Asparagus. Life Lessons 101.

So yesterday morning, I was pissed off. I mean, downright four letter word inducing, lip quivering rage. At like 10am. There's a whole lot that went into building me up to that point. It started the night before, well before our gig was to start. Early in the evening, I got a ridiculous stomach ache. You know the kind where the bathroom better be within 30 seconds of you. By the time the gig started, I was just wishing I was in bed. Then things got worse.

We were running with an unfamiliar sound system that required a sound man to navigate, and we didn't have one. Couldn't get the levels straight for anything, guitars, vocals, bass. Feedback everywhere. It was a train wreck. And me being the anal perfectionist that I am, was completely unnerved and subsequently played like crap. Thus the scowl appeared on my face as we were breaking down, and I wore it like a crown all the way home. Woke up with it the next morning too. Spent a few minutes arguing with one of my teenagers about something ridiculously inane. Then I sat down to blog about the whole Arizona immigration thing.

I made damning points about Arizona having the guts to do what the country can't. Seeing as 7% of their population is illegal to the nations 3.9%, they enacted legislation to do something about it. I quoted Chicago Rep. Luis Gutierrez in his attempt to show the "bigotry and hatred" won't be tolerated. (Um, these people broke the law. Some "borrowed" social security numbers, and most are driving down the cost of wages by taking the jobs that "nobody wants". Tell that to the nearly 12% of the actual citizens that are unemployed). And as I was putting the final corrections in place, I hit a wrong keystroke (still don't know what I did) and 30 minutes of writing was gone. Poof. And this blog site isn't MS Word. There is no "undo" button. Throw everything together, combined with my smoldering fire of not having worked in a year (you really do feel like less of a man), I went off.

But it was about an hour later when I was at the produce market that perspective finally crept in. I was noticing how the simple act of picking produce was having a calming effect on me. As I made my way over to the asparagus, I made a comment to a fellow shopper, a kindly looking elderly lady. "You ever notice how they package asparagus so that one pack isn't enough, but 2 is too many?" And she agreed, and shared a cooking tip with me. So I replied with one of my own, telling her after she cuts off the ends, she could use a potato peeler to take the skin of the hard end of the stalks. She looked at me and said, "You see that? You serve the lord and every day something good will happen to you." I tell her it is time consuming, and she says, "But it will make for a better meal." And she smiled at me and walked away. And right then, something amazing happened. I smiled too.