Don’t Stand So Close to Me

Low tide on the marsh

Ten and I motored down to our fave weed emporium yesterday. From the adjacent highway, I could see a LONG-ass line snaking around outside the door. I’d NEVER seen such an enormous queue at this particular shop and thought, with all that’s going on, OF COURSE there are lines stretching into infinity! We’re living in ridiculously insane times.

Then we got into the parking lot and I saw that the line only seemed interminable because everyone was standing about ten feet apart. In fact, the joint had put red foot prints on the ground so we’d all know exactly where/how close together we could NOT clot. They enforced this too. The car park wardens herded inadvertent offenders, those who drifted, back to their respective footprints. This was awesome+. Honestly. Everyone was happily cooperative, understood the deal and appreciated it.

Pot Shops have to be open (essential biz and all) but, unlike the grocery store and the pharmacy, these folks were smart about protecting us consumers AND their employees….again, unlike the grocery stores.

After getting back to Valhalla, I HAD to go for a walkie. Riding in the car for a couple hours, especially with Bix’s spectacularly shit suspension (but HEY, we get 40 miles per gallon!), just wears me clean out. Most of that, I think, is because I’m still in Recoveryville.

In any case, the seawall was, relatively jammed with folks strolling and lounging about, enjoying the warm temps and the scent of the sea. Sounds grand, no? No. I was feeling stunningly antisocial and NOT just because any one of these humans could be carrying the potentially lethal, for me, Trump Virus.

This ascent into extreme introversion happens occasionally – usually when I’m feeling overwhelmed by the big L – LIFE. I just need to be alone (or only with fam – Jen, Ten and Oni – which counts as alone) to chill myself out, regroup.

It’s at these Garboesque-I-vant-to-be-alone times that a scene from Blade Runner always comes to mind. It’s when Roy Batty asks Leon "Did you get your precious photos?"

Leon:
 (Shakes head) Someone was there.
Batty:
 Men? POLICE men?

Unfailingly, I misremember Leon’s dark, annoyed, feral reply as “People. People were there.” I said this to Ten, in what I imagined was a Leon-ish tone before it occurred to me that he might not know the reference and think I'd lost the little mind I've got left.

I explained, he understood and we took a right for a short ramble through the back streets. NOT as lovely BUT I got some exercise and didn't have to be all cheerful and affable with strangers.

Yea me, huh?

There is a pleasure in the pathless woods,
There is a rapture on the lonely shore,
There is society, where none intrudes,
By the deep sea, and music in its roar:
I love not man the less, but Nature more.
~ Lord Byron

Solitude gives birth to the original in us, to beauty unfamiliar and perilous - to poetry. But also, it gives birth to the opposite: to the perverse, the illicit, the absurd.
~ Thomas Mann, Death in Venice and Other Tales

Whosoever is delighted in solitude, is either a wild beast or a god.
~ Aristotle

That’s me, don’cha know – both a wild animal AND a goddess. OOO, that gives me more painting ideas!

Don’t Stand So Close to Me – Sting