The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing. ―Edmund Burke
Ahem! Don’t get old,, whatever ya do!
I think that THIS is the post written within the last day:
I’m not embedding any effing URL here, dear WordPress!
For cryin’ out loud! I have NO idea what happened here…but this is the best I can do to tidy it up. Sorreeee about that.
{chortle!!} Freshly back from the Albertson’s Stupormarket, where I decided to jump on the Wagon…and this time, stay on it!
😀
No kidding. An hour ago I went over there — in the absence of a car, walking through unholy heat and humidity* — picked up a six-pack of beer, and repaired to the check-out stand.
And…
Stood in line…and stood in line…and stood in line…and stood in line….
The line wasn’t that long. Not at all. It was that the service was slower than molasses in January.
Finally I just gave up. Put the beer down on the counter and walked out.
And you may be sure that will be the LAST time I shop there for just a few small items.
We really don’t have much choice, though, here in the ‘Hood. It’s that Albertson’s; or the Fry’s to the north of us, where you have to travel through a pretty scary district even to reach the entry to the parking lot; or the Sprouts across Main Drag West, where you navigate across 7 lanes of hectic traffic to reach the front door.
Maddening!!!
___________________________
*Just now Wunderground says it’s 102 out there, but a mere 1% humidity. Couldn’t prove that last by me: the sky is full of fat, floating clouds and the air is so soggy it feels like you’re swimming through it!
Here we are at the Mayo Clinic in North Phoenix. A needle is jammed in my left arm while staff infuses…uhmmm…some kind of gunk into me. No one has been kind enough to bother to explain what these torture sessions are meant to accomplish…only that I get dragged back here about every ten days for another one…and another one…and another one. Boy-o-boy, could I do without this!!
After 10 years in disease-ridden Saudi Arabia being jabbed — over and over and over again — with every painful inoculation known to science, I deeply hate shots and needles. So…even though the Mayo’s procedures are relatively pain-free, they fill me with dread and misery.
Meanwhile, my son and I are quarreling — we had a nasty squabble on the way over here — and so at the moment I’m passing miserable, He has stalked off, relieving himself of my (admittedly) obnoxious company. So I’m sitting here in the dark soaking up…whatever goop they’re pumping into my left arm.
Honestly. It’s getting to be past time for me to exit this earthly realm. Just now that option looks more and more attractive.
Unfortunately, women in my family who didn’t smoke and didn’t fu*k every dong that came along have lived to VERY advanced old age. They were Christian Scientists, so they accomplished this with no medical care.
So if you don’t imagine that was God’s doing, then you can suspect I have a lot of years ahead of me.
Presumably pretty miserable years….
Well, it feels like I’ve been trying to type this one-handed for years…so: away!
Banging around: Load the breakfast dishes into the washer, feed the dog, make the bed, clean up the bathroom, rescue the dog from another choking frenzy, wonder how I can get her to a vet without my car… On and on and on.
One of the babysitters is due here pretty quick. And that, to put it mildly, is a nuisance. Of the first water!
Everybody does things a little differently. So these women come to my house and see all the weird things I do — the way I make the bed, where and how I store the dishes, how I address the week’s laundry, and on and on — and whenever what I do is different from the way they do it, they think I’m a nut case.
And so they undo everything I do and rearrange everything the way they do it.
As a professional nut case, I find this stuff beyond annoying. It’s frustrating. It’s a nuisance. It’s fukkin’ enraging!
To have a cleaning lady come in once every week or two and do everything the way she’s used to doing it: that’s fine. But every freaking day??? Not so much.
***
Ugh! Hot, gray day outside. Not raining, but humid to the point of soggy. Very uncomfortable.
As Ruby and I trot around the neighborhood each morning, we pass crews of workmen slaving away at repairing houses or building new additions. How on earth they manage to do that sweaty physical labor in this horrible, humid heat: that escapes me.
****
It’s after nine, and the babysitter hasn’t surfaced yet. Probably stuck in traffic. At least one of these women drives all the way into town from a farm community located about halfway between here and Tucson. Horrible trip! It must take her a good hour to get here. At least: by the time she hits town, she’s also hitting the worst of the rush hour.
Who knows? Maybe I chased the poor soul off with my crabby personality. I hafta say: I do rather resent having someone in my home all day, every day.
My lone-wolf temperament makes me uncomfortable with long stretches of company. An hour or so of togetherness: that’s fine. But the whole damn day? Not so much!
This morning I really should go to a grocery store. But it’s too damn hot and humid to walk there.
We do have an Uber driver living right across the street, though. I may impose on him to drive me someplace to get supplies. Later. Much later.
Actually….hmmmmmm…. I wonder if he and I could make a kind of standing appointment, whereby he would pick me up at xx time on yy day, every week (maybe even two or three times a week?) and schlep me to the stores and to appointments.
If he would do that, it would solve the transport problem. Because the Funny Farm sits on the north end of a highly commercial district, I can get to most places on foot or by lightrail. But…I ain’t fond of public transport (next time I have to put up with another sh!thead, I’m gonna murder the ba*tard!). So…if I could hire a driver to show up here at a regular time on a regular day, I could get just about everyplace I need to go (barring doctor’s and dentist’s appointments).
Ninety degrees and overcast at 7:30 a.m. Hideous, muggy, Saudi Arabia-style morning.
The Dawg and the Human have made their daily circumnavigation of the neighborhood. Mercifully, at this hour no fruitcake is haunting the park, therein to shout obscenities at an 80-year-old hag. And it’s a little early for the workmen pounding hammers at the nearby house that’s being rebuilt into a mansion. So…it was a quiet morning.
Whenever my son inherits the Funny Farm (assuming we can engineer things to make that happen…), he is going to fall into a sh!tload of money. These houses are going up and up and up and UP in value, because of their central location and their upper-middle-class style.
Still, I must say….I wish I were in Berkeley, whence my mother’s family emanated. So pretty, and so cool! Much classier than these parts. And, o’course…much more expensive. The Human and the Dawg couldn’t afford to live there, not for love nor money.
So…here we are, sweltering in the Southwestern desert, short on culture and high on sweat. What a place!
Re: My mother’s nicotine addiction: she smoked and she smoked and she smoked and then she smoked some more. You knew when she was still awake in bed late at night and you knew when she awoke in the morning: by the stink of her goddamn cigarettes.
To me, the horror of it is that she truly never wanted to stop. She had NO INTENTION of quitting the accursed cigarettes, no matter how sick their sidestream smoke made me. And she never did. Eventually the habit killed her.
“You’re so susceptible!” I remember her whimpering that about my tendency to come down with every virus that floated past on the breeze. For the luvva gawd! Is it even remotely possible that she didn’t see that what made me “so susceptible” was her trashing my lungs with her fucking sidestream smoke?
Much as I hated grade school, junior high, and high school, today I have to say: THANK GOD for public schooling. Those hours on campus got me out of her house and out of her unholy stinking miasma for at least some part of the day.
What incredible evil!
To my mind (what remains of it…), the thing that was so disturbing was that she knew what she was doing. She read widely in popular and middle-brow publications: and those were awash in reports to the effect that smoking causes cancer. Journalistic publications of all kinds ran article after article going on about how smoking causes cancer. It was on the evening TV news reports. It was EVERYPLACE.
But she believed — truly did believe — it was all blather emitted by Big Brother in a campaign to control the thinking and behavior of the general public.
Once, as I recall, she even said so explicitly: used the term “Big Brother.” /eyeroll/ How stupid can you get?
Do you need to be told? She died of tobacco-induced cancer. A pretty damn hideous way to go…