Today is a great day folks.
In Boulder County we bid farewell to the dreaded mask. These masks that choke us. These masks that hide our smiles. These masks that made us discover how to smile with our eyes. It's taken me two years to figure out how to smile with my eyes. These masks that somehow smell like pepperoni pizza, spicy ranch and American Spirits after Jamestown pizza parties. What the? These masks also kept us safe. I am not sure if we are all gonna catch the Vid this weekend after all of these masks are slammed into trash can across the county, but here we go all the same. For our customers and staff alike we are encouraging the continued use of masks until all of these dang covid droplets are a thing of the past, but we are not requiring them.
Covid had been as dividing as politics. I am so sad to lose so many friends and maybe soon to be friends over divided opinions about this pandemic. Human nature is a funny thing. Pack mentality and woke-ed-ness and all that.
Social Media may very well be the most evil thing we have allowed ourselves to do to ourselves, next to glyphosate. We poison our minds and souls and hearts. We sit idly on the sidelines as we watch our kids fall into the deep end of their god damn phones and iPads on Tic Toc and Snap Chat.
We sit on the couch looking at Instagram and Facebook seeing how many likes we've got on our vacation photos of the happy moments of our lives that we want our "friends" to notice. Then we cry alone at the stop signs on the street into our masks behind our sunglasses picking our kids up from the therapists appointments and meeting our banker to figure out our HELOC to pay for the mental health help we need for our kids during this epidemic that is like a coal seam fire underneath our houses.
I watched Vicky write The Social Dilemma over the course of a year or so everyday at the high walnut table in Moxie wondering what the heck she was typing away at. If you have not seen it, you need to. It explains it all.
We bump into people who ask us "How are You?" And when we tell who we really are they tell us too. We are all hurting. We are all working hard to save our kids from themselves. Being a young person right now is so hard. There are not enough hospital beds to help sick kids. There are not enough therapists to hear their anxiety and depression and fear.
I don't even know what to do aside from try to be kind to each other and try to give every little kid I see a high five and check in with them a little.
Michael Franklin from Naropa University Art Therapy and our beloved Jenny from Moxie are planning an open air community art series at Moxie Louisville. We will have clay, smocks, tools and Naropa grad students to help make some free art. Music and Food too. Stay tuned for a date. I think perhaps art is a good place to start. We will also host a Bread & Clay day soon where we make art and food with our hands and fire them in our wood fired oven like our mentors at Bread & Puppet.
art by Asja Boroš
Let's hear a little passage by David Foster Wallace, actually a commence speech that is also available as a book. One of the best:
And a song by Peter Town. Maybe one of my all time favorites. We sang this with friends last Tuesday at E-Town in the cafe.