New Challenges For Travelers

There is a remote chance that I will return this year for a visit to the country of my birth. That would be America, specifically California. Six years have passed since my last visit, and it appears to me that the situation on the ground has changed dramatically. The changes have not run in favor of an easy and comfortable trip.

The new COVID variant, Omicron, is statistically significant and obviously dangerous. Every day, people are contracting the disease. People are being admitted into the hospital. Most impressively, people are dying. In spite of that obvious threat level, I don’t see a lot of masking going on. Instead, I hear a lot of yelling about not wanting to wear masks, and freedom, and you can’t tell me what to do, and take off that mask you fucking commie. Has any work been done about the possibility that COVID has a potential psychological impact? Subtle, perhaps, but acting to make sufferers irritable and unreasonable?

If, indeed, I do travel to the indispensable country this year, I will be masking. Probably double masking. I have seen examples of masked people being accosted in retail establishments or travel situations for having the freedom-hating temerity to wear a mask. As though, perhaps, the only possible explanation could be that the masked individual was a libtard, or under the spell of ex-President Obama and his puppet, Joe Biden. I have formulated a strategy to use if I am faced with this behavior in a convenience store or something.

My play will be to feign weakness, cough into the mask, and say in an unsteady tone, “I’m sorry. I was in Africa for six months (cough) and my doctor thinks that I was exposed to Ebola. He says I must wear (long, wet, wheezing cough) this mask to protect (cough) other people.” (Reaches out to lean on something, holding chest and coughing.) “Oh, shit! I forgot my rubber gloves!”

It was a lot of fun to run this strategy past a couple of friends of mine, but I know that in reality it would only make someone want to shoot me. A lot of the unreasonable Americans are now strapped.

Proof Of Life

 

Alive, although that condition is subject to change. I am typing on a new laptop, using a version of Word called, “Home and Student.” I am finding it very peculiar in many ways. Things tend to disappear. I am finding that as time marches on, computers in general become more difficult to use, less functional, and less intuitive. It’s annoying. Or perhaps it’s just that life is passing me by, which is true one way or the other.

Blogspot is full of moribund blogs. The reasons are many, and the phenomenon is interesting. Many people set up a cute blog and post two or three times about the wonders of cats. And that’s it, the blog idea expends itself. Perhaps they were killed by their cats. Many people, like Doghouse Reilly, set up a blog and write fantastic posts for years about mostly politics, with some culture and a little sports thrown in for variety. His blog disappeared. He was ended not by cats, but by the human condition, which stalks us all. I still draw breath, but I have reached the age where the entire horizon is sufficient only for a vague terror of waiting for the other shoe to drop. The nearness of death inspires some people. Others, like me, are merely paralyzed by dread.

Best wishes to all. I should be writing more soon.