F16’s Don’t Kill People, 500 Lb. Bombs Kill People

I have a commentary at Unknown News this week about a State snowplough driver that was sacked for clearing the driveway of an elderly cardiac patient he didn’t even know. He was not paid to do it, and did not profit from the good deed in any way. If he had just sat in his truck and slept as the snow fell, or maybe back at the office, surfed the web for a bit, he’d probably still have a job. Instead, the fool did a decent and kind thing-look where it got him.

The only thing I loathe more than department stores are department stores located in malls. There’s too much to intellectually and emotionally process in those little microcosms of everything that globalisation and late capitalism have inflicted upon the world. It begins before one leaves the car park filled with row after row enormous SUV’s.  I rarely go near those places, much less on a weekend, but sooner or later I need to purchase foundations (that’s bras and girdles for you young folks). Mind you, I walk with great difficulty and department stores generally do not have carts available to use as a sort of walker. I used my cane, but it was still a difficult haul to the department I needed. Note for the fashion conscious, the military look is all the rage this season –epaulets everywhere dangling off things that look like sweatshirts with brass buttons. I tried to wrap my head around the weirdness of making the violence we’re inflicting around the world into a fashion statement, but the best I could come up with was that we’re fighting a war over there so that we can be free by expensive clothes sewn by people paid ten cents and hour, who probably really do hate our way of life that relies upon their suffering to thrive. But yeah, you know, no one likes to go to the mall with a leftist, so I kind of kept the observation to myself. Thank God I have a blog.

Have I mentioned I’ve been ill? Have I mentioned the chronic nausea/puking from the treatment?

I asked a rather simple question of the salesperson;

“Where are your minimiser bras?”

She didn’t know, and went to ask, which was a perfectly reasonable response. She returned with a woman only slightly older than myself with her hair dyed so dark a blue black it looked as though someone had upended her in a bottle of India ink. Strangely, I never see women under maybe 75 with grey hair anymore, even when they are well past the point of fooling anyone. Mine is becoming rather salt and pepper and I sometimes wonder if it elicits a certain reaction from others whereby they assume I am either poor, ignorant or radicalised. Eh, two out of three’s not bad.

So Inky looks at me and sneers over her electric blue framed half-reader glasses asking “How much can you spend?”

“Can?” I mean, come on, “can” and “will” have different connotations. “I don’t want a fifty dollar bra.” I stated rather directly, whereupon she launched into a lecture regarding the proper way to purchase a bra, fit and getting what one pays for, and so on. It wasn’t the sales pitch so much as the condescending lecture that put me off. I worked in the foundations department at Filene’s in Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts for long enough to know what is required for a bra to fit. I also worked retail long enough to know that they way to make a sale is not to try and humiliate, intimidate and bully a customer into purchasing an obscenely priced item based on a deluded appraisal of  your know-it-all-ness. No, really, that doesn’t make me want to purchase anything, much less an overpriced piece of spandex, cloth and wire. I left. I could have purchased the twenty dollar item I found (still, a bit of an extravagance at that) but after that exchange, how on Earth could I?

I wanted to point out that having wage slaves attack one another is sort of defeating, but looking at her, I got the sense that she wasn’t working because she needed the money. This was her entertainment-intimidating the rubes and bumpkins that have forgotten their place and try to purchase undergarments anyplace but the local farm store (and no, our farm store does not sell bras, though they do sell clothing and thermal underwear). The sad thing is, I moved here to get away from people like Inky, and now West Omaha is filling up with them faster than they can build McMansions. The suburb of Chicago that I lived in during my High School years has one of two effects on people. They either become one with the new-rich (in appearance anyway, everyone’s in debt to their eyeballs) or they become radicalised and get the hell out of there as fast as possible. It’s amazing, how many Catholic Worker types I’ve met over the years from that town. I suppose, to anyone willing to think about it, the outright vulgarity of displayed wealth and subsequent perception that the social class is somehow deserved-well, I suppose that would send any person with a bit of kindness in them heading for the first breadline to pass out food and give away their possessions. Yes, I know all about Inky-maybe not personally, but I know her Inky ilk, I went to school with them, and while I don’t wish the Inkys of the world any harm, I do want them to stay as far the fuck away from me as possible. I’m not a clumsy teenager anymore, and I really don’t want to be friends. My friends don’t try to sell me fifty dollar bras.

Back to that chronic nausea. I’ve learned that breathing through my nose really helps when I think I’m going to throw-up. It is not absolutely reliable, but most of the time it at least provides me enough time to find an appropriate place to begin hurling my guts out. Inky was so close to my face. So very close. Really, all it would have taken would be a cessation of nose breathing and one nice big gulp of air. Maybe I could have helped it along by trying to recall the childhood smell of chicken my mother used to stew in V-8 juice (skinless chicken, yet). Maybe spaghetti from a tin. I probably wouldn’t have even needed to go down memory lane in my current condition. I mean, all I needed to do was look down and drop my half a cheese sandwich on her Ferragamos.

I did not-but you already knew I wouldn’t. Suppose I ought to be slightly ashamed that I even thought of it (humorously, not maliciously-but still). I’m sure that it stretches my vow of non violence a bit to be fantasising about seeing Hy-Vee store brand “cheddar” and wheat bread stuck in the little open-toe hole of the shoes that had her hobbling about like a handicapped stilt walker with rickets. They really weren’t even attractive shoes. They probably cost more than my automobile insurance. I handed her back the bra and left, becoming ill moments later in the rest room of the less-pretentious-than-the-really-pretentious coffee place that’s still pretty pretentious, but everything’s relative when you stick these places in Omaha, Nebraska. A sweet girl in the restroom showed me how to use the sensor-controlled paper towel dispenser. I guess I need to get out more. It worked out OK though, whilst I chucked my guts, my husband and son sat at a table and enjoyed refreshments. This coffee place, like all the others, I suppose has a line of frozen candy drinks with whipped cream and other assorted goodies. They also have the world’s largest straws to suck that stuff up with. As L. quite accurately observed, they are like surgical tubes. Aside from the fact that there is no way to get one’s mouth around that thing without it looking like…well, I wonder if  “javafellatichino” is copyrighted ? Oh yeah, make my “Javafellatichino” and grande, please.”

Big idiots, big trucks and automobiles, big, big, candy coffee sucking straws, and I’m still wearing a bra that I’ve sewn back together half a dozen times in the last five years. It’s OK though, one day I’m going to be able to have a consumer interaction that doesn’t make me feel

a) exploited

b) as though I’m exploiting someone else

c) like throwing up all over someone.

Want to know the secret to keeping a small child quiet and happy? Give him/her colourful empty boxes to play with.

I’ve been saving the boxes from butter, tea and oatmeal for my son to stock his play kitchen with. Last week, I found him sitting in the middle of the living room floor sniffing the empty butter box because it (this will be a shock, I know) “Smells like butter.”

Knowing my little one’s interest in all things cardboard and lids, I bought him his first little box of animal crackers (the ones that come in a colourful package with circus animals and a little string to tote it about with). After about ten seconds of marvelling at the animal shaped crackers, he dumped them out and made off with the box to compare the tigers and elephants to the ones in his (actually, it was my husband’s as a child) Fisher Price Circus Train Toy. Confused, he came back pointing to an unfamiliar pair of animals.

“Hippopotami”, I informed him. What I wonder though, is whether that is the correct plural, as the box read “Hippopotamuses.”  I’m fairly sure I’m correct, though I really ought to check the unabridged, multi-volume Oxford English Dictionary my husband brought home one day many years ago when he was feeling particularly guilty for having forgotten a birthday or Christmas, or some such occasion and thought an OED would smooth things over (note to my friend in Canada-I’d hold out for something really spectacular once you move-like a room addition with a spa or something. Dictionaries are nice, but…). Incorrect grammar aside, Danny was delighted with his tiny box of animal crackers and Mummy scored big points for pocket change. Yay thrifty Mummy.

You’d be surprised at the hours of imaginative play children can find in the most mundane items.

Blogsome has been pretty flaky the last two days, so if you try to load the site and get a blank page, the problem is with their servers. That said, they are still a million times more reliable than Blogger, and in the year I’ve been using them, this is the first major difficulty I’ve encountered and really, it is not a huge issue.

I would still encourage anyone looking for a place to host a blog to consider Blogsome.com

There is a fantastic low-power community radio station in Lincoln, Nebraska. KZUM has some of the most wonderful, eclectic programming I’ve ever heard over the airways. Unfortunately, the signal is weak by the time it arrives at our home and I can only pick it up (weakly) in the kitchen. One of the regular shows features Latin American big band music. It comes on once a week at one in the afternoon, so Danny has an early lunch and rushes into the kitchen to join me for a bit of dancing. There’s another big-band show as well in English, hosted by a nearly unintelligible old geezer that drags his record collection down to the studio once a week for the entertainment of the community-oh, how we love that show.

One evening, my husband was washing up the dinner dishes and came running into the living room to tell me they were playing the entire Frank Zappa Freak Out album. He’d never heard anything off it save for Help, I’m a Rock, so it was a bit shocking to hear songs about the Watts Riots, and You’re Probably Wondering Why I’m Here. Just for that, I’m willing to send them a cheque to keep broadcasting.

So the other day, I was putting Danny’s lunch together and waiting for Democracy Now to come on. They did their usual loop of sponsored advertising where an announcer reads a bit of prepared copy saying so and so has helped pay for today’s broadcast. A new sponsor is a local bottled water company.

I’ve never worked in radio, but having a two year old at home, I do find that a large part of my day is spent reading aloud-often things I’m seeing for the first time. Often, I stumble over my words, but more often, I altogether mistake one word for another. Sometimes it can be humorous.  When the KZUM announcer mentioned that the new sponsor was a purveyor of “Artisan water from Nebraska” it actually took me a minute to realise that the craze of labelling everything from chocolate to bread “artisan” hadn’t extended to bottled water from the Midwest. When I finally realised what he meant, I doubled over with laughter, at the thought of people throughout Lincoln, wanting to be trendy heading out to their grocer in search of “artisan” water. As the old Olympia Beer commercial used to ask,

“Who are those Artesians anyway?”

Chocolate cake with orange filling and ganache glaze.

Hope everyone has a lovely weekend.