Haircut. I got a haircut.

How is that for clickbait? I am sitting on my porch on a lovely Spring late afternoon, early evening. I know that the lily beds need thinning, desperately, the azaleas could use cutting back. The mimosa saplings, in all their ugliness, should be dug out. I need to put the forsythia in some sort of cage or train it on a stake. It is just this skinny little vine. For all I know it might even be a flowering quince, not a forsythia at all. 

Strange to be a prisoner in my own house, like a recluse from a Dickens novel.That has been the trajectory of my life, even pre-quarantine.I see my neighbours, whom I recognize from my daily walk. The family with their adorable toddler just walked by. I know many of my neighbours by their dogs, beagles, Malamute, setters, pug. One woman walks her dog, after work, wearing her scrubs. 

There are chores to do, unfinished tidying up, as if completion would compel me to look at that the rest of the quagmire of untidiness, unexpressed needs, sex acts not consummated that is our marriage. 

Let me sit here now. Just sit. Just watch. Just be neighbourly. It seems so hard to shut off the mind. Toss the politics out. The media and politicos have done a Hell of a good job, making themselves indispensable. It used to be we were hooked on cigarettes, pushed on us by media. Now we’re hooked on politics, pushed on us by media. Instead of smoking Marlboros, we like Trump. Newports? We like Obama, Virginia Slims, Hillary, perhaps? If you don’t think politics can be reduced to brand identity, maybe the media people and the Mad Men have failed.

Back to the bird songs, the motorcycle noise, the dogs. 

I have been watching episodes of the BBC 4 archaeology series Time Team on YouTube. Great series. I recommend it. They talk about The Bronze Age, then The Iron Age. What comes after The Iron Age, The Permanent Press Age? Did the Polyester Peoples live in that epoch?

1) I need a haircut.

2) My head is totally messed up around human sexuality

3) I have been in some sort of physical pain most of my adult life

4) If I don’t know where I’m going, I will probably end up someplace else.

5) Chastity isn’t as bad as sex with an indifferent partner.

She is upstairs, her shower just finished. I could go up and kiss the water droplets off the nape of her neck.

But I refrain, fearing the rejection, of hearing the reasons why intimacy is impossible now, the empty promise of soon.

Wimp.

This is what the Northbound Silver Meteor, Amtrak 98, looked like passing through Ashland, Virginia on 11 May 2020. It is headed to New York City, starting from Miami, Florida.

It is a smaller train, due to the slack in demand from the coronavirus. It looks like they still have dining car service on this train.

My readers who live overseas may be unfamiliar with what an American passenger train looks like, as well as some of you who live in The United States. So here you have it.

I have been up awhile. J gets off work soon and should be home around 5:30. I guess I could sleep then.

Today I remember my mother. I miss her, dead now for nearly twenty five years, but why?  Mother was chronically depressed in a world where treatments for depression were worse than the disease.

She was bright, but could not afford college in a world where a job to support a widowed mother meant everything. She was a drama queen, as only the daughter of an alcoholic father can be. I remember her laughter and her rage. Her rage contained all the angry thoughts she ever had, externalized. She would say  she only wanted two children, but Dad wanted more.   There are four of us. I was the second. Let me tell you about Survivor’s Guilt.

She liked sit coms, from I Love Lucy to The Golden Girls.  Her favorite soap opera was As The World Turns. 

So remembering that angry, tragic, paradox of a human being is hard. I got through my sentence in her household of a prison, devoid of self-esteem,  filled with self-hatred that alcohol could never purge.

On balance, she loved us and did the best she could. That is all any Mother can hope to do.

Around ten past five this afternoon, I started my walk, opting for the six mile circuit with its road exposure. Today, passing the creek on my course, I saw an Eastern Bluebird. This is roughly the same place where I saw a goldfinch last week. How cool is this.

Spotting a lovely bird is a totally exhilarating experience. I pressed on, finishing my six mile walk. Afterwards, I saw my neighbor and asked if I could give a treat to Scout, their dog, when I saw him. She said, “Yes”.

So life is good. At times it is frustrating and lonely. But I have a home and I live in a community with nice neighbours.

This early morning has Richmond in a cold snap. It is 40°F, about 4°C, an anomaly for Virginia in May. Hopefully the fruit trees in the Shenandoah Valley have set their buds and the apple and peach harvest, come Summer and Fall, won’t be diminishef.

Sometimes being up in the early morning, with a DVD collection can inspire my mind. I wander through the discs. I just watched some pornographic movies from 1930’s France. The movies, about ten minutes long, were shown in brothels to the customers whilst they waited. There were lots of lesbian scenes. Given that shooting movies involved using expensive film, the scenes were hurried. The performers got right to the point. Porn wasn’t the industry then it is now. The women looked like women, not sex robots.

Eventually boredom takes over. I’ve seen all I can stand to watch. They’re just too sad.

I load a disc of old cigarette commercials into the machine. I watched some mid-Fifties commercials for a Brown & Williamson menthol filter brand, Bel Air. The commercials all featured an annoying tune or jingle extolling the features of a Bel Air cigarette. Brown & Williamson hàd a factory in Petersburg, just South of Richmond. The factory closed and the local economy never recovered. This was about forty years ago.

Now I am watching Camel commercials. To think I must have seen thousands of these commercials growing up. Contrasting the cigarette commercials with the porn, the cigarette commercials seem more obscene than the porn.

I’m going back to bed. J will be home in about ninety minutes.

Turner Classic Movies seems to be showing lots of Elizabeth Taylor movies of late. Now some of these movies are good. Some are just awful, Cleopatra, for example, can hold down the space of awful well into this century.

But Elizabeth Taylor was gorgeous, sexy and bright. Her voice could melt steel, it’s sooooo hot. There must have been a clause in her contract that she had to wear a bullet bra beneath all her stunning designer fashions.

I’m turning to jelly here. She was a Movie Star 🌟. No question about it.