There is something magical about the roads in Hemet. I have never, in all the places that I have ever lived or visited, seen anything quite like it. Whenever it rains, the roads in Hemet, and by extension, in San Jacinto, magically turn into rivers.

There is a tarred road in one instance, and then after a few raindrops—voila—there is a river flowing through State St., San Jacinto St., and through all the auxiliary streets that run across both cities. Florida Ave. is most suitable for whitewater rafting during a rainstorm and turns into a lake between Columbia St. and Cornell St. I have seen kids fishing there. We need a ferry to go across.

I used to think that this is a problem only with the old roads, built decades ago when the engineers had no idea about the intensity of local rains and the need to build an appropriate drainage system. But even the newer roads, like parts of Highway 71 or Sanderson Ave., have permanent “Flooded” signs placed all over the road. Sanderson Ave. stays flooded for days even after it has stopped raining. The engineers must have been from out of town, because they also did not build appropriate storm drains. They only followed a template to have puny, little openings to let the water seep in. These openings are so small that the water flows right across them and joins the water down the road until, well, a river is formed.

I see that our city is busy building a wall through the middle of Florida Ave., to keep the customers from coming into local shopping centers. As if we needed any additional help to make the local businesses to close down. They could have used the same resources to build better trenches instead, for the rainwater to go to some sort of a reservoir. But, as you know, that would be asking too much! We can’t have intelligent planning. We only have impulse planning and the impulse to hinder customer access to local businesses was so strong that we had cemented the middle of Florida Ave.

Now we have islands where homeless people crossing the road; at all the wrong places, of course, can stand safely from the moving traffic. Where, once these islands are fully paved, our girls can display their wares for the potential clients. I, on the other hand, have to go to the ends of Hemet and then make a U-turn to get to my cleaners or any fast food place.

Some city council members make a big show of pushing an owner of a local motel to change their sign, but the same city council members probably don’t travel on our roads during rainstorms. They don’t experience the thrill of driving when the water accumulates so much that all traffic must go through the middle of the road. You can practically shake hands with the drivers going in the opposite direction, that’s how close we have to travel. They don’t experience the adrenaline rush when the splash from the wheels of an obscenely large pick-up throws tons of water on my windshield, rendering me blind for a few seconds. I have to stop texting to make sure I don’t run into other blinded drivers.

I have seen only one attempt in the last seven years to fix the drainage problem near Meridian St. Unfortunately, the trench dug in the middle is so deep that the bottom of my car always ends up scrapping along the road because my tires are so deep in the dip. I have to weave across in such a way that each tire has to move in a different direction. By the time I complete going across the three or so feet, the light turns red and I have to endure friendly honking and lovely gestures from my fellow drivers.

To make things even more interesting, the river that runs through these streets always ends up taking parts of the streets with it. Each rainy season deprives the roads of their dignity until the tarred roads are nothing more than gravel roads. State St. has more cracks in it than my broken heart, after so many storms have come and gone in my life. Imagine the indignity, that Florida Ave. is always getting paved or cemented, while the stepchild that is State St., doesn’t even get a little pothole bandaged once in a while. It has to wither away with the rains, one tiny stone at a time.

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A Different Point of View

“Time heals all wounds” is an age old saying that people use to comfort someone who is sad, or hurt, or who has suffered a loss. The idea being that sadness lessens given enough time, or that the period of mourning will be over—eventually. I am talking about emotional and psychological wounds, of course, and not the actual, physical ones. Physical wounds, if deep enough, always leave a scar behind, with deep and thick scar tissue to remind us of the shock that caused it. Emotional and psychological wounds actually have a chance to fully heal and leave no scar tissue behind, as the wisdom goes, but do these wounds really heal completely, given enough time?

They don’t completely heal, we all know that. We can pretend that they are healed, because no one can really see the actual wound. It is us who feel the pain, and it is us, who have to deal with the suffering. We can pretend that we are not suffering, even when we can barely stand the suffocating pain. We can also pretend that there is no wound to begin with by repeating over and over that it didn’t hurt! At the same time, there are those who enjoy the pain and like to suffer. They keep picking on the wound, until it festers and gets infected, and gets loaded with, you know, the “p” word. Yes, there is an emotional equivalent of the “p” word to that of the “p” word for physical wounds.

Before I say more, let me tell you about my favorite meme about this subject. It goes like this: My therapist told me, “Time heals all wounds.” So, I stabbed him. Now we wait…

Heal, don’t heal! That’s not important. What is important is how we deal with the pain. As one smart cookie said that it’s what we do with the time that heals. Some prefer pain killers. Drinking comes to mind. The heavier the pain, well, the heavier the drinking. It is like applying Orajel to the area. Numb the heck out of your tissue. Eliminate all the nerves that keep firing and the pain is no longer there. It may be a temporary solution, but hey, it works for the time being. We can apply more when the pain starts again. Keep numbing the pain and eventually, the pain will be replaced with some other problem. That is one way to solve our dilemma, replace one pain with another.

Or we could replace the horse that we fell off, with another horse. Some of you may readily know what I am talking about. It is about replacing the source of the pain with another equivalent source. Run from the arms of one, into the arms of another. You can forget about the pain if you can find a way to forget about the pain-giver. This method works like magic. Poof, and we are on another track and setting ourselves up for another, but different pain.

There is also the option to be the one causing the pain and not be the one suffering from it. Break hearts instead of getting your own heart broken. Cause emotional trauma to others before someone can hurt your feelings. Go on the offense, instead of being on the receiving end of things. Take the first shot; throw the first punch; make the first move; throw the ball, long and deep.

My favorite technique is to not give a darn. Don’t let anything bother you. Be nonchalant, as people who know me are sick and tired of me saying that. If you don’t make yourself vulnerable to emotional and psychological distress, well, then no one can cause any harm. Just don’t fall in love, or be attached to anyone, or even care. Once you achieve this aloofness, there will never be any wounds that need healing. You’ll go through life with no pain, and with a lot of gain. You’ll see that people are drawn to you like flies. It is human nature to try to change you in such a way that you become susceptible to such harmful things like affection, friendship, and adoration. But you don’t really need any of them to live a successful and fulfilling life. Yes, people say that to truly be happy, you do need such things in life. My response is very simple: Why try to be happy and risk being hurt, when you can just be content and live carefree. Why, indeed!

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A Different Point of View

The customer is always right. That was the adage they used to hammer into our brains when I started my first business. That was what they taught us in all the business classes and that’s what the marketing geniuses always preached. I’ve spent most of my business life regurgitating that very same maxim.

But lately, I have to wonder if the truth to this dictum—yes, I have access to a thesaurus and I intend to abuse it to the max—still holds true. The real purpose behind this phrase is to reassure customers that they can expect the best service at your establishment and to make your staff work hard to keep customers happy by providing such service. But in today’s social media savvy (I mean heavy) environment, is the customer always right?!

In my experience, most customers are the silent type. They come to your business expecting good service and if they don’t get it, they simply go somewhere else. They don’t file any complaints, or demand to see the manager, or insist on talking to the owner. They simply take their business to another service provider.

There are, however, a lot of customers these days who fall into the category of “not always being right,” and they all seem to have been made worse by the existence of social media. They have been granted tremendous power—albeit unfair power—over local businesses by Yelp, Google, and other search engine based entities. Always ready at the drop of a hat to give a bad review, whether deserved or not, simply because they didn’t like the way you greeted them, or the way you handed them the money, or even the fact that it took a couple of minutes longer because you had a sudden rush and had to scramble to handle the extra load.

There are many types of these customers, each worst than the other and each determined to make your life, as a business, harder so that they can feel good about themselves and then share their “experience” with a really narrow and limited circle of friends.

The first type is my favorite. Customers that belong to this type are always looking for a refund. “I want my money back,” they would always shout because you missed this or you didn’t do that. Whatever they point to, is not even that significant sometimes. They want to feel superior by nitpicking on some shortcomings, real or otherwise. Sometimes they haven’t even paid for what they claim to be

missing. “Oh, you took too long.” “I had to wait close to an hour.” When you look at their receipt, it is not even twenty minutes, which is actually below the average time it usually takes. They just want their money back. When you explain to them that you have done over ninety-nine percent of the work, they still want their entire payment back because that one percent is all they “really” cared for.

The second type is the one that carries a perpetual chip on their shoulders. They are always playing the victim card and look for prejudice where there may be none to begin with. They justify their bad attitude by saying that you, as the business, don’t like them because they belong to a certain race or ethnicity, and your poor service is the result, even though there may not even be any poor service; they just want to see it that way. Any service is poor to them, no matter how hard you try to please them. They cannot be pleased. They don’t want to be pleased. That’s how they go through life.

The third type is the opposite one. They are the ones with their prejudice entirely on display. They are the ones that believe that you don’t belong in their neighborhood/city/country because you happen to look different from them. You are considered an outsider, even though you may have lived here longer than them. If you have an accent, even if the person with the accent is just an employee and the actual owner is one just like them, they would tell you to go back to where you came from. In my case, that would be West Covina. Horrible commute, but doable, if I must.

Then there are the dishonest ones, the cream of the crop, who try to find some way not to pay you for your service. My favorite line is, “Oh, I already paid.” When you ask to see the receipt, “Oh, I threw it away.” When you say that you are the only one collecting payments, they say, “Oh, I paid it to the other guy.” When you say that there is no other guy, we can check the cameras, then the foul language starts. They start cursing as if you are the one doing something wrong.

The customer is not always right. You must keep this in mind that this world is full of shysters, scammers, and thieves. Most of them end up at my business, and my employees, God bless them, have to deal with them on a daily basis.

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Now, I know that I am not the first person to say it, but that is the shortest fairy tale that one can write. It has that distant feel of a time long ago, maybe even of a land far away, and the warmth that comes with wishing for a happy ending.

The concept of “happily ever after” has eluded humankind ever since Eve took a bite of that wretched fruit. Some people say it was an apple, and I can never eat an apple without feeling that guilt of having done something wrong. Even though I wasn’t the one to blame, I still feel somehow responsible. Some cultures say that it was probably wheat. Therefore, eating bread is always considered harmful, and every diet that comes along—well, almost every diet—tends to emphasize giving up bread.

But, what really is “happily ever after”? I remember a comedian once said that when he was young, he would be watching TV and wishing that he was with someone special, doing things that bring “happy” to one’s self; now that he was old, he maybe with someone special, but find himself wishing that he was rather watching TV. As you can see, “happily ever after” is not the same as it once was. As we get older, our perspective on things changes; definitions of things change.

Fairy tales change their significance as we grow older. That may seem disappointing to some, but that is the reality of things. Disney has made a fortune from the stories of princesses and their associated princes, but can you imagine spending a lifetime with a princess. Imagine the frustration of going through each and every day. It is not just about singing and dancing; there is real life to live. And, kids, real life is never a fairy tale. There are bills to be paid, and I don’t know anyone who has the means to pay their bills when the “ever after” comes knocking on one’s door. Maybe someone like Bill Gates, possibly, but the rest of us don’t even have a prayer to rely on.

The other day Covered California ended my health insurance. There was no explanation, other than a note on my account that I had actually indicated to them that I didn’t need health insurance. For the life of me, I can’t see how in the world I would have said something like that. Call it a computer glitch, if you may, but my health insurance is canceled. All the appointments I had made, now can’t be kept. You can see how my “happily ever after” has suddenly hit a stumbling block.

I have a doctor friend who does not believe in pursuing “happily ever after.” You only get a few years of bliss, according to him, and then it is one long, empty, lonely stretch, where you spend time wondering where things went wrong. For most people, things went wrong with the arrival of their first child. It is downhill after that.

 The “high” of a newfound love fades away in three to four years, he says, and then you have to deal with one issue after the other, until you find yourself doing things separately from the other half of your “happily ever after.” Another friend is adamant that the passion we feel at the beginning of this journey, usually gives way to just merely cordial relationship, at best, towards the end. You might as well be brother and sister, according to him.

I believe in the theory that one should lease instead of purchase. The passion starts with a bang and then slowly fades away. It is time to then change to a newer, slicker model. Passion then starts again with a bang, and well, the cycle repeats itself.

I know some people would disagree with me and may even dismiss my babbling as nonsense, because they happen to have their “perfect companion” on their way to a blissful ending. I only add that it may be more blissful if they were traveling by themselves. At least they could then enjoy the journey, admire the scenery, without worrying about the constant nagging interruptions that inevitably creep in when one spends way too much time with another human being. Throw into the mix a bunch of kids, randomly spread throughout the trip, and see if anyone even listens to the cries of a wounded soul, yearning for a little attention, hoping for someone to give a darn.

Once upon a time, they “occasionally” lived happily. Now that sounds like a better tale.

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We all remember this age-old saying, meant to encourage us to complete our tasks in a timely manner, do our chores as soon as possible, and meet life’s challenges as they raise their ugly head. Finish your work now rather than postpone it for a later time. Do your homework as early as possible—something that I wish my kids would heed. Instead, they do their homework in the car on the way to school, on the day that it is due. (I have often wondered why their grades always seem to be stuck at C-minus.)

Do not procrastinate that would be the wisdom of this saying. I do procrastinate, though—and often—but I don’t know if that is such a bad thing. My wife calls me the man of tomorrow because I am always saying that I’ll do it tomorrow. Whatever “it” maybe; tomorrow is my target date to do it. Of course, there is another tomorrow after that one, and so on.

I don’t think it is procrastination that I suffer from, because I make a conscious decision to postpone some of my tasks; I am not just lazy about them. There are certain to-do items that one has to postpone; that would be the right thing to do. As a matter of fact, not postponing them would be wrong. There are times when it is better to wait and do it later, instead of doing it early or doing it on time.

I give you an example so you may understand my point. Four months out of every year, our electricity bill doubles, and sometimes triples, because California government has given its permission to the electricity providers, through legislation, to fleece us as much as possible. They call it charges based on demand. There is more demand for power in summer, and the charges automatically go higher. Now, like every red-blooded American, my paycheck is always a couple of weeks behind my bills. When electricity rates rise on a logarithmic scale, I can’t pay my bill on time, or at all. I make a deliberate decision not to pay it today and put it off for another day. It works well because once I pass the due date, I get a letter telling me that my power will be cut off on a certain date. Once I get close to that date, I then make payment arrangements. Sometimes my payment arrangements overlap with my next bill and I postpone paying both bills. Then I ask that my payment be split over three months. As luck would have it, every few months, I get five paychecks in one month because I get paid weekly. That fifth paycheck then allows me to cover all my shortfalls. Now if I don’t “procrastinate,” as my wife is so fond of pointing that out, I wouldn’t get the opportunity to catch up with my bills.

Another example would be a letter that I got from the IRS a while back. I could have opened it and found out what it was about and have dealt with the issue right then. But we all know that a letter from the IRS is never a good thing. Imagine the stress that I would have gone through had I opened the letter when I received it. It is not like the phone calls that we often receive where an agent of the IRS, with an Indian, or Chinese, or Russian accent, tells us that the Sheriff is on his way to arrest us unless we pay so much money right on the spot. That one is easy; we just go to the nearest CVS Pharmacy, get one of those non-traceable gift cards with a credit card logo on it, and then call them back with all the details. Problem solved right away. But a letter, my goodness, that is serious. So, I threw that letter away. I got a couple more letters in the coming months, which I also threw away until I got the one that is sent via certified mail and it requires my signature by the Post Office delivery person—mailperson, that is, in case we confuse him or her with an Amazon delivery person. Although, it is hard to tell these days if the Post Office is really working for Amazon, with so many Amazon boxes coming to my address. But, I digress.

I not only bought myself a few stress-free months because I did not follow the advice from this saying, but I was able to finally resolve my issue with the IRS amicably. I only had to pay an exorbitant amount of money as penalties and interest, but thank goodness, another month with five paychecks is just around the corner, and once again, I can catch up with my bills.

I hope you can follow my corollary to the above saying: “Don’t put off ’till tomorrow, what you can put off until the day after tomorrow.” You’ll thank me later.

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We knew it was time for him to go and we were prepared for the news. But, when the news came, the shock was still very strong and jarring. I had never cried so much as I did when he took his last breath. Not so much at the void that he has left but at the relief that he was no longer suffering and could finally be at peace. May he rest in peace!

I remember my childhood and growing up under his watch. He was a good father and like all good fathers, gave us all the resources to grow and to be successful. He showed affection at a time when showing affection was not part of our culture. Fathers were meant to be strong disciplinarians with rigid and cold personalities. We were meant to fear our father. He was not supposed to be affectionate. He never uttered the words, “I love you,” to us. It was not part of our culture, or even of our language. But he made us feel loved, with his actions and his care, so that we never had to wonder. We just knew.

He had a great personality, was full of charm, and had a good sense of humor. I learned my first prayer from him and my strong belief in God came from his teachings. I learned about history and philosophy from him and even about medicine, as he practiced medicine as his calling. He taught me to be caring and giving, as a means to happiness. I also learned my first raunchy joke from him, when he told it to his friend while pretending I was not within earshot; not to mention, my love for reading, when he made all of his magazines and books available to me, irrespective of my age and the ability to handle adult content.

( Different Point of View ) We are three brothers and one sister and throughout our years, he helped nurture and develop our personalities as they suited us best. We each required different handling techniques and without any formal training, he and my mother managed to help us grow as unique individuals. He loved my mother with all of his heart and I think his decline started when she passed away at a rather young age.

Getting old is not for the weak, as the thought goes. He was strong, and as I learned, getting old is not for the strong either. Things start to happen that one normally does not anticipate, even though we see all others go through the same aches and pains. Body starts to collapse. Organs start to hiccup. Skin starts to loosen. Joints stop working. Pain becomes the norm, rather than the exception. More and more pills become part of the meal plan. Side effects from those pills add to the misery and soon quality of life is only as good as the effectiveness of the medicines being prescribed.

We wanted him to go in the end. He was bedridden. He could not move around, could not go to the bathroom on his own, and eventually could not even talk properly. The picture of a man with the ability to conquer the world changed to a shriveled skeleton of a being. That is the biggest loss for me.

The other day I looked in the mirror and saw my father staring back at me. Most people say that I look just like him and it was uncanny to see him standing there across from me, as he had looked when he was my age. I felt a sharp pang in my heart, as it became quite clear that I had reached that very same age when my father had started to decline. I just wish I could go back in time and do things differently, just to minimize the toll that life is about to take on me. I just wish I could get a second chance to be with my father and not take him for granted this time around. Alas!

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