Friday Market Reopens

People certainly maintained a healthy distance in the Friday market this morning.

I saw several masks, a veil, and a bandana tied over the face rodeo-style. I took some requests for masks, and should be knitting some soon...stylish knitted cotton masks that will also work as neck warmers after the virus panic subsides.

I saw the front-page news story: In Scott County, Virginia, seven people have tested positive for the dreaded coronavirus. Two have died. Names aren't being released; all that's being reported is that people who die from coronavirus have been people who go into pneumonia and nearly die whenever they're exposed to ordinary colds or flu--geriatric patients, chemotherapy patients, and in the city AIDS patients.

Everyone set up their displays three or four car spaces apart. Without any planning or discussion, everyone looked at the parking lot where the open-air market goes on and thought, "We could make it easy for people to drive through the market, not getting out of their cars except to buy something." Even on its most crowded days the drive-through option has been one of the things that's made Gate City's market special. In the past people have taken adjacent car spaces in order to take advantage of as much shade as possible. Today people were organizing their displays so that people could drive around on the sides and see everything from their car windows. I was glad to see most of the older shoppers taking the hint. It was not possible to hear nearly as much of "the talk of the town" as I usually do. I did hear several people say that they were, like me, still waiting for their stimulus checks, having filed taxes. I didn't hear anyone affirm that they know anyone who's actually received their thousand dollars, although I do at least know...one.

This is socialism, Gentle Readers. This is what lovable old Bernie Sanders and cute little Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez wanted to do for you, but the virus beat them to it. (Oh yes, they blathered about guaranteed incomes...which would have run out fast, probably not reaching the majority of people in your neighborhood, just like the famous stimulus checks.) Now that you've experienced it under ideal circumstances--one lovely little spring vacation--picture having it in winter, too, and having it go on and on and on. I think the politicians who've called for socialism need to be planning their post-political lives now.

Anyway it was a nice balmy day with a cool breeze; more people bought books or gift items than bought bottled drinks--from me, anyway, and I didn't see anyone else selling bottled drinks. A few people just walked around not buying anything. Several people were, as usual, only really shopping for tomatoes. Several people seemed gloomy, but more as if they were fretting about where those stimulus checks had got to than as it they were ill.

Then just before closing time a certain disgrace to his parents' memory came out and sprayed poison all over a steeply sloping back yard.

Well, some vendors like to go to Nickelsville for the afternoon anyway. I had cyber-chores to do. I packed up and left. How much heavier everything had suddenly become. Other people were leaving too. They did not look happy although some of them, besides the fresh-baked-goods family and the vegetable man, had sold some of the stuff they were loading up.

I hadn't heard how many of them had been sick or ill earlier this week. I only really started to feel better after Wednesday's rain and somehow wasn't really surprised by the idea that, with our federal government allegedly caaaaring so much about keeping us all healthy, I wasn't going to be allowed to feel well this weekend either.

All the poisoners whine, "I spray poison only N number of times a year--how much harm can that do?" Well, if each of these people sprays poison just once a year, and (by chance, since no planning or regulation goes on) each of these people sprays poison in a different week, that's enough toxic waste floating around in the air to keep the whole town slightly sick all summer.

Some people who were in the Friday Market today are going to notice their senses of smell and taste diminished, their throats prickly, etc. etc. etc. That's not coronavirus. That's dicamba poisoning. If you were having a glyphosate reaction from earlier this week, the combined effect of the two poisons is guaranteed to exacerbate both reactions. Some people are going to be sick as dogs later this weekend. If they're really attached to the belief that "pesticides" are not toxic to them, they might convince themselves that, oh mercy, they caught someone else's tummybug at the same time they caught the dreaded coronavirus, oh woe, oh wail. It's not impossible that, in the process of getting tests and treatment for coronavirus and norovirus while actually having neither, they might manage to get both--on top of the poisoning they have as of the time I'm typing this.

It's not alway easy to tell whom we should sue for making us ill by spraying poison into the air because he's too lazy to pull up the plants he doesn't appreciate in his yard, but for anyone who became ill in the Friday Market today, it is. We all know his name. He really was ill at the time he destroyed his parents' business, so some of us might have been inclined to empathize too much about the fact that he really destroyed the business by using the best store space in town to sell drugs illegally.

It's funny how reselling surplus painkillers, which at most harms only the fools who willingly feed addictions to those poison pills, gets jail time for someone who's doing well to be out of the hospital and not destroying himself with those pills--yet actively poisoning the whole town is not yet recognized as a violent crime.

Gate City needs its Friday Market so desperately, right now...I think we need a local ordinance that spraying anything at all, even Deet, outdoors on a Friday morning should guarantee an immediate arrest, the hardest time the local jail has to offer, and a minimum six-figure fine.