Coffee heat rising

Idle essays

Gooood morning, America…

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Aaarghhh! 😀 It was a good morning in America, till my fine failing memory scotched it up. Yesterday afternoon when I put a pot of sun tea to steep on the flagstones by the BBQ, I said to my hot (indeed) little self, “Remember to bring that in lest the dogs bash it running around.”

Seems like a reasonable thought, doesn’t it?

The dogs usually go out the side door at any time other than early morning, because it’s shadier and cooler on the side of the house. In the morning they go out the back door. And any time they go out, they FLY out the door like two rockets competing to see which will get to the moon first.

Naturally what with the distraction of an entire day of singing and then a church potluck, I forgot the tea. When I staggered in the house yesterday evening, only one thing was on my mind: Fall face-down into the sack!

That’s my excuse and I’m stickin’ with it.

So, continuing the “Naturally” trail, we get home from running a mile. I toss off my clothes so as to jump into the pool, fling open the pack door, and the rockets FLY out the door in their accustomed style.

And they SLAM into the damn bottle of tea, which flips over, explodes, and scatters tiny razor-sharp shards of glass all over the quarter-minus.

For those of you who live in more civilized climes: Quarter-minus is finely ground gravel mixed with sand. It’s used to ape the natural look of the ancient desert floor in xeric landscsping.

What a MESS!

So I have to spend a half-hour cleaning up that menace.

First, check dogs: they seem not to have cut their feet and I can’t find any shards of glass stuck in their pads. That’s something, anyway. I guess.

Now it’s BOLT down breakfast, because I have to get out of here at 7:30 to take the car to Chuck’s for an oil change. That is about 12 minutes from right now, as we scribble.

Chuck’s 8 a.m. appointment means that I have to do this wack-sh!t jig to get out of the ‘hood. You can’t turn left off the main north-south drags that flank the ‘hood, except for Conduit of Blight, which is blocked by the damned train, which means you’ll have a five-minute wait at any left-turn signal. The train renders Conduit of Blight pretty much nonnavigable south of Gangbanger’s Way.

So to get to a road where I can reach Chuck’s garage, I have to drive through three neighborhoods to reach a southbound road that I can turn left off of, or drive through two neighborhoods, go a half-mile north, go east on Gangbanger’s Way all the way to 12th Street, then go south on 12th (adding another half-mile, meaning I have to drive a mile out of my way to accomplish this jig) to neighborhood street where Chuck’s resides (you can’t turn left into Chuck’s from the main drag that his garage fronts on, either), park in the alley behind the garage, walk in, and let the boys know I’m in their precincts.

So 12th Street is a half-mile east of Chuck’s. This latter route, then, entails having to go TWO MILES out of my way every time I take the car for an oil change.

In other words, our fine green-thinking City Parents’ traffic control schemes ADD to the air pollution and gas consumption problem that they supposedly address. You can be sure that if one little old lady is driving out of her way to go in the direction that she needs to go, so are a whole lotta other people.

Makes Yarnell look mighty good, doesn’t it?

Yarnell doesn’t even have stop signs. That’s how huge it is.

And so, away…to do battle with the effing rush-hour traffic! A good morning to you, too, America…

This, That, and the ‘Tother…

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Drawing a bit of a blank about what to write about this morning. Yesterday evening I had some brilliant idea, but now can’t remember it. But of course I can’t remember my name, so…no surprise there.

Here’s an Abert’s towhee out here in the backyard, pecking up some bugs under the paloverde tree. They’re effective insectivores — the birds, that is; not the trees. Along with a thrasher or two and a passel of sparrows, they’ll keep your yard free of ants and any number of other little crawlers.

Most of the hummers have (wisely enough) migrated north. They’re leaving the Valley earlier each year, in response to the climate change that doesn’t exist.

The Anna’s hummingbird used to migrate with them. They stopped doing so, though, with the influx of human admirers who hang out sugar water for them. For many years they buzzed about the Valley all year round. But this particular variety of flying gem is also damn scarce this spring…summer, or whatever it is. Reloaded all the feeders but have only seen one or two of them. So presumably this is yet another loss to what was once a pretty spectacular quality of life in Arizona.

My son says he wants to buy 40 acres in southeastern Utah, park a Tiny House in the middle of it, and go completely off the grid. Just him and his golden retrievers.

I have to say…there are times when that sounds pretty damn good. Think of how many unpublishable novels a creative type could scribble under those conditions.

😀

But turning to the writing career, let us speak of cabbages and journalism…  The other day I picked up a sort of scholarly disquisition published by a Canadian university press. It is, shall we say, spare. Not to say “slight.” Which is, yes…that is what it is.

It’s only about 100 pages of copy, including a very lightweight introduction that does nothing but outline the book’s contents.

Looked at that thing and thought…huh! What I’ve already got in the “Drugging of America” series would fill that much space. Especially if, as this guy’s book is, it’s set in large type with wide margins. The guy has gotta be someone’s son-in-law.

So I decided to trick out a proposal. Preparatory to that, I took the first post and de-bloggified it yesterday. First step was to convert the links to end-notes.

Well. Naturally this led to another garden stroll through the Internet. HOLY shit, but this is a rich topic. Madly saved sets of links to a new Wyrd file, and came up with material for a good three more chapters. This would give the proposed book ten solid chapters, plus an introduction, plus a bibliography. And that would be one heckuva lot stronger than this little hardback I’m looking at now.

So over the next few days, I need to write an introduction, a chapter outline, a TofC, and a proposal. In a week or two, I hope to have that ready to send off. I’ll also send it to Columbia, which has published another of my books. And the UofA Press, where I have friends who have friends.

Step aside, Barbara Ehrenreich…

Choir season is winding toward its end. It’s been a splendid year with our two new musicians operating as director and associate director. The latter proposes to give voice and music lessons over the summer.

A friend and I have already imposed on her for the same, during the past couple of months. She (assoc. director) would like to be paid in the form of donations to the church. That would’ve been OK if I hadn’t used a large slab of this year’s required minimum drawdown from retirement savings to pay off the damned car. But having done that, I’m running dangerously low on money — have about four grand to last till the end of the year…and since operating this shack, eating, and maintaining the hounds and the car cost about two grand a month…well. Houston, we have a problem.

Really, I don’t know how I’m going to get through the summer, to say nothing of making it to the end of the year.

Complicating matters, the pool replastering job can’t be delayed much longer. There’s a crack under the coping that clearly extends through the shell, meaning the water that’s leaking through it is quietly creating some major structural problems. So that needs to be fixed.

Maybe it can be patched. But that will not fix the other issue: the plaster is flaking off because it’s almost 15 years old. That will cost four to six grand.

Ohh well…

Speaking of the writing career, I told myself I would finish (or at least make progress on) a chapter of Ella’s Story. Since I have to be out of here in an hour and a half to meet my business partner in lovely downtown Tempe, I seem to have procrastinated about as much as possible on that scheme.

And so, away…

Yipes! Allergic to life???

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So I’m down at the church putting in a little volunteer time and altogether enjoying my hot little self.

About three hours into this excursion, I realize I’m damn hungry (sorry, God, but You’re responsible for this hunger gig, so kindly hold the lightning bolt), so I raid some leftover cupcakes that have been remaindered to the work table. Pretty tasty: some sort of spice cake nummy commercially processed and processed stuffoid.

An hour or so later — mebbe less — get home and start gathering chow to heat on the Que:

  • 1 small piece beefsteak
  • 1 handful of pre-roasted potatoes, needing a reheat
  • 1 fistful of fresh asparagi [i hate the Mac, which hits, somehow, backspace-skip-back-over-half-a-dozen-words-for-no-rational-reason]

Place these edibles on the grill; pour a glass of wine.

DAYum, but that wine…well…it HURTS. The inside of the lips hurt hurt fuckin’ HURT.

WTF? Cold sore? Reeeellly??? Bottom lip as well as top lip? Seriously?????

Stumble to bathroom while chow is grilling, inspect the maw.

Yeah, lots of redness around the inside of the lips. External part of lips starting to swell. No sign of a localized cold sore. Hm… DIY diagnosis: allergic reaction to some goddamnfool thing.

Like…really, really, REALLLYYYYY i cannot afford another trip to the Emergency Room, dear God and dear Medicare. What to do?

Drop an allergy pill, of course.

What can go wrong, eh?

Not dead by the time the magnificent meal comes off the grill.

Still hurts to eat dinner. But…no sign of anaphylactic shock.

Yet.

Munch a handful of chocolate chips for “dessert.”

Decide I have not yet died. Pour one final glass of wine.

Hurts slightly less to consume this dose of lip-singeing potable.

Ersatz dessert inhaled. Dogs placated. Wine snurfled up. And…the swelling (which was proceeding apace by the time I dropped a Claritin) is much reduced. A sip of wine does not feel like it was preheated in a blast furnace.

Thank you, Your Godship.

But nevertheless (apologies to Your Godship): SOMETHING there is that allergic reaction kicks up!

What?

Only the faintest clues:

  • cinnamon?
  • industrial chemical added to processed bakery goods? fake white frosting??? ersatz vanilla flavoring?
  • whatever else was in the tasty treat, which, being highly processed, was pretty damned anonymized?

Dunno.

Thinking maybe I need to keep a few allergy pills in the car, there to have recourse should this happen again

As I click “Publish” for this idle post, the effect — whatever its cause — is almost gone.

Message? Do not, my loves, DO NOT eat fake food, no matter how hungry you think you are. The starving children in Bangladesh are a lot hungrier.

Spin Those Wheels!

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Well, really, I can’t complain SO much about wheel-spinning. Even though I managed to evade working on the Big Annoyance of the Day — shoveling a foot-deep stack of accursed paperwork off the desk — a bunch of stuff actually has gotten done. Ditz, it’s true…but stuff that needed to get done.

Do you ever feel like, even after you’ve managed to power through a lot of tasks, that you still have been spinning your wheels half the day?

Done:

🙂 Clean out pool pump pot; clean out pool strainer basket; reinstall pool cleaner, run pump
🙂 Figure out why irrigation system stopped working (FAIL!)
🙂 Water citrus trees manually
🙂 Water other plants manually
🙂 Spray Dawn detergent solution on plants infested with skeletonizing bugs
🙂 Repair back gate latch
🙂 Repair kitchen cabinet pull
🙂 Pick up mess in house
🙂 Change bed; wash sheets & towels
🙂 Cook and concoct dog food
🙂 Clean up ensuing mess in kitchen
🙂 Pick up dog mounds
🙂  Drag trash out to alley
🙂 Post today’s chapter of If You’d Asked Me… (how to handle harassment of cute young teenager)
🙂 Post link to that on Facebook
🙂 Enter comments in FB writer’s community

Not Done:

🙁 Write the next installment of the Drugging of America series
🙁 Iron jeans
🙁 Write more of Ella’s Story
🙁 Cope with gigantic stack of accursed paper

AND…as you might guess, “Cope with gigantic stack of accursed paper” is the chore that all this wheel-spinning has been designed to avoid. I hate, hate, hate dorking with paperwork.

So I put it off. The bills come in. The checks to deposit come in. The statements come in. This nag, that nag, and the other nag comes in from various vendors and doctors’ offices and creditors. They all get tossed on a table.

They’ve been sitting here for upwards of a month now. The table is beginning to groan under the pile’s weight.

Yes. I’ve paid the bills. But all the rest of it is just sitting there.

It is going to take several hours to plow through all that brain-banging shit. And no. I just do. not. want. to. do. it.

Should write the next Drugging of America piece. And could. That also will be a time-consuming and energy-sucking task. If I start on that now, not enough time will be left in the day to fart with the pile of paper distractions. To say nothing of enough ambition.

One thing I probably could do is have the credit union send statements electronically. That would create three fewer pieces of trash to be plucked out of the mailbox. I’m already downloading all the transactions into Excel as it is.

But you just know, don’t you, that whatever form they use to send these proposed electronic statements will not readily convert to Excel. So that will just inflict three more pieces of useless electronic junkmail to deal with. Like I don’t have enough of that?

So little worthwhile stuff comes in the mail anymore, I hardly ever bother to open the thing. Now that the mailbox has to be fortified and locked, the extra effort entailed in tracking down the key, traipsing it out to the curb, wrestling with the mailbox lid, relocking it, traipsing the key back to the house, and hiding it again makes picking up the mail counterproductive. There simply isn’t enough real mail in there to make it worth being bothered to walk out there and wrestle it out of the box.

Consequently, these days I pick up snail-mail about once a week.

Yesterday, it occurred to me to count: EIGHT out of nine pieces of delivered mail went directly into the trash.

That suggests that about 90 percent of mail being delivered by the U.S. Post Office is junk advertising circulars.

And, therefore,  for every piece of nuisance paperwork that arrives here, nine pieces of trash have to be toted to a recycling bin. Ninety percent of delivered mail represents pointlessly destroyed trees, pointlessly polluting paper mills, pointlessly polluting ink manufacture, pointlessly expended gasoline to tote trees, paper, ink, and junk mail around, pointlessly expended power to run those mills and drive the printing presses and operate the equipment to recycle trash that is never even opened or looked at.

That pisses me off. It ought to piss you off, too.

Oh, well. /rant.

I’d better get up and go deal with the pieces of paper that actually do require attention. Of a sort.

 

Oh, for an April Shower!

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Around here we don’t get April showers. We get April winds. Howling April winds.

In normal times (which we haven’t seen for some years) we get February rains and April winds. But once again this winter brought almost no rain. So the place is dry as…yeah: dust. If you don’t breathe, you’re fine. But if you do…too bad: allergy season with a vengeance.

The wind has been roaring around for days. For hours last night it was banging stuff up against the house and whacking birds into the westside Arcadia doors. And this morning? The air is still (for the nonce), but what a mess to clean up!

Leaves and palm tree debris all over the yard. Junk from the surviving Devil Pod Tree on the southwest side blown all the way over into the patio on the northeast side…and of course, into the pool.

I’m thinking I’ll plug in the blower, blast the stuff off the patios, and mound it into a couple of haystacks, over which I’ll toss tarps to hold it down until Gerardo gets here to haul it off. Can’t step onto the back porch barefooted without puncturing the soles of my feet, so at least need to get the trash piled up somewhere out of the way.

And it’s blowing the oranges out of the trees. True, they’re pushing over-ripe… I’ve been gorging myself on the delicious things for weeks. But once they’re thrown on the ground, they’ll spoil within a day. So these winds usually mean the end of the orange harvest.

So, so, SO much ditzy, distracting work to do. I really want to finish the current chapter of Ella’s Story, which is painfully slow going. But some of this stuff has been put off too long, and some of it has to be done now…

  • Shovel out the wind debris
  • Clean the mustard algae off the pool walls
  • Shovel the mountain of paper off the dining-room table (damned piles of mail that get left there to attend to…later. Much later.)
  • Do battle with the effing credit bureaus again, trying to get the bastards to reinstall the fraud alert needed thanks to Equifax’s having shared my private information with bad actors around the world
  • Spray the alley weeds behind my house and the feckless neighbor’s house
  • Pick up the dog mounds
  • Haul the trash
  • Run two more loads of laundry
  • Iron clothes
  • Figure out how to put a battery in that damn modem Cox attached the phones to
  • Free the Bear Spray cans from Costco’s consumer-proof wrapping and figure how to use the stuff

The kids who moved into Sally’s house either have a moral objection to Roundup or are too preoccupied with parenthood to be bothered to clean up the weeds. In the spring their front yard looks like a slum property — eventually he’ll get out there and manually pull up the weeds, a tedious chore, indeed. You can’t blame him for putting it off as long as possible. But they never do a damn thing about the alley weeds, which are a serious fire hazard. And it’s against the law to let them grow up as high as your butt…a law most honored in the breach.

But I can’t complain: when the ex- and I were young things, we never touched the alley behind our shack. Partly because we were above all that (weren’t we? after all!) and partly because we didn’t know it was our responsibility to keep the area weed-free.

😀 The young things haven’t been here long enough to watch a neighbor’s house burn to the ground (!) after some of the neighborhood brats set fire to the brush in the alley, out of idle mischief.

So I’ve sprayed once out there — it’s killed off most of the weeds outside my fence and theirs, but a few outliers and newcomers remain to be attacked.

The wind is quiet just now, so I should get out there and do that right this second, before it starts to blow again. Typically it’ll die down fairly late at night and then start again mid-morning. But just now am busy swilling coffee.

The wind blew over the giant garbage bin in the alley. Noticed this yesterday. It’s too heavy for me to haul back upright, and (though I haven’t looked) I’d put money on it that the kid back there hasn’t lifted it, either. So I’ll have to drag the trash down about three city lots to the next set of neighbors’ bin. That doesn’t exactly fill me with inspiration to take out the trash! 😀

My laziness knows no bounds…

Wherever You’re Goin’…

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…You can’t get there from here!

That old chestnut simply has to have been written by someone from Phoenix. About Phoenix. What a f*ckin’ zoo this place is!

Having failed to get to yesterday’s West Valley Writer’s Workshop shindig, today I determined to go to a weekly Central Phoenix Writing Workshop, therein — with any luck — to meet some new people and maybe even make some new friends. A guy who shows up at the WVWW events is one of the Central Phoenix organizers, and I thought it would be nice to see him, he being a pretty interesting fella.

But no.

It should be a straight shot down Central Avenue. This outfit meets in a hipster coffee house dead center in the renovated downtown.

Li’l hipsters…

To give you an idea: During the recession, I considered (in passing) buying a condo within walking distance of this place. They wanted as much as my four-bedroom house costs for 1 tiny living/dining room, 2 “bedrooms” (one would suffice as a small office), and a kitchenette.

Yeah.

But that’s not so much here nor there.

Turn out of a neighboring ‘Hood and head south on Central.

It is slow going.

And then it gets slower.

And then it comes to a dead stop.

WTF? I can’t figure out what the problem is. Must be an accident up ahead.

At Indian School Road, traffic just sits at the light. After awhile, we inch close enough to the intersection that I can see Indian School is closed east of Central. Cop lights are flashing: must be a Wreck from Hell…not an uncommon event in these parts, as you can imagine.

By now it’s quarter to two. The group’s meeting starts at 2:00 p.m. I’m not gonna make it if I stay in this mess. If I veer right and then dart south on Seventh, maybe I can get around the mess. Fortunately, I’m already in the right-hand lane. I nuzzle the car into the right-turn lane, cutting off some poor wretch who has the same idea.

We sit through FOUR SIGNALS before I get to the front of the line to turn right on Indian School.

Westbound traffic is OK.

Turn south on Third, knowing that at Thomas (this being my old stomping grounds) I’ll have to jog west and then south onto Fifth, since those two streets convert to one-way at that point. PITA.

It gets later.

By the time the supercharged Venza reaches Thomas, we’re just a few brief minutes short of two o’clock

At this point, I figure I’ve had about enough of this run-around.

For.

Get.

THAT!

North on Seventh Ave, headed back to Bum Central, way far to the north of these gentrified confines.

…Meet yo’ daddies and yo’ mamas!

Cruising north, back at Indian School I come to this organic market that I’ve always wanted to visit but usually can’t because when I’m northbound on 7th Ave I’m in a ball-busting hurry (yes, I do always run late…why do you ask?) or it’s late at night after some downtown event or I’m evading the Hated I-17 or I have someplace to go on Seventh. None of those eventualities invite one to diddle around in a grocery store.

Dart right out of the middle lane, tromp the brakes, annoy the guy who was flying along in that lane about 10 mph over the limit. (I know, because we were pacing each other.) Whip into the store’s parking lot.

What a freaking blast from the past!

If you are old enough to remember the 1960s and 70s, then you are old enough to remember organic food co-ops.

This place is like an organic food co-op, only clean. Only with pretty damn good-looking produce. What it really makes you think of is a Whole Foods crammed into the space the size of a typical Sprouts.

Remember the allegedly “organic” produce in those 1970s co-ops? Wilted. Brown. Soggy. Looked like it had been picked from somebody’s backyard garden and left to ferment in a warehouse for three weeks? Yeah: you had to be a true believer to buy that pre-garbage.

The produce in this store was FREAKING GORGEOUS! Plump and handsome and happy and calling out to your taste buds: Come to me, come to meeeee!

The clientele? Omigod. You never saw so many aging hippies in your life. And of course health-conscious gay guys. The store is on the edge of the Melrose district, the home of many gay couples. Everyone in the store was visibly having a wonderful time shopping. No irony there: it was clear these people loved it.

And they had hippy-dippy personal products, so many organic combs and brushes and creams and soaps and toothpastes and beard softeners and hair pomades and…the boggle minded.

Naturally I bought a piece of (YES!) unscented Castile soap (couldn’t believe it) and a little pottle of unscented workingman’s hand softener gunk (think udder cream gone to San Francisco). Hallelujah brothers and sisters!

If they’d had some tie-died clothes, you can be sure I’d’ve bought some of that, too.

Raced back home bearing a beautiful, ripe (!!!!) acorn squash, a perfect unblemished yellow onion, and a pound of allegedly organic, allegedly hormone-free, allegedly grass-fed ground meat from the loins of the perfect cow.

Nice. Will I go back? Probably. It was overpriced. Yes: prices outstripped Whole Paycheck even before that honorable store was kidnapped by Amazon. But did it have things I don’t think I can find elsewhere? Yeah. Definitely. I will go back.

So.

Even though you can’t get wherever it is you think you’re going from here, you can get somewhere interesting. 😀