Handbill Handout

 This morning a grey Altima parked in front of my house.  It had New Jersey plates.  The woman driving the car got out, took three full black trash bags out of the back seat and carried them up the walkway adjacent to the twelve unit garden apartment building across the street. A little while later a grey pickup truck pulled into the spot behind behind the Altima and two women got out.  They walked around to the back of the truck which was one of those with the plastic cover covering the whole back part and opened the tailgate, took several black trash bags out of the back of the truck and instead of crossing the street carried them south toward the next corner and disappeared from my vantage point. A little while after a guy came down my street painting a while line to mark off the street parking.   Someone want to tell me what's going on here? 

  I had my hair cut today for the first time since around a month before the pandemic took hold.   That’s 18 months ago, more or less.   At some point during this period we find ourselves in I had decided that one positive thing I could do while I wasn’t forced to interact in person with anyone on a professional basis is grow my hair long enough to donate it to a charity that makes wigs for kids who lose their hair to chemotherapy or for other medical reasons.   It was a no-effort effort on my part, and now that it’s done hopefully some small positive thing will come out of this long tunnel of negativity.   Hair is just hair, I figured, you cut it off and it’ll grow back, maybe, right?   Still, I felt a little pang of sadness as I heard the scissors crunch through the strands.   I just had another birthday, and the thought that “it’ll grow back” is a promise of time that I’m not entirely sure I have and won’t know that I have until it has already passed.   The hair is gone now, it

  Watching the people go to the restaurant on the corner I wonder what their expectations are for the occasion ahead. I wonder if they’re looking forward to the gathering or dreading it. I wonder if they’ll get life changing news, someone announces a wedding or an imminent child or maybe they got a fatal diagnosis and they break the news between the apps and the entrees.  I wonder what the appropriate time of the meal is for that? Before dessert, certainly. 

Remember when the pandemic was new and those articles and some pictures from the 1918 flu pandemic came out and some people wondered why there wasn't more of a historical record or documentation of how to handle it?   I think this week has been an education in why that is, it's that when people 100 years ago got to the end of their pandemic they just wanted to get past it, be done with it and not think about it anymore.   So nothing was gained and nothing was learned.   We've come to the (beginning of?   middle of? ) the end of the pandemic now at least in the urban coastal regions of the United States.   In the middle we came to the psychological end a while ago because most folks in most states outside of the urban coastal regions don't give a rip about those we've lost, or their neighbors, or society as a whole, only about what "impinges on their freedom".    There’s zero interest in learning anything this time that we can use next time, or even impro

The young people of today will probably never know the overwhelming desire to turn off the television during a thunderstorm because when they were a kid they hear about That Neighbor Whose Antenna Got Struck By Lightning and It Went Right Down and Came Out Through The TV and KILLED HIM!   It's always a guy, I guess women were always smart enough to turn off the TV when the storm started. 

 I have been having a recurring nightmare where I'm caught somewhere, usually outdoors, definitely far from home, NOT naked like the stereotypical nightmare everyone has....just.....barefoot. Also in this nightmare, the foot that is now and forever missing a toe has that toe again, except that it hangs like a small bag with a rock in in it and flops around as I walk, completely out of my control.  Or sometimes it retracts into my foot.  Whatever it does, I know that it absolutely does not belong there and I have a mounting sense of panic that I need to get rid of it.   At that point I'm transported to a crowded workspace or restaurant or some other place where it's difficult to move around because of the press of people but somehow one of my mounting army of dead family members finds me and drags me to a table where other people are, people who want to talk to me.  I don't want to see them.  I argue and berate the people who are trying to get to me.  Now the living are