Through with This Flu 2: The Wrath of Normie

A few quick, fun notes. We’ll know how wrong I am in ten days!

I’m calling it. By the first of May most of the shelter-in-place, lockdowns, closures, etc., will be lifted. Some locales may try to hang on to their restrictions a little longer but I saw the writing on the wall where I am today.

After so many days of looking like the old, empty, impoverished rural town it was when my wife and I moved here in 2016, the traffic on the main drag Monday looked closer to 2017. Which is to say it wasn’t quite as busy as 2019, but 2016 to 2017 is a respectable jump for Monte Vista, Colorado.

Twitter was full of hatred and jeering for the lockdown protesters at various state capitols on Sunday. This contumely was so unilateral that I questioned whether the protesting side was allowed to express themselves at all. As it is, that’s not what I’m basing my prediction upon. People are out and about now. After one more weekend buttoned up and being told they’re stupid for questioning or resisting the manipulation, people apparently thought Monday afternoon was a fine day for a drive. I didn’t see anyone wearing masks in their vehicles, either, as I did on Saturday.

These aren’t people who make time to go to protests. These are regular people of the San Luis Valley, doing their back and forth through this crossroads town. What they’re doing out is their own business.

And when the bodies fail to stack up after the protests, when the hospitals fail to be overwhelmed after folks ride out into town to whatever’s open...well, a lot of people are going to be disappointed, apparently. Just wait until next time when it’s a real crisis. You’ll get your satisfaction, then.

Meanwhile, Drinko de Mayo is going to be extra-special double-secret lit this year. Just a feeling. We’ll all know in a couple of weeks.

I had a feeling I wasn’t pronouncing this right, and whaddya know....

Through with This Flu

What was that Hunter Thompson line? “How weird must things become before your love will crack?” Something like that. I’m too lazy to Google it.

Something that occurred to me right after posting my piece on the Chinese Flupalooza earlier this month was that Spring Break, that lucrative Dionysian bunching of young, scantily clad college student bodies at southern beaches, was canceled, too. Of course, college classes were canceled along with school in general, so every week is Spring Break now. 

Then Florida opened her beaches this week. There was a bit of grumbling, with a few pointed shrieks of how this would be a disaster, and boy aren’t people from Florida stoooooopid! It went away very quickly. Except for the Tweet below, I haven’t seen much on this. I don’t expect to, either, for the simple reason that this will not result in hospitals filled to capacity with dying sunbathers, any more than the phlegm-sodden stacks of bodies are filling those sidewalks where the numerous homeless still sleep unmolested.

So sorry to disappoint, eh?

What bothers me is what’s going to happen when a truly deadly contagion comes along, like the Spanish Flu of just over a century ago. The Spanish Flu didn’t single out the elderly and immuno-compromised as the Wuhan Flu does (it’s serious enough if you’re in either of these demographics; don’t get me wrong), but the young and ostensibly healthy. 

As it turns out, the state and local officials in too many places have gotten too obviously giddy with their emergency powers, and more people than before are questioning the wisdom—and, more critically, the moral integrity—of the people in charge. I’d thought the lockdowns and closures would be lifted two weeks ago. I’d hazard that most things will be opened up by the end of April, but I’ve been humbled before the Disney-villain-grade hubris of the powers that be. “What, you don’t like being locked down for a week? How about two months, then! Keep pushing us, peasants!”

I will say this: if things aren’t at least on their way back to something approaching normal by summer...authority will be challenged. How, I don’t know. But it’s already being challenged in some quarters. The natives grow restless.

The biggest casualty of this so-called pandemic is trust in people we need to be able to trust. Now we see everyone is serving an agenda. Everyone. There is not one honest soul out there. If the number crunchers don’t like a certain elected official in question, the numbers will be juiced to make that official look bad. We see this every day. We already know many deaths from other causes have been attributed to this flu.  We can’t trust our own government’s statistics any more than we can trust China’s.

Most of these state- and local-ordered social restrictions are arbitrary and serve no other purpose than for other elected officials to throw their weight around and show they’re doing something. We see some using the “crisis” as an opportunity to get some pet causes advanced. The panic mongers will make excuses along the lines of “can’t make an omelet without breaking some eggs,” but few will buy ‘em. 

People were already jaded and cynical to a degree. Now they’re getting really jaded and cynical.

I have no idea what’s to become of all of this, but as the old saying goes, it’s no way to run a whorehouse. When the real pandemic shows up, a real crisis...yeah. You know it.

OK Boomer Gets His Groove On

Shower thoughts while leaning back in my desk chair, a schizoid warm/cool/warm again spring breeze blowing over me from the open window in the Season of the Plague Panic.

Does anyone remember when they were young and when asked their age, would say, “__ and a half,” as if that half-year meant something? It was something kids I knew did up until age 10, if not a little earlier, in the late 1960s. I have no idea if it’s something children still do. I don’t recall hearing any of that from my own when they were small in the late 1990s and early 2000s.

I passed the halfway mark of my 59th year earlier this month. Lord willing and the Chinese Kung Flu don’t git me, I’ll be 60 years old soon. Although I was born late into the generational frame known as the Baby Boomers and identify more with Generation X in values and outlook, I’m old, and all old people are Boomers. The science, as they say, is settled.

What more Boomer thing, after all, to seek out and purchase most of the Creedence Clearwater Revival catalog on compact disc as I did for my birthday last autumn? 

The first four albums, which arrived the day after my 58th birthday. Cosmo’s Factory, the most popular and highly regarded of the discography, will be added later, but for my money Willy and the Poor Boys on the far right was the band’s masterpiece.

I was listening to “Sweet Hitchhiker” from the 20 Greatest Hits CD (the only CCR disc most people have—hey, 20 songs, and you know ‘em all!) sometime in September and I was put out by the awful sound. Didn’t they make remasters of these? Thank God, they did, back in 2007. There was a box set, out of print, naturally, and, oddly, that’s the only way you’d get a remaster of the infamous final album, Mardi Gras, also known as “John Fogerty’s Revenge,” which still has two of Fogerty’s best songs on there, “Someday Never Comes” and “Sweet Hitchhiker.” I solved that issue by downloading remasters of these tracks in mono. I had no idea people were still recording in mono after 1968—and these tracks are from an album released in 1972!—but there it is.

Anyway, I got all of them except for Pendulum, the penultimate album, and Mardi Gras. I might yet pull the trigger on them, if only to round out the catalog, but I’m happy with what I have. It’s a rich treasury of hard rocking Americana practically invented by a former National Guardsman who declared to his brother, “I am not going back to that car wash!” when his leadership of the band was challenged. John Fogerty was/is the genuine article. Unlike what passes for Great Artists today (in the tradition of those horrible singer-songwriters of the 1970s, and hold that thought), he did not grow up in upper middle-class wealth and comfort. 

I ordered my copy of Cosmo’s Factory in December. It arrived on top of a 28 lb.of cat kibble. I’ve been practicing avoiding going out long before it was cool.

I’m only two discs away from the complete CCR studio discography. The deep cuts on these albums were all I ever dreamed of and more. Such an astounding run of creativity in four years. Yes, four years.

Which brings me to the Never-Ending Funeral for John Prine, the Wuhan Deathflu’s most (sorta) famous victim. Most people didn’t know who John Prine was or what he’d done until last week, and those who did, for the most part, didn’t know he was still alive until he wasn’t.

Prine went to folk music school, which sounds as bourgie as it gets to me, but he did at least do some time humping sacks of mail for the U.S. Postal Service, where he famously wrote all of the songs on his first album. If he was faking the empathy demonstrated towards the characters in his songs, as Bruce Springsteen did, the Prine, like Springsteen, did a master-class job of it, and it’s just as well that Springsteen should appoint himself Mourner in Chief.

What gets me is I’m seeing one video after another posted to my Facebook feed by people doing one tribute after another. I suppose an algorithm thought I’d be interested. No problem. Except each and every one of these people paying tribute to the late, great songwriter is...I’m not sure how to put it. Let’s just say they have never met, nor would ever go out of their way to meet the kind of people John Prine saw on his postal routes. They’re of the untouchable caste to these Brahmin singers, fit only as pitiable subjects for song, sung with as much earnest poignancy as can be mustered for maximum virtue-signalling points.

“Priced for the PEOPLE!”...the kind who think nothing of blowing nearly $80 on a CD that hasn’t had a remastering since 1990. They’d do better to spend $449.00 to hear sad songs about poor working people on vinyl.

With respect to Prine, who truly was a fine songwriter worthy of the accolades, my inner Holden Caulfield rages at the reminder of how shamelessly phony so many our much-lauded singer-songwriters are. Again, you’d have never known Prine was alive at all until all these sad-faced clowns in their boutique bespoke clown shoes showed up to hang their brand on his aw-shucks Regular Guy ethos when he passed.

With all the notices of yet one more Sensitive Girl Singer from the mean streets of McMansionland doing the umpteenth hundredth cover of “Angel from Montgomery” it’s past time I called on Facebook to block these notifications as “Irrelevant.” Which, sadly, they rather are. 

I’m not of their caste either, just another old white guy in flyover country. Don’t I have a meth addiction to attend to? (No “Sam Stone” weepies for you toothless trash!) Therefore....

Rip the tracks, make multiple backups, and keep the discs themselves in a cool, dark place. Unless you don’t care about someone else taking away your favorites on the streaming channel because news has come to light that someone heard the bass player say a bad word in 1985.

By way of rinsing the metaphorical dirt from my handling of the above subject, I turn to a most fortuitous recent acquisition. It’s especially fortuitous because box sets don’t last so long; when they’re gone, they’re gone. Fortunately, the entirety of The Cars’ discography was still available to me as of last month. This is six albums for the price of two high-end in-demand CDs, or three regular (and rapidly disappearing) catalog CDs. They appeared within mere days, too, despite having ordered these a week after the onset of the Chinese Bat Soup Plague Panic.

The Cars’ discography covers a full decade from 1978 through 1987, plus the surprisingly good Move Like This, released in 2011. Now I have them all. I’d always wondered what Heartbeat City and Door to Door sounded like, as I’d found The Cars’ mid-1980s output to sound weirdly dated, as most ‘80s music sounded to me. That sound was already going out of style in 1987 by the time their last album came out, so you can literally hear the end coming. 

You also hear it beginning. Here’s something most people never realize: Elvis Costello’s classic first album came out in 1977, the year before The Cars’ debut. Debbie Harry and Blondie exploded all over the radio with “Heart of Glass” the same time “Just What I Needed” went into rotation on the radio. Again, we’re talking 1977, 1978. The Cars’ sophomore set, Candy-O, which might as well be the second disc in a double-album with their first, dominated most of the college parties I attended in the autumn of 1979.

Yet all of the above musical outfits, despite breaking in the mid- to late 1970s, are thought of exclusively as ‘80s bands. They were considered “New Wave” when they started—The Cars, with their mix of heavy, shreddy guitar and funhouse synth, particularly embodied the genre—yet that scene was over and forgotten by 1981. Shake It Up, coming on the heels of the third album speed-bump Panorama, arrived just in time to send it all off—also, just in time for MTV, when it was dedicated to music videos.

Their biggest success was with 1984’s Heartbeat City and “Drive,” the song that I grew quickly tired of upon moving to Atlanta that summer. That particular album translated well onto the then-new “compact laser disc” as the contemporary rock radio station touted it.

It was another three years before Door to Door, but aside from the times having changed, and poised to changed more, with the arrival of Guns ‘n Roses debut album and the precursors to grunge beginning to make noise, it’s easy to hear everyone losing their enthusiasm on the album. There are moments that recall the old days, such as the radio hit, “Tonight She Comes,” but as the tracks wear on it’s clear it’s over.

It had been ten years, and although it was an uneven run, The Cars had their own sound and personality and did much to improve the state of radio back when that was something we listened to. 

My old Sonic Stage platform may not be the greatest, but I’m used to it. Note the duplicate albums in The Cars section at top. Those are the HDCDs that came out many years back that some say are the best remasters.

 

It stands to reason that if I’m old enough to have seen child stars like Drew Barrymore and Christina Ricci grow into buxom sex bombs and fade away into middle age and menopause, I should see entire careers come and go. Between Creedence and The Cars and all my other old friends from way back in the day, I’m keeping myself entertained.

Grandpa’s Saturday Morning Sundown Syndrome

Because I’ve been stop-and-go on two separate posts and I had this fragment sitting around in my journal and I needed to get something up there to let ‘em know I’m still alive and thinking useless thoughts.

I get up on Saturday mornings
the sun blazing through the bathroom window
bathing toilet and sink in glory

and I wonder what cartoon would be on right now
in 1968

The best stuff came on earliest
the old, weird stuff, the dark and violent 
sci-fi shows with puppets from England
getting shot or set on fire
these mysteries shouted to life 
right after the farm report
wrapped at seven

the excitement peaked with the newest 
and most popular stuff
in the nine and ten o’clock hours
then slid slowly downhill around lunch

at one o’clock the trippy Lone Ranger cartoon
came on and at one-thirty it was over
and there was nothing to do 
but go outside

of which I remember next to nothing
sunlight, pinecones, pinestraw
other children

come to think of it Saturday
was like any other day inasmuch as

it was something I endured until dinner

Sometimes I wonder what kids today
do that makes this day off from school special

but don't get me wrong

for all my warm fuzzies 
this old man’s mind can still grasp 
the fact they’re missing
nothing.

Nah, I’m not even including this in my book. No one knows what I’m talking about here anyway and it’s just as well. Still, Copyright © Lawrence Roy Aiken, in case it matters.

Thoughts on Eating While Fasting in the Quarantine

I can’t be the only near-60-year-old coot who remembers this stuff.

Wrapped up as I’ve been over the last few years with 1960s television shows and how media and its messaging was presented then, I recently came across something in some half-century old memories of mine regarding the concept of “in-between-meal snacks.”

This is strictly from my memory. I’m surprised no one at Fat People Hate on Voat or the anti-fattie chan boards has brought this up, but in-between-meal snacks were a thing in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and at the time—and for some time before that—they were frowned upon. I remember distinctly as a child that, unless it was a special occasion such as a birthday party or holiday function, one simply did not eat in between scheduled mealtimes.

It was one thing to be a child caught with his hand in the cookie jar, but to be caught so as an adult was shameful, a step removed from keeping a flask in your coat and drinking from it when you thought no one was looking. You had a problem. Depending on who saw you, you were either contemptible or pitiable. As most people fear catching your weakness like the disease they subconsciously perceive it to be, mostly the former. Ugh, what a pig! No self-respect whatsoever! Can you believe it?

After you’re done laughing at the ridiculousness of these food descriptions on these fake flyers from 4chan, keep in mind someone spent a lot of time Photoshopping all this. The border decor is zany beyond Zen.

The commercials I saw sought to justify those in-between meal snacks, quickly re-branded as simply “snacks.” You can justify eating anything if it’s healthy. And so it came to pass I was munching on granola bars as a 14-year-old grooving to his Who records in 1976. It was so long ago, it was years before the term “granola head” or “Lola Granola” became pejoratives for airheaded neo-hippies.

And it was a semi-radical thing, as semi-radical as getting yourself a soda pop and drinking it in the middle of the afternoon like you didn’t care, because you didn’t. That was 44 years ago, as of this writing. I remember the commercials in the late 1960s with cheery jingles indicating it was okay if you drank Dr. Pepper at 10, 2, and 4. (There were even promotional clocks given out with the times highlighted. There was one in the barbershop my step-dad dragged me to for my monthly Peter Gunn-style head-shave in 1970.)

The Pepsi Generation, “Comin’ atcha, comin’ strong” drank whenever they wanted to. Soon everyone was drinking pop when they wanted to. Why not have a bag of chips with it? What was it with this hang-up about drinking and eating whenever you want, anyway? Stupid, cranky, bossy old fools...and, to be honest, that’s all they were, for the most part. It wasn’t so much about concern for anyone’s health as it was “Because I said so, that’s why!” 

“Chicken captchas” gives the game away. Meanwhile, my addiction to peanut mud was a major contributor to my Class 2 obesity back in the day. Hey, but peanut oil is healthy!

And so it came to pass that those old folks passed, and in-between-meal snacks, once regarded at best as “treats,” became a regular part of their children’s and grandchildren’s diets. Now, what was once the Tattooed Fat Lady of the circus sideshow is the new normal. We’re here for reasons, like ‘em or not. 

Will we ever go back to way it was? I doubt it, not in my lifetime. It’s just something I think about whenever I pride myself for fasting for more than 16 hours. It’s only in this most recent age that food is so cheap and abundant and attitudes towards day-long grazing so relaxed that not eating has become an achievement along the lines of eating 60 cheeseburgers in one sitting. “Yeesh, what a freak! It’ll be a miracle he doesn’t kill himself doing that one day.”

If I do, I’ll certainly leave a better looking corpse, one that neither requires a grand piano case to be buried in, nor risks sending an entire crematorium up in a white-hot human grease-fire. It’s the little things that truly distinguish a fella.

All of 3.4 lbs away from normal BMI, and 17.4 from goal. I’ve been stalled out here for a month now. Apparently I’m going to have to cut back more during that window when I do eat, given that I’m eating enough to cover these 16-hour+ fasts. It happens.

April No Foolin’

Not this year, anyway. Which is something of a good thing, as I find it rather annoying. Check me out, looking on the bright side of a pandemic panic...it only get worse from here. You’ve been warned.

It’s ha-ha funny and eew-weird funny all at once, waking up thinking it’s Wednesday when it’s Friday. I’ve been living the self-quarantined life long before it became a government mandate and here I am losing track of time like a common normie. Strange days have found us; strange days have dragged us down. #MeToo. Heh.

Here’s to 1990s-era gas furnaces that still function, daytime temperatures in the high 50s/low 60s F and rising, and my wife, who slaps those “Live, Laugh, Love”-esque decals in the most delightfully random places.

Speaking of ha-ha funny, I noticed an absolute dearth of April Fool’s themed material on the Web. There was even a meme to that effect, that we’ve had all the foolery we can stand for right now without the usual first-of-April shenanigans. 

I hate that kind of humor anyway so this goes into the win column for me.

Everyone’s talking about (and likely will always remember thus) the instantaneous shortages of toilet paper, but this was the canned goods/dry goods (e.g., Ramen noodles) aisle at the Walmart in Alamosa, CO, midday on St. Patrick’s Day.

One commentator online noted, in so many words I wished I’d come up with myself, “This is the first time anyone’s ever thought to turn a country off just to see what would happen.”

You don’t see this mentioned at volume in the mainstream propaganda feed, but think about it: We canceled St. Patrick’s Day. St. Patrick’s Day is the first unofficially sanctioned American drinking holiday since Super Bowl Sunday six weeks before. No green beer this year, though. No parades. No bars, taphouses, breweries, etc. scoring one of their biggest paydays of the year since Super Bowl Sunday, and until maybe March Madness, and until then, maybe football season.

The hammer was brought down where I am the very day before. I don’t know anyone with the COVID-19, but I do know people who took a big hit when St. Patrick’s Day was canceled, when the restaurants and taphouses and bars got shut down altogether until—Easter? Now the end of April. I pray they do not take it this far, but it looks now as if they just might.

By the way, I’ll be interested to hear how many, “I don’t know anyone with this stupid flu, but I know people hurting from these shutdowns and quarantines and crap” stories start cropping up. I’m blackpilled on this, which is to say I don’t think they’ll be afforded enough of a voice to make a difference. Besides, fewer people own businesses than don’t, and the resentments of the latter group can easily be turned against the former. 

The store shelves aren’t all that’s emptied. I’m having flashbacks to 2016 when we moved into a depressed rural town with nothing going on. The economy took off in 2017 and many vacant, long-abandoned spaces were bought up or leased and put to work. Nothing left to do now but wait and see whose investment survives this.

A note on the cancellation of March Madness: I don’t think the college basketball championship nearly as popular as made out to be by the media but it’s a lot of money a few people are not making this year. These aren’t the kind of people who “take one for the team” so the fallout from this should be interesting. As should the pushback from people who gave up on televised sports a long time ago for the numerous reasons occasioned by the media and the sport’s management.

Again, restaurants and bars that count on better-than-normal income from people coming in to watch the games over beer and nachos took a hit from this. There have been a few memes sneering at how some people are more concerned with the economy than people’s lives, but the economy is people’s lives. It’s how they make what it takes to live. You shouldn’t have to be of the owner class to appreciate that. Especially if you depend on something being open so you can draw a paycheck from it.

As I’m seeing as of this writing on Palm Sunday 2020, the sentiment is there had better be some bodies stacked in the street by the end of next week, the week after that at the latest, or...or.... 

Probably nothing at all, but that’s just me, and no mere mortal with Internet access will know until we get there. To be clear, I won’t be disappointed if it’s not the great apocalyptic pandemic this Chinese Deathflu is being sold as. Not at all. Some may have cause to be upset to learn they’ve been duped, however.

Just saying.

Vernal Equinox 2020, the first of only two tines in the year when the sun sets right in the middle of the front gate and walkway towards our due-westward facing house.

Because I mean it when I say nihilism is for losers, I’ll end by passing along this upbeat note I’ve seen ringing around the boards this past week.  Another meme going around notes that in the rush to get back to normal, maybe there are some parts of “normal” we could do without. Most people are pretty blank and just go with the flow but those inclined to question things are getting all kinds of answers to questions they didn’t know they had. 

Some may even act on those answers. The Plexiglas barriers between cashiers and customers at the supermarket won’t be the only change wrought by this panic. Priorities are being questioned. 

It’s about time, a fine occasion as any, I say. Best of luck and love to all of you out there asking the questions in these most unprecedented times. Whether it’s “Where’s the toilet paper?” or “Is this really what I want to do with my life?” either one is as important. Funny how that works out. Almost ha-ha funny.

The answers reveal themselves daily. Let us do all of those things that keep us out of trouble and endeavor to be here for them.

“There’s a feeling I get/When I look to the west/And my spirit is crying for...” turning around and going home. It’s good to have a home.

Thoughts on the Close of Mad March 2020

Normally, I resist making perishable posts about ephemeral events hyped in the media. However, it appears we’re at a historical juncture of some description, however hype-fueled, and I might as well weigh in. Everyone else is, and what else can you do?

All opinions on all matters described are irrelevant. All of them. This means your disagreements with me are irrelevant, too. All of the important decisions are out of our hands, we are not privy to any internal memos and our opinions don’t matter. What we do, does.

This should be 1080-p high-definition clear to anyone who isn’t already wrapped up in policing how other people are supposed to think. As for those, we cannot help them. Nor will we afford these noisome creatures the attention they crave.

Now then, the tl;dr, the executive summary, whatever we’re calling it, my speculations given the incomplete and unreliable data I’ve seen:

The Chinese Flu, the ‘Rona, the Peking Pulmonary Pox, etc., is more hype than anything else. We’ve had multiple outbreaks of several variants of influenza that have killed far more people. We were urged to get our flu shots, nothing more. The susceptible died—tens of thousands among multiple billions—and the world went on about its business. It was as simple as that.

Someone somewhere decided they were trying a little experiment this time. Businesses were ordered closed and now millions are out of work. If this flu was as virulent as Yersinia pestis (plague) in the 14th century, or smallpox at any other time, sure, lock things down. This COVID-19 is, by most accounts, a killer of the elderly and those with pulmonary systems already weakened by asthma, pneumonia, etc. It’s serious enough for the susceptible. Not serious enough to warrant what’s going on now.

An incomplete representation of my plague porn collection. When you know about the big killers and how they changed the very fabric of the societies they ravaged, it’s hard to be impressed by a basic bitch (bitchy enough, mind you) like COVID-19. By the way, I’m aware of how Richard Preston’s reputation has suffered due to his exaggerations in The Hot Zone (lower left) and other books. What can I say, except I’ve read the bad with the good. Preston simply took the journalistic maxim, “If it bleeds, it leads” a bit more literally than he should have.

But my opinion, like yours, doesn’t matter. We’re here, and this is what’s happening. The closest historical analogy I have to what’s going on now is the 1973 Arab oil embargo, which brought nearly 20 years of classic Detroit steel and muscle cars to a close, set norms on winter and summer thermostat temperatures, and plunged the U.S. into a deep spasms of inflation-driven recession that lasted throughout the rest of the decade and didn’t break until near the end Ronald Reagan’s first term in 1984.

There were other factors at work influencing the changes—as there are now, both cultural and political. Same as it ever was. We already know we’re going to be living in a completely different world when we come out the other end of this thing. The question is what that world is going to look like. Will the authoritarians win? Or will enough people push back and begin angrily sweeping away all those things they tolerated as part and parcel of livin’ in the USA six weeks ago, but now appear as they truly are, stupid and frivolous.

For what it’s worth I don’t see a decade-long drowning in inflation like from 1973 to 1982, but the precise opposite, an explosion of exuberant economic activity once the bans are lifted. People will pack the restaurants and bars and other public venues in celebration of their release.

Where will the money come from? Everyone with a credit card is just going to put it on the card. Sort of like the U.S. federal government has been doing all along, except we have to pay our debts back. The main thing is to lift these bans as quickly as possible. I really don’t see these things going all the way until the end of April. Most people don’t have savings to sustain them beyond the occasional brake job, if that (I’m one of ‘em), and if they’ve got credit cards, that’s how they’re paying for groceries and everything else.

This is a historical landmark run as a non-profit by local volunteers. At least these people aren’t suffering for this, just their paying jobs.

This is all speculation, of course. Whether I’m right or wrong has nothing to do with anything; I am in control of nothing except what I do right here at my desk. I have a novel to finish. No, I haven’t observed anything to make me change my approach towards the collapse of civilization in my series, and I thank God most unironically for that. I’ve got all the rewriting I can handle right now.

Thanks to my wife’s usual assiduousness in shopping we were and still are well-provisioned. We also are in good health, so far, so good. I’m also That Guy. That is, aside from being an amateur epidemiological expert, I’m also a natural introvert. I’m socially awkward and avoid people when I can, with only very special exceptions. At this desk in front of this computer in this house is my favorite place on Earth to be.

In sum, it’s strange days but I’m good, and here’s hoping you’re the same. The only way out of this is through. As a famous functional alcoholic once put it, if you’re going through hell, keep going. So that’s what we’ll do.

Be well. 

Most restaurants in town have given up even on the takeout. It simply isn’t worth the manpower.

A quick P.S., because I want this absolutely clear: I find this current plague panic similar to the 1973 Arab oil embargo and the subsequent long, deep recession only inasmuch as culture is changing because of it. That’s heavy enough, but I want it noted that there is absolutely no precedent whatsoever in this old man’s recollection of people being ordered to stay in their houses and forbidden freedom of peaceable assembly as per the 1st Amendment to the Constitution. This is a completely new one on me. A new one on a lot of people, I imagine. How long is this sustainable? I’m not even trying to spitball on that one. We’ll just have to wait and see. 

I know this much: what happens will largely depend on how many people know people who are actually sick with this thing. Is this flu a media-driven hype or a real and present danger? I lean towards “hype,” but what do I know? Only that I lean towards hype, but I really don’t know.  Yet.

My predictions, presented here as an investment for our future amusement (look, Ma, I’m an optimist!), are, 1) these bans on business openings and assemblies won’t go all the way through April. I pray I’m right on this because, 2) depending on how long the bans and quarantines last, the economy should surge like a crazy surging thing once the reins are loosened. Naturally, it depends on how much cash and credit people have left after not working so long and paying bills.

Here’s hoping we’re all here to congratulate me on my perspicacity later.