The New Normal

20 May 2021

I started this blog post several weeks ago. I’m not sure why it has taken me so long to finish. I’m going to go out on a limb and purpose it has something to do with depression and a lack of will power on my part. Maybe some procrastination too. It also could be due to the fact that I took a vacation for the first time in a long time, and I couldn’t remember how to get back to real life. Truthfully, it could be any of these reasons.

The week before I went on vacation, the verdict on Derek Chavin for the murder of George Floyd was still out. Every morning it seemed there was another mass shooting, or another killing of a person of color by the police, or both. This was the early days of April. A lot happened then. Too much. Every morning I wanted to crawl back into bed before I even got out of bed just from looking at the news on my phone. We were living in a world of pure insanity. Let’s not forget about the pandemic either. It’s like we were so close to getting back to normal, but normal didn’t feel acceptable anymore. Not after being shut away from one another, trying not to catch a deadly virus and watching as this country unfolded into a racial reckoning in real time.  

I found myself on a plane. I hadn’t stepped foot onto a plane since well before the pandemic hit. I felt nervous about being in such a confined space with lots of people again, even if I was vaccinated. So, I did the one thing that always seems to work, especially these days. I got stoned. I was dropped off at the airport with half an edible in my system. After getting through security I was hailed over to a kiosk by a young man who probably weighed 100 pounds when wet. 

He sat me down in the chair at his booth and asked if I used eye cream. Yes, I told him. He told me he wanted to try his product on me. It was potent and would battle the fine lines and the cavernous under eye circles I possessed. He gently dabbed cream under one eye and put a mirror to my face. My skin felt tight and I swear my lines looked blurred and my dark circles looked luminous. Maybe it was the lightning or maybe it was the pot. He was good. His pitch was adorable. I played along so he would do the other side.

Then came the catch. The eye cream was $400. I gasped. My friend said the airport is the place to buy it, because when you buy the product online it is $900. I stifled a laugh under my mask. Who did this kid think I was? Had he not seen what I was wearing and my travel bag? Those two things should have told him all there was to know. I told the kid I didn’t have $400 to spend on eye cream.  I may have been stoned, but I wasn’t stupid enough to think it was wise to pay that kind of money for one product, no matter how young, or bright eyed I looked.

I excused myself from the disappointed sales clerk, thinking a better use of my pennies was to grab a glass of wine before I got on the plane. Oddly enough, I lost track of time at the bar. Weird, I know. Luckily I was able to get my wine to go. Fantastic, I thought. So I grabbed my to go beverage and booked it to my gate. When I was allowed to board I walked right up to the ticket checker with my wine in tow. Turns out airlines still frown upon passengers bringing their own alcohol on board. The stewardess assured me there would be complimentary wine on the plane. I thanked her for the information, brushing aside the suggestion that I was some kind of lush. But then I realized I had just spent more money on this glass of wine in a plastic cup than what I would spend on an entire bottle of wine normally. She suggested I step to the side and finish the glass. So I did. I stood to the side of the massive line of passengers, guzzling my to go wine like a one woman freak show. 

Once I got onboard, I turned into the row directly behind the row I was assigned to sit in. It’s as if I had never been on a plane before. I stood in the row like a dope while passengers filed onto the plane. How was this happening to me? There was no way I was going to be able to cut in front of these people who were coming down the aisle lurching for their seats in their correct rows. Finally, someone in line must have took pity on me. They motioned to me and allowed me to cut in front of them and swing safely into my row. There is a god, I thought.

My big trip was to see my parents and my brother, who I hadn’t seen in a long time. My mom and I went on a mother/daughter outing to get our nails done. We popped one of her homemade pot cookies and started walking to the nail salon for our appointment. We arrived late, naturally. I felt like I was walking with a pint-sized ninja. My mom was dressed all in black, her gray-blonde hair poking through her baseball cap. She was utterly adorable. She giggled down alley after alley, so that we could avoid other pedestrians and traffic. Probably a smart choice.

I’d like to go record and say that getting a pedicure while stoned is perhaps the best use of one’s time. The water for the foot bath is the perfect temperature and your feet are soaking in a tub that you didn’t have to personally clean. Plus, since the bath is just for your feet, you don’t have the burden of submerging your entire body in a bathtub. Sure a full body bath feels good, but christ, that’s a commitment. Plus there’s a foot massage involved. Not only did a lovely woman release all the tension in my feet and lower legs, but she literally moved each foot in and out of the water for me. 

When it came time for the cheese grater portion of the pedicure to remove the dry skin, I braced myself. I hadn’t had another person touch my feet in over a year and a half and, frankly, I was worried what this unlucky person would discover. As I watched the dead skin fall from my feet, I couldn’t help but think it looked like snow flakes. When it lasted for over a minute, it looked more like a baby avalanche. This poor woman, I thought.  

I looked over at my mom, who was in the chair next to me. I asked her a question. She had no idea anyone was talking to her, or probably where she was for that matter. After 20 seconds she responded. She was in the middle of a word game on her phone, she told me. She’s never been so good at this game before she said. I asked her if she turned the massager on in her chair. She told me she was too scared to turn the massager on because she already felt like she was on a rocket and if she turned the massager on she might just lift off into space. I didn’t have a response for this

A minute later she turned to me and asked what the calmest setting is for the massager. I told her to give me a minute so I could try all the settings and get back to her. The kneading setting was the winner. I told my mom where to find the kneading button on her remote. She can’t locate the button. She claimed she had a different remote. I slid over and examined her remote. It was the exact same. We got her started on the kneading setting and she turned to me and said, “oh, this is nice.” I looked at the very patient women giving us pedicures and wondered if they knew just how stoned we were.

It only got better and stranger from there. When the lady moved to my hands and started massaging my fingers, I caught myself clutching her hand with my free fingers. Was I imagining this? Nope. She politely kept pulling her hand out of my grasp. Great, I had become a creepy hand clinger because of the pandemic. I know it’s been awhile since another human has spent so much time touching me, but still. I was out of control. When she started massaging my shoulders I thought I had actually died and this was heaven. I wanted this woman to become my new best friend. I swear when she finished the neck massage she winked at me. Clearly she had felt our connection too.

On the walk back to my parent’s house we cut through the park in their neighborhood. It was sunny and warm, a real rarity in Seattle this time of year. Once we attempted to cross the street, we stopped dead in our tracks. A black man in handcuffs was leaning against a cop car while three white cops surrounded him. All of a sudden reality set in. I reached for my cell phone in my pocket and turned to my mom. We both looked at each other and agreed that we needed to wait this out and stay across the street to act as witnesses in case things went south. Soon we weren’t the only passerby who had stopped. All down the block groups of mostly white people had stopped to watch. I don’t know if the cops noticed the clusters of people watching the scene, but we all stayed until the scene ended nonviolently. 

It’s funny how quickly I was thrust back into reality. But it’s not really funny that this is reality. As a white person I felt responsible to stay and make sure the police didn’t terrorize or murder this black man. After the interaction ended we continued walking. I felt sick to my stomach. Sure, this cop encounter ended okay, but there was no guarantee that it would. What if this encounter hadn’t taken place in such a public space, like many encounters don’t? Here was my mom and I high as kites, walking all over the neighborhood without a care in the world. We were unafraid of what it would mean if a cop stopped us. Our white skin was our free pass. It’s a universal pass for white people. It’s so fucked up. I know it’s nothing new, but it’s still completely fucked up. 

Going home again is weird. Being in a restaurant is weird. Interacting with people is weird. Picking up where life fell off before the pandemic is weird. None of us can be the same and our world can’t be the same after something so catastrophic. We’ve got to change and evolve. Wear a mask. Get vaccinated. If there’s one thing to take away from life after a pandemic, it’s that life is truly fragile. It can change from day to day, hour to hour, or through an interaction from person to person. It was a big reminder not to take advantage of anything. Not your health. Not your friends. Not your family. Not your privilege. Not your life. And not the stranger’s life next to you.