It was Wednesday, the first day of the bizarre five-day "compromise lockdown", which in translation is something like "we will close what we can and can, and for the rest we will pretend to be crazy". Something happened to us with the stove, it looked quite dangerous, the repairman came and said that it was both dangerous and urgent: it was necessary to replace the so-called a three-phase socket, a set of both "male" and "female", whatever that means, because this one is eaten away and unusable, and it could also cause a fire. Okay, but - now what? A new socket needs to be bought, but there is nowhere to go because electrical equipment stores are closed by order of dr. Paje Patka and the teams are closed, since they are the infamous breeding grounds for infection (it's a miracle that the virus likes sockets). Hypermarkets work, but they don't sell it, we checked. And what are we left with? To cook lunch on a campfire in front of the building for five days? Fortunately, the master remembered his taxi driver friend who "knows the whole city", he turned Gari, who has a suitable shop on the outskirts, and lives close to it... And so, the stove was ours again, with a lot of tinkering and time spent , nerves and fuel, admittedly. We even had lunch, already around seven in the evening!
The next day we went shopping in Lidl. Here we go, when there are no more theaters and cinemas (also infamous factors of the general corona plague: who didn't get infected in the theater, had no reason to come), give what you want... When that, in front of Lidl - a long line?! This has never happened before... Someone mistreated us and wasted our time irresponsibly just to get into just a damn shop, where, of course, it was as crowded as ever. And how could it not be? The point of such stores is to be crowded, so they are not Dior boutiques. However, someone had to stage a theater of the absurd from special "anti-epidemiological measures" in front of the shops, to justify themselves and mistreat us.
Such scenes in front of hypermarkets are a direct product of the very justified protest of artisans and restaurateurs due to the forced closure. The trouble, however, is that s way, and there the unwilling Lidl became a metaphor for all those who "laugh" at something. Namely, this is where the terrifying slave philosophy of the so-called our man, who, noticing the senseless inequality, does not demand "we want to be like Lidl!", but whines "why does Lidl work if we can't?" Therefore, it wouldn't bother him even if it was under lock and key, only if others were also under lock and key... Although there is absolutely no point in that.
So it was Thursday, and Friday brought a new lockdown affair. Bookstores were not open for the third day, which was already an act of complete insanity of the police officers (they were working even in a state of emergency), and then someone discovered and announced that only the bookstores of the Official Gazette were open, and that - with a permit. With some accompanying justified irony, other booksellers and publishers reacted correctly: not "close the Official Gazette so that we can all write together and equally", but "as they do, let us do the same!" And so it is, as of today: a small but sweet victory against the thugs of Patkovgrad.
What is more natural than these few scenes? Perhaps it seems that epidemics, just like regimes, can fall into a decadent, "baroque" phase, almost openly frenzied. It seems that the Serbian section of the global pandemic is in just such a decadence: our "mad ruler" like from genre movies falters in his machoness before "mad scientists" like from cheap comic books, so compared to them he seems almost normal, and these have gone crazy from all reality, and happily race the locomotive without a driver straight into the tandaria. And the end of the railway is in sight. It's about time someone hit the brakes.
Bonus video:
