Oh, hallelujah! More and more people are getting vaccinated against COVID-19! We’re finally becoming able to venture into the public sphere and safely congregate all willy-nilly with a multitude of our fellow citizens again! Yes! Soon, so soon, we can hang out completely unmasked and carefree and seek our various entertainments in large, physically interactive groups again! Gregariousness intensifies! O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!
Actually? Fuck that noise.
Do you know what a relief it’s been, what a delight, not having to subject myself to even approximately close contact with the ill-mannered, foul-tempered, unwashed and odiferous throngs of humanity that make up what Homo sapiens sapiens is pleased to call “society”?
SPOILER ALERT: It’s been an unmitigated delight.
Getting to remain pretty much ensconced within my personal bunker for an entire year, surrounded by my sprawling library of books and my idiosyncratic collection of music, with swift and reliable access to the internet – the world is in the computer, Zoolander – and my requirements of nutrition being delivered or somewhat furtively picked up according to my preference that day … that’s long been a consummation for which I’ve devoutly wished.
(Like, can one ever be far enough from the madding crowd?)
And, oh, how very generous of Our Pathogenic Co-habitants to provide such a situation – while concurrently revealing anew, via media-highlighted public response, the vast mobs of ravening imbeciles that comprise certain ideological sectors of our country’s population.
(Is it more fun, I wonder, to “own” the libs or the repugs? But, nota bene, that’s a rhetorical question: I’m glad to let others change the be-shitted diapers on any tribe of those puling infants.)
And now all this lovely, invigorating, joy-inducing, and (for once) societally approved solitude is going away? Now we’re all expected to return to constant displays of (and actual engagement with) public congeniality? To gather together in the sanctity of human congress? To leave one’s cave and no longer guard The Precious?
Yeah, no.
This article appears in May 28 • 2021.