We just went out to pick up take-out from two places. The first was from a restaurant in the same place as the local mall- the parking lot was almost full. Can't even imagine stepping foot inside a mall right now, holy shit.
Then the other place is on a busy street in the area full of shops/restaurants. It was a ghost town right up until this past week- there were so many cars and people walking around that you'd think the pandemic was over. Zero social distancing going on. Fucking crazy.
The weirdest thing I've learned from all this is how many people rely 100% on what other people tell them to do and don't think for themselves.
Like I know so many intelligent people that are like "I'm watching to see when Newsom says it's ok to go to Diners and eat inside because I'll go out once he does" or once the city opens beaches I'll go there because they opened them. It's like once someone says something is ok, they think it's 100% safe and everything is fine again.
I have moderate anxiety and I already get anxiety about going outside lately because of the mask thing and if you wear a mask some crazy person may try to start shit with you because you're wearing a mask and if you don't wear a mask someone might get in your face for not wearing one, so the anxiety of that is already keeping me from going out much. But what I'm really worried about is once they re-open most things in another month or two and everyone thinks this is "over" even though we'll still be in the middle of deaths that if I wear a mask outside at that point it's more likely than ever people will get aggressive with me.
I actually would feel a lot more comfortable driving to somewhere in a different less populated city walking around because of that. It's even more awkward if you run into your neighbors and they're all right wing truthers and crazy on this. I've been avoiding my neighbor who has a parking garage directly opposite of mine and likes to spend most of his day standing in his garage being the neighborhood watch and talking to everyone he sees, because he's always been a crazy anti-vax, racist trump kind of retired old guy. I used to run into him about twice a week and have a short conversation when I was parking or leaving, but I haven't seen him for like 2 months because I'm purposely avoiding encountering him.