Much later in the evening...

I had planned to wash my hair and give it great care with wax and hairspray and fix it up just right, so that I would look smashing again, but I did none of that and wasted my time instead piddling around doing nothing important, which seems to be the story of my life, but yet somehow I manage to get through it and get the most important things done and keep it all running in a fashion, I just don't have very smashing hair right now.

It's not really necessary for me to have smashing hair, I mean halfway decent hair will do too. After all, I'm not trying to lure some unsuspecting man into my female web of intrigue and sex appeal, so who cares what my hair looks like, as long as it is not dirty and terribly disarrayed.

It's actually curling now, which it has a tendency to do after I've put wax and hairspray in it and is very funny, because after I wash it, it is completely straight. I have the straightest hair on the block. Not so after I apply wax and hairspray, I get a natural curl and suddenly it looks as though I have a big head of hair instead of wispy straight hair.

But never mind, if I get up on time in the morning, I may have time to wash it then and give it the twenty minutes that it takes to fix it properly and get it dry enough without a hair dryer, which I also really need to buy one of these days.

These last couple of days I just haven't got my act together. Whenever I walk out of the kitchen with my mug of coffee, I slosh coffee over the side and onto the floor. When I make cigarettes, I spill tobacco onto the clean linoleum. When I eat a piece of bread with jam, a glob of jam falls onto the area rug. I have a half dozen little mishaps like that all day long. Anything that can be spilled, will be spilled. Paper towels are very handy right now. Luckily, I don't spill much on my clothes, but several items have had to go in the wash.

I live in the Republic of Absentmindedness. Alongside the Country of Forgetfulness. I'm not quite living in the Great States of Dementia, it's too early for that. Sometimes I think, "Oh, what the heck, just wave the white flag and surrender to it and become highly irresponsible," but there's a very sensible onlooker in me who won't let me get away with it and who runs interference for me and gets me back on the right road again. The Road of Paying Attention.

I'm sure everybody has these extremes fighting for position inside themselves constantly and it's always a battle as to which one is going to get the upper hand. The one with the smashing hair or the one with the puddle of coffee on the kitchen floor? I'm sure you all feel sometimes like you're just a tiny little mouse that's battling a Goliath with a big battle ax and you only have your little slingshot with dried peas, or were those little pebbles?

Sometimes I'm in awe of the fact that I'm supposed to be the adult now and know all the answers and be capable of running the ship, when obviously I sometimes don't really have a clue and I'm just faking it. Those are the doldrum days when I pretend that everything is moving along just smoothly, when in fact we're not going anywhere. The ship is not sinking, so it seems like we're safe, until we pick up speed again and move along at the steady pace that indicates progress.

I'm so glad I'm only responsible for myself and three animals. I think that is just about the amount of responsibility that I want in my life. If you were to add a fifth body to that, I'm sure I would panic and crawl away in a crevice in a mountain and become a hermit and grow my hair long. Or I would become a nun and devote my life to silence and growing herbs in a walled garden. Oh, I don't suppose I can smoke and drink lots of coffee then.

Actually, for as much as I fumble and stumble around, my life is as perfect as I'm going to get it. It's the simplest kind of life I can envision for me and simplicity is what it's all about, the absolute absence of complications, that will only set me cycling and I don't mean on my bike. I very rarely meet people who are as sensitive to events in their surroundings as I am, but they do exist and I do know some and feel a great affinity for them.

It's a terrible thing when you are like a leaf that gets blown about in the wind of the events that are the result of your contacts with the people in your life, but you can't be an island and you need human contact at the risk of getting blown about. A little side wind that's unexpected blows you off course and sends you cycling and moving from one extreme mood to another, which is very tiring, until it wears off and you somehow reach your equilibrium and go gently floating into the summer breeze again.

This whole treatise started with my hair and the fact that it wasn't smashing and I have decided that, despite the late hour, I will wash my hair before I go to bed. See, it's bothering me enough that I can't even sleep on it and I need good hair to go to bed with. That means that maybe tomorrow I will stop spilling coffee and dropping globs of jam, but I refuse to become attractive to members of the opposite sex. I have no desire to have that complication in my life.

With all the willpower that is in me, I will now attempt to end this bit of writing, but only because the hour is late and not because I'm done saying the things I have to say. I'm like a meandering brook and could go on forever babbling about any subject under the sun that would catch my attention right now. Instead, I will take my medications and put on my pajamas and wash my hair and do a really good job at it.

Washing my hair under the shower never works out well, because the shower refuses to point to my head and only one single little beaded stream points at my face. It's an exercise in frustration.

See you all in the morning when I have to get up bright and early for my ergo therapy, yippee!

Ciao...