Want scary? I'll show you scary

The cost of cornrows, that's what's scary.

Am I the only person who noticed this? In the first image of Lawrence Lovette using Eve Carson’s ATM card he had a ‘fro in need of a little a little work. ‘A little work’ means a good four hours of a professional hairdresser’s time and about $200 dollars, if my friends who have had this done remember correctly. When he was arrested, his professionally done cornrows were perfect. He was stylin’. On Eve’s money.

He robbed and murdered a decent young woman in part so he could get his hair done.

Yeah, yeah, put on your Scream costume, grab the biggest knife in the drawer and run around going EEEK! EEEK! EEEK! Nothing is more frightening than the darkness in Lovette's heart.

Take me for a ride in the car-car

Every once in a while, it’s nice to get a glimpse of what life is really like for us non-socialist, dual-income Americans. The disconnect between reality of US family life vs. movies and TV shows (i.e. how the world sees us) has always been one of our biggest PR problems. In movies, even when American families are “in turmoil” they still have enough money to be wearing Abercrombie & Fitch while driving cars most of us couldn’t pay the gasoline for through scenery most of us have never seen in person. The turmoil is usually brought about by misguided individuality, but that is harnessed for Good by the program’s end.

Then along comes Nebraska, Lady Liberty style, inadvertently inviting the nation to shelter its benighted children at their hospital doors. Even though social services for those who need it are virtually non-existent in our society, we pretend to be amazed to think families might be so overwhelmed by their own children that they are willing to drive across country to drop them off and say ‘bye-bye’ forever.

Our churches, the Thousand Points of Light, these should fill the gap, right? To begin with, churches help mostly their own because there is a limited amount of help to go around, and the thousand points of light are just what you see when you hit your head really hard on the kitchen counter as you stoop to grab the hamburger patty you were shaping before the dog can get to it. Ain’t nobody else.

So what happens when children turn their considerable energies toward screwing up in the homes of exhausted parents who have to work two jobs just to put food on the table?

Imagine it. Really. Anyone who has ever held their own infant and felt all the love and hope and tenderness that experience brings, think about it. You pack your kid into the car, drive for days, and then dump him in the only place you legally can. Neither of you have ever been there before, and you know there’s a really big chance you will never see your son again, but you do it because you fervently hope someone else will help him better than you can. You’re not crazy, and you’re not a criminal. You just can’t take care of him anymore without something bad happening to one or both of you. Your drive is a pilgrimage of love. If you doubt that, consider dead Cayley. Don’t you think “the little snothead,” as her mother fondly called her, was worth the gas? Mom didn’t.

Soon, Nebraska will close its doors to older children. Of course they will. There is only so much help available, after all. But don’t for a second judge the people who took advantage of the offer of help. Nebraska’s inadvertent, SOCIALIST generosity may have saved lives, and it certainly unmasked, if briefly, what goes on in the hearts of Real America everyday.

Yes, but she’s got initiative, she does

Woman beheads man with sickle, http://www.cnn.com/2008/WORLD/asiapcf/10/17/india.beheading.woman.ap/index.html


Anyone who stalks, jumps and bites a woman on the face and neck with hate in their hearts (and for the confused, if you want to rape someone you want to take away their rights to their person and that is, by its very nature, hateful) deserves to have his head chopped off.

While I do not condone the institutionalizing of this punishment, I think that anyone who has been harassed and attacked has a right to defend himself or herself, even if beheading seems a bit icky.

Too bad fashion week is over. It would have been a massive coup to include sickles among the silks and knits and boxy, bowed pumps. An accessory loss, if you ask me.

Consider the chickens, have they got angst?

Our area is rampant with raptors, hawks in particular. Sit outside at night with a mouse on your head and you can expect to be clawed to death by owls. I’ve given up that favorite pastime for this very reason. During the day, a pair of nesting hawks and their extended family crisscrosses the skies of our happy valley looking for prey. When they hit the ground, whatever is under their talons has no chance.

Letting the chickens out for a stroll in the garden is therefore a risky business. Still, as Fall approaches it becomes more and more important that they roam to get enough food. Bugs, grass seed, clover, all are essential to hen happiness. So we compromise. Mid-morning I let them out of their protected run to take their chances in the yard if I’m home. If I’m gone all day, they get out in the early evening before the owls really take over. I know I’m probably kidding myself, but these just seem like times when I hear fewer hawks and see no owls.

Yet the time always comes when I hear the screams of hawks coming home and I must hustle out to the chicken yard to lure the girls back in. Today, as I went to shut the gate, I heard the flap of large wings close by. I had startled a big bird out of the trees near the hen house. We had been playing the odds pretty closely it seems.

Still, they roam around looking happy enough. They aren’t pulling out their feathers over things they cannot control. They dash under the bushes if they sense something scary. They race pell-mell to their enclosure if they hear me coming (I might have a biscuit or fruit). In short, they are happy. On days they can’t go out, they seem to sigh, shrug and go off to scratch over places they may have missed, no worries.

To these chickens, what is is. And people still say chickens are dumb?

Like Xerox paper for chocolate

Writers frequently tell the whimsical story of how they failed in the work world by becoming a secretary or marine biologist. Terrible employees who forget to order coffee, or somehow manage to put sharks in the tank with the dolphins. They make me so jealous.

A notorious dilettante, I wasn’t super good at anything in school. But I can put my hand to most things passably, which has been what gets me in stuck in grinding jobs I hate.

Wait, why? Because in the work-a-day world excellence is not required. Mostly, a willing attitude and reasonable conduct will get you any job. For example, imagine the feeling of adrenaline I felt when two weeks into my office manager job with a news agency, it was discovered that there wasn’t a SINGLE sheet of copier paper in the ENTIRE BUILDING, all four floors. Then two weeks later it happened AGAIN. Reporters are excitable people to begin with. Deprive them of paper and they get like Jack Russell terriers in a sausage factory run by cats.

Did my boss fire me? Nooo, in fact, when I handed in my resignation he sighed, realizing it was for the best, but sad nonetheless. Emergency paper searches he could deal with, hiring another body, now that was real work. Mike was a great boss, btw. There’s never been a straighter shooter with more perspective on the importance of things.

I guess it really helped to not have to pretend to be On A Mission. I’m not on a damn mission. I’m just making a living so I don’t have to bag groceries when I’m 75. A little good-humored recognition of that from the higher ups would be a big help.