When Chance the Rapper said, “BACK UP, BACK UP, I NEED SPACE NOW, I NEED YOU TO SLOW DOWN, ITS NOT A RACE NOW” on his famous song “All Night,” I know he did not have a crystal ball looking into 2020 but it sure does feel like he did.
I never imagined that we would be living in a time where if anyone gets too close to you that it feels like you have to call a 2319 and be put away, but here we are.
Since the beginning of the pandemic work for me has still been constant, I did not get to work from home, and I did not get to have any time off. The world heard pandemic, but my job and other grocery store retailers heard, M O N E Y.
So, of course with the store still being open, it meant we were still open to guests and quickly my job went from just being a retail store to a retail store, the park, the club and every hang out in between, all in the middle of a pandemic.
One thing about having to work during this time is that I am able to see all the different stages that the world has gone through all in the matter of fewer than five months. We have gone from the world is ending so let’s stock up on toilet paper, to you don’t have to wear a mask and gloves but you better be in the house by 9 p.m.-unless you are an essential worker with a signed paper, to okay roam free BUT where a mask and gloves, and to the final stage of no one really knows what is going on so let’s open the world back up and pretend it is not happening.
So while the world—Texas to be more exact— decides to continue to ignore the steadily rising number of COVID-19, I can only think that there has to be species on another planet watching their version of Rod Serling say, “You are about to enter another dimension, a dimension not only of sight and sound but of mind. A journey into a wondrous land of imagination. Next stop, the Twilight Zone!” as an episode of “Twilight Zone” starts playing that is our lives here on Earth.
