It's Four Twenty All Day

For years, I've been sending those scary, horrible Easter images to friends.  Now everyone I know is doing it, so. . . . 

My mother and I are supposed to go to her across the street neighbors' house for Easter dinner at four.  My mother, however, has not been feeling well and said she may not be able to attend.  She feels she has some sickness.  I have had it, too, something long and vague.  Just an achey tiredness without fever and a sort of anxiety/depression about it.  It feels like a "sit and die" syndrome.  It could be what was originally called "Spring Fever," not the kind you get in college but the other, the malady.  Except we don't have fevers.  

So Easter is up in the air.  

I did exactly what I have been doing on lovely Saturdays yesterday.  I stayed home, stayed inside.  I thought to walk, but nope.  I sat and read and worked on pictures.  Around one o'clock, though, I realized I hadn't eaten, so. . . . 

Yup. I did that.  And I ate it in the car like it was the 1960s.  I enjoyed it.  But I have been eating like shit this week and I have my annual physical on Monday.  My bloodwork is bound to come back horrible, especially if I eat the ham and fixings at my mother's neighbors' house tonight.  But I don't care anymore. Fuck it.  What is the doctor going to do, put me in time out?  

But of course I do worry.  I worry far too much.  It stresses me out, wears me down.  As I care for my mother and think about the inevitable.  

I am down more than I am up now, and it is overwhelming me.  I live in a state of suspended catatonia.  I don't have a good bone in my body.  

"Oh, man. . . cry me a river."

Yea, I know.  But sometimes I need to drop the facade.  Are you thinking you don't live behind facades?  Ha!  More than I do, my friend.  I'll admit it.  How about you?  

Wow.  This is not good Easter talk.  Last night I did laugh.  I haven't laughed like that for a very long time.  I watched this (link).  The guy just riffs for over twenty minutes.  I needed the laugh.  

But I'm not laughing this morning.  I think I'll go back to bed.  I'm pretty sure the Easter Bunny didn't bring me a basket of eggs and chocolates.  Eggs are far too expensive, and I read that people are dyeing potatoes instead.

But I'll not get even that, I suspect, let alone good, rich chocolate.  I'd settle for a simple love letter, really.  

C.C. once told me that if I felt lonely, I could always go to church.  "You don't have to believe," he said.  "They won't kick you out."  There are a fair number of churches just off the Boulevard where the upper crust "worship."  I don't think they are seriously religious, these churches, but more social, places where peers can meet.  Those churches will be hopping today with men in suits and women in their Easter finery.  Maybe I will take my usual Sunday morning walk and see.  It might cheer me up.  

RICHMOND — School officials in one part of the Lone Star State are no fans of the lone nipple on the Virginia state flag, so they have nixed an online lesson that included a picture of the banner.

Virginia’s flag and state seal feature Virtus, the Roman goddess of virtue, whose name suggests a buttoned-down gal but whose toga tells another story — draped so low on her left that one breast is fully out there for God Almighty and everybody else to see.
Some people call that art. The Lamar Consolidated Independent School District, in fast-growing territory west of Houston, calls it “frontal nudity” — something banned from its elementary school materials.

Lamar’s school board voted 5-1 in November to update its library materials policy, which included adding this provision: “No material in elementary school libraries shall include visual depictions or illustrations of frontal nudity.”

A case of early 20th-century gender confusion led to the breast baring in the first place. In 1901, Secretary of the Commonwealth D.Q. Eggleston complained that Virtus “looked more like a man than a woman and wanted to correct it. He instructed designers to add the breast to clarify her sex,” the Virginian-Pilot reported in a 2023 deep dive into how Virginia wound up with the only state flag boasting an exposed nipple.