I'm dying my hair to black. It's a dollar job, buck a pop at the store, and it's soaking into my head right now like uranium. It really really helps to keep it dark on top. But there is a problem.
Earlier today I tested my new electric power assist bicycle on a long run. Mission sucked, it was as strenous as riding a road bike the same distance. Laws of physics, blow me. As soon as I got my wind back from taking the trip, I looked in the mirror, saw how under-the-bridge my hair looked, and went for my hair dye pack like a spawning salmon.
The skull cap of sludge is turning colder, but I don't put that in front of my dog sled of misery. Just a second ago, I got an excruciating spasm. I'm in screaming pain, and the shit on top of my head, last I checked the mirror, has me looking like an undesirable. I am going to have amble to the kitchen sink to hose the shit out of my hair. Will soon be hiking like the Hunchback, swearing and screaming. Can't fucking wait.
I got another ten minutes before the hose, so here's the special thing that happened on the bike trip. Most of the way home, the battery was showing near discharged. The bike weighs 75 badly placed pounds, hills here are steep, spires you might say. To discharge completely would hurt.
Like now.
A few blocks from home, working the last volts the battery liked to donate, like corporate America, I decided to rest near the high rise. There's a double lot where two crack houses used to compete like Sears and Monkey Wards. The demolition squad left some of the cinderblocks from the basents, providing a cozy cold corner, minus the rest of the room, to scrooch up in. Corners were made for cowering in. There I was, perfect.
This gangle of cut and dragged morning glory vines tied the room together, like a tall house plant.
It looked more like a hybrid tumbleweed and crown of thorne. This area has a lot of Catholics, so you get that sort of effect in shit that blows in and out of here. My cinder block corner had an open view of the first floor of the highrise, beehive of dysfunction and ease, illness and freedom from hard labor. I get a Harriet Tubman vibe. There was a bureaucratic set of tunnels and trails to arrive at the current state of liberation,but I had my own free piece of concrete basement floor to enjoy.
The words, 'hi there, hi there' started flying like crows and doves in the air. At first I tried to ignore it, since I wasn't aware I was being spoken to. I'm good about cleaning my plate when you have me over for dinner, might even fold the napkin. Whatever. You don't go looking to see who it is that's talking, unless you know them, and their doe eyes are meeting yours, absent of malice. Otherwise, you pretend people aren't there.
'Hi there' kept flapping its blowsy heather wings. The flesh is weak. I started to look around.
"Look up higher." she said. First I looked at the fifth floor of the highrise, and it was its usual row of vacant unseasoned concrete balconies. I looked at my bike like it was half guilty for what was happening. It's fucking near time to rinse the liquid plutonium gell that will soon fix my repulsive grey hair. Presto change-o, it will be black. I might look young again when this is over.
On the seventh floor. "When the moon is in the seventh house."
Soon as I looked up there she entered my life with all the familiarity that modern times lack. I'm a lucky piece of shit with a not too successful electric bike.
A huge woman in a night gown was talking to me from on high. Shit like this happened in the Bible, but things were more substantive in those days.
She seemed to like me. "And Mercury alines with Mars." A song from the rock musical 'Hair' started up in my head, like a juke box.
This isn't the age of Aquarius. This was not the sort of woman that gives me the big hard one. The batteries 'down there' have been running lower than in years past, but there is still a supply of juice. The visage above didn't help. But damn it all, she was friendly.
The little bell on my clock spring timer just went 'ding,' and I must get this shit out of hair, so I am going to leave off at how I conversed with the huge woman, she waving her arms in the air like a big bird, her too transparent nightie doing a dance to the bounding flesh. We conversed, about nothing but the weather, fine as could be asked for, and maybe how sweet it is to have such a fine resting spot right where I was. She was right, I had my own corner of a demolished basement to hang in till both legs got half back to normal. Damn like the ending in The Yearling.
Maybe it's a hamstring. Something cord-like and imperative feels like it is tearing loose from the trailer hitch nearest my ass. This bullshit has to mean something, or else something else would have happened. I know per usual that after the hair dye rinses out, the skin on my forehead and face will have on it embarrassing stains that take about a day or two to wear off.
