engine splutters

"it was a most surprising thing to see those streets which were usually so thronged now grown desolate, and so few people to be seen in them..." daniel defoe. "a journal of the plague year"

it was fairly quiet in the parking lot at the local mall at ten in the morning on a tuesday...a time when, in normal circumstances, the stores would be opening...it was a reasonably warm morning for mid march and there should have been cars, shoppers, the norm...there were not and it brought a couple of thoughts to mind...first off it sometimes takes a disaster or difficult times to bring what is actually necessary to life into focus..whether the need be philosophical or material...since this is a mall we will tend toward the material...in 2012 i came home from work one day to find every fire truck in town in my yard and my son-in-law boarding up my recently burned house...a significant amount of the material things we owned ended up in a dumpster and we survived...without them...oh, the house filled up again after we moved back in...but not to the extent it once was...we realized how important things like photographs ( most of which survived and may are now digitalized ) are and that there was no need for that many laundry baskets or lint rollers...one wonders if , with many retailers cutting back hours or closing for a few weeks, if those inveterate shoppers will have an epiphany...or if they will be 1) going to amazon and/or, 2) waiting outside the door on the scheduled day of reopening...will they lose the habit? unlikely...however one is then left wondering how the consumerista machine will rumble to life again and how many small businesses will be left and how much more consolidated the provision of goods for the ( hoped for ) coming frenzy of acquisition will be...

the n y times tells me the stock market responded to trumpy's stimulus plan in a positive fashion and that all fifty states now report covid-19 cases...my state's health department reports six more cases...one more death..and an infinitesimally number of the population tested...so they still don't know any more than the cdc or the rest of us about the true extent of what is happening...don't let them confuse you...there are two confirmed cases in my home county so, "the sicknesse is got into our parish this week, and is got, indeed, everywhere." the diary of samuel pepys. 21 july 1665...one surmises this is far from over on a multitude of levels...perspectives will change...illumination proceeds.