The Incredible Everywhere-ness of My Gray Hair

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My hair is long and gray and getting scraggly. (Weird to be physically falling apart, in a losing battle with entropy, but that's the way it is for me this year.) Sometimes my long hair still looks cool, but it's really getting tatty at the ends and has to be clipped constantly. 

Mostly, though, my hair is in the way. I'm losing the energy to put it up, to braid it, to do anything with it. Of course, I'm also in a spell where it's tough to get up the morning, but that probably has to do more with politics than with my actual physical state. Once upon a time I looked like this, a collegiate Mommy in an apartment with a black high gloss floor, a handsome young motor-cycle riding husband,a toddler and a host of neato posters:

and now it's like this, at Dragon Con, trying on a dragon's tail I didn't quite buy.

These days, my gray hair is caught in my vacuum nozzles, wrapped round around the little wheels of the machine, choking the wands, so that once a job (at least) I have to disassemble the thing and peer into the tubes to see if a clog is impacting the once forceful suckage of the my little Mighty Mite sweeper. If it is, then it needs to be poked out with long brushes, the kind used to clean furnaces.

Hair is threaded into the weave of my doormats, so that to clean them, I have to not only sweep and shake, but pick them by hand, unwinding and knotting for disposal those long gray strands. Hair is in the brush every day in ever increasing amounts. I even find it--pardon me for going here--in the cat poop that I lift from the boxes. It's distressing to be losing so much of it, really it is, after years of taking the bounty for granted.

Once again, I want to cut it, a process I constantly go through, growing it out and then cutting it off. 

Cut it--and look in the mirror and lament--WHY DID I DO THAT? 


And begin to grow it out again. If it will grow, in the winding down of my physical form...


Peace--


Juliet 

See all my historical novels:

https://www.julietwaldron.com

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How Dystopian S/F became Our Current Reality

We’re like 18^th Century aristocrats, all of us in the West. We sit and lounge while communicating with one another at lightning speed, like insects twittering to one another inside some over-burdened global hive.  Perhaps the trip to a Matrix destiny, that proposed end game of our “civilization,” is a lot closer than we think.

I'm sitting at an old CPU, practically a dinosaur, typing on a miraculous late 1980's IBM keyboard. It's indicative of my age, annual income and education that I treasure this antique. It has a marvelous decisive finger touch that this old style typist appreciates. 

However, the world has passed me by. Now babies clutch tiny devices in their fat dimpled fists. Their little faces, which used to shine while they discovered the world, are now are intent and passive. We are being readied for our place inside Some Thing's great machine, just as s/f  writers, our Cassandras and prophets, from PKD to Silverberg to Octavia Butler--and many others beside, who I have yet to read.

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The Overlords must need a lot of us, perhaps for the now well-known flesh-as-battery option. They have set their "sacred" minions to declare that sex-- one behavior we monkey/people naturally have a gift for--is Evil. Of course, to the monkey mind, these days also bent and shaped by our creation of language as in the Medium is the Message--it is at once inevitable that therefore "evil sex" must occur as often as possible. Our governments seem to believe that sex occurs only for the procreation, though any self-respecting teen will tell you this is patently ridiculous.

 All methods to prevent over-population and consequent destruction of our species' range (now this entire planet) -are strictly forbidden by various "religious" authorities. Let's face it--an oversupply of anything in our current Capitalist system leads to low valuation. Therefore this insane directive to increase and multiply is nothing less than a "Majority Church/State Sanctioned" breeding program for slaves. 

Human lives clearly mean less and less and less to the 1%, our corporate masters who have just about successfully concluded their game of Planetary Monopoly. The "excess population" (per Scrooge) is doomed to become either Soylent Green or just old-fashioned cannon fodder--when there are 9 billion of us, who in charge will give a rat's ass when a million give or take are killed in some unnecessary but rah-rah-team-fight church and/or racist final solution? Take a look at how quickly and completely the westernized Middle East collapsed under the weight of sectarian conflict and a few rapacious, murderously inclined dictators!

Mother Kali will be dancing soon, I fear. I just hope she can clear out some of our major demonic evil-doers, along with the inevitable "collateral damage." I can only pray that our beautiful Mother Earth will survive our bad behavior.

The "Summer Collection"

A 1950's Canadian Indian Residential School story: 

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Now it’s May again, and the possum has fully awakened.  Of course, it doesn’t just gradually become spring these days—no! That would be old fashioned; it would be what we've grown to expect after the last 70 years. Instead, we have had a long dry chill here where I live in the literal rump of the NE, followed by 90 degree weather for a few breathless days, causing the everyone, including the cat, to suffer from pollen allergies. Next, it falls back into something like the kind of May oldsters like myself remember: a bit gray, a bit sunny, puffy cumuli that might turn into a sullen deck over the apple blossoms , and a distinct pleasant chill whenever the wind blows.

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The result is that I have to start changing my winter clothes collection for my “summer collection.” We’re not talking Turner Classic movies or million bucks athletic garb at this house; I’m speaking with tongue firmly-in-cheek. 

What that graceful word “collection” actually means to me is putting my light colored t-shirts, capris and shorts in the drawers in place of the heavier, darker heavier tees and turtlenecks which have occupied them all winter.

  

It involves lifting heavy plastic tubs full of shirts in/out of tiny spaces in badly aligned closets, maneuvers that require me to bend and lift and twist.  Either that or getting down on the floor to retrieve a low flat box from under the bed. And we all know the fun of getting up on two legs after we've had to get down on all fours, we who are now in their "Golden Years."

 Willy-Yum watches the human bang, crash and clamber from a safe distance--the hall rug. Here, he settles in, big front paws tucked inward against his chest.

After wiping the dust from the lids, I open the tubs. Inside, there they are, the tees I put away at the end of October last year. 

It’s an ever growing collection, I fear, because I have become attached to each and every one, carefully chosen as they were from catalogs or from artsy websites. There are dinosaur tees, one with Eco-slogans, Wheels of the Year, Calaveras, cats, famous movies, and other famous types, from Alex and Eliza Hamilton and Wolf Mozart and his Stanzi as well as  the many faces of Dr. Who. It’s my down-market version of sartorial elegance, suitable either for bike riding, grocery store, yard work or the gym.

When the task is completed, we’ve got the Possum Perfect summer wardrobe (or is it weird-robe?)   packed into the chest of drawers. I’m all ready now for all the heat and humidity now relentlessly on its way.

~Juliet Waldron

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