TomFlannery.com

It’s getting to be that time when we sum things up. The year in review as it were. And…well…I’m not really feeling it. I’m tired and I’m cranky and I’m wearing the same clothes every day and everything is getting worse instead of better. Even Christmas is taking it up the ass, as there’s some sort of freak biblical storm heading our way, promising to flood us all out and then huff and puff and blow our houses down and then turn everything into a sheet of Covid-y ice because of course it is. I’m half expecting a forecast of flowing lava for New Year’s Eve.

2020 has been a dumpster fire, and re-living it, even for a few paragraphs, seems a bit masochistic. But as an OCD writer (are there other kinds?)…..blank space must be filled or angels lose their wings.

We begin our story in March. I’m sure January and February were fine.

Rumblings of a virus. In China. It already had a name. Covid-19.

It seemed a world away. What happens in China stays in China….that was the thinking. In short, nobody really gave a fiddler’s fart. The President, when asked, just assured us that our nation, under a red white and blue God, was immune to such shithole country shenanigans. So we went about our business, eating and drinking and being merry until the Scranton St. Patrick’s Day Parade was cancelled. Wait, what?

Finally, we started paying attention.

To gather in large numbers was now Russian roulette. People were actually dying of this thing, whatever it was. Apparently it was passed through droplets from the mouth and nose, and when some innocently suggested wearing masks, they were laughed out of the crowded bar. So, no masks. Got it. The President was asked again. He called it a “hoax”, without bothering to explain the increasing body count.

All our gigs were cancelled. We actually played a show on Sunday, March 15th, which was parade weekend. Rumors were that the governor was gonna shut it all down…..and there was a melancholy sense that this was gonna be the last time we were allowed to do this for a while. If I remember right, we lingered longer than usual after the show, nursing our beers and trying not to talk about what everybody was thinking. Then we all went home and stayed there. Overnight the streets were empty.

Everybody started talking about something called “Zoom” and we all did the best we could to remain connected. And then Tom Hanks and his wife tested positive, and then John Prine died. I took long walks around town at all hours. It didn’t matter. The streets were empty regardless. The fear was palpable. A new phrase become household. “Flattening the curve”. If we all hung together, it would take a few weeks. And then this thing might go away. Whatever it was. And weeks went by and there was no flattening of anything, and everybody started getting a little frantic. Businesses were closed. Now what? Teenagers making minimum wage literally risked their own lives checking the rest of us out in grocery store lines, and it was only in retrospect that people began to comment on how fucked up that was. The President downplayed the entire thing. NYC was running out of ventilators and Andrew Cuomo was becoming must see TV. PPE was a new acronym for most of us, and then we learned that we didn’t even have enough of that. Apparently there has been a pandemic response team that might have mitigated such things, but they had been fired. Trump went on TV and told lies and suggested we inject bleach, and then on the weekends he’d golf, which probably saved lives because at least then he wasn’t suggesting….you know…..that we inject bleach.

“Social Distancing” became a thing. Everybody knew this meant staying 6 feet apart, but try that in a Wal-Mart food aisle and see how you make out. Masks were in vogue again, except for the incels and Karen’s who were more and more convinced that Trump was saving us all from all those liberal pedophiles hanging out in the basement of pizza parlors. Grandma was expendable because “muh raats”……and seemingly every day a new video was making the rounds on social media of crazed maskless white people screeching at hapless teens just trying to do their jobs.

In the midst of all this came more black men and women being killed by cops, and protests erupted nationwide. It was a long, hot summer. The virus spread like rage.

Trump set a good example by holding large, maskless, un-socially distanced pep-rallies. Eventually he got sick himself, and was helicoptered from the White House to the hospital where he had 20 private doctors who pumped him with $100k worth of drugs not available to the unwashed, and this morbidly obese 74 year old junk-food addict got all better in 2 days and told all the dying people that there was nothing to be afraid of if you were just a manly man like him.

It was madness all around.

We were warned of a second wave…..that it would be much worse than the first. And then it was upon us and was much worse than the first and everybody seemed shocked. All my Trumper friends said that all of this would mysteriously “go away” the day after the election and yet here we are, re-locked down with 3000+ dying every single day……watching hoaxers Lindsey Graham and Marco Rubio get vaccinated before front line nurses, awaiting the scraps from the tables of the millionaires we keep voting into office to fall on the floor so we can kick each other in the teeth fighting over them.

Meanwhile New Zealand is 100% virus free.

Our President has failed us. Congress has failed us. The Senate has failed us. We’ve failed each other.

Hate flows unvexed to the sea.

2020. Piss off.

In a bit…

–tf