The chronic malcontent joins the tiny hat movement

Sometimes when I stand at my computer desk, staring morosely at my screen, my cat sneaks silently into the room and sits on the floor behind my feet. Inevitably, eventually, I step backward onto his tail. I think it's a ploy to get sympathy. I thought he wasn't all that bright, but maybe I'm wrong: He's figured out how to get love. That is more than some of us can say.

I'm seeking a hat that will clamp down on the vertigo. Is there such a thing? I have many kinds of hats: berets, cloches, stocking caps, straw hats, watch caps, baseball caps, and hats whose names I do not know. Most are black. None of the hats I have seems to mitigate the vertigo, so I'm hunting for a new hat. Maybe something in tin foil.

I wear a hat pretty much all the time. I wear a hat to the store. I wear a hat to job interviews. I even wear a hat to bed. I'm wearing a hat right now. The only time I don't wear a hat is when the temperature exceeds 90°. Then I'll let my scalp roam free. People are always shocked to find I actually do have hair. I suspect they believe I've been a cancer patient for years. Nope, sorry. I buzz my hair short on purpose.

Somebody should invent a hat that helps old people think. Teachers used to tell students, “Put on your thinking caps!” to imply that they were not thinking to their full potential. Did it inspire students to think harder? Deeper? Clearer? Who knows. All I know is, I want a thinking cap. I want one for my mother, and I want one for me. I don't care what color.

Lately I've been thinking that everyone should start wearing a hijab, the Muslim women's headscarf. If everyone walked around in hijabs, maybe people would get used to seeing them around town. Then they wouldn't be scared of hijabs. It's normal to be scared of things we don't understand. If you were wearing a headscarf on your head, you would understand it's a piece of cloth that wraps around your head. Then you wouldn't be scared of it.

I'm not much of a joiner. Groups make me feel uncomfortable, and the idea of joining a movement in a presidential election year really makes me queasy. (I might accidentally become a Trumpeter or something, and then I'd have to kill myself.) However, I don't think the tiny hat movement is all that well organized. I haven't seen any newsletters. I don't know if there is a website. In fact, I might be the first one in the tiny hat movement. It's hard to tell if I'm part of a movement when life is moving around me. Do you ever have that feeling?

Anyway, if you would like to join the tiny hat movement, leave a comment, and start wearing a hat.

The chronic malcontent experiences ego deflation

Happy effing new year, readers. All 10 or 12 of you. I hope this year all your pleasant dreams come true (and none of the nightmares). Me, I just hope to stay present as the moments sweep me along, if not savoring each treacherous moment, at least, not wishing I were somewhere else doing something else. I'm just hoping to be here now. What else is there? I've spent years trying to fix my past and manage my future, and look where that got me. Broke, flabby, and discontented. Joke's on me.

Once again, it seems whatever mojo I enjoyed over the past few months has evaporated as I've been sinking into my mother's shrinking world. Aspirations of art, writing, doing something with myself, all seem to be misting into nothing. Late middle-aged woman, interrupted. Again. Interruptions in the past I blamed on partners. This time it's my maternal parental unit who has become the baby planet nucleus of my parched existence. I've whined about this before, sorry if it is getting boring. It's boring to me too, and it's my life. I suppose it's hard to sink lower than the realization that I'm bored with myself.

I had an idea for a story today. This is nothing new. I'm a dreamer, ideas are like breathing. The frothy cloud of creativity burbled in my chest. My heart rate accelerated. I suppose my eyes twinkled, although I'm not really sure (they sometimes dance from vertigo). I chortled once. If I remember, I will commit it to a Word doc and save it in a folder that I will rarely look into again. I have enough ideas in there to last a while. Unformed hazy potential.

As I've grown older and less optimistic, I've finally stopped seeing creativity as the antidote to my malcontentedness. My creative life has pretty much shrunk to this blog, the electronic platform from which I whine. I used to paint, but what do you do with a bunch of paintings nobody wants? Build furniture out of the particle board panels. Cut the canvases into strips and weave them into placements. See? An idea a minute. I sit in meetings and draw the images you see on this blog. I have a notebook-a-month going back to 1995. Who wants them, raise your hand.

The excessive-thinking malady brought on by fear of downsizing is cutting the crutches out from under my wobbly creative spirit. Too much stuff is at war with need more stuff. (What's up with stuff, anyway? How did it turn into my higher power? There's a topic for another rant.) The Love Shack is not a big place, but more to the point, I will not last forever. Before I die, if I have the choice, I would like to jettison some of this baggage and abandon myself to the creative spirit. I'm sure it's still in me somewhere, waiting patiently for an invitation to peek around the door.