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If you’re one of those people who thinks executive dysfunction only happens for things we don’t like (school, cleaning,) then please consider the fact that I’ve been meaning to plug my phone in for 20 minutes and I’m now at 2% and still putting it off to write this post ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

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Little toad friend thinks our patio is a tree.

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Breakfast tastes like spring! (at Bolivar, Missouri)

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Filling in an extra 8.5 hour shift at the library with what was suppose to be my day off. Not optimal, but I know that Adam has the greenhouse, chickens, and plants under control. And the library I am filling in at has a park right next o it, so I had a chance to swing on my lunch break. Not a bad day. :) (at Fair Grove Branch Library)

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Man of Faith

This morning there was an older gentleman sitting at the computer had a slate colored baseball cap on. Across the front of the cap was an embroidered bible and the proclamation "Man of Faith". Along the brim, were the words "I Love Jesus".

Storytime had just let out and there were a couple families with you children in the children's section and using the self-checkout. The children were not yelling, just being kids. The man in the gray hat loudly asked "WHO WOULD BRING SCREAMING CHILDREN INTO A LIBRARY?". Immediately another patron, across the computer aisle from the first, answered "I wouldn't!!".

I got up from my desk, went over, and explained that a storytime had just let out in the community room and that due to the small size of the library (I am at a small branch) the children's area was part of the library and it did sometimes get noisy.

The man didn't say anything back, just scowled and turned back to his computer.

Matthew 19:14 "Jesus said, "Let the little children come to me, and do not hinder them, for the kingdom of heaven belongs to such as these."

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#boxes #story #religion #god

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Refresh

Refresh Google News, the digital Daily Planet.

See where... The tornadoes are. The war zones are. The active shooters are.

See where... The seas are rising. The refugees are dying. The bullets are landing.

Minute by minute. Where the acts of God, hand on trigger, are right now.

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Purple star. 

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Doors

There is a elementary age child in tights and flat furry boots walking in the library. She steps high, like a bird. Like a trot.

She steps her weird steps as she walks in through the sliding glass door.

She steps her measured gait while walking through the children's section. She finds three small chapter books. At her age I was reading The Boxcar Children. Her books are pink with a Pegasus on the front.

She steps higher when she is leaving. Small short thigh stretching steps.

Her heel comes down right ahead of her toe.

As a child I remember having weird obsessions with stepping only on the brown tiles at the Dillons we shopped at. This was sometimes difficult and I was left leaping between islands of tiles, scrambling to keep up with my mother.

It must have looked like a game, to those behind me. Red hair, silly purple t-shirt, hopping along.

They could not know the dread I felt at touching a white square.

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Two hundred and ten years ago, on a day at this approximate point in space, Lewis and Clark first saw the blue crashing waves of the Pacific Ocean. On this morning, in my time and my place, the man next to me on Highway 13 has a dream catcher hanging from his rear view. He drives a dark Cube. He has a chubby pale face, a blonde haircut that looks like maybe he tried to go somewhere nice this time. He has a business casual polo on, even though it is Saturday. It was a Thursday. When Lewis and Clark reached the Pacific. The dream catcher dissects the early morning November sun, spreads pink and yellow rays on the man's face. The dream catcher swings slightly, as the man makes his way down the highway. Driving with me, on the asphalt. Over the Sac (Sauk) river. Past a skunk (squunck), dead on the highway. Lewis and Clark traded the people they met near the ocean fishing hooks for salmon. In his journal, Clark described the people as "low and ill Shaped". 

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Men in Car: [While near me in the Walmart parking lot.]: YOU'RE FUCKING GAY!!

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9/18/15

The sky is haloed and glowing. Fish scale purples and Jurassic greens.

He is sidetracked by the spider in the laundry room. He stops, to see what I'm staring at out over the dirt road.

Bright blue, acres of pure atmosphere between the London sky and the bruised horizon that hugs the rising sun. Wonderberry thumbpress ink and well water clear blue. Sky painted as night transitions to morning.

As I drive out the sun will rise tangerine mirage horizon. An orb whispering braille, golden into clouds, passing them gently in climbing ascent. The sun's light will catch on the brass faces of dormant nodding trees and glide, suncatcher, crystal, through the fall webworm ornaments. My windshield will go brilliant with the radiation.

But all that will come later.

In the dark morning - a time of cats, baby tree frogs, praying mantis eyes - he rises. Before the sun. Before the purple boot stomp of the breaking dawn. He pulls pants on, starts the aluminum hiss of the stove burner coffee. Greets the creatures.

He toasts the muffins, made from the fruit of his earth. He assembles a lunch. Puts coffee in a cup the size of my palm. He thinks sandwich, thinks laundry, thinks dog walk. He thinks spiders in the laundry room.

Until my stillness makes him stop. Until the earth spins enough that the passion flower vine blush and the bright melon solar citrus yellow and the tornadic green trees of the horizon comes up and around us.

Then, in that moment between dark and day, in that stillness as we move out of shadow, we stand. Absorb. Begin.

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Newsworthy

The child's limp body, Syrian soaked bone tragedy washed up on the worldwide Google News shores. Turkish officer. Holding the child like my father hold my baby brother late in from a car ride. As if the child fell asleep in the car seat. Small foot, slack ankle wearing Velcro toddler's shoes with blue soles. Journalists fluctuate, not sure what term to use. Are the people dying (in the lorries, in the seas) migrants sneaking illegally? Are they tempest tossed refugees? News cycle quick tongues twist. Cedar sparking. Schizophrenic rambling. Kardashian celebrities on even footing with humanity catastrophes. The footprint the tiny tennis shoed toes leave is unpredictable. The officers boots stand in wet sand, The tide is always rising. The face of the Syrian people is hidden, blue lipped, tucked into the shirt of a Turkish soldier.

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Half-mast

On my 29 mile, 51 minute, morning commute the BBC spoke of the lorry parked on the Austrian freeway.

Alone in my Chevy Cobalt, five miles over the speed limit. The announcer said suffocation. Blood dripping. Badly decomposed.

Beside me a woman was driving a Pontiac Vibe. She was also alone, in her bright red comfortable car. She had two American flags attached. One to each window. The driver's side flag whipped in the wind, pert on the plastic flagpole.

The passenger's side flag hung down, half-mast, limp, above the empty seat.

I tried not to imagine finding the seeping.

I tried not to imagine not breathing, in a box with seventy other people.

At the stoplight, I stole a glance at the woman in the Vibe. She looked blissfully unaware that she was breathing.