Trust

I’m plagued with minor injuries lately.  In attempting to hook up a VCR so I could watch a weird Japanese cartoon somebody found for me at a flea market, I cut my hand on some plastic construction on the bottom of the VCR, deep enough to bring a little blood. 

A tick saw fit to bury itself in my calf a few days ago.  I noticed it before it got good and committed (that word looks weird to me now… I’m not sure if it needs both those t’s.  But only one would suggest a long i.) and ripped it out, smashed it between my fingers, and flushed it down the turlet for good measure.  The result is like a mosquito bite– red, raised, and itchy.  The surrounding area and indeed a large portion of my calf felt feverish for a day or so.

I was a Toys’r’us a last weekend, and at some point I picked up a rather large box containing some sort of remote-controlled Wall-E.  When I put it down, a layer of the cardboard cut my finger.  But not like a normal papercut, this came in at about a 25 degree angle and more or less peeled away a small triangle from the first layer of skin.  Again, a little blood, and the stinging that comes with any papercut.

Enough about that.  I went with my father yesterday to "First Monday," which is, if you aren’t from an area that does something like this, a large outdoor flea market held once a month on the weekend prior to the first Monday of the month.  This is usually the last weekend of a given month, like this time around, but it could easily fall on the first weekend of a month.  Not much going on at such an event to interest me these days.  When I was a lot younger I was in awe of the vast array of animals for sale, and not just puppies.  Chickens, rabbits, tiny ponies, ostriches, peacocks, alpaca, goats… although I’ve never seen a single cat for sale.  That’s weird now that I think about it… Anything like that, any sort of monthly or even weekly flea market, especially an outdoor one, will attract people selling pets, but while I’ve seen everything from puppies and ferrets to bunnies and parakeets, I can honestly say I don’t think I’ve ever seen kittens.  You apparetnly have to go to the animal shelter for those, or do what most people I know do and wait for the day two or three of them mysteriously show up under your front porch. 

Ahem, anyway, ten years ago I’d have been fascinated by the easy availability of swords.  It seems everybody has them, and the more there are available, the cheaper they seem to be.  These days, I just don’t care.  I intended to sell the swords I do have at that yard sale we had (last weekend?)… I forgot them, but I had a bunch of big-ass knives there that nobody bought, so the swords would probably have been a waste of time too.  So what could I possibly want with more?

This time around, the most interesting thing I saw were Mennonites.  (I’m not too worried about spelling that one wrong– not like they’d see it!)  The women, as everybody knows, always wear multi-layered, ankle-length, long-sleeved, dark-colored dresses and these black bonnet things.  It was nigh 90 degrees yesterday.  I’d’ve melted under such conditions.  The men don’t have it much easier with their long black pants, dark shirts, and black vests, complete with wide-brimmed black hat.  The shirtsleeves are short, but there’s no way that afforded them much extra comfort.  But they never seem to sweat…  I got a bit distracted at one point watching one of these guys buy a shotgun.  Guy couldn’t have been over 30, and I imagine the gun was probably twice that or more, while his wife could have been as young as 17 or as old as 25… hard to tell.  She never spoke a word, just waited patiently while her owner husband turned the shotgun this way and that, looked down the barrel as if aiming at something on the ceiling, hefted it several different ways, popped the thing open and looked inside the barrel, actually took the stock apart from the barrel and examined the firing pin, asked the man running the booth a few questions I was too far away to hear over the din, aimed at the ceiling a few more times, hefted it a few more times, and finally forked over at least two hundred dollars for the antique firearm.  I feel confident he intends to actually use it.  He never said a word to his wife either; when he got ready to leave, she fell in step just behind him.  Weird stuff man, these people are from a completely different time. 

Porcelain calls me.  Night all.