Four nights ago I was seated at the bar, surrounded by the usual gang of idiots as Mad Magazine still likes to call them. There was the usual merriment that hits around eight o'clock. Everybody is witty and the laughs just keep on coming, and gemutlichkeit is so thick that you could cut it with a knife. A bester bunch of buds, a sweller bunch of swells would be hard to imagine. But it passed through my mind just briefly, just an echo of what I had heard earlier in the day, Ohio, I think it was Ohio that was closing all its restaurants and bars, crazy idea, but could it happen here?
But I was well into my fifth beer, just at the point where the trip home would be a bit of an adventure, but not dangerous in any way, and it slipped through my mind, as I finished that fifth beer and sloppily said good bye to all my wonderful pals, and I slipped off into the night. Never to return again until who knows when.
I think it was the very next day that all the bars and restaurants were closed down for two weeks. Well at the end of two weeks it will be reevaluated and everything I hear indicates they will continue to be closed down for oh, eight weeks. But they weren't to be closed until after Monday, and I got to thinking that I would like to have one little last hurrah, just a couple, maybe three brewskis in a bar, just to hold me over for those long eight weeks and maybe more. I texted a Ten Cat buddy, and I was to meet him at 5:30 at the Old Town Ale house.
But in the morning I had a doctor's appointment. Just a routine checkup that I had scheduled two or three weeks earlier when we were still making jokes about Corona beer. At the beginning I told her let's do the usual stuff and then let's do the corona stuff. The usual stuff went fine, except for the smoking and the drinking. The smoking isn't that bad because it's only a pack every other week, but those six beers on Fridays and Saturdays, she really doesn't like that, just because I am old.
The corona stuff. The really bad part about it is that we don't know how bad it is. Trump got rid of a program that would have jump started action on the case six weeks ago, and then he dragged his feet on manufacturing tests so that we still don't have enough, and we are fast past the point where we could have nipped it in the bud and now it is shot through the populace, clean through.
A lot of people are going to come down with corona (COVID 19), maybe 80% will suffer through it, but the other 20% will need to be hospitalized, and there is not room enough in the hospitals and the ones that don't get in (and some that do). will die. But how about me, healthy-eating, exercising, longevity-in-my-family me? How would I stand up to the corona? Not very well she thought, Well I don't know. I feel fit as a fiddle, and docs, you know, they are always pessimistic, they like to scare you just for your own good.
I went to the Whole Foods afterwards to get that yogurt that my cat Buddy likes but they were all out of it. I stopped by the Jewel and it was packed and some shelves were empty, The people were not panicked but they were all moving fast, I stopped in at a bar near my house to have a last Italian beef until god knows when, thought I might wash it down with a brewski, but then I ended up getting it to go. When I got home I texted my Ten Cat buddy, I wouldn't be making it to the ale house, the doctor had scared me fucking straight.
Kennedy being shot didn't mean all that much to me at the time. You could make a case that it put LBJ into office and his escalation of the war in Vietnam certainly effected my life, but who knows what Kennedy would have done that was different. 911 cut short a temp job I had. And then it led the way to the crazy Iraq war which doubtless led to everything being worse than it would have been without it, but I can't say it effected my life all that much. This house arrest thing, it's driving me crazy.
There is science to what is going on, it will certainly cause us fewer fatalities than if we did nothing, but at this point we can's say how many fewer. I am surprised how meekly everybody is going along with this Pleasantly I guess because I think it is the right thing to do, but I wonder how long it will last. It's not surprising that the people of kumbaya are almost all for it, but the people of soreheadedness is only like fifty percent on board. Could be trouble down the road.
We are now six hours into the first two weeks that the bars have been closed, one fifty-sixth of the way through. So far so good.
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