Quarantine

One minor development in my Batflu experience: I have now been officially “quarantined.” We won’t go into the details, for to understand them one would have to be a simpleton, like our provincial premier, or otherwise gravely challenged. Whereas, my intellectual resources, despite cardiac setbacks, are still lively and copious enough to detect absurdity and what is called, “bullshit.” There may be a few cogent things to say about the Batflu branch of virology, but at this point in the show, two years into the howling nonsense, there is nothing that can inform debate. Anyone who says something will be immediately contradicted by a legion of mostly self-appointed “experts.”

Shut in, closed up, locked down, but not actually starved under current Ontario pandemic protocols and restrictions. In praise of my angelic little sister, she has remembered what her big fascist brother (voluntarily) eats, and fetched a fresh supply in her snazy sports car. Thus, he will spend the next few days in luxurious isolation, openly cooking. She included several state-approved, Chinese communist face masks, which will enable me to take out the garbage, even if community health officers are patrolling.

The Batflu Kerfuffle may be thought of as a dispute, within a tribe of monkeys — wearing diapers on their faces, and observing social distancing, vertically and horizontally in their trees. Most are glued to cellphones.

One could be frightened by this spectacle, but, putting the cellphone down, one could enjoy a thunderous belly laugh. Humans, in contrast to the apes, often succumb to waves of panic, and the totalitarian experiments that accompany them. On balance, most apes are calmer and more attentive (but not necessarily more courteous). They can only be alarmed when threatened by something plausible. They do not waste their time in hysteria, unless something is trying to eat them, and even then, they prefer to make their escape discreetly.

Perhaps it is because they, and most other creatures in nature, spend less time than we do, brooding over biological death — even though it might be more significant for them than for us. They seem, relatively, comfortable with it, and take more risks in the cause of loyalty. But humans, even when safe within the shell of our own stupidity, seem never to escape this anxiety thing.