Let's pause here to talk about mullets, sweet mullets.

According to Wikipedia, The mullet is a hairstyle that is short at the front and sides, and long in the back. Often ridiculed as a lowbrow and unappealing hairstyle, the mullet began to appear in popular media in the 1960s and 1970s but did not become generally well-known until the early 1980s. It continued to be popular until the mid-1990s.

As many have laughed long and loud as a mullet sets foot in a room, the mullet is business up front and party in the back. The mullet was never popular, but always funny.

Now, what ass would really don a mullet? The haircut jumps out of crowds and renders the whole scene silly. Nothing can possibly be serious with a mullet around. As in, cancel this funeral, the mullet just tripped near the guest book, or, everybody go home, the wedding is over due to a mullet in row three.

Mullet. Where the hell did you come from?

Let's take a look at some of recent history's mullet heads (by the way, I am distracting myself with mullets so I do not think about how willful and difficult the dogs are with their training).

Scrolling back a few decades we find Tom Jones, David Bowie, David Cassidy from the Partridge Family (look it up), Paul McCartney, Michael Bolton, and Phil Collins.

History apparently wasn't happy with the plain old mullet and soon began to puff it up. In the 1980s we had permed mullets, and mullets that looked like they fluffed in the dryer. Duran Duran heads had mullets. Billy Ray Cyrus had a mullet. Someone must have coughed and suddenly other countries came down with the mullet. Eh hem.

OK. Enough. Additional reading shows me that the mullet is associated with social movements, rebellious factions of people who want to be different, sports player, social status, blue collar workers, hockey fans, and fans of country music. The mullet appears worldwide at various points in history and in many countries. People with mullets are often smiling. What the hell?

Every now and then I need to rant at something, and mullets just had it coming.

Did I ever mention why I wanted to drive a pick-up truck?

When I coasted to a stop at the top of a ramp in my 80-something Tercel and it stalled and never restarted, I sang a favorite song to myself …I think I'll pack it in and buy a pick-up…(thank you Mr Young).

I was in Long Island wearing really saggy sweats. They sort of swayed and hung in tired waves as I walked around the car.

I was 18 or 19 and a teenager in America, where personal independence feels like a steering wheel and life zips by at 60 miles per hour through the wiper's smudged path in the windshield. I was going for it. I had gas and a radio. I just had not considered bad luck.

For a long time the specter of bad luck did not occur to me. My life was still a wish list to Santa and I was a believer. That rotten Tercel had a hole in the gas tank and the gauge didn't work. i would put in $5 at a time and in grease pencil I recorded my mileage on the rearview mirror. I would come up short sometimes so I kept a few gallons of emergency gas in a red jug in the back. Or, I would overpour and watch gas splash across the station. I am sure I could be arrested and killed for any of these stupidities now.

But I was excited by life. I daydreamed. I sang along. Now, I am a sour, morose jerk and I don't even have a radio. Anywhere.

Today the dogs and I got out twice to lope through blowing leaves that caught Lily's eye. She ran in circles and tonight as she tucks her nose under her tail to sleep, we wait for snow.

Santa has had his back turned to me for months. We were renovating, and I had to heave him, his torn cardboard box, and a bunch of fake snow and evergreens from the closet where they once hid for 11 months of the year. They saw daylight in December. Sometimes they would stay out long enough to see New Year's, but that prompted panic in all of us.

He sits with his red shoulders hunched and his ruddy face and knit cap angled away. Mold or dirt or something gross from the basement is discoloring the powder-white tufted hem of his coat. Little kids would not like this filthy, sullen Santa at all. They would not think of gum drops. They would think he is an asshole. I thought he was an asshole a few times, until I realized he lived in imaginations, stories, and dreams. As I got older I understood that I had to blame myself if I did not get what I wanted.

I remember Jerry's daughter as a little girl with a magic marker and a shiny catalogue. As she circled everything she saw I told Jerry, this is no good. No good.

She was young enough to forget the hundreds of things she had surrounded with black indelible rings. Christmas morning was always terrific. A year or so later she was more specific. The lists started. In perfect penmanship and with many erasures and underlines, we received for mailing a letter to Santa. If she only knew he would end up a dejected and soiled thing perched on a box as water flooded through the basement.

Jerry and I were having a normal day until we unfolded Erica's list. Long. Very long.

Again, I told Jerry, not good.

He said, Erica, that's too much for Santa. He has all your friends and all the kids in your school and all the other kids everywhere to worry about. Pick just a few very important things that you really want.

We soon read through the abbreviated list. Jerry even said, Uh Oh.

I tried to explain: Erica, you still have 20 things here. Santa can't know what is most important to you, and he probably can't give you all of these things. What if he picks a few things, but they are not really what you want? I think she understood this. I think she started to believe that Santa was a sham and an asshole for it. In other words, she was growing up and would soon see through the fairytale gauze of childhood. The other side of growing up has been good for her. Replacing Santa is her father, and he is wonderful and better than Santa anyway. Some of us, like me, step through that thin mist as childhood clears and The Rest Of Our Lives begins, and struggle. I have not made it safely through my teens yet, and I am 38.

Today I am going to pretend that rotten fat Santa is not sitting with me here in the basement, smirking. I saw a high school friend's father today who said, I was at Dan's house over the weekend and we looked at his yearbook. I saw you! You look the same!

Hiding my face at first, I peeked out and said, that's good, right? Then I drove back to work in tears, remembering the many things that I thought were possible when I was 17. Santa is such an asshole.

___________________________

For fun, I asked Google, who will I marry?

Then I took a quiz that asked me to agree or disagree with prompts including: showers are for stupid people, you used to or still do throw rocks at animals, your love life is sad, you love the smell of wood, most of your friends are hobos…

My answer? You'll live in a tree house with your husband (or wife) in the jungle. Your kids will be like Tarzan. That's about it, I guess.

Lily thinks that Google is useless. While I took the quiz she had jumped in my lap, licked my neck, whined, and tried to stop me.

The moon spills milky light across ugly ground. Stretched shadows will shrink as dawn comes with promises.

The fullest moon since 1993 wanders across the night. Winter will end as the moon sinks, and down here on the ground I wait for spring.

I can't wait to open my hands and drag them across daffodils.

I am going to go read about murderers arrested, sentenced, locked up, then found fascinating by the media. My heart is set on finishing that gentle, pastel flavored Cabernet I opened this week, and turning pages. Sordid stories and a dose of wine might quiet the screaming in my head that is ranting about spring.

Following his funeral mass, images of Ed's life flashed on the wall, tossed there by a projector as his friends killed a half keg and went searching the VFW hall's downstairs bar for bottled beer.

Jerry asked M. how Ed's accident happened. M. told him that Ed was working on a job site in a part of the house away from everyone else. They went around back and he was on the ground. His ladder was still up. Ed fell, suffered serious head injuries, and lapsed into a coma after the December accident. By the first hours of March, he was gone.

Watching his pictures on the wall , I asked S., how old was he?

Forty four, she said.

Did he ever wake up?

Shaking her head and blinking eyes full of mascara, she said, I don't think he did.

Turning to watch Ed's girlfriend across the room, S. asked, did they ever get married? I saw a wedding photo, she said.

They were not married, as far as I know, I said. We watched the pictures change on the wall. We saw some twice, and one with our friend Fonzie three times, but the wedding shot never reappeared.

We get home and I pull ticks from the dogs and find Lily's honey eyes and Bandit's determination to sit on my feet comforting. I hear Ozzy snoring and know he has parked his tan body against Hershey, who blends with the shadows.

You could write songs, J. tells me.

I don't think I could. Shaking the margarita, I'll soon add fresh lime and orange juice, invert the lime rind into a boat and float some Grand Marnier.

Kendra, you really could, he said.

J. is insisting now and I have to add a dash of nuance: I can write stuff, sure. I can swap words around so they're slightly more interesting than the first time they played through my head, but writing songs must be something different and closer to poetry.

I tell J. that not all writers are gonna be good at all writing. Some people hear the notes, but I just see images and do my best to describe and understand. I think song writing is something else, I said. I see a creative guitar finger dipping into the fluid imagination and coming up with pretty words, slick, shining, and memorable.

Done with the drink, I stab a straw in it, and say, suck that my friend. I hand the pale green frothy drink to T.

So tonight while I catch the soft, cottony smell of laundry soap as I snap a towel from the basket, a phrase jumps out about Japan. The country is a pit of death where stiff cold limbs snag at desperate survivors.

I look up song writing on the Internet and find a recipe for generating everything from titles to lyrics to choruses to the very last verse. We'll see. Maybe I'll concoct something about Lily's creamy, smoke-tipped fur, amber eyes, and illness. Nothing's perfect.

Images of a "new" Japan: a victim's wrinkled hand gripping at nothing after death erased huge chunks of a country. With fingers bent and the skin loose, the person's hand is covered in mud, just a few clicks away from the image of a cow's body with sun catching its eyes. Raging water finally nestled the dead animal down and receded, leaving it as part of the horror.

She is the delicate hue of a pastel sunrise, and the surge of death and water that tore away at Japan. Mother Nature turns her indifferent face down each night as the day goes dark and we sleep.

I felt heartless today while making tea at the General Store and wishing there were more cream, while all over Japan people pushed through wreckage seeking signs of their dead.