by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner
I feel I’m about two weeks ahead of everyone else psychologically when it comes to this pandemic. As such, I’m feeling rather calm. I’ve reached acceptance.
The key thing is I accept that absolutely no one is going to give me any credit for, in a sense, calling some major elements of this crisis. I’m just a no body. I am an aspiring novelist and the I’m very pleased with what I’ve managed to develop so far. I am rather worried that its context will be dramatically different, however. Though given how overtly political and anti-MAGA it is (in a very diffused, non-preachy manner), I guess if we manage to make it through alive, there might be an audience for a rumination on the Trump Era hiding under the guise of a thriller.
I’m going to assume that’s the case gong forward, anyway.
We do have some significant milestones ahead of us. Trump hasn’t gone bonkers yet. We haven’t had The Event that will “re-calibrate” our perception of the world for years, maybe decades, to come. That Event will either be the first conspicuous culling of the elderly associated with The Gray Plague and / or recorded instance of the WuFlop somewhere in the United States. Given how fucking racist MAGA is, I probably need to stop calling it “the Wuflop.” It has an actual scientific term, but I don’t know how to spell it — yet.
Anyway. The issue at this point is how bad, exactly, is it all going to get? I could get a lot worst than we imagine right now given the cold hard fact that there are about 15,000 rest homes in the United States with a total of 1.4 million residents. Each one of those rest homes not only could potentially be felled by COVID19, but also serve as something of a “signal amplification” site for the virus because it’s not like prison where not that many people go in and out. People go in and out of rest homes all the time — often from outside the community — and, as such, well, yikes!
It may get very dark within the next two weeks until our minds acclimate to what’s going on around us. We haven’t even gotten to the part where global bad actors decide to strike while the going’s good.
And still Trump won’t be held politically accountable.
