Next question: How could she have allowed them to kill her? She knew…she knew!

Well. The answer rolls into one: my mother was murdered by the God-damned tobacco industry, whose acolytes got her addicted to nicotine.

Craving, craving, ever craving…she puffed her way to the grave. By the time she died, she was going through two or three packs a day. She couldn’t have stopped, even if she had wanted to — which she did not. Puffety puffety puffety…chugging right into the grave.

A thousand curses on everyone who works in the tobacco industry. More than a thousand curses on any legislator who ever agreed to keep tobacco peddling legal.

They murdered my mother. Every goddamn one of those killers, from the tobacco company employees to the bastards in the legislatures that have kept tobacco legal, every single one of them is a murderer.

They’re all complicit in the murders of the SEVEN MILLION PEOPLE A YEAR. And one of those victims was my mother.

A horrible way to die, the cancer brought on by tobacco smoking. My mother suffered monstrously. So did my father, as he struggled to care for her during her hideous final months and weeks.

He chased me off from her bedroom, as she lay dying: didn’t want me to watch that show. Neither, I expect, did she.

But finally the show did end. She died: in vast pain until the last couple of weeks, when she was mostly unconscious.

It’s hard to understand why her death and the thousands of deaths like hers are not regarded as murder. Actually, the world-wide the toll is far larger than that: eight million murders a year. 

Why, my friends, do we tolerate this constant, ongoing mass murder?

Yeah, I know: money.

But money doesn’t make it right. Money doesn’t make it not murder. It just makes the murder even more immoral than it would be if someone weren’t getting rich from it. 

Ruby and the Human shoot out the door at the crack of dawn. A somewhat muffled crack…the sky is threatening….

GORGEOUS rainy-day weather: high fluffy clouds, soft air, people out strolling around the park.

Tony the Romanian Landlord is among them: out there proselytizing. He’s a religious nut: wants to convert everyone to his faith.

Ruby trots right along.

Weather is keeping most people in, so we don’t have to dodge any neighbors’ dogs. That’s refreshing.

****

Back at the house: COFFEEEEEEE!

Browsing the news reports… Gosh, am I glad NOT to be living in the Middle East anymore!

I grew up in Saudi Arabia — a less-than-sylvan venue. My mother was terrorized most of the time. My father had a pistol stashed on the top shelf of the hall closet… Heh! He imagined I didn’t know where it was.

Not only did I know where it was, but in his absence I was given to hauling it down and fiddling with it. Luckily, it never went off.

My mother barely survived our ten-year junket out there. She came down with amoebic dysentery, which damn near killed her. She was in the hospital for weeks.

But…the upside was that she demanded to come home — that is, back to the States — and my father didn’t have it in him to decline. My guess is, she threatened to divorce him if he didn’t agree to come back to the States. But…that, really, I do not know as fact.

What I do know is that after she got out of the hospital and went through some grueling treatment, she and I flew back to California, where we stayed with the maternal relatives in Berkeley until my mother could get a job and land us a place to live.

When my father’s contract with Aramco ended, he got a job shipping out of northern California — and later, out of Long Beach, the grody urb where I had been born some 16 years before.

Driving back across the country from New York, they discovered Sun City, here in Arizona. My father was enchanted: NO KIDS!

He really did NOT like kids. Hated the sound of kids playing outdoors. Highly resented their presence.

At any rate, this glorious discovery brought us here to Arizona, the minute he figured he could retire.

***

He figured wrong: a recession raped his savings and so he had to go back to sea. But my mother and I stayed here, and I ended up going to college at the University of Arizona in Tucson…not Cal Berkeley, where I’d planned to go.

Thank you, Daddy…

To be fair, he really didn’t understand that there are differences among higher education institutions. To his mind, the UofA was the same as Cal Berkeley. I knew better, but there wasn’t a thing I could do about it.

After I graduated, I landed a Mickey-Mouse job at a law firm in downtown Phoenix. Yeah: answering the phones.

Everyone needs a four-year degree and a Phi Beta Kappa key to do that, eh?

So my prospects, as I’d imagined them, were mightily fu*ked up.

Married a lawyer by way of making my living.

Well. To be fair: back in the Day, that’s what women were expected to do.

Ahhhh, the good ole’ days!

“There’s a coyote in the park!” exclaims she, her voice radiant with fear.

No kidding, think I. Y’know, they were here first….

Oh, well. I manage to keep my yap shut, except to thank her for the dire warning.

By and large, coyotes — even the urban variety — are more afraid of you than you are of them. If one approaches you, the correct response is to turn and face the little fella, glare at him, and firmly utter these words: No! Ba-a-a-d dog! BAD dog! GO HOME!!! 

The standard coyote response to this is a horrified look that says, clear as any human language could say it, Good grief! This one’s crazy! Said realization crossing the critter’s mind, your dire enemy turns around and trots away from you.

LOL! But seriously: the presence of our coyote fellow citizens is the reason I carry a large, sturdy walking stick on the doggy-walks. Get smart with me, Fang, and I’ll knock you into the middle of next week!

By and large, though, coyotes are not interested in getting smart with you. They tend (wisely) to be  afraid of humans. And so, nine times out of ten, if they spot you they’ll turn tail and trot off to the wide-open spaces. When walking your dog in our parts, your job (among several) is to keep your eyes open and maintain plenty of space between the wild canid and your pooch.

Remember: They’re more scared of you than you are of them.

And when we say “blew,” we mean “like a freakin’ tornado!” Great blasts of wind plus buckets of rain.

Well…it seems to have passed: rain has stopped, wind has dropped back to normal breeze level. But gosh! What a thing to see!

Luckily, Ruby and her human were not out strolling around the ‘Hood as this thing blew up. If we’d arrived on the other side of the park, we wouldn’t have had a chance of getting home before a good drenching. And….boyoboy, am I glad I wasn’t out driving in it!

Trees and shrubbery are still swaying in some residual wind, but the liveliest part of the storm seems to have passed.

***

Well, this puts the eefus on any scheme to stroll to one of the local grocery stores and restock the shelves. I ain’t goin’ out in that!!

Nonetheless, we still have plenty of supplies. We certainly can last well into tomorrow, and probably much longer than that.

Freshets like this one usually clear up within a few hours, here in (un)lovely Arizona. So by this evening or (preferably!) tomorrow, I should be able to stroll to the corner shopping center. Ohhh well!

Weirdly, I locked myself out of the house this morning, along about dawn.

HOW? That escapes me.

I thought the door was unlocked when I stepped outside in front, into the dim early light.

Well.

No.

Wrong!

Try to get back in: LOCKED TIGHT!

Side gate: locked.

All the windows: closed and locked.

So….I couldn’t get back in the house. And Ruby was trapped inside.

Fortunately, the neighbors were already up. Tom (the male neighbor over there) was puttering with his car.

So I descended on them…O lucky them!

Thank goodness they’re VERY nice people. Tom was able to get the door open.

And now I’m assigned to get some extra keys made, so as to give one or two to them.

Yes, my son does have a key. But…y’know…strange as this may sound, he has a JOB.

Right. He can’t jump up out of his desk chair and come charging up here to rescue his idiot mother every time she gets herself into some new predicament.

So. It was a disturbing way to start the day. 

The nuisance babysitter….uhm, hired companion lurked around until the end of working hours, and finally, along about five o’clock drove off into the distance.

Very nice lady. But…y’know…I’m used to living by myself. And I’ve NEVER liked people lurking around me — not even when I was a little kid. And much, much less now!

As soon as she exited, I set out on a (hot!!) afternoon walk, sans doggy friend. Ruby, of course, likes to charge around the neighborhood at any time and under any circumstances. But it was simply too hot to drag her over the sidewalks and the asphalt roads.

Her human would have preferred not to go strolling about in 100-degree heat — humid heat! — but really: I just had to burn off some of the frustration and annoyance.

Not that the babysitter isn’t a very nice person, very pleasant. Not that she interferes with my life (well…she does, but that’s not her fault). No.

It’s simply that I’m accustomed to living by myself, having done so for lo! these five or six decades. And as the result of that, I really don’t like having someone lurking around all day, no matter how nice they are and no matter how much their presence enhances my safety and well-being. Yes: I do like people (well…most of ’em). But I also like my aloneness — to the extent of preferring it, most of the time.

What to do about this annoying development?

Well…  My inclination is to say nothing. Just let it go on. And try to train myself to get used to it.

The alternative is much worse.

My son was seriously considering consigning me to an old-folkerie called The Beatitudes: effectively a prison for the aged and the infirm. And that truly does fill me with horror.

Mercifully, he allowed himself to be persuaded to hire babysitters…uhm, caretakers…to come in and fill the daytime hours with me. These women are supposed to keep an eye on me, take me to grocery stores, see that I don’t get into any mischief, watch that I bathe and eat and keep the house tidy.

Now…whereas I can’t say I like that prospect (ugh!!!!), it’s about a hundred times better than being consigned to an institution.

Our lady doesn’t get here until after Ruby and I have had time to make our morning hike around the ‘Hood. (That can fill anywhere from 40 minutes to an hour). And once the summer heat passes, she’ll be gone in plenty of time to let me make another little hike to run off any frustration and aggravation.

Plus she can drive me to grocery stores…and…I’m hoping, if I’m really nice to her, she may agree to help me get Ruby to the vet, whose offices are a bit too far for us to reach on foot. Especially in this heat.

Anyway…it’s annoying, that’s for sure. But it’s one HELLUVA lot less annoying than being locked up in an old-folkerie.

In fact, it’s more like about once every two hours. But since I’m sick as a dawg myself…Helle’s Belles! It ain’t good. 

Suspect this is a function of the drugs the vet gave us. Tomorrow we’ll have to drag her back to his office. And that is MORE than “not good.”

Because…my son having purloined my car, I can’t haul her to the vet! He’ll have to take time off his (demanding!) job to drive the dog and me around.

And that is about as not good as it gets.

Meanwhile, I’m pretty sick myself. Whatever is causing this horrible peripheral neuropathy can’t possibly be good. It hurts, and it makes my ears feel like an air-raid siren is going off in my head.

Welp…the little dog is back on the bed and conkered out. Better try to join her!

***  ***  ***  ***

Welp!  THAT didn’t work!  Here we are, an hour later, and the Dawg is up again, demanding to squirt the backyard with more liquid sh!t.

The Human is good & sick: in no condition to be jumping out of bed once an hour.

***

Hmmm….  She’s not wanting to get back in the sack. Probably figures it’ll be ill-advised to put the Human in a position to have to get up AGAIN to let her out.

***

Ohhhhhh GAWD! Now I’ve got the collywobbles, too!

What the HELL?????  Whatever is making the dog sick is making me sick, too??  Is that even possible?

….

Ohhhhhh yeah! Wouldntcha know!  And some of these bugs are drug-resistant bacteria.

Since she’s been on pills for the past two weeks, chances are pretty fair that we’re looking at just that.

Shee-ut! That means I’ll have to go to a doctor tomorrow, which means somehow I’ll have to get myself out to see MayoDoc, an hour’s drive away from here. And do so without a car….

Yay. I can hardly wait for the sun to come up…

I grew up in Saudi Arabia, where my father worked for ten years as a harbor pilot for ARAMCO, steering tankers and freighters in and out of the port at Ras Tanura. The country was as Third-World as a country could get, a marvelous incubator of toxic disease.

One of those diseases was amoebic dysentery, a gawdawful and potentially fatal infestation with the local germs that lurked in all the food…especially in fruits and vegetables. Anything that we ate had either to be fully cooked (as in cooked to mush!) or soaked in Clorox to disinfect it.

Well. My father worked with a guy who wasn’t too bright, and said guy had a wife who was even less bright.

And she just didn’t get the message about sanitizing ALL the food.

One evening they had us over to their house for dinner. I was in the kitchen watching and playing around — at the time I was about ten or twelve years old. There, I observed that our hostess didn’t bother to sanitize the cabbage she used to make our salad. She even handed me — a little kid! — pieces of this unclean produce, which I scarfed right down.

Fortunately for me, I had pretty strong resistance by that time, after spending nigh unto ten years in the bowels of Hell. But…my mother did not.

She ate that salad, and shortly thereafter came down with a roaring case of amoebic dysentery.

She damn near died of it. Years later, I learned that there was a moment when her doctors thought she very probably would die.

But she didn’t. After weeks in the hospital and then in bed at home, she eventually recovered.

Sort of.

She never really fully recovered. But she went on with her life.

A truncated life.

The upshot of the unholy infection and its ungodly treatment was that some time later she did develop an abdominal cancer.

And yes: that killed her.

Understand: The wives who were brought to Arabia with the men working for the Company were required to sit through a lengthy course in how to prepare food safely, and how otherwise to protect their families from the diseases to which simply living out there would subject us.

That idiot woman knew not to serve up unsanitized produce! Yea, verily: She knew to soak those greens in Clorox and rinse them well before making a salad of them. 

Interestingly, neither her husband nor her young son would eat the stuff. “Don’t like cabbage,” we were told.

I believe she deliberately tried to make us sick.

She could not have not known that the produce had to be mightily sanitized before it could be served to people who were to eat it.

Given that fact, it’s my belief that she purposely served us unsanitized cabbage in the hope that it would sicken us.

And it worked. It sickened my mother enough to do her in, ultimately.

Did she do it on purpose?

Could be. But…on the other hand, there’s an outside chance that she truly didn’t know what she was doing. My father regarded her husband as one of the stupidest men he’d ever met. So…who knows? Maybe they were a matched set. Maybe she really was so stupid that she didn’t bother to sanitize the produce before serving it up to her guests.

Maybe.

Doesn’t matter: Stupid or cunning, the upshot was the same. She killed my mother.

Man, do I hate the Arizona desert. If there were any way I could afford it (and…if my son weren’t ensconced here…) I would be SO outta-here!

Ruby and I just came in from the morning dog-and-human constitutional. Ugh! Thought I was gonna melt into the pavement before we got back!

Well…one good thing about it was that there were hardly any other people out there.

Most folks have better sense than to charge out in this kind of sh!tty weather.

Now we’re waiting for the babysitter my son hired to show up. I told him that I am NOT going to opt the daily exercise hike — it’s the only thing that keeps the spavined hip from freezing right up — and so these women either have to show up an hour later than they normally might or they’ll have to wait in their damn car for me.

I did leave the dear lady a note saying we’d soon be back and suggesting she repair to the local supermarket for a nice cup of coffee (they have an awesome coffee bar there!). No sign of her, though.

Awwwwwwwwww…. What a shame, eh?

Whoever was in the house a day or so ago babysitting and puttering ripped off a lot more stuff than I thought. One of the phone’s handsets is gone, as are a few other miscellaneous desk-top items. Plus the entire phone that was in the living-room desk.

Busy folks, eh?

Anyway, now I’ll have to figure out how to get extensions to replace those phones. And that may be a challenge: they were pretty old. I may have to replace ALL the phone handsets. That would be seven of them.

And you don’t even wanna know how much that’s gonna cost.

I sure don’t….

Seriously: it looks like replacing two of them will run around eighty bucks.

No wonder the dear soul wanted to steal mine. 

As though I hadn’t been living alone and taking care of myself and my dog and my home and my yard and my pool all by my little idiot self, for year on year. You wanna talk about annoying?  

Holeeee shee-ut.

She sits there on the phone gabbing with her friends and whomever, yakity yakity yakity yakity yakity yakity…. The endless yakathon devolves into an exceptionally annoying noise. Especially to a person who is used to living alone.

This comes on top of the discovery that some workers he sent over got into my office and stole sh!t to the left of them and sh!t to the right of them. They stole my office phone’s handset, among a number of other things.

Fortunately, I had another phone stashed in a cabinet in another room. But…that means that sooner, if not later, I’m gonna have to buy another handset.

If they even still make that brand and variety. Seems to me at one point a guy at the local phone store said these things are no longer available.

In-f*cking-furiating!

So, back to the original infuriating element of today’s post: I need to decide whether to try to stay here, in my nice little house in my nice bourgeois neighborhood, until I drop dead (good luck with that!) or to move, in the very near future, into one of those horrible prisons for old folks….uhm….”life-care communities.”

The very thought makes my skin crawl.

Back in the day, the University of Arizona (my dear alma mater /eyeroll/ ) required all female undergraduates to live in the dormitories. Well. Unless one was married or living with one’s parents.

That experience left me with a lifelong distaste for institutional living.

Ugh!!!!  I started in that way, and I do NOT want to go back out through that door. Bleayach!