In any case, more alarming statistics and other such reports are not going to do me any good. I’ve put myself on a media blackout for the time being. I trust that the information I actually need will find its way to me. It always has before.
Contrary to the scurrilous rumors being spread by my enemies, I did not wish upon a monkey’s paw for more time to spend reading and writing. Nevertheless, supply chain disruptions have led to my workload being temporarily lightened by about fifty percent. Unfortunately, that’s the fifty percent that we actually get paid for. Three weeks without income is something of a bracing jolt for a small business, but whuddayagunnado? Things will work out, unless they won’t. That’s how it’s always been before. All we can do is stick to the common-sense routines: drink a bottle of Purell every day, make sure the moat is fortified with alligators, and keep the cauldrons atop the walls filled with boiling oil.
Glancing around the web, I see that most people have united around the one thing we all hold in common, namely, the conviction that this pandemic proves, beyond any doubt, every political dogma I’ve been banging on about for the last three decades. I’m no different, of course. This pandemic proves, beyond any doubt, that most media, social and otherwise, is worse than useless, that most people have very little of interest to say but prefer chattering to silent reflection, and that it would be better to sit down with a book than add my own voice to the incessant, frenzied din. My greatest fear is that, once things get more-or-less back to normal, the only shared frame of reference our juvenile culture will have is Marvel movies, and thus we’ll see countless comparisons of that time we couldn’t leave the house to search for nonexistent toilet paper to that time Thanos “snapped” half of the universe into oblivion. There are some things worse than death.