This is either my impression of Ebola sweeping the nation or a quick iPhone shot through the windshield while zooming past Santa Fe on the latest 12-hour U-turn from Duke City to Bibleburg and back.
The maple in the front yard has commenced the annual leaf dump.
The Old Home Place® still stands, and I had a chance to chat with several of our former neighbors while trying to see how much stuff I could cram into a Subaru Forester without actually causing its rims to bottom out on the driveway.
This took my mind off what blithering eejits we’ve become over this Ebola business. Seems you don’t actually have to have the disease to shit yourself over it.
Tell you what, though. I get sick in Texas, I’d rather see a barber than a Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital sawbones.
The Turk’ enjoyed some backyard time while I cleaned a bike in honor of the summer solstice.
Summertime, and the livin’ is easy. Just ask the Turk’, who enjoyed a little outside time in the Mad Dog Media Botanical Gardens, a.k.a. “Weedpatch,” as I washed a bike in honor of the solstice.
Shortly thereafter it began raining off and on, with thunder for flavor, and the feline outings, bicycle riding and Old North End Garage Sale took back seats to working and earning.
Speaking of which, I can see I’ve been going about the latter activities all wrong. Clarity is so 15 minutes ago. If a guy could only learn to deploy with a straight face semantically null phrases such as “further leverage,” “cultural and creative assets,” “place of choice,” “launching new ideas” and “preserving our rich cultural heritage,” why, People of Money would write us fat checks for doing absolutely nothing beyond talking authoritatively and incomprehensibly out of our asses.
Toward that end I’m pleased to announce the formation of the Caramillo Street Collective for Creative Obfuscation, whose sole purpose it shall be to talk shit for money. I know, that sounds an awful lot like what I already do, but trust me, this is a radical departure from business as usual at Chez Dog. It’s a means of further leveraging my cultural and creative assets from my place of choice to launch new ideas that preserve my rich cultural heritage.
A Subaru Impreza that’s belching cigarette smoke from the driver’s window is hardly a “Partial Zero Emissions Vehicle,” which is marketing bullshit anyway. It’s either a zero-emissions vehicle or it isn’t.
PZEV sounds like the sort of stealth fart we used to call a “one-cheek sneak.” Elevate half the butt slightly above the plastic chair and let fly as the teacher pauses in mid-lecture to take a breath.
Pppppppzeeeeeeeevvvvv.
I found myself stuck behind this PZEV shit (that’s an audio pun, son!) while riding my Vespa over to the scooter shop for its annual maintenance and a minor repair. Interesting how the de rigueur carry for a lit cig’ these days is out the window. As much as the fuckers cost you’d think the addicts would want to keep all those expensive carcinogens inside the car where they can get full value out of each nicotine stick.
But what do I know? I shed that particular vice three decades ago, when a carton of Marlboros cost less than a Subaru.
Still, if ever there was a bad week to quit smoking, this was it. Smack in the shitter goes Iraq, with all the usual suspects slithering out from under their rocks to flicker their forked tongues for fun and profit — including Dickless Cheney and his carpetbagger kid, who’s so overfed and under-taught that she couldn’t even queer a Wyoming election properly. Some 4,500 Americans dead in her daddy’s imperial fantasies and yet the cyborg sonofabitch walks the earth unfettered.
Plus Herself has been road-tripping again, leaving me in charge of quarters. The Augean Stables is what that is. Bowls to fill, litter boxes to empty, Boos to walk twice daily — did you know you have to pick up the dog shit now?
Well, here, anyway. In DC they put it on the Sunday shows and on the op-ed page of The Wall Street Journal.
Jesus H. Christ, how does Sen. Babbleyap McCrankypants (R-Off My Lawn) keep getting on TV? You’d get a smarter interview from a plastic plant at a nursing home. Or a sack of hair outside a barbershop that caters to the feeble-minded. Or a bag of Chinese hammers at Walmart.
You get the idea.
This bellicose plastic sack of wet war dreams never met a meat grinder he didn’t want to stuff someone else’s kid into. You could scrape enough stupid off his dumb ass to make a six-pack of Louie Gohmerts with enough left over for two Scientologists, a Fox News anchor and the DMV of your choice.
And I would like nothing better than to see some deceased grunt’s mom give him a roundhouse dick-punch with a roll of Kennedy half-dollars in her fist, just plain pop him like the pimple he is. Arizona and the nation would be better served by a Magic 8-Ball full of old Pat Buchanan columns.
Having enjoyed the tender mercies of military medicine as a child and the early days of HMOs as a young professional, I should be long past being surprised by the behavior of anyone working in what we jokingly refer to as health “care” in this country.
Still, even I can be taken aback from time to time. This morning, for example.
Our neighborhood doctor’s office was absorbed by a corporate entity a while back, and since has undergone the usual transformation, acquiring a “Brazil”-style voice-mail system, a shitload of attitude and a mania for following orders, as long as they don’t come from a patient.
For the purposes of our tale you should know that I’m a lifelong asthmatic, diagnosed around age 8 in Texas. And I like to hit the old albuterol inhaler a time or two before exercise, the way you might squirt a bit of ether into an old carburetor before firing up your ’54 Chevy. Last year, while getting a bum knee examined, I mentioned that I’d had trouble getting an albuterol prescription refilled and the doc grumbled, “We have to test for that, and I don’t have time today.”
Test for that? I’m only been asthmatic since 1962. The Air Force sawbones who diagnosed me is presently pushing up the daisies that are making me wheeze. “No, time, no time,” he said, scurrying off like a roach on a griddle.
Next time I saw him, concerning a tenacious case of Snotlocker Surprise, he had the time. “Wow, you really do have asthma,” he remarked, and wrote the ’script. No shit, Doctor Fuckin’ Welby. I examine the package upon pickup: One inhaler, “no refills, dr. auth. required.” Fuck me. Well, what the hell, I only use it before all the bike riding I’m not doing anyway.
Last week I noticed I was about two weeks away from running out of the stuff in one of the worst allergy seasons in recent memory and rang up the doc’s office to get a refill. Ha, ha, etc. The robot says doc doesn’t do that any more — patients are to phone the pharmacy’s robot, which will in turn ring up the doc’s robot, which will tip off the doc, who will OK the refill, whereupon the doc’s robot will give a thumb’s up to the pharmacy’s robot, which will call you when your prescription is ready for pickup.
None of this ever happens, of course, and my follow-up phone calls to both doc and pharmacy prove unproductive, like a bad cough.
So I pop round to the doc’s office, and that’s when it all goes pear-shaped.
The receptionist wears the expression of a intake officer at the county lockup. “Name! First name! Date of birth! When were you last here! Who did you see!” So right off we’re already enjoying each other’s company. I’m expecting the back room and the bullet-nosed flashlight at any moment.
And it got worse. The doc I saw was apparently not the one who wrote the ’script. That person works in another office. The robot spoke to her. She did not reply. Nevertheless, you were telephoned and informed that you must be seen before any drugs will be issued to you. You must see, you vill see Ze Doktor!
Um, no, Brunhilde. I couldn’t pick this ’script-writing phantom of whom you speak out of a lineup at gunpoint. I saw the dude, not her. Nobody ever called me or my wife — not him, her, or anyone else, including your robot. And no, I don’t need to be “seen,” what I need is some albuterol.
About this time someone in scrubs inserts her long and snoopy proboscis, like Brunhilde blessedly bereft of any glimmer of knowledge about the situation, and confirms that ja, ja, I must, I vill see Ze Doktor! Ve are only following orders! At no point, mind you, has either of these “health-care providers” apologized for inconveniencing a customer. I say “customer” rather than “patient,” because neither had either inquired about my actual health.
“Can you breathe? Sir, are you having an asthma attack? Your face seems to be swelling ominously and turning a fiery red. …”
And at that point I may have inquired whether my getting a simple prescription refill without physician intervention might free up Scrubby’s time for treating an actual sick person in dire need of her mad skillz, and she may have suggested that I seek my medical care elsewhere henceforth, and I may have praised her for providing the first sound medical advice I’d ever received from her organization, and proclaimed that I intended to take it straight away, while adding that under new ownership what once was a friendly neighborhood doctor’s office had become as penetrable as North Korea with the sort of customer service one expects from a pimply teenage malcontent stocking shelves at a K mart scheduled for closure and demolition.
Take a deep breath, you say? I got 17 more of ’em left in this inhaler.
Mad Blog Media 