It's Halloween, y'all! And it's coming at the right time. I've been feeling kinda glum this past week (an accumulation of small stuff), and Halloween is a fun festive occasion to raise my spirits (from the dead!). Lil' S1 is doing his own thing with friends across the city, and then S, Lil' S2, and I are going over to some friends' house in the neighborhood. The adults will all hang out and drink and eat, and the kids will go trick-or-treating. We will probably have to have at least one adult go out with them. Maybe me. I enjoy being out and about on Halloween. The neighborhood* gets popping in a way that mine never did as a kid. And it's so nice to see a community hanging out together, in person, when so many forces in society—social, economic, etc.—are pushing us away from human interaction.
*Though not our particular street which gets almost no trick-or-treaters for some reason.
I took something tantamount to a "me morning" today. I wasn't planning on it. But I turned my weekend alarm off at 8:30 and went back to sleep and was out until 10:30. Then I got up and decided to treat myself to a Starbucks, which I normal don't do, because I'd be spending $150 on coffee each month if I bought one everyday, and now I'm just chilling, writing this blog entry. The rest of the family is mostly preoccupied with other things, which affords me this opportunity. Also, S was away for work this past week, so she's less likely to give me the side eye for zoning out in my own world.
I also deleted the news podcasts in my feed that I usually listen to Saturday morning. The midterms are right around the corner, which is undoubtedly a cause of my malaise this past week, and I don't want to listen to stories about them. The Dems are favored to do very well, which means either they won't, which will be a huge disappointment, or they will, which isn't such a great thing either, given some of the candidates they are running. I've been trying, and mostly succeeding, to not get emotionally invested in the election this time around. It is the epitome of "no sense worrying about something out of my control." I vote in DC, so I already voted on everything important during the primary, and there isn't even much of a point for me to submit a ballot (but I will anyway). I'll vote for the prohibition of force feeding animals,* which is the only real thing on the DC slate this election.
*Humans have to kill something to produce the amount of food necessary to feed everybody on the planet—if not the animals directly, then the pests that would destroy our crops—but we don't have to torture them.
I could donate money to candidates out of the district, but I don't actually think that helps. Every cycle we get these Democratic candidates, ready to pull off the upset in some red area, and they receive outsize national attention and build up this enormous war chest, and then they lose handily. Beto O'Rourke is the first example that comes to mind, but there was also that lady who was gonna beat Mitch McConnell in Kentucky and that dude in South Carolina and probably a half dozen other examples I could come up with if I thought about it a bit longer. Now, don't get me wrong, Dems should try like hell to win in races like these. The political winds shift can shift drastically over time, even if it doesn't always seem like it. But it happens by winning the support of people who actually vote in those elections, not from outsiders. In fact, one of my semi-hot takes is that too much outside money often hurts candidates because it raises the profile of the election and makes the locals resentful of the interlopers meddling in their business.
Anyway... another thing that got me down this week is that I went into CVS. I should have known better. CVS's are among the most depressing establishments in the country, and the one in my neighborhood is particularly bad. There are only three reasons I go in there: To get a vaccine; to pick up a prescription; to buy some over the counter medicine. The first one is the best of the three, and it involves getting jabbed with a needle. The second one is typically an interminable experience, where I wait in a line that stretches all the way through one of the aisles, and there is always at least one person in front of me who argues vociferously with the cashier about things the cashier clearly has no control over. (They don't know why your doctor only prescribed one-week of medication instead of two! They're just facilitating the transaction!) I actually switched my pharmacy to the one in the supermarket next to the CVS (which is still not great, but much better), but S and the kids still use the CVS, for some reason, so I still have to go there to pick up meds every now and then.
But this week I went in for the third reason, to buy some antacid that I didn't even need. I just wanted to break a 20* and had a momentary lapse of judgement in where to do it. The first thing I notice every time I go into a CVS is that there are almost no employees there, except for in the pharmacy in the back. There's not even a cashier there because everything is self-checkout. Then I notice that almost all the products are behind theft-resistent plastic. It used to just be relatively expensive things that are easy to pocket now you have to find somebody to unlock the case (which isn't easy because of the lack of employees) to get, like, mouthwash. It's super depressing. It's like being in a prison commissary.
*Some neighborhood kids came by asking to rake our leaves. I didn't want them to for several reasons, one of which was that they had this old scraggly, busted-up rake that looked like it was going to shred our lawn rather rake it, but I didn't want to be a curmudgeon, so I told them I'd give them $6 to do a tiny portion of our yard. Then I realized I didn't have any bills lower than $20, so I gave them an IOU, and then they came over everyday the next few days to collect, but I still didn't have the money, because who uses cash anymore? But I couldn't be the guy who stiffs the neighborhood ten-year-olds, so I went to CVS to get the $6.
Antacid is actually not one of the products that is locked up, so I grabbed a box of Pepto tablets and wandered around until I found somebody who works there and told her that I needed to pay. She motioned me to the self-checkout machines, and I said that I wanted to pay in cash. She took me to the register (no line at least), rang me up, and then realized there was no money in the till. So, she put out a call over the intercom: "Will a manager please come to the front of the store?"
We waited and waited and waited, and then she made a second call: "Will a manager please come to the front of the store?"
And we waited and waited and waited some more, she made an exasperated sound under her breath and then put out a third call: "Will a manager please come to the front of the store?"
"I think the manager went home early," I said jokingly, making a weak attempt to break the awkwardness of the situation. She didn't respond to me, but said over the intercom for the fourth time, "Will a manager please come to the front of the store?"
After waiting a bit longer, I asked her to just cancel the transaction, but she said she couldn't do that because she had already rung it up. I started getting frustrated at this point, and said something to the effect of, "This is ridiculous! All I need is $11 in change, and it's taking a half-hour." The length of time was an exaggeration, but not by all that much. She seemed sympathetic, and finally said, "Okay, okay," and then she punched a code into a different till and opened it and gave me my change. Why she didn't just do that in the first place, I don't know, but at least I could pay off my debts now and not have to worry about a group of elementary schoolers breaking my kneecaps.
In happier news, our flag football team won in the first round of the playoffs, so we play in the semifinals on Sunday. This, despite the fact that one of our best players was out with an injury. It's really remarkable, considering how much talent we lost from last season, that we are one game away from playing in the championship for the third straight time. We might not make it, but still I'm proud of how the kids played. It's already been a pretty good season, and there's at least a chance it will get even better.
Okay, gotta go. Until next time...
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