I walked it

 I was up around 5, and figured I had to get out of here by 6:30, assuming it will take an hour to walk to FedEx, to arrive at 7:30. They close at 8. I had coffee and walnuts and packed one large thing that sold overnight, that took the biggest size of car wheel box, which I just happened to have one of. 

It was a simple matter of, I could mess with the bike, and find out the tire is ruined or something, and not get to FedEx at all, or I could pack this one more thing and load up the trailer and walk it up there. So I walked it. 

The bike trailer is very hard to control with just a piece of strapping. It would be tons easier to pull with a handle like on a kids' toy wagon, rigid and with that kind of grip. The walk indeed took an hour, and I hung out a bit with the guys in FedEx, talking about whether we live in a simulation. I'm halfway to thinking we do. 

I got a couple of useful boxes for mailing and one for scrap metal behind the sandwich place, then on the way back stopped where a bag of stuff had literally fallen off the back of a truck and took a lot of stuff out of there - foam blocks and anti-static bags and such. 

There hadn't been much in the way of zombies on my way out, but by the time I was on my way back the sun was just about down and the zombies were coming out. And the thing about walking is, now I was moving at roughly the same speed. They shuffle along more slowly, but not that much more slowly. 

A zombie was maybe 200ft, ahead of me on the sidewalk, parked with its bike and looked young and fit, and thus hungry for brains and able to fight effectively for them. After packing up the stuff from the bag of stuff, the zombie hadn't moved and I figured it was waiting for the ambush. Zombies are not subtle. So I got out my pepper spray and had it in my hand, finger on the button, while I went cautiously around it. But it didn't move; it was staring at its phone and had been all along and continued to do so as I passed and was long past. Maybe the zombie had found something, perhaps a video of brain surgery, and was transfixed by the sight of that delicious brain. 

As I got to the bridge I had to pass under, I spotted another zombie ahead of me that was not transfixed by anything but was doing the usual idiotic zombie shamble, stopping very often to look around at things - I'm sure a brain infested with zombie virus and rotting, produces its share of hallucinations. 

My pace was somewhat faster than that of this zombie, as much as I tried to keep it ahead of me. I caught up at Junction Avenue, but lucked out in that the zombie turned left on the near side of the street and I turned left on the far, and then stopped at the tire place to see if any interesting packing materials were there. The zombie continued to shamble, stop, stare, shamble, stop, look around... 

We both proceeded South on Junction. I got to where there are zombie RVs and box trucks and cars and all sorts of improvised places to rest one's rotting bones, and side-tracked into the parking lot there whic enabled me to put distance between myself and the denizens of the RVs and cars etc. The zombie was now effectively following me, but it apparently got tangled up somewhere at that point and no longer followed, I noticed, checking up on things after I'd passed the RV's. 

I was still keeping my pepper spray handy and thought, "I'm safer now, but 'safer' is a relative term" and indeed, at the end of Junction, where it becomes a dead-end, I heard zombies fighting. A zombess screamed, "You're a bitch!!!" and "Thief! Stealing my stuff!" and got into a minivan with the passenger side so smashed in, it was amazing it was drive-able. The male got into a loud, black, old, SUV and also drove off. (For bonus points, this zombie in the black SUV has been driving around here all night, passing back and forth, parking, then taking off, then parking again.) 

I got back in here and finished the salami slices I'd bought at H Mart yesterday. Presently I got the bike trailer out again and my "getter stick" and walked up to the bountiful dumpster in which I found absolutely nothing and the same goes for the veggie dumpster. Except for a few clean plastic Target bags, that trip was a waste. 

I got back and watched the zombie with the noisy, older, black SUV have some kind of a confab in a limited palette here, with other bums in a grey, a white, and a red SUV or car. I think they are probably small-time drug dealers which would explain the fight earlier with the zombess, and that they have OK but not great cars. The serious drug dealers have beautiful cars that always look like they just came from the car wash. 

I do not care to repeat what I did today, taking things to FedEx "by hand". It's an hour each way and tiring. But the problem is that I have a lot of different things I have to do here.  A good number of them actually have a higher priority than fixing the bike. 

Today was a good introduction to how things will be when I've gone that final step from car to motorcycle to bicycle to merely being happy I've got a decent pair of shoes. 

As I walked in today, I thought, That's another reason shopping malls have died. People in the US are just not up to walking around for hours which is exactly what we did when we went to "the mall". 200 TV channels and computers are blamed, but I blame the modern sugar and carbohydrate based diet. Malls are still alive and well in Asia, where obesity is not yet normalized.