Rooftop Musings in These Foolish Things

July already. Though I track the dates, I honestly don’t know who I am, where I am or what I am anymore.

Sitting up on the rooftop of my building drinking decaf and trying to get in the mindset to do some work. Honestly feels amazing up here with a beautiful breeze and cloudy skies keeping the heat away so far. You’d think nothing was wrong with the world sitting up here in this beautiful space.

But then I look over the side of the rooftop deck and down to the metro stop below and see the zombies stumbling around and hear the siren of an ambulance. I see the ambulance stop as they do daily here. I note that the streets look dirtier than ever before and there are no businesspeople walking around.

Of course, there haven’t been businesspeople for months, but literally nothing is happening unless it’s something bad. On Monday, it was “active shooter day” where not only was there a shooter about four blocks away, but then there was another shooter on MY block a couple of hours later.

I don’t walk out the doors of my building to the street level anymore. I only leave the building in my car from the underground parking and come into the building that way too. I have noted while driving through the central business district that many of the boards that were covering the smashed-out windows after the looting have come back down so it no longer feels so post-apocalyptic. That’s good news. Progress.

But then there’s always that other pesky issue of Covid lurking around every corner and potentially infesting and oozing all over everyone I see.

Sunday evening was weird. I’d just been at my parents’ place for most of the day and came home in the very early evening. While I was walking the dog at a nearby park, my neighbor sent a text asking me to come up to the rooftop for socially distanced wine. Sure, I thought. Will be nice to see her.

Long story short, I think she’d been drinking all day (said she was at brunch – must have been there for HOURS). And she brought a friend with her – some guy who owns a bakery that’s about to open a few blocks away. Well, for some reason this guy wanted to ask me some questions so he came over (no mask) and crouched low by my deck chair and got very, very close to me and I had already scooted away from my friend because she was drunkenly YELLING at another neighbor (there’s a story behind that but it’s too long to tell and involves giving away my exact location) and I know that yelling spreads Covid further than 6 feet.

So this guy gets within INCHES of me. I’m like, WTF dude, I’m trying to social distance. And he finally backed off and went to sit across the giant socially distanced circle we’d made.

But then, about 15 minutes later, he decides to try this move again? Comes over and does the same crouching tiger move and gets in my face. And this time I was like I TOLD YOU TO PLEASE KEEP YOUR DISTANCE! I TOLD YOU THAT I’M SOCIAL DISTANCING!!!

He was dumbfounded.

So I left.

What is wrong with people? Seriously! The numbers are mind-boggling. They double every couple of days! We are all going to get this!!! And it could be resolved if we all just wore masks and stayed away from each other for a while.

But nooooooo. Folks gotta play this game of roulette with our lives. So over it. Just so very over it. Another person on PB just wrote an entry saying that during this time we truly are our brother’s keeper. It rings so true and people really, truly need to be less fucking obscenely selfish.

OK. Sun’s coming out strong and it’s about to get too hot to be up here. Glad I had this rooftop time when it was lovely. I may do this much more often from here on out.

Love and miss you,
GS