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Urban life

Life in the (Tedious…) (Drug-Ridden) Big City

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So tell me, what type of drug use engages Q-tips, chewing or bubble gum, and (maybe) a stiff wire swimming-pool brush?

Yesterday evening — late afternoon, actually — the dogs were barking around out in the backyard, generally being ignored or hollered at. Then at one point Ruby abruptly went ABSOLUTELY FREAKING BATSHIT!!!!

With the possible exception of two very angry German shepherds, I don’t think I’ve ever seen a dog fly into such a frenzy. And I’ve had a lot of dogs in my altogether too lengthy lifetime. This dog wasn’t yapping. She wasn’t barking. She was screaming. Truly screaming like a person might scream.

Well, I was very tired and feeling under the weather and mighty tired of hearing dogs bark — not for nothing was Cassie surrendered to the dog pound with the reason, “barks.” So I yelled at them to shut the eff up and then hollered them back into the house. They settled right down when offered Dinner.

Dogs live for Dinner…

Welp, this afternoon when I went to take some garbage out to the alley, I discovered what had set Ruby the Corgi off: Somebody had been camping outside the back gate, evidently up to no good.

I know what the Q-Tips are used for. I know that gum is often favored by people who are wired to the teeth on stimulants like meth and Ecstasy. But the wire swimming-pool brush, the type used to scrape stubborn algae off the walls?  whaa????

One drug users’ message board suggests using a “wire brush” to clean your meth pipe . But I don’t think they mean a brush that’s six inches long by a couple inches wide. Part of it was mashed down, as though it had been stuffed inside something or used to scrub something. Sooo…could be, I suppose.

Speaking of “very tired,” this sort of sh*t makes me feel very tired of my neighborhood. It’s the stuff of dreams about moving far, far away.

There’s something to be said for an alley. It adds about 20 clear, vacant feet between you and the neighbor behind you. It puts two walls instead of just one between you and said neighbor.

And there’s something to be said against an alley: it’s a burglar thoroughfare, a campground for bums, a coyote freeway.

Our alleys are particularly well designed as bum campgrounds. The builder set up the back gates so they would open onto  vestibules inset in the fenceline, for reasons no one can guess. Maybe he thought this would encourage neighbors to hang out and chat with each other whilst hauling out the grass clippings and the trash. Maybe some stupid city regulation mandated it. WhatEVER…the effect is to create little cubbies where people can sit on the ground and sleep, drink, or do dope.

Annoyed, I picked up the paraphernalia the creep(s) had left behind, and then dumped a little dogshit on the ground out there. Tomorrow my son is bringing his golden retriever over for a weekend of dog-sitting. Now, that animal can create a gigantic mound of manure. His product is going into the Bum Armchair, too.

Then later this afternoon I’m sitting around the castle thinking about how I should be working and thinking about how I still feel awful and do not want to work and may never want to work again when Ruby flies into yet another rage, this time at the front door. I don’t see anyone out the front window, but I can’t view the whole courtyard from the window. The front door is protected by an iron security door, so I open the interior door and discover that someone has opened the east gate and left it hanging open.

They haven’t left any advertising nuisances. So that suggests most likely they walked up to the front door and tried to open it. Finding it locked and attached to a barking dog’s trigger, they took off.

{sigh}

Do I need to get the pistol out? It’s usually locked up. It’s a hassle to haul it out, and more of a hassle to prepare it to blow away some harmless burglar. I do not want to get the pistol out.

But then I didn’t want the dog to keep on screaming, either. Possibly not getting the pistol out is a symptom of the same overall sense of fatigue and laziness.

I need another German shepherd.

What kind of dog is like the GerShep of 35 years ago, an animal whose health will not run you into the poorhouse, whose temperament will not open you to lawsuits, and whose intelligence rises to the level of discerning? It must be large enough to remove a burglar’s foot, when need be…

Yesterday when I went over to the westside to hike with SDXB, we passed some very nice suburban tracts. One of them looked like the houses might be more or less in my price range. No slums bordered these tracts. None of the houses looked rundown. No police helicopters hovered overhead.

Sometimes I think I should sell this place and move to Scottsdale, to the west side, to Yarnell, or to Prescott. Someplace where bums do not smoke or inject drugs outside your back gate, where armed robbers fleeing the police do not come to ground in your garage, where idiot City Parents do not destroy your neighborhood with a misguided electric train boondoggle, where property taxes are still relatively low, where cop helicopters are not given to parking over your roof, where my dogs are not driven batshit once a day.

But then I’m reminded of the reality that I…can’t…afford…to…move.

Maybe I could afford a small, camper-style RV, though. The dogs and I could live in an RV. Then we could go wherever we pleased. Preferably someplace sparsely populated and quiet. Very, very quiet.

Rub_al_Khali_002

Cat Wars: Reinforcing the Battlements

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tabbycatSo the carpet-tack strips I zip-tied along the tops of the cinderblock walls by way of discouraging Other Daughter’s nuisance cat from jumping into the yard, predating on the birds and geckos, and using my desert landscaping as a giant litterbox have worked middling well. I haven’t seen her atop the wall for a long time, nor have I found any of her parasite-laden little doggy treats laying around the backyard.

And so, as crackpot as this particular decorative element appears, it seems to be working to keep the damn cat out.

A year and a half later, the strips have buckled and warped under the onslaught of rain and sun. Fortunately, this was easily fixed simply by adding a another half-dozen plastic zip-ties. They’ll last a few more months before I have to take them down and replace them.

But the problem of the caps atop the cinderblock support columns remains. They present no practical way to tie down pieces of carpet-tack strips. Aluminum pans full of water, besides looking even crazier than the tack strips, breed mosquitoes and get tipped over by mockingbirds using them as watering holes.

I ended up jury-rigging some little squares of carpet tacks, which provided a couple of crossbars that could be tied to the decorative blocks abutting some, but not all of the columns. These worked to keep the cat from perching on the columns, but they can’t be tied down firmly — or, in one corner, at all — and so the buckling renders them even more bizarre-looking than the straight pieces and, where no tiedown is reasonable, essentially nonfunctional.

What to do?

Several folk sites on the Internet claim that cats dislike tinfoil. With a lifetime supply of Costco aluminum foil residing in the pantry, this would be an easy and cheap fix.

However, one crass skeptic has mounted a video in which he tests this theory. He tapes lengths of tinfoil down a short, hardwood-floored hallway and lets the camera run.

Kitty approaches the new carpeting with suspicion. She sniffs. She tests it tentatively with a paw. Then she strides over it, marches up to the camera, and rubs her furry flank across its lens.

😆 Yay, crass skeptics!

More believable is the claim that cats don’t like sticky stuff under their feet. We’re told that double-sided tape stuck atop a counter or on furniture you would like to remain un-clawed will discourage counter-roaming and sofa-ripping.

Possibly. At Amazon, reviewers of an anti-cat product designed to stick on upholstered furniture report that the cat simply removes the tape and then proceeds with its project of shredding the sofa.

However. Perching on top of something is different from clawing fabric. There actually IS a good chance that sticky stuff could repel Other Daughter’s cat from the cinderblock column caps.

However1. Sticky stuff will stay sticky about 48 hours out there. So much crap drops out of the Devil-Pod Tree and also, at this time of year, out of the paloverde tree that a sticky surface would soon be rendered nonfunctional.

This returns us to the question of how to affix tack strips to the column caps, even if temporarily.

How about using double-sided tape to hold them down? Scotch sells an exterior mounting tape that is beloved by a huge majority of Amazon reviewers. The minority who whinge about it complain that it doesn’t hold up certain objects. But as a weapon in the Cat Wars, the stuff would lay flat — it wouldn’t be called upon to stick anything to the side of a wall. Some of the product’s admirers claim that heat only makes it work better; it seems to lose effectiveness in sub-freezing temps. Those do not occur around here, at least not often.

This could be the answer. Four hundred and fifty feet of heavy-duty double-sided tape would hold down a lot 18-inch strips of cat-repellent tack sticks.

House_gecko_with_spiderIn the absence of Other Daughter’s accursed cat, life has begun to return to the backyard. The gecko population is slowly recovering.

And in the presence of geckos, the mosquito population has declined.

We still have some, but nothing like the swarms that normally harass the Funny Farm’s warm-blooded denizens at this time of  year.

The flies also seem to have declined a little. Still enough to be a nuisance, but not six or eight in the house at a time.

And I believe there are more birds out there than before.

And there’s a duck.

Yes. DUCK. A little research reveals that it takes baby ducks about 60 days to fledge. So if they hatch and if they survive, they’ll be around for most of the summer.

DUCK is not disturbed by the presence of the human in the pool. Today I do have to shock-treat, since we’re starting to get some algae. But the only time she leaves the nest to forage is around 3 to 4 in the afternoon. So I figure if I slip some chlorine into the drink early in the morning, by mid-afternoon the water should be safe for her even if she happens to go into the pool. Which she doesn’t. Not often, anyway.

M’hijto remarked that the ducklings are likely to be picked off by the neighbor’s damned cat, if not by the coyotes, the raccoons, and the resident red-tail.

Hence the project to shore up the battlements. Quack!

YoungDucksminimized

The Self-Appointed HOA

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P1030422So the first thing I had to do this morning, instantly upon rolling out of the sack after the dogs informed me that dawn was cracking, was to run out into the alley and post signs on the thick, lush cat’s-claw vines that overhang my back wall.

Over the (many!) years, they’ve piled themselves to a height of about 12 feet, effectively blocking the view from the alley into my yard. This is what allows me to skinny-dip in my pool. Although the fence is six feet high, it’s six feet from the level of the alley’s grade; from inside the yard, which is built up above grade to alleviate flooding, it’s five feet high, revealing all to passers-by. You have to get a variance to lay another couple courses of cinderblocks. Although some people have done so (and many have just raised their walls illegally) — it’s a hassle, and I can’t afford to have someone come in and do a proper job of building up the wall. But the vines, which do not violate city code, serve conveniently to keep curious eyeballs out of my backyard.

Meanwhile…

Of late a group of neighbors has taken on the function of a de facto homeowner’s association. They are unelected, and they’re a private club — they post their doings on Facebook, but they refuse to allow everyone in the neighborhood to join their closed page. They won’t let me in, for example, because I expressed my displeasure with folks who allow their large dogs to run loose — illegally — in the neighborhood park. One guy took issue, since he feels he has a God-given right to let his dogs run around loose, and people who don’t want to be bitten or to have their leashed dogs put at risk should stay out of the park.

Whatever business they’re up to gets reported on this Facebook page. I find out about it because a friend passes it along to me.

And they get up to all sorts of stuff. Among the “stuff”: having the City install speed bumps and roundabouts on the ’hood’s main north-south feeder street. Now it’s true that drivers who used to flow smoothly and happily on Conduit of Blight Blvd, the large main drag to the west of us, have diverted themselves onto Feeder Street NS because of the years-long train construction project that has made Conduit of Blight nonnavigable. And yes, it’s true that people who use our neighborhood streets as cut-throughs don’t give a damn about us, our kids, or our pets and drive like they were at the Indianapolis 500. And it’s true that all the junk now littering the formerly quiet Feeder Street NS does slow these outsiders down.

However, our self-appointed HOA seems to have no concept of “unintended consequences.” Among these:

• Speed humps cause truck drivers to gear down and then gear back up, adding to the noise pollution and especially creating a racket for people who live near them.

• Speed humps cause vehicles to go thump-THUMP every time a driver crosses over one, adding still more to the noise pollution — imagine having one of those outside your bedroom window!

• People have already learned that you don’t have to slow down to get over these things. Habitually offending drivers now just cruise right over them, without even bothering to cut their speed.

• Speed humps cause physical pain to people who suffer chronic conditions such as arthritis, back pain, and abdominal pain — every whack as your car bumps over one of the things feels like a stab.

• Roundabouts do not cause people to slow down. When people don’t slow down to a crawl, they find their cars climbing on the sidewalks and the neighbors’ lawns, or running over the (expensive taxpayer-funded) landscaping in the middle of the things.

• This phenomenon makes it unsafe to walk on the sidewalks near said roundabouts. So people walking to the park from neighboring homes detour across the lawns of the upscale houses facing the park, so as to avoid the risk of being hit while on a sidewalk bordering a roundabout.

• The junk with which they’ve littered Feeder St. NS has clogged traffic in such a way that for half the morning and half the afternoon, it literally is impossible to cross that road on foot. So if you live west of the park, you can NOT get to the park for your morning walk!

• As a result of the well-intended but poorly thought-out obstructions, many people who know the neighborhood now avoid Feeder Street NS by driving around it on formerly sleepy and private local lanes. I never drive on Feeder St. NS anymore, and I’ve noticed that I have plenty of company on the neighborhood back streets, now much busier than they ever were before.

• And also as a result, at least one neighbor on a roundabout has his house up for sale (good luck with that!). This likely is the same neighbor who stated in public that the things are unsafe and that he never agreed to a roundabout in his front yard.

These folks are not city planners, they don’t have good sense, and because they’ve set themselves up as a closed club, they’re not getting all their “constituency’s” approval or even any opposing input for their little schemes. They’re not elected. They’re just a bunch of well-meaning folks who see themselves as stepping up to the plate.

We did have a neighborhood association that was low-key but functioned well. It was headed by another self-appointee, whom we’ll call Thom, who did an excellent job at letting neighbors know what was going on down at City Hall and at facilitating communication among the neighbors, the local police, and the city leadership.

Unfortunately, his wife had designs on political office. They raised funds and saved cash to finance her run on a city council seat…and shortly before that election, what should happen but the Republicans gerrymandered the city council districts. They ran a line straight through the middle of our neighborhood, putting the four or five blocks west of Feeder Street NW into a low-SES district that is largely minority, largely lower-income, and largely neglected. Mrs. Thom had right-wing leanings, and as you can imagine, her vocal dislike of the firefighter’s union (and the set of opinions that comes with that knee-jerk stance) did not stand her in good stead with the working-class voters who make up the vast majority of our new political district. She lost magnificently.

So they moved eastward, into a more affluent and politically conservative district, and we lost Thom, the guy who actually had good sense and who was doing a fine job as volunteer neighborhood association capo.

Into the vacuum stepped the present coterie of naive do-gooders.

For their latest project, they’re calling on the neighbors (read “their friends,” since not all the neighbors are privy to their plans) to turn out this morning with garden shears and power tools to tidy up a couple of the ’hood’s chronically messy alleyways:

All Hands On Deck for the first annual Neighborhood Alley Clean-up! Let’s make this a successful and enjoyable community event. With the influx of opportunistic crime [they were shocked, shocked I tell you, when one of their band belatedly noticed the prostitutes who have worked Conduit of Blight Blvd for years, having spotted one of them servicing a client in an alley 😀 ] we are working the first two alleys just north of Feeder Street East-West and Conduit of Blight.

We will meet at [an address about a block from the Funny Farm]. The event is scheduled for Saturday, March 14, 2015 between 7:30 and noon. We need neighborhood participation! Please bring gloves. Supplies contributed by the City of Phoenix.

All alleys, exterior and interior, are to be cleared of debris, view obstructing shrubs and weeds. We can continue this effort by working together to report blight and maintain the alley-ways behind our homes.

“View-obstructing shrubs and weeds,” eh? And whaddaya bet these worthies will figure 12-foot-high cat’s-claw vines come under the heading of “view-obstructing”? Especially since that’s exactly what their purpose is.

So this morning I went out there and tied signs reading PLEASE DO NOT TRIM VINES! to the plantings along 95 feet of the back lot line. And I’m not kidding. If they vandalize my plants, I am taking them to court. Depending on how much it will cost to buy a city permit and have a contractor raise the height of that back wall (which is longer than just that 95 feet…), I will take them either to small claims court or into a civil court to get them to pay for restoring my privacy.

P1030423I appreciate their concerns about upgrading and maintaining the property values in the ’hood. And the alleys, especially at this time of year when the weeds start to grow, surely do get junky and cluttered. BUT…the city has a neighborhood slum abatement office. City code requires homeowners to keep the alleys behind their property free of trash, weeds, and obstructive volunteer shrubs and trees.  It’s not the place of some self-appointed band of busy-bodies to take it upon themselves to come along and cut down whatever they please. All it takes is one phone call to the slum abatement folks, and the city will send an officer to inspect the alley and issue warnings or citations to people who need to clean up their acts.

Y’know, if I wanted to live in an HOA, I’d have bought a newer house in a suburb that’s a LONG way from the meth gangs to the north of us and the city’s main conduit of blight of the west of us. One of the several reasons I live in this neighborhood is that I don’t want to live in a regimented, look-alike HOA development. None of these people are elected, nor do they seem to care whether everyone who lives here has any voice about their Great Ideas. And I for one wish they’d get a clue.

Lies and Prevarication

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PinocchioWe’re told — I forget where, offhand — that the present generation receives the word “lie” as unforgivably rude. So, to spare any Millennial blushes, let  us discuss the Art of Prevarication.

Isn’t it amazing, what people get away with? They get away with it so frequently and so sublimely that they regard it as part of life, their natural privilege.

Ms. Neighbor — the one who was prevented from boarding my ship because my son had the cojones to go across the street and tell her “no!” — called the day before yesterday to wish me luck in the surgery and mumbled some sort of apology that I didn’t hear fully because I didn’t want to listen to her voice and so hung up on the answering machine. However, my son, a born diplomat, had told me that I should go over there and tell her how sorry I was that he ordered me not to take her in and extend my sympathies on her predicament.

He’s so polite.

So this morning I returned her call and reached her at her house, soon to be her former house. Said she, “Oh, dear, oh dear, I would never have suggested it if I had known you were going to have surgery yesterday!”

Say what? REALLY?

Does she think I don’t recall saying, “But I’m going to the hospital tomorrow for a second round of breast cancer surgery”?

Does she think I don’t recall her saying, “Oh, but I can be of help to you! Now my refrigerator can fit right here…”

Well, of course she does. Or she thinks she can make me think I don’t recall it, not quite like that anyway.

One of the things that accomplished liars prevaricators understand is that most people tend to believe the most recent thing they’ve heard. You can kind of “overwrite” a previous conversation or fact by saying something different with enough confidence, especially if your listener is elderly or not too bright.

I guess she thinks I’m a little bit of both. 😉

She must be an accomplished manipulator. That’s prob’ly why her relatives don’t want her moving in with them.

It wasn’t until I was in my 40s that I became aware of the number of people who lie as easily as breathing. So repressed was I as a child that even to this day I find it uncomfortable to fill in a fake name, phone number, and email address on a form to get another nuisance “member card” for some retailer. So it seems to me that an awful lot of people are very, very good at lying, and they do it as a matter of routine.

When I was about 45, I met and befriended a young couple who practiced insurance fraud. The ways they collected would beggar your imagination. They awed me. I’d never met anyone like that. Interestingly — or, hell: maybe “not surprisingly” — their professional prevarication slipped over into their personal lives. You really couldn’t know for sure when some story one of them told — whether it was an episode of ordinary daily life or some High Drama — was true or not.

There’s an art to prevarication. It’s like acting: you have to practice at it. Method prevarication, as it were.

The result of coming to know people like Ms. Neighbor and the Insurance Fraudsters is unfortunate: most of the time I don’t believe anyone. When a student comes up with some excuse for why she can’t turn in thus-and-such a paper, I assume she’s lying. When a salesman claims he’s required to tack on thus-and-such a chargeable service, I assume he’s lying. Today I question the truth of just about anything anyone says. And about a quarter of the time, I’d estimate, that’s justified.

Maybe that’s just Life in the Big City?

Image: Pinocchio. Enrico Mazzanti (1852-1910). Public domain.

 

 

 

Bizarre Day on Wisteria Lane…

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Yesterday was bizarre. That’s about the only word for it. I swear, we no longer live in a Monty Python Show. We seem to have moved to Desperate Housewives’ Wisteria Lane.

I’m racing around trying to get out the door to meet my friend and business partner in Tempe for lunch at the fancy restaurant we favor, there to celebrate her birthday. The doorbell rings. The dogs go batsh!t.

It’s my neighbor cattycorner across the street. She’s sold her house and is moving out, apparently having fallen on hard times. The sale closes on Friday, the 29th.

As it develops, she has not found another place to live. She had arranged, she says, to stay with a friend who was going to put her up for a month while she looks for a new place. But said friend went on vacation to Puerto Rico and just returned to the states — with a Boy Toy in tow! This guy is moving in with the woman, and now Neighbor is dis-invited to stay there. Would I do her a favor and let her move in here? Otherwise she doesn’t know what she’s going to do.

Holy sh!t.

A month or two ago, when the house sold (it was underpriced by about $30,000 and so got snapped up instantly), while the three neighbor ladies on this end of the block were out in front yakking, she mentioned that she hadn’t even looked for a place, and I said, jokingly, that if push came to shove she could move in here.

That was before I had the last surgery and long before I was told I have to have MORE surgery tomorrow.

Caught point-blank and face-to-face, I didn’t see how I could say anything else than “uhhh….ohh-kayyy….” The puppy is squirreling around. I pick her up and put her in her X-pen to get her out of the way.  Now suddenly Neighbor is planning where she’s going to put her bed (meaning I have to move furniture out of one of the rooms) and talking me into letting her put her refrigerator in my garage (do you know how much a fridge running in a 110-degree garage will run up a power bill?!?) and saying words like “one to three months” and going on about how she’ll start looking for a place to stay after she gets her money from the sale (while I’m thinking…don’t you get your money on closing day? the kids aren’t moving in for a month because they want to do a bunch of renovations…can’t you ask if you can rent the place for a week or two while you look for an apartment?)

She wants to start moving in on Thursday. That’s the day after tomorrow: when I’ll be recuperating from surgery!

This conversation goes on until I say I have to leave because I have to drive to the far side of town. Neighbor is shoveled out the door.

Now I’m running late. I fly around the house trying to finish getting dressed and write a check for the  editorial work my friend has done, which I intend to pay her for over lunch, and get ready to shoot out the door. Last task is to stick the puppy in her crate so she can’t defile the floor. And…and she’s GONE!

I call and call, search and search, and I can’t find her. I figure she slipped out the door when Neighbor left. So next thing I’m out in the street screaming like a fishwife for Ruby. Neighbor comes over; they look around. Finally she explores the house and finds Ruby in her X-pen, where of course I’ve  forgotten that I stashed her. This is what happens when old ladies get distracted by unexpected and potentially hassle-laden new developments when their lives are already disrupted by repeated cancer surgeries.

I thank Neighbor, pick up Ruby, and shovel Neighbor out the door. Ruby, squirming in a frantic effort to get out the door, too, hooks a hind claw in my shirt — my favorite shirt — and tears a hole in it.

Shit.

Lock up the dog. Change my clothes, fly out the door. Meet my friend.

Have an amazing meal, as usual, at Tricks. Then we go over to The Shoe Mill, the single best shoe store in the Valley, where I need to buy a couple of pairs of the expensive Europoean shoes that don’t hurt my feet. There I buy two pairs of Naot sandals, all my sandals having simply worn out, and we each buy a pair of Pikadillos, actual shoes of the sort grown-ups wear. None of these are cheap: my tab is almost $600.

Well, I figure since I buy good shoes about once every four years, that works out to $150/year, so I don’t feel too bad about it. And I wear those kinds of sandals almost every day, since I live in jeans. One pair is a little dressy-looking and will be perfect for church (we’re required to wear black shoes to process), and another is an amazingly cute and astonishingly comfortable platform.

But meanwhile, as time has passed and discussion has been had, the whole idea of Neighbor moving into my house at all, to say nothing of one day after I get my boob cut open again, sounds worse and worse. I didn’t like the idea much at the outset but now I’m getting worried. I’ve lived alone for 20 years, and I like it that way! If I wanted someone living with me, I’d have someone living with me. Notice that I live with dogs: they can’t kipe my food, they don’t talk back, they don’t leave their makeup on the bathroom counter, and they don’t want to watch mindless television into the middle of the night.

I discuss this with Wonder Accountant, also a Wisteria Lane resident and friend/acquaintance of Neighbor. She suggests a written agreement and points out a number of pitfalls, not the least of which is “what are you going to do if she doesn’t want to move out after three months?” I want her out after one month, not three months.

Discuss with Insurance Broker to see if taking rent money from this woman will affect my homeowner’s insurance. He says not but is concerned about liability if one of the dogs bites her. He suggests I require her to take out renter’s insurance, about $15 a month. He asks what I’m going to do if she doesn’t want to move out after three months…

Discuss with Realtor Pal, to see if he can help find her a place to rent — he says the rental market, especially in the “reasonable rent” category, is impossibly tight right now and it could be difficult to find her a place to live. Because she’s getting so little from the house sale, it’s not going to be easy to get her into a condo or patio home, either:  she underpiced to begin with and then she agreed to give huge allowances to rereoof the place ($10,000) and do the pool repairs and apparently some other things, and then she discovered the house had a $45,000 lien against it to cover the care of her crazed father, Carlos the Knife, as he descended into his final dotage. He says that she should get her money on Friday when the deal closes and in fact if she asks they should cut her a check on the spot. By the way, Realtor Pal asks, what am I going to do if she doesn’t want to move out after three months?

Now I’m feeling behind the barrel.

Phone rings: it’s my son, wanting to see how I am and, while he’s standing in line at a deli to buy his dinner, to lay plans for the next Surgery Day. I explain what’s going on. He says, “I’ll be right over.”

He arrives, riding his white charger.

This man is an automobile insurance adjustor. His job is to spend the whole damn day, every day, listening to people’s sad stories, fielding their demands for compensation, and telling them “no.”  He pours a bourbon and water. I tell him the story with all its convolutions.

He says, “You stay here. I’ll take care of this.”

Mounting his white charger and taking up his white lance, he gallops across the street and presents himself at Neighbor’s door. Drawing from deep wells of testosterone-fueled swagger (God, but men are amazing creatures!), he informs her that he has unilaterally decided that his mother is not taking on a roommate one day after she has breast surgery. He tempers this by claiming that I’m actually a great deal more fragile than I look, and says he has decided this is all a very bad idea.

She says no problem, she’s sure she can find someplace else to stay.

So. Thank God and my doughty son, I’m out from under that. What a flap!

Today, then, all I have to do is deal with the plumber, deal with the cleaning lady, deal with the new 102 class, deal with new copy sent by paying client, prepare for surgery, and call in to the hospital after 4 p.m. to find out when it’s scheduled. Doesn’t that all sound like jolly fun?

At least I won’t be moving furniture out of the spare room…

Staying on Top of Things

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Growing into a wise old grizzled old bestower of the culture’s lore has its privileges. And it has its drawbacks.

One of the latter is that you take to change less and less as you devolve further into the wisdom of maturity. That’s another way of saying you get to a point where you can’t stand it when people change things up on you!!!!

Argha.

All of which is to lead in to the tale of yesterday’s trip to downtown Phoenix, a place I’ve managed to stay out of for a good long time. Once again this year, I agreed to participate in a mock trial for the County Prosecutor’s office, a device used to train young lawyers and an activity that’s a bit of a hoot.

However, they changed the venue from the seedy offices where one would expect a prosecutor to reside to the courtroom set-ups at a proprietary law school that occupies many floors of a new highrise downtown. And in doing so, they changed parking garages, too.

Holy sh!t.

Parking garages now share space with things like…oh, a bowling alley. I had one hell of a time finding the entrance to the parking cave, causing me to have to navigate and renavigate the frenzied, spaghetti-like maze of one-way streets that they’ve installed downtown. What a mess!

I’d elected to go down Central Avenue because you can’t turn left off Seventh and Seventh during the rush hour. Though I thought the reverse lane ended somewhere north of downtown, I wasn’t sure where and didn’t want to go right, right, and right to turn left to get to the promised parking garage.

Everyone else had the same idea: Central was a commuter’s nightmare even north of where the accursed train turns onto that formerly beautiful urban boulevard. The train not only has massively uglified what was once the only really pretty street in central Phoenix, it’s made a horror show of driving.

Finally I had to cut off a few of my fellow homicidal drivers and slam my way into a right-turn lane so I could go west to Seventh Avenue, which was virtually empty because everyone was on Central. On Seventh I cruised downtown without a problem, but by then I’d turned a 20-minute drive into a 40-minute drive.

So I was late by the time I hit downtown, and then it took forever to find the parking garage with its well-disguised entrances.

Fortunately I wasn’t the only one — others also straggled in even later, having encountered the same mess.

Part of the problem is age — one adjusts to change with increasing difficulty as time passes — and part is CHANGE. The city and its grasping developers have transformed our formerly down-at-the-heels downtown, largely for the better.

What used to be a nature conservancy for drug addicts, alcoholics, and the homeless mentally ill has turned into a vibrant, active, busy central-city core. New high-rises now dominate the skyline, and old historic high-rise buildings — now mid-rises in the new landscape — have been elegantly restored. The place is buzzing with activity.

Problem is, the centerpiece of this redevelopment, a large, expensive, and ugly stadium, took up so much space that they had to reroute a couple of main drags and turn a bunch of two-way streets into one-ways, with no discernible logic or good sense.

Adding to the mystification, the damn train has made an unholy mess of the roads and traffic lights a half-mile in either direction of the rails. Timed lights have gone away, so you sit through two or three red signals to get past an intersection, and you never know which way you can turn and what lane you can safely enter. Bizarre arrows are painted in lanes directing you out of this or that lane, for no apparent reason; these are sometimes ignored and often senseless. Literally I have seen intersections with signs reading

NO LEFT TURN
NO RIGHT TURN
DO NOT ENTER

As you can imagine, then, a drive to a downtown destination makes for a confusing, unpleasant trip.

Adding to the confusion is that what’s in my head as  I think of the downtown map is the grid I knew when I worked down there in my 20s. That was a long, long time ago. Today’s map is a whole lot different. And i. don’t. like. it.

So we see how incumbent it is upon the aging city dweller to bloody keep up with the changes in her or his city!

I think what I’m gunna do, while the weather’s still nice, is get on the train at AJ’s, attired in some costume with comfortable shoes, and ride downtown. Then I’m going to get off the train at Washington or Jefferson, with a Mapquest printout in hand, and spend two or three hours just walking around.

This, I hope, will revise the internal map of the place. And it’ll be a good way to get the day’s exercise.

Images:

Downtown Phoenix at night. JCordova. Public domain.
Exquisite train stop in downtown Phoenix. 2008. Ixnayonthetimmay. Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported, 2.5 Generic, 2.0 Generic and 1.0 Generic license.