TomFlannery.com

It’s the holidays. The time of year when folks are usually a little bit nicer. More smiles. More laughs. More time together. The pace slows down a little on the outside. The lights go up. The fences come down. We all long for Whoville. Snoopy comes to town, with Topper and the Warlock and Frosty and Rudolph and we all trust in the magic snowball.

Yea well, that’s not happening this year.

The fear is palpable. You can feel it everywhere. The virus. The rent. Food on the table. What if this? What if that? It’s dark out there…..and the temperatures are dropping. The wind howls and the black ice is around every sharp corner.

And we’re all becoming hypochondriacs. And why not? Coughs, runny noses, fatigue, body aches, fevers, ’tis the season normally. But now there’s an elephant in the room. Should I get tested? Where can I get tested? And since I’m essentially quarantining already, why get tested at all? If I’m positive, then what? All we can really do is hunker down and wait for a vaccine, or more precisely, wait for our government to not completely jack up the distribution of said vaccine. We watch the numbers, rising. Every day. Relentless. It puts a lump in the throat, which re-triggers the paranoia, because maybe lumpy throat is a covid symptom that I wasn’t aware of.

The nation is currently on auto-pilot. President Trump has long since cashed in his casino chips, and has continued to ignore the pandemic entirely, focusing instead on rage-tweeting election lies and raising money from his cult members, presumably to assist him in staying out of prison. In yet another bonk over the head, today Attorney General and Trump ball washer Bill Barr was forced to admit that his office has uncovered zero evidence of election fraud, which if the past is any indication, means he’s about to be fired via a tweet any moment now. I have to admit that this treating Trump like a pinata at a birthday party in lieu of him conceding like an actual adult is fun in a “but it’s still sorta damaging to democracy” kind of way.

As wanton cruelty was the President’s one and only presidential point, this week, as Americans die in record numbers (more Americans died from Covid in November than in Australia, Canada, China, Japan, and Germany combined) from a virus he called first called a hoax and then did nothing to contain even after he contracted it, he’s focused on changing the rules for federal death penalty cases by bringing back firing squads. Yes. FIRING SQUADS. This is truly demented, twisted, despotic stuff. And yet it’s on page 17 of the paper, because his casual brutality has become normalized.

I just went out for a walk, and the weather matches the mood. Alternating between rain and sleet, with biting winds. Everything is dark. Everything is wet. The sun is buried. My shoes were full of mud. It was lunchtime but it felt like the end of a long day. A lot of cars had their lights on. The kind of day that can give any town a bad name. I know this is all temporary, but these days one can be forgiven for throwing in the towel before it’s been handed to him.

Sports was a thing for a while during all this. The NBA and NHL bubbles somehow worked, as did the baseball playoffs. There were some bumps and bruises, but overall the games proved a welcome distraction. Football, on the other hand, which is essentially bubble-proof, is gradually turning into a shit show. College games in the Trumpier areas are being played with tens of thousands of people in the stands….welcome news for an airborne virus. As I type this the Steelers / Ravens have had their scheduled Thanksgiving prime time game re-scheduled 4 times, and it’s now to be played at a most un-football like day and time….Wednesday at 3:40pm. It really has no business being played at all, since the Ravens team is infested with the virus. On Sunday the Denver Broncos were forced to play an actual game that counts using a practice squad wide-receiver at quarterback, which is kinda like the bat-boy pitching a MLB game. This happened because the 3 actual QBs on the Broncos roster gathered and refused to wear masks, and came into direct contact with a positive test. The result was perhaps the worst game in the history of the league. If the NFL was embarrassed by any of this, they got over it once the TV revenue checks cleared. Money, as always, trumps (sorry) everything.

That being said, the mask goes OVER YOUR FUCKING NOSE. I’m not sure what it’s gonna take for folks to grasp this simple concept. Does it need to be engraved on tombstones?

In a bit..

–tf