the state of the state

I have come to realize recently that the town that I currently live in seems to reside in a bubble. It's straight off the interstate, but close enough to the next major town that, apart from stops at Hilltop for gas or stops down for pizza, most of the time, cars going through will just wait the thirty miles. The town has an elderly population. It's the biggest town in the county, and sits straight in the middle, but it's got about 6000 people in it. 

This is a town that small businesses seem to thrive in. The chains in this place: Dollar General, Family Dollar, Casey's, Cenex, Petro, Dairy Queen, Subway, Burger King, Pizza Ranch. Two other pizza places that are locally owned. Locally owned ice cream parlor. Locally owned burger restaurant. Locally owned clothing stores and neither thrift store is something like a Goodwill or a Salvation Army. No chain coffee shops, unless you count the Starbucks in the college. 

This town feels like a bubble. Our cases have doubled since the start, but that just means that we're sitting at 9. We're between the largest concentration of coronavirus in the state and a county that is quickly gaining traction in its number of new cases. 

Our public pool opened up last week. 

There was a protest/rally for BLM/George Floyd on Sunday. Sixty people gathered in City Park, and then about fifteen walked on sidewalks from the park, past my place of work, up past the police station, looped around, came back down on central. Nothing extreme happened. One of the hardware stores on Central has a sign out front showing support for Black Lives Matter, which is nice of them--not the store I would expect to be sharing that message, but, hey, you go, hardware store. 

We went to the town over on Monday, me and Steven, and it is so different there. It is almost back to normal here. In general, North Dakota's cases are holding steady at between fifteen and fifty new cases a day--normally it's around twenty. We did have a little spike last week, which brought us from four to nine, but I'm guessing those five were all buddies or something, because we haven't had any more since. 

It's just weird, to live in this bubble. I'm not saying that this town is perfect--it's not. Roads are fucking awful, and there's a bit of a meth problem. But it is so hard to connect to the horror and pain in the world when I'm paying less than 300 a month to live in a relatively nice apartment (balcony!!!), and I'm going thrift shopping tomorrow, and I never had to stop working.