Why Do I Torture Myself?

Well, I have taken zero photos today. It's been, on the whole, a rather long and difficult day. I don't mean anyone went to the hospital or anything that difficult by any means but a day spent in town can be exceptionally stressful for me. 

I wanted to go ahead and get my covid vaccine as early today as I could so that hopefully, I'll be feeling good enough by Wednesday to go to pottery. As I have discussed, the status of the covid vaccine in Florida is extremely hazy and undefined at the moment. Our governor, Ron DeSantis, who is as cruel a Republican as any of them can be, along with his pick for our state's Surgeon General, Dr. Joseph A Ladapo who feels that no one has the right to tell people what to put into their bodies or what not to, and likens vaccine mandates to slavery, have made it almost impossible to figure out how to locate and then obtain the vaccine if you want it which makes no sense because many of us WANT to put the vaccine into our bodies, thank you very much. 

I generally get my vaccines at a Publix pharmacy which is easy and so very convenient for me. BUT, for some reason that I cannot fathom the only place to get the immunization in Florida is at a CVS with a MinuteClinic™ (cute, eh?) and you must have a prescription from your doctor to get it. At first they were saying that if you were over 65 you'd be able to get it without a prescription but we all know that RFK is trying to kill us all and DeSantis and Ladapo are panting, god-fearing lapdogs trying to bury any and all vaccines as quickly as their little paws can get the job done so forget that. 

So. Glen did get a prescription from Dr. Zorn for both of us last week (I know I've already talked about this) but somehow he'd lost them so I called the office and they so kindly agreed to print out copies which they did and which Glen picked up and he left mine with Lily at her work because he had about ten errands to run in town. So I got my prescription and drove all the way out to what used to be Bumfuck, Tallahassee but which is now part of the suburban sprawl which has overtaken the north side of the city to where the CVS was. 
When I got there, another customer waiting to get his vaccine, I guess, told me how to go about it, what the process was, and I thanked him and went to the correct pharmacist who looked exactly like a man who was ready to tear his hair out. 
He was very, very kind, though, and when I commiserated with what he was having to go through and said, "Not to talk politics but..."
He said, "I don't even know what I can say or not say anymore," and his eyes went a little wild but he got my information in the computer and gave me my forms to fill out and then sent me over to the MinuteClinic™ where a nice but not very chatty woman gave me my shot. 
So. I am vaccinated. And I already feel fairly shitty. I am a vaccine over-reactor although why do I say that? I react the way I react. Glen doesn't react at all, aside from a little arm soreness and maybe a little fatigue so is he an under-reactor? 
Jesus. We sure do love to label ourselves, don't we? As if government wasn't already doing a fine job of that. 

Since I was on that side of town I decided to go visit the Goodwill a few miles up the road which I hardly ever get to. This is the rich people side of town and I have found some good things in that location but that was many years ago. It was already almost two and I was getting hungry and I remembered that a Thai restaurant used to be next door to Goodwill and I figured I'd eat there. But before I got back out on the main road, I saw a clothing consignment shop that looked pretty interesting. I need some new clothes. Most of the things I have are getting pretty large on me which is a lovely problem to have but seriously- I have always joked about loving bag dresses and now that's all I have for the most part. 
So I stopped in there but I just couldn't find anything I really liked. I tried on one dress but definitely not as August would say. I found a cashmere sweater though, and bought it because although it wasn't Goodwill cashmere cheap, it was still cheap. However, it is ninety degrees here and a sweater, no matter how soft, is not going to help me out much at this moment in time. 

I drove on up the road to find the Thai restaurant had moved its location so I proceeded directly to looking at dresses at Goodwill which was a pain in the butt because those dresses were not arranged in any discernible way, either by size or color although there were certainly markers on the racks which did delineate sizes. 
They lied. All of them lied. 

So I went through every dress and I didn't like any of them. Not one dress. 

Enough of that. And I needed to eat.

I ended up at a Publix where I also needed to do a little shopping and got a sandwich there which I ate on the way home. The Publix was one I'd never visited because it's quite a distance from Lloyd and it's fancy and has lots of features most Publix's here do not such as a WING BAR and I don't know what all. This Publix is located on Bannerman Road, a place where I used to live a long time ago. I've written about that road, that time, that place, the miles and miles of nothing but woods and pasture and a few small communities and a juke joint called Smitty's Club. And now? 
One ugly development after another and one little strip mall after another and one gas station/convenience store after another and when I passed what used to be Smitty's Club and which is now a restaurant and probably a bar, I saw that the place where Smitty had been buried is now paved over by a driveway and I swear to GOD, if they didn't move his body before they did that, whoever "they" are is going to hell. 

And now I'm tired and I'm mourning and I'm remembering a community where hippies were accepted despite the fact that we were white and the community was Black and I remember hunting for mushrooms on those miles of cow pastures behind our house and the subsequent journeys into the more cosmic realms and the heat of the summer with no air conditioning and times when my boyfriend did not come home at night and how poor we were sometimes and the music that was played in our little Jim Walters home and the bulldogs we lived with and the little girls next door who braided each other's hair on the porch on those hot summer days and mostly what I remember is the grace offered to us and to our friends for no real reason at all except that our neighbors were grace-full and I know that if not for that time on Bannerman Road, I would not be the person I am today. 

Amen. 

Love...Ms. Moon