Coffee heat rising

Idle essays

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. 😀

Colder Than a By-gawd…

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…as my father used to say. Things were colder than, hotter than, faster than, slower than, pricier than, smarter than, stupider than…a by-gawd. 

And no, I don’t know if he knew what the word “bigod” meant. Or even that there was such a word. He wasn’t what you’d call a real eddycated fella.

At any rate, it’s passing crisp out there on the back porch: 40 degrees. For southern Arizona, that’s practically an Arctic freeze!

Was gonna take the dog for her (usual) daily walk this ayem, but decided agin’ it given the chill on the air. So…we loaf.

Actually, Ruby patrols the back yard, ever-hopeful that the beloved Pool Dude will show up. Oh, how she adores that man! 

And why? That escapes me. He looks like an ordinary sorta fella, a guy who got trained to clean pools while he was serving a prison sentence (as indeed is the case with many pool dudes). WHAT has he done to so ingratiate himself with that dawg?

Seriously: she does know when it’s Pool Dude day (how???), and she lurks by the door or by the pool fence waiting for him to show up.

Ooohh well. It’s after 9:00 ayem and still damn cold out there.

Probably should stroll over to the Sprouts or the Albertson’s and restock a few (un)necessaries. But my enthusiasm for traipsing through the ‘Hood and dodging bums to the left of me and bums to the right of me is…well…limited. So is the enthusiasm for leaving Ruby locked up in the house when she really does need a walk.

Occurs to me that I could order up a service dog vest for Ruby, so I can take her into stores and (apparently) even on busses and streetcars. You can buy them on Amazon, no questions asked. Apparently people are not allowed(!!) to ask you for any other evidence or proof that your mutt really is a service dog. If we had one of those li’l costumes, we both could go into any of the five grocery and drug stores within easy walking distance of the Funny Farm. Down at the church, one woman even used to bring her lap-dog sized little mutt to the services, gussied up in one of those vests, and park it next to her on a pew!

Heh heh…not to say {cackle!!}….  Has a certain appeal, doesn’t it?

LOL! I wonder if bums would leave you alone if you had a corgi with you. 😀

Seriously: when a German shepherd would accompany me on a stroll around the ‘Hood, NO ONE would pester me. Lacking such a bodyguard, o’course, the locals will hit you up for handouts, make passes at you, holler obscenities at you…  Blech! What a place.

Maybe I should follow SDXB to Sun City: a.k.a. Mausoleum West. 

[sigh} I truly hated living there when my parents had a Sun City house.

Nice loafing porch, eh? Looks just like my parents' place...At the time they were there, the place was Hate Central. If anyone of a darker persuasion dared to move in, they would be HOUNDED out. And yea verily: I kid you not. That happened, just a year or so ago, to a friend of mine. So I assume Sun City is still as Whitey-White as it was Back in the Day.

What an awful place!

Well. They liked it, though. The constant roar of fighter jets overhead (ooohhh, it’s the sound of freedom! my mother would coo) was a worthwhile trade-off, in their minds, for a housing tract fully free of brown faces.

And one benefit of it would be a paucity of jerks hanging around waiting for women to ogle.

 

 

Dog as Everywhere Everywhen Companion

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Good grief!!!  Did you realize that…my goodness!  You don’t need to have official, doctor-certified proof that your dog is a service dog to acquire a “service dog” vest that will let you take the critter just about anyplace you can go?

Check this out:  Service Dog Info…

Really, all you need is a service dog vest, which you can order from Amazon.

And if some clown demands to see proof the dog is a certified “service dog”? Well:  You raise your hackles and you get huffy as hell and you tell him to take a flying f*** at the moon.

The likelihood that anyone will bother you is fairly low. But knowing humanity, don’t you just KNOW someone will pestiferize you? So be prepared with a high-handed reply. Practice it at home, even.

Betcha you could get away with it 99% of the time.

😀

Seriously (almost)… If I could take Ruby with me, right this minute I’d get off my duff and hike over to the Albertson’s or the Sprouts, dawg in tow. Dawg would be delighted. I’d get a bottle of beer or a package of junk food. And I wouldn’t feel even the slightest bit guilty over galloping off and leaving the dawg behind at the house.