Looking outside, waiting for the next plague
- Mike Dewey: Life Lines
- August 8, 2020
- 984
What’s next?
Frogs … locusts … retro disco?
It’s only been a few days since Hurricane Isaias blew through coastal Carolina on its way north, but I’m already bracing myself for whatever the next plague might be.
Oh, and for the record, whoever named that particular storm ought to be horsewhipped or at least sent to bed without his supper.
What kind of a name is Isaias, anyway? All those vowels? I hate it when showoffs try to prove they’re the smartest kid in the room.
Give me Ike or Hank or Joe, something easy to remember. There ought never be a name that forces 99% of the population to stop reading mid-sentence and say, “What’s this? A typo?”
At least when the Grateful Dead named their 1969 album, "Aoxomoxoa," they assumed most of their fans would be too baked to even try to pronounce it.
And that brings us to my top-five best LP titles of all time: "Let It Bleed," "Rubber Soul," "Who’s Next," "Never Mind the Bollocks, Here’s the Sex Pistols" and "Are You Experienced?"
I wish I could have played at least one of those records on my almost-new turntable, powered by my nearly new tuner/amp, but the callous storm knocked out the power during my prime listening hours, leaving me no choice but help my wife tidy up the back yard.
The debris was mostly small- to medium-sized branches and limbs along with the usual assortment of leaves, small birds and what I call “hurricones,” which fall from the stately pine trees every time a storm passes through.
This has already been one of the most active Atlantic storm seasons on record, and we’re only in early August, but that’s not climate change or global warming or the melting polar ice caps.
No, it’s just the price you pay for living near an ocean, sort of the way ankle-deep urine is simply what you have to deal with when using a public restroom while attending a big-time sporting event.
What’s that you say?
You can’t go to a game anymore?
Silly me.
Of course you can’t.
There’s a pandemic going on.
It was in all the papers.
What’s that you say?
No one needs newspapers anymore?
The list of plagues just gets longer and longer, doesn’t it? Just when you think America is filled to the breaking point with street protests, police brutality, a cratered economy, the coronavirus and a new Taylor Swift album, along comes hurricane season.
Lessaiz le bon temps rouler.
That, for those of you who may have forgotten your freshman year French, means “Let the good times roll,” always a good thing to have packed in your traveling lexicon, when we used to go places.
I was trying to remember the other day the last time I was in another state, and no, I don’t mean panic or hysteria or shock.
An actual, physical, corporeal movement from one of the 50 to another, and it took me a while. It’s been so long. Even now, I’m not sure which came first: driving north for my class reunion or heading south to visit my brother in Florida over Christmas.
Either way, that’s probably going to be it for a while.
My wife and I considered the possibility of just leaving the country altogether for a couple of days — maybe hanging out in Jamaica for Thanksgiving, perhaps celebrating the election results — but we soon realized Americans are about as welcome in other nations as illegal immigrants are wanted here.
Seems we’re being walled off, forced to cool our heels in passport limbo even as Swedes and Swiss and Saudis come and go as they please. The world, alas, has decided we’re just too dangerous.
I don’t think we can even get into Canada, which is saying something. I mean there’s probably not a nicer, kinder, more amiable lot on the face of the Earth than the Canadians, but even they have pulled in the welcome mat and turned off all the lights, hoping we’ll just go away and bother someone else.
Greenland, maybe, or Tierra del Fuego.
So what do you do when it’s not safe to venture outside, jobs are vanishing, storms abound and you can’t escape to another country?
It’s simple.
You decide to open the schools.
Stop me if you’ve heard this one before, but it looks like America’s children are going to be used like guinea pigs in a fifth-grade science experiment: transferred from one environment to another, fed fructose and Twinkies, just to see what happens next.
It’d be funny if it weren’t so deadly serious.
Don’t mistake for an expert in anything, unless it’s baseball, rock ‘n’ roll or cooking with a wok, and I’m especially unqualified to speak as a parent because it wasn’t my fate to procreate.
But it seems to me abjectly absurd to risk kids’ health — even their very lives — by sending them out into a landscape littered with dangers both seen and unseen, expecting everything to go well.
“So how was school today, Johnny?” Mom asks as she carefully inches open the triple-locked front door, making sure not to let the dog bolt between her legs. “Did you learn anything new?”
Johnny pulls off his face shield, bandana and goggles and just glares at her, thinking, “Why won’t she let Scraps go outside?”
But what do I know?
This is the new world, and I’m old, well, not ancient but close enough to understand I’m clearly on the back nine of life.
A friend of mine reminded me of something I wrote in my very first column of the year, something to the effect that 2020 was going to make 1968 look like a garden party by comparison.
Well, we’re now crossing into August, and it’s bad everywhere.
There’s no telling what new plague awaits: mail-in ballots, anyone?