In which too many are not, for a variety of reasons I won’t get into, taking this shit seriously.

Half the customers in the cheese shop these past few weeks have been tourists. White people on vacation to wine country, visiting tasting rooms, hotels, restaurants, and my place of work in sleepy little rural Oregon, for the purpose of “stimulating the economy” and getting drunk and, possibly, spreading a killing, maiming disease to a bunch of service workers who have no choice but to show up at work and pull a paycheck to make those ends meet.

Mask-wearing in my shop in general is now over 90%, but I had a customer last week whose mask was, I shit you not, beaded, and made of sheer, lavender gauze. Decorative, but completely useless. An agree-to-comply-but-don’t-comply fuck you to everyone with whom the damn woman comes into contact. Including me.

Fuck her. Seriously. And everyone like her.

I smoked for 31 years. So I’m not eligible for a lung transplant, you ignorant bitch. Enjoy your non-essential impulse buys!

I don’t blame people who go to work sick because they have to, but nobody has to bring six fucking people into a goddamned cheese shop in BFE wearing a useless mask. That’s just being an ignorant, selfish, childish asshole.

Look at this goddamned map; click through and read:

The majority of the nation is in “uncontrolled spread” of Covid-19. Let me state that you do NOT “need” to:

– go to fuckin’ Disney
– go to large parties (sorry about your enormous wedding, but shit happens)
– come to my county as a fucking tourist during a pandemic
– fly somewhere just for fun
– get your hair or nails done
– hang out maskless in any public space (not even you drunk fucks smoking outside the Elks)
– go to games or concerts.

FFS, you need to stay HOME except for essential activities. Groceries, health care, funerals maybe. Essential work. Not vacations and shopping and dining out.

Shut shit down, send the “menial” (but SO essential) low-paid, high-risk service workers home, and give them money to live on. We can afford it. Mail the fucking checks, every month. Meanwhile, institute contact tracing and rapid testing and all the shit we failed, stupidly, to do the first goddamned time.

ONE HUNDRED AND FIFTY FOUR THOUSAND DEAD HUMAN BEINGS in this country, you absolute shitheads. If we put all those dead bodies in coffins and stacked them up, it would be a cube 3.24 miles per side. Imagine a cube more than three miles per side in the center of your city: THOSE ARE OUR COVID DEAD.

My county, Umatilla, has been shut back down to baseline as of tomorrow at noon because we’re at 234.4 cases per 10,000 people:

It’s not just live or die with this virus. Those who live are, evidence is beginning to show, often very fucked up. There are people who may never breathe properly again. I saw several who presented two months after getting over a mild case only to die in the hospital of sudden cardiac arrest. Victims report exhaustion and weakness and fatigue for months and months.

There are people who had mild or asymptomatic versions of this disease in March who are now presenting with lung damage and blood clots. There have already been lung transplants and amputations and heart failure.

This thing’s been here for barely half a year, we know very little about it. It’s not the fucking flu; the flu doesn’t turn your blood to sludge and ruin your heart and lungs like this shit does.

Stay home as much as you can. Wear a mask when you can’t, and wash your FUCKING hands.

I don’t know how to convince you to care about other people.