Retail vs Corona 2021-pt.2

Hello, how are you doing in quarantine right now? I'm doing okay on the front line, working at a grocery store. Here I'd like to update you on what it's been like working at the grocery store during the pandemic. In case you didn't know, I've been documenting pandemic life at the grocery store since the beginning of the pandemic. You can read all about it here. I've even got the first post documenting literally the day before the pandemic began. I went to a punk rock show that day. 

Let me start with cleaning and sanitation. In the beginning of the pandemic there was cleaning going on all over the place, left and right. However, as of February 25, little to no one actually cleans anything. Hear me out, the actual cleaning service provider that cleans overnight cleans the floors and the bathrooms, but not much else. They usually miss the breakroom, which is always filthy. Which is unfortunate because that's where we eat and take our breaks. The cashiers hardly ever clean their register belts. However, they will do it if a customer is disgusted and asks them to. It should be noted that we are no longer cleaning carts for customers.  

Next, our store is no longer providing us with free masks. Which is a hassle because masks are so important, even more important now because they're suggesting that we all wear two masks now. There are gloves available but only in small and medium but they're always hidden and you have to hunt for them and hope to find it. To give credit where credit is due they did provide us face shields. Perhaps they thought that since they gave us face shields they don't have to provide us masks. 

The general mood of the work environment is surprisingly upbeat. The customers seem to have found a happy medium of treating the employees with respect and dignity. Upper management, co-director, and store director seem to be on good terms with the store and its employees. That's a blessing because at other times during the pandemic the morale of the workers has been very low, at depressing levels and management have been more aggressive towards employees.

However, I could attribute the good happy workers logo with a big time shift in my schedule. I'm now working mornings and early afternoons instead of closing. I find it to be a happier time of day for employees, management, and customers. In addition, I feel like although my life has changed drastically, that I'm much more appreciated during these earlier times. 

Lastly, it isn't often that management ever limits the numbers of customers that come into the store. The last time that happened was on Super Bowl Sunday. Things got a little crazy but they only limited the numbers of customers allowed in the store at any one time for maybe half an hour, and then resumed with allowing anyone entry. The lines get very long at my store and it's very difficult to social distance in the checkout line or in the aisles. Me being a cashier, I can hide in the cashier station and be relatively safe from others because you're enveloped in a cocoon by the window shield blocking between you and the customers in front and in back. At least I have that. 

Surprisingly, I haven't even got a cold once during this entire pandemic. Perhaps we should keep the masks. 

Stay safe, keep your head up, and social distance. If you're risking exposure to the virus like we are at the grocery store, godspeed. Do the things that are required to stay safe. 

Signing off this morning. Thanks for reading. Stay connected to my blog to learn more about retail vs corona as well as various posts about music and literature. 

Dubliners

Dubliners by James Joyce is one of the best collections of short stories. Maybe the best ever of all time. Yes, it's that good. 

This is a collection of short stories based on people, their lives, relationships, and the history of their times in which they're living in, Victorian era. It's based in Dublin, Ireland, which is full of alcoholics, Catholics, Protestants, Priests, school children, working people, and rich people of the Victorian style era in which this is written. 

What makes James Joyce's stories here so great and so effective is that he writes a simple style that is easy to read and understand. Not only that, but his stories go somewhere emotionally, something that is very much lacking in modern entertainment like video games, television, and movies where things simply just happen in a linear escapade. 

One of the stories that hit me hard was the one where two friends are talking. One is a bigshot that made it in Europe, traveled everywhere, has a great career, wife, and kid. The other didn't make anything of himself and never left their hometown. We get the idea that the other didn't appreciate his friend because he declined his friends' offer to see his wife and kid, thinking that his friend thinks he's better than him because he's so successful in life. But at the end of the story we find that the successful one with the wife and kid is actually miserable and doesn't like his life. Things like that are impressive in writing, that sort of contrast.  

There's a meta magical realism in James Joyce's writing that is unmatched even by other writers of the same period like say for example, Jane Austen. It's realism but there's always a little something extra, a twist here and there that makes the short stories pop and shine with luster unmatched by other writers of his time period, of even the entire western canon. I haven't completely tapped into and understood this writing style completely, but I will understand more when I read more of his works, the next one being Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man. 

Lastly, a review can't be written without mentioning The Dead, the story at the end. Here we have a party where a wife and husband attend. The husband is ready to have sex with the wife in their hotel room, but he sees she's crying about something so it doesn't happen. It turned out that she was thinking about a boy she loved when she was younger, who was a great singer. Music is very important in Joyce's world. In Ireland. In Europe in general during this period. The husband realizes that his relationship with his wife is actually nothing in comparison with the boy who died loving her. The snow falls outside the window. It doesn't really get more meta than that. 

James Joyce is one of the greatest writers of the western canon. I plan on reading much more of his works: Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man, Ulysses, and Finnegan's Wake. 

This Immortal

This Immortal, serialized as ...And Call me Conrad, is a novel by Roger Zelazny released in 1965. 

"It was abridged by the editor and published in two parts in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction in October and November 1965. It tied with Frank Herbert's Dune for the 1966 Hugo Award for Best Novel."

It's a short fantastic tale set in a post-apocalyptic world full of mutants and aliens.

In the beginning our protagonist Conrad, who either is or isn't Pan, [a Greek god], takes an alien visitor to a Haitian vodou ceremony. The idea of overmen, or gods, is very important here. The Haitians at the ceremony tell Conrad that his friend is possessed by a devil god named Angelsou. Well, to be fair he was a hired killer. The Haitian vodou section was a good experience reading in science fiction because Haiti isn't mentioned much in science fiction. As a Haitian-American, I find rather that most of the time Haiti is mentioned in popular works, it's always the negative zombies in the fields motif. Here, it was nice to see more of a cultural connection through religion. This shows Zelazny's interests in other cultures and makes his work more interesting other than big dumb objects in the sky of the science fiction pulp fanfare. The notion of tourism comes to mind especially while the characters are traveling in Greece, Rome, and Egypt. 

The story here is nothing special. Other people want our protagonist Conrad to kill someone going on his tour. Conrad doesn't want to do it unless they have a good reason for him to. They don't. So the whole point of the book is for Conrad to figure out why they want to kill him and how he's going to protect this guy from getting killed. It's very simple but the suspense is built up throughout the entire short novel. It's quite the usual linear novel that builds to a climax. 

Again, like in other Zelazny novels, it's not the story that is all that great or important, rather it is the writing style. Zelazny writes a fast, expressive exposition and dialogue that keeps you on the edge of your seat. There's a lot of fast action scenes in this novel. One of my favorite parts was when they attacked and captured by cannibals. And then some anthropologist who became leader of the cannibals pitted their vampire-god against Conrad, but it ends up being Husan, an Arab who ends up doing the fighting. 

Zelazny really got me when I found out they had to fight a vampire. But it turned out that the cannibals keep this guy locked up in a cage and only let him out to eat humans and drink their blood. So he's of course being taken advantage of even though his people see him as a god. Not only that but he's also a fat slab of 350 pounds that can barely move. However, what gives him his godlike physical abilities is not only his drinking of blood, which is the reason why he's called a vampire, because he drinks the blood, but also the cannibals give him drugs that numb any pain that may be inflicted upon him. He's basically a fat beefcake that feels no pain when fighting. But the fight was lackluster. It turned out that Husan had poison on his finger tips and although he got his ass kicked, the poison at some point finally kicked in and our vampire god dies in one instant. Anticlimactic to say the least but it does move the story along quickly. Simply put, it was written that way. 

At the end we still don't know what Conrad is. What we do know is that he is or isn't Pan. Also the novel begins and ends in the same way. Conrad and his girlfriend are just hanging out. Which is a good place to begin AND end a story. 

Lord of Light

Lord of Light is a terrific science fiction novel written by Roger Zelazny. It was awarded the 1968 Hugo Award for Best Novel. It is was easy to see why this novel won the Nebula Award in 1968. Why? 

Because shock and awe. 

What can I say? This is one of the best science fiction novels I've read in a while [over 6 months], and if you take a look at my reading list [look here] you can tell that I've read a lot of really great science fiction. Although I've read a lot of the science fiction golden age canon, I must add that there's still a lot of great science fiction writers I haven't read. 

Moving on, the idea of gods, Buddhism, Hinduism, was known to me through hippy rock and roll and the flower power generation, even Frank Zappa says in a song, "a book of Indian lore." Keep in mind that I've also read the Bhagavad Gita and a primer on Buddhism entitled What the Buddha Taught, written by a Buddhist monk. But you don't have to know any of that to actually appreciate this book and that's the brilliance of it. However, I will say that known those two other books helps give me somewhat more of an understanding regarding these religious doctrines. Knowing about actual Buddhist parables gave me a much greater appreciation for this book. Having read the Bhagavad Gita, you can clearly see that the Hindu gods and their actions aren't entirely based on imagination. 

I fancy myself as some sort of zen master type. I tap into it quite often as a way to help me get through my day. Seeing our main character, Sam, as a Buddha but without having him actually proclaiming to be a Buddha, or even a god, or even a lesser god, although we still aren't sure what he is, that is something exactly like a real Buddha would do! It's brilliant. Why? Because its simple, it works, and it stays true to how we perceive gods and or prophet-god. The idea of Sam taking over all the godly order, there's a Luciferian catch to it, but the way the book is written, he's nothing like the Bible's Lucifer, nor even Milton's Lucifer, who is a lot more endearing in a sense than the Biblical version. Although the story is all over the place and the fight scenes are mostly just cinematic metaphors with thunder and lightning, the story makes sense until almost the complete end around the 230 page mark, where things go all over the place. But that's okay. I'll forgive Zelazny because it's fun. 

Zelazny is a stylist. Here the book turns out amazing not because the idea is great, unique, or original, rather it is because it is written in Zelazny's true voice, or original style as I will call it here, and because the writing is simply put, shock and awe. The idea of a science fiction novel in 1968 that's inspired by Hindu and Buddhist ideas from the East was probably a novel idea at the time, but it isn't so original these days. If this book was written in the modern era it would have a completely different effect on the audience, the reader. Because ideas were still new back then, and because it is precisely because its original that it doesn't matter if a lot of it doesn't make sense. Why? Because the way its written, the style, it just works.

A lot of the fight scenes between the gods make no sense. But it doesn't have to. Such is the nature of the gods. Long live the Lord of Light. 

Live performance 2/10

Live performance recorded today, 2/10/21. Featuring on alto saxophone Jason Thomas and myself, Orlando Figueroa on electric guitar. We perform some standards, blues, and improv.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eE_W3HRc0CI&feature=youtu.be&ab_channel=MegaFigueroa007

Live Performance 2/3

Live performance on Wednesday, February 3, 2021, featuring Jason Thomas on alto saxophone and Orlando Figueroa on guitar. We played some jazz standards and did some improv. Sound is okay, not great, but the performance was a good one. It's a blessing to be able to livestream, record, and play music during a worldwide pandemic. Thank you for listening and stay safe. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K_DERvGXm4o

Hegel: Outlines of the Philosophy of Right

I read this book directly after reading The Phenomenology of Spirit. It was a great, smooth transition. Also keep in my mind that because I've read Kant, Wittgenstein, and Heidegger, and a little Fichte, this makes a lot more sense that if I had gone in not knowing much about German philosophy, particularly the style known as German Idealism. Hegel is dense reading but his ideas are truly thought provoking and exciting for those who are curious. This is truly fascinating reading during the coronavirus pandemic of January 2021. What a great way to spend quarantine. 

Anyways, Hegel would say I have a good life because I have a job under a corporation, that is under a government, that is under a nation, we as a people all are one people together, and as individuals we mere atoms, nothing. However, there is a clear and important discussion about we the people, and how important the universal will is, how important it is to see the good, and make the world a better place. But remember that is only the universal will, and that the state must act in whatever ways it may, such as by fighting wars or making peace in the world, increased taxes, and such.