What a day. What a true waste of a day. I went to town.
Why?
Oh god.
Who knows?
Not me.
I had the idea I could get my hair trimmed. I haven't had it trimmed since Steel Magnolias and that was last, uh, March? How hard is it to get your hair trimmed? Impossible for me. I went to a place that May had told me about where there was a certain stylist who did good things with longer hair. The place was closed.
Closed. For rent.
And when it got to the point where I was just aimlessly pulling into any place that said Salon, I knew my fate would be to get the worst hair trim in the entire world- not that it would matter one damn bit- but it didn't matter in the end because every place I tried was CLOSED.
What's the damn deal? Tough times for the beauty biz I guess.
I will call my lady in Monticello tomorrow, see if she has time for me next week.
It was one of THOSE days where I kept driving around, stopping at places for fools' errands and nothing made any sense at all. The most important thing I did today was to buy a new non-disposable coffee filter. I am not kidding you.
When I was in the Bed, Bath and Beyond, buying that coffee filter, a woman was talking on the phone to someone about a coffee maker and the phone was on speaker and everyone in the store could hear the person on the other end yelling, "I don't want a one-cup coffee maker! I never said I wanted a one-cup coffee maker!" and all of us shoppers looked at each other ruefully- I mean, we couldn't NOT hear this. And the woman in the store with the phone was so patient and if it had been me, I would have told the rude girl on the phone to get her happy ass down to the Bed, Bath, and Beyond her own damn self and get whatthefuckever she wanted. Fuck it. You're done, bitch.
Ho, ho, merryfuckingho.

But in one store, and it may have been Bed, Bath, and Beyond, Happy Christmas, War Is Over came on the Muzak and I had to stop and listen to John and Yoko and those sweet children and think about the fact that pretty soon, very soon, our troops will be out of Iraq and dammit, that is something. We may still be fighting all over the place and sending out drones- I do not know- but look- we won't be sending our men and women over there.
Our girls and boys.
Our children.
To kill their children.
Thank-you, President Obama. Thank you for that.

And I was grateful and I remembered last night when some old dude from the home got up and said a little thing about how our troops would be coming home and he remembered being in WWII, I guess, and he sang I'll Be Home For Christmas in his old man voice, but it was true and strong and listen to me- if we wanted war to be over, enough of us, it would be. I'll never forgive George W. Bush for starting that war for no reason, NO REASON WHATSOEVER, but based on lies and more lies and nothing has come of it that will help anyone. I don't care what anyone says- war is never the answer. And if it is, I am living on the wrong planet and we are asking the wrong questions.

Shit. I don't know. I feel worn down like a penny left on the railroad tracks. Being in town with all of the Christmas shoppers has flattened me, the traffic, the way none of the shoppers seemed happy, the woman screaming on the phone, the way all of the beauty salons were closed, the way Walmart's garden center had not one flowering plant besides poinsettias and enough of those to provide a small nation with one apiece for its citizens, lines and lines of hothouse poinsettias, doomed to death by early spring and what was the point of all that water, that fertilizer, that energy?

But. But we'll be pulling out of Iraq. That part of war is over.

I don't know.

I went looking for War Is Over on Youtube but dammit, because of some legality we can't get the old version here in America anymore but we can get this one and it's got John speaking about government and the people and the power and it's eerily prescient and I couldn't get through the whole thing because it shows war.
You don't have to watch the whole thing either. You can just watch the part about peace and love and peace on earth and watch Yoko talk about how it's also about nonviolence in homes and bless her. Bless her heart.



My home is peaceful tonight. I am making soup. This is how I deal with things. I chop and I simmer and I cut and I gather and I make soup. And I am so grateful that this year I am not participating in something I do not either believe in or understand. John Lennon talked about how the government was focusing on long hair and stupid stuff like that and now we are focusing on giant screen TV's and buying, buying, buying and it's all the same- don't pay any attention to the man behind the curtain. Buy the crap, buy the party line, buy the lie that war is justified and if you don't believe it, you are not a true American while the main contender for the Republican party in the presidential race believes that giving children jobs as janitors is the way to educate our youth in moral values and the work ethic.

Yeah, well, I'm done with all of that. For now, at least.

I know there is much to celebrate and be grateful for in this world but for tonight, I am hanging on by my fingernails with not a whole lot of hope for the fucked-up human race.

I'll probably see things differently tomorrow and for tonight, I'm just grateful for peace here, in this house, in this part of the planet we call Earth, for the fact that troops will be coming home.

Amen.