LXXXIII – Nothing To Sneeze About

Occasionally something comes along that starts out benign enough, but when it is seen/heard ad nauseum and winds up hitting close to home, it is enough to drive anyone bonkers. I’m sure you’ve heard about the Coronavirus. It’s in the news—literally everywhere, it’s all around the world. Apparently, it’s spreading like wildfire. Unfortunately, so is all the media hype about it.

The Coronavirus took off from some province in China, and has spread in one form or another to several countries, including the US. The (lame-)stream media wants everyone to think it’s going to explode and kill millions, as did pneumonia in the 1820s and the Plague in the 1920s. Because of the media-driven frenzy (and you know people take the major news outlets’ word as gospel), people are out there wringing their hands, running around like Chicken Little. Oh my god, the sky is falling!

First of all, the symptoms of Coronavirus are similar to the flu. After all, it’s a virus, as is the flu. Unless you actually come into contact with someone infected, your likelihood of catching this virus is practically nil. However, instead of thinking and acting rationally, people are out there acting like this is the fucking apocalypse, hoarding everything they can think of. This is one part that seriously pisses me off. You can’t go to the store without seeing a myriad of empty shelves. Where I live in southern Utah, there are three Walmarts within about 20 miles of each other, a Costco, four Walgreens and a Target. No Kmart, since it closed last year. But, at all these places, you cannot find several things. You can’t buy hand sanitizer. Nary a bottle is to be found. Rubbing alcohol is disappearing, since people are making their own sanitizer. Clorox and Lysol wipes are going. Hand soap is hard to come by. Canned soups and fruits are being hoarded, as are bottled water and toilet paper. I went to a Walmart last night and happened to find 11 six-roll packages of toilet paper. I bought all of them. Not because I’m scared of anything (quite the contrary), but I have a family of six and I don’t want to run out. That would be horrible, to need to take a shit, and there’s no paper to wipe with, and no prospect of finding any. I don’t know if you have, but wiping with paper towels is not enjoyable. Something else whose shelves are barren: flour. What in god’s name are people going to do with all this flour‽ Seriously, some things make no sense. Also, why is it that Swiffer mop liquid has been out of stock for months now? These mindless hoarding idiots are out there as soon as these places receive their trucks. No sooner are they unloading the trucks onto the sales floor that people are buying cartloads of stuff. One Walmart stocker told me that they received nine pallets of toilet paper, and it was all sold within like 15 minutes🙄😱🤬🤬.

While these mutants are buying everything in sight, the CDC is telling people they don’t need to stock up on surgical masks. They’re really not going to help, anyway. Also, you don’t need umpteen gallons of hand sanitizer or antibacterial hand soap to reduce the chance of getting infected. To start with, antibacterial soap doesn’t do a bit of good against a fucking virus, in the same way that antibiotics won’t do jack shit for you, either. The best thing to do is an age-old practice that has been taught for many years: WASH YOUR HANDS! Good lord, is it that hard? If those cretins would simply wash their fucking hands, they wouldn’t need to hoard everything in sight. Another disturbing thought: why is it that people have to be told to wash their hands? I tell ya, there’s some awfully disgusting human beings out there. I don’t know how many times I’ve witnessed someone go into the restroom, and after they were done with their business, they would leave the bathroom mid-flush🤢. Dude goes into the bathroom. Dude goes and pees (or even worse, drops a deuce) and leaves with dry hands, not having seen a drop of water or soap🤮. I honestly don’t get how a person does not wash after going to the bathroom. I guess because I’ve worked many years in restaurants, it’s been drilled into my brain. When working in a kitchen, you’re taught to wash in the bathroom, and once again when returning to your station. After all, those door handles are breeding grounds for bacteria, especially after those nasty fucks touch the handle with their filthy paws. Of course, there’s those who take their soft drinks (many without lids) into the restroom, but that’s a different discussion, and I think I already mentioned that in a previous post.

I turn for a second to a different situation. I’ve seen pictures of the aftermath of tornadoes that wreaked havoc in Nashville, TN on the morning of 03 March. It breaks my heart that anyone has to go through the destruction of a tornado. One person captioned a picture mentioning the names of three businesses formerly located at a certain intersection, saying that the places were no more. Earthquakes, tornadoes, hurricanes. Nature’s fury unleashed on humans. I totally understand the need for emergency supplies there. Not in the situation of some media-driven panic over a virus not unlike the flu. As I mentioned before, I’m not too worried about this, unlike others I know all too well. If it so happens I catch this thing and die from it, it’s meant to be, I suppose🤷‍♂️.

One last thought about this whole Coronavirus thing. I can’t believe there are people who seriously think that drinking a Corona beer is going to give them the virus🤦‍♂️. Do these people honestly think that beer has anything to do with a virus? Give me a break.

It looks like this Coronavirus isn’t going away anytime soon. I just hope you don’t give in to the hype about millions dying from it. AIDS was thought to be a death sentence back in the early 80s. We were told everyone would die from Zika, Ebola, H1N1, the Y2K computer bug, the devil returning on 06/06/06, the end of the Mayan calendar on 12/21/12, and so many more things, just in the last 20 years. But guess what? Most of us are still here. Personally, I don’t think the Coronavirus is going to take as many people down as is being speculated. But hey, if you want to go sterilize and quarantine yourself, you do you, boo. I’ll go about my day-to-day and take my chances.

Are you planning to stockpile everything you can and hunker down, scrubbed and sanitized, or are you just going to ride it out? Comment here or on my social media pages. Whichever way you decide to go, just do me this favor: be safe and be well.

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