I just flew in from Detroit...

One down, seven to go.  

Seven weeks of wearing a gargantuan medical walking boot because I have and teensy-eensy tiny li'l stress fracture on the top of my foot.  Prior to seeking medical help, my foot hurt only when I exercised.  And for a little while after I exercised.  Other than that, no problems. 

I'm trying to lower my cholesterol and live slightly healthier.  Towards that end, the only lifestyle change I've managed to embrace is exercise.  I actually like it.  Even looked forward to it, vaguely. (Actually, what I enjoy is listening to audio books while I'm walking.  Before the boot I was in the middle of the first Dexter novel.  Luckily I have a long drive coming up in April and I'll be able to finish it off.  So to speak.) 

Every morning for years I have worked out for at least half an hour.  Lately I added a three mile walk in the evenings.  That was all well and good until I added in a bit of jogging.  Quite honestly, Baptists should have foregone the anti-dance crusade and gone with an anti-jog crusade.  Jogging has to be a more devilish form of movement than dancing.  I, for one, feel certain that people are closer to hellfire and damnation when jogging than when dancing. Joggers are Satan's bobble-heads.

So, anyway, I wanted to keep exercising, so I figured I should get my injury treated. 

And now I'm stuck in this boot for two months.  The boot makes my foot hurt worse.  I've finally figured out the reasoning behind the treatment.  It's not that the boot is beneficial per se, it's that it is so cumbersome and uncomfortable that you'd just as soon sit as walk, so you stay off your foot and that gives it time to heal. 

I hope. 

As you can imagine, this has played hell with my cardio plan.  I still go to the "gym" in the mornings.  It's actually the physical therapy department at the surprisingly vibrant little local hospital.  Since I can't walk, run, flail about on the elliptical machine or wedgie myself with the stationary bike, I have been lifting weights - mostly dumbbells. 

This morning I graduated from the sissy weights (color coordinated, rubber coated rods which only went up to 9 pounds) to the bad-ass weights (grimy iron dumbbells on a steel rack that make your palms smell funny and have a minimum heft of 15 pounds).  I managed to do all the same exercises with the heavier free weights. 

And now I think I am going to die. 

However, despite the moans and groans, my morning workout compadres all agreed that they would not want to take me on in a fist fight.  They were also nice enough not to point out that all they'd have to do to win the fight is step out of arm's reach.  Regardless, that was the encouragement I needed to get me back there tomorrow.

Even if I can't lift my arms and have to just sit there and stare at the barbells.

Billy Idol Makes My Head Feel Funny

It's a gorgeous day, even though the sun is shining and there are no clouds.  One can't always have a day of dreary perfection, so I've learned to look for the beauty in even the sunny places and spaces.  The park was calling my name, so that's where I spent most of the lunch hour.  I sat in the car with the radio tuned to the 1st Wave station on Sirius.  I kept it quiet so I could hear the birds squawk. 

It rained some this week, so there was actual water in the faux creek with the ugly little bridge that was built by a strictly utilitarian crew of city workers.  The bridge is very uniform.  I like uniformity in design, but it doesn't work for me if the design is all squarish and straight.  Art Deco is my favorite design style and it is all about uniformity.  But it also flows and curves and sweeps and spreads out in gracefully controlled falls.  Lines are good when curved.  Curves are almost always more interesting. 

I love it here after a rain.  You can pretend that the water in the ditch is actually a charmingly natural little brook and that the scraggly, barely mower-high, dandelions are West Texas' answer to the bluebonnet fields. 

The ravens like it too.  They dance around on the edge of the tiny stream.  They aren't actually ravens, just common grackles, but they are still pretty cool.  And they do an awesome Hitchcock tribute on houses and yards all over town. 

I get a kick out of all the solitary people who come to park their trucks along the edges of the park and eat their lunch in the shade of the elm trees that manage to over-hang the pavement a bit.  The draw - an organically occurring ditch - that runs through here allows to the trees to get enough water to gain some decent height. 

The cemetery has some good trees too, and you can find some of these same people and more eating lunch out there every day.  Whichever place they choose, they stay in their car, keep the radios quiet and don't feel the need to engage in cell phone conversations.  I love it.  It's like we're all attending an introvert's convention together. 

Collected introverts, dancing blackbirds and faux-creeks. 

It's what's for lunch. 

I just like to say "Casper Weinberger".

Words are powerful.  Names are important. 

Remember the old Bloom County cartoon where Opus muses that he and Caspar Weinberger have had to work hard to overcome the hardship of their less than stellar nomenclature?

For the most part, I contend that courtesy titles are a form of self-perpetuating discrimination.  I ain't sayin' it's right, I'm just sayin' it is.  I like titles that tell what you've done (Doctor, President) as opposed to those that give your marital status.  I am 41 years old and I cannot remember a single incident in my entire life in which it was ever necessary to use the title Miss or Mrs. 

Words like chairwoman or policewoman discriminate because the very sound of the word tells you this person is somehow different from the norm.  Why not just be the chairman?  Or the officer?  Why do you need a different title to do the same job? 

Why do we need separate Oscar categories for male and female actors?  Why can't all actors compete against one another?  I do understand, given our currently regressing caveman culture, that this might result in a dearth of female recipients, but it just chaps that women compete only against women and vice-versa.  As if women need some sort of separate arena?  We don't. 

We do need separate bathrooms, but that's about it.

I worked with a court administrator once who preferred the term administratrix.  Thankfully, no one would actually call her that.  The called her some other things, though.  Administratrix - what century is that from?  It sounds like what you'd call the receptionist at a S&M club. 

And then there are the sports teams.  I realize that there probably ought to be some way of differentiating men's and women's sports teams.  And honestly, I've got no idea of how to do it, really.  I just know the current system sucks.  (Isn't this how these things normally go?  Someone gets all smart ass and bashes the situation without having thought through any sort of a way of improving things.)  I don't have the answer, I'm just complaining. 

Bulldogs are always a popular mascot around here.  And every school that uses it calls their girls teams the Lady Dogs.  Yet "Go Bitches!" is frowned upon when shouted from the cheap seats.

The little town just north of here uses the admirably unusual mascot of the Kangaroo.  The women's teams?  Lady Roos.  Lady Roo sounds like a ripoff of Lady Gaga. 

While writing this I am wearing a t-shirt that has "Lady Horn Softball" emblazoned across my chest.  Granted, the boys don't play softball, so they could have used Longhorn Softball.  But, no. 

The Lady Horn might well be an implement of male destruction hidden away from sight and perhaps the culprit behind all the anti-feminism pervading our legislative bodies these days. 

Lady Horn.  Watch for it.

It was all fun and games until someone put an eye out.  With the Lady Horn. 

You gotta say it like Peter Griffin says "Roadhouse":    Lady Horn.

Worse yet?  The reason I'm wearing the shirt is because my kid's team was playing the Sundown Roughnecks.  (A roughneck is a type of oil field worker/job.)  Of course they don't call their team the Lady Roughnecks.  Nah. 

The Roughettes!

Kid. you. not. 

The Roughettes.  Appearing nightly at the Emasculation Lounge with Lady Roo!  They'll be here all week. 

Comic Books–Tool of the Devil

Someone in my household started wearing reading glasses.  It wasn’t me. 

But one day when I was straining through an evidently tiny copy of The Watchmen, I saw them lying on the end table.  I picked them up.  No one was home, no one would see me…  I slipped them on and tried squinting.

It didn’t help.

The squinting, that is.  The reading glasses eliminated all need for it!  Amazing!  I finished the book in record time. 

Thanks to the Kindle and it’s easily adjusted text size, I contend that I shall never need reading glasses.  Provided I give up reading comic books. 

But I don’t want to do that.  In fact, I ordered a new one that came in the mail today.  It’s the first volume of The Preacher series.  I’ve read some later volumes and I just love it.  It’s about a minister from west Texas.  It is chock full of bloody, gory violence, explicit and sometimes extraneous sex, and more vulgarity than you can shake a collection plate at. 

I love it!

 

So, I ordered the first volume from some anonymous internet seller on Amazon.  It came in the mail today and I have either had a brush with fundamentalist sickos who had no idea what they had on their hands, or I have just met my new best friends.

For reals.

They sent along a free gift.  The free gift included a kitty-rap decal (I guess that’s what it is), a cross-shaped sucker (which is just horribly, horribly wrong in my twisted mind) and a choose-your-own-adventure book entitled “You Are The Messiah”.  I can’t wait to read it. (I wonder how it works if you’re female? Does that take you down some alternately subservient path?)  And then there is a post-card for “The House That Drips Blood on Alex” playing at Megaphone Comedy club. 

Isn’t that insane?!!  It’s like Christmas in the asylum, all over again!