Ghost Town

I drove through the city today, the Breadwinner had to run some money to one of her places where a couple of employees stop by once or twice a week to check on things and clean. It's and eerie and strange feeling driving relatively empty streets, looking at empty sidewalks and closed stores, the people you see at bus stops and walking all wearing some sort of mask. It does seem a bit straight out of a pandemic movie, as if a large portion of people have been wiped out. Of course there is the real possibility that could happen but at least here in my fair Rust Belt hamlet the residents seem to be taking it pretty seriously. I wouldn't have left the house at all except the Breadwinner asked me to drive her and i don't mind cruising through the city and listening to music, that's a well documented pastime of mine here at the lounge. In fact i actually took the long way just to have a look-see, a ghost town of a downtown, a deserted Strip District, the empty streets of Bloomfield and then the burst of humanity near the hospitals. The shopping district of Mall-nut devoid of a shopper. An empty Liberty tube and an even more empty W. Liberty Ave., and my hood where there is barely an automobile to be found on the streets except for Amazon trucks and landscaping companies and of course the intermittent walker or two out for a stroll to break the monotony.

For my part i've been using the web to peruse independent record stores in search of obscure Jamaican sounds. While i sit upon my throne and bitch about the capitalist nightmare and the age of consumption i am very much guilty of having a record problem. Of course it does come in handy during these strange times because i never run out of excellent tunes, at least in my humble opinion, to listen to. And while i would have much rather bummed around the town of Negril on the west coast of Jamaica looking for records come June it seems that this is the closest i'm going to get to that this year. I'm just as stoned as i would be in Negril (or close to it) it's just much less beautiful without the heat and breeze and salt air, the smell of jerk chicken and some of the world's best herb.

But back to my drive. It was good to get out, i never left the car but caught the breeze through the cracked window and felt a bit Bruce Willis in Twelve Monkeys sort of way. As i said i was glad to see how the people in my city were heeding the call to stay home if possible, to protect themselves and their fellow citizens. There was a moment there where i thought the human race might be able to pull together just for a bit to advance the cause, for both our species and all the others, for the oceans and the rainforests and i'l be fucking damned if i wasn't having my granola moment and feeling a good bit optimistic when i sat down for a minute in front of the tube to see the state of things and...

and all that shit melted away faster than an ice cream cone in that blazing Jamaican sun i love so much. There in high definition was what i can only refer to as the sub-species of humanoid, the lowest common denominators, eagles and flags on their shirts, MAGA hats on their heads, sans face masks, all crowded together holding signs and chanting and angry that someone told them to stay inside and avoid crowds because if they don't they could become seriously ill or maybe carry that little ditty to someone else who could become seriously ill or maybe even pass it along to someone who it might kill or maybe even more than one, maybe a few or a half dozen or a dozen. All because they're gonna exercise their right to be assholes, which of course is fully guaranteed in this country but not something i'm certain you would want to broadcast to any and every person you could find. Now i understand that this crowd is probably not big on shit like science but that fact is that if even one of these muppets were contagious a good bit of this crowd is going to get it, and let's face it, this crowd looked like a poster for pre-existing conditions, chock full of diabetics, obesity, chain-smoking, Budweiser drinking, high blood pressure and insert any fast food chain superfan here, one could only surmise there would be a few fatalities among these specimens. Critical thinking skills among this group is not what we'd venture to call their strong point. Sadly this wasn't restricted to one state but to four or five. What i saw most definitely in this crowd was the face of asshole white privilege. Spoiled and paranoid children afraid of boogie men, xenophobes and homophobes and gaslighting whataboutists.

The fact is these rules, advisories, whatever you want to call them, were put in place to protect people. This was the recommendations and thoughts of doctors and scientists. If that kept you from talking in your head to an imaginary ghost on some "special" day you might be missing the point of the book they wrote about him. He'd have told you to stay the fuck home too!! I don't think i would have thought two years ago that i would be glad my dad was gone but these days i'm pretty fucking cool with it. The guy worked the graveyard in the grocery store, he smoked, he would have been a prime candidate to get killed by this shit. Granted he might have said fuck it and quit but knowing my old man he'd have kept showing up just for the hell of it. Yeah it's hypothetical but it's something i think about when i see people who are basically saying to the rest of humanity that they're special and more important than you and can do what they want and they don't care if someone gets seriously ill or dies, they don't care about whole segments of the human race because it infringes upon their life, a fucking life that most likely doesn't remotely reflect a meaningful existence but damn it when they want to go the fucking mall they want to go to the mall!! they need to buy ammo and trick out their pick-up trucks and amble around Wal-Mart cuz it's their god given right!! But don't let the lemmings get you down... because for the first time in decades the people of Northern India have seen the top of the Himalayas, the satoris abound.