I survived the cyberpunk end times, and never got to assemble my own Mad Max warrior tribe. I got my COVID shots and never got weird mutant superpowers. I ventured out of my survivalist seclusion and found out the world is going to keep going.
Recently we’ve all emerged from COVID quarantine, and my household bravely ventured out to public life again. My first time dining out at an actual restaurant took some adjustment.
My darling wife of 30 years, Mrs. Penguin, could not afford to lose her cool. She is a patient woman, and I speak here as a man who is an expert at being impossible to take out in public. She sat in Felix & Oscars enjoying her personal pizza and margarita, happily munching and slurping away. I was eating too, but nervously. My sweaty hands gripped the table. My eyes scanning madly from side to side around the room. I assured her that I too, was having fun.
But inside my dumpster of a neurotic brain, I was screaming: “AAAAAAAAAAHHHH! I’M SURROUNDED BY PEOPLE!!!!”
The Coronavirus pandemic of 2020 / 21 has taken its toll on everyone, and it was true, I was surrounded by people. Every table filled, every barstool packed, all weekend long. It’s been a year and a half of sorrow and gloom in this nation and the world, but with the vaccine doing its work at last, everyone spent the glorious spring weekend about town here in Des Moines, Iowa. The crowds were not rowdy. They acted like people who had been under quarantine for a year and a half.
Or, in my case, a mouse emerging from its hole to investigate the house carefully, on the one day they took the cat to the vet. I expected a giant spiky COVID-19 virus to jump me from around a corner with a baseball bat at any moment. Maybe the virus would charge me and rip my shoulder off, taking me down like a cheetah. I have been careful for a couple years. I was a paranoid germophobe hermit before there was a pandemic. Speaking of which, has anybody checked on Howie Mandel lately?
I discovered a secret area at Valley Junction
But I did it, I braved a whole weekend at large in Des Moines from meals out to shopping out at glorious Valley Junction. The air that I breathed was outside. The light was coming from outside. Everything was coming from outside. I was outside.
No more clicking on a laptop and tapping on a phone to summon delivery people for our every need, nervously grasping bags from behind the germ barricade.
I know most of you out there have not been this isolated. But I’m a freelance blog writer for the web, I was working at home already. I could work down a manhole cover, down to the sewer next door to the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, and the worst issue I would have with that arrangement would be banging on the concrete wall to get Donatello to turn the boom box down.
Bottom line: All you had to tell me was “pandemic,” and people ask who you were talking to because I disappeared already.
So long had it been since I’d been “out” out, that I felt the need to wander off and reintroduce myself to the town. And there, in a spot within the Historic Valley Junction shopping district, I encountered the most unexpected junkyard of forgotten commercial signage.
Legal Delta 8 Hemp in Des Moines, Iowa
Forever since signing up with the gig at DabConnection, I have been amused at the irony of becoming a cannabis expert while residing in Iowa, one of the bottom 10 least cannabis-friendly states. Marijuana is still “the devil’s lettuce” here.
But at Valley Junction, I discovered a vape shop selling actual hemp flower, miracle of miracles. I gleefully reviewed Hemp Living USA’s delta 8 / CBD flower for DabConnection. Sadly, Iowa is a totalitarian state with mean ogres in power, so it’s not likely to last. But I stocked up.
Two artists to discover on Soundcloud
Recently my esteemed colleague Giles Edwards points me to some audio reading work, including a haunting narration of the greatest hits of Edgar Allen Poe. Tell-Tale Heart, Pit & The Pendulum, Cask of Amontillado, they’re all there for your spellbound perusal.
You might ask, how do I know this guy? I know him through my gig at 366 Weird Movies, where he also reviews and lends his insights into the most flabbergasting works that cinema has to offer. He and I have an informal, sort-of competition there to see who can review the worst movie. When it comes to bad movies, both of us have exposed ourselves to films so terrible that they cause permanent brain damage, so it’s a pretty gruesome competition like you’d see in a Saw movie.
The other artist, Cassandra Trbovich, has just dropped her first track, “Sexuality,” a song she wrote, scored, produced, and sings herself. And you might ask, how do I know about this obscure fledgling artist? Why it’s simple! I’m her dad. I have raised this person, who somehow survived the experience with her sanity intact, and now she’s a Soundcloud artist.
123ish ravings: political parties and the race illusion
Over at my 123ish gig, I’ve become the resident mini-Vox editor there. 123ish is an international site translated into four languages, after all, so it reaches a lot of the world which is hungry for down-home cornpone insights into WTF is going on in the states.
Well, our 2-party political system is due to go bye-bye, for one thing. And for another, your belief in this irrational concept called “race” is just a hallucination. As always, they are now added to my 123ish directory blog post, because that site is never going to dig up author bio pages.
That is not all, not by a long shot, but I’ll have to report the rest of what I’ve been up to in another post.
