Popeyes

Despite the volatility of the world, you assume everything will remain the same. You stay away from Walmart’s on Black Friday or Popeyes when they’re about to unleash some new fast-food product (there was at least one fatality from a shoot out when the fried chicken sandwich was introduced). During a scene of Wild Strawberries, the professor (Victor Sjostrom) has a dream in which he enters a deserted street. The shops are boarded up and the clocks have no hands. It’s  reminiscent of the famous Twilight Zone, “Time Enough At Last” where the harried librarian, played by Burgess Meredith, finally gets what he wants--a world devoid of people where he can read without being interrupted. If you live in the Northeast this is the case. Terror is reserved for sleep when the mind lets its guard down. How to reconcile that with the fact that record breaking monsoons have displaced 30 million Pakistanis, the forests in California (including the Redwoods) are threatened and a whole generation of Ukrainians have been uprooted and displaced by a war for which no end is in sight? Melting glaciers in the Arctic and elsewhere will result in a dramatic rise in the sea level everywhere. During the beginning of the pandemic, Midtown Manhattan became a ghost town. Business still hasn’t completely recovered. Another Bergman movie The Seventh Seal, depicts a knight (Max von Sydow) returning from the Crusades in the middle of the Plague. His only companion is Death (Bengt Ekerot) with whom he plays his famous chess game. Preconception creates a complacency. Even at the Event Horizon of the Black Hole, there's always the delusion of exemption, the same one that most humans maintain until the day they die.

read "Diasporic Dining: Fast Food Inc" by Francis Levy, HuffPost

and listen to "A Hundred Pounds of Clay" by Gene McDaniels