Chapter 15: Tiki Torch Fuel (6/9)
"When did you re-open?"
Three months into the group hallucination, and the back porch trend is ever-expanding. The Millennials keep finding some way to not social distance (and try to maintain some semblance of normalcy), so of course across the region Tiki Torch Fuel is long-gone.
One must imagine it’s a cascading problem from up north in the Free Country of New Hampshire, where it gets colder at night, and people are needing it more and more, just based on their newly-expanding population alone.
Slowly but surely, the fear-porn addicts and CNN zombies are starting to re-emerge from their apartments, which they likely have not left, three months later. You can always tell who they are because they have the face-shield, or the respirators, or both.
One such tragic soul waited until we were empty towards the end of the night, when there was no one in the store.
I remember her well: An older lady, she hurriedly scooted to the soil aisle and quickly grabbed a small shovel with a trembling hand.
As she approached the counter, her delusion was on full display: Mask, face shield, plastic gloves, and, for one reason or another, a full-length downy winter jacket (in June).
Checking out, the middle-aged lady looks up at me through our plexiglass and, filling her face shield with a hot carbon-dioxide fog from her lungs, says:
”When did you guys reopen?”
She obviously had no idea there were pockets of life out there. (And, need I remind you, we had never closed—not even for one day.) She had recently just left her home for the first time in MONTHS.
Addendum: I recently celebrated my birthday back at our favorite Irish-Catholic-owned watering hole. Like many other people, all my friends had abandoned me—all based on the prismatic response to or world gone mad. Except for a few.
One is a world-famous artist friend who had long been cancelled by the academic establishment. His wife was in town so we all went out to dinner but—even among this small group—there were diverging opinions. It was illustrative of the world at large.
As a society, we had all become so compartmentalized that we didn’t have a singular shared truth.
As I had been reading my Bible again (and studying guitar), one thing has become abundantly clear: Our society has come a part at the seams because we no longer share a belief in a Creator.
The Daily Wire’s resident philosopher (and converted Jew), Andrew Klavan, puts it better than I ever could, in his video “There Is No Shared Reality WITHOUT God.”
Next week the War of Southie Beach continues:
