Rare Air
Part Two
Masks in public places, keeping your distance, closing all the stadiums and movie theaters. Scarcity of everyday goods followed by rationing. Politicians whining about expenses and debts while good people die unnecessarily. Crazy assholes throwing tantrums about their rights like two-year old’s, as if a sickness can be yelled at or bargained with.
Sound familiar?
We all thought the same thing. Everyone I knew from work, my roommates, their friends, annoying oldies who wanted to chat it up in the block long lines at the drug store or the super market. “Oh, here we go again!” They said it might come back, they said to watch for it the next year, and again the year after that. There is always a they and they are usually right.
Only the new asshole in Washington D.C. was supposed to be better. A new task force was assembled. Laws were getting passed, safeguards were being put in place. Critically underfunded parts of the usual apparatus were getting flush with green and we were going to be ready for the son of a bitch when it came back again. How easy it was to forget and put faith in people and institutions that had failed us and fucked up before, time and time and time again.
The death tole was higher, earlier, the first accounts were terrifying but we heard it all before. Didn’t it start with bats last time, so this time it was _____ or was it ______. This time it kills the kids first, fuck school, cancel those snot-soaked birthday shindigs. No more play dates. No, that’s just what you heard, your kids are fine, it’s killing the oldies just like before. No, it targets women now. Fuck that, minorities are the ones at risk.
This time it makes you crazy, no it just makes you lazy. This one is a whole different monster and masks won’t do a damn thing. This time its in the water and all the social distancing in the world won’t help you. No, its in the air because of chem trails and the ever-loving weather control devices.
It killed us, maybe all of us now, I’ll never know but if there is anyone else left, huddled on some mountain top in Colorado, or Switzerland, or China I can assume with a fair degree of accuracy that they have realized, just as I have, that social media was its accomplice the whole time.
We killed each other, we killed ourselves with the free exchange of misinformation, trying to turn our boring and dreary lives into something interesting and worth talking about. Stick a blow dryer up your nose turned into give them a good shake. Social distancing turned into making sure we put depressed people on meds so they didn’t suddenly wake up with a burning need to soak themselves and their loved ones in gasoline and light a match.
As it turns out, duh, most all of that second hand news was bullshit, the thing moved so fast though. Yet, well, back to people being hardy and willing to ignore just about anything they can’t immediately solve.
My everyman moment finally came when the cupboards ran completely empty. Two weeks and three trips waiting in line only to be turned away because there was nothing left to buy.
Nothing left to buy. Warehouse sized grocery stores were setting up three tables at the beginning of the morning. That wasn’t the fucking wakeup call?
Nope, not for me, because the power was still on, ramen at the ready and all the time in the world to catch up on television shows and video games.
The last time I went for a walk someone just sat down in the middle of a trail and even after everything I had heard I didn’t get it. I still didn’t get it. I was a solid week into eating ramen and drinking tap water and I watched someone just sit down and die on a trail and I still didn’t get it. I wasn’t in a panic; I wasn’t considering where to run to or who I might have to steal from or kill to survive. I stood there, several feet away, calling first responders just like the other two joggers who noticed him. All of us just stood there until our calls were completed and yes, we all walked away from him.
Watching a man just…give up and lay down, watching him and making a call and walking away from the scene was only the first of my many sins.