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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!

A Day Later…A Dollar Shorter

And now it’s 7:20 of a hot, muggy Friday morning. Just NASTY out there!

Ruby and I are back from this morning’s doggywalk, having dodged…well…not TOO many (for a change) “fur-babies” and their non compos mentis humans. Only two dogs were running around (illegally!) off-lead — we managed to stay out of their way. But OH!!! It’s SO HOT out there!

Well, I hafta admit, it’s not as miserable here as it was in Arabia at this time of year. Along about now, rain could coalesce out of a clear blue sky — that’s how humid it was. And every morning water would drip off the eaves as though it had rained…which it had not. But I will say…this morning it was soooo soggy and sooo hot out there that I was dripping wet before we got back to the house.

Sometimes, honestly….I would just like to move away from Arizona.

But where would I go?

Can’t afford the Bay Area, which I regard as “home.” So that’s out.
Loathe Southern California: it’s worse than here, not because of the weather but because of the bat-brained natives.

Not fluent enough in Spanish to move to Mexico.

Canada: tooooo bloody cold.

New Mexico: don’t know anybody there…too hot in the summer, too cold in the winter. And effete.

I dunno…frankly, Arizona is at once the best and the worst of all possible worlds. Sometimes I wish I could have brained my father for dragging us here (it’s only 30 years too late for that!  😀 ) My mother loved it though, so Sun City was a nice way to wind up her life. He didn’t seem to mind the weather, but between Texas, Saudi Arabia, and the high seas, he didn’t know much of anything that was any better.

That poor man! After 30 years of hard, HARD work, penny-pinching every minute along the way, he finally managed to retire. Moved them to their dream home in Sun City, figuring to live out their lives in peace and quiet, parked contentedly in front of the TV.

And…yeah…  Within a few years, she’d killed herself. Puffed herself to death with her tobacco addiction.

Seriously: the woman was almost never without a goddamn cigarette in her hand. She would smoke while we were eating. Smoke and smoke and smoke in front of the TV. Smoke at restaurants. Smoke cleaning house. Smoke while she was cooking. Smoke while she was driving. Smoke in the bathtub. Smoke in the shower. Smoke and smoke and smoke and smoke…all the way to the grave.

I can’t even imagine how he was able to sell that house in Sun City: it stank so much of cigarette smoke! Presumably whoever bought it must have been rabid smokers, too. Or else not very bright. What. A. Stench!

Sometimes I wonder if she deliberately killed herself. By the end of the 1950s, it was widely known that tobacco smoking would give you cancer. Having watched her mother die hideously from a reproductive cancer, she lived in terror of the disease. But…apparently that didn’t scare any common sense into her head, not where the effing cigarettes were concerned. Really: she wasn’t stupid. Quite to the contrary. The only thing you can think is that she knew what she was doing and she did it on purpose.

My father smoked…but he sure didn’t smoke like that!

****

Cop helicopter circling overhead interrupted that grim little reverie. Grim to grim, eh?

He just took off to the west. Presumably either the perps escaped or the cops on the ground caught them. LOL! Why we always keep our doors and windows locked, here in lovely uptown Phoenix. What a place!

****
And, for the life of me, I canNOT make WordPress do what I want it to do. So this post is going online weirdly formatted. Sorry about that.