My ten tedious days of COVID lockdown are over. Almost three years into the pandemic, the disease hasn't gotten me yet — just another benefit of being a hermit. The mask helps, too.

And now I'm back in the world. Kinda missed the place.

To celebrate, I ate at Mrs Rigby's yesterday, and I've definitely missed that place — good food, low prices, working-class customers, great waitresses, and no TV on the wall.

I sat at the counter, and read not the latest issue of the AVA newspaper, but the third most recent (I'm running behind).

"No coffee, thanks," because once again I'm trying to quit. Haven't had a cup of coffee in a couple of months, nor the caffeine withdrawal headache that always struck a few days later.

Lunch was a cheeseburger, fries, and salad, with a glass of water, but when I ordered, the waitress asked if I wanted a second burger. Two burgers was my standard for a long time, but, "Nope, just the one burger from now on."

Me and food — I always want to eat a second burger, or more of whatever's in front of me, but that's eating for entertainment, and I'm trying not to do that.

The salad, by the way, comes with croutons and, oddly, Goldfish mini-crackers sprinkled over it. The Goldfish weirded me out when I saw my first Rigby Salad, but you can't argue with the crunch.

Everything was exquisite, of course. Always it is, at Mrs Rigby's.

Midway through the burger, a different waitress came 'round and offered to pour me more coffee. "No coffee at all," I said, and we both laughed when she saw I didn't have a cup. When coffee was my habit I drank a lot of it, and the staff still has the habit of trying to refill me.

The total tab was ten bucks and change, plus my usual five dollar tip. Damned fine lunch for sixteen dollars, and waiting for the bus afterward my belly felt full, so one burger is enough.

In addition to the Post Office job I'm hoping to land, months ago I also applied to be a Metro bus driver. (That's for full-size buses, not the short bus that I briefly almost drove last summer.)

With Metro, they had me take some bogus psychiatric profile test, and I never heard from them again, so I'd assumed I'd flunked the psych eval. But this morning, two months later, there's this:

This email is to notify you that you have passed this part of the application process! Good job and well done!
The next step is an interview. Our team will contact you on those details. Thank you again for your patience as this is a long process for this highly competitive position.

So now I'm on track for two jobs? Ha! If there's a choice, I'd rather work at the Post Office, where a mistake gets a letter waylaid, instead of Metro Transit, where a mistake kills somebody. I have made a lot of mistakes in life.

It's nice having two possible jobs, though, and I'll definitely go through with an interview at Metro, to see what happens.

When you watch a really old movie — a noir from the 1940s, a western from the 1950s, definitely anything from the silent era — everyone who made it is dead. It's kinda cosmic to think it the first time you think it, but watching a lot of old movies that's an old thought for me.

Here's a new one, something I hadn't considered until today: All the cars in those old movies, every car and truck and bus made that year, and every vehicle made all the years before and most of the years after whatever old movie I'm watching, is junked.

With the exception of a very few museum pieces and the cars still clogging the roads, every automobile made since automobiles have been made is now rusting or buried or squeezed into a cube somewhere — immeasurable millions of tons of metal and glass and plastic that isn't and wasn't and never will be used for anything else. What a wound on the world.

Cars are abominations in so many ways.

News you need,
whether you know it or not

• More than 90% of rainforest carbon offsets by biggest provider are worthless, analysis shows

• Virginia rejects $3.5-billion Ford plant over fears of Communist Chinese control

• Mississippi Democrat files "trigger" bill to bring prayer back to public schools

• Fox News invents a fake trans Joker controversy to have a melt down over

Mystery links
There's no knowing where you're going

• Click

• Click

• Click

Clicks ahoy

• Some lies we tell ourselves

• For every $1 gained by a bottom 90 percenter since 2020, a billionaire got $1.7M

• The glue that holds us together

• Restaurants for women

• How Walgreens manufactured a media frenzy about shoplifting

• Rats in your toilet?

• Tunnel Ultra: The mind-bending 200-mile ultra-marathon in the dark

• Conversation pits

It's an architectural style that's faded away, and I never saw a conversation pit in real life, but always thought the concept looks comfortable, congenial, and cool. Have any of you ever had a conversation in a pit?

♫♬ Mix tape of my mind ♫

• All Through the Night — Cyndi Lauper

• I Predict — Sparks

• Many Rivers to Cross — Harry Nilsson with John Lennon

• She's Always a Woman to Me — Billy Joel

• Water in the Sky — Phish

Eventually, everyone
leaves the building

• Carole Cook

• Chris Ford

• Danny Kaleikini

• Ben Masters

• Kingsize Taylor

• Frank Thomas

• Lee Tinsley

• Christopher T Walsh

1/19/2023
Tip 'o the hat to Linden Arden, ye olde AVA, BoingBoing, Breakfast at Ralf's, Captain Hampockets, CaptCreate's Log, John the Basket, LiarTownUSA, Meme City, National Zero, Ran Prieur, Voenix Rising, and anyone else whose work I've stolen without saying thanks.
Special thanks to Becky Jo, Name Withheld, Dave S, Wynn Bruce, and always extra special thanks to my lovely late Stephanie, who gave me 21 years and proved that the world isn't always shitty.