Handbill Handout

  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 i...

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....

 It's not Monday Night Football or Hockey Night in Canada but it is my new Pandemic-End Days pastime.  Friday Night Shopping.  For the first three weeks after, as Arlo Guthrie might have said, we were successfully injected, inspected, detected, infected, neglected and selected we went to the shiny new Shop Rite in our area.  That Shop Rite is in a location previously occupied by a combination Path Mark and K-Mart that included one of those excellent "restaurants" with the particle board booths and the hot dogs of indeterminate age on rollers and the knock-off Slurpee brand "Icee" which means it was exactly where any self respecting lower-middle class nine year old would want to eat while mom listened for the Blue Light Specials.   So in other words, a Shop Rite aspiring to be a Wegman's would have some good mojo from the spirits in that particular location. Since variety is the spice of life we're going to change it up tonight and go to the Stop 'n...

 I've been told that because a piece of my foot is now possibly in heaven  or at the very least in an ashtray or garbage can that I can get a handicapped card for my car. Fuck that. I'm not ready. Somebody else asked me if it was tough to keep my balance since the part that's gone is pretty important for balance.  I said it wasn't.   Then I tried to look at the moon tonight.  It's a 54% waxing gibbous I think, and it was straight overhead.   I looked straight up while standing in the middle of my front walk and I almost fell.   I staggered back to the house and steadied myself against a wall and looked again.   I just saw a glow.  The edge of my roof blocked my view.   I went back inside. 

 I’m sitting here listening to the Preservation Hall Jazz Band’s “A Tuba to Cuba” and it occurs to me how little I still know about jazz in general and how I know practically nothing about Afro-Cuban jazz, so little in fact that I had to type some words in the ol’ Google box to make sure “Afro-Cuban jazz” was the right term.  Despite my utter ignorance I thoroughly enjoy this recording that I purchased entirely because I was listening to it at a listening station in the excellent record shop Louisiana Music Factory and Snooks the store cat wandered by and looked at me which I took as an omen.  Sometimes the store cat knows what’s best for you.  I’m glad to be listening to this at home, alone, working because if I was listening to it in the old office that I occupied before my employer’s ill-fated migration to the disease-friendly open concept that led to everyone wearing noise cancelling headphones all day and instant-messaging colleagues sitting six feet away inst...