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!
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| End of year 2024 |
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| Early 2025 |
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