Thursday I was off to the hearing center for my annual
appointment with the audiologist. It’s been five years since my last, full audio
test in the sound proof room and she wanted to do another. Okay, fine by me. My
hearing hadn’t gone down a lot in that time which was good news so she cleaned
out my aids, put new and bigger tips on the tubes so they’ll quit popping out
when I turn my head a certain way and she programmed them up a notch. She also
sold me a year’s worth of batteries for twenty bucks---roughly twenty-five
cents each. (How can they do that?) Once in a while she’ll send me to another
room so the doctor can clean the wax out of my ears, but that didn’t happen
Thursday. But I do wish I could have taken the dog with me and have his ears
cleaned. Levi’s ears have been bothering him and the eucalyptus based product I
bought at the pet store leaves him smelling like a vaporizer is running around in
the room. It works, though. A couple of treatments and the wax build-up was
gone and now I have an eight ounce, eight dollar bottle to use up before it
expires on Election Day, 2020. Should I try it on myself?
Speaking of elections, be forewarned this paragraph will be
a political rant so skip it if you only want fluffy reading. Okay, here
I go: This past year Trump with Mitch McConnell’s help in the Senate gave
millionaires and billionaires massive tax breaks which has driven the deficit
up 18%, setting new records. It’s projected with our 2019
budget we’ll be spending $4,407 trillion and only taking in $3,422. So what did
Mitch have to say about that this morning? He says it’s time to make cuts in
Medicare, Social Security and Medicaid. There is something grossly obscene
about a senator worth 22.5 million dollars voting himself a giant tax
cut then wanting to balance the federal budget on the backs of elderly
women who have to go to food banks to make ends, the mentally ill who live
on the streets and all of us slightly better off retirees who worry
about our money lasting until we die. What Mitch fails to acknowledge is that
Social Security is basically self-funded and the growing costs in Medicare and
Medicaid is mostly due to the Baby Boomers coming into the programs. The sheer number of Boomers has
always driven the marketplace. If the Senate doesn’t turn blue, and Mitch remains in
control, he’s declared the changes he'll be pushing through. Believe him! The
primaries are coming. VOTE!
Resuming my milk toast post: After leaving the building
where the audiologist is located I got to wondering once again why they have a
doorman for a building with only twelve office suites in the whole place. In my entire
life it’s the only building in town I’ve ever been to with a doorman. The
building is in an upscale neighborhood with no foot traffic, no panhandlers to
wander in…maybe a little wildlife would if they had motion sensing doors, but
the only automated part requires a person to push a button if you’re using a
wheelchair and the doorman is off peeing in the bushes or what else a doorman
would be doing if not on duty.
Back to my end of town I had to go to Pac Mail to buy a box for
an awkward thing I want to sell on e-Bay and when I got to the door I saw a 40-ish woman
about twenty-five feet away carrying a large box to ship. So I waited for her
and held the door open. She thanked me and walked right up the counter to be
first in line. If the tables were reversed I would have told the person who
held the door for me to go ahead. If not for me playing doorman for her I would
have been to the counter and told the clerk what I wanted while she was still
struggling to get into the place. It irritated me that I got irritated on a
beautiful, sunny day over a breach of what I consider to be proper etiquette.
I should have body-slammed her out of the way and said, "Age before beauty."
Next on my list of stops was lunch at the Guy Land Cafeteria
with some people watching for dessert and I hit the jackpot. I got to listen to
a young, sexy guy with a Sam Elliot voice banner with a Jennifer Lopez look alike sitting in
another booth. Before he was done he learned where she worked---she had two
jobs---and what shifts she worked, the neighborhood she lived in, that she and her
last boyfriend parted on friendly terms. One question and answer after another. When he got up to leave he walked over
to the girl, grabbed her hand and shook it. What kind of guy does that? A guy who
then says, “I’ll be seeing you again.” That low, sexy voice would have
left me in a puddle panting. She seemed to vaccinated again its power but she
didn’t act like he was saying that in a stalker kind of way either. Still, I couldn’t
help wondering if she realized how much personal information she’d just given to a
total stranger. I’ve gotta quit watching You,
the psychological thriller series on Lifetime. He could have been Joe stalking Beck. So I memorized their faces just in case her “Missing!”
posters start popping up on power line poles... ©
