2025: Perhaps the Worst Affluent Year of My Life

 What do I mean by the title? I'm one of those guys who never figured out WTF I was supposed to be doing with my life. That line by Rodger Hodgson in his last album with Supertramp always sticks in my mind:

"I never knew what a man was supposed to be.

"I never wanted the responsibility."

Spent high school being told that I'd aced every aptitude test ever devised by man, and that I could be anything I wanted from a chemist to a journalist to a musician. Big help that, as I was confused enough as it was. In the end, I think I was just an absolute genius at taking multiple choice tests and nothing else. I went to a trade school the year after graduation, and was all thumbs. I could stand over people and tell them exactly how to repair something, but couldn't get my own hands to do what I knew needed to be done. I got infuriated with rusted bolts, grease-caked worn out parts, and in general things that didn't work the way they should after I'd followed every procedure to the letter.

I joined the army just before turning 20, and was basically a smart guy in a dumb job. I did clerical and data processing work in Washington DC during two tours, with three years in a corps headquarters in Germany in between. Didn't want to make the army a career, as just about everything about it seemed mindbogglingly wasteful, inefficient, and stupid... but I worried about WTF to do after I got out.

Much as I was sick of abstract thinking and traditional academic study by the end of high school, I'm one of those people who actually BELONGED in college and was really rather out of place trying to do things that didn't require a degree. I started taking evening classes in DC, and by the time I got out of the army in January 1981 I had my bachelor's degree  and had pretty much aced the GMAT exam for graduate study,

Long story short, I ended up with a master's degree in linguistics, a rather esoteric field that left me--again--wondering how in fuck's name I was supposed to make a living in this world. I ended up teaching English abroad, first in Peru, then Japan, then Mexico, then in Japan again. The last job abroad paid pretty well, and I I saved enough to spend the rest of my career teaching part time in community colleges in the U.S. while investing in real estate in California before prices went from insane to head-smashing bonkers.

The Big Picture here is that I spent the first thirty years of my life poor. My folks always lived paycheck to paycheck, and I HATED the way they  were always fretting about money while I was growing up in the sixties. I was very frugal, could always make what I earned go a long way, and saved substantially enough that I owned some nice stuff... but there was always that nagging question of what's next, how I was going to actually get anywhere in the long term.

From about 30 on, I had some breathing room but still wondered how I was going to make a long-term living and WTF I wanted to be when I grew up... if at that point I ever would. There were a couple of girlfriends--both over four years older than myself--in Peru and Japan who very much wanted to get married to me, but I worried about how the heck I could support them and thrive at the same time. One eventually married a guy older than herself, and the other I kept advising to do so, though I really don't know what became of her.

From mid-thirties to just after 40, I stayed at the same job in Japan and came back to the U.S. once a year, saving a lot of money and gradually buying up property. From about 1990 on, when I was 35, I'd say I was into my "affluent years." I was no longer worried too much about money or making a living, and knew I'd make it as long as I didn't do something stupid like get married and have kids with the wrong woman.

The years since then have had their ups and downs, but lack the drama and existential angst of youth. Besides that, I acquired a lot of hired help that I've kept around for decades. I have a regular insurance agent, tax preparer, mechanic, handyman, and several property management companies for the places in California and Arizona.

These folks absorb a lot of the headaches I used to deal with myself when my affairs weren't as complicated. Last year, in 2025, I absolutely would have lost my mind if I had to deal with the otherwise unbearable shit-slides that rolled my way seemingly endlessly and one after another. That's what the title of this entry means.

It all began around mid-2024, actually. I began waking up with weird round marks on my face and other parts of my body, or sometimes scratch marks that looked as if I'd been mauled by a bobcat. I'd break out in hives at unpredictable times, my upper or lower lip would swell up for an hour or so, and I'd sneeze uncontrollably sometimes two dozen times straight. After awhile, my bed sheets and pillow were covered in drops of blood.

After a month at my place in Prescott, I returned to San Diego in late October 2024 and lay down on clean sheets, exhausted from the long drive. I woke up in the wee hours to find my futon bed crawling with bugs, which I quickly concluded were bedbugs. In a way it was a relief to finally know what had been causing all these weird symptoms over the past half year or so. At least now I had a specific problem to address.

After a month of washing, spraying, vacuuming, and laying out diatomatious earth (however that useless recommendation is spelled), I finally decided to hire a pest control company, For about $800, they came out and sprayed four times while I spent most of December back in Prescott. Meanwhile, I found that I had the same problem at my place there too!

Well, on Christmas Eve I returned to San Diego and immediately saw a bedbug crawling up my living room wall. I went to bed that night and got eaten alive. I might as well have flushed $800 down the toilet, and now I had them in Prescott too as well as San Diego.

The day before New Year's, I headed out to my place in Miami Beach for a month, only to find them THERE as well! More washing, spraying, vacuuming, hoping, praying, cursing, crying.

Once back in San Diego, I tried another company for heat treatment, this time for $1,000 to treat both my small condo and my vehicle. Within a week, it was obvious that I still had bedbugs. I called the company back, actually a guy and his wife with a few other employees, and he told me that my concrete floor topped with jute rugs made for a perfect bedbug environment. The concrete couldn't heat up enough with the rugs on top, and the loose-weave rugs were bedbug Nirvana. I asked him why in hell he didn't advise of that in the first place.

ANOTHER month of following everyone's useless advice and trying to deal with this infuriating problem myself. I threw away basically everything I owned: the jute rugs, old clothes I seldom wore, decades old journals I knew I'd never refer too, pillows, cushions, curtains... you name it. More spraying, vacuuming, washing... and still bedbugs!

Another trip to Prescott for a month, where I hired a company to do a canine inspection of the house. The goddamned dog couldn't detect any bedbugs... So WHY do I have bites all over my fucking face, I asked the guy. No good answer. After more of the same, the problem seemed to go away... but by now I was far far beyond feeling reassured by temporary respites.

Now it's the beginning of May. The heat treatment guy and his wife come out a second time to do a second treatment with a small discount. I wake up the next morning to a bedbug crawling in my bathroom sink...

This is really just the backdrop to my dealings with The Tenant from Hell at my folks old house, which I'd bought from the estate when my dad passed away in 2011. In 2020--shortly before the tenant moved in and immediately got exemption from paying rent due to the pandemic--it had required almost $30,000 of repairs when the sewer line rusted and the master bathroom became unserviceable. I hired a well-known shit-for-brains company to remodel the bathroom, and a contractor through the management company to dig up and replace the sewer line.

By 2024, the fiberglass floor of the new bath was cracking due to improper installation. The management company and I have since spent countless hours on correspondence, trying to get the company to make good on its warranty. Meanwhile, I had to hire someone else to replace the bathroom and keep the unit from being uninhabitable. Every time I see an advertisement for that fucking company, I want to kick the TV screen in.

By 2025, the OTHER bathroom floor had collapsed due to a leak that the tenant failed to report to us. At one point, neither bathroom was usable, and the tenant stopped paying rent. By midyear, I had to pay for two bathroom replacements plus legal fees to evict this tenant, who couldn't afford the rent anyway and had found these problems a wonderful excuse to spend a year living in the house free. By the time it was done, I was out another $25,000+.

The tenant was finally evicted, and two months of renovations and repairs followed. I spent a lot of time there, and did some of the work myself. Since June, there have been new tenants who pay on time and apparently are very happy with the place.

No sooner did that misadventure get resolved than my other rental unit in San Diego, a duplex in the same SDSU area, started having problems with drainage backup of its own. It tended to happen on weekends, with the tenants calling in emergency plumbers who charged upwards of $900 each the multiple times they had to come out  and clear the pipe.

In the fall, I finally plopped down another outrageous amount to have the front yard dug up and re-piped after clearing the roots that had been causing the problem.

 All of this while battling bedbugs in three of my own residences in three different states. Friends and relatives sympathized with my occasional rantings in despair and impotent rage, but none of them, of course, wanted me anywhere near their places or to be anywhere near mine. There are still occasional mysterious marks on my skin when I stay in Prescott or Miami Beach, and an irregular stream of them in San Diego. Perhaps the worst is over, or perhaps I'm just thinking wishfully to keep from jumping off the La Jolla cliffs in utter aggravation, but I know at this point that I'll never be completely rid of this cursed problem. I feel at times that it's the reason I never married or had kids, as I can't imagine dealing with this with other people in my household and/or trying raise a family.

In a macabre twist perhaps, I chose last year to finally make arrangements for internment in a national cemetery. Dumb as my years of military service were, I earned the privilege... and as with everything that ever had to do with it, dealing with the VA over this turned out to be an endless horsefuck. Finally, months after submitting all of the required paperwork with no response, a helpful employee at Miramar National Cemetery transcribed the information from my copy of the paper application onto an online form. A week or two later, I had my letter of eligibility for internment there.

This year  has started with an enormous headache over the insurance on all of my rental properties having to be terminated and reinitiated with an affiliate due to reorganization of the company. This resulted in cancellation of one California Earthquake Authority policy, and inability to pay the premium on the other due to computer glitches. I followed up and followed up and nagged and pestered over problems caused by other people and matters that had until then been on autopay and out of sight / out of mind.

So you see, I would have gone completely insane by now were I not a big boy with plenty of hired help to turn to in dealing with these aggravating adult-sized problems. It's really just an extrapolation of what I've been going through since I was about 8, with the old familiar refrain from acquaintances and observers: No wonder you prefer to be alone! How do you keep from losing your mind and going absolutely berserk on someone?

If 2026 doesn't provide some relief, I'll likely end up in that national cemetery sooner rather than later!

End of year 2024 

Early 2025

                                 

Preflight Trip

Haven't had much to say for the past couple of years... not on here anyway. Will vent from time to time on facebook groups and pages, but it's nearly impossible to have an intelligent discussion on social media. So many there feel free to be as rude as they like from behind a screen. I'm 71 now, probably look it, and will get snarky comments about wearing a toupee or such whenever someone disagrees with my point of view. I keep forgetting that people are often on there because they have absolutely nothing else to do, underemployed thirty-something bald-headed pricks or those types that wear a shower cap all the time because they know their hair is as ugly as everything else about them.

I digress. Am still reveling in the fact that I'm retired, even six years after the fact. I love the monotony of my current lifestyle, waking up and going to sleep whenever I want to, and doing pretty much the same things (nothing much) whether hangin' on 7.5 acres in rural Prescott, at my modest waterfront condo in Miami Beach, or at my equally cozy SDSU area condo in San Diego. I work with the HOA in San Diego, and can do so pretty easily even while out of town. When in town, I'm active with the local community council, and occasionally get invited to events at SDSU by virtue of being a lifetime alum and a legacy donor. I take an active interest in my rental properties, and often work on them myself.

There are huge swaths of downtime, but it sounds impressive and keeps me busy enough.

This little slice of life entry is about January 29th, the day I left on a redeye flight for Miami after spending the time since Thanksgiving week in San Diego, and the month before that in Prescott. Was going to do a deep cleaning of the San Diego condo on getting back in town, but put it off until the day before leaving for Miami. This is because it's a 575 square foot place with a lot of stuff, being my home of record and, by default, primary residence. It's a pain in the ass to clean, as you have to move everything to another place in order to clear out a space to clean. The whole process takes about five hours, and I hate every minute of it.

Therefore, I did a quick tidying up and set up the Christmas decorations for a little less than two weeks, then took them down on the 29th while finishing up the deep cleaning. Meanwhile, I'd gone in for a doctor's appointment on the 9th because my doctor never sees me and was curious to see how I was doing. Well, my pulse and blood pressure are like a teenager's, but my bloodwork was basically toxic waste. She told me, in essence, that I had to stop drinking or I was going to die soon.

This wasn't really a surprise, and once again I convinced a primary care physician to give me three months to lose weight and get things into a more normal state. It isn't that hard to quit drinking, as I don't really miss it when I abstain. Diet Dr Pepper and soda water in my fancy glassware works fine, and here in Miami Beach I've been pretty content to restrict my diet to black coffee or tea, fruit, granola bars, soup with a little extra meat and vegetables added, and whole wheat bread. Maybe I'll splurge on a real meal once a week. Am making some pretty dramatic progress, and will continue to do so.

As for the 29th, I got up reasonably early and spent much of the day getting the condo spic and span. Then I showered and shaved, put on the sweat pants and shirt that I always wear to fly, and set out for the airport via public transportation. There are several ways to do this. Often I'll walk a couple of miles to the Alvarado trolley station--which I think is now named for UCSD Medical Center East--and then catch the free shuttle from Old Town right to Terminal 2 at the airport. This time, though, I decided to walk a half mile down to College and University to catch the 7 bus to Balboa Park. The plan was to take a look at the Christmas displays, then walk down Laurel Street to catch a shuttle at the rental car center by the end of the runway.

There was all the time in the world to do this, luckily. I stopped at the Taco Bell at College and University, which I almost never frequent. When I was a little kid in the early sixties, there was a man who used to walk his dog up and down the drainage ditch behind our house on College Avenue. One day he told my dad that his house had been taken by eminent domain. The Mobil station with its Flying Red Horse was razed, and the Taco Bell went up. The man's house was knocked down to put up a parking lot for the Taco Bell. It seemed pretty stupid then, even to an eight year old kid, and my dad was so infuriated by it that he refused to go to that Taco Bell for decades.

Being over sixty years ago, I decided to let bygones be bygones and have one of the combination meals I'm familiar with from going to other Taco Bells. Trouble is, this one had one of those self-service kiosks that I can NEVER figure out how to use. After a half dozen aggravating experiences, I finally figured out how to get the one at the local Burger King to work... as long as I'm ordering something familiar. Otherwise, I avoid self-checkout; someone always has to assist me anyway and ends up almost as aggravated as I am by the time it's done.

Well, I tried three times to order my combination meal. The third time, I thought I'd got it; it took my name and gave me an order number. There's always a half dozen employees scurrying around in the back, and I managed to flag one down to ask if I could have my drink cup while I wait. She said the order didn't go through... I'm not one for screaming at minimum wage workers or acting out in public places, but I did turn on my heel and walk out the door with an emphatic "Aw, fuck this place!"

Then the bus comes, and I manage to get on the wrong one, ending up on the north end of Colina Park instead of along Park Blvd where I planned to take my long walk among the decorations. The driver actually tried to be helpful, but I was already pissed off over my latest misadventure with self-service kiosks. I told him, more abruptly than I probably should have, that I knew my way around this neighborhood where I'd grown up, and just needed to get to the airport without a lot of complications.

Well, after walking down 54th Street to University, it was easy to catch a 7 bus and get off by the Natural History Museum in Balboa Park. Here, this mundane and mildly aggravating day became memorable and even precious. There was Santa with his nine reindeer along the grassy path to the organ pavilion, looking just as they did when I first saw them in December 1957, shortly after I'd turned three and with my brother all of two weeks old. Then the booths with the dioramas of Jesus' birth and life, reassuringly familiar. I lingered a bit, a cynical adult with a mild case of the ass over the day's annoyances, yet misty eyed with nostalgia and sweet sadness.

From there, it was a brisk walk down Laurel Street, which goes down an abnormally steep hill to the I-5, and then on to Harbor Drive and the airport entrance. From there by the end of the runway, near where the original terminal once stood, it was an uneventful shuttle ride to Terminal 2. I sat for a short wait and recalled how we used to take my paternal grandmother, Mimi, to that little terminal for her return flight to Indiana after she'd spent the holiday season with us every other year throughout the sixties.

The airport is rather festive with its holiday decorations, and Phil's Barbecue within the security area provided me with a satisfying meal and none of that self-service kiosk stupidity. The flight was delayed an hour, but I was back to a reasonably good mood and counted my blessings that it wasn't cancelled altogether with all the weather delays. Though I had a nice window seat on the flight, I didn't sleep at all that I can recall. We got in to the familiar Miami International Airport around 7AM.

Then the airport express bus to Miami Beach, and a second bus to within a couple of blocks of my condo in the northernmost part of the city, just a five minute walk from where that complex in Surfside fell down in June 2021. Didn't see any of my neighbors for the first couple of days there, and spent most of the 30th asleep anyway.

That's a life highlight nowadays, traveling to the other side of the country so that I can hang in another beach town and spend most of the time doing nothing. Gotta love it!

Balboa Park, much as it's always been at holiday time

 

Day before Xmas 2024 in Borrego Springs
(yeah, a year ago)