A Day in New York: The Ordinary Face of the Great Reset

This happens to be my block. I don't blame the migrants. I blame the oligarchs who are successfully killing standards and stealing from all.

A line of cars all jammed up, waiting for a garbage truck to move out of the way. The offending truck, just sitting there in middle of the street, with a garbage can placed behind it comfortably, is in no hurry at all. It is functioning at the pace of a Soviet bureaucrat. Let ‘em wait.  

Zoom out—and you’ll find a line of skinny, tired-looking, freezing refugees. Two very long fenced off lines, in fact, going for half a block each way. Some wearing masks, some wrapped in foil of some sort, big scraps of foils traveling by wind along the sidewalk, giving it an abandoned look. It’s cold outside, they look poor and hopeful, they make do.

Unlike the previous batch that came with bad music and fine motorcycles, this batch looks impoverished and tired, and the music they play on their phones is actually alive. On a better and warmer day, I would dance to it.  (The paradox of modern times is that even the poorest people have smartphones for the peeping convenience of the panopticon’s managerial class.)

And then there is this woman who has just rented a likely expensive commercial space on the block for a business targeting affluent hobbyists with a lot of free time on their hands. There’s nobody coming in to check it out. Really nobody. No matter how much she sweeps and moves the stinky garbage cans away, no matter how desperately she  draws signs with smiley faces, and places boards so as to lure people in, no one is coming in. And frankly, there has never been a successful  business in that space to begin with but now it all feels like an Ionesco play. It’s dead. The mood is of abandonment.  The block is filled with tired refugees and their hunger for a better life for themselves and no relation to the now-gone, well-fed American vibe. That business is out of place.

I go to a pharmacy. At the pharmacy, an employee is processing new arrivals of reading glasses. She has laid out all the glasses on the aisle floor, for some reason, and is sorting them out.  Why is it necessary to sort out new arrivals, especially the kind that people put on their faces, on the pharmacy floor? What a silly question, obviously. This is just how they do it under the new normal. This is how they do it under the manufactured petty dictatorship of the unmotivated, the underpaid and unhealed, to the sound of never-ending and endlessly lame Pfizer commercials for very profitable vaccines.

The Return of the Soviet Cashier

Overlords to Peasants: After Your Meal of 'Ze Bugs' Have a Drink of Sewage Water

I come home, decide to make a particular dish and unearth a pack of “healthy” flour I  had stashed a couple of years ago, preparing for the end of the world. I open the pack—and the flour is full of bugs. I open another pack (same brand). It is full of bugs. I open another (same brand). It is full of bugs. All packs had been sealed, the bugs didn’t come from the outside. If I ate it two years ago, I would have eaten the bug eggs in ignorance, while opposing the great reset. Thank God I didn’t open it then! Gocha, Klaus! No pasaran! I finally open a flour pack of a different brand, and it’s fine.

I am not going to wait for two more years. I am just going to use it and hope that there are no bugs in there.

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is what the boot of the great reset looks like.

An unassuming decay of standards.

A thorough poisoning.

Apathy and agony of the previously elevated.

A cunning game of musical chairs.

A dictatorship of the unmotivated, underpaid, and unhealed.

PS. Out of all this absurdity, like the grass that grows through asphalt, our new love will be born. It will be the kind of love that is born very stubbornly when the face meets the boot. It will be very strong. It will hide at first, and we won’t even know that it’s there, but it will be growing. And then one day, it will come out full force, and make itself known. And we’ll know why we had to be born at the time of this not so great reset. Yes, we’ll know, our love will guide us. And once we stop believing our enemy, once we stop betraying each other, the asphalt will crack. We will cry over all the betrayals of the centuries past. We will cry together over the stupid things we’ve done to each other while under the enemy spell. And the spell will be gone.

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