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The Duration: Things of Which I Am Mightily Tired
Snippy self-satisfied pundits who tweet out news stories with prissy little swipes referencing something said three weeks ago by someone they hold in superior contempt. Just post the gad-dang story without preening your feathers.
Masks.
People who don’t wear masks.
People who wear masks walking the dog, making you feel stupid for not wearing a mask, but c’mon, man
People who were tweeting three weeks ago about how this was basically Ebola-TB-HIV-Norovirus that would turn every hospital into a stinking morgue because we had six, maybe seven ventilators in the country, and are still striking the same apocalyptic tone on a day when this happens:
The inexplicable disappearance of my favorite TP brand. It just ceased to exist. Same with Purell. Did they reset the Matrix and someone forgot to load certain brands?
Plastic shields at store checkouts. We all wonder if those are up for keeps now.
Busybody news stories about the things we shouldn’t be doing, as if we should all be riding stationary bikes for an hour every day while watching self-improvement documentaries about “self-care strategies.”
Morose news stories about how we shouldn’t feel positive, because everything sucks, which would be more compelling if the author hadn’t been preaching the gospel of Miserabilism before this struck.
Broad assertion of powers over everyday life in the name of Science, because we all know Isaac Newton was one of the authors of the Constitution and slipped the “Trust the Models” clause in somewhere in invisible ink, and it has absolute authority.
Anything having to do with Joe Biden, which seems like a review of a play that has been running on the East End since 1967.
TV shows full of people living ordinary lives as we knew them, because they seem like documentaries of Jazz-Age Flappers doing the Charleston a week before the crash of ’29.
And so forth. In short:
(In my best Marv Albert voice):
Yyyessss!
(happens to be my worst Marv Albert voice as well)
Endless references to “these trying times”, “these difficult times”, and worst of all, “our new normal”.
“Flu Bros”
If I hear “our new normal” once more…..I didn’t like it when Obama used it. I really don’t like it now.
Yard signs printed by one of the regional health system conglomerates congratulating the “health care heros,” when almost every one of said health system’s facilities is a ghost town and patients in need of non-covid treatments are told to go pound sand.
Personally I wish we could stop referring to it as the ‘novel’ coronovirus now. The novelty has long since worn off…
Ooooh I am looking for ward to hearing the voice of this Lileks on the Podcast,
As one of those healthcare workers that is being sent somewhere else to work just so I’m doing something, I’d rather see those signs later when we really are overwhelmed trying to catch-up from all the postponed things.
Masks. Masks for you. The people.
This. And paper towels. If we could just get the good TP and good paper towels, we’d be doing all right in our house. I know how the supply chains got messed up at first with the changes in demand and initial stockpiling, but I expected them to get it figured out faster than this.
Yeah. They say the average American city is three days away from running out of food. Apparently, we’re twelve hours away from running out of toilet paper.
This can’t be said enough. Today I read how part of the delay is being caused by “repurposing” large restaurant-sized rolls for consumer consumption. This, of course, overlooks the fact that nobody in their right mind would use flimsy restaurant TP unless they had to in a restaurant. Give us the good stuff!
I’m so glad I quit watching the news on T.V. a few years ago! But, I am really, really tired of all of this stupidness.
I’m about to cut up the last of my t-shirts.
So if you have a week’s worth of stash, 90% of your competition, aka neighbors, will be too week to compete with you for scarce resources.
Sorry, but I don’t think I can make tomorrow’s poker game.
Aren’t you glad you bought 100% cotton?
Anything said by Dr. Fauci about what we should or shouldn’t be doing or how life is gonna be like. Getting to hate that guy!
I am tired of hearing the phrase “grim milestone” every time the cumulative case count passes some arbitrary numeric threshold.
I live in a place they call MedCity and have neighbors who are nurses and doctors. Our city greatly depends on these medical-related jobs and the service industries they support. They say the hospitals are pretty much empty. Where’s the crush? I’m also worried that we’ll raise a generation or two of tissue-box-wearing germophobes.
On the brighter side, we are fortunate to live in a time in history where our advances in communications (the Internet) has allowed more people to work remotely than would have been possible even 10 years ago. And telemedicine, even in it’s infancy, is possible.
Are we really doing this?
I guess we’re really doing this. Let me grab my mask before taking one of my pet peeves for a walk….
Until a few weeks ago, there were two literary tropes that I thought should never be employed, because they were simply mined out and exhausted. One was to begin a piece of writing with any play on the A Tale of Two Cities opening, “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times….” The other was to begin a piece of writing with any play on the famous Twain quip, “The reports of my death are greatly exaggerated.”
Since about three days into the current apocalypse, and after I had already done it twice, I decided that titling any post with a variation of the Gabriel García Márquez novel title Love in the Time of Cholera should be banned.
And, as I understand law in the time of coronavirus, every governor has the authority to do pretty much anything right now, so this shouldn’t be a heavy lift. Shoot, I’ll bet it’s already illegal to riff on a Columbian author in the state of Michigan. They’re way ahead of the curve there.
And, as someone who got into the business just as PC-DOS became a thing, I really enjoyed having having a few years where little Billy “Doctor Evil” Gates was not not trying to cram something shoddy onto me, I am just thrilled every time I hear that he wants to be the face of whatever vaccine ends up being used. Just turn on autoplay and all your base are belong to us.
This was posted over at Instapundit this morning — at the very least, if people in the L.A. area are still social distancing, they’re tired of being confined to their homes and and have decided just going out and driving around is something to do that won’t impact anyone in terms of spreading COVID-19. Odds that some California pols see this photo and demand a crackdown on unnecessary driving, at least 3-1 in favor….
I’m now reconsidering my post starting “It was a bright, cold day in April, and nobody was winding the clocks.”
So, to sum up: “People.”
Or “Gregor Samsa awoke from a night of troubled sleep….”
I’m still partial to “A Saturday afternoon in November was approaching the time of twilight, and the vast tract of unenclosed wild known as Egdon Heath embrowned itself moment by moment,” which I can still type (and hopefully get right) from memory thanks to a Monty Python skit I memorized when I was 17.
Very tired of companies I’ve had almost no or very tangential contact with sharing their Covid -19 policies with me. I rented a car couple months ago for work and was so relieved they had a policy! (sarcasm).
It started in the 90’s when these businesses had started with ‘Rain Forest and Environmental Policies’ – I just want a hamburger, a cup of coffee or a car rental.
I’m on board for that. There should be severe punishments.
It was a dark and stormy night.
Suddenly a shot rang out!
Hey, “repurpose” away, just get the stuff out into the supply chain. Right now it doesn’t exist anywhere, these days the stores are a lot like Moscow under Brezhnev.