The Weirdness is Penetrating Even the Most Indifferent, Pre-occupied Minds...

Folk #1: Okay. Over here in my own personal orbit, seems the bubble has been breached. We have reached some kind of tipping point. A guitar-tech I know, a late-thirty-something guy, that I have known for many years, one who has usually treated me with a casual indifference, who always seemed to look down on my beat-up guitars, who barely gave me the time of day, suddenly opened up. We chatted on the street, yesterday, in the doorway of the guitar shop where he works. I asked him, "How's it going?" Usually I would get a shrug, and a grunt, in return, but, this time, words gushed from his lips like a raging river. "What's happening? How did things get so weird? The government, the world, the markets? Weird." I could see this guy was totally reeling. His world, like mine, was in total free-fall. This is not someone who ever appeared to care about anything, never talked politics, never offered anything, a person seemingly lost, firmly situated in his own private concerns, in his own little box. A new consciousness has suddenly sprung up from his worried mind. I take this as a good sign. The weirdness has penetrated even the most unconcerned, over-preoccupied folks. Turns out he went to the NO KINGS protest over the weekend too. Surprising. And, yes. Most excellent. The first step in the healing process: Knowing you have a problem. It is not just us cultural canaries in a coalmine, even the seemingly least politically conscious folks amongst us, are now woke up. That is good. Yes, indeed.