I recently contracted some kind of flu-like bug. My head got stuffy overnight and I woke up with severe vertigo. I slept about three extra hours and the vertigo went away. I stayed home from work the next day and slept another three extra hours. That was pretty much the long and short of my symptoms.
Immediately I encountered a chorus of “You need to get tested.” When I asked why, the response was some form of “it will help others.” And I asked in return, “How do you know that me getting tested and having my life shut down in quarantine would benefit others?”
This masquerade has been dragging on for twenty months now. There are a lot of statistics and graphs and history now. There have been draconian clampdowns and mask mandates and distant socializing. There have been places where the tyranny was relatively benign and there have been societies where there was high compliance with stringent mandates.
One thing is overwhelmingly documented in all of this: there is no correlation between the mandates and the spread of COVID-19. There are places that do very little and the virus behaves a certain way and it is all recorded and graphed out where anyone can see it. Then there are the draconian tyrannies where nothing is allowed and the public complies and everyone wears a mask and isolates himself — and the virus does exactly as it did in the places that were one tenth as restrictive. There are places with high rates of vaccination and their graphs look just like the places where there are low vaccination rates.
The majority of people, it would appear, have been tamed by the tyrants. They just obey and get on with their lives. That hasn’t been the case with me.
I’ve seen people driving their cars with their masks on. Alone, windows rolled up, and a mask on. Ask them what it’s for. They don’t know.
A friend of mine went out of town to visit his daughter and son-in-law. When he came downstairs one morning, he found the son-in-law sitting alone in his own living room, wearing a mask.
In my neighborhood, kids get off the school bus and walk two or three blocks to their homes in small groups, talking to their friends. Most of them still have their masks on.
Very few fast food joints have opened their dining rooms around here yet. When I can get inside to use the restroom, signs are everywhere about wearing a mask and keeping your distance. Then there may be no soap at the lavatory sink.
Presumably vaccines are beneficial, but it has been firmly established that (1) it won’t keep you from getting the disease and (2) it won’t keep you from spreading the disease. Those two facts should be enough to stop the tyrants from requiring the Mark Of The Vaccine to buy or sell. But, of course, it doesn’t.
People die of COVID every day. (Other people die of cars every day.) But nearly everyone below 80 years of age survives COVID. It may be that some who have died would have survived if they had been vaccinated; we can’t really know. Probably some who have died in car wrecks would be alive if they had never gotten into cars.
Life comes with risks. Humanist governments offer security: “Huddle together under this tyranny and we will protect you.” But some of us would prefer to die on our feet than live on our knees.
This article is a copy & paste from the Daily Memphian, 10/15/21. Check them out and consider subscribing at https://dailymemphian.com .
Back in the day — hot days after school in the spring — we played left field ball in a vacant lot on Poplar Avenue.
If you’re wondering what lot, it was across Poplar from the street where Laura Lewis lived. She was in my class at White Station. She had twin little brothers. Big sister named Tancie. Remember? Yeah, that was the lot.
If you’re wondering what left field ball is, it’s baseball when you don’t have enough guys for a whole game, or enough room for a whole game, or a tree in center field, so you play where you can with what you have. Yeah, it was a lot like that and lots of afternoons like that.
Back in the day.
One out. The Poindexter brothers were up next, Chris batting followed by Duke on deck. The Lewis twins — Harris and Lawrence, just freshmen — some glove, not much bat — were on that side. I’m playing between second and third — sort of a combo shortstop and third baseman. Chip Jenkins is behind me — the whole outfield. Pete Bale is pitching.
We will get these guys out. Because it’s getting late. Because it’s hotter than the hinges on the gates of h—. Because my mouth is full of cotton and I, and everybody else, needs a drink of water. Not water we bought. Not from a plastic bottle. We need a drink of water from the hose on the side of that house right over there.
We didn’t know whose house it was, but we knew they wouldn’t mind if we used the hose.
Not when I was growing up. Not from the hose on a hundred houses. Unless they had a fence and a dog. And the hose and the dog were behind that fence. The only dogs behind fences when I was growing up were the kind who would mind if you climbed that fence and headed for the hose.
Back in the day.
We’d turn it on after the game, let it run a bit until it goes from hot to cold, then we’d all fill up, and run some over our face, maybe spray each other a bit, and all pile into a couple of cars and go home. Along with a couple of our dogs. Maybe in Duke’s Nova, or Chip’s electric blue Super Sport, or my mama’s convertible. The twins would ride their bikes home. I don’t remember, but probably followed by a dog.
All full of some of the best water in the world. All at the end of another very East Memphis afternoon.
All evidently come to an end.
That lot, and that house behind it all became Bud Davis Cadillac, and that became Cadillac of Memphis. The house on the opposite corner from that lot is now the Blue Plate.
And water these days has become a luxury item like those Cadillacs.
I was thinking about all of that, remembering that, as I strolled through the water showroom at Kroger for a look at the latest models and to kick the tires. Water in the front and at the back. Water stacked in the end aisle displays. Pallets of shrink-wrapped cases of bottled water on the floor, 50 feet of bottled water on shelves. Water with names evoking mountain streams, sunsets by springs, sunrises in orchards, and health and fortunes and life itself improved.
One can get lucky right here in aisle 20, male or female, after just one sip of this water and one wink. One can throw one’s cane aside and run from here to frozen foods after just one swallow. One needs a sommelier to sort the subtle fruit enhancements, the nuance of peppermint or chocolate or cinnamon, domestic or foreign.
One brand is even called Smart Water and can be yours for three dollars for 30 ounces.
I’ll refer you to a meme I saw about that recently: “If you’re paying three dollars for a bottle of Smart Water, it’s not working.”
On this particular day, Smart Water was on special for a buck fifty.
I’ll refer you to the definition of that in the Urban Dictionary: “a buck fifty” – to the point: straight forward.
Here it is in usage: I’ll go a buck fifty with you; we’re not drinking from the hose anymore, we’re getting hosed.
These days.
“A bezillion” gallons of water roll by Memphis every day on the Mississippi River. (Mark Weber/The Daily Memphian file)
For a couple of millennia, water below Memphis has not only been good enough to drink, it’s been good enough to become known as the Memphis Aquifer, good enough to be known around the world as some of the best water in the whole world, good enough to be the envy of the world … even the envy of Mississippi, who is trying to go all the way to the Supreme Court to steal it, or to make Memphis pay Mississippi to use water from the Memphis Aquifer.
I mean, really, could I even make that last part up?
Even still, our cavalier and careless attitude about our water, our lack of understanding about the value and fragility of it, almost allowed TVA to tap into our aquifer and take millions upon millions of gallons of it to cool a power plant — wasting a bezillion gallons of our “drinking” water when a bezillion gallons of the Mississippi roll by every second.
If it hadn’t been for my friend Ward Archer and others who started Protect Our Aquifer, TVA would have done just that.
And if it hadn’t been for Protect Our Aquifer and concerned citizens of Memphis and people in threatened neighborhoods, an oil pipeline would have been built right over the aquifer. It wasn’t and it won’t be.
Something as seemingly ordinary as water is the stuff of life, something as extraordinary as ours demands vigilance.
Memphis water — right out of your hose, right out of your tap— is already better than 99% of all of that bottled water in Kroger. I only say 99% instead of 100%, because some of that coconut or mandarin orange stuff is OK, but not one drop of any of it is worth what you’re paying for it. Here’s the complicated formula:
Bottled water — costs more than just something, as in a rip.
Memphis water — costs close to nothing, right out of the tap.
And there’s this, that bottled water is, well, bottled.
The water that supposedly comes from cold mountain streams or tree-shaded springs? Bottled in plastic, shrink-wrapped in plastic. Processed and manufactured in plants, stored in warehouses, stacked on loading docks, shipped in trains and trucks. And if it’s supposedly from Alpine meltwater or some other exotic source faraway? Add ocean shipping, customs, and waiting in sweltering rail containers in shipyards.
And those plastic bottles and packaging in our landfills and rivers, lakes, and oceans? Thrown out our car windows, gathered in our parking lots and yards and streets, along our curbs and trails in the woods?
Even recycled, it all comes back to haunt us again and again.
Even the plastic bottles that claim to be “biodegradable even the caps” are pouring water down your leg and telling you it’s raining. If Cro-Magnon man threw one of those out of the cave 35,000 years ago, it might just now be disappearing, if a Mastodon stomped on one or a whale shark spit one out 10,000 years ago, you might just now not be able to read the sell-by date.
These days.
Every year, Americans are swallowing about 45 gallons of water per capita from either plastic or glass bottles. That means folks around here, people literally sitting on top of famed Memphis water, are getting soaked by paying for about 54,240,000 gallons of bottled water a year.
At the price of Smart Water — 10¢ an ounce times 128 fluid ounces times 54,240,000 — that’s $694,272,000 every year. Even if you buy Smart Water on special at half that, or water of reasonable intelligence at half that, it’s still hundreds of millions of dollars. I’ll go a buck fifty with you again, that’s stupid money in a town that doesn’t have a lot of it.
Put another way, a family of four is spending from $1,152 to $2,304 a year on bottled water.
These days.
Kids aren’t playing left field ball where I grew up on Highland Street or on Perkins Road or anywhere that I know of, or much of anything else for that matter outside of the watchful eyes of organized sports and activities, outside of the circle of their parents and their SUVs, outside of fear of the world and its consequences. Maybe that’s safer, maybe its worth the loss of kids learning how to take care of themselves, how to explore and discover on their own. Maybe so. We’ll see.
When kids aren’t going anywhere on their own, their dogs aren’t going anywhere either. Not outside a fence. Not without a lease. Certainly not in neighborhood packs. But they’re not fighting either, or biting either, or dying in the street like several of my dogs did. That’s definitely better.
As much as I write about not trying go back, about memories as treasures not destinations, Memphis water is an exception. Try some.
Instead of throwing away that plastic water bottle, start a recycling program of your own — fill it from the tap. Turn on the hose, let it run a bit to cool off and lose the taste of hose, and then take a pull of one of our city’s great assets.
Then spray a little on each other. On the kids. On the dogs.
While the taste of Memphis water will take some of us back, it will win some of us over.
I’m a Memphian, and some of what that means is in the water.
