Red River Revelation

I've crossed over from tired into the zone of incoherence. Regardless, newsworthy things are happening. So.

Rita didn't destroy Centenary after all. It got Centenary rather damp, but was actually quite refreshing for those of us who just needed one day without electricity to force us into a state os pseudo-relaxation.

One pleasant byproduct was that Friday, at work in the bookstore (which is just so damned beautiful these days), lo-and-behold, who walks in but my old, old friends Ginger and Tammi. They're characters from back in the days when I lived with my Dad. Ginger was that awesome highschool friend I had in middleschool. Ginger, Tammi and their mom, Barb, were the ones who lat me stay at their house watching movies and eating Tamales all night when I came to close to forgetting that I'm a girl.

Anyway, they're all grown-up like and forced out of their homes by inclement weather. Ginger has a beautiful baby who drew on my coffee table with a red crayon and was adorable. Wait... B.A.B.Y. It makes me feel at once old and also somehow like that radical kid who has dirt of her face from falling out of trees. It was the nicest of all nice surprises to see them.

Unlike Jason and saul showing up at my house in their underwear, in the rain, which wasn't so much nice as just funny.

Anyhoo. My first day of work at the Revel was... long. I had a meagre 8-hour shift while Kacie had to work a full 12 hours at that funny farm. Selling turkey legs to people dressed like storm troopers in the Colorado summer is nothing, I mean nothing, like bartering with shreveport festival-goers for eight straight hours without a break and not getting paid. I thought Wal-Mart was where you go it you want to see people hit their kids. Oh no. No no no no no.

Working the coupon booth is where the Red River Revel is no longer an arts and music festival and becomes a beer and learning-how-to-count festival. I will be glad when the day comes that I can go back to being a patron. It's not that I don't enjoy volunteering: it's that I don't enjoy having to wait on a woman who hits her child, one child among four who are all covered with burn scars, while she breathes smoke in my face and trys to figure out what 50-cents plus 50-cents is. I want to kidnap her children, bake them a plate of cookies, give them a bath, read them a story and tell them that if anyone ever hits them again... to call. the. cops. Period.

I shouldn't complain about three more days when these people will have to live with it for the rest of their lives. But I miss selling hot meat to happy people.