I become a wax BORG, and go visit Psycho again

SLAP!

“Stop that!” Linda demanded.

“But I don’t feel it!” I grin and bring down my open hand on the front of my naked shin wth force.

SLAP!

Linda grabs my hand, “Just because you CAN do something doesn’t mean it is always GOOD to do it!” (wow, way to sound like a mom Linda!)

Yes, it was leg and bikini waxing time again. Last weeks’ gyno exam had convinced me strongly on the need for a waxing. I thought my leg hair was pretty sparse until I sat there sans panties waiting for some guy to walk through the door.

“Oh gross, I’ve turned butch!” I exclaimed looking down.

Anyway, my nerve endings are definitely all dead up to a couple inches below the knee. I thought this a new sort of parlor trick (hence the slapping); Linda had these “practical” statements like: “Just because you can’t feel it doesn’t mean you can’t bruise it!”

“So?” I was still into the neat experience of being able to make really horrific Hollywood quality beating sounds and not feel a thing. My lower legs now seem permanantly a different color than my upper legs (they are a light shade of blue). And post wax, the lower legs are covered in rivers of dried wax that the beautician couldn’t even scrape off with her flat shoehorn thingy; so on they stay. It is sort of interesting watching someone dig away at a leg, trying to get under the wax without ripping a long strip of skin completely off and then remember, “Oh yeah, that’s MY leg.”

There was almost an accident when they tried to flip me over on the table. I think the beautician was getting a bit frustrated that more and more bits of wax seem to have molded to my body (I am the wax BORG! You WILL be absorbed into us!). And at one point during flipping they almost lost control of my body and barely missed planting my butt directly into the wax pot. “PLEASE don’t spill the wax pot on her butt!” the beautician begged, “I can’t handle even THINKING about dealing with that today.” Alright, alright, no butt wax, fine!

Though ice particles and rain were coming down when we went to the waxing place, it was sunny when we left. Can you guess where we went next? It’s kind of like the show/bar Cheers; “Sometimes you want to go, Where everybody knows your name, and they're always glad you came.” Okay, they don’t know my name, but they know my wheelchair. You guessed it, back to the park! (For all those thinking “Oh not MORE squirrels!"; hey, it is either slightly happy stuff about squirrels or me moaning on for three pages about pain and fatigue.....yeah, I thought so: on to the squirrels!)

Most of the leaves had fallen in the last week and I had quite a few black squirrels who seemed to either know me or heard about me (“Yo, go check out that broad in the wheelchair, she’s easy!”). While they run away from other people, they seem to have no fear of me as evidenced by this guy who decided to eat his peanut STANDING UP on my feet. Why? I guess they are big feet? (he was old squirrel and like many grandparents, was too busy shelling the peanut to care what else was going on around him.) But the REAL point of this picture is a message to all those girls in junior high and 9th grade: Look…cleavage! And no, I didn’t have to hang upside down from the jungle gym to achieve it! (click on any picture to enlarge it: yes, take a closer look, genuine non post-menopausal cleavage!)
Even though I was in my regular chair and not the handcycle, the squirrels seemed to recognize me anyway. Demon Child of last week was not around (Psycho did however appear later, racing across the field and into my lap with the squirrel equivalent of a young niece/nephew giving you a full body hug while searching your pockets for candy). Some of my squirrel rendezvous seemed almost, well, intimate. They had an air of “We’ll always remember Paris in the springtime” and those Hollywood style meetings in the steam on train platforms. It was either that or they were trying to say, “Hey, it’s cold and getting colder, do you have the goods on you or not?”
The peacocks were sunning themselves in the “Grove” as we call it (a collection of old fir trees where many of the older squirrels hang out). They are beautiful to the point of being painfully exquisite. They are also male (the boring white ones are female). I think they were planning on going clubbing tonight. One mother herded her children away saying, “Watch out, those peacocks are vicious.” Poor misunderstood peacocks, while they are often sarcastic and self absorbed, I wouldn’t exactly call them "vicious."
If you stay in one place for any length of time, the squirrel telegraph gets around and a half dozen start bounding towards you across meadows. We had been looking for Psycho but as different black squirrels would pause for a split second before crawling up the wheelchair tire we knew it wasn’t him. Then he appeared. Have you ever seen an animal (or person) running towards you with such unwavering determination that they seem bigger than they are?

It was “OMG! Here he comes!” One leap from the ground mid bounding stride and he was in my lap. Some people watching and passing by thought I had “trained” him. Like I really spend my time in the park teaching squirrels how to pick easy targets for mugging? (“Remember, the ones in the wheelchairs can’t get away!”)
Notice my nice cross in the pic: it is actually a skull, neck bones and rib cage nailed to a cross which ends as a dagger, very um….dark (and I got it last week during Halloween sales!). Linda thinks I am an “innocent” (her 'nice' slang for ‘touched in the head’), since. for example. this morning I saw that the beautician was wearing a gold cross (no bones or skulls) and I, without thinking, exclaimed, “Nice cross! Hey, I’ve got one too!” While I watched the eyes of the beautician widen as she took in the whole tortured upper torso nailed to a cross (in which the bottom tapers into a knife blade as well), I suddenly realized that maybe OTHER people who wear crosses might not find mine QUITE so inspirational as I do. Luckily she wasn’t that religious as she broke into loud (and mildly hysterical) laughter. Still, I think my cross is really cool.

So while I was actually very weak and punky this morning (had to be fed and helped to move at all), I think I learned some sort of valuable life lessons today. I will try to sum them up: 1) If you give up and just go back to bed, then you won’t have a chance to accidentally spill wax on your ass or make fight sounds on the nerve-dead parts of your body. 2) Men who jump into your lap are not that scary when they only weigh 8-12 oz. And 3) If you bribe often enough, people will be impressed with how many friends you have, or think you have wild animal training skills when all you really have is wild “I’m buying this two pound bag of peanuts please” skills.

Happy weekend; Linda says it too! (and thank you big pharma for opiate pain pills!)