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For once, at least, it's a cloudy, rainy day I'm glad came around. We were headed for a drought unless it rained soon, and so it did. The grass on my lawn had turned brown, and maybe that had something to do with what I wrote about the world running out of food yesterday. Even if the people had planted a garden it would die without water, and all their waiting for spring to come with it's promise of green vegetables would be to no avail.
I see a lot of travel videos on PBS. There is nothing else much on over-the-air television to watch but the phony sitcoms about doctors, lawyers, policemen, and false reality shows where they have more backup than performers.
I enjoy watching some of the documentaries. I'm tired of watching nature show about the struggles of animals to stay alive in a shrinking world. A lot of these shows are so old all the animals featured in them died long ago. There is nothing to save anymore. Soon, the drone aircraft will be used to kill the ones that are left just for target-practice. Man's inhumanity is not only directed toward man.
Apparently there are lots of people in northern Europe who still live out of their gardens. They don't have electricity or clothes-washing machines. So, they don't spend a lot of time attempting to look glamorous when they're barely surviving. I have a washing machine and a dryer, yet I don't try too hard to look glamorous either.
I've been letting my hair grow out just to see what how it might have changed over the last ten years of keeping it cut off in a buzz cut. I was planning on growing it out for a year or so to where I could bind it back in a pony-tail, but it got too hot and having all that hair on my head threatened my life with heat prostration. The fact that I'm an old man made it even more of a problem. My ancient air-conditioner died, and so the only way I can cool down is by running an electric fan, and by cutting my hair off again.
I like it short like this. Buzz cuts are me. I don't have to wear a hat just to keep my hair looking half-way neat. I can ride around with the windows in my car rolled down. The A/C in my car don't work too well either. I'm a little upset by that because it's the first car I've had in decades that had an air-conditioner that worked right. Not being able to use my hands because of the arthritis is not only klutzy, but inconvenient as all get out.
I didn't cut my beard off. It's gotten pretty long. About 8-10" long now, and scruffy looking. I haven't trimmed it or tried very hard to keep it looking neat. Even if I did, the worn-out clothes I wear to allow for my belly to get bigger or smaller would give me away. What's the point of having a neatly trimmed beard if the rest of me looks like a snaggletoothed bum.
My feet hurt so I just drove over to the strip mall to walk on the wide sidewalk outside the stores. My feet are so swollen it was uncomfortable to wear my new Crocs or even the larger sized pair David bought me to help me learn to love Crocs. When I got to the mall I decided to just go barefooted. I'm real pleased I did.
Walking barefooted on the concrete sidewalk brought back a lotta memories of my childhood. My feets remembered and started talking the same old stuff they did when I was a kid. In the villages and small towns I was brought up in everybody including most adults went barefooted in the summer.
I remembered walking around the first village my family moved to when I was two years old from Mississippi. They had a few sidewalks, but the main feature was the concrete highway that ran from Fort Bragg, North Carolina to Camp Lejeune, North Carolina. It was called the military road because that was the only reason it was there. The federal government still didn't pave roads in the South due to Reconstruction unless it involved the military. World War Two changed that somewhat.
State Road 24 was the only paved road in the coastal plains and the farm folk truly used to goggle at the chance to drive their iron-rimmed mule-drawn wagons down it to hear the crushing of the sand on the concrete under those metal rims. My family rented half a house on the north end of this village where the farm traffic from that direction would bring their goods to town to sell them.
I used to sit on the front porch of this house (which still stands) and listen to the noise of the mules hoofs clomping and the silicon crunching, and the sounds of the farm children screaming from the wagons. Everybody went everywhere when the farmers came to town unless they came alone. That usually meant they were there on business. The bootlegging business. Lots of swamps to hide stuff in.
I'll probably go back and walk on those sidewalks barefooted again. It's a lot mo' bettah than wearing shoes on my swollen feet.
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I do not attempt to tell the God's own truth here because I don't know what the truth is or hardly ever. I try to capture the drifting thoughts that randomly appear in my imagination for reasons I may not understand. I don't know if the content I capture with these words is true or false. The Comments settings are turned off to prevent me from having to defend what amounts to little more than fanciful, sometime crude speculation. Great moments in our lives never return.
