Image by Comfreak from Pixabay
This morning while driving to my first job I saw a new sign placed at the first major intersection I pass.
“Weed Eating”. That refers to the herd of goats one sees around town (the town is still full of empty fields). These goats can do the Scorched Earth job on anyone’s property and seem to be perpetually employed.
No contact required. Drop off the goats, shut the gates. And I imagine the herd owner gets paid via one of the convenient digital venues, or by the post.
Receiving mail is troublesome. I open my post box every few days, pull out the mail with a glove covering, or a tissue. I drop it with glove or tissue, into a large shopping bag. It all sits inside my door for three days before I touch it again.
Even though I have a UVC wand for sanitizing, that is time consuming, and I know what’s in the mail before opening it, most of the time.
“Equipment Rental” is on a sign a little ways up the road from the busy intersection (deserted these days). It is a farm that normally has some activity in view of the “main artery” connecting to downtown. I don’t know what that farm does for income, but I have not seen that sign before.
Is renting the machines they usually work with a financial safety net right now? I imagine so.
There is the usual drive thru line up at Starbucks, of course. That is good, because there are jobs. Not everyone is in free fall.
My third, contact free, and non-essential job, I have been doing at home already. It is writing as an affiliate marketer.
The big venue, Amazon, while purportedly overwhelmed with orders, and therefore making more money than ever, has cut back its affiliates’ commissions from the highest, 10%, to 3% and 1%.
Shocker. Still reeling from that one. I think that my sticking with it since the last commission slash, is perhaps a symptom of the Stockholm Syndrome.
I am feeling dull today, with the overcast sky and my care client going back to bed.
I cleaned the kitchen, quietly, just me and the buzz of the fluorescent tubes in the tiny kitchen ceiling. Plus the crackling fireplace on Youtube, in the front room.
The fridge weighed in, intermittently.
This spring is long and gloomy. The pandemic has brought distrust and anger, to the surface from the swamp it’s been festering under.
Here, however, it is quiet, not-in-your-face. It is dreamlike, disconnected.
There are jokes on the radio – “do you know what day it is?”
I saw some on Facebook too, with dogs, kittens, tiny pigs and babies, all speaking for us.
I can walk through the day’s tasks and get ’em done.
It’s like I’m standing still, and someone is rolling the scenery.
I imagine that’s what it’s like for Sedona, our surfer girl in pointe shoes. She concludes she is in a drug-induced coma, after the shark attack.
And the scenery that is rolling by is really interesting!
How is your isolation going? Ever feel a little disconnected? In free fall?
