Random Thoughts on the First Day of the Second Half

My last post was my 666th. Not that I’m superstitious, just uncomfortable. And I really do have stuff on my mind.

NOTES ON THE CURRENT CRISIS: It’s interesting how much the events of this year have made so many of us appreciate the changing of the months. It’s as if we’re all hoping that this will be the month everything gets back to normal. Naturally, they don’t. Things seem to loosen up on one side, then things get stupid-weird on the other.

As far as this Panicky-Demic Lockdown mania goes, the people making these stupid and arbitrary rules aren’t giving up their power. Fourth of July is canceled and so is the rest of the summer. If you think the snickering-smug authoritarians are going to let you have your Christmas shopping and parties this year, I advise you to think smarter, not harder. Thanksgiving family dinners will be discouraged, if not outright prohibited before that. Whatever happens in the November U.S. federal elections will only serve as further excuse for tightening the screws “for public safety.”

For those sniffing about for Socially Unacceptable Political Thought on my part, I remind you that the will to power uses ideology as fig-leaf, a beard to distract from its primary purpose, i.e., acquiring and exercising more power. It was the Big Lesson of George Orwell’s 1984, that the power to be able to spout any kind of nonsense unchallenged — say, “2 + 2 = 5” — is the ultimate goal. 

Everyone seems to have missed that point, but I’ll say it anyway, if only to be able to say “I told you so,” and if only from beyond the grave. Despite repeated proofs of inflated infection and death statistics, despite empirical, see-for-yourself proof that the big scary virus has turned out to be a nothingburger used as a boogeyman to frighten and intimidate and control, people are still playing along with this second wave thing. 

As I say, I don’t make human nature. It is what it is. Whaddya gonna do?

That no one on the Internet believes the official 9/11 narrative, that most even suspect an inside job, says much for lost public trust over the years. That said, the Internet is not the world. The fact that so many people are going along with this is discouraging.

“CAN WE PLEASE COMPLAIN ABOUT SOMETHING ELSE?” DEPT.: I’ve managed to find workarounds for the increasingly unworkable Google Blogger. So far I can still switch easily between “Legacy Blogger” and “that mess they’re forcing on us now” so I can make the smart quotes work. 

However, I am unable to load my photos directly from my computer onto a blogpost in either version. The workaround for this is to upload the photos to the Google Photos app — yes, it took ‘em from my PC folder just fine — and “Insert” the photos from there. I suspect this was something done on purpose by way of forcing people to use that app, but that’s just me, and so what? Nothing’s changing until it does.

There is one bright note to all of this. It used to be that I had to go into HTML to fix how any word I italicized became twice as large as the text around it. This bug endured for years. Someone finally thought to step on it.

That said, New Blogger still doesn’t get its own font sizing commands. Large text becomes medium-sized text and captions are illegibly small, however many times you highlight and hit the “Normal” button. As always, it’s fixed in HTML or not at all, and you still can’t count on what you saved to stick. You’ll come back to an already published post and see all kinds of haywire formatting. Why? How? I don’t know, I don’t care. I just wish it would stop. 

It won’t, of course. This is on me for not following through with my Wordpress account. Moving along, then....

Like I don’t have enough on my desk already.

TEN YEARS GONE: This morning as I fed the cats I was impressed by the autumnal quality of the air, and on the first of July, at that. Then I remembered walking out from my house in Colorado Springs on the first of July ten years ago. It was sunny and hot, the clear blue sky of another world because this was the first day in 20 years we were not getting paid and taken care of by the Department of the Navy.

My wife had officially retired the day before, just in time for the Great Recession to hollow out the IT industry I was hoping to break into with my MCSA and CompTIA certs. We had both hoped to land GS jobs on the Air Force Academy but abused wage-slave NAF was the best we could do. 

All that, and I was Class II obese. I was still two years from figuring out how to write a novel, and three years from being published. It would be five years before I finally gave up on temporary work, as the gigs were only getting worse on top of so few and far between that I might as well not bother.

So I wrote and published two novels, lost 50 pounds, then another 30, moved 200 miles from where I’d been living for nearly ten years, got cancer, got over it, and here we are now, 308 pages deep into the last novel of my series.

What a ride, is all I have to say. Hands down, my 50s have been the most inspirational and productive decade of my life. I thought I should say something about it.

It really is like this, For me, it describes mid-2012 until now, so, whoa. Eight years.

Fresh Baked Crow with a Side of Optimism

Takeaways from the latest teaching moments of the Current Crisis.

I nearly deleted my last post for my profound embarrassment but the lesson is too instructive to waste. I’ll go even further and point out that I’d thought this media-driven mass hysteria would be done before the end of March. That I didn’t think a lockdown of businesses and what is essentially mass house arrest of the entire First World could be prosecuted so long speaks more to my overestimation of human nature than anything. 

It’s nothing to get bitter about, though. Just “take the L,” as the young folk say, except in my case the L stands for “lesson.” I’m not losing anything. Just the people who had jobs and businesses to attend to, and are now facing bankruptcy, foreclosure, permanent financial ruin, etc. 

Those people probably voted wrong anyway, which is why the media is keeping smugly silent about the millions of private disasters going on across the republic. If there’s one thing a lot of people have figured out, the media might not be the enemy, but they sure as hell aren’t your friend.

Meanwhile, it’s achingly apparent the people in authority declaring these lockdowns, with the occasional opening under capricious and stupid restrictions, are enjoying their power too much to give it up now or ever. Despite the occasional act of defiance on the part of small business owners, it now appears plausible some governors will attempt to cancel summer and fall, clear on through Christmas. That “second wave,” dont’cha know. We might have to do this for years until we get either a vaccine or an outright cure! Or wherever else the goalposts are moved.

They’ll get away with it, too. One lesson I’ve gleaned from this is it’s that people will put up with anything, even when they know it’s wrong, even when it hurts them. They will do as they are told and grumble most heroically about it later in hushed tones among their closest confidants. This is not a condition specific to Germans between 1933 and 1945. It is what it is. If someone ever writes an update to Charles Mackay’s indispensable Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, our Great Pandemic Panic of 2020 will make for a most illuminating chapter, with historical cross-references to back up the principles of mob psychology at work.

This rural crossroads town was barely hanging on when my wife and I moved here in 2016. The empty storefronts began filling up and everything was going great until, oh, mid-March of this year. Everyone say, “Thanks, Karen!”

The other lesson, naturally, is never to attempt predictions on when things like this will end. This pandemic may not be entirely a hoax, but it’s been certainly hyped. This is a case of mass delusion bordering on hysteria, and there are enough people out there high on this crisis to keep it going until it stops.

I’m still deluded myself to entertain some optimism, though. People are beginning to realize there’s a class of people in charge of things who don’t merely dislike the public they’re tasked with managing, but hate them and wish them harm. As a better blogger than I puts it, real change will not occur until the Dirt People understand the Cloud People don’t like them, not one bit. It’s getting a little more obvious than normal. But, then, this is the New Normal, isn’t it? It’s what they keep telling us.

The media act as amplifiers and speakers for this class, and they like to hear the peasants/hicks/what-have-you scream as they burn, too. Most people know better than to admit they trust the same people who brought us Gulf Wars I and II starring Saddam Hussein as the New Hitler, and with Weapons of Mass Destruction in the sequel, but they still do. A minority of a minority is blinking the scales from their eyes. Maybe not enough to make a difference, but it’s more people than the day before. There will be more tomorrow.

I’ve predicted the breakdown of trust in already fragile institutions, but bureaucracies are immortal, and the cognitive dissonance of the public, their ability to forgive and very literally forget once things start more-or-less working again, is how that immortality comes to pass. A corner has been turned, but if it takes us anywhere it’s to the glum resignation of subjects of the Soviet regime standing in lines for basic items. In our case, we even have handy decals on the concrete to show you where to stand, and arrows inside the store to direct your movement in the aisles.

If I’m optimistic, it’s because I feel something really messed-up, but also exciting is going to happen. I don’t know when, there’s no telling when, but  a new “normal” is coming. Given my experience so far, the safest thing to say is it’s not going to look like anyone thinks it is, and it’s a chump’s game to speculate.

Be cool, stay safe. The old rules of this fallen world still apply.

A timeless visual parable.

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.

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.