Saturday night. Salmon Saturday, to be precise. I can’t remember the last time I ate salmon – or even cooked fish. It feels like that was before I started this blog series. At least six months without salmon… I forgot how amazing it tastes – just melts in my mouth. For a little while, nothing else mattered.

Hung out with xgf again today. We went to the overcrowded hippie house where she used to live, and picked up some of her remaining things. It was odd to see ye olde hippies again, to see and smell the place where I once spent so much time. I have this strong intuition I’ll never see it again.

Xgf is moving back into her parents’ house next week. Her father thinks covid was created by Jews to depopulate the world. Her mother wouldn’t even offer to come help her move. I can’t even imagine having such a family… I’ll help her pack up and move because hey, that’s what friends are for. After she moves to that weird little town on the other side of Toronto, I most likely won’t be able to hang out with her again – and that’s when the isolation-fueled depersonalization is going to get really interesting.

Today was cold and windy. The T-shirt weather is over. I might have had a less exciting and more depressing summer at some point in the past, but if so, I can’t really recall it. An entire season, stolen. It’d be nice if at some point we could all just treat 2020 as a gap year and agree that it never truly happened. (Maybe that’s why those who lived through the 1918 pandemic mostly ignored it in their textbooks and memoirs?)

In covid news: not too long ago, there was a potential covid cluster at a Toronto strip club. Over 400 people may have been exposed to a sick employee over the course of four days. That establishment, like many others, had a sign-in list at the entrance in order to track and notify folks if someone tested positive. Well… Most of the names on that strip club’s sign-in list were fake, and so was their contact information. The policymakers really should’ve seen that one coming, eh? It’s a legal pickle, because the only way to know for sure is by scanning people’s IDs and holding that information in some database – and once you do that, that’ll open up a whole new can of worms. So now we have hundreds of potentially infected folks running around the city, and the best bad hope is that they watch the news, learned of the exposure risk, and got themselves tested. Fun times.

I’ve just downloaded the Canadian covid-tracking app, which relies on Bluetooth and honesty. (Mostly honesty.) If you test positive for covid, you’re expected to tell that to the app, and it’d notify everyone whose phones exchanged Bluetooth handshakes with you. Not a bad concept, though it’s got a couple of serious flaws. Still, better than nothing. Here is hoping I never get any notifications from the app, eh?