masks and skins

The reason they want you to wear a mask is not to protect yourself.  The N-95 is the only mask that will do that and they don't want you to have one because they are scarce and all of them should be owned by medical people who really need them.  The reason that they want you to wear a cloth mask, especially going into stores is to protect your friends and neighbors from you, who may be packing the virus even if you feel perfectly fine.  Those shopkeepers have to face a lot of customers every day and every unmasked face increases the probability that they might get the virus and carry it back to their families.  When you walk into that store without a mask you are telling the clerk across the counter that you could wear a mask and help them feel safe but you don't want to bother because it is uncomfortable or you don't think it is fashionable.  Of course you lead a very isolated and pretty safe lifestyle but the clerk doesn't know that.  For all they know you are some guy who hangs out with his beer drinking buddies every night and are likely breathing your virus right at them as they hand you your change.

That's the thing about those maskless characters, they are not boldly accepting the risk, they are recklessly putting the risk on innocent bystanders.

I wore the bandana  before my sister sent me some masks that she made.  When you wear the mask you are supposed to wash it everytime you come in from the outdoors while you are washing your hands.  This means that sometimes my mask is wet and then I don the bandana, I think it looks pretty cool, 

I guess I misbehaved yesterday afternoon.  Last week some of my neighbors got together on the bench by the tower that faces the river.  We were masked and we were six feet apart and there were fewer than six of us.  We had so much fun we decided to do it again this week.  But this time somebody brought along a six pack of beer.  You can't do the bop in a sack (the very first 45 record I bought in 1959 when my adolescence was just coming to bloom and the terrible latest fashion was something called the sack dress) and you can't drink a beer in a mask,  So I pulled it down, took a swig and pulled it back up,  We were well apart and it was a very windy day, and the latest data is that outdoors in windy weather is lots safer than indoors in still air, so I guess we were okay.

I was just listening to a guy on NPR talk about masks and of course things are not so clearly defined as masks good, no masks bad.  It kind of depends on how well you wear the mask and whether you touch your face, and whether you wash it after every outing.  And if you are feeling a little tetchy it's not a good idea to put on a mask and think everything is fine because some of it can spread beyond the mask.

And maybe it's a good thing to wear the mask because it's kind of a solidarity thing, it shows that you are aware of what is going on and are putting your shoulder to the wheel of getting past this thing, and it encourages others to do likewise.  But I don't know that plays into the hands of the two tribe thing,

There is a case to be made for opening up again.  Not all people who think that are gun toting neo nazis.  I am trying not to get into this knee-jerk tribe thing (masks and no masks, maybe we should call it masks and skins like on the basketball court, but it is hard,