Seven Saturdays every week

We're having internet connectivity issues at the house, so until it's resolved I'm at the library again. Expect posts less often, and slower replies, and pages will come in bunches when they're posted.

Yesterday, nothing, and being without the internet feels very 1995. 

Today, four new pages, and two reruns.

The world is remarkably different, quieter and better, at 6:45 on a Saturday morning, and so's the four-way stop near my house. Last Saturday I waited there five minutes, for a bus to the diner for breakfast alone, and during that short wait only five cars went by.

On a weekday at that hour, it would've been a parade in all directions, people enclosed in metal rushing to places they don't want to be. Saturdays are much saner.

Seven Saturdays every week for me, so unemployment is awesome. I've been out of work for a month, and loving everything about it except the lack of a paycheck.

Can't afford to retire, so I'll have to go back to work somewhere, and soon.

My mom doesn't know I've taken a month off, because I don't want to talk about it but she'd insist. She still thinks I'm temping wherever I'm needed, a week here and a few days there.

That's been my cover story for months, and my plan is to make it so. When it becomes necessary to work again, I'll put my name and number in at a few temp agencies, tell them I'd prefer short-term assignments, and I'll be everyone in the world's favorite fat temp worker.

Addendum, to my observation several days ago that everything I own is a corporate product.

I'll be needing new pants soon, so on a wild lark I googled to see the price for pants made by non-slave labor. Surprisingly, they're not as expensive as I'd expected — about quintuple the price of pants made in China, but I'll bet they last five times as long, so as an experiment in being a decent human being, I ordered one pair, in the largest size they offer.

Half an hour later came an email from a very nice woman who asked my waist measurement in inches. It's a large number. She replied a few minutes later, apologized, explained very kindly that their pants wouldn't reach around my enormous ass, and refunded my purchase.

That lady has competitors, but their prices are beyond a hundred dollars for one pair, and my daydreams of ethics abandon me. Anyone remember looking for the union label, that meant we're free to make it in the USA? Those days are gone, so I'll keep walking around in slave-made sweatpants.

There's nothing in Republican ideology that Jesus Christ didn't speak out against, and yet the Republican Party's most fervent supporters are what the media calls "evangelical Christians" — many millions of them. Is it a conundrum, or simply another debunking of religion. More evidence that everything Christianity claims to be about is bogus.

Found something I wasn't looking for, at a grocery store's website, and one word jumped out at me. See if that same word jumps out at you:

"WinCo Foods and all businesses operating in California, that have $100,000,000 or more in annual worldwide gross receipts, are now required by the referenced California Transparency in Supply Chains Act to disclose the efforts they take to eliminate slavery and human trafficking from their supply chains. Consistent with that obligation and as a part of its ongoing relationship with our manufacturers and brokers, WinCo Foods now requires that all companies in our supply chain agree not to use any form of forced, indentured, bonded or prison labor and that they agree that they will not use any slave labor or permit any human trafficking in their supply chains."

"Now" was the word I stumbled over, in that last sentence. What's that word mean, really, in that context? "WinCo Foods now requires that all companies in our supply chain agree not to use any form of forced, indentured, bonded or prison labor…"

Before the law required it, WinCo didn't give a damn about that, is what it means.

Some days I walk around the block, or simply stand in the missing front door on the porch, and watch cars go by at the intersection. Same intersection I talked about at the top of the page. It's a four-way stop, usually quite busy, with rows of idling vehicles waiting their turns to gas themselves away.

A few minutes at a time, I've spent an hour or more this week watching that intersection. It's mesmerizing. Maybe today one of them will surprise me, anything's possible, but I haven't yet seen a driver smile. 

8/3/2023   

 itsdougholland.com
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