DebraMilligan.com

The Falling Leaves

Autumn 2018

There are no actual falling leaves here in northern northern California at the moment. In fact, yesterday was 90-ish and parched-dry-hot. I write of the falling leaves of the future and the falling leaves of the past, the falling leaves of a way of life that will soon be no more — because people didn’t want that way of life to begin with!

I always hold Friday to be special; and yesterday, Friday, 28 September 2018, was very special for me because it was so wonderful. My day would be deemed mundane and laughably boring by the people-who-no-longer-count:

the Elitists who think they know how You should live; the Experts who have decided how Everyone Else — but they — should run their lives. Those vulgar hypocrites are exempt from their own high-handed dictates and low-minded loony lunacy. Those phonies are, in fact, exempt from life, real life. They exist, not live, and there is a world, a huge world, of difference between those two worlds.

Yesterday, I went to Great Clips to get a haircut, a re-styling of the long, thick mop into a layered, texturized look. The job done by the hairdresser was great! It was my 4th good cut in a row at this place! This Great Clips location is a keeper.

Hairdressers have been through the ringer during the past 20-25 years. The people who used to run independently-owned hair salons were OSHA-ed out of business. Two very dear friends, a highly skilled barber and his Polish-born wife, went through hoops just to stay afloat with their highly successful shop.

The cost of doing business with a pair of scissors and hair dye became too burdensome, stressful and unprofitable through taxes and regulations. The small salon-owners and the hairdressers who “rented” stations closed shop, before a leech of a lawyer slithered through that business door.

By the mid-2000s, my friends and small-business associates retired, too young. They went on trips, abroad. They enjoyed life, as best they could, while the simple but talented art of cutting hair became the next bastion to be bastardized by the bureaucrats.

A Tax-and-Spend politician is like the shark in the 1975 film JAWS. The ghoul must eat constantly to stay alive. And so it forever goes in search of green-food, money, from the paying public and the private-industry sector of the economy, to feed his/her endless need to extract money, from you, to do the bidding of the Special Interests Groups that have become gross parasites upon the Body Politic.

The political freak show on seemingly endless public display is the unseemly sloughing off of those parasites from the human condition, the macabre feast upon which the politicians have fed for 50 years of the Nanny-Welfare State. Those decaying, rotting leaves are leaving us, the sensible and the sane in America. We do not bid them a fond farewell. There will be no spring, eternal or otherwise, for those Americans-in-Name-Only who prostituted their nation, who perverted the politics of what-could-be into the politics of power-at-any-cost.

The barber-surgeons would be their next prey, the next hapless victims of the Politicians fighting for The People, in the name of The People, at the cost of The People. Initially, it was the guys and the gals with the shears, the scissors that cut away unwanted keratin, who got the shaft from those hairy eyeballs, these crude fossils who — for a finite time — fouled up the American experiment. We are now cutting off the revenue-life-blood-stream for those bureaucratic blood-suckers! A snake in the corner is not a pretty sight.

I am stunned to realize that so much of what my heroine Shannon Caine in NORTHSTAR had to deal with is currently news, headline news, all the time. She really wasn’t raising cain; everyone else was!

The idea that anything, or anyone, can be self-regulating is foreign, absolutely alien to these idiots addicted to so many things: power, sex, drugs, booze, attention, gory games to destroy decency while they destroy themselves. The first NORTHSTAR was published in the fall of 1994 and that fiction has only become more true with the passage of time.

Stunning!

I am also stunned to realize that the plague of political porn known as Government now annoys the entire nation, not just California. The Golden State merely gets the over-the-top tarnished texts online, on the media feed (to satiate another tank of sharks), and on daily digests of data dribble — to show just how out of control things are here in CALIFORNIA.

Let me attest to this state of rest:

We’re doing well enough to type letters on our keyboards and into our laptops. Where those private pieces of palaver go is anyone’s guess!! But we’re keeping our heads above water as the Politico-Sharks surround us!

After my terrific hair-cut, I went with Dear Husband to Costco to get our flu shots. The experience has become a yearly routine: filling out the forms, waiting for the pharmacist to hand out the dire warnings of potential death, getting pricked with the needle, and then band-aided as he wishes us well and sends us on our way. We exited the small room that had enough lighting for an Alfred Hitchcock frenzied film.

I proceeded on to the john, the public bathroom, which, admittedly, is the true health hazard. The inner sanctum is so hazardous that the place has more warning labels than rolls of toilet paper. The long washing trough (formerly a series of sinks) now has posted above it a series of COUNTY HEALTH DEPARTMENT announcements. Each warning placard states the precise mandatory range of the temperature of the water exiting the elongated touch-less tap.

I have no idea what overheated lawsuit prompted this proviso. And I do not recall the hot water numbers because I was too busy trying to get some water out of one of the long-necked spouts. I tried several of them. The foamy soap had been on my hands for a minute or two, and was beginning to dry, so I thought perhaps the foam was that water-less disinfectant that everyone is smearing all over their hands in any public facility. Dear Husband does it often. I prefer the thrill ride of coming home and washing my hands with the lemon-scented soap at my kitchen sink.

The stuff smells wonderful!

It was only a few years ago that I felt brave enough to ditch the Dial-anti-bacterial soap from child-rearing years and progress to a hand-cleaner that will not remove the first layer of skin. I’ve been told by my Adult Son that not enough children nowadays are ingesting adequate DIRT (the kind on the ground, not on the Internet) and various infections and diseases are making a comeback because the kiddie immune system hasn’t been challenged enough.

The kiddie everything-system hasn’t been challenged enough! Those challenges are coming!

I progressed with my foamy hands to the paper towel dispenser, another ominous sight. After a minute or two-wait for the re-cycled paper towel to descend the automated touch-less dispenser (NO-TOUCH!), I wiped off the foam soap. I then ventured forth to the Food Court where, in fact, food is touched.

Admittedly, I eat at this setting only under the threat of low-blood sugar. It’s been years, many years since I submitted my stomach to Costco food. I went with the plain cheese pizza. My first slice there in a decade — and it’ll be another decade before I eat that much pizza again.

The pizza was tasty, but the problem for me eating at this Costco Food Court is that I always remember the time when I was there with Dear Daughter and we silently observed a woman filling 5 soda cups with onions (hot-dog-onions). She walked away with them as if her confiscation was perfectly “normal.”

“Boomer,” I told my then-adolescent child.

My next stop on the errands list was Bed Bath & Beyond to look for a small waffle iron. I found the only one — the floor model for about $30 (the classic one, for small waffles). So I had to buy the thing online. I purposely go to a B&M to make the effort and nearly always wind up ordering the merchandise online. The cashier did not have a clue if this item was available at the online store, an indication of just how far apart are the B&M and digital worlds.

Yes, the world of the past and the world of the future are moving very far apart, very fast. The world of the past is composed of the fallen leaves that have decomposed into the residue and remains of propagandized fears and hyped hostility toward humanity. Those fallen leaves are the people who stood in the way of the progress of humanity, of individuals who yearn to live in freedom, to simply . . . live!

The falling leaves of the future are swirling forward, moved along by the winds of change that are long overdue. Those falling leaves, in California, are the people who have left this state, in droves. The winds of political war blew many of those falling leaves right out of the state.

There are also the falling leaves that now flutter with vibrant color as they remain in this Golden State. We may even be the acorns! Every fall, we stick to the ground, that soil filled with all kinds of beneficial bacteria, and we refuse to budge from the basics of life.