The Haircut. The Visitation.

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Got a nine dollar haircut and some advice besides from J. the stylist, who tells everyone -- me, the salon cat, his parents -- that funerals weird him out so he will never ever go to any. His parents understand, he says. I think they have spent their lives understanding.

And now to the visitation, 5p for family, 6-8p for hoi polloi. This will be a moment. We have not seen mom's body. If tears heal, let's drag in the lepers and the hard of heart because I think I know what's to come. If not now, when? J. the stylist said one of the things he does not like about funerals is what he considers how many of the tears sad are false, or at least irrelevant, since (and I'm paraphrasing here):

What’s Hecuba to him, or he to Hecuba,
That he should weep for her?

Perhaps, that's true. But give true tears credit, and false tears, too, for I think some don't weep in the moment, but store their sorrow up for later on. It's natural as flowers in spring. Just wait.

And let us remember the rest of Hamlet's thought.

Had he the motive and the cue for passion
That I have? He would drown the stage with tears
And cleave the general ear with horrid speech;
Make mad the guilty and appal the free,
Confound the ignorant, and amaze indeed
The very faculties of eyes and ears.

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Dems Get Fed Up With Republican Senators, Kick Their Ass; Or, Lord Hamlet, Prince of Bloggers

Don't we wish. This post originated in my viscera as the stimulus package stumbles forward, impeded at every lurch by Republicans whose plush lifestyles have yet to be pinched by the recession and who figure they can ride it out if it turns into a depression, even if we get a right-wing dictatorship as a result.

They have correctly concluded that the people will not rise up and impose their own version of justice, no matter how bad the economy gets and how indifferent our masters continue, as (I read) Roosevelt feared in the Thirties. So I suppose these plush Repubs calculate they are all right no matter what. Though perhaps they are just stupid and have sunk too deep into their own dreams and trances.

Anyway, originally I was thinking about how sometimes one does feel as if certain a certain politician deserves a caning, and so I Googled off to the one caning I remember, that of a senator by a congressman in the 1850s. What I had forgotten was the circumstances of that caning. An anti-slavery senator was savaged by a pro-slavery congressman -- and got off in spite of the senator being seriously injured (though, to be fair, the particular speech that prompted the attack was quite brilliantly rude to the point of cruelty, and something Harry Reid could study with profit).

And so suddenly I was not only pissed off at the present, I was pissed off at the past.

But what to do?

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Why, what an ass am I! This is most brave,
That I, the son of a dear (stimulus package) murder'd
Prompted to my my revenge by heaven and hell,
Must, like a whore, unpack my heart with words
And fall a-cursing like a very drab.

Well, there you go: Lord Hamlet, Prince of Bloggers