The Postman Took Today Off

10.12.2015 17m

Another beautiful fall day, the sort of Western Pennsyltucky climate that I love.

I felt very utilitarian as I loaded up my panniers for some errands. I biked to the local drug store and made a purchase. I biked to the Post Office and womp-womp-womp-womp: the Post Office is locked!

It's Columbus Day National Look What We've Done Day except we don't want to look at it, so we mumble Indigenous People's Day but I would really prefer the Canadian elocution of First Nation's Day. But nobody asked me.

But this is kind of a threshold event for me, because I had no frontal-lobe awareness of the fact that it's a federal holiday, and pre-retirement the timing of federal holidays was a very important thing to me. To the point where, most federal employees know exactly how many US Presidents are still alive, because you get a day off when they die. (Carter, Bush41, Clinton42 as we may soon be referring to them, Bush43, and Obama.

That's five days off, sitting on the shelf, just waiting to be used. A true hound-dog federal employee would always prefer one-term Presidents, just to maximize the potential holiday pay.

I choose to interpret the fact that I wasn't thinking about the Federal Holiday as a sign that I have more fully transitioned into Retirement. Breathe in, breathe out, cough like a geezer.

Since the Federal Govmint was closed in a ritual celebration of looting and genocide to make a clear space for the slave trade, I turned to the free market for my next destination and rode to Bruster's Ice Cream in Bridgewater to contemplate this turn of events. Then I rode to Bridgewater Crossing and caught some rays in what is sure to be a future field of gentrification.

Rode back to the Rez, stopped at Starbucks for a cold water refill, so much goodness.