Coffee heat rising

Life in the Desert

The Small Joys of Life in the Desert

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Mwa ha ha! Just pressed “BLOCK” on a spoofed robocall number…the first nuisance call that’s gotten through in days. Literally, the nuisance call rate has dropped from a dozen a day (or more) to one a day (or less). woo-HOOO!

Out the door with Ruby the Corgi at a few minutes after 5:00 this morning. Gorgeous morning…and there was nobody out there!

Yes: just a few minutes earlier than usual, the hordes of dog-walkers haven’t stumbled out their doors. Nary once were we lunged at by massive, just-vaguely-under-control guard dogs — the cost of living on the margin of a high-crime “neighbor”hood. On our entire mile-and-a-half route, we ran into just one other dog person: the guy who has the herd of corgis! So of course we had to hang out for a minute or two and chat, he and his dogs being eminently civilized. 😀

Believe it or not, yesterday — June 2nd — was the first day of serious swimming here at the Funny Farm. First time I was able to get into the pool, stay in it, and actually swim around for awhile. The water is still cool, but not so crisp as to raise goose-bumps.

Normally, summer begins around the first week of May. The snowbirds leave town in April, so scared are they of temps in the 90s. NG usually heads for her Denver digs early in April, while IMHO it’s still passing balmy here. So this whole extra month of sweater weather at doggy-walk time and — best of all — no air-conditioning(!!!!!) at any time has been quite the little Godsend. Last month my power bill was $134, some sort of all-time record low for this time of year.

So that’s pretty surprising.

The chard seeds I planted in the pots where their predecessors lived for a good four years, through frost and scorcher, have already sprouted. So, before long I’ll have fresh greens to go with the various dinner menus, rather than frozen spinach.

But speaking of large, threatening dogs populating the local byways, one is always reminded (if by nothing else, by the constant roar of helicopters overhead) that we are gentrifying a neighborhood bounded on two sides by high-crime areas. The corner of Gangbanger’s Way and Conduit of Blight, about a half-mile from the Funny Farm, regularly scores the highest arrest rates in the city. A perfectly acceptable and invitingly shoppable Sprouts resides .8 miles from my house, door to door. I could easily walk down there to shop, adding some exercise and saving, over time, a whole lotta gasoline. But…noooo way! It simply is not safe to walk on Conduit of Blight. Even if you were carrying heat, it wouldn’t be safe.

This means that even to go down to the corner market, I have to travel in a locked car, putting two layers of steel between myself and my…uhm…neighbors. It also means that as a practical matter, I shop at the corner market a whole lot less than anyone should have to. Today, for example, I need to restock because I’ll be spending most of the day tomorrow volunteering at the church and getting stitches pulled out of my gums. To do that, I will get in my car and drive to the AJ’s at Central and Camelback, a 10-mile round trip rather than a 1.6-mile stroll.

I find that deeply annoying.

It happens because the City has neither the will nor the resources to keep vagrancy and crime under control. Things like this happen, for example…all. the. freakin’. time. The sh!thead who set this fire, which incinerated a dozen apartment-house renters’ cars, lived in the apartment’s parking lot, where he was sleeping in his van. Residents complained repeatedly about the guy, but were (they claim) ignored. The apartment building, which once was a fairly nice place, is now owned by the City of Phoenix and is, shall we say, not recommended by Google reviewers who have had the misfortune of living there. It is smack in the middle of one of the most hotly gentrifying districts in the city.

As we scribble, the itinerant perp is under indictment for murdering his father. Why exactly he’s free to wander around and set fire to parking garages remains unclear. Well, no, it doesn’t. We know the reason: the City of Phoenix and State of Arizona do not give one thin damn about the safety of law-abiding, tax-paying residents and so neither entity does a thing to preserve said residents’ safety and property.

The presence of wandering sh!theads and the prevalence of crime petty and major come under the heading of “life in the big city.”

Which brings us to the question of why on earth do I stay in this place?

This morning, with that perennial concern in mind, I was looking at real estate in Fountain Hills, a middle-class suburban redoubt on the far side of Scottsdale. For what I can net on this house, I could buy a more or less comparable place over there. Quite a few such shacks are on the market just now.

Problem is, though…I don’t want to live in Fountain Hills.

Because…

a) It’s too damn far away from where I go and what I do.
b) The houses are cheaply built, even the ones that cost somewhat more than an arm and a leg. Views are gorgeous, but the architecture is junque.
c) Apparently there’s no gas service out there. So every house has ultra-expensive electric air-conditioning, and no house has a gas stove.
d) Scottsdale (where you’d have to shop for just about everything) is just not this Walmart Girl’s style.

If I’m going to move away from all my friends, from my son, and from everything I do here, I might as well live in Prescott.

But…I don’t want to live in Prescott.

a) It snows in Prescott. I like my swimming pool and I ain’t leavin’ it behind.
b) I know no one in Prescott and have no desire to build new networks of friends and business acquaintances.
c) If it costs an arm & a leg to air-condition a shack in Phoenix, you do not even want to know how much it costs to heat a place up there!

I could afford to live on the far west side of Phoenix, in one of the Sun Cities. These have exceptionally low crime rates and are, shall we say, quiet. As in the quiet of the mortuary.

But…I don’t want to live in Phoenix’s crowded, tacky, Southern-California-style suburbs.

a) That area has everything you could possibly want now…but it is just mobbed. Awful, crowded, hectic streets and shopping centers everywhere you go outside of the mausoleum-like Sun Cities.
b) I’ve lived in Sun City and am not doing that again, either.
c) Like Fountain Hills, the far west side (on the California side of the slums that spread outward from Maryvale, the kernel of west-side blight in this city) is too damn far away from where I go and what I do.

Beyond the SoCal ticky-tacky (by an hour’s drive or so) is Wickenburg, the West’s Most Western Tourist Trap. Now…I could stand to live in this place. Absolutely. And I could afford it. Except…

a) Out there in the borderlands of the boondocks, that gorgeous yard is going to attract rattlesnakes and coyotes. Ruby the Corgi couldn’t be allowed to walk around out there unattended. Not and live long, anyway.
b) If Fountain Hills and Sun City are too far away, Wickenburg is on the far side of the galaxy.
c) I cannot live without a Costco.

It’s hard to imagine how I could find a place comparable to this one, which has everything I like in a dwelling and few things (other than the resident drug-popping transients) I don’t like, in an area that is safer, centrally located, and reasonably affordable.

So, as they say, il faut cultiver notre jardin.

Joys of the Day

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Today has been a day of small joys. Hallelujah, brothers and sisters! Just imagine…

1. The phone stopped jangling

Yes! The minute the new CPR v5000 Call Blocker was plugged in, the nonstop robo-harassment came to a proverbial screeching halt. The nuisance call rate is down from upwards of a dozen a day to one. That’s right. And none of those once-a-day nuisances have come at some wacky hour like 7:30 or 8 in the morning or 8 or 9 at night.

2. The clindamycin pills ran out.

Woo hoo! I got through the whole ten-day prescription without any noticeable side effects!

Yet.

You can enjoy a C. difficile infection as much as six months after a course of this stuff. That’s the worst of a raft of potential unpleasant outcomes.

Really unpleasant. SDXB’s former wife died of a C. diff infection. On her living-room floor. She lay dead for two days, before a neighbor and friend came over to check on her, looked in a window, and saw her corpse there.

Wonder-Endodontist recommended scarfing down probiotics whilst taking this fine drug, so I went out and bought a box of that stuff at Sprouts. Look it up on NNT: as a prophylactic to head off C. diff-related to antibiotic treatment, 42 people have to be treated for 1 person to be helped. Among high-risk patients, 1 in 12 is helped.

Yeah.

Well. It’s better than none. “C. difficile infection is the leading cause of gastroenteritis-associated death,” says NNT, “and was estimated to cause 14,000 deaths in 2007.Although almost half of infections occur in people younger than 65, more than 90% of deaths occur in those 65 and older.” Since “65 and older” appears to equate to “high-risk,” it looks a lot like swallowing this stuff is worthwhile.

But swallowing it is a challenge. You have to take three a day on top of the four clindamyacin horse pills, and the probiotic pills are also horse pills, about the same as the Big Gulps of the antibiotics.

My plan is to finish the entire box, which included enough pills for another five days. Then for the next six months or so, eat plenty of foods allegedly rich in the magical probiotics. I already do that, because I eat a slice or two of cheddar cheese almost every day. I hate yogurt, but can tolerate it mixed with other foodoids, such as soups and sauces. And I’m very fond of fresh (unpasteurized) sauerkraut and kimchi. Love olives — this house has two trees full of them, and I happen to know how to brine them in the Greek manner. One site claims chocolate contains probiotics…that, too, I eat in modest amounts every day.

3. Amazing weather lingers

It’s the end of May — by now summer should be y-cumen in. But no! It’s 60 degrees in the morning, and the days are still cool enough to loaf around outdoors all day long. That is weird.

The place is overrun with doves and tweety-birds. This afternoon I bought another gigantic bag of birdseed from the WalMart, since the little dinosaurs have gone through the existing supply.

Also cleaned and refilled the hummingbird feeders; relocated one to the newly pruned paloverde tree.

4. Finally deposited about $2,000 worth of checks. I hate the credit union’s at-home deposit function. Sometimes it’s so time-consuming, especially if you have several checks, that it’s less annoying to drive up there and drop the checks off in person.

5. Pleased to recall that I put two grand aside in emergency savings: covered Luis, thank God. Luis and a sidekick cleaned out the front porch, thinned the giant mesquite tree, cleaned up the shaggy desert willow, trimmed the yellow oleander, pruned the paloverde branches off the roof, and cut about a third of the looming goddamned Australian weeping acacia out, thereby eliminating most of the risk of the damn thing falling on my house or my neighbor’s during this summer’s monsoon winds. For two day’s heavy labor by two men, he charged $940. A bargain, I’d say.

6. Remembered that I needed to download all the checking account transactions since the first of the year. The credit union has upgraded its system so it took all of 5 minutes to download 6 months’ worth of data for 3 accounts!

7. When I put off a chore because I hate doing it, I tend not to do the other chores I’m supposed to do that day. Then I put everything off and get nothing done. The ditzy bookkeeping tasks done, I went so far as to clean the bathrooms and pick up most of the litter and run a load through the clothes washer.

Woot!

8. Then it was off to Walmart, Walgreen’s, and Costco, what fun. Got an external hard drive, needed for Time Machine backups, for $10 off, it being the last one on the shelf. Whilst ambling around Costco, remembered that the barbecue repairman was supposed to have shown up at 1 p.m. At this point, it was after that.

Luckily, the lines were short. Flew out of the store and raced home, but by the time I got here it was 2:00 p.m. However…

9. The BBQ guy had let himself in. By the time I got here, he had about fixed the broken igniter switch. Then he cleaned the entire, very dirty unit. Thing looks like new and works as well.

All in all, it was a productive and pleasant day.

Or would be, if I could count… 😉

 

Attacked!

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Yesterday evening Ruby and I were trotting through lower Richistan, past a house that a young couple with kids is renovating, when the morons’ 80-pound German shepherd roared out of their front yard and attacked my little 25-pound corgi. I tried to grab her and pick her up off the ground, but every time I’d reach for her, the dog came after me. Ruby, meanwhile, being a shepherd dog herself, after a second of terrified shrieking, shifted into full defensive mode and launched herself at the attacker.

Fortunately, the pooch’s humans heard me screaming and came running to call off their dog. But not before the animal had harassed and terrified me and my dog.

One of their cute little kids hollered after me, as I was stalking off down the street having delivered to the parents a volley of…uhm, shall we say “vulgar criticism” at high volume, I’m sowwy!

{sigh}

God, but I am tired of stupid. What IS it about people that they think neither common sense nor the leash laws apply to them and they can do as they please as long as a cop isn’t standing there watching?

Our house. Can you believe this place went on the market recently at over a million dollars?

True: it’s scary living here. I was among the cohort who gentrified Phoenix’s historic (and now spectacularly overpriced)  Encanto district. The ’Hood is effectively the New Encanto. And we have similar problems with transients, crime, and endless assaults on our quality of living by moneyed interests that own the city government. Encanto had (and still does have) many more transients than we see up here. Its Zip code had the highest per-capita drug use rate in the city, and the crazy (sometimes horrifying) incidents occurred so often that our office manager used to ask me, come Monday mornings, what new tale I had to tell. And I usually had one.

What were those tales? Ohhh…the day a burglar murdered an elderly neighbor by chopping her to death with an axe he found in her garage. The night a man tried to bump a lock in the exterior door of a room next to where I was sitting in front of the television (and was within about a second of succeeding when I realized what the noise was, ran to the front door, and screamed FIRE!!!!!!! at the top of my lungs). The cat burglar/rapist on the roof. The guy who watched a neighbor until he knew when her husband was out of town (which was fairly frequently), cased the house until he found the only window that wasn’t wired for a burglar alarm, climbed through it, and spent the night beating and raping her. Little things like that…

Consequently, I’ve had German shepherds all of my adult life. And I’ve had them explicitly as protection dogs. Only now that I no longer have the physical strength to handle a large, high-drive dog have I switched to smaller breeds. Here’s what I’ve observed about the breed, after several decades of handling its representatives.

First lemme tell you somethin’: if you bought yourself a GerShep to protect your kids and their buxom mother, you need to know about German shepherds. And you need to have better sense than to leave your dog out in an unfenced front yard.

The German shepherd has been harmed in many ways by overbreeding to develop “guard” tendencies. The result is often an unstable disposition, which can make for a very dangerous dog. Consequently, if you choose to own a German shepherd, you need to keep it under control at all times, and you need to be aware of its power and its potential to do harm. Yes: my shepherds have chased off home invaders (one poor guy is still running…said to be approaching Siberia about now).

Yes: my shepherds made it possible for me to walk around Encanto Park as a nicely endowed young woman without harassment. But I’ve also had a shepherd that tried to attack my mother-in-law and then me and then a veterinarian – the vet explained that some breeds are prone to a kind of mental illness that causes this behavior, and that once such a dog launches into an attack, it cannot be called off. This, he added, is the direct result of ill-advised breeding practices. If, like me, you’re a German shepherd fan, you should be aware that these conditions exist.

A German shepherd is like a .38. You don’t leave your revolver sitting on the coffee table. Similarly, don’t leave your German shepherd sitting around an unfenced yard and don’t let it off the leash in public. It’s a good thing to protect yourself – but not if you put innocent people’s safety at risk.

Harmless as the new-blown snow…

Small Town/Big City: A study in contrasts

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Payson ranger station

Yesterday VickyC and I finally made it up to Payson to visit our friends KJG and Mr. KJG in their beautiful, newly renovated home in the pines. It was wonderful to see them and to admire their lovely property.

KJG drove us around to some of her favorite haunts in Payson, a small ranching and tourist community perched at the top of the Mogollon Rim. The contrast between Phoenix’s toxic LA-style hectic traffic and the small-town vibe up there was amazing. Not once did anyone cut us off, park in the car’s blind spot, try to get-there-first, jerk around, or behave as though they were drunk, stoned, or demented. Nor did we, even once, run into a traffic jam occasioned by the city tearing up the roads.

We drove through a couple of districts where they’d looked at houses during their search for their dream house somewhere outside of the increasingly dystopic Valley of the Sun. There really are some lovely residential areas up there. And in some cases, the prices are not completely out of line. For about what I could get for my house, I could buy a nice place in town.

This, in sharp contrast with the experience of driving around lovely Phoenix on Wednesday:

I went up to the FedEx office, which is not very far from here. Really, if you didn’t have to traverse Gang Central, you could walk there from here.

First, though, I went to my favorite storefront mailboxes/xerox/notary public-type place, because a) they offer just about every service having to do with shipping, mailing, and minor office services you can dream up and b) I like those folks a lot and usually will try to give my money to people who have proven they can be nice to me. To get there, I have to cross the freeway. Main Drag South and Gangbanger’s Way are both fantastically dug up, creating backups that go halfway to Reno in one direction and halfway to Santa Fe in the other. So I figure I’ll go west across the freeway on Meth Lover’s Lane, the next main drag north of Gangbanger’s. The mail store is in a strip mall facing Meth Lover’s, westward across the freeway and on the north edge of the Ghost Mall (Gangbanger’s skirts this gigantic collection of vacancies along its south side). So it’s northward up Conduit of Blight Blvd toward Meth Lover’s, there to turn left and proceed west across the freeway.

Not. So. Much.

Every effing road in this city is torn up. Wherever you’re going, you can’t get there from here…and yesterday provided no exception to that rule.

At the intersection of Conduit of Blight and Meth Lover’s Lane, they’ve got the damn road shut down to one lane. No left effing turn.

Fortunately, I spot this situation from afar, and fortunately I’ve lived in Our Fair City for so long its road map is imprinted on my brain. I cut off a poor bastard in the outside lane, swerve into the two-way left-turn lane, and jerk across oncoming traffic into a light industrial area. Proceed west as far as this little street will go, dodging an 18-wheeler who’s stuck trying to turn around (thank you, God, for sparing me from having taken up that occupation!); amble to the end of the street, turn north, and follow that road up to its intersection with Meth Lover’s, figuring it’s gonna be a real bitch to turn left onto that thing. Rev up the aggressiveness hormones (drivers in Phoenix learn to control these bodily functions by sheer effort of will….), grit my teeth and…HALLELUJAH BROTHERS AND SISTERS, there’s a freaking signal at Meth Lover’s!

So I get back on my way without having to risk my life unduly. Or anyone else’s, come to think of it.

The mail store folks say they can only do UPS but they point out that I passed a FedEx store on my way there, right on Meth Lover’s Lane. Ah! I know that industrial park!

So I turn back onto Meth Lover’s, cross the freeway eastbound, come to the FedEx store, and have to turn north (left AGAIN!!!!) onto the little street that goes into the industrial park. Traffic northbound on this tiny road is SO THICK that I cannot turn left into the parking lot near the FedEx store. I figure that’s because other folks, southbound, are detouring through the industrial park to dodge the mess at Meth Lover’s Lane and Conduit of Blight. They’re all as mad as I am, and nary a one of them is about to give another motorist a break. So I proceed down Little Street till I find another driveway in the back end of the parking lot. Dart in there and then drive all the way back up to the front of the lot and get parked near the FedEx shop. No problem sending the computer off to Apple…that’s very nice.

Now I have to get home, once again circumventing the mess at Conduit of Blight and Meth Lover’s. Holy sh!t.

Noooo way of getting out of the parking lot the way I came in: cars are now backed up to Flagstaff. However, the next road to the west of Little Street is Office Complex Drive. This proceeds past the insurance company where my son works, past the former site of the branch office that the credit union so conveniently closed, and past a grassy flood-control park where I used to run my German shepherd when she was young and fierce. AND it happens to debouche onto Gangbanger’s way, which goes right past my neighborhood.

Yes!

The only problem is turning right out of the FedEx parking lot onto Meth Lover’s (circumventing the light at LIttle Street) and then darting across the fast lane (“fast” is not the operative word here…) and into the two-way left-turn lane. But thanks to the signal holding up westbound traffic at Little Street, I manage to take advantage of a Fellow Homicidal Driver’s momentary lapse in attention and dart across in front of him to turn left onto Faceless Office Building Road…only because FOB Road also has a signal.

Proceed without incident down FOB Road and reach Gangbanger’s Way. Mercifully, there’s also a signal at that intersection, allowing me to turn left onto the 7-lane main drag that is Gangbanger’s.

wooo HOOOOO! I got home alive, one more time!

This is pretty much the story of any drive you make through this accursed city, no matter where it is that you think you want to go. Wherever you’re goin’, you can’t get there from here: EVERY road is ripped up and blocked somewhere. Unless you know how to get around virtually any intersection in town, you are going to end up sitting and sitting and sitting and sitting and sitting in stalled traffic.

Later in the day, I had to make a 40-minute drive to meet a client at a Barnes and Noble over at Arrowhead Mall, way to Hell and gone on the west side. It was pushing 4 p.m. by the time this confab broke up. Rush hour here starts at 3:00 p.m. sharp.

Homeward bound, I decided to stop by the credit union on the Great Desert University’s west campus, so I could deposit the check without having to dork with scanning it and uploading two images. This entails driving east across Bell Road — one of the main drags into White Flight Country, now situated on the far west side — then veering south on 43rd Avenue to Thunderbird, and sliding onto the campus. Not too bad: since most of the rush-hour traffic consists of whiteys headed homeward — in the opposite direction from the way I had to go — this went smoothly enough. The transaction completed, now the choices are to continue east across Thunderbird to the freeway, take the freeway to Gangbanger’s, and trudge east to the ‘Hood, or else go all the way across Thunderbird to Conduit of Blight, go south several miles, and then turn east onto Gangbanger’s.

Well. You’re crazy to get on the freeway any time after 3 in the afternoon. And the alternative would take me right back to the mess at Conduit of Blight and Meth Lover’s. Luckily, though, I have that map imprinted inside the brain. So…back eastbound on Thunderbird to 35th, south toward Gangbanger’s way, and thence to the ‘Hood.

Again because this route was east- and southbound, running in the opposite direction of the blue-collar workers and cubicle-dwelling office workers who get off around 3:00 or 4:00 and head home to their styrofoam-and-stucco boxes on the west side, I escaped a lot of rush-hour congestion. But traffic coming in the opposite direction? Holeee mackerel! At the light on the east side of the freeway, westbound traffic on Gangbanger’s was backed up almost a mile. There was no incident stopping them. It was just too damn many cars for the road to handle. That is, yes, seven lanes (if you count the two-way left-turn lane as a traffic lane).

Ugh!

When I got home from this junket, I called up “real estate, Prescott” and looked at the offerings in that Californicated small town. It’s a pretty area, and my house is now worth so much that I could in fact afford to live there. And I did find a couple of cute houses…but in general, I just don’t see anything there that I sincerely would wanna live in. Problem is, my house is damn nice…you’d have to go some to beat it, or even to match it.

The other options are the Oro Valley in Tucson (think I’d ’druther live in Prescott, thank you) or Sun City. The latter would be much cheaper. But my god. Living in a mausoleum ought to be cheaper!

Payson is significantly cheaper than Prescott. However, it has a few disadvantages: it has few urban amenities such as top-rated hospitals, Costco, gourmet grocery stores or even Sprouts; little choice of veterinarians, dentists, doctors, or much of anything else. Those things, of course, are readily available in Phoenix: an hour and a half down the hill.

But… Do you really want to drive an hour and a half to get to one or the other of those?

KJG does it without a blink: she said she’d driven into the Valley to see the kids twice last week. But…she’s highly motivated.

So. I don’t know. Do I want to uproot myself to get away from the traffic, the crime, the drug-addicted transients, the heat, and the overall lunacy? Maybe. But do I really want to leave my son and all my friends? Hmmm…

View from Payson. By Doug Dolde at English Wikipedia – Transferred from en.wikipedia to Commons., Public Domain.

 

 

Flutterbyes and Flowers and Springtime

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What a gorgeous morning! Cool but not crisp, birds flying around building nests, honeybees darting about the citrus blossoms, which perfume the air like some kind of exotic tropical flowers. Over coffee this morning I spotted a dainty little white butterfly competing with the apis species. Looked very much like this little guy…

Most low desert urbanites hate the citrus flowering season, because they wrongly imagine the highly perfumed blossoms aggravate their allergies. And if you didn’t already have respiratory allergies before you came to Arizona, you soon get them. 😀 But the truth is, plants that attract pollinators by scent are not especially allergenic. What stuffs up your nose and makes you wheeze are blossoms that are pollinated by wind, whose pollen wafts aloft and floats into your schnozz. The worst offender in these parts, believe it or not, is the ponderosa pine, which covers the Mogollon Rim. Despite the depredations of pine bark beetles and drought, Arizona has the largest ponderosa pine forest in the world. And its pollen soars down off the rim and settles into the Valley each spring, where it wreaks havoc with the flatlanders’ noses.

Ruby the Corgi is having a sh!tfit. Someone must be walking their dog past the house. Either that or another bum is stumbling by.

Yesterday she had a merry ride out to Sun City, where we were invited to dinner with SDXB and NG. Normally, when schlepping dogs around, I lay the back seats down flat and, in the present annoying Venza, stuff old bed pillows into the gap between the half-a$$ed cargo compartment and the back seat, so a sudden brake doesn’t fling the dog down in there and break the beast’s leg. Or neck. Normally, Ruby huddles in terror by the back gate, hoping to get out at the earliest possible moment. This is a behavior she learned from Cassie, the Late Queen of the Universe. Cassie truly hated riding in cars.

Running late, though, yesterday afternoon I decided to leave the seat-backs up and just lift her onto the seats. The menacing well between the front and back seats was already crammed with pillows, so…why bother with pointlessly heaving the backs down and then back up?

Well. It took her a little while to realize that — mirabilis! — from the vantage point of the seats she could see out the windows!

This was quite the little revelation. In evident doggy delight, she spent a fair amount of the ride migrating back and forth between the left side and the right side, gazing out at the sights and then switching to the new exotica on the other side. Very cute.

Possibly after this she’ll be less averse to riding in the car. She’s not phobic, the way M’hijito’s dog Charley is. But she hasn’t been fond of auto travel. It would be neat if she would come to like riding around.

Image

Desert white butterfly: Sarefo [CC BY-SA 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/)]. Wikipedia

Life in Hell…Life in the Dystopia…Thank You, Apple

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Garden Spot in Parvenu Central.

Surely I’ve shared my feeling with you — explicitly or implicitly, hm? — that we live in a dystopia. Remember that old cartoon, “Life in Hell”? Well, yeah. It’s a lot like that. Only not so harmlessly absurd.

Today, a fine Day from Hell, presented a superb view of the Canyons of Dystopia. What a place! What a time!

My laptop computer — an aging MacBook, a creature that has made itself integral to my daily life, to my entertainment, and (most to the point) to my business activities — has about given up the digital ghost. It’s taken to shutting down <<~PING~>> out of the blue, sometimes losing data, sometimes not. This is happening more and more often. Uncountable numbers of hours with the telephone Apple techs (starting at 6 in the morning; extending till 10 at night) have done nothing to fix the problem.

In defeat, the Apple techs and I agreed that we were forced to present the damn thing to the Apple geniuses in a brick-and-mortar Apple store.

Naturally, Apple closed the store nearest to me. So I had to schlep the contraption out to Scottsdale.

I’d been at the new, annoying, echoey, brain-banging Apple glass-and-metal box lately installed at Scottsdale Fashion Square. So…yeah. I decided to take a chance that the slightly less-new Apple store at Scottsdale Quarter would be less…annoying.

Well.

No.

Make an appointment: 2:45 p.m.. Start driving driving driving about 2:00 p.m. Get there pretty much on time. Park in the Scottsdale Quarter’s parking garage: B-1W. Pull out my crip-space placard so I can grab a space within walking distance of an elevator or stairs, leave the chariot not very far from a pair of elevators, and make my way toward air. Trudge upstairs past innumerable trendy restaurants and trendy fashion stores and trendy home stores and finally find my way, with difficulty, to the Apple store.

Yes. Glass-and-metal box.

This shopping center is simply dreadful, in an upscale dreadful way. Cold. Hard-edged. Stylish. Ritzy. Loud to the point of blaring. And fucking annoying.

It is, in short, a little shard of dystopia. A freestanding monument to dystopia.

I finally find the Apple store in its maze, after asking at two shops. Get there on time.

Over the blaring background noise and the echo-chamber interior noise, the Apple employees and techs are extremely nice. One of them, a manager, tells me they’re a little confused because one of his employees had been carted off to an ER, about half an hour earlier, with chest pains.

A short stay in the cacophony suggests why. If you had to spend your days in that racket trying to tend to unhappy customers or peddle Apple’s wares to idle lookers, you, too, would have cardiac symptoms.

Shortly, the lone tech behind the Genius Bar decides the MacBook needs to be sent away to TechLand, therein to be evaluated and, with any luck, fixed. This is OK, sort of, because I still have the old iMac to work on. Not that sitting in front of a desk on a hard chair for hour on hour on hour is a good thing. It leaves me with every joint in my body hurting. But at least I’ll be able to make a little progress on the assignments at hand.

Now I leave the Apple store and make my way, with some annoyance, through the complicated maze that is Scottsdale Quarter. Get on the elevator and go down to level B1 West, where my car was parked. In a disabled parking space a few steps from said elevator.

Or was it?

I search all over and cannot find the Venza. Set off the key fob’s panic button: nothing.

Back on the elevator: down to level B2 west.

Same story: no fuckin’ sign of my car! I search and search but cannot find the car.

Now I figure I need to call a cop or security guard to help out. Cop? Not so much: the cell phone is in the missing car.

I go back upstairs and enter a couple of business establishments, asking if they can call up a security guard. The flunkies there haven’t a clue!

Go back downstairs and search again. Not a chance.

Back up to the main level. Find an employee: can you call a security guard or cop to help me look for my car? He hasn’t a clue. He points me to another guy. That guy pretends he doesn’t speak English, fuckyouverymuch.

Now I’m beginning to panic, because I do NOT know what I’m going to do. Has my car been stolen? Seems unlikely. But I know I parked it under a sign that said B1 West. And it ain’t there.

Finally I ascend once more to the ground level, walk around the vast building, and enter through the driveway (“no pedestrians”), and start walking. I find Level B1 East. Keep walking the maze. Eventually I arrive at a sign saying “Level B1 West,” but don’t see my car. I start walking further down into the depths of Hell when out of the corner of my eye I spot the damned Venza: on the other side of the elevators from where I was searching. Not before, we might add, quite the little panic attack.

Never been so happy to drive away from a place in my life.

I made my escape through the west side of Kierland Commons, past block on block of excruciatingly pricey Soviet-style, perfectly ghastly-looking block apartments. Horrible-looking, dreary, barren, depressing places. Very expensive horrible, ghastly-looking, dreary, barren, depressing places.

You know… I think of myself of fairly ritzy-titsy. North Central Phoenix, where I’ve dwelt since 19-and-aught-67, is what would be called, in a venue such as San Francisco, “Old Money.” And let’s face it: despite my protestations of penury here at the ironically titled Funny about Money, I am, yes, damn near rich as Croesus.

But as for the amazingly, hideously dystopic environs of Scottsdale’s astonishingly ugly Kierland Commons district? I am SO FAR out of my league in that place! Dear God. I hear Yarnell a-callin’….

It’s so harshly dystopic that it actually makes dreary, dumpy Sun City look good. It certainly makes Prescott look very fine, indeed.

Lemme tellya: if I were a young woman today, you couldn’t pay me — not in the currencies of love nor money — to bring a child into this land of ours. To bring an infant into the godawful world we live in today would be a form of child abuse. It should be actionable.

Image: By Cygnusloop99 – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=7863726