You can see, as the Onion puts it, we here in Palmer are well into stage 4 of pretending corona virus is over. I, too, am fully on board with doing my economic duty and patronizing the Moosehead near daily. Two drinks, Space Dust and Fireball, a decent tip, and a goodbye to Sarah or Meg or Amy, and I'm out the door again. I sit away from the bar, no mask, and read and write, and watch some sportsball, and scroll my phone. Completely unnecessary. I could easily and more cheaply sit on my sofa, where I spend most of my waking "telework" time, and drink beer. Yet I persist in this gathering and potential infection vector nexus. Lately, it's been one of the sole comforts of getting increasingly decrepit and nearer death - watching and listening to the patrons, the people passing in the street, the lack of tourists, the rugged profiles on the horizon, the gulls, the ravens. Will I get COVID? Have I already had it? Can I get it a second time? Will I have to be hooked to a ventilator as I slowly drown in my own fluids? Who knows, and in some way, none of those questions are answerable, valid, or reliable.
Our town had a protest/vigil in support of the BLM movement. It was organized by a teen girl who felt the need to do something, anything, as Malcolm X wished, "to change this miserable condition that exists on this earth." So she invited some BLM folks from Anchorage to speak to a peaceful crowd of about 1700, mostly comprised of valley residents. After that, the group had a walk about town armed with signs and slogans. There was, of course, the ammosexual pearl grasping on the internets prior to the march, with a local state house representative going to the tubes to call for 2A fetishists to also congregate near local downtown businesses to "keep an eye on things". I didn't attend because A and I didn't want Uly to be in a place where things could go awry. Later, I biked downtown for the bar some hours after the event ended to find yet still knots of people aggregated on intersection corners ingesting honks of encouragement from folks of all stereotypes. A truck, much abused, aged, and bed-less rolled by with a sign "solidarity" in black sharpie taped to the rollbar, its driver a spindly white man with a greasy nest for hair. The fire engine hooted its approval. An Alaska Native woman held a sign that read, "Inupiaqs for BLM". Later, I found this rock left behind on a picnic table next to the community garden beds. A few days later, the rock was gone, either by malice or some more benign motivation.
Yesterday I walked home after Friday Fling. It was the first of the year as the assholes who are in charge also canceled Colony Days this year, the traditional beginning of our weekly food and vendor walkabout. A and Uly and I masked and hand sanitizered up and partook. Most of the folks weren't wearing masks. We made two circuits before Uly decided he wanted a hot link from the Cajun tent while A got a beef bowl and steamed buns - a custard and a red bean paste. I repaired to the bar for after dinner drinks, A and Uly to home. On the walk back, my mind brimmed with absurdities - a Reese's Pieces box in front of the Dairy Queen, the concrete apron at the base of the homeless infested woods where the past week I'd seen a man passed out at 11AM of a weekday, the overcast sky, the empty creamer jug in the ditch, the quaint park I walk through and at which I always feel a sort of sentimental depression at its disuse, the quiet neighborhood that hosts a house with a political style sign advocating for "MEGA GUILLOTINE 2020", the grass concavities of a cow moose and two of her calves' sleepover, my neighborhood where a group of children I'd seen earlier playing in an inflatable plastic pool had left a pile of empty ice pop wrappers in the grass across the street, then, most ultimate of all these mysteries, home.
Tomorrow is father's day. My old man's been dead for 16, 17 years? That I can't remember unless I devote serious mental computation to derive the date speaks volumes about my character. Either way, he's been gone a while. I'm glad he's not around to see the news about the country today, for obvious reasons. He'd have been 78 this year and I can't imagine him that old, all dried up, fragile, already the picture of death he looked in his casket when I saw him last. The things I remember about him are probably universal to many other sons out there but certain things stand out - his insane grip strength, the softness of his hands, his ability to accurately set the gap of a spark plug with his thumbnail's width, how he ate aspirin by the handful, 24 at a time, after a workday, his stale cigarette smoke odor, all his missing front teeth, the subcutaneous cysts on his neck, how his favorite flowers were gladioli, the time that, during a spanking, I told him I hated him and he sat me down at the kitchen table with a pencil and paper and his hard voice ordering me to write out "I hate my daddy" 100 times and I couldn't finish the first line, and countless other ways, too numerous to list here. I find it funny how I carry him around with me still, both mentally and physically - his ashes ensconced in an earthenware vase on my kitchen counter behind the sink and next to the compost pot and Dieffenbachia. I've tried to write him into fiction, failed. It's probably for the best.
