Observances

Today a woman (and I use that term loosely) approached me while dancing a lemur-like dance, with her arms waving in the air as she seemed to leap and fling herself with her hips, all while singing. Others in the room were heard as if their speakers were on a two or three, and her voice was booming at nine, causing me to recoil. It took effort not to protect my ears, as my hand instinctively wanted to do. My eyes decided to make up for it by blinking so rapidly that it nearly caused me to have a seizure. She roared and laughed out this story about how her parents only ever played 50s music when she was growing up, some 25 years after the 50s I should add, and she still loved it to this day. In fact, things in life all somehow corresponded back to various songs in her memory bank, and often she is overcome with the need to sing the appropriate song for the occasion.

All I could think about was how I would really like to punch her right in the nose.

You do not behave this way in public, and you certainly don’t walk up to a group of complete strangers singing, dancing like a rhythmless white girl, and then telling everyone around about your childhood music experiences, and how they turned you into a raving lunatic.

She was way too goddamn happy. Drugs? Mental illness? In need of a good ass kicking? Some pampered princess who has never experienced life? What? What makes someone this freakishly happy? Whatever it is, we must seek the cause and kill it. People like her shouldn’t be allowed to walk around behaving this way. And if they are truly this happy, they should be forced to keep it to themselves.

Singing when there’s no music? Um, no. This is why people like me hate musicals. Only deranged, drugged or damaged people do this. Dancing, and very badly at that, when there’s no music? Even worse. In public, surrounded by strangers? Oh boy. Stand back. And then telling them half your life story? Euthanasia is the only option.

Happy, loud people who share too much: hate them.

* * *

On Monday, I had a series of appointments with multiple doctors scheduled back to back to back, and the first took far less time than anticipated, so I found myself driving around Bannockburn, Illinois, wasting time until my next appointment.

Bannockburn lies among the other North Shore suburbs like Highland Park and Lake Forest, notorious for their wealthy residents. I’m not a huge fan of the rich. I worked in Highland Park too long and was treated so poorly by much of the clientele that I have a bitter taste in my mouth each time I drive through the area, even 13 years later. However, I had time to kill and I decided to take a gander at how the rich and famous live.

Do you know what? Most of those houses were fugly! Big, square, obnoxious monstrosities! Some had these hideous metal sculptures in their front yard, as if to give passersby the impression that the owner had avant-guard flair, which translated to me as a wealthy version of pink-fucking-flamingos. Tacky. My eyes threatened to sprain from rolling so much. Who the hell takes themselves this seriously? There were some gorgeous homes, don’t get me wrong, because not everyone who has money is totally in love with himself and is trying to persuade others to feel the same. How insecure can you be? Why would you live in a home that has only three windows and is shaped like a psychotic architect tried to incorporate every conceivable shape into different rooms in the same house? I couldn’t help but laugh.

It made me realize that we aren’t so different from the rich. They’re just as moronic and garish as we are, trying hard to be noticed. The only difference is they have more money.

Yet I did notice a few more differences.

For one, they had hardly any for-sale signs. If you drive through my neighborhood, there are easily two or more houses for sale on every block, and these don’t include the ones that sit empty, nor do they include the ones recently foreclosed. Everywhere you look, homes are for sale by me, and they remain for sale for months on end, until the signs rot and fall over on the lawn. So, unless the rich sell their mansions in a way that doesn’t include public signage, it seemed to me that the folks in Bannockburn aren’t struggling with the same economic problems we are.

Another thing I noticed was the street names. Tennyson, Keats, Kipling, Malory, and Shelley. No matter how ugly your house is or what nasty metal atrocities you install on your front lawn, you are automatically filled with self-importance when you live on Bentley Drive. This is in direct contrast to my ‘hood, where we live on streets like Misdemeanor, Pimp and Smack. There is no Masters Lane in my town, no matter how you interpret that. And there is no Martin Luther King Drive in the wealthy areas. There is no irony there. It’s just kind of sad.

Something that gave me a little bit of comfort was the fact that gas is a full dollar per gallon higher in Bannockburn than it is an hour away by my house, which is still 20¢ per gallon more than our neighboring states. Go ahead and speculate on what drives gas prices and if we ever should’ve been paying more than we are now, which is still too much.

* * *

While visiting my favorite doctor, I had a little conversation with him about drugs, because the meds I’m on are causing so much trouble for me. The anti-malarial drug is a chemo med, so in addition to the digestive disruptions, nausea, hair loss, fatigue, bruises with no known cause all over the body, and muscle weakness, the medication somehow interferes with whatever it is that tells the bladder to hold the urine until it’s full, so I have to pee about every 2 hours, around the clock, day and night. Boyfriend Extraordinaire thinks I’m having hearing loss as well, though I’m not convinced of this yet. All this doesn’t even touch on what the steroids do, which I’ve actually become accustomed to suffering from at this point. My doctor shook his head and was grateful that my other doctor discontinued the Plaquenil and gave me a diuretic to help with the fluid retention in my neck, hands and feet. However, he warned me that the diuretic will make me pee even more, which I thought wasn’t possible, but he was right.

He looked so distraught about my side effects that I felt I had to comfort him a bit.

I said, “Meh, all drugs have side effects. What I don’t understand is why are they all negative? Why do medicines make you nauseated? Or make your hair fall out? Or make you have to pee every 90 minutes? Why don’t any of them have a single GOOD side effect… like… whitening your teeth… or… making your boobs perkier?”

He laughed and said, “Oh, wait! There’s Rogaine! That was designed for something else and someone started noticing that people were growing their hair back.”

I replied with surprise. I had no idea Rogaine had other intended purposes.

He continued, “And there’s Viagra!”

I piped up, “Oh yeah! That was a cardiac medication, wasn’t it?”

“Yep, a cardio-pulmonary drug that had this interesting side effect. Hehe, and then they just changed the dose by a few milligrams, and charged A TON more money for the specialized dose, and that’s what Viagra is today. A total marketing scam!”

“Ugh, of course,” I moaned.

“I get male patients who beg me to prescribe it and say it’s for their pulmonary problems so that they don’t have to pay the high price for it, but no, I can’t do that.”

I giggled and said, “Darn, you should, and stick it to them!”

Then I paused, thinking of the great pun I unintentionally made and we both started laughing again.

I have faith that this doctor does not live in one of those geometric homes with sharp protrusions of oddly shaped rooms, tiny windows, and unsightly sculptures on his lawn. He’s way too cool for that.

* * *

Tonight, the premiere of “Celebrity Rehab” aired and I am already emotionally invested in some of the addicts. I desperately want Rodney King to do well, make friends, and have a good life. Steven Adler, I’m afraid to see where things lead him because he looks like he’s too far gone to save. I want the rest to do well, of course, particularly Jeff Conaway because I can’t stand the idea of him being back over and over. However, there are two characters (and I use that term accurately) who are going to make me have violent outbursts just watching them. Jeff’s girlfriend is one of them, and I actually hate her so much that I wish she’d just overdoes already and be out of the picture. The other is Gary Busey, but I think that if he hangs out for a few more days, the rest of the people are going to kill him. THAT will be a good episode to watch! Dr. Drew might even join in, and my crush on him will only intensify. Damn this show for hooking me all over again!

No Greater Exodus In History

The Crackhead has left the building!

Much to my surprise, she moved out about two weeks ago because all of her utilities had been shut off, one by one, over the course of a week, and when the weather got hot, she abandoned the house to stay with a friend. She also left behind her three cats and her 20-year-old daughter. The daughter finally moved out Saturday, but she, too, left the cats behind.

Crackhead’s Daughter knew someone who was friends with movers, and the movers packed up her stuff and took her to the new place as a favor to the mutual friend. The guys were not shy about what they found in that house. When I left my place on Saturday, one of the guys had picked up a box of books in the garage, but he couldn’t get halfway down the driveway with it before he dropped it and started gagging violently. The books in the box shared their space with thousands of maggots, and when he lifted it up, maggots fell out of the small holes in the box, and it took him about three full minutes of fiercely shaking his hands while shuddering from head to toe before he convinced himself that there were no more maggots on him. He looked at us looking back at him in horror and he announced, right in front of Crackhead’s Daughter, that he’s seen a lot of disgusting houses, things he couldn’t even talk about, and this was the second worst house he’d ever moved. He said he might never feel clean again. Then he frantically started screaming about what the hell maggots would be doing in a box of books. Crackhead’s Daughter didn’t say a word, just hung her head.

When I came home many hours later, the movers were gone, as were the humans, but the three cats sat in the upstairs windows that were left open, and meowing like crazy. No one knows if anyone in the Crackhead Family left them food or water. Police were called, but said they couldn’t come out to remove the pets unless someone was in the house to let them in. What? Since when? That’s not what I see on Animal Cops!

The absentee landlord lives in Florida and owns about two dozen houses in my subdivision, all of which he rents to out as Section 8 housing. They are all problems, but my neighbors took the cake. He evicted Crackhead in May, but out of the kindness of his heart (cough, sputter) allowed her to find a place to live before hiring someone to heave out all her shit. Isn’t that nice? Nice, considering he’s refused to respond to the hundreds of complaints from neighbors and the association, that start out begging and end up threatening him if he doesn’t do something about Crackhead. Finally he gave her the heave-ho. It’s been 12 years of suffering.

Today was the heaving day.

An industrial-sized dumpster sits on the lawn that we share, and it is full to the tippy top of some of the foulest smelling garbage you’ve ever suffered. There was a solitary man hired to dump all the detritus left behind, and he too was not shy about complaining to the spectators about what he found inside. A minimum of two animal corpses were found in the house, so decomposed that they weren’t identifiable as cat or dog, and one is beneath a refrigerator in the garage that the dumper didn’t get to yet. There were some pieces of furniture that were put in the dumpster, which were soaked through and through with urine, and stained with mysterious substances that one didn’t even want to imagine. The smell of ammonia was so strong it would make your eyes water if you were downwind. Without the ammonia on the wind, the pungent, ever-present stench was that of rot. Food, flesh, feces, or anything carbon-based rotted in that home for years, and the fetid odor now sits outside in a dumpster, less than 10 feet from my windows. However, by and large, the majority of what the dumper found in the home and garage was a collection of garbage, bagged up and piled to the ceiling, probably dating back a year or more. Crackhead had stopped paying for her garbage pickup and just kept the garbage in the house. This is an improvement from the time period when she stacked it up in 5-foot piles against the back of her garage until her entire yard was covered in bags of garbage, and the village would do nothing about it. Only the landlord threatening to evict her got her to clean up the yard, and she took carloads of garbage bags, some that had broke open and were seeping decayed waste, and she left them in dumpsters behind various local businesses in the middle of the night. After that she must have started piling them in the garage, and when the garage was full, she piled them in the house.

The dumper got to the house early this morning and called the police immediately to come for the cats. The dispatcher said someone would be there before 3:30 that afternoon (because that’s when he told them he was leaving), but no one ever showed up by 5:30 when he actually left. No one showed up at all.

I don’t know what must be worse for those cats. Living in that landfill with people for companionship, and perhaps some food and water occasionally; or living in the house after it’s been gutted of most of the filth, with no companionship or sustenance. I’m thinking the former. And I’m also thinking that they probably won’t live much longer if the dumper didn’t think to leave them some clean water.

But, at least three of their other four-legged roommates had died in that house, never to be removed, and I know damn well if they were humans, they’d be so psychologically damaged that they might not ever be adoptable. Who knows what kind of diseases they carry, too. I just don’t want to know. Yet, if the police do not remove those cats tomorrow, I’m going to start calling for reinforcement from other agencies to put pressure on them. I drove home tonight and three squad cars were sitting at the local bank clocking speeders and talking, even though the dispatcher said they were too busy to pick up the cats. Not acceptable.

Obviously there have been years and years of egregious behavior on the part of the officials whose jobs dictated that they wrangle up people like Crackhead, and make them responsible for their actions. From the police, to the village, to the landlord, and all the governmental agencies that did surprise inspections of that house to ensure that her benefits should continue, they all failed so epically here that it just seems like an apathetic punctuation mark at the end of long era of not giving a shit. Yep. Cats. Left alone in the pit. No one came for them. The end.

But it’s not the end. And I’ll fight to get someone to try to rescue those cats. They deserve better than this, even if it’s months of medical care followed by a life in a cage at a shelter, awaiting adoption.

And I’ll fight harder if they renovate that house and rent it to another crackhead.

This is a legacy that needs to die.

Dirty Old Men Should Not Bother Dirty Young Women

Most things sexual don’t offend me save for a few really heinous proclivities that involve scat, urine, pain, blood or other such extreme. I don’t pretend to understand many of the fetishes out there, such as feet or shemales, but I don’t judge, and wish everyone well in the exploration of their sexuality, as long as it’s legal and harms no one else. There haven’t been all that many mainstream movies rated R or weaker that I’ve found to be gratuitous unless it was violent or overly cheesy. Pretty much, unless it’s a rape scene (which I don’t consider sexual, though it has sexual parts involved) or something so outrageous as to be laughed at, it’s pretty difficult to make me uncomfortable watching a sex scene in a conventional movie.

Today, when I was speaking with someone who went off a little on a rant about the sexuality in movies today, I was offended. He didn’t describe any scenes and he didn’t say any words that upset me, but it was the way he spoke that made me sick. First there was the lisp, which in and of itself isn’t offensive in any way, but when spoken by this man in a despicable kind of way, it came off as nasty. Second, he drew out the words he was trying to emphasize in a way that made it seem torturous to be waiting so long for the word to finish. Then there was the fact that he was about 80 years old and had just spent quite a while telling me about all the hot women in Hollywood, like Denise Richards, Sarah Michele Gellar, and Michelle Pfeifer.

He told me about nice movies I should watch, like Simply Irresistible, One Fine Day. (Gag.)

“You know, without all that NAAAAASTY SEXXXXXY stuff.” I just knew spittle was everywhere, and that was more unnerving than any movie he might have been referring to.

He said, “Have you ever seen the movie Wild Things?”

I thought to myself, oh no, that’s the movie with Neve Campbell and Denise Richards making out. Here we go! He’s going to tell me about how his god doesn’t allow two women to kiss, or some such anti-gay sentiment.

Wrong!

He loved it. He also liked Unfaithful, which I found surprising how intensely sexual it was. Then he started talking about how you could see up Michelle Pfeifer’s dress in the Fabulous Baker Boys, and she wasn’t wearing underwear. Also, he liked the movie Inventing the Abbotts, because there was a scene in it where Jennifer Connelly showed her white panties to someone under a table.

Suddenly I was feeling a lot like actual sex scenes were far more sterile than some panty-flashing that this man was describing. He was like a horny teenager who could list 50 years worth of movies that included nudity.

Then he really offended me by starting to list all the actresses he thought were beautiful, and all the ones he thought were ugly. What bothered me most was that this man was grossing me out on a level I haven’t experienced in a long period of time, and he had the nerve to think that his opinion about what women he thought were ugly were somehow thoughts worthy of sharing. The ones he didn’t like are ones who’d never flashed breast or buttock, coincidentally. Yet, he would continually interject certain movies that he thought were too sexual and offensive to him.

This is when I realized that overt sexuality doesn’t bother me. It’s when some dirty old man gets a kinky thrill out of seeing Sandra Bullock’s breast and then telling me about it, and then I’m ready to spit.

Give me the foot fetishists, men in drag, boys with toys, chicken-fuckers and gang-bangers any day of the week as long as I don’t have to talk to the dirty old man who likes to talk about his softcore fetish.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to go sandblast myself until I’m clean again.