Mid-May 2020
The other day I was driving Dear Husband, and myself, to the local flooring shop to select carpeting and flooring for our soon-to-be finished Dream House. He knew the location much better than I do for this small business, but I wanted to drive the non-edged Edge vehicle (See Summer Driving Lessons) to get some more hands-on experience on the road.
He indicated that I ought to take the upcoming right off of Highway 49, a landscape of wildly diverse businesses that can easily divert the eyes. I tooled the on-road-vehicle to the right, thankful that there was no left-turn option since distinguishing left-from-right remains a challenge for me. And I drove directly, straight-ahead, into a trailer park.
Dear Husband then quietly informed me that I had missed the turn. “I turned right where I was supposed to,” came my mild defense. Yes, but then there was a second right-handed hair-pin turn, onto the frontage road where this store is located. I had failed to execute the crucial manoeuvre.
“I thought a trailer park was an odd location for a flooring store."
I began to make a quick 3-point turn, over a speed bump, but then a car with an elderly woman came barreling toward me, honking her horn, and wagging her finger at me. She looked like a bat out of hell. I calmly decided to take my time in exiting this woebegone site. The honking got louder. I pulled out of the Trailer Park Subculture, wondering why I had so exorcised this biddy.
My carpet and flooring selections took about half an hour. Actually, the time spent chatting with the owner was more lengthy. I wanted to thank him for being such an Essential Business!
As it turned out, the wood shade I’d picked, Whiskey, is much too dark. Bob the Contractor and Joe the Painter do not want me to become a slave to cleaning the wood floor; they suggested a lighter shade. I considered Bourbon, but finally went with Applewood, the perhaps non-alcoholic choice.
Dear Husband drove to the flooring store the next day and obtained a sample. When he returned, he informed me that he’d not driven into the Trailer Park, but . . .
“You do know They took a photo of our license plate. You were driving without a mask. I wasn’t wearing one either.”
A few minutes later, after I realized that my dear spouse had spoken in jest, it occurred to me the Great Divide that exists, and has always existed, between the Individual and the Groupie. No one in the flooring store had been wearing a mask either. I guess I virtue-signaled my true virtue by wearing only bodily clothes into this retail establishment!
At present, it is almost impossible for me to visit any online website and not see Sponsored Ads for retailers, clothing and otherwise, selling masks. There are also the Banner Warnings about Overlord COVID-19. And the hectoring to save lives by staying inside. Followed by sales on masks, and humongous ads telling me to tell Lawmakers to Protect Hospitals and to Safely Re-open California. Side-by-side with fetching displays of children in need of elective surgical care! And the Rest of Us, who are sick of sheltering in place — getting back to health by advancing, like warriors, to the nearest Managed Care Facility!
They’ve got it all backwards:
First you open the Hospitals, then you open the Golf Courses! First you harvest the Dead Vote, then you hold the Election! There is the solemn vow to uphold that those people will not have died in vain! It’s how we Americans ended up with Battleground States.
I somberly understand the deaths and economic devastation wrought by this Chinese virus, but I also perceive that 99% of those digital ads are from Chinese businesses that are not leaving the Internet anytime soon. As for the fascist mandates, digital and otherwise, to Stay-Indoors-Save-Lives-Wear-Masks-All-the-Time-Huddle-in-Fear-Inside:
They demand you wear a mask, but it’s really a muzzle they want on your snout!
These bats out of hell are revealing a lot about our fellow human beings, and too much of it is despicable. There is, as always, the silver lining amidst the doom and gloom: comedy.
One noble goal of the Rugged Individualist is the banning and/or deletion of his Fakebook account; or a visit from Law Enforcement in the dead of night with a cease-and-desist order of all free-speech activity online; or the earning of legitimate wages through pulling out a pair of shears and making skillful use of them. Junk science has been revealed for what it is; and those giant sucking machines of taxpayer-funded money were the first bats out of their hells to promote panic and public hysteria over an infectious disease. Blinding Anyone with Science just is not done!
The beaches all along the 3,427 miles of the California coastline may or may not be open for Memorial Day. I expect the next Proviso from our Tin-Pot Tsar will be to order the ocean not to reach the shore. We have reached the point in this lunatic farce of elected governance where real science is offensive and all but out-lawed. Maybe music can help:
Can the ocean keep from rushing to the shore . . . It’s just impossible!
I watched a film the other night that I’d not seen since I was about 7 or 8 years of age: The Prince and the Pauper, from the Hollywood of 1937. The movie was overly long, but the acting was divine: Claude Rains as the Machiavellian Villain, Montagu Love as a very definitive King Henry VIII, and a young Errol Flynn, whom I spotted right away due to merely the elegant movements that would soon become patented swashbuckling gest. The twins were awfully good too, without any need for computer-aided-celluloid trickery.
The hideous problems afoot in 1500s Norfolk, Hertford, and East Anglia haven’t fully gone away. At times, the times of yore feel anew, minus the droning bores of the conglomerate media and the corporate shills in positions of power, jurisdictions once known as High Authority. Speaking treason, fluently, is currently the primary thrust of online speech, where even a fascist app cannot find fast enough the Perpetrator of Truth.
During my adolescence, I experienced a household wherein speaking the truth was punishable through any of a variety of castigations, ostracisms and hurtful measures, fueled by a vindictive woman, a bat out of hell, who found the truth to be one of her many enemies. Being told to shut up was, for me, an invitation to talk, write, sing, and to find any other way to defend truth. That quest did not become a personal mission for me, but it did coalesce into an intrepid way of viewing the world. There are the people who try to hide the truth, especially about who, and what, they are; and there are the people who set out to expose those frauds.
Sometime during my early adulthood, I decided that my talents would be best suited for aspiring toward a higher purpose, the creation of art; but it has long been a problem for me to completely ignore the bats out of hell, and their minions, the barking dogs. I rely now upon the master-minds online who, with witty minds, constitute alternative sources of Online Media. I humbly thank them for their often-unpaid devotion to rooting out the rotten truth, and to saying it, plainly and clearly, without malice, but with the resolute thoughtfulness of good will that motivates any good deed.
Speaking the truth is a good deed, and whether you want to know that truth or not, the truth is owed the duty of becoming known, despite, or even because of, a harsh reaction to its very existence. Telling the truth is a call of duty. When to tell the truth requires the instincts of a supreme commander and the merciful touch of a gifted artist. Wrapping your lies in the First Amendment is the act of a coward, and those cowards are being found out a lot faster now, all because of Digital Journalism.
The individuals who today form the front lines of Digital Journalism are an entirely new bastion of bold souls — defending the truth. They prepare the way for anyone who seeks to live freely and, for people like me, to create art from within that freedom. Those daringly inventive people take the personal and professional slings and arrows of the outrageous idiots who are known more for their idiocy than for their outrage, although the two grotesque behaviors have become nearly indistinguishable.
Truth takes on the form of a dangerous commodity when so many people have been paid to lie to conceal it. The truth, however, never dies. And so the pawns put in power to do the bidding of a nasty behemoth like Communist China — they seemingly multiply and, not prosper, but diminish — who they are, through prostituting themselves in ways that bring to mind the knaves of the medieval era, with drones and digital devices.
Thunderdome comes home.
Home has, for many, taken on an entirely new meaning within the past month or two. For me, my home became even more of a haven, because there were times, some of lengthy duration, when I did not have a home, at least one that was not a prison or a cell of personal safekeeping to assist me in the art of survival.
The weeks of confinement to one’s abode have been mandated through unconstitutional power-for-profit grabs by tinpot-dictator-governors. I’ve ventured forth into my countryside to walk, and to spend time in the sunshine, and have experienced Karens along the trails. And I’ve returned to my abode, a rented dump of temporary residence, to renew the sense of solitude that a home is meant to possess. For me, this house-arrest-hysteria provides me with truths I would not have otherwise gleaned about many things in this life.
My life, with Dear Hubby and with Chancey Boy, proceeds in spite of the madding crowd that’s always been a bit too mad anyway.