Coffee heat rising

Idle essays

Uh-oh! Xmas-time!!

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Well, Christmas snuck up on me this year. But good! I’ve been loafing with such extravagant loaf-skill that I haven’t paid a bit of attention to the annual merchandising frenzy. And what with my car purloined, I can’t drive to choir…so frankly, I hadn’t even noticed that Christmas comes in three days!

Eeeeek!!!!!

And I have no idea what on earth my son might like to get as a Christmas present. 

Actually, I’m thinking I may make the rounds of our favorite retailers and pick up a fistful of gift certificates for him.

Maybe a bottle of nice wine?  Hmmm…maybe not. Recently the Mayo Quacks decided he had a nice Ailment of Middle Age and so really ought not to be swilling our favorite potables.

Ohhhh well...we’ve got all day to think about that. Whenever I get off my duff, I’ll make a run on the local stores and search out a few things for him.

Free!! (??) I hope….

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Woo HOOO! It looks suspiciously like this is NOT cleaning-lady day!

The wonderful Luz (Cleaning Lady from Heaven) is not parked in front of my neighbor’s house (she visits those neighbors before descending on me). It’s almost noon!  So…unless that dear woman picked up another client and has enjoyed scrubbing yet another shack before coming here, I’m FREEEEEE from having to pick up the pig-pen.

Mwa ha hah! Sure do hope so…

Isn’t that awful?  SOOOO lazy that I don’t want to be bothered to shovel aside the litter so she can get at a surface or three to clean!

The other day some obnoxious and nosy financial dudes visited the Funny Farm. This, supposedly for a bland chat…and…yeah. Transparently to nose around in my house and see how I live and probably to see if they can get me committed to an old-folkerie if I dwell in stacks of litter.

Fortunately, because the ineffable Luz was slated to come by in the near future, I had picked up the place and put all the dishes in the washer and stuffed the dirty clothes in the laundry and…voilà! It looked almost like someone civilized lived here.

That was lucky!

{whew!}

If I’m going to be spied upon like that, presumably by my son’s hired help, after this I’m gonna have to make the bed and pick up the clutter the minute I roll out of the sack.

Not that it’s a bad thing to tidy up the place the minute your feet hit the bedroom floor. But that it’s a damn nuisance…and an invasion of one’s privacy.

And it makes me wonder, seriously, if I should pack up and move out of the city.

But….where? 

That mystifies me 

First, because this neighborhood is about as ideal a neighborhood as I can imagine. The house is within easy walking distance of not one, not two, but THREE major (gourmet-style!!) grocery stores, a veterinary, a computer store, a hair stylist, and a Target.

Seriously: I don’t have to travel more than about five or six blocks to get everything needed for day-to-day living here. Truth to tell, I don’t even need to own a car to live here comfortably and conveniently.

Second, because the neighbors are very nice, very friendly. Even Tony the Romanian Landlord has mellowed out! This makes it a pleasant place to live.

Third, because a major regional hospital is about a four-minute ambulance ride from here. Dial 911, and the rescue guys (and gals) show up forthwith.

Fourth: because the crime level — not nil, of course — is surprisingly low for an urban neighborhood. Yes, of course I have fierce burglar-resistant screen doors on all the entrances, and of course they’re kept locked. But I don’t feel especially at risk, sitting here in the Funny Farm. In another neighborhood where we lived, I surely did.

Hmmmm……

Having those two clowns show up here and nose around was…disturbing, to say the least. I may have to hire the cleaning lady to come by once a week. Right now, I surely don’t do that…can’t afford it.

But…let’s think about that: I can afford weekly cleaning help one whole helluva lot better than I can afford to be locked up in a prison for old folks. That would make it easier for Luz to keep the place spotless, and also I could probably put her up to driving me to various retail stores.

So….

I think I should make a few minor changes to my routine: ones that would create the effect of major changes in my day-to-day lazy lifestyle:

  • Forgodsake MAKE THE GODDAM BED the minute Ruby and I roll out of the sack. Be sure the bedroom and bathroom are all tidied up.
  • Pick up the kitchen and stash the dirty dishes in the washer the minute I finish breakfast. Never leave stuff laying around the kitchen or dining room. {How lazy am I? Let us count the ways…}
  • Get in the habit of picking up the house before going to bed, rather than in the morning.

Hm. That probably would do the job, since I do not habitually lay around like a total slob. If some namby-pamby showed up here, assigned with the task of inspecting my living arrangements, they’d think I live like a cleaning lady. 😀  😀  😀

Seriously: pick up the clutter first thing in the morning, and no one who shows up later in the day will get any ideas about senility affecting my lifestyle.

Is it an invasion of my privacy?

Damn right! But nothing like the invasion of (nonexistent!) privacy that would be inflicted on me in one of those prisons for old folks.

Colder than a By-Gawd…

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Yes: It’s quarter to ten in the morning and 55 degrees out there on the back porch.

Now, in the large scheme of things, that ain’t very cold. Especially not for mid-December. But for mystical, unknowable reasons, it seems damn cold! As my father used to say, Colder’n a by-gawd.

What exactly a by-gawd was (some sort of pagan deity???) and why a by-gawd was expected to be extra cold, I dunno. Or extra hot: it was possible for the day to become “hotter’n a bygawd.”

Arizona’s dry air does tend to mess up your perception of ambient temperature. In the summer, 100 degrees doesn’t seem all that hot. But in the winter, 55 degrees seems oddly chill.

The roar from the blasting fighter jet engines at Luke Air Force Base — just a few miles outside of Sun City — echoes all the way down here to our parts. And that’s a good 20 miles. WHAT a racket.

My mother, an inveterate patriot with a capital P, used to sit on her Sun City back porch in the early mornings and simper, over her coffee, “ohhhh, it’s the sound of FWEEDOM!”  

Yeah.

Well. No, Mom: it’s the sound of World War III, comin’ our way.

Fortunately, WW III hasn’t quite made it to the back yard. Yet…

But that Air Force Base is one of the several top reasons that you couldn’t get me to move back to Sun City. The racket from those bombers. The hatred of anyone whose skin wasn’t dough-white. The dislike of young people in general (no, do NOT move in with your parents over summer vacation!!!). The mediocrity of the grocery stores. (Hey: old people’s taste buds are dead, so why try to sell them decent food?). Horrible place!

SDXB and New Girlfriend are still holding forth out there. The place is just his speed, of course. She was already there when they met, so I assume Sun City must be to her taste, too.

Last I heard, SDXB was mightily sick. N.G. was trying to attend to him, but she’s even more superannuated than I am, so that job may be beyond her. She’s such a nice lady: I hope she doesn’t lose him…now or anytime in the foreseeable future.

***

Welp, pretty soon now I should get off my duff and trot up to one of the nearby grocery stores. Yes: that is one the several ways in which this district excels over (un)lovely Sun City: we have not one, not two, but THREE excellent grocers within easy walking distance of my house.

* An Albertson’s
* A Sprouts
* A Fry’s

Plus an automobile mechanic, a hair stylist, a pet store, a veterinarian, an optometrist, a computer store, a Target, a drugstore, two sit-down restaurants and unnumbered fast-food joints…on and on. WHY would anyone want to live anywhere else?

😀 Okay, okay: it’s true. SDXB refuses to eat in restaurants, so for him, that detail counts for nothing toward our neighborhood’s livability quotient. He doesn’t keep pets….okay: no vet needed. He has virtually perfect vision…grrrr!  So it’s not hard to see why he fails to regard the ‘Hood as in any way superior to (un)lovely Sun City.

As for moi: I feel like I absolutely fell into it when my Realtor brought me to this place. It simply could NOT be better for a middle-class singleton living in a free-standing house.

The apartment blocks across Main Drag West have, it is true, pretty much filled up with some less-than-desirable neighbors. A cop was shot in the hallway of one of those buildings over there. So…yeah: I do have to keep the possibility of moving elsewhere in the back of what passes for my mind.

And…I do think that if I end up having to move because of real estate deterioration, it’ll be closer to M’hijito’s house. He lives within easy walking distance of the beloved AJ’s Overpriced Grocery Market. So I can imagine buying a place down there. Also, a couple of pretty Fancy-Dan high-rise apartment buildings reside in that direction…right on the lightrail line.

So….if I felt like economic & social pressures would dictate that I’d better move before I start to lose a lot of money on this house, I probably would move down into his district…assuming it looks like he’ll stay in those parts for a good while longer. If he moved to some other part of the Valley, I’d prob’ly trail after him. If he left the Valley…???  I dunno: in that case, I might move into one of those high-rises.

Maybe.

So…What would you have done if…?

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LOL! Ever look back on earlier years and contemplate what life would have been like if you had done y instead of x? 

😀

Undoubtedly an exercise in futility…because o’course you did NOT do y. Probably  for the best, come to think of it. But it’s entertaining….

What if I’d moved to Sun City when SDXB went out there?

What if I‘d insisted on going to UC Berkeley, instead of letting myself be lured into enrolling at the University of Arizona in exchange for the privilege of skipping my senior year in high school?

What if my father hadn’t taken a job out of Southern California and moved me and my mother away from San Francisco?

What if my father hadn’t discovered that Sun City’s cost of living was so cheap, he could quit his job and move us to Arizona…thereby dooming me to the UofA instead of Cal Berkeley?

What if I’d never seen SDXB, back in my freelance writing days?

hmmmmm…..What if, indeed?

a) What if I’d moved to Sun City when SDXB went out there?

Probably I wouldn’t be living there now. I loathe Sun City: the bigotry, the whitey-whiteness, the racket from the airbase, the dreadful excuses for grocery stores, the…on and effin’ on…

b) What if my father hadn’t take a job out of Southern California and moved me and my mother away from San Francisco?

I almost certainly would have gone to UC Berkeley, the university I craved to attend from the moment I learned there was such a thing as a university.

In that case, if I’d gone on to the Ph.D., I would have ended up, very likely, with a decent academic job. Probably would have married another academic. And just now might still be living in California.

Or waypoints.

c) What if my father hadn’t discovered that Sun City’s cost of living was so cheap, he could quit his job and move us to Arizona…thereby dooming me to the UofA instead of Cal Berkeley?

Well….  Assuming I finished the Ph.D. at Berkeley (not here in unlovely Arizona), I would have had a much more negotiable degree. By now I probably would have retired from a reasonably high-paying academic job. And very likely would not be living in Arizona.

d) What if I’d never seen SDXB, back in my freelance writing days?

Who knows, o’course. I probably would still be married to the corporate lawyer, though. Chances are I’d still have had an academic job — probably tenure-track, or at least a higher-paying trudge through a Maricopa County community college.

LOL! How silly!

Seriously: “what if” has gotta be one of the most futile lines of thought ever invented by the human mind. Because nobody can second-guess — or even first-guess — what would have happened if circumstances had been just slightly different than they turned out to be.

Life…just is. 

Five Days Later!!!

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SURPRISE!!!! The ole  bat actually survived any number of days after the last time I was posting in Full Glum Mode. 😀

Can you imagine? Who’d’ve thunk it??

I sure wouldn’t’ve, a week ago.

Welp. The teeth still ache. The gums still burn, The fingers and the feet still tingle. But just now they ache, they burn, and they tingle one HELLUVA lot less than they did when last we visited here. So…maybe, just mayyebeeee whatever the hell this ailment is will go away.

One can always hope, eh?

This evening, the Human was feeling well enough to dodder around the neighborhood with the energy-laden corgi. 😀

What a pretty little neighborhood it is! Truly, I lucked MASSIVELY into it to have found this place and bought a house here.

Amazingly, it has NOT gone downhill in the decade or so since SDXB and I bought in here. If anything, many of the houses have been much upgraded, and their fancification has spiffed up the ‘Hood.

The outrageous lightrail, roaring up and down Main Drag West, has not, after all, emitted so much noise and hauled in so much trash as to downgrade the living conditions. If anything, it has fancified the place even more: Californicating it to the taste of  younger adults.

Affluent younger adults…

This place is getting fancier and pricier by the day.

When I croak over, so it appears, M’hijito will inherit a house worth a chunk of dough in a centrally located urban neighborhood, one that may even be a place where he will want to live himself. Whether he does or not, he surely is gonna come out on top of the deal.

😀

Boyoboy, am I glad  didn’t move out to Sun City with SDXB, who fled the oncoming stampede of upgrades as soon as he saw it coming. I might’ve gone with him, if I hadn’t been there and done that, thanks to my parents. They were among the original buyers out there. And…as a younger, pretty much unwelcome resident at the time, I learned to un-appreciate the place.

More recently — just over the past few weeks — my feeble li’l mind has turned back to the possibility of decamping back to Sun City. But…y’know…don’t think so! 

  • Don’t wanna live in a mausoleum for old folks, not ever again.
  • Don’t wanna be serenaded all day from 6:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m. by the roar of fighter jets out of Luke AFB.
  • Don’t wanna live in a place where Black and Brown folk are uniformly hated and reviled.
  • Don’t wanna live in a place where you can’t buy fancy gourmet foods because vendors assume old people mostly want to eat frozen dinners they can microwave.
  • Don’t wanna live a million miles from a decent department store.
  • Don’t wanna live a million miles from a Mayo hospital.
  • Don’t wanna live a million and a half miles from M’hijito’s house.
  • Don’t wanna live where you never hear the sound of little kids playing in the street near your house.

Don’t wanna…don’t wanna…don’t wanna! Just wanna live here in my drab li’l middle-class tract house, smack in the middle of the Big City. 😀

GORGEOUS Day!

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Wow! This is one of those days when you should be in Arizona. 

The fine blue sky is striated delicately with high, thin, fine white clouds. The temperature hovers between perfect and perfectly perfect. Folks are strolling around and driving around and frolicking with their kids. And…yeah: you should be here!

Walked through a couple of my favorite corner shopping centers, mostly to see if they had this piece of junk or that piece of junk that I might buy if adequately tempted. Nope.

That was good: I succeeded in not buying a piece of junk! Snabbed a couple of food items: and that was it.

GREAT exercise, though, and very pleasant. 😀  I should do this every day.

Uhm….on the other hand, the weather should be like this every day. 😀

Not. Bloody. Likely!!!

😀  Walked through the grounds of the little nondescript church to the south of  the Funny Farm. Really: I simply must go over there and ingratiate myself with those folks and try to get on their choir.

The only thing I really do miss from my defunct life is choir. And apparently that little church does have a choir.

Well…this is Sunday. That gives me a whole week to build up the nerve to barge in and introduce myself. So…we shall see what, if anything, transpires. 😀