How can this be real? I am on FB and I still am fighting with naysayers.
Within an hour we will pass Italy for number of reported cases. They have been one of the most dramatically effected countries on the planet, but they will be behind us. There are human beings you walk past every day on the street that think this is a hoax.
The President is suing a PAC for running an ad that is nothing but his words, his voice, as a voiceover that is time coordinated with a graph of the increase of the virus on our shores. He is suing them for running his words, uncut, verbatim.
There are millions of your fellow citizens that think Trump is right to sue. They think running his uncut words is an attack on him, an assault. They are still out there, ignoring the data, ignoring the failures that have been thoroughly documented. They think your concern and mine are overwrought, crazy. The guy I was talking to today said “We aren’t Italy, nor Spain nor China”.
I guess American Exceptionalism is the kryptonite. There is something unique, special about the country that will insulate it from any serious implications of the greatest pandemic in 100 years.
Phew! Good to know. A meaningless pablum previously used to make a powerless population feel empowered and just plain better than “them” (it applies to all “thems”) will actually protect people from illness and death! Now that’s pretty gosh darn exceptional!
Maybe I’ve just been holed up alone too long. Maybe I’m just scared and pissed that son of a bitch might kill me. We need a sober, serious leader and … that’s a shame. We don’t have that.
Wouldn’t it be a hoot if we elected a reality TV star as President?
No.
Can I confess to you? The reader. Yeah, you. This is really hard. I’m so angry, and so sad. I’m stunned. This is a surreal situation, a Hollywood blockbuster. We’ve seen it a hundred times. It starred Dennis Quaid, or Tom Cruise, or Brad Pitt for the very recent ones, keep it relevant for the younger readers. But it’s a global disaster movie, and it stars …. us. A billion different stories all aroud a common theme, all playing out together in real time. So this is cataclysmic to me, because I’m alone in my little condo, typing away, trying to connect, but my story just doesn’t rise above the others. It’s shared, and we love to see it as a “One-ing”, a universal theme that binds all people. But it also isolates us, as there is no parent, no one in control, no one that has the answers, no one to fix it.
This is a confession, a little peak behind the curtain, because this post started out as something else entirely, as you can readily see. But I just couldn’t keep going, because today it was just personal. I’m pretty well informed right now, I’m as up to date with the data as a civilian can be, not reporting from the inside. I think it is fairly easy to read between the lines when the actual experts are giving their assesments. It is more dire than is being reported directly. The information is there, on occaision blatantly, but more frequently as an undertone. Some things are best left unsaid.
The rosiest spin I can put on the future is … unknown. This is like a first leap out of plane for a freefall. I have no idea what’s coming. I don’t know what my golden years are going to look like. They were shakey at best before, but now?
Stay with me. I’m trying to type it out. How are you doing this stuff? How are you wrestling with the unknown, the never imagined? Not professionally. They had imagined it. That’s what pisses you off so badly. They were screaming about this stuff, and he did nothing. He wet his pants and hid from it.
He coulda been somebody. He coulda been a contender, instead of a bum, which is what he is.
Any diversion. My friend called me yesterday. He said “Go look outside your door”. I did as directed, and outside was a soccer ball that he had written “Wilson” across, a nod to the movie “Castaway”. It was wonderful, an amazing setup for a very sweet gag. It meant a lot to me. The laughs were welcome, but being thought of was kind of amazing. He’s a work buddy who is continuing to work while I set out at home, and those choices do pretty well indicate the divide in ideology between us, but he has always been thus toward me for no explicable reason, and yesterday he hit it out of the park.
Later, I looked at Wilson a slightly different way. I saw a peak through the window of the Tom Hanks movie. This solitary world I inhabit right now. My little island, smaller than his but with many, many more distractions, none of which seem to have the power to distract me at all.
So this was a departure. Let me know if for good or ill. I know I missed this whole day. This veered off into more personal territory, for good or ill.
For the few twisted sisters out there reading my slop, I appreciate it. It is a purpose, if an impossibly humble one.