Hand-washing, that is.

Pontius Pilate springs vividly to mind, in fact.

Okay, you know, I usually don’t like this blog to be about current events because you can get  enough of that stuff all over the place. But I do have to say that, yesterday afternoon, I went to go drop off my water bill at what we lovingly call here “City Hall” (a tiny store front), and I headed past our local gas station and my mouth fell open. Literally.

And it was snowing like crazy, too, with very high blizzard-like winds but the snow wasn’t sticking, or anything — it was just so weird outside. (This was shortly after the strangely unanticipated funeral procession drove past my kitchen window — see yesterday’s quick post). Anyway, everything just felt so weird. And then I saw that the price of gas had plummeted!! It is currently $1.83 a gallon. It is so cheap that it’s bizarre.

What’s even weirder, is that I usually go further out of town, into the middle of nowhere, to buy my gas because it’s almost always cheapest there. But, suddenly, right smack in the middle of Crazeysburg was the cheapest gas I’ve seen in 30 years. For no discernible reason whatsoever.

And we have our one little dollar store here, and it has plenty of toilet paper, and also food. All kinds of processed, packaged, and frozen food. Not the kind of food I buy, though (except for ice cream, in the event I need to ponder something). Still, we have food. I mean, don’t come visit or anything, because we don’t want you to clean us out. My point is only that we have all this stuff that the big cities and the nearest towns are all out of, and now we also have the cheapest gas I’ve ever seen — I really do think I’m living in the Land that Time Forgot.

Well, onward.

Yesterday, in the mail, I received a poetry book that I had ordered recently and it arrived signed by the poet. It was the best inscription I’d ever read. For some reason, she knows I’m a writer, which took me aback a little, but her inscription was mostly about best wishes for “seeing beauty amidst disaster.”

That, to me, could not have summed up all of life, and specifically my own life, more perfectly.

I’m looking forward to reading the book — it’s an award-winning chapbook. I will write more about it after I read it. I get the feeling that the poems are extremely intense (they’re about disaster, actually). I’m gonna find out.

I am also going to get that darn web site working today if it kills me. It is just insane, how much trouble I’m having. And it’s just tiny bits of trouble here & there, which accumulate into just a really frustrating headache. So we shall see. But I guarantee you that I have been  building websites since 1997 — and those include many award-winning websites!! — and yet nowadays, these “user-friendly” and “easy-to-use” website templates  are counter-intuitive, rarely do what I need them to do and they make me lose my mind.

New topic.

I had a brief text exchange yesterday with my sister, just to start the process of dipping my toe in that water of needing my birth mom to be here for extended periods when I have to be in LA. (My mom lives with my sister.) And my sister assured me she would make it happen.

So, between the two of us…

My poor mother — her fate is now sealed and she doesn’t even know. But to be fair, she really does like staying here. She gets all that privacy and gets to do stuff out in the garden, with my many flowers (mostly meaning: pulling the weeds that I tend to ignore now because pulling weeds would require that I leave my desk).

Which reminds me. I went into the guest room to water the plants this morning, and just look at this poinsettia!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Beautiful, right? Plus, there was a ladybug on the window, too! (Although I’m kind of starting to believe that these are just ladybugs, you know? Maybe not signs of anything more than unexpected life. Which of course, is a good sign.)

However, I digress.

But my point was that it takes so much off my mind, knowing that even if I have to be away for extended periods, my mom will be here, taking care of my house and my many cats.

Well, I’m gonna scoot. I want to get back in bed and read poems for awhile. Then gear up to face that web site again. I hope you have a really nice Sunday, wherever you are in this pandemic-driven world. Just do what you think is best, okay? And keep in mind that we’re never really gonna get it (life) right, you know? So just let it evolve into whatever it needs to be — life, love, best-laid-plans, etc.  One thing I know for sure about all this stuff is that everything we think we understand is probably way off course and that everything always comes back around for another shot or a closing statement. And then we personally define whether that’s good or not so good. And then on we go. Right? All righty. I love you guys. See ya. And remember… (really nice version of this song if you’re willing to still listen to Michael Jackson.)