Covid Blues, or life in our modern age

 

So, here’s the thing: I spent the last month or so dealing with the pestilence of our time, the Wuhan wet-market wonder virus, and so I have little or no time to write anything, even though the faux election of this nation’s first walking dead president provides, and will provide, I think, a never-ending supply of anecdotes to comment on over the next four years.  As to the virus, I am well now, or so the local board of health says so, but my doctor is not sure he agrees with them. Therefore, in an effort to ease his distrust of the board of health, I went to another doctor's office and have a nice Jamaican lady shove a cotton swab up both my nostrils.  I trust that the results will be negative, if for no other reason that I intensely dislike the sensation of having things shoved up my nostrils.  It is most disagreeable, as I am sure you will agree when this happens to you.  And it will.

As to the disease itself, for me it was little worse than a not too bad head cold or maybe a very weak flu.  Temperatures went from normal to weak fever to normal again within the span of a few hours, as did my desire to do hurtful things to Chinese people for unleashing this plague upon us, although calling it a plague do little else except give the virus a swelled head and make it feel much more important than it really is, in much the same way as a D-list television actor might feel if he / she / it /they / xhe / whatever landed a big role in a major feature film. Whatever the Wuhan flu is, it is not septicemic plague or the Ebola virus.  Here in this our Great Republic, we have shut down the most powerful economic engine in the world over a disease with a 99.98% survival rate.  I know that different people react to the disease in diverse ways, but I would think that protecting the most vulnerable populations, i.e., the ill and the elderly, first would be a promising idea, and then just let everyone else get on with their lives.  This makes sense to me, but I live in the Vampire State, where the reigning blue monarch will brook no dissent from his decrees about what it is good for the peasantry and will not tolerate sense if said sense does not conform with his whims. So, such is life.

I should also point out that my 91-year-old mother has the virus, and yes, she blames me for her having it, thank you very much for asking, as does my brother, whom she infected when he brought her into the doctor’s office for the test, and I must say that the decibel level denouncing the former is much higher than the decibel level denouncing the latter, mostly because that is apparently my fault as well.  My mother is doing quite well; she is not happy with not being able to do yard work, but we must all make sacrifices at this unhappy time in our country’s history; and I expect that her next test will be negative, given that her oxygen levels are in the high nineties and her appetite is slowly returning.  My brother is also doing well.  He hunkered down in his house with a year’s supply of Doritos and enough Bud Lite to float a team of Clydesdales on and watched football for the whole of his quarantine.  I suspect that his viruses were probably the happiest viruses in the state, and that his bloodstream these past few weeks was a veritable Mardi Gras of drunken viruses traveling from one of his ends to the other while wearing Saints gear and screaming hoo dat at the passersby .  After shocking the locals with their behavior—I am not sure how that is possible either in my brother's bloodstream or in New Orleans, but I suppose that there is a first time for everything—our celebrants then started puking in the street and on themselves, before sidling up to a cute T-cell in a black leather bikini and pumps on my brother's equivalent of Bourbon Street and saying, hey baby, wanna replicate?  In any case, my brother tested negative a few days ago and is already back to work.  I’m not sure how things worked out with the T-cell.