Corona Virus Thoughts #18

Continued strange movement along 101. The latest: a bedraggled man of the road waving a badminton racket as he walked; a shirtless and tattooed man holding two cans of Smirnoff Ice Smash as he bicycled through a parking lot on a kid’s bike with chopper handles; a large man carrying a huge driftlog to his tiny car and thinking he was going to fit it inside; a man wearing pajamas and a trench coat ambling all over town; a svelte woman missing her front teeth who lurks around in the manner of a prostitute.

The fissures are getting deeper. The heat and pressure escape. It’s not a relief.

225k dead. The football stadiums are filling up with maskless fans. It’s like watching a show and wondering which cast members will end up dying before the series is over. People are killing themselves to watch football in person and see the President.

Will it all be over soon? Are we going to have an attempted coup? The first one in our history?

I talked to a kind elderly woman in Oregon Tavern Age country. She was killing time with a Bud Light before attending a local Trump rally as a patriotic show of support. She thought about bringing her autistic adult daughter that she cares for at home, but thought that wasn’t a good idea since no one at the rally would be wearing masks. I didn’t say anything.

I worked the pandemic into a Christmas story! It will appear as a bonus if you buy the book through the Nestucca Spit Press web site (get yours today!). Here’s a riff from the story:

About the only good thing going for Santa was the raging pandemic. No toy run this year. He’d canceled it in the summer and took a lot of pounding on conservative talk radio and social media as a result. They screamed and stomped and dubbed him an essential worker who had to stay on the front lines and do his job.

Santa didn’t respond to the firestorm of criticism, but he was secretly relieved he didn’t have to deliver more useless crap to increasingly hostile and dumbed down people, particularly the Americans. What had happened to them? They once established the world’s first national park system, implemented the Marshall Plan, and rescued the bald eagle from extinction by banning DDT. They couldn’t do anything worthwhile anymore. They could fix nothing with themselves or their diseased body politic. Why? Why? Why? Santa didn’t know and he didn’t really give a shit anymore. All the virus meant to him was sitting at home and rereading the titans of Russian literature to ride out the holiday season.