Curmudgeon and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day: Part 2

I’d been ill all week. Bad air hammered me until I felt dazed.

Restless, I inspected my “landscaping” from the day before. It could’ve been a notable accomplishment but I’d done it on autopilot. I’d been sloppy and haphazard. Not my best work.

I rubbed my throbbing hand. There’s something about freshly chopped thistles that’s more than the sum of the parts. Also, my hand was still tinted blue.

“Fuckin’ 2020.” I muttered.

It could have been worse. I was as prepared as anyone. I didn’t see it coming but I anticipated something. I’ve been scanning the horizon because I knew society had put itself on the knife edge.

What I mean by “knife edge” is that folks in 2020 were pre-primed to pull the plug. Shutting down not just America but the world formerly required planet-wide total warfare. Now we’re in shutdown over a contagion so weak people need laboratory tests to know they’ve been exposed to it.

I’ll admit, I didn’t anticipate the form of the destroyer. I’m furious it’s so… mundane. A world with intercontinental ballistic missiles, category 5 hurricanes, and Ebola folded over a hyped-up flu? Yes, it sucks but we’ve seen far worse. Black Plague killed half the population of Europe. Small Pox killed 90% of the New World. In 2020, on a planet nearing the 8 billion mark, COVID has taken less than a million souls. For this illness to crush our social order… we had to deliberately take a dive.

I’m fortunate compared to the average but still pained. A stubbed toe sucks even if your neighbor has leukemia.

Meanwhile, the air was bad. Nothing to be done but wait. I wait poorly.

I paced anxiously, noting all the things undone. Firewood supplies too low, pig fence sagging, chicken coop is a shamble, etc… I saw the pattern.

So many things have been put on the back burner. Little projects were deliberately delayed or outright ignored. I’m reluctant to spend money on big projects until I see the end of the current madness. Wisely or not, I postponed a fair number of things for when sanity is restored. Not a bad idea at first but the resolution hasn’t arrived. It’s week 24 of what once was called “flatten the curve”. By week 6 it was clear they weren’t stacking corpses in the streets and this thing would peak and then decline. Three months ago, was the time to celebrate dodging another bullet and get back to work.

Instead, the slog of manufactured anxiety hardened. Week after week of just plain waiting. When will society to come to its senses? It makes a man feel trapped. Do I really have to put up with mask Karens and riots for another two full months? I resent all that lost time. Summer is short, winter is long, and after a certain number of them we die. Wasting everyone’s time (including mine!) is draining our lives.

A foul mood indeed. Locked in cement, waiting, waiting, waiting…

Resignation is not my style. After half an hour’s moping, I was done. I grabbed a shovel. I picked a spot; not far from my big American flag, on a portion of the lawn that has a good view.

I began to dig.

I dug small but deep. The hard earth holding the sides straight. No loose sand here. I used a square shovel to straighten everything up. Then I dug deeper. I straightened the lines again. Lather, rinse, repeat.

I was going to postpone the rest. Handle it another day. But the clouds were growing. It would soon rain. I’d waited too long anyway.

I buried the ashes of my dog with reverence but minimal ceremony. I had much to say. I had no voice to say it. The dog knows anyway (or knew).

The ashes had been sitting in my workshop all this time. Carefully stored in a little wooden box. I didn’t want to face that task while my society was hiding behind masks and burning its own cities. But the time had come anyway.

After, there was no cathartic release. I still felt ill. The air was still bad. It was still 2020 and there are still forces tearing my society asunder. But I felt a little less unsettled. Sometimes you turn a bend in the road… gradually.

Waiting until things were “normal” might have been the right thing to do in March. In September, it’s a liability. Never make your move too soon, but don’t wait too long. The Black Plague never came. I don’t have to wait for everyone to accept the fact; it’s enough that I know.

I buried my dog’s ashes on September 11^th; a date that’s the JFK assassination of Generation X. Young adults, having no connection to a building felled before they were born, wonder what the fuss is about. Meanwhile, today’s children are living their very own disaster and we’re doing them a disservice. Theirs is not a remote threat. The madness of 2020 is forced into the very fabric of their lives.

I got a better deal than they’re getting. I was born to mutually assured destruction. Instant death from the sky! You know what I learned from that? I learned that instant fiery radioactive death of everyone and everything was imminent but that’s not a good enough reason to cancel chemistry class. Kids of 2020 are born into a Black Plague of the imagination and it’s a good reason to cancel everything. Society cancelled school, birthday parties, summer camp, Halloween, swimming at the pool… everything.

When something can’t go on forever; it won’t. Virtually everyone will slowly accept COVID wasn’t the Black Plague. November 3^rd will play an irrational role in that transition. To say it aloud sounds cynical; so we don’t say it aloud. But everyone knows it’s true.

A few will cling to their cult of misery. They’ll reject good news. You can see it happening. COVID weekly deaths are a quarter of the frightful peak and dropping. Instead of celebrating, they substituted “asymptomatic case” for “deader than a doornail”. Slick!

A different but related cult plays politics as bloodsport. They lay the groundwork for an auxiliary lawfare round of electioneering starting even before the actual vote itself. Cults love rehashing the same ground. When the “War to End All Wars” was over, they had a sequel and named it “World War 2”. Get the band back together and play another gig.

Others will fall back to golden oldies. Malthusian tripe resurfacing over and over again: if we’re not going to die of starvation then we’ll die from global warming. Or perhaps another pointless iteration of communist / socialist / progressive initiatives. Now that Venezuela is a complete disaster lets repackage everything as universal basic income and launch it in Sweden.

A few, the most tragic of all, never move on. It will be COVID = Black Plague forever to them. We’ve seen similar arrested development en masse. Witness the sad dying remains of folks who peaked in the summer of ’68. Most of that cohort has had careers, raised families, and lived among the living. A few didn’t. They watch a real estate developer from New Jersey and see not the man but themselves at nineteen. In their minds they personally slay Nixon every day. To them, Nixon/McGovern isn’t from 1972, it’s going to happen two months from now… in 2020. Just a month ago they convinced a major party convention to feature Steven Stills playing an old ditty from 1966. Half of a two-party system used steaming video on broadband internet to beam Buffalo Springfield from a time of black and white TV to the rest of us who just don’t care.

Personally, I had smaller concerns. I wanted to bury my dog in a time of relative stability. It became unattainable. I relented. I buried the ashes in a world where people wear masks like protective amulets and grocery stores use tape marks to show where to stand so the virus can’t see you. County fairs were cancelled, I can’t go fishing in Canada, and the news hasn’t told the truth in years.

It was a big step to accept that. That night, I took the next step.

Mrs. Curmudgeon is already there. She’s been waiting for me to catch up. She’d already made the arrangements and all I had to do was give the nod. Twelve hours after I buried ashes of the best dog I’ve ever had, we put down a deposit and joined a waiting list for a new puppy.