Covid is rearing it's ugly head again. This time, it's Delta variant. It seems to have entered the country via the Nanjing Airport. Vaccinated airport workers who supposedly were never near any passengers got it and since they weren't on isolation shifts, it got out into the community.

I don't know it yet but—separate from the usual hotspots showing up here and there—this is about to be the largest and widest spread outbreak China has had in months and months.

We've been masks off in most places for so long that it's not unusual for people to put them on only as long as is necessary to get into a venue that's requiring them. I've certainly been guilty of that myself. Usually when on busses, like today's bus, between cities.

I have a tendency towards carsickness. As well, all the ways you might alleviate boredom on a two hour drive require looking at a screen or a book and that just makes it worse. So, instead, I eat sunflower seeds.

The rhythmic crack spit crack spit (always into an empty soda bottle) keeps my mind empty but busy, keeps my hands occupied, and the chewing motion helps keep the eustachian tubes moving in ways that tell my inner ear "things are okay".

I'm planning, in about a week, to meet my friend Margaret to go to Luoyang and the Longmen Grottoes. By the time I get a ride to meet her¹, sips of soda will be taken by quickly slipping the N95 down and back up again. For now though, the superspreader events at the Zhangjiajie Theater and other sites haven't yet started rippling outwards and it's still okay to have a chin diaper loosely hanging from one ear as I nibble my sunflower seeds crack spit crack spit.

I have to have a mask. I have to acknowledge acceptance of the rules. I don't have to wear it properly but I have to wear it. Taking it off  would be wrong. Crack spit. Crack spit.

The amount of time our bus spends speeding through one tunnel cluster after another, sometimes with pergolas to keep the rockfall from impacting an entrance or exit, makes me real glad I didn't go try for up and over on one brake.

Seeing what my brake pads look like when I get to the Merida in Shangluo², I'm even more glad. The only reason I don't have no pad at all left on the front is that the pads weren't completely aligned right and I wore a groove rather than evenly getting everything at once. As for the rear, although it still stops things (sort of), it actually was completely worn away to the point where it's basically my brake shoe against my rotor.

It's basically flat from here to Danfeng with a slight tendency towards downhill. It's also basically a big ugly fast road that the big trucks aren't allowed to use since an expressway was built. I might have been quite miserable in taking it a decent ways but instead, just as I'm leaving Shangluo, I run into two guys cutting short a two or three week tour and going home by train because shit is on the edge of getting weird and they're both teachers and every Education Bureau in the country has started issuing firmly worded suggestions against interprovincial travel in the weeks before the new school year.

So, instead, I share with them the best meal I've had in weeks and get a room at the same hotel.

No one was yet being super duper mindful again of handwashing or any of those things we really ought to all be doing always but don't cause we're lazy and germs are invisible and I'll wonder afterwards if I got the scratchy throat from them or if it was one of the other people on the bus with me as I ate my sunflower seeds crack spit crack spit³.

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¹ The bus and taxi saga is a tale for another day

² For no particular reason, my first stop was a Giant which is also the county bike club. They were sufficiently incompetent as to insist that I needed to change my entire brake assembly rather than just buy new brake pads. I did not allow them the option of doing things to my bike.

³ If anything, I probably got it from the filthy conditions of the room at the faux Sheraton