[Editor’s note: It feels wrong to some how come up with stinkpieces about whatever pop culture I want to rant about. Plus, I wont have time to devote to it. So, pretty much till the crisis is over, I’m going to do this. Freestyle, freeform, gonzo, insert your chosen adjective here. Random thoughts. What is going on. Whatever I experience. And probably multiple times a week. We are in The! New! Plague! And here we are]
This is a joke. I feel like I need to say this. Go ahead and laugh. We all need it.
Last week, my son got strep throat. Two days ago my wife got it. My son is fine now, and my wife is recovering. But man, it makes shit awkward.
Cut to this morning.
I’m buying for my parents-in-law. I did my buying yesterday (fuckin a), and they are both late 70s/early 80s. My father in law just had colon cancer surgery (mass was benign).
Anyway, 7am. On the phone with mother in law. Can’t find some shit. Stores been ransacked. And no, not toilet paper, we both got ahead of that game.
She asks me how my wife is doing. I go “oh, her fever broke last night”
5 people in the checkout line turn to look at me.
I look at them dead in the eye “STREP! SHE HAS STREP THROAT FROM MY SON! SHE IS ON ANTIBIOTICS! ITS NOT COVID! YALL CALM DOWN!”
And that actually relaxed people. Got laughs. Had some camaraderie in the checkout line.
I write a ton of doom and gloom. But, I don’t think I am freaking out here. In a way, I think this was inevitable.
This history of the human race is one of plague and war. We just some how keep rolling D&D 20s to where we haven’t had a world-wide conflict or disease for almost 100 years.
I saw a reddit comment about a guy in the UK asking if his local pub owner was going to close. His response was “It didn’t close during the black death or spanish flu. We aren’t closing now.”
In a way its stupid, but in another way….its very human
Like everyone else in the country, my local schools are shutting down. My son’s pre-K will probably close. I am assuming we are going to be in these four walls for an unknown length of time.
I am impressed with how much he understands about this. He knows people are going to get sick, he knows COVID-19 and Coronavirus as terms, he knows old people are the worst off so he can’t see my parents-in-law for weeks.
I have enough food here for about a month at this point. Dunno if we will need all of it, but we are ready to hunker down.
I have been very anti-the social internet. And I still am. But, I am glad I have the platforms I like. Places like here. Feel like I need to get some of this shit out of my head.
Will Twitch really blow up here? Bunch of people home. Entertainment that can be done on lockdown. Feel like that may be the case.
What will a new normal look like here? I have no fucking idea. But this feels like its going to be a generational shift. Like 9/11 or Katrina (for me). This is a moment. Observe it. Take it an hour at a time. We will get through.