Alright, so I completely forgot that I have a blog.  I haven’t posted since LAST YEAR.  Yeah, it was December, tail end of the year, but still.  Last year.  It’s mid-April now.  I haven’t touched this site in more than five months.

That’s just sad.

Life just kinda does this shit to you, you know?  Where you get busy and there’s priorities and you have to let some things go in order to remain sane?  Do you know what I’m saying?  The good side is that I’m sane.  The bad side is that I had to let this space go for a while.

Anyway, I have a story to share with you all.  Whoever is still out there who hasn’t cleaned house on their RSS feeds, anyway.

Earlier, I stopped at the grocery store.  I’ve got almost no edible food in my kitchen, and I’m thinking–it would probably be a good idea to pick up some stuff.  I don’t even have anything to drink aside from some skunky beer, vodka, and french-vanilla creamer.  Coffee and tea, yeah.  But that requires effort and a wait.  That’s the way things have been around here lately.

Anyhoo, I’m in the tiny liquor section of our grocery store, coming out of the big-ole walk-in refrigerator with an 18-pack of Bud Light, and a woman and her young son were making their way around my cart, which I’d left outside the entrance to the fridge.  She muttered “Sorry,” as if she really needed to apologize for moving my cart, which I’d left, selfishly, in a spot completely inconvenient to anyone else wanting to make their way around the little liquor section.

I flopped the beer into my cart and took a quick look at her and her child.

Quickly, the thought flashed through my mind, though not in these words, just more of an impression:  “They don’t belong here.”

I pushed my cart down the little aisle and I considered turning right to the next, where the vodka is located, to see if Ketel One was on sale.  But something stopped me.  The thought was very clear in my mind–

“The woman who moved my cart to get by, and her child, are in the vodka aisle, and she doesn’t want me to see what she’s doing.”

As I turned left, I thought, “She’s going to try to steal a bunch of booze,” only again, it wasn’t in words, it was a feeling.

By the time I’d made it to the check-out, she’d apparently been accosted by the manager and had run out the door and to her car, with her young son.  The manager was near the customer service desk, asking her to call 911, and his hand rested on the handle of a cart filled with bottles of Absolut.

And one, lone, little-boy’s hiking boot.

I overheard phrases–”She was shoving the bottles in his jacket.”  “What kind of example is that for a child?”  “She should be ashamed.”

You think she’s not?  You think that woman doesn’t walk in shame every moment of her life?  She’s so desperate for whatever it is she’s desperate for that she has to try to steal booze from a grocery store and use her five-year-old son as an accomplice?

This level of desperation is easy to hide from in my little town.  But it’s coming, isn’t it?

I’ve felt, for several years now, a sense of foreboding; shaky footing; desperation in this country.  And it just keeps growing.

A large part of me, the vocal part of me, is terrified.

But there’s a part of me that’s somewhat excited.  I know, that sounds weird.  But I’m a little excited to see the parts of this country which have been, historically, untouched by everyday desperation, feel the effects.  See desperation.  Feel desperation.

I’m excited to see the eventual outcome.  Maybe I won’t survive it…maybe it’ll take so long to see what’s happening right now with any sense of distance or relativity that it’ll be my grandchildren talking about it in history class.  Or my great-grandchildren.

I just don’t know what’s going to happen in the future.  And for the first time in my life, I’m absolutely giddy about it.