Yesterday was Parade Day, the best day of the year, when school is cancelled and the town is shut down for miles. Make way for the parade! the sirens scream.
Yes, the fair parade is a big deal in Roswell. Shutting it down in 2020 was just another way to demoralize an already demoralized community. When the furor settles, Roswell is a rural and agricultural community that has been hit hard by the shutdowns. Farming was supposed to have been “essential” but, sadly, when our distant bureaucrats determine that some businesses are essential and others aren’t, they unwittingly (or wittingly — I don’t put anything past politicians) disrupt supply chains that eventually cause farms to go out of business.
This year’s fair parade was a moment of hope, though, when the town rallied together, and the only person wearing a mask in the crowds or in the parade was the alien overlord of diabetes — oops, I meant to say Dunkin Donuts.
Even though I’m not a community-oriented person, I still find it heartening that a small town in the middle of nowhere gets together to celebrate what is important to them: schools, sports, local businesses, and the agricultural world the fair represents. I even find it heartening to see misbehaving boys riding their skateboards against the flow of the parade. And then there were the children who decided they would lead the parade on their bicycles; there they were, right in front of the blaring police and fire vehicles, as though they’d self-determined themselves to be the real marshalls of the event.
As much as the world changes, it stays the same. That’s why I kept this parade as the precursor to a major turning point in my latest book, Order of the PenTriagon. To the heroine, the normalcy of sparkly cheerleaders tumbling down the road is something to envy. But, despite the world coming apart for her, there the parade is — in a distant future when aliens have left the human population in disrepair.
When I started writing this book, I couldn’t have imagined how the world would shortly change; I get a strange shiver when I consider the so-called “pure bloods” of people in my book world who haven’t been vaccinated. No, I don’t consider vaccinated people to be impure; that would be the current meme world calling them that. To be honest, though, I wanted to throw in everything I’d read or heard over the years from men like Alex Jones or David Icke … and these men, I’m afraid, turned out to be actual truth bearers in many ways. David Icke might be slightly insane (I would call Jones “obsessed” and not necessarily mentally ill), but he still had a sense of reality the rest of us normal people have lacked.
I’ll finish this post by encouraging you to read my book, and also to post a picture of the Shriners in the parade, as they have a role to play in my story. Obviously, the men in the photo below are real people, not book characters. I impute no evil or good intentions to them; it’s really just an illustrative image, as it shows what Shriners look like with their hats and bikes.
Jill Domschot 