The great 800-lb pumpkin is silent. The madness yields to peaceful serenity.

Our 2020 non-Harvest Homecoming is under way, and it's a peaceful, easy feeling compared with the usual frenetic amok time, albeit still a tad strange given that with weather like this, we'd be pinned to the tarmac.

Today has been so very normal -- although "normal" will always be a subjective concept in Nawbany, where "We're All Here Because We're Not All THERE."

As first recommended in 2019, here's a new, innovative way to kick off Harvest Homecoming, whether or not it actually takes place: Sardinian throat singing. 

Friday and Saturday should be interesting. Minus the vendors from elsewhere, with some local organizations setting up anyway, and a few businesses staging kinda-sorta HH events, you get an idea as to how a scaled-back festival molded to downtown's actual contours might look. Maybe a springtime bookend fest one of these years? 

However, this year's not-the-fest-as-usual has a new 800-lb gorilla. It's the fact of these little farm-near-me/">mini-celebrations -- how many unofficial beer walks ARE taking place tomorrow, anyway? -- occurring in a pandemic context. Yes, I understand that the governor gave the okay to congregate outdoors, albeit it only recently, but supposedly the mask "mandate" that never really was still applies.

From my vantage point, I've spent the past few months watching local VIPs from both political flush mobs violating the mask mandate frequently and with apparent impunity. It's no longer my self-assigned "job" to call them out, so I haven't. 

However, the unmistakable message I've gotten is that our local political duopoly hasn't been very interested from the outset in leading by example.   

Note that I'm taking great care to be bipartisan, that elusive quality of fairness we all insist should be more prevalent. Let me be clear about what I've witnessed. It's been a firmly bipartisan indifference to science. 

Does any of it matter? 

Beats me. It will always annoy me that from top to bottom in America, grassroots business persons have been expected to enforce "mandates" that neither political entity cares to oversee and be held responsible for implementing. 

In closing, a random HH link from 2018:

Try to imagine Harvest Homecoming if 95% of visitors DIDN'T drive to it -- or, "Why Public Transportation Works Better Outside the U.S."