Sunday evening.

Another weekend carefully wasted on video games and reading. Hard to believe that used to be my default preference once upon a time. (I’m an introvert – sometimes I simply must recharge ye olde battery without any human contact.) On the other hand, that’s another weekend without catching and/or transmitting covid, so I did my patriotic duty? Maybe? Kinda? I maybe kinda did my patriotic duty, yeah.

A year or so from now I’ll learn whether the experimental vaccine I got was the real deal or the placebo. Right now, I feel like I have a very mild cold, but that could be just my brain messing with itself as I play the “placebo or real?” guessing game. Heh.

A random stranger finally dropped by and took my damaged 42″ TV off my hands, at long long last. Way too many people either changed their minds or didn’t have access to a car to come by and pick it up. It’s finally gone… It’s been my companion for nine years. Looking back, it’s hard to believe I lugged that thing from Vegas to Dallas to Tampa to Seattle to Toronto, across more than a dozen addresses. If and when I get a replacement, it’ll be a tasteful 32″ or smaller TV. (Why yes, my life is very exciting.)

I’ve been doing some thinking about who I want to be and who I want to be with after this pandemic mess finally ends… Might fool around and create a new dating profile: nothing real-world for now, but I can’t think of a better opportunity to get a penpal and get to know one another while the world is slowly mending.

This week’s big grocery indulgence: salmon and dark chocolate. (Not at the same time, of course.) In the coming decades, cocoa and salmon will become more rare and more expensive. Gotta enjoy them while they’re still around. Not too long ago, as I was reading William Least Heat Moon’s excellent Blue Highways: A Journey into America, I was always surprised by his nonchalant dietary descriptions. He was road-trippingeron. That was half a century ago, and it’s hard (though not impossible) to believe you could just get a large piece of smoked salmon so cheap. These days, just a few ounces will cost you $10 or more. Another 50 years, and it’ll become an even more unavoidable delicacy. At some point in the future, people will get nostalgic over the early 2020s. It’s hard (but not impossible) to believe, but this will be many people’s idea of the good old days.

In covid news, this is pretty ironic… Miami Beach has declared a state of emergency after being overrun by thousands of maskless spring break revelers. That’s action and reaction, cause and effect: Florida has spent most of the last year doing everything in its power to attract tourism and downplay the effects of covid. (Governor DeSantis called Florida an “oasis of freedom” less than a month ago.) And now that there are legions of loud, party-seeking, aerosol-exchanging college students all over the place, the local authorities are suddenly starting to realize they’ve made a huge mistake. Miami Beach’s curfew will be between 8pm-6am for at least the next three weeks, until April 12th. There’ll also be traffic restrictions, some business closures, and the local cops have allegedly already arrested a few folks. If you tilt your head and squint a little, this is entrapment of sorts: Florida clearly wanted to get tourists, and now that it got what it wanted, it’s going “no, no, not like that!” This isn’t as filled with schadenfreude as the infamous Fyre festival, since a lot of the visitors this time are middle-class kids and not part of the 1%. I don’t feel sorry for them since their pandemic party got ruined, but I can see how they’d feel cheated and insulted. Sucks to be them.

Stay safe, y’all.