Frozen In The Heat Wave
Wangjie Li [album, more within]
Imagine. (But imagine with a song: Glass Animals - Heat Waves.)
Your name is Julie. You're 24. You work at the drive-thru window of a fast-food chain--it's not important which, though you have a cool boss who will occasionally let you savor a paper-wrapped vanilla cake-cone soft serve every now and then when it's slow at work. Especially when it's hot. Overbearingly hot, in these turgidly humid Texas summers.
You live in a small two-story condo with three roommates, and you all rent from a polite but matter-of-fact gay couple who run a salon down the street. Your room is cramped but adorned with mementos, pictures of friends, the occasional reminder sticky-note, inspirational quote, and stacks of fiction. Every day, you come home, browse Facebook for a little bit (relatively uninteresting--it's not COVID times yet) and wind down into your books with a quick homemade but rebelliously healthy dinner and sometimes a glass of wine.
The days pass by in warm fog; wake, work, home, eat, read, sleep, repeat, with weekend respite, drinks and dreams and art projects hamstrung by cold economic realities. It's hard to remember how you got here or how to get out; was it your fault? Are you able to change anything? Will this, like all things, pass, or is your future solely within your own hands? If this passes, will it be... better? It seems unknowable.
One day, you take an order for two paper-wrapped vanilla cake-cone soft serves. You idly ponder putting in a third order just for yourself; today is a record scorcher at 105 F. You shake the thought off and return to work, handing out a few bags of "food". Then you pull the soft serve, put one of the cones in each hand, and turn around to hand them to a man you now see is shirtless, wearing sunglasses, and covered in scruffy red facial hair. It's summer in Texas. You've seen far stranger.
You hand the two cones over with a polite smile. You also notice that there's no one else in the car. The man takes them from you wordlessly, faces forward, rotates both cones in his hands, and then plants the soft serve against his nipples. Your jaw drops. He doesn't look at you.
The man takes the right cone off of his nipple, licks the soft serve, puts it in the cupholder, and, with his left hand still holding the left cone in place, drives off.
He's gone.
Inexplicably, you feel freer.
Some links
https://theconversation.com/how-pandemics-past-and-present-fuel-the-rise-of-mega-corporations-137732
Florida shatters records with over 10,000 new COVID-19 cases in single day | Reuters
Florida shattered records on Thursday when it reported over 10,000 new coronavirus cases, the biggest one-day increase in the state since the pandemic started, according to a Reuters tally.
How the Virus Won - The New York Times
Invisible outbreaks sprang up everywhere. The United States ignored the warning signs. We reconstructed how the epidemic spun out of control.
Trump's phone calls alarm US officials, from pandering to Putin to abusing allies and ignoring his own advisers - CNNPolitics
In hundreds of highly classified phone calls with foreign heads of state, President Donald Trump was so consistently unprepared for discussion of serious issues, so often outplayed in his conversations with powerful leaders like Russian President Vladimir Putin and Turkish President Recep Erdogan, and so abusive to leaders of America's principal allies, that the calls helped convince some senior US officials -- including his former secretaries of state and defense, two national security advisers and his longest-serving chief of staff -- that the President himself posed a danger to the national security of the United States, according to White House and intelligence officials intimately familiar with the contents of the conversations.
