sick and tired WARNING: contains dickensian childhood interlude

Well I'll be dipped. I'm sick.
No, not like that, you bad potty person. Ok, well, fine, like that too, but what I mean is, I have germs.
No, not those type of ....never mind. Just-onward, ok?
In all the recent activity I plumb missed the fact that I have a rip-roaring cold going. Yeah! No kidding! I just thought I was having really bad allergy symptoms, so I loaded up on the Sudafed and forged ahead. Yesterday morning is when I began to suspect something more might be going on, when the chills and fever situation began. But everyone else around me has been sniveling and sneezing and bitching and moaning too, so it just seemed like same shit different day in that matrix.
___________________________________

Now that we have the deciding factors in the Playboy of the Western World situation buttoned up I cannot help but return again and again to how this all stands in stark contrast to how my grandmothers care was handled.
And being roughly the same age as my parents were when they dealt with that situation I understand it even less.
All of these people were in their mid forties . Not stupid inexperienced kids acting on impulse.
There was no lack of money. No issues of diminished capacity. No physical debility, no lack of options, no unforseen circumstances that dictated their decisions.
No excuse.
I went to therapy for this. I spent five years, two times a week, never missing a session, dealing with this shit, and I dealt with it head on, as is my style. And the big events, I moved past them.
But now when I consider it in the abstract, as someone my grandsons' age, stuck for the next eighteen years with people that steeped in emotional illness and hate-orI think of the group of them deciding the fate of a helpless, sick old woman...in a family that despised women, that misused them in every way imaginable...it's straight out of a purple, lurid horror-thriller.
And it was. It really was.
Can you understand that? IT REALLY WAS THAT BAD. It wasn't just me not understanding or taking things wrong or whatever excuse.
Not even in the abstract.
Theres no way you can look at what went on and come up with any explaination for it other than the perpetrators were simply warped, evil people who got a great deal of satisfaction from being warped and evil.
You think I don't believe in good and evil? I believe in it even more now than I ever did when I was a devout Catholic.
What they did, they decided to do. They thought about. They planned.
How in the fuck do I ever get clean?

ritzy-schnitzy

Well, the Playboy of the Western World is IN!!!
My biker took him down today to pick out a place, and he decided on a one bedroom apartment on the fifth floor with a full kitchen.
This is SO VERY uncharacteristic...I fully expected him to choose some cheap ass little closet of a room facing an airshaft or something and instead he goes for the gusto! Right on!
I simply cannot describe the happiness and the relief I feel knowing that he will be taken care of in style for the remainder of his days, eating good food, having his cleaning taken care of, being chauffeured around town...
Oh, that reminds me.
We now own a rare edition Porsche, fully restored.
The Porsche belonged to the Playboy; it was his Tail Gunner for 20 years. As long as he's alive the biker plans to use it to usher him around in. That car is his pride and joy and just because he can't drive it any more doesn't mean that he can't ride around in it and profile.
Does this not rock? My family is safe and taken care of.
_________________________________
Lately I have been making the commute every morning to the Stainless Steel Amazons' new place to babysit the Goonybird while she settles in. Poor kid; she has projects at work and finals at school, all in the same three-week timeframe that she had to move out of her old place on the hill. And that was a giant pain in the ass; dealing with Mr. Tiny Weenie the landlord and his wife Mrs. Suffering Martyr, who decided on the spur of the moment yesterday to fly up from California and show the place that evening. Gosh, thanks for the advance notice, bitch! Appreciate it all to hell! So we flew on over there yesterday, after she had pulled a full day of classes and work, and did a blitz clean on the motherfucker.
Guess who called an hour later drunk as a whore and changed her plans?
I hope someone flies her plane into a big steaming pile of SAVAGE REPUBLICANS.
_____________________________________
Whoever owned the property my daughter just moved into evidently never heard of them there newfangled inventions, the lawnmower and the weedwhacker. No wonder the deer thought it was Platos' Retreat; it was so overgrown they may as well have been in the middle of the wilderness. Fortunate for me, though. I love nothing better than taking a neglected patch of green and making it into a showplace. So while the Goonybird wanders around in the Goonybird-high grass watching ants I reclaim the place from the forest.
Fuckin you want to talk about blacberry vines.
Jesus Christ on a red bicycle.
The things are over the top of the house where it faces on the uphill slope. It's like unearthing Pompeii. I found the old deck; someone removed it from the house and hove it into the stickerbushes. Which grew up through it and nailed it securely to the ground. I found their blue coffee mug too. And 100$ worth of their old dead landscape plants that they neglected, and the spare bits of sheetrock from the remodel, and some pvc pipe, and...yeah. All covered by evil thorny wands six feet long and arched over higher than short little me can reach. What makes it really bad is that blackberry has a mounding habit; new canes loop up and then die back at first frost, then next years growth loops up over those dead canes, die back, and so on and so forth, year after year. So for every live cane I take out I remove twelve dead ones, thorns intact. What you end up doing is coring out the old stuff, chopping it up with a limbing shears and then hooking it out with a rake. That leaves a hollow igloo of new growth overhead. Then you lop those at ground level, hook a potato rake into the canes up overhead, and then pulling the whole mass inside out...hopefully making the wands flop away from you. Doesn't always work like that. I am well perforated this evening.
I spent some very unhappy childhood hours battling these evil things. In Oregon, Himalayan Blackberry is an uncontrollable monster, three times the pest it is here in Washington because the growing conditions are so ideal. Any cleared land that isn't kept clear comes overgrown with blackberry before the year is out. We used to take them out as a (resentful, uncooperative, drunken, bitching at the top of everyones lungs, crying, fighting, driving off in a huff) family effort and every year someone would get taken to the emergency room to have a finger or a toe reattached, an eye bandaged, or a gash sewn up. These things made you MAD after awhile. Pretty soon the whole bunch of us would be battling away grimly, slashing away for all we were worth. I remember my grandmother using her silver paper shears.
Back then you didn't cut them down and haul them off; that would spread them like a plague. The canes were cut down, chopped up with hatchets, meat cleavers, axes, rose shears, loppers, k-bars, butcher knives, whatever came to hand- and then gasoline poured over the whole plot and set alight. And that was just about enough to keep them down for ONE YEAR.
Ah, but now, now it is just me.
Me versus the blackberries.
I have time, and I have the drive. And this time they aren't EVER coming back. Know why?
I also have ROUNDUP.

where the deer and the antelope play

The Stainless Steel Amazon has moved into a lovely house. Charming, well placed, full of light, on the lake.
One of the advantages of living in this part of the world is that the countryside retains a certain wildness despite most efforts to tame it; so that you have large forest ruminants and ungulates and raptors wandering through the scene lending things a certain Jurrassic jay nay say kwan.
My daughter has deer.
Deer who tiptoe through the misty grass, dipping their pretty heads to feed...taking giant monster dumps all over the lawn..looking in through the front windows like Gladys Kravitz with a runny nose...indulging in grunting, jerking interludes of bovine passion standing on the front deck, framed by the picture window, while my grandson hops up and down and says 'See doggie? Fight doggie!'
Deer suck.

ch ch ch changes

So many things happening!
The Stainless Steel Amazon moved into a new place...sweet, two bedrooms, ON THE LAKE, BABY, in a ritzy neiborhood with a yard for the Goonybird. All under her own steam. My daughter, the engineer!!!!!!!!!
The Playboy of the Western World has decided to go into assisted living!
Well, ok, you knew that.
He has chosen a place!
We went and checked the place out, and not only is it up to par, it is fucking
POSH AS FUCK.
He is selling his house!
HIS HOUSE APPRAISED FOR 50 THOUSAND MORE THAN WE EXPECTED IT TO.
OH MY GOD.
Everyone is on the bandwagon, all our ducks are in a row, fuck. Fuck, fuck, fuckity fuck-fuck.
I mean, FUCK.

The place the Playboy has chosen is in the center of town in an old luxury hotel. This is a place that he used to party at when it WAS a luxury hotel. Some years ago it was completely renovated and the origional furnishings and fixtures restored where that was reasonable. My God, this place is , hell, it's just amazing.
IT IS SURGICALLY CLEAN.
THERE ARE NO DROOLY PEOPLE IN THE LOBBY.
THERE IS A BALLROOM. I mean on top of everything else that is nice about the place, they have a ballroom with an immense chandelier, a full stage and orchestra pit, scenery flats, giant mirror ball, parquet floors...they hold events there, open to the public, hell.
They have a GOURMET DINING FACILITY.
The studio apartments are half the fricken size of the house I live in. Full of light. Wheelchair and walker adapted. Scrupulously maintained. 24 hr. staff emt. trained.
The one and two bedroom apartments are over the goddamn top!
He gets to keep most of his crap.
HE GETS MAID SERVICE.
HIS VISITORS ARE NOT MONITORED.
I could go on and on.
Thank god the man made such a fantastic investement. He probably had no idea that things would appreciate the way they have and I cannot wait to tell him!!!!
________________________________________
And now for the not so good news.
The interim facility he is in is a slum. It stinks of piss, the staff are slack and THERE WAS DRIED PISS ON THE MANS FLOOR FOR TWO DAYS.
I have been head of housekeeping in many places, last but not least the motherfucking HILTON HOTEL in Portland. I know when a place is not maintained. I can tell how long things have been sitting and what kind of attention they get when it comes around. This place needs to be reported and I FULLY PLAN ON DOING SO.
Unfortunately, his insurance has placed him here for the duration of his need, so he's stuck there unless the son of a bitchin place gets hit by a meteor.
I went down to the nurses station and got them shaking their tailfeathers, but they took it with ill grace, despite the fact that I bit my tongue and played nice. The last fucking thing I want to hear is a bunch of whining and excuses. Anyone can make a mistake but as soon as the excuses start my radar goes off. Between that and the state of the carpets in the common areas, I already have a pretty accurate picture of what goes on, which aint much. That and the high number of Altzheimers patients tells me that this is a warehouse-oriented facility.

He will NEVER stay there again. I will resort to arms.