High Art and Risky Business

Well, it's the day after Saturnalia, and yet I'm still up and at it, early in the morning. This is also after 2 melatonin tablets before bed. Welcome to old age. Grab a complimentary cane at the door.

Dave, on the other hand, is not. His awake time is usually about 2:00 am, when he takes this opportunity to get all his internet porn online reading done and then goes back to bed for like nine hours.

It snowed last night, the good kind of snow - white, clean, not enough to shovel, and early enough in the season that we are not fed up with it yet. At this point we still consider it pretty, lovely, somewhat magical and we have enough sense to know that Spring a very long time away and there are likely many more snow covered mornings to wake up to face the music, rage against god, use naughty swearwords and sob and therefore, the appearance of snow does not throw a monkey wrench into our illusions. Snow in April, however, is quite another story which we most likely will address at some point. Stay tuned.

Speaking of the white stuff, today is also The Monthly Feast Day of The Sacred Crone. This festival's highlights include the Coloring of the Hair ceremony in which the Goddess L'Oreal magically transforms all the white/grey hair in the land into colors not commonly seen in nature. My current color is "light brown." Wake up. I know it's boring but you can pretend to care for god's sake.

Light brown is not, as all you Supermarket Haircoloring Professionals know, really light brown. It's quite a bit darker than light brown. In the world of boxed haircolor, brown means black, dark blonde is brown, red is clown wig. Buyer beware for sure. Most often this information is not discovered until something tragic happens. However, in my life, the worst hair color incident happened in the hands of a "professional." At that time I believed that the title "professional" could be granted to anyone who worked in a salon. That, my friends, was the first of the lies I uncovered during my investigation into the dark and seedy world of hair color. Short story- my hair was violet, I wore hats for a month and avoided going out in bright sunlight or in the daytime if I could avoid it. This eventually led me to my involvement with the wrong crowd of people and now I have them to blame all my naughty stuff on. Awesome. Anyway, eventually I got my hair color corrected and my life of purple hair and hanging out with the children of the night came to an abrupt end.

Now I color my hair myself and I'm sure I'm not fooling anyone with this lame ass color, but that's the way it goes. You see, hair "colors" that are in no way fooling anyone for even an instant are now considered real colors simply because a large percentage of the population are old women and are sporting these groovy shades. We have essentially created new hair "colors" because we are very creative that way, and because most of us have trouble seeing all that well. Consequently, other people have come to accept them as sorta real, or as real as it gets for old people. Lots and lots of beige, cranberry and eggplant out there -sometimes a just a slight hint of sage (just if the sun hits it right) or even periwinkle. It's awesome. Really it is. If you are not old I bet you just can't wait to be now.

Ok. Enough of this. I have more important things on the agenda to talk about today. Ready?I am going to do the RECYCLING!!!! And then I will hit the hay because that will pretty much take up my whole day. You see, this town has mandatory recycling.

The waste management guys have been known to check your bags and if there is paper in the plastic one they will pull you out of your house still in your jammies and put you in a camp. And that's all I know because no one has ever returned to tell us what happened. Rumor has it that the guy who owns the bookstore that's only open at night was once taken. And now look at him. I'm not taking any chances.

So every week, I have to separate paper, plastic, compost, and other trash which you better make sure doesn't have anything in it - at all. The only things that are allowed in the "regular trash" are floor sweepings and nasty stuff (like used feminine thingies and blood-stained meat packaging.) Then these items must be placed in the appropriate colored plastic bags and they must be out by the street by 6:00 am because these guys are not going to be forced to stick to a schedule because they don't pay those union dues for nothin. And you can't piss them off because they will retaliate with the ultimate revenge - THE REJECT STICKER. Yeah, that one plastic cap from a soda bottle that somehow found it's way into the bag of smelly regular trash? That one will cost ya.

So as you can see, this is a day for both high art and risky business. Rest assured, I will not let you down.