At the gate to the Mariner's stadium, TELCOMM PARK, we were told my purse was too big, and Bryant's old green shopping bag could not be brought into the park. Rather than return to Tacoma baseball-less, we made our stuff a lot smaller, stuffing pockets with the contents of our bags, then folding the bags so they could be hidden from the guards. No one asked if we'd been vaccinated. It was 9/11 security for 2021's pandemic.
The game was interesting, at first. Red Sox and Mariners were tied at 3 for a very long time, however. We'd bought tickets from a guy outside (we paid $20 and the tickets read $12) and ended up in a section full of young professional tech men (two women were in the section, at most, and one disappeared). Most of them had no interest in the baseball game. Had there not been bone-jarring music and constant orders to "GET LOUD!" they might have forgotten where they were. They talked tech and more tech. One guy talked Linux. Sometimes they stood up to talk to their neighbors, while we in back, those of us who were watching the game, were shielded from it. By the time the game was tied in the 8th inning and first one team and then the next threatened, almost all the tech guys left, along with many other "fans." One lone techie threw up his hands, said, "the game's tied!" but that didn't stop the others from leaving.
By extras, the order to GET LOUD! was met only by Red Sox fans, of whom there were many elsewhere in the stadium. The Red Sox scored six runs in the 10th, leaving the Mariners to flounder through their half inning, scoring once due to the stupid new rule that puts a man on second in extra innings.
By then, gulls had begun to circle the stadium, ducking in and out, then sitting in lines along the roof edge, as if waiting for hotdogs and beer. Which was, in fact, what they were doing; as the stadium emptied, the birds got closer and closer to landing where the trash lay between the rows. One family had put all their trash in a bag and left it near the aisle; everyone else simply left trash every which way. There were no trash cans. Perhaps the 9/11 security aimed to prevent trash cans from being used IRA-style to hide bombs.
We took a bus back to Tacoma. One row ahead and across from me, I heard a man ask his neighbor if she knew about the Beatles. Miraculously, she did not. She was Haitian, she said. He was a white man in a thin black coat, black pants, and a sort of a black leatherish Beatles cap. He said he talks frequently with John Lennon in Argentina on social media. I knew it was the same John Lennon because he said he'd been born in 1940. But mostly, he talked about illnesses and cures. He'd met a Haitian man who'd done a body scan of him, found a deadly disease, and then cured it!
Took a religious exemption from the COVID vaccine. (He did wear a black mask.) Something about Bill Gates and poison/micro chips. Something about a Rockefeller injecting petroleum products. Vial switching substitutes harmless saline for the poison. Something about herbs. A lot about herbs. Flaxseed oil. His younger brother died; got cancer in his genital area, right where he kept his cell phone, perpetually on. Didn't change his diet, didn't eat the black seeds. The black seeds are important; they're in the Bible and the Koran both. Called cumin. The black seeds will cure you. Buy the turmeric from Hawai`i, not from India, where there's mercury in it.
Once or twice he acknowledged that no one believed him when he said X. But he said X and X and X all the way back. As we approached Tacoma, his Haitian seatmate became quite vocal. She also had friends who knew about herbs. Her voice got louder, until finally she announced she had to get off the bus. "I am so happy to have talked to you!" she said to the man in black.
He got off later, at UW-Tacoma. Last I saw him, he was staring at the wall across from the bus stop.
