Bizarro Beauty Parlour

            On Sunday I got caught up on my journal.

            I finished re-reading Pat Parker’s poems. I still found them boring for the most part. They are important for their content but boring for their poetry. They just don’t go to any place new.

            I re-read William Faulkner’s “A Rose for Emily”. A weird store about a woman that hated everybody and everybody hated her. She was a vestige of slavery and plantation privilege with an old Black servant. She poisoned her northerner lover.

            I added some sautéed onions, garlic and sweet peppers to the chipotle chilli that I’d made the night before. The fresh ingredients tones down the harshness of the chipotle a little bit.

            I watched an Alfred Hitchcock Hour teleplay. Some ex-cons rob a safe that for some reason has inside of it, in addition to $112,000, a canister containing highly radioactive material. The youngest of the three decides not to escape but to try to save people’s lives from radiation poisoning.

            I finished re-reading Eudora Welty’s “The Petrified Man” with the bizarre but strangely ordinary women in the beauty salon. Her characters and situations are certainly bizarrely comical. The kinds of people she portrays as living in the south are not unlike some of the people that were around me when I grew up in rural New Brunswick.