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After 6 p.m., and the thermometer on the back porch — which has been in the shade all day — reads 95 degrees. That’s down considerably from the 100+ we’ve had all day.

Need to take the pooch for a walk…but I’m kinda afraid to do so. The pavement — especially the black asphalt on the roads — is likely to be so hot it will burn her little feet. I certainly couldn’t walk far on it without singing my soles So, dammit: I’m mightily undecided.

Waiting several hours won’t do much good: that asphalt stays hot into the middle of the night.

Shoulda taken her out as dawn cracked this morning…but was waayyy to lazy for that trick.

The low desert is lovely all winter, when Michigan and waypoints are under several feet of snow. But we pay for that during the summer.

My neighbor Marge rented an apartment in Prescott, a small town in the (relatively) high country. She’s taken to spending most of the summer there. Wunderground says it’s 78 up there now, slated to drop down to 59 (brrrr!!!!) tonight.

Well. That sounds loverly…but I don’t feel I can afford to rent quarters in some other burg to escape the Phoenix heat.

Well. I probably can. But I’m too cheap to do it. 😉

At any rate, the air conditioning has been pounding away all day. That kind of overwork worries the Proprietor: sooner or later the system will crap out, and then I’ll have to hire someone to fix it, to the tune of a couple hundred bucks. Or more.

In the meantime, while we wait for a repairdude to show up, it will get hotter than a damn oven inside the house.

LOL!

Take a look at THIS site: https://prabook.com/web/home.html

Here, I stumbled across a biography of a former colleague from Arizona State. It’s hilarious! He’s written the most spectacular encomium to himself. Makes it sound like he’s had a career on a par with a full professor at Harvard. The guy was adjunct faculty at Arizona State University’s provincial West campus, where he and I taught such august courses as “Writing for the Professions” — a.k.a. “Freshman Comp for Juniors and Seniors.” An underpaid and pointless waste of time.

Heh heh heh…I’ll have to dream up an ego trip for myself and post it at that site. 😀

Ever wonder why, years after the fact, you didn’t think of something that was obvious?

Something you missed because you blew off the circumstances without thinking about them? Well…lemme tellya…

My parents’ best friends — closest friends for most of their adult lives — went back to their home state, Texas, because my mother died. They’d come to (ghastly) Sun City to be near her, not near my father. And…when she died, they just plain abandoned him.

Then, speaking of that which is obvious, we have what killed her. Anyone who knew her and knew how much she smoked has to know what ailed her. Especially if that anyone knew anything about the symptoms of cancer.

Did she know?

Ohhh…on some level she must have.

She knew what cancer looked like: she nursed her own mother all along the road to mortality. But did she care? Seriously? Apparently not: she wasn’t about to do without one of the few small pleasures in her life just because it might kill her.

Well. I know what wine will do to me. But I continue to lap it up anyway. Wouldn’t have a dinner without it. On the other hand…I don’t do it 24/7…

****

She was the kind of right-winger who believed — sincerely — that if some pronouncement came out of the government, it was a lie whose purpose was to try to manipulate you. So, she studiedly ignored the steady stream of warnings about tobacco, and specifically about smoking the damn stuff.

Not surprisingly, then, the tobacco peddlers killed her — murdered, is the term I use for it. They knew what their product would do and they kept on selling it to people who were addicted to it. And by dint of money and influence, they contrived to keep the murderous stuff legal. It’s still legal…your kids may be killing themselves with it right now, as we speak.

Welp! I’ve gotta do with the wine (and the whiskey) what my mother should have done with the cigarettes. Maybe I can squeeze an extra few years out of my life… 😀

It’s long past time to get off.

Seriously.

Today it dawned on me that I just can’t keep on going like this.

• No friends.
• No activities.
• No creative work that makes one damn bit of difference.
• No job.
• No way to get a job.
• No one who cares.

Gotta find some place for the li’l dog, and then get outta here. Time to jump off the (un)merry-go-round.

Up to Young Dr. Kildare’s office today. Nothing very cheering there. He’s long gone. His partners (or whatever they were) are pleasant enough but don’t know me from Adam’s off ox. And why should they?

Stuck, they are, on the outer fringe of drearily bourgeois Moon Valley. They count the hours and the minutes to the end of the day, when they can lock the door and head outta there.

Moon Valley: where my dear and now extinct friend Elaine took up residence with her aging and sickly husband. They’re both dead now. He died of the cancer that had decided to eat him up after they moved to the Moon Valley house. She hung around for awhile, bouncing from condo to condo, and then moved back east where her kids were. Soon thereafter, she also croaked over.

My son is the only person left who cares whether I live or die, and his nose is stuck to his employer’s grindstone. He has no time so spend with an old woman.

{chortle!}

Amazing, how sorry you can feel for yourself at 2:00 in the morning~

How he must have suffered.

That’s what I think, when I recall my mother’s dying…in their marital bed, in the bedroom of their beloved little house in Sun City.

My mother smoked herself to death.

Yes.

She knew: she knew smoking would kill her, and she did it anyway. She smoked. And she smoked. And she smoked. Every conscious moment, she had a goddamned cigarette in her mouth.

Did she care that it would kill her?

Apparently not.

But more likely, she thought the whole “fatal smoking habit” thing was some kind of scam. A fraud perpetrated by Big Brother, whose motive was to control our behavior.

She told me she started smoking when she was just 16. And she was 60-something when the habit brought her to her bed. So…really…it was reasonable (in its way) to believe the whole “Smoking Causes Cancer” Thing was Big Brother trying to tell you what to do. And what not to do.

Far as I’m concerned, she was murdered. Killed by greedy thieves who wanted nothing other than to get her to trade her cash for their filthy weed. They got their way. And she died.

Horribly.

He was amazing. He cared for her, lovingly and kindly, through hour after hour and day after day and week after week of horrific suffering. Suffering that was inflicted as much on him as on her.

Argh! Started to write this and then discovered I was typing away in the middle of y’day’s post. Trying again…

Sunday morning
8 a.m.

Temp: 92 degrees
Humidity: 28%
Predicted high: 108 degrees

Just back from the daily junket around the park. I’m soaked. Ruby just drank half a (large!!) bowl of water. Fluffy white clouds still float abcove, though not as colorfully as y’day’s.

Oh, well. The sticky weather does cut down, at least a bit, on the Dog Parade over at the park. Only counted six dogs over there, none of them off-lead (for a change).

Trudged past the (still vacant, still wrecked) home of the neighbors whose son got in trouble with the law.

This was the guy I hired to prune the (now defunct) tree in front. He supposedly had taken a course in tree care and pruning at the Desert Botanical Garden, potentially a BFD.

Well. If he did, he wasn’t payin’ any attention in class. 🙁

He pretty much trashed the tree, which I eventually had to have removed. How was I pi$$ed? Let me count the ways….

Those poor people eventually lost the house, where they’d lived while their kids grew to adulthood. My guess is, they were original owners. But their son’s escapades bankrupted them…so out they went.

Some fly-by-night contractors bought the place. They’ve  been poking away at it for the past two or three years. It’s still a wreck…the pool empty and trashed, the backyard a disaster area, the front yard churned-up dirt and dead trees. Jayzuz!

The neighbors must love it…

The place is, one must allow, an inauspicious investment. It’s right on Feeder Street North-West, which carries traffic inbound from the working-class west side all the way to downtown Phoenix. So that means everybody who works in the high-rise office buildings down there, everybody who has a blue-collar job  in the yards to the south of downtown, every lawn dude driving his truck and crew into town to mow and trim some richerati’s yard: they ALL HEAD SOUTH ON THAT STREET. Five fine mornings a week.

Well. And back north in the evening.

So the house is noisy and bathed in exhaust fumes, every rush hour. I guess some people don’t mind that, because Feeder N/W is lined with rather nice homes. The shack on the corner is the only one standing vacant.

Tbis is what happens, in lovely Arizona, if you happen to have a kid who gets in trouble with the law. It doesn’t just wreck the kid’s life. It wrecks yours, too.

A friend had that happen: her son got caught diddling a barfly who was three days (!!) under the age of consent. Her mother, having lost patience with telling her darling daughter to quit bringing men home and jumping into bed with them, called the cops and had my friend’s son arrested. Child molesting, y’know.

Yeah. He ended up serving a prison sentence, unable to get a decent job, living with his mother.

Fortunately, she’s a very smart and resourceful lady. She converted an old garage behind her historic home into a handsome studio, where her son dwells in peace.

But most people don’t have a fall-back like that. Apparently our former neighbors did not.

Hence, another tale from the ‘Hood…

Heeeeee!  Or is it Alzheimer’s in the Time of Doggy-Walk? Darned if I can tell! 😀

Ruby and I charge out the door about the time dawn cracks. Soooo hot and humid out there, it feels like Saudi Arabia in the summertime…. except here we don’t have a Persian Gulf three blocks from our house.

Seriously…think I remarked once before that lovely Araby was so humid that sometimes you could be standing outside under a clear blue sky and it would start to rain on you. Not a bit would I have been surprised to see that happen this morning, as we circumambulated the park

Only seven dogs were out for walks this morning, and it was too hot for Ruby to do much lunging at them. So that was…refreshing.

Clothes drenched by the time we get back…jeans soaked with sweat. Now I’ve gotta do ANOTHER load of laundry this morning. Washed all the laundry y’day, which took half the day. Sure could do without a second act of that play!

Ohh well.

Also now, I’ve got to traipse back down to the grocery store. Tried to evade the long trek to AJ’s by shopping in Trader Joe’s yesterday.

BUT

Ringy-ding ringy-dingy ringy-dingy!!!!

Computer tech on his way over here.

Sumbiche.

This requires me to remember why I called. And y’know what? I don’t!

The laptop is running fine.

So is the desktop.

WTF?

Just as I was about to go out the door!

And…THERE we have our memory problem!

I have no clue why I called those folks.

Hmmmmm…. Need to make an AJ’s run…not that I can remember what I needed to buy…ohhh well.

Did you know you can buy these things on Amazon?

Got a distraction goin’ on. Outta here!