When I was training for the Shockoe Slip marathon each year as a very young man, I had a lot of fun running 12 miles into Richmond and then navigating the ruins of Belle Isle. When I got stronger after going into the Army, upon returning home on leave I found I could crawl upside down along the half-mile of suspension bridge and pipeworks to get across the river instead of going the long way around on the rock bed.

Even when I was very young … I noticed the incongruence of all the buildings. There were ruins of architecture from the Civil War … Victorian England … Much older classical structures … even older stone walls that looked to be built by very early inhabitants … other things that looked like they came from another planet. It was a lot like when they blend many different styles in a small place like Disneyland replicas of different eras.

I had ideas that were crazy. I knew they couldn’t be true.

I used to get a creepy feeling they were left over from stage changes. Here was a building they threw up for one scene … here was another.

I’m well aware of the story behind this and a million other ruins in America. I know what the logical explanation is.

When I was 7 years old, I could see from my bedroom window the great mysterious indian mound outside my subdivision in the fields there. I would look at it and think … it didn’t look indian. It looked to be something much older than a thousand years. Like similar thousands of mounds all over Virginia right next door, they labeled them all “indian” when they dared to talk about them at all.

As a young boy I had weird ideas I didn’t dare talk about to anybody.

So many things looked like … stage changes.

It was as if somebody had done a “great reset” and decided to completely change the decorum. Get rid of the current cast and introduce new characters to refresh the series when it was getting stale. Nothing but reboots with new faces, no new stories. Like today.

Of course, it was mandatory that the new fresh inhabitants be handed some loosely cobbled together tautology to explain the incongruousness of it all. Better yet, none of the new cast liked to think much or hard about anything. So they accepted the story they were given because otherwise they’d have to think and that upset them. They were actors, not thinkers. What was wanted was for them to hit their marks and say their lines. For the entertainment value.

They would have the orphan trains and the baby incubators. Nobody would inquire too deeply about their parents or where they came from. Excess children that needed to be adopted now. A “great reset” and there was a huge surplus of them, no parents anywhere.

Just something to think about. I think all the time. The more I know, the less I feel I know about anything.

Sometimes when I’m really thinking crazy … I wonder if the “vaccination” is part of a classic cycle and as always, most of the population will get it. Then they have to deal with the hard cases who didn’t. It’s standard practice to weed out the tough nuts at the end.

Then they can tell the new cast members any story they want to.