(no subject)

[olivermoss]

I usually avoid being chatty with the cashiers at the grocery stores. I know some of them are under pressure from management to be super friendly and some people glom onto to them for scraps of social contact. I figure it's a lot of stress for them so I usually treat those encounters as bussinesslike as possible.

Last night, one started talking to me because one of the floating baggers has just told her about the Joe Rogan bullshit about vaccines and we wound up chatting for a second. She was basically needing to vent about the ... everything. I mentioned about how during the forest fires I'd been in the stores stocking up not because of the pandemic, not because of the air being so bad out local monitoring stations couldn't even record how bad it was, but because of people coming in from outside of Portland to bear spray locals and try to run them down with cars. She said her partner is Non Binary and she basically told them to not even leave the house while that was going on.

Yeah, last fall in the middle of both a massive smoke event and a pandemic our top concern was other Americans seeing us and trying to beat the shit out of us. That's ... a lot. That's really a lot. I wonder if I am still a bit frozen somehow from having gone through that. Like part of why I am having trouble moving forward with anything was how bad all that was and not properly processing it. I had a therapist at the time, but her approach was to treat everything as unimportant. Basically 'yeah some people will get beaten up but statistically it wont be you, yeah some people will get cancer but it wont be you, etc' Yeah, I know it's unlikely to be me but it's still horrifying to have that going on around me and the world being that damn unsafe, but she ... she actually made me feel invalidated and even more isolated by saying none of this really effects me. Having someone to talk to once a week, literally the only conversation I was having at all at the time, was better than nothing but also .... her toolset seemed to be 'treat everything as NBD and people as alarmist for being stressed over politically motivated attacks in a pandemic where the air is orange.'

Anyway, we ended the brief conversation talking about a mass shooting that the police said was unrelated to the maga trains, but was on the day of an announced train that didn't happen and was by someone from those circles so we don't really buy that it wasn't a frustrated magat murdering people.

And then she wished death on Mitch McConnell for being the person whose been single handedly blocking votes on gun reform for ages.

It's just got me thinking about going through all this shit in isolation is just really a fucking lot and some of it's easing up but how do I move forward, especially since right now I am in a town heading back into 'extreme risk' lockdowns? I don't even have ways to try to break out of being so isolated, even now this late into 2021. Feels like I'm stuck in a time loop episode. Nothing moves forward, everything just resets.