Day 46
The discussion has started at the workplace: What are we going to do in the next phase? We all know, I think, that relatively few people have had the Dread Virus so far, and many more will. Nothing is going to be normal for a very long time. Yet it feels inevitable that before too much longer the rules are going to change again. Things that have been unthinkable will be thinkable again.
There are parts of the next phase we can see coming. Masks are going to be part of our future for a long while. We’ll be keeping polite distance as often as we can.
And, as night follows day, we’re headed into a new golden era of quack medicine. Yes, I know, we’ve just been told by the President that injecting disinfectant might be a great idea. And we’re hearing how mobile phone towers are spreading the virus. It seems like we can’t get more gullible. But just wait. Once America’s bosses have put their feet down, and the bulk of us are unwillingly, uneasily back in their cubicles and shared offices, we’re going to see some real magic.
I’m trying to guess what people are going to be doing, and I can’t even do it. Whatever is coming, it will be stranger than anything I can think of. Stranger than eating Tide Pods. Stranger than buying quartz eggs from Gwyneth Paltrow, to detoxify our bodies from the inside. Stranger than snake healing. It’s going to get wild.
Maybe if I try to think of the worst possible ideas, we can check them off the list, so other people don’t feel obliged to test them. Let’s see:
Wiring the microwave to run with the door off?
Soaking rusty metal, to make rust tea?
Falling down stairs on purpose, to stimulate cell regeneration?
Drinking hot candle wax?
Eating freeze-dried poop? (My mistake, that’s already a thing)
Shed toxins by filling up a cup with spit?
Jeez. It turns out I can think of awful things more easily than I guessed. And I didn’t even put the worst stuff down.
I thought that was going to be funnier, to be honest, and of course the reason isn’t—the reason it just feels sad and helpless—is that people are really going to do things like this. We’ve been watching months of news about a virus that kills by slow suffocation. It’s so scary that just about anything seems worth doing by contrast, even things that stretch reason beyond breaking.
The unfunny moral is that we’ll need to help each other get the best information available, and we’ll need to take each other’s straw-grasping with some grace, because tilting at windmills might be saner than standing still while the windmill comes to get you.
