{"id":6457,"date":"2020-10-26T06:11:37","date_gmt":"2020-10-26T13:11:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.nestuccaspitpress.com\/blog\/?p=6457"},"modified":"2020-10-26T06:11:39","modified_gmt":"2020-10-26T13:11:39","slug":"corona-virus-thoughts-18","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.nestuccaspitpress.com\/blog\/meditations\/corona-virus-thoughts-18\/","title":{"rendered":"Corona Virus Thoughts #18"},"content":{"rendered":"<!--themify_builder_content-->\n<div id=\"themify_builder_content-6457\" data-postid=\"6457\" class=\"themify_builder_content themify_builder_content-6457 themify_builder tf_clear\">\n    <\/div>\n<!--\/themify_builder_content-->\n\n\n<p>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 <em>two<\/em> cans of Smirnoff Ice Smash as he bicycled through a parking lot on a kid&#8217;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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The fissures are getting deeper. The heat and pressure escape. It&#8217;s not a relief.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>225k dead. The football stadiums are filling up with maskless fans. It&#8217;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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Will it all be over soon? Are we going to have an attempted coup? The first one in our history?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>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&#8217;t a good idea since no one at the rally would be wearing masks. I didn&#8217;t say anything.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>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&#8217;s a riff from the story:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><em>About the only good thing going for Santa was the raging pandemic. No toy run this year. He&#8217;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.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><em>Santa didn&#8217;t respond to the firestorm of criticism, but he was secretly relieved he didn&#8217;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&#8217;s first national park system, implemented the Marshall Plan, and rescued the bald eagle from extinction by banning DDT. They couldn&#8217;t do anything worthwhile anymore. They could fix nothing with themselves or their diseased body politic. Why? Why? Why? Santa didn&#8217;t know and he didn&#8217;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.<\/em><\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>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&#8217;s bike with chopper handles; a large man carrying a huge driftlog to his [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":6458,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1090,5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6457","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-corona-virus-thoughts","category-meditations","has-post-title","has-post-date","has-post-category","has-post-tag","has-post-comment","has-post-author",""],"builder_content":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nestuccaspitpress.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6457","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nestuccaspitpress.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nestuccaspitpress.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nestuccaspitpress.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nestuccaspitpress.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6457"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.nestuccaspitpress.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6457\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6459,"href":"https:\/\/www.nestuccaspitpress.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6457\/revisions\/6459"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nestuccaspitpress.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/6458"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nestuccaspitpress.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6457"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nestuccaspitpress.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6457"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nestuccaspitpress.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6457"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}