Imbolc\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Waning Wild Moon<\/p>\n
Watched The Hurt Locker<\/a>.\u00a0 It comes to mind this morning because Saturday is grocery shopping here at chez Ellis\/Olson.\u00a0 After spending a full rotation in Iraq as a fearless and emotionally committed bomb tech, the lead character rotates back to the mainland. The scene that takes us back to the states with him opens with him pushing a grocery cart down a frozen foods aisle.<\/p>\n The shift from the sandy, hot precincts of Iraq to a modern US grocery store jars on several levels.\u00a0\u00a0 The first is visual.\u00a0 The glass is clean, the chrome gleaming, the banks of freezers stretching out quite a distance.\u00a0 The second is aural, no bombs going off, no screaming civilians, no rumbling trucks, no blare of heavy metal music.\u00a0 The third is the juxtaposition of this\u00a0 bomb-suit wearing, in danger of dying, hard-drinking, rock and roll blasting, Staff Sergeant William James with the ordered gleam of American food retailing.<\/p>\n His wife comes by with his son, “Get some cereal and I’ll meet you at the checkout.”<\/p>\n He leaves frozen foods and goes into the cereal aisle.\u00a0 Told to get some cereal he confronts another well-ordered aisle, this one with boxes upon boxes of varied types of grains made into breakfast food.\u00a0 His confusion and inability to make a decision contrast sharply with his demeanor in the war zone where life becomes stripped down and, though often life or death, the decisions are more straight forward and apparently easier to make.<\/p>\n I have a very mild sense of this every time I go to a grocery store.\u00a0 It comes from traveling in 3rd world countries and seeing the chaotic, but often much more interesting mercados and street merchandising there mixed in with the desperate poverty that makes the range of choice available to us enough to cause the kind of confusion and lack of decisiveness expressed by Staff Sergeant William James in the Hurt Locker.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Imbolc\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Waning Wild Moon Watched The Hurt Locker.\u00a0 It comes to mind this morning because Saturday is grocery shopping here at chez Ellis\/Olson.\u00a0 After spending a full rotation in Iraq as a fearless and emotionally committed bomb tech, the lead character rotates back to the mainland. The scene that takes us back to the states … Continue reading Shopping<\/span>