A shopping failure…

…before I got COVID;

I open up my fridge one day and go to have some grapes that are left in the barred shelf towards the bottom of the door, and there’s a slight mold just everywhere on so many of them, both in the one pack where there’s still a few left and in the other one that I hadn’t touched at all, and I have to go sort through them to possibly save a few, which I’m able to do a very little bit, but I have to go and throw the rest out, as they give off this sweet odor and they all look like they had been slightly crushed and compromised and unbeknownst to me something had been allowed to grow in all of their bruises.

A story of another's childhood.

So, this summer I caught up some with the one resthome resident who used to give me candy at the resthome where I used to work, and she got to reminiscing about when she first moved to the U.S.

She had told me bits before about her (English) teacher who did such a good job with the classroom by pointing to everything while she said it, like pointing to her nose and saying “nose,” but this time she told me quite a bit more, including about how her family moved to this steel plant where they had a house and her father was the night watchman while they got settled.

It turns out that though they had at least one distant relative in the U.S., he wouldn’t help them or the rest of their extended family, but this one random (Jewish) (owner) guy at the factory would help families he didn’t know come over, and he’d provide them housing and let them get acclimated for a number of months, and then let them move on to something else and bring the next family in to where they were.

“You make this sound like there’s this small house right in the middle of the plant,” I was like.  “Like it’s just standing there, and there’s these giant factory buildings and chimneys with fire coming out all around.”

“That’s exactly what it was like,” she was like.

She also said that a lot of (Germans) from the factory would come over to their house to eat lunch, and her mother would put on coffee for them.

“Were they German Jews, or Germans?”, I was like.

“Mostly Germans,” she was like.

“So did you have any problems with them?”, I was like.

“No,” she was like, “We didn’t, here.”

She also said that when she was a girl back before they moved, even the small children would call out “dirty Jew!” at people, and she had seen a synagogue in flames.

She also has had no desire to go back and participate in reconciliation efforts, she has mentioned to me any number of times, though different people she know has.

“When you see something like that, you never forget it”, she was like. “Why would you want to go back?”

She also was saying that someone she knew, they named a street in Germany after someone from their family who got sent to the camps, and the mayor participated in a big formal event and everything and the family was invited and went.

“But what good does that do?”, she was like. “It doesn’t bring them back. Now, if they could bring them back, that would be something.”

Some restaurant banter…

…at the (Thai) restaurant where I work now, to a(n early 50s) (white) woman there with her husband and two (later teenager) kids, who ordered a glass of a bottle of wine where there wasn’t a full glass left but who was nevertheless open to buying the remainder at a discount and then switching to something different:

1)      “Would you like me to bring that out in a glass for you, or would you like to pound the bottle?”

 

2)      (When she has two wineglasses on the table) “Now that’s what I call a party.”

. . .

(She got a kick out of all that, like, seriously.)

British tabloids and accordant sensibilities.

A few weeks ago my one (half British) (half Sudanese) friend (the sister of the brother-sister pair) texted me and was like --

 Did you hear this disturbing story?

-- and after some initial confusion because her next text with the link hadn't come through, I found the story and read it online and we discussed.

First off, there's nothing like British tabloids. I just re-read and document-searched now, but I do swear that they initially called it a "bleak" shipping container with video cameras, it's such memorable phrasing.

There's also this:

The details of Britton's crimes are so horrific and 'grotesque' that Chief Justice Michael Grant urged the public and security staff to leave the courtroom before the prosecutors outlined the facts of the case in a rare move. 

'These facts contain material that can only be described as grotesque and perverse acts of cruelty which is confronting and distressing and which in my assessment have the potential to cause nervous shock,' he said. Much of the details surrounding Britton's offending are also too gruesome to be published. 

It's almost like Lovecraftian horror, where they can gesture to certain details -- for example, "They also found severed dog limbs in a freezer, a decomposing puppy in a pond on the property, and a severed dog head on a neighbouring [sic!] property" -- but then they leave you to visualize much, much worse.

Second off, this kind of story really starts involving you personally in the different people's perspectives and roles, in this unnaturally horrific situation.

Like, right away, I texted her --

That's crazy

 How could the wife not know

Especially since there was a shipping container on their property

-- to which she replied --

That's what I said!!

She must have suppressed it

Or actively avoided asking anything b/c she knew something bad was happening 

-- to which I replied --

Maybe he was interpersonally abusive and she was afraid 

 -- in what was really a quite extended exchange about another person, like I don't usually text.

It's like these stories leave you little arenas of horror and indignation, where you get sucked in and are forced to engage with these lurid and bizarre situations and then go comment on them. Like, my one (half British) (half Sudanese) friend isn't really into tabloids or true crime or anything, but she was forced to share that "disgusting" story and try to figure out what was happening.  It seems like it's just part of the ambient culture, and her.

It's interesting, too, how these stories just find the worst and most disturbing trash and sell it, but then take on the most "moral high road" tone, too, where they condemn the people in it, and are considerate for you and don't tell you all of the most disturbing details, because that would just be wrong.

Just a very, very distinctive perspective and voice and effects.

Third day back at work:

1) When it's slow later in the evening, I'm back in the kitchen and I hear the (Guatemalans) calling out and talking to each other and laughing in their (native) language. The one (Guatemalan) guy who started the diablo joke then starts being extremely open about his language, and he asks me if I want to learn "How are you?", and he teaches me that and the reply "Good."

2) Later, when I'm back in the kitchen again the (Guatemalan) guy who started the diablo joke has to re-teach me the reply, and when I practice with him and ask "How are you?", he replies, "Good, old man," and I catch him on that, and he's flummoxed at how I knew that word, and then I praise the one other (Guatemalan) worker who's there who taught me the equivalent of "Hola senor" in their language, and I say in (Spanish) that he's a good professor and he taught me well, and they laugh at that, and how I called him professor, but they don't laugh in a mean way.

3) My one (older) (Thai) coworker who's a whiz at the phone reveals that a lot of times when we have to decide on our staff meal, she votes for the basil fried rice because the one (tall) (skinny) (Latino-American) guy who just graduated high school really loves it, and he "needs support" in order to get his choice to go through.

She also said that a number of years ago there was a (Thai) cook who'd go on a day off to this riverboat casino like over an hour away, and he'd play all night and then come back to work the next day and be all tired because he hadn't slept, and once he tried sleeping during work and went to go sleep in the back storeroom, and the (husband) owner found him there and yelled at him.

She said he wasn't a good worker, too, and would always try to push off work onto other people.

Some meditation and routine adjustments:

1) I'm holding off doing any long yoga sessions and of course starting jogging again, but I'm so sore after work, that the next day I've been starting doing a ten-minute light stretching session, to get myself feeling more normal again.  That is in addition to (not as a substitute for) my six-times-a-week meditation scan to try to cleanse any lingering virus from my system.

2) To end my six-times-weekly virus-cleansing meditation sessions, I now imagine something like dull golden hazes or auras or almost like carwash scrubbing brushes, brushing into all of my body and into the small veins, in order to get out the viruses that could be hiding there.

First post-COVID grocery day...

...when I had the day off and walked to the far pharmacy and grocery store in the (college town) that I now live in:

1) At the one local brewery where I stopped through to have a patio coffee and send out an important email, the one (Bosnian-American) (computer programmer) regular who I know suspects that I might have picked up COVID at the farmer's market, since even though it's outdoors, it was crowded, and my immune system was probably run down from working extra shifts and getting into a new and more intense workout routine right around then.

2) At the one (Mexican) ice cream place by the pharmacy, I got a two-scoop cone (avocado on top and pistachio on the bottom) and sat outside at their little table there and ate it and chilled, only to have just as I finish it the (younger) (Mexican) guy who had served me come outside trailed by the (shorter) (very indigenous-looking) woman with tied-back hair, and ask me as he holds a pad of paper what I want.

And, I'm confused at first, and then I show them the ice cream cone wrapper crumpled up in my hand, and I'm like "I already bought ice cream here" or something like that, and they both look confused for a second, then they recognize me (my not having a KN95 mask on may have been a contributing factor), and they turn to go back inside, him first, and then the woman.

So, as she walks past me, I put my hand by the side of my mouth very theatrically to block his sight, and I stage whisper very loudly, "Que loco" ('What a crazy guy'), at which she turns to me and looks me in the eye for a second and says in (heavily accented) (English), "I know," and then turns and promptly walks back inside.

3) As I'm lost in the grocery store baking aisle, I go to turn to two (early 20s) (black) women walking down the aisle towards me to ask them if they know where I can find some brown sugar, but I stop myself just in time.