece of steak that’s worth the exorbitant prices most stores are now charging for beef: AJ’s.

****

SDXB on the phone. He and New Girlfriend live in Sun City, directly under the flight path of those Air Force jets. And like my mother, they regard the racket as “The Sound of Freedom.”

No doubt they’re right.

Too bad, though, that Freedom can’t turn down the volume a bit! 😀

SDXB loves living in Sun City, as my mother did when she was holding forth out there. It takes, I think, a certain mentality to like that lifestyle. Personally, I’ll take the sound of kids playing over the melody of F-16 engines blasting. But whatEVER: each to his/her own, eh?

Speaking of the which — sound, that is — the serenade of not one but TWO emergency vehicles wafts in through the screen door…. WTF d’you suppose is goin’ on out there now?

Looks like it was a good thing I dawdled over this blog post and killed time yakking with SDXB before I started out for the store. Fifteen or twenty minutes earlier, and I could’ve been in the middle of whatever that mess is.

***

And I would have missed the beloved Pool Dude, who just showed up at the door to collect his well-earned wages.

What a nice man! Probably a paroled murderer…but what the heck. He does a primo job of murdering pool algae.

Seriously: when a dear friend’s son got in trouble with the law (irrationally: not his fault!) and was thence thrown in the slam, we learned that one job regarded as “good” for paroled convicts is pool maintenance.

And considering what Pool Dude is earning — f’rgodsake, I just paid him $400!!! — if you worked at it and were even moderately competent at handling money and billing, you could in theory make a decent middle-class living at it.

Well, OK: part of the 400 smackers was for a large bucket of chlorine tabs. That stuff is expensive as hell, and if you’re buying a better quality product, it’s even more expensive than that. And the bucket the guy got — presumably from a pool product wholesaler — weighs more than I can pick up. So presumably it will be some months before we have to buy more chlorine.

Welp. I’d better get up and get outta here before the lunch crowd gets on the road.

And so, AWA-A-A-A-Y!

Wow!

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Wow,  indeed! What a GORGEOUS evening!

The sun has settled into a turquoise and orange bed. The sky is dark enough for some stars to shine out, but the sunset irradiates the western sky. One star — no doubt Venus — hangs above us in the evening air. Incredibly beautiful!

Ruby and the Human: just back from circumambulating the neighborhood, duly awed.

Truly: I do not know that I’ve ever seen a more awesomely beautiful sunset.

The little brown dog trots along like a four-legged brown rocket, no doubt having a gay old canine time. We encounter no other doggy nuisances, and almost no other humans, except a family playing in a front yard with their toddler.

Turn off the TV, folks! Come outside and look around: a far better show awaits you.

<3

WHY do people do this?

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What if your bright and educated daughter showed up one day with a Certified Total Jerk and announced, “We’re in love! We’re getting married and moving to a dump in the middle of nowhere because — y’know! — he’s a mining engineer!”

What on earth WOULD you do?

That’s the story of my (former) mother-in-law. She married one of the Great Turkeys of the Western World — proving that love does go blind at the garden gate, or somewhere along the path.

He couldn’t hold a decent job — not for love nor money — because  he was such a jerk that he insulted just about everyone he met. At some point, someone in our tribe remarked that he never stayed on a job more than about six months. If he didn’t piss off the bosses enough to make them fire him, he’d quit on his own before things reached that point.

The particularly Looney-Toons aspect of this saga is that M-i-L was a very bright woman who, in a time when few women even thought about going to college, much less actually did it, had a four-year degree from a major university.

It always posed a kind of mystery to me…because she wasn’t an unattractive woman, and there was no reason she couldn’t have hooked up with a decent human being. Instead, she flang herself down the pit of a marriage to one of the most unpleasant men I’ve ever met.

They were divorced by the time their son and I married. Dear Dad had remarried by then. Crazy Mom never remarried, and indeed, after some years, came out openly as a lesbian.

At one point along the line, Dear (ex-)Father-in-law was visiting at our house. I asked him — truly mystified, I must say! — why on earth he married the woman.

“Because,” said he, “our parents disapproved.”

Well. That was the kind of fliply stupid thing he typically said.

No doubt the story was more complex than that. But it does beg another question: Why didn’t you wait for a year or so and see how things worked out?

If you were intent on scandalizing your small-town parents, you could have taken off on a prenuptial fake honeymoon: shacked up together for three months or so, just to drive the relatives crazy. This would have allowed you to see how that relationship would work out, and….

…yeah: And maybe have spared you 20 years of married misery.

Jeeemineee! I can’t even imagine what I would have done if I’d had a daughter who showed up with a jerk like that in tow. Nor what if I’d had a son who jumped into the marriage bed with a wacko like the character Chuck selected.

Nothing, I suppose. They were both of age. Their parents rightfully had no say about who they chose in the mate department.

Huh…. It puzzles me to this day: not only that they got married at all, but that they stayed together for some 20 years. It must have been 20 years in Hell!

Lost Times, Lost Friends, Lost Family…

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Phoenix…ugh! The place gets more and more like L.A. as the days pass!

I was reminded of this, fairly vividly, when I drove through a tract just to the south of the ‘Hood, probably built out in the late 1950s or the 1960s. The houses there remind me so much of my mother’s best friend, Anna. The Long Beach, California, neighborhood where Anna lived could have been built by same developer — the houses practically clone Anna’s little place.

It was a nice little place. Her husband, Capt. Fred Ellison, was a sea captain just like my father, and he made a pretty good living, for a blue-collar guy.

And their house was nice enough: a sweet little place in a blah, faceless Southern California tract. Every shack looked the same as the next one, really. If you didn’t know Anna’s address and didn’t know where you were going, you’d never find her place.

The two men were coming on to the end of their careers, along about 1960 or ’62. They both planned to retire soon.

Capt. Ellison was on the last inbound leg of his last sea voyage. We were all looking forward to the great retirement and all the fun the friends would have and maybe talking Anna and Capt. Ellison into moving to Sun City, where my parents had already decided to retreat.

And damned if he didn’t drop dead on the ship’s deck.

No exaggeration: he had a heart attack and literally fell down dead. As the ship was heading in to harbor.

Well, the Ellisons’ house in Long Beach, a pleasant little place, was paid for. Their only child, a daughter who had some mental problems that seemed to entail a shortage of IQ points, was married and had two kids. And she had an appropriately mindless job on a factory assembly line, also in Long Beach. The son-in-law was a decent man who had reached the apogee of his career in a similar job.

That, of course, was the end of any inchoate schemes to inveigle Anna into moving to Arizona.

So there was something kind of heart-rending about driving through a neighborhood that looked so much like the one where Anna and Fred had lived. Absurdly, I wondered if my parents would have moved into town if Anna and Fred had bought a place over here, in that tract.

They might have. But probably not. My father, who was not fond of kids, thought Sun City was the greatest innovation since gin & tonic. The child-free appeal of Sun City, for him, was just huge. One rather doubts that Anna and Fred, who had grandchildren, would have thought the same way.

Also, Anna was massively overweight: so much that a good-quality bathroom scale could not measure how much she weighed. The ensuing health problems would have made it difficult for them to move. Plus their daughter, who was not overly endowed in the compos mentis department, was happily ensconced in that assembly-line job and a stable marriage. And Anna’s grand-daughter, who seemed to have developed a normal contingent of IQ points, was in high school and no doubt needed her grandmother to keep her more or less on track.

So…it’s reasonable to doubt that Anna and Fred could ever have been talked into coming over here, even after Fred retired.

Too bad. They’ve been missed over the years.