The Red Tide

16x20 Glow in the dark, glitter, crushed glass. Resin coated.    In May of 2020, I experienced my very first red tide in San Diego. The red tide is bioluminescent algae. At night when the waves form and crash they take on the electric blue, glowing color of a bolt of lightning. The year in itself had so far been incomprehensible. In very short order I had lost my job, fearfully followed the governors stay at home orders, and experienced things just as bizarre as glowing waves. What sticks out the most is how at a giant Vons one night, every shelf of the room-sized dairy/ milk section of the store was empty. There was no canned food. No noodles and of course no paper products. This creeping reality came in that I had better start figuring out a way to survive that didn’t rely on an industry where masses of crowds showed up and thousands of pieces of used silverware sit in a tub together for half the afternoon.   It’s funny to look back on May of 2020 now. We were convinced covid would