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Holee Ess-aitch-ai! Does this stuff NEVER stop?

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So I’m trotting around the house, having just climbed out of the bathtub in the heat of the afternoon…wads of wet hair cascading around my shoulders, when BING BONNNGGGG! 

Somebody at the front door, dammit. 

It’s a woman looking for Josie, my neighbor to the north. I explain that she needs to proceed another block onward, ever onward. She looks kinda confused.

I think, ungenerously, pleeeze go away! 

Meanwhile, a cop helicopter is circling overhead. And circling. And circling: low and loud.

Now I’m thinking maybe she ought not to walk over there by herself. 

But on the other hand, there’s always the possibility that she’s one of the perps the cops are searching for.

Hm. 

Oh well. Shortly she decides to wander off. And I decide not to try to stop her: let her go. Hope for the best.

What a place we live in!

*****

Argha. I probably ought to have a bigger dog. Twenty-five pounds the Hound of the Baskervilles does not make.

But y’know…here in my dotage, I don’t wanna have to deal with another dog big enough and powerful enough to drag Tarzan down the street. So…the potential German shepherd will have to find another roommate.

An alternative option would be to move to Sun City. Those mausoleum-like precincts are relatively free of raiding home invaders, thieves, and burglars. One probably doesn’t even need a 90-pound dog out there…hm?

But…but……  I hated living out in Sun City, and I really, really don’t want to move back there. That would be true if my son could live a couple miles down the road (as he does here), but the prospect of being out there all alone makes it spectacularly true. Ugly, dreary, boring place…just not my cuppa tea.

So here we are. Hand me that pistol, if you don’t mind, whilst I see who’s at the door…

Another Beautiful Day in Arizona…

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“Leave us all enjoy it,” as one long-gone local radio personality used to intone, every morning.

Ugh! I’d like to leave it, all right. 

But with M’hijito living here in town, I’m ain’t about to go anywhere.

Leave us all enjoy it. Sure. Right now it’s a chilly 95 in the shade of the back porch overhang. That’s at 8:05 in the morning.

Ruby and I just got back from circumambulating the park: an hour’s walk through the swampy morning. Ugh!!!

Oh well. At least we both got exercised.

Speaking of sons (as M’hijito happens to be, of mine), we walked (again) past the house where the couple’s son got caught in some sort of hijinks and was shipped off to the state prison.

They lost their home. The sleazy investors who glommed it have never tried to rent or sell it. It just sits there, deteriorating: falling apart. Neighbors must have complained, because now they’ve beat back the weeds and they keep the rotting wood picked up. More recently they did some repairs and painted.

But it’s still an eyesore.

In a fancy neighborhood of million-dollar homes. Right on the park.

Ruby-doo is still COOKED. She sitting here on the tiles, panting.

One of the advantages, I reckon, of not being covered in a coat of thick fur is that the fans in the house can cool you off.

Just now, though, I’m feeling kind of advantageless.

Those terrifying “social workers” who showed up here yesterday and gave me the third degree left me very scared. And by damn, I’m still scared.

Whatever they wanted, whatever they were up to: it couldn’t have been good for me.

This morning I tried to call a lawyer…and discovered my guys have evaporated into the fog! One has died. One no longer practices where he used to, and that place is not handing out his new phone number…if he even has one.

And..well…  I must say, I am SO alarmed by the “social worker” visit, wherein a couple of officious types tried to quiz me and extract a bunch of private information from me, that I seriously do think I should pack up my car, throw the dog in it, and drive away.

Now, not later.

Frankly, if I had someplace to drive to, that’s exactly what I would do.

But…WHERE?

My California relatives are all either dead or gone. No refuge in those parts.

Reasonable out-of-state venues are in New Mexico, parts of California, Colorado, and maybe Texas. But…the Texas relatives are dead. I can’t afford so much as to camp out in California. And New Mexico? What would I do there and where would I go???

************
Later

Well…for one thing, calm the hysteria. 😀

No, I’m not real pleased with the visit from the “social workers,” or whatever-the-hell they were. And I’m concerned that they’ll descend on my son in the middle of his very busy workday.

He does work out of his home — on his employer’s dime, which fits out a nice office and electronics and phones. So if they show up there and start pestering him, they’ll chomp big bites of paid time out of his day.

Hm. If he tells them to get lost, that no doubt will be counted against him. So he’s in the damned-if-do/damned-if-don’t trap.

****

Lately, I’ve found my daydreaming moments haunted by my late mother.  She smoked herself to death, y’know.

No kidding: the poor woman hardly passed a conscious moment without a cancer stick in her mouth. The first thing she’d do in the morning, the instant she woke up, is light a cigarette. The last thing she’d do in the evening, as she was turning out the light by her bed, is smoke a cigarette.

In between, she puffed away pretty much nonstop.

She must have been so dependent on the nicotine that she had to have a fix before any period that was likely to pass without a cigarette. And the damn things killed her.

Not a pleasant way to go, we might add.

***

In even flakier precincts, I find myself irresistibly wondering WHO sicced those flakey social workers on me.

If social workers they were. I suppose they could’ve been some kind of private snoops that someone sent over to poke into my business.

But I don’t think so. Probably they really were what they said they were: state workers sent to snoop.  But WHY? And sent by WHOM?

Those are the nervous-making questions.

****

Welp…no point in obsessing about it. But…I’ll tellya, if I could afford to pack up and move outta here, I’d be on my way to Colorado as we scribble.

 

 

 

What Happened to Her?

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Yknow… Sometimes in idle moments I wonder what happened to my mother to make her SO SCARED.

Something must have happened. You wouldn’t be that terrorized of ordinary daily living unless something had happened to you.

When DXH and I lived downtown, we had a beautiful old classic rich person’s house in the historic part of the city. It really WAS beautiful. And the people who had it before us added on to it, creating a little mansion with a huge living room, huge dining room, large breakfast room, vast kitchen, large laundry room, separate TV room, and four bedrooms.

The house was first-rate. The neighborhood left something to be desired, though. Like…basic safety. The place swarmed with scammers, rapists, and burglars.

DXH traveled off and on for his job and his civic volunteerism. When he would leave town, my mother would get all upset.

No kidding: she would be nigh unto frantic when he absented himself.

She lived, with my father, in Sun City, a mausoleum-like retirement tract that stood a 30- or 40-minute drive from our house, through unpleasant traffic.

But whenever DXH would leave town, she would volunteer to drive into the city and stay with me while he was gone. What on earth she thought she was going to do if the dread burglar/mad rapist actually did enter the house escapes me. But there she was.

What she thought she would do is shoot the ba*tard. She would always show up with a nice little revolver, which she would set on a TV table next to the fold-out bed where she slept. This would give me the willies — she did not have formal self-defense training, and I don’t even know if she had formal training in the use of a pistol. But my father did: he was a licensed firearms instructor. So…I expect she knew how to pull the trigger.

The question, o’course, was whether she knew when to pull the trigger.

And when not…

Most of all, though, what worried me was that she was so scared. 

Now, in those days, women were scared. I was, too, when left alone in a house that any passing sh!thead could easily enter. And occasionally did enter…  But…but…why was she SO damn scared she thought she needed a deadly weapon at her side, even when a large dog was sitting there guarding her?

Yes. “Scared” was why we owned a German shepherd…

I figured something must have happened to her. You surely couldn’t imagine yourself into a state of fear so elevated. She must have had something real to cause that terror.

If so, she never told me what it was. (Thank goodness: if she had, I would have been just as terrorized.)

One of the reasons my parents retired to Sun City was that people believed those stodgy realms were safer than safe. What could happen? Who would want to rape a wrinkled, gray old bat? Who would waste their time burgling the home of some wretch trying to live on Social Security?

Well. Stuff happened all the time. Overall, the public imagined that Sun Citizens were fairly affluent. They weren’t, but compared to someone living on welfare in South Phoenix, they appeared to be. So burglaries did happen. Stick-ups did happen. And the occasional bizarre rape did happen.

So the truth was, our house and neighborhood were at no more risk — or not much more — than their little retirement dream house out in the far western suburbs. But I didn’t know anyone else who felt called upon to keep a revolver at the side of their bed.

Here, where Ruby and I live now, is…safety-wise? About the same. Certainly no safer than anywhere else. Certainly not as safe as a place in a gated community or a high-rise with a security guard posted in the lobby.

But hereabouts I don’t feel at anything like the risk we sensed downtown. We have deadbolts on every outside-facing door and on every security screen door. Alarms on every window. And a dog that barks like a banshee. You couldn’t get in here without giving me plenty of warning to get out a different door or to lock myself and the dawg behind a solid-core interior door and call the cops.

{sigh}

But really: what a place we live in, eh? The Land of the Free and the Home of the Terrorized.

When I was a kid, my mother was wary…but we didn’t live inside a barricaded fortress. What do you suppose has changed? And how?

Porch Pirate Heaven

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My house has a nice big courtyard in front, with two entry gates: one on the east side and one on the west side. This makes for a pleasant and welcoming front porch, and it also provides a nice fenced-in patio where Ruby the Corgi can watch the passers-by. And bark at them. Especially if they have a dog.

It also provides a nice sheltered spot for thieves. You know them: the guys who follow the UPS and U.S. Mail trucks around the neighborhood, watch for a driver to stop and leave a package at the door, then jump out, run up to the door, grab the loot, and take off down the street again after the delivery guy.

Many of the neighbors don’t have packages delivered to their homes at all. They rent a PO box and give out its address to people who send packages or important mail.

This, of course, means you have to get in your car — during business hours only — and schlep across town to the Mail Boxes USA store — dig out a special key, unlock the drawer, get your stuff (if it’s there…), close and relock the drawer, climb in your car, and haul the junk back to your house. What’s the point of having stuff delivered at all?

By way of addressing the porch pirate problem, I put up signs on each courtyard gate:

Welcome to Porch Pirate Heaven!
You’re Being Followed
Please Don’t Leave Packages
Outside the Gate
Place Them Inside the Patio
Ring the Doorbell!
Thank you! <3

You think I jest? Consider: A neighbor who put out cameras in front has caught videos of the local thieves following UPS and Mail Service trucks up to a front door, jumping out of their car as the delivery person trundles on down the street, running up to the door, grabbing the package, racing back to their vehicle, and continuing on down the road after the delivery truck.

Quite the little nuisance, eh?

Interestingly, I’ve found the Sign Strategy works surprisingly well. I’ve not had a single delivery stolen since I started posting this notice. Dunno whether the porch pirates just don’t want to come inside the courtyard, or whether they figure there’s probably a camera recording their antics. WhatEVER: since I’ve started with the sign, I haven’t lost a single delivery.

To my knowledge… 😉

And QUADRUPLE-ARRRRRRGHHH!

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So some long-time workmen who are pretty reliable fellas show up. They’re puttering around…and somehow….

SOMEHOW…

…they get ahold of my front door keys and they fuck them up with élan!!!!!!!

My GAWD!

None of the keys works any of the locks or none of the locks or whateverthehell…WHAT A MESS!!!!!!!!

HOW THE HELL DID THEY DO THAT???

GODDDAMMMMIT!!!!!!!

Now I’m gonna have to call the locksmith AGAIN to come over here and untangle all the goddamn locks.

This guy charges an arm and a leg just to breathe the air inside your house, to say nothing of doing any work. So this is gonna be another $200 bill. Then I’ll have to listen to my son bitch at me for spending all that money on the goddamn locks.

Again. 

Y’know, when I had the first locksmith over (they all work for the same outfit), I asked him to fix ALL THE LOCKS so they work on the same key. So: this would make it hard for me to confuse the keys and fu*k everything up.

Now, NO TWO LOCKS work on the same key. Set one key aside and you are FUCKED until you can dig it up from wherever the Hell you put it down.,

And wherever that is will likely be pretty random, meaning it will be hours or maybe days before you find that key, if you ever do.

STOP THE GODDAMN WORLD!!!”
I WANNA GET OFF!!!!!!!!!

Holy Sh!t….DUCK FOR COVER!

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KeeeeRAAP! Some ba*tard just shot at our cop helicopter!

The action took place a couple blocks to the north of the Funny Farm…maybe three. But definitely on our side of Main Drag North.

Call the dog — she’s loafing in the kitchen, and she sees no good reason to get up and leave her scrap-scavenging post.

Call the dog.

Call the dog.

Call the dog again.

At last the obedient beast decides to get up and roam over to see what I want. Who knows? Maybe the Human has food.

Coax her up the hallway and hit the tiles. 

Stay down until whatEVER-the-Hell is going on quits.

Cop Copter is hovering over our old house, the noise-collector a few houses in from Conduit of Blight Blvd. That’s about a block-and-a-half from where the Funny Farm stands.  We hunker down on the bedroom floor…and….

ohhhhhh shee-ut, here he is again, roaring over at roof-top height. 

WTF?

Stay hunkered.

At last the Copter swoops around and takes off into the north-easterly distance.

Lift the corgi onto the bed. Check the doors — for the third time! — to be sure everything is locked.

Climb onto the sack with the dog.

Holeeee krap, what a place!