There is a massive neighborhood festival fairly close to me every year.

And I've never attended it, until this year.

We were hesitant about attending...I had a recent, relatively long hospital visit, and was still trying to get my sea legs back, and this thing involved a lot of walking. Also, my spouse was also struggling with some pain. Despite that, we decided to attend.

They close off entire neighborhoods to traffic, and bands are set up on people's front porches. There's probably somewhere around 100 bands.

The walking was not too bad. We parked about a mile away, smoked a joint, and then took a shuttle into the neighborhoods. You walk from house to house, listening to all different bands. This thing draws maybe 20,000 people?

Floating on a nice high, walking the neighborhood streets, everyone is smiling, and you can't help but dance in the middle of the road.

All kinds of music...from classical to jam band stuff.

There was this woman, probably in her 40's, dancing with another woman in her 80's, and holy shit, they were good dancers. I thought I took a long video of them, but I fucked it up apparently and there is only about 2 seconds of the video on my phone.

Everyone was friendly. Everyone nodding hello to you and smiling. Lots of dogs. I asked several people if I could interact with their dogs, and they cheerfully said yes. The whole scene brought me back to the pre-concert "Shakedown Street" at Grateful Dead shows, except that there were no craft vendors, just food trucks.

Point being...there's a lot of people out there that are not insane. There were no Trump flags, no apparent assholes, no political arguments...just normal people having fun.

There's still hope out there.