Had to run back to home plate to deposit my scary Dahmeresque item into my freezer. I'm in the midst of working on my next mag story on specialty food items with which to jazz up one's culination and popped into a Muslim store I've been in before. The son of the owner developed some kind of kooky instant crush on (yikes) me and he was all gangly goonie and I inquired about the meats - are they only frozen - ? - and next thing I know I'm in this walk-in cooler that was a regular Joel Peter Witkin fantasy with animal body parts all over the place hanging from nice big silver hooks. And...on a metal table was ... the head. A lamb's head. All flayed. They eyes intact watching me, my cinematic concentration zoomed in on them with a small trumpet blast ushering forth from an unseen yet Japan-worthy micro-speaker. An eye of a lamb, watching me and this horny teenager. And the brown rotting teeth still in its dead mouth. So, thinking of my art career, I asked - how much? The answer? Free. So off I wandered back into the street, plastic shopping bag over my arm, the weight of the head making the plastic welt up my forearm skin. My legal pad filling up with notes, my mind filling up with future art images, and further strange tales to tell.

Everyone in Nancy's World: We miss you, Nancy.
Me (responding to everyone): I miss myself.

Well, it's summer apparently and the work is piled up to my eyebrows and there are more looming deadlines which would crush the average person like a coconut falling from an airplane over a huge asphalt driveway. A pal at a supersonic photo lab whipped off a major order as my other lab has a piece of crap new machine which is making all of us already-stressed pros look like a bunch of slackers. Had to disappoint a colleague today with this horrid news: Black Sabbath here is CANCELLED. Sad, but true.

The day after. Lawn littered with beer bottles, cigarette butts. The driveway marked with an occasional burn streak, and pyrotechnic wrapper. The next door neighbor, the cardinal nestlings, and the stray cat pet a bit deaf today. The tip of my right thumb is charred and scarred from a bit of a firecrack mishap but it's all in a holiday's work. Today off to rock and roll photography of the local persuasion and found out today that I'll be in New Orleans for an extra day for the conference which I will be whisked off to next week as my house guests will have to do without me and my sarcastic quippicisms for three, not two, days. Life, a happy miasmic whirlwind and it's far too early to hit the Oban.

What Independence Day means to ME: as all the imported hockey giants and expat photographers living in the castle section of Scotland denounce America as a slaughterhouse and a whakteen sludge of animation gone awry and t&a and those television shows where seemingly everyone is fat and ugly and dumb and sans shame, I say the US of A is still better than lots of other places. Exhaustion sets in when thinking of the social inequality here and elsewhere but it's still a lot better here for most people than not. And you can drift around much further. This country is like twenty of the average country combined, and it acts it, too. Maine is a different country from Ohio which is a universe away from New Orleans. And Texas is unto itself: don't mess with Texas. We have choices, most of us, some of us, geographically. The money is ugly, the coffee is getting better, women's rights are faltering, the flag could be snappier, the voting process needs desperate rehabbing, but overall, commercially & cinematically speaking, we kick ass. And in the rock & roll realm no other country can touch us/US. And, in that amplified state of mind, I think of buying up in Canada at the loonie store a Canadian flag and a US flag and how my beau thinks me so utterly corny for having a patriotic streak but it makes me nearly welled up in tears holding a $1 plastic flag. Wars, and horror, and history, and earnestness, and that I can drive to Canada and buy a facsimile from a wire bucket for only one dollar. And I wondered today, as I hung the flag up on my backyard fence, if the VietNam Vet, Frank, across the street, was watching me doing this, if he would be enpained if I dropped it, if his chain smoking impulse would be triggered, or if his encapsulated decompressing debriefing would fly again from his mind, his lips, his quivering eyebrow. God Bless Your Underwear. I'd rather be living here than loads of other places. Amen and Sayonara.

How should I know an eight-foot white pine weighs 500 pounds? I'm a city girl gardener and, besides, all those fluffy needles, those thin branches, roots, what's that, fifty pounds? So I barge on into a local nursery and pronounce that I'd like a white pine tree and will be taking it away atop my sturdy car. The lady's eyes bulged nicely. She asked and what kind of car do you have? I said a Subaru. She then told me the weight and that two men and a truck and some machine she named by brand name would be able to come to my pad and install the thing to the tune of $500. I failed to connect with her telepathically to give me what I wanted, to give it all to me for perhaps $200. So instead I bought a rusty obelisk for far far less and it'll have to suffice at the moment. It's only five feet tall. It's not a white pine tree. I want a white pine tree. Everything cannot be perfect in Nancy's World if, when her world incorporates her backyard, she doesn't have a fucking white pine tree and she wants one. Thank you.

Did the big drive this fine evening to the exurban concert venue out in the sticks cow pasture and photographed Travis and then Dido, white folk rock. As good fortune would have it one of my colleagues had his rv out there stocked with Pepsis and so we sat in there and chatted while his wife watched some tv show I've never heard of and his other guests and kids came and went. Dido's band was actually great and the long instrumental intro for her was fab, I looked at the crowd and they were all on their feet, anticipatory smiles on their faces - it was actually electric. Afterwards I went to a grocery store (perhaps number three on my list of top ten things that I hate in the domestic arts category) in Pastureville and selected the world's LOUDEST GROCERY CART with wheels a -squeakin', me still in Dido sticker. I took solid pleasure in creating a major sonic disturbance with this rolling construction zone. A dazed-out employee of the store said "I know where you ARE" - heh heh heh heh.