At Least and at Last, I Can Open the Windows

Spring is in the air, and all the young people are about on the streets. A glance out of my window will find one or two beautiful young women in yoga pants wandering past at any given moment. Meanwhile, it's day three on the sofa with the mystery bug for me. I feel pretty good except for a pounding headache that fires up instantly whenever I stand. I don't know if this is the illness itself or a side effect of temporarily going off the various poisons required for me to function correctly at this age. It makes sense for the young to live recklessly. Growing old is a drag, but it doesn't last long, I suppose.

The governor has ordered all non-essential businesses to cease operations not performed remotely. As a longtime student of interconnectedness and emergent properties, I'm quite sure we'll come to find there are far more essential businesses than we first imagined. On the bright side, this fiasco highlights the precariousness of globalizing the supply chain and might encourage the creation of more balanced systems in the future. Then again, if the numbers of beautiful young women wandering by my window during a pandemic serve as any measure of human nature, we will learn absolutely nothing from this. Nothing at all.

Somehow the apartment has gotten messy despite my hardly leaving the sofa for most of the week. It's remarkable. Yet there's no rush to clean it. Any day now, they're going to tell us we have to lock ourselves up indoors with no visitors for weeks on end–whether we like it or not. Even the pretty young girls who wish ever so much to bask in spring's sunshine and breezes will have to stay at home. And if people don't take to their sofas like good little disease vectors, Wolf will bring in the national guard to see to it we do. A few pistachio skin crumbs sprinkled about the place won't bother anybody but me. I'll tidy up anyway, just as soon as I can stand without my head trying to explode.