My life is completely upside-down. Remind me to never schedule this much travel in a one week period, ever again.

I was going through the yellow pages looking for a dry cleaner to do a rush job on a business suit for this next trip, on which I leave this afternoon. I came upon an ad for a company called ‘ATLANTA CRIME SCENE CLEANERS’. That by itself wasn’t so unusual, I guess. These companies are cropping up all over the country, folks who specialize in cleaning up the bloody mess that a violent crime leaves behind. It’s probably pretty profitable, considering the ugliness of the job, which would turn my stomach even if I were wearing their Tyvek ™ suits and respirators.

No, the really unusual part of the ad was the next line: “COMMERCIAL CONTRACTS WELCOME”. It slid right past my eye at first, but a few seconds later it hit me. I don’t know what sort of company would need a standing contract with a crime scene cleaner, other than perhaps The Sopranos. “Sheila, call the cleaners … Bernie got smart and I had to whack him, right on my Persian rug. Oh, and ask ’em if they do contracts … I might have to whack Joey next week, and the busy season’s coming up.”

Anyway, I found a nice dry-cleaning fellow who’s going to fix me up. One emergency averted. Now all I have to worry about is my cat, who sneaked out of the house this morning and could not be found before I had to leave. The poor guy has used up a significant number of his nine lives, and has already had one encounter with a vehicle, I can only hope the family rounds him up today before he gets into any real trouble.

I spent the drive to work this morning listening to Ani DiFranco, a singer/songwriter I hadn’t given much attention until now. Some of her music is a little too angry for me, but some of it is incredibly insightful. One song, called “Hello Birmingham” from the album entitled “To The Teeth”, actually moved me to tears, so intense was the message. She talks about the killing of Dr. Barnett Slepian, an abortion doctor…

It was just one shot, through the kitchen window.
It was just one or two miles from here, if you fly like the crow.
A bullet came to visit a doctor in his one safe place.
The bullet had shown the right to life, whizzed past his kid and his wife,
And knocked his glasses right off of his face.
And the blood poured off the pulpit,
And the blood poured down the picket lines,
And the hatred was immediate,
And the vengeance was divine.
So they went and stuffed God down the barrel of a gun,
And after him they stuffed his only son.

No matter on what side of the abortion issue you find yourself, this is powerful stuff. It strikes close to home, because I live only a few miles from Carrollton, Georgia, home of Neal Horsley and his radical, militant anti-abortion web site, “christiangallery.com”. This is the site made famous a few years back when it listed the names and addresses of abortion doctors … drawing red lines through them as they were killed off.

Don’t get the idea that I’m pro-choice. Don’t get the idea that I’m pro-life, either. I’m not taking sides on this one. No uterus, no vote. I am however anti-shooting-abortion-doctors-for-sport.

God, I’m tired. Maybe I’ll get some sleep on the plane, if the Federally-Mandated Screaming Baby is a few rows away.