Coffee heat rising

Strangely Healed…

The other day I was whinging on and on and freakin’ ON about the aches and pains of Olde Age. And now, amid a gorgeous Tuesday evening richly festooned with Christmas lights? Weirdly, almost ALL the pain is g0ne!

Why??? THAT is beyond me.

Obviously, if I knew what makes it come and go, I might be able to arrange for it to be gone more than here. 

Ohhh well.

Ruby the Corgi and I traipsed all over the ‘Hood this evening, regaled by piles and piles of Christmas lights. What a hoot!

Over in the Richistans, where people have lots of money to diddle away on this stuff, the place looks like Times Square! 😀

Seriously: every house is all lit up. It’s quite the spectacle.

Not so much over here on the po’ folks’ side. But even we have some light festivals.

There’s a little Protestant church down on Main Drag South...a generic sorta thing. Looks like they have a choir. So…hmmm…  I’m thinking about asking them if they’ll let me join it.

Or not. A good choir is a time-consuming thing. And…with no formal music training, I really don’t have all that much to offer.

What the heck..I do need a way to meet and be around people. But…who needs me, eh? ;-D

Seriously: I’m just not that good around humanity. And trying to introduce myself to and join some new group is quite the challenge for me. I’m thinkin’…I don’t want to work that hard.

Let us think about it…

 

And…whaaa? UNdone for????

WTF?????  After this morning’s whiney whinge, now — come 3:34 in the afternoon — suddenly I’m a whole new person!!! 

Why?????  What on earth would cause a gigantic slug of misery to suddenly evaporate? To be replaced by a calm, almost complacent mood tending (even!) toward the cheerful?????

Seriously: I cannot imagine.

This morning I was truly miserable. Now: back to normal; indeed, even fairly cheerful.  Why?????

Well….I can’t imagine. Unless it was a nice sunny day and a long walk down Conduit of Blight Blvd and through the neighboring shopping centers.

Ruby and I hiked all over the ‘Hood, through three neighboring shopping centers and all around a part of the tract where SDXB and I used to walk almost every day, back when he lived here.

He has moved to Sun City, and so is long gone. Me: I wouldn’t go back there if ya paid me.

But he likes that kind of fustian fuddy-duddery, so he’s very happy there. He and New Girlfriend seem to be doing well enough, though it sounds like he’s pretty damn sick. With my mother (oh, lemme tellya horror show!!), we found the medical care in Sun City was even more substandard than you get in the typical American living space. Just. Gawd. Awful.

Would she have died if she’d had decent care?

Well, yes.

But she sure as Hell wouldn’t have suffered the way she did. And that little Life Passage is one of several reasons you couldn’t get me back in Sun City: not on a bet.

At any rate: free of that place, Ruby and I put some serious mileage under our paws and had a lovely time hiking around the ‘Hood and through the neighboring shopping centers.

What exactly I’m gonna do to get through the upcoming end-of-life years, I dunno. Have to confess that I haven’t the faintest idea.

Seriously: over the next few months and year or so, I do need to make some plans. Maybe confer with M’Hijito about what he wants me to do … yeah, I know: check my idiot self into the Beatitudes, a venerable old-folkerie.

Thanks. I’d rather take a flying leap off the North Rim…  So we do need to confer and think carefully about how to deal with the upcoming (potentially hideous) years. But just now…I get to enjoy life for a few weeks or months!

 

Done For!

Continuing spectacularly sick. Ohhh well…by now I’ve gotten used to the what appears to be the fact that I’m never going to get well. The best that can be hoped, I reckon, is that life comes to an end in some reasonable period of time.

Though, it must be allowed, we’re well past any “reasonable period.”

This morning — it appears to be a Tuesday — I plan to call a venerable old-folkerie here in the Valley. Well…the place is what I regard as a prison for the elderly. They take everything you have: your life savings, the value of your home, any other cash you happen to have laying around. In return, they babysit you and feed you awful institutional food until you pass into Eternity.

Which, we must hope, will happen soon.

Soon as my mother died, my father signed himself into a similar place, one then called “Orangewood.” His experience was just hideous, but not because of the institution and its operators: he married a woman he met there, apparently imagining she could somehow take my mother’s place.

Well. No one could do that. He was deeply, truly in love with my mother, and she with him. This new broad…ohhhh my gawd! Long story short, that “marriage” promptly turned into a Horror Show from Hell.

For me, it had one advantage: taught me that if you get locked up in one of those places, you mind your own business and don’t get chummy with anyone. And especially don’t marry anyone!

I had hoped to save my assets to pass along to my son. Unless I drop dead in the very near future, that ain’t gonna happen. Clearly, this unholy ailment is going to drag on and drag on and drag on, as I get weaker and weaker, more and more unable to care for myself. Soo….might as well resign myself to the fact that he will get little or nothing from me, because the disease is going to eat up everything I have: the value of the house, the savings I’ve set aside for myself, the small but real inheritance from my father. Gone. All of it.

If I were little stronger, I’d bring an end to the horror show myself, right now. But I simply don’t have the nerve end my own life. Just plain not brave enough. Sooo…that which I have is effectively no longer mine. Shortly, it will belong to a prison for old folks.

What a world we live in! 

So…Where Were We?

These days, I never know….

😀

Last I heard, we were at the Mayo Clinic, where staff were busy torturing me. That was grand fun.

Did it do any good?

Uhhhhh…well…

In a minuscule way, I’d say. Hammering on the keyboard still makes the fingers tingle. But not as badly (I think) as before.

Hey! Life is short. Tingling is long. Why complain about it, eh?

Shortly after 8:00 p.m. now. Outside, morons are setting off bang-bangs. Fireworks, presumably, but they could be firing their li’l guns into the air. Fine if they’re shooting blanks. I’d just as soon not have one of their bullets cascade down through the roof and the ceiling. 😀

Continuing spectacularly sick here. My guess now is that this ailment is not something that will go away. I’m just gonna have to get used to it. Consider the ear whistling to be a kind of serenade. The lips, the feet, the hands buzzing (in a different mode) to be a welcome sign that I’m still alive. And quit bellyaching about it!

Contemplating those women in my family: those powerful women. The grandest of them — a mother and a daughter who lived well into their 90s — were Christian Scientists.

Apparently Christian Science, back in the day, was regarded as a type of eccentricity verging on insanity. 😀  WhatEVER. That notwithstanding, we did live in a free country — we did then and we do now — where people are allowed to harbor whatever crackpot theories they please.

They were powerfully clean living, those two women, largely as a manifestation of their religious beliefs. They did not drink alcohol. They did not carouse. They enjoyed home-cooked meals that consisted almost entirely of what we would call “whole foods.”

If that was insanity, we should all be so crazy!

They pretty much raised my mother, while her own mother went off the rails. And I think she regarded each of them —  especially my great-grandmother, as like a mother. Wish they’d lived long enough to meet my son: they’d have liked him.

Oh, well. They’d have been well into their 100s by the time he was born…so appreciation might have been difficult.

No outcome from the Mayo yet. They did a few annoying tests, but no opinion as to what ails me has been emitted.

So let us cast our minds back to the early 20th century and ask…if we were a Christian Scientist, what would we think ails me?

Booze, I reckon. They would tell you that the wine I was in the habit of drinking daily — a habit that lasted a good 20 years — was toxic, God-forbidden, and very probably what has made me sick.

It’s as good a theory as any. And since our august Mayo physicians apparently have no clue, we might as well proceed on the assumption that I’ve made myself sick through two decades of daily boozing.

So I’m on the wagon. Again. Still. WhatEVER.

And…is that working? 

Well, in comparison with 20 years of daily tippling, I’d say we haven’t given the teetotaling  anything NEAR enough time to show what it can do. We have a few dry days vs. year after year of daily sniftering… So presumably it’ll take a while for this clean living stuff to take effect.

As we scribble? My lips are burning. My ears are buzzing. My fingers are tingling. The soles of my feet are tingling. But otherwise everything is fine.

Uh huh….

En Train

So here we are, trapped in a Mayo lab room imterminably while they pump a bottleful of medication into my arm,

******* OHHH for cryin’ out loud! WordPress just ERASED 3/4 of this damn thing when I hit “publish.” Must not have gone “Save” first, eh.

Welp! Watch this space. 

Just got home. Now must walk the dog from pillar to post. Whenever (ifever?) we get back, I’ll rewrite this thing and post it.

Good(?) Morning, America…

Okay…back online. For the nonce, anyway. 

We seem to have lost the post I was working on. Big deal: not like I had much of import to say. 😀

No more than I ever do!

Don’t know what hung the laptop, but suspect this little glitch presages a trip to the computer store to have the thing worked on.

Calendar reports that M’hijito is supposed to show up here at 11:30. For what, it doesn’t say…but I assume it’s to drag me out to the goddamn Mayo Clinic again. That’s almost an hour’s drive across the Valley, halfway to freakin’ Payson through unholy traffic.

Well. No….if all we’re doing is visiting their test lab, that’s only a quarter of the way to freakin’ Payson.

But…I didn’t notice today’s scheduled horror on the calendar, and so I just scarfed down coffee and breakfast…replete with plenty of sugar. If they’re planning to jab, jab, jab some more and then test, I’ve screwed that up.

And of course, while these frolics have unrolled, the coffee has gone stone cold.

********

Before I discovered the (phantom??) Mayo appointment on today’s calendar, I was gonna go over to the neighborhood Bland Christian Church (some sort of nondenominational thing down on the corner of Main Drag South and Main Drag West), where I hoped to see if they have a functional choir and, if so, whether I might join it.

So. There’s another scheme down the toilet.

I do NOT understand why the goddam Mayo consistently schedules its accursed vein-jabbing tests on Sunday mornings. This is the berzillionth time they’ve demanded that I skip choir and traipse out there for what appears to be yet another pointless test.

Not that it would matter today: without a car, I can’t easily get down to my own church for the purpose of spending a couple of hours baying. But…the point is, it pisseth me off. Because if IS pointless.

Particularly today, since I didn’t notice the note on my calendar and so have scarfed down breakfast, replete with sugar, toast, and enough coffee to float Noah’s Ark.

***

Looks like WordPress is back online. Presumably the latest and greatest hang-up was some sort of temporary glitch. Let’s see if this post will go up….