science IS real Black lives Matter NO human is illegal Love is Love Women's rights are Human rights Kindness is Everything
In My U.S.A….
Tag: social commentary
Grooming?
I used to paint and knit. Now I groom my healthy dog’s fast-growing hair. I trim at least a quarter cup of hair a day yet one would guess since it grows so fast!
So when I saw these short-haired shedding dogs, I laughed aloud that that Ziggy’s uses these images to advertise “GROOMING.”
A bath and maybe a nail trim is nothing in comparison with the hours I spend each week brushing and cutting hair.
Many. Hours.
Even having had large Collies and a Malemute did not prepare me for how time consuming this little 16 lb non-shedder could be. Though non-shed is a misnomer. She sheds, just like a person, very little. And her hair just keeps growing.
It grows thick and fast and doesn’t stop to ensure that her feet retain traction on the ground, but instead her paws mutate into large balls of fur. Without a severe trim at least once a week, her winter-rabbit paws are so slick with hair that she’ll slip and slide as if our floors are ice. Which leads to injury just like when people run on ice with slick bottomed shoes.
In other words, the dogs pictured do not warrant the term “grooming” any more than lounging in a hot tub is like riding a ten foot wave.
Neighbors
When a neighbor wrote this on the sidewalk in 2020, I felt it in grey…
yet, in 2023, I feel the optimism that my neighbor’s color choice conveys. I continue hoping “BETTER” for so many more, in so many more ways that anyone might have imagined three years ago.
Forgiveness
Dark in Light
DARK IN LIGHT Wanted to show you the moon but cruised off the wrong ramp and wound up in a war zone where there is no curfew: men standing solo in the middle of the street or huddled, talking beneath burned-out lamps; wanted to show you the soccer moon but drove down darkened roads with bars enclosing windows and doors, barbed wire spiraling a hardware store and nursery—planks and daisies out of reach; wanted you to count the seas across that haloed orb but drove alone through neighborhoods as treeless as that dog-song moon; beat-up cars driven beyond unmarked borders pulled over by uniforms with clubs and guns, jagged tension cutting concrete air; I want to know who declared this war of Americans against Americans: children peer from sheeted windows, women hide behind hollow doors, a man looks up from an empty street, each of us equal distance from the sun’s reflective sphere.
Thank you to the editor of Something Like Homesickness for first publishing this poem.
Washington
If you want a friend in Washington, get a dog. Harry S. Truman
Please VOTE
Perspective
I have stared long enough at the glowing flat rectangles of computer screens. Let us give more time for doing things in the real world...plant a plant, walk the dogs, read a real book, go to the opera. ~ Edward Tufte
Freedom?
“If a woman can’t be trusted with a choice, how can she be trusted with a baby?”
Study and protect our living Constitution, or ignorance and manipulation will prevail. Legal precedence matters.
America
AMERICA Although she feeds me bread of bitterness, And sinks into my throat her tiger’s tooth, Stealing my breath of life, I will confess I love this cultured hell that tests my youth. Her vigor flows like tides into my blood, Giving me strength erect against her hate, Her bigness sweeps my being like a flood. Yet, as a rebel fronts a king in state, I stand within her walls with not a shred Of terror, malice, not a word of jeer. Darkly I gaze into the days ahead, And see her might and granite wonders there, Beneath the touch of Time’s unerring hand, Like priceless treasures sinking in the sand. Claude McKay, 1921 Shenandoah Literary
Graffiti
“Graffiti is one of the few tools you have if you have almost nothing. And even if you don’t come up with a picture to cure world poverty you can make someone smile while they’re having a piss.”
Originally shared on Random People Quotes Project.
Elizabeth Oakley Weaver 