Celebrating A Year In Lockdown

 I think the first Covid shutdown in Michigan started the 23rd of March last year.  Or maybe that was when it was announced and it started the 24th?  Whatever.  The point being it's been a year since we first locked down for Covid.

And thanks to all the idiots who continually violated lockdown rules, many of us are still locking it down a year later.  If all those Trump-loving jerk-offs had masked and social distanced from the beginning we might have had far fewer people hospitalized or dead and maybe we could have opened things up responsibly.  

Anyway, it's only been 11 months from when I'm writing this but so often it still seems like yesterday.  I mean sometimes I remember that the last time I went to a buffet place or an Ollie's was back in February 2020.  Or that the last time I went to a movie theater was for Rise of Skywalker on Christmas Eve in 2019!  Or that I haven't set foot in a coffee place to write anything since the first week of March in 2020.  It was about a year ago and yet it seems like just yesterday.

The question I ask myself then is:  how much do you miss it?  And the answer is:  not a lot.  I mean looking for bargains at Ollie's or eating crab cheese sushi at a buffet place was nice, but it wasn't a big part of my identity or anything.  Even going to coffee places to write was not a big part of my identity.  All apologies to comedy writers, but I never went there so other people could see me write; it was mostly to get away from the TV and other distractions at home.

Really a lot of the things people complained about the most were things I didn't care about much. 

• I shave my head so I don't need to go to a barber
• I don't have in-person friends so I didn't need to go see them
• I didn't eat in restaurants a lot
• I'm not religious so I don't go to church
• I obviously didn't need to get my nails done and I couldn't care less about getting a tan
• I don't drink often and when I did I did it at home
• I don't play golf or team sports
• I really don't like hunting, fishing, or camping
• I wrote a whole blog entry about how I don't really like movie theaters anymore
• I don't really like crowded places like sporting events, concerts, or amusement parks

In other words, all the crap people whined that they "needed" to feel normal was not really anything I needed to feel normal.  The things I needed I could still do:

• I could talk to my family online or on the phone
• I could write at home or in my car as I wrote about almost a month ago
• I could keep up with my games on my phone pretty much anywhere
• I could go out for a drive and get food from the drive-thru or curbside
• I could watch movies on streaming at home

It actually disappointed me how so many people seemed so unwilling or unable to adapt to Covid.  I mean all these people who "need" to go to church.  And every holiday from Easter 2020 to Easter 2021 where people "need" to get together.  Or of course how we "need" sports.  And so on.  As a country instead of like acting like the responsible leader of the free world, we acted like a bunch of spoiled, entitled brats screaming and crying because they couldn't get the toy they want.  I wanna go golfing!  I wanna go fishing!  I wanna watch football!  I wanna go to church!  Waaaah waaaah waaaah!  And so we have over half a million people dead and many more than that who may suffer debilitating side effects for perhaps years to come.  All because people were too dumb and selfish to alter their lifestyles in the slightest.

One of the really annoying things to me was people like me were literally being paid more to stay home and not work than to go to work at a crummy job.  People were being paid to stay home and watch TV and all they did was complain!  When people had to go to work, all they did was complain about that, but when given the chance to sit around home and watch TV--and be paid for it--they complained about that.  Other than the constant threat of death, most days it was pretty awesome to be able to sleep in, not deal with obnoxious people, watch TV, and write stories--and get paid almost twice what I was making at work!  If we could have kept that going the whole year I would have been all in favor of it.  But nooooo, these whiny assholes bitching and complaining like a bunch of little kids ruined it for all of us.  I just loooooved getting up early, going back to work, and risking death so I could make less money.  Idiots.  So many of these morons were probably like me, getting more money than working their crummy regular jobs, but they were too brainwashed by Fox "News" and the like to realize how great socialism could be.

The "Greatest Generation" in World War II gave up so much to fight the Nazis and Japanese Empire from sugar and metal to their lives.  But when it came our turn to sacrifice, we threw tantrums like little children.  The worst part is that so many of those tantrums came from the White House, Capitol, and state capitals.  Instead of leadership we got whining and conspiracy theories spouting nonsense "cures" and bullshit like "herd immunity" and bogus promises that it would go away like magic.  Which it never did.  If cases are still going down it's because of vaccinations.  It's because of science and medicine, not magic--and sure as hell not "herd immunity."

One of the few positives is I don't think without something like Covid an old stiff like Joe Biden could have hoped to beat Trump.  Without Covid raging, killing hundreds of thousands and--probably worse to our materialistic society--ruining the economy, the racist demagogue would probably have cruised to an easy win because so many people wouldn't have cared--like in 2016.  Like in Our Brand is Crisis, you need a crisis to get people off their asses to vote.  Sometimes--like 2016--the crises are invented but this time it was very, very real.

And now we have more and more people getting vaccinated, so that maybe someday we could get back to "normal," whatever that means anymore.  Of course the Tony Laplumes of the world would try to give Trump full or partial credit for that when really we would be so much farther ahead on this if that fucking dipshit had ordered more doses and actually had a plan for a national rollout instead of the lazy fuck just letting states do whatever they want because he was too busy whining and spreading conspiracy theories and trying to overthrow the government he wasn't running anyway.

Anyway, if I sound like it's over, of course it's not.  Maybe the worst is over, or maybe it's just that Round 1 is over and there's still another round to go with all the variants of Covid.  Who can really say?

If everything went back to "normal" would I go back to my old patterns?  Maybe, in time.  It would be nice to see the family in-person again.  Or to eat out.  Or watch a movie.  In the meantime I'm still doing the best I can and as the alcoholics say, "take it one day at a time."

Here's hoping Year 2 doesn't have to actually be a whole year.