Well, Heather’s toe is getting worse. I’m worried for it. A couple of days ago, still in California, I’d noticed she was limping, and since then it’s swollen considerably, turned quite the exciting shade of red, and become really, really painful. I spent most of Friday running her from doctor’s appointments to x-ray places to various pharmacists hunting up the anti-inflammatory / painkiller the podiatrist prescribed. He wasn’t sure what was wrong (they NEVER know what’s wrong) but the popular theory is gout.
Gout?!!? I thought gout was illegal everywhere except in third-world nations. Ugh. She’s hurting a lot and has advanced to crutches.
Man – but driving was just idiotic. So much back and forth, and I don’t know if it was the rain, or because it was Friday, or if it was just the day – but people were insisting on being idiots. I spent a LOT of my day waiting at stop signs for people who simply… sat… I’m not sure what it is about the American driver’s education system that has somehow failed to pass on the mystical teaching of What To Do At a Four Way Stop, but I imagine these people are still there, flashing their lights at one another.
Damn you, idiots. Damn you all. And what sucks, is when they finally go to the Hell they so richly deserve, they’ll probably be too stupid to notice. They’ll just stand there, burning in little pools of acid or perhaps being confused by really complex vending machines waving at one another and wondering what’s going on.
Death.
Before I move on, I also feel I must be clear, I’m NOT a Nazi slave-driver, I offered to cancel the evening’s show! Heather was in pain, it was raining, Battlestar Galactica was on… but Heather is a fierce little beast and insisted – we went to Java Mamma’s and played a great little show to a teeny but enthusiastic audience (my favourite kind) with the constant sound of rain acting as accompaniment outside. We met a couple of new people (did anyone take pictures? I don’t think anyone took pictures! I’ve GOT to get my camera fixed!!!) and even met the Reisterstown Witch!
Perhaps you wonder – what Reisterstown Witch? I did. I was additionally confused by the fact that THIS Reisterstown Witch was dressed as Dorothy. She walked in halfway through our second set and we had to play No Place is Home for her, and then we HAD to play Simile Blue for her… and then I got to talking to her after the show…
Well, every neighbourhood has it – the one house that goes ALL OUT for Halloween. When I was growing up, it was the house around the corner where the husband installed a strobe light, removed the front bushes (and kept them potted elsewhere), dug a pit in the front yard, and then proceeded to lie in a coffin ALLLLL NIGHT leaping out at kids and pelting them with candy.
In California, it’s Derrick’s mom’s place which Heather and I passed at high speed, only glancing at the crashed flying saucer and the accompanying severed heads.
And in Resiterstown, it’s apparently the home of the Reisterstown Witch, who dresses up as the Witch from the Wizard of Oz, soaks her self in green oatmeal, and then leaps down her stairs and stirs her cauldron while cackling. She made one kid pee one year. She’s not proud. With dry ice in the roiling depths, children must blindly thrust their hands into the ancient, crusted vat of no-doubt doom, and pull back handfulls of candy, or not… or sometimes merely STUMPS!!!
Well, probably not. I think they probably ALL get candy out of the cauldron, but she DID make that one kid urinate all over her front step, so there’s probably hidden tiers of evil deep inside.
Her granddaughter had requested an appearance by the witch but she’d insisted she didn’t want to sit in the vat of green oatmeal more than once a year (her husband hates what it does to the shower) and dressed as Dorothy instead. She even has a 14-year old neighbour who’s eager to take over for her one day… what an aspiration!
Still, the witching calls and you HAVE to answer. Otherwise you just end up singing in harmone with yourself…
