My patience is now officially blown with the lockdown.
I have the misfortune of being an “essential worker.” Because I drive for Lyft and Uber. Because I haven’t been able to find a real job in over nineteen years.[1]
I normally cut orders off about twenty minutes before sunset largely because I don’t want to be caught out traversing or picking up or dropping off in neighborhoods where the gun and knife club comes to order shortly after sunset.
But tonight, my last ride ran a bit long with multiple stops. Fine, I thought. Giant Eagle is open until ten pm.
Being vegan, there aren’t a lot of places I can eat in Pittsburgh and they’re all hurting with the lockdown. I’d really like for them to survive. And it happened, the way home from that last ride took me right past D’s Six Pax and Dogz on South Braddock in the Regent Square area of Edgewood. So I stopped, picked up their veggie hot dog and wished them all well, ate it and some fries on the way to my next stop.
I’d also noticed some bird shit (it’s that time of year) on my car earlier, so I stopped at a drive through car wash and wiped down the interior while it did its thing on the exterior.
I pulled up to the Giant Eagle about two minutes before nine pm. Guess what? They’re closed.
My patience is blown. I suffer a lot of indignities as an “essential worker.” The pay really sucks and, although I handle more of my own costs directly, I’m really on the same level as a cab driver, even with my Ph.D. The least the powers that be could do is let me buy some fucking groceries.
Israel
At this point, I’m very strongly tempted to ignore the political crisis in Israel. It hasn’t seemed to be moving toward resolution. Except, that the president there, Reuven Rivlin, is losing patience. And it seems that, in this, one of the few occasions where he actually matters, he has a few tricks of his own.[2] I’m mostly archiving this because I suspect that however all this turns out, Rivlin’s moves just might prove pivotal.
Haviv Rettig Gur, “Israel’s frustrated president threatens new elections – in a bid to avoid them,” Times of Israel, April 13, 2020, https://www.timesofisrael.com/a-frustrated-rivlin-threatens-new-elections-in-a-bid-to-avoid-them/
- [1]David Benfell, “About my job hunt,” Not Housebroken, n.d., https://disunitedstates.org/about-my-job-hunt/↩
- [2]Haviv Rettig Gur, “Israel’s frustrated president threatens new elections – in a bid to avoid them,” Times of Israel, April 13, 2020, https://www.timesofisrael.com/a-frustrated-rivlin-threatens-new-elections-in-a-bid-to-avoid-them/↩