Some of life’s components are not really interesting until you’re moving down the sidewalk and one darts out in front of you. Like an 8-bit video game or somebody handing you the equivalent of a deli counter ticket that reads “13”. Suddenly, it’s your turn in line to pay attention to what is now going on around you.
If you ask me whether I think Elvis is alive, or whether I believe Sasquatch to be real, for both I would say they’re a joke. No matter what the internet or televisions tells me, I’m neither going to hide away my PB&B sandwiches, nor am I going to head into the White Mountains of New Hampshire to scout for excessively large footprints. I won’t do such things because both existences are wholly implausible. No scientific evidence. It would be a real stretch to say that you could change my mind.
But, if on any other day than October 31st, these two guys pulled in my driveway and hopped out of the car to say hello—perhaps my mind would be changed.
Of course such tall tales I don’t give much mind to, but here I’m aiming to outline something truly ridiculous. There are serious considerations that are far more likely to touch my life as I move through it. Like the prevalence of a disease, and whether or not I’ll choose to take it seriously.
Nobody wants to get sick, but as humans this eventuality is an aspect that has been foisted upon all of us. And maybe I should rephrase things and say that nobody wants to get *really* sick. Experience a period where the entire family is unable to visit a hospital room where you lie on your stomach in order to breathe better…although you don’t know this because you’re in a medically-induced coma. Nobody wants to get sick that way.
I’m not talking about the hospital scenario like it’s the Elvis or Sasquatch one because I know it to be real. I know somebody who is in that room right now. And while I already felt compliant in observing all of the COVID-19 preventative protocols, I now feel a renewed dedication to protect myself and others. If people—especially those younger than my parents—are falling gravely ill, then of course you have my full attention.
Even the suspicion that you yourself might have the virus is something that does wonders in reframing your mind. Halloween festivities might be off-limits this year, but haunted houses are already set up and they’re standing by to scare you straight. For months now, hours of vehicular queues have been snaking around buildings in order to accommodate the hoards of people anxiously awaiting their turn. And once that moment arrives, you steel yourself as a vaguely human form in blue and white attire floats up to your car window and performs a slight sawing back and forth action into each of your nostrils. Nice and slow for added malaise. All tricks with no guarantee for a treat.
Each participant for this event hasn’t finished this adventure once they’ve had their brain poked at with a swab. If they’ve paid for the “same day” scare, it’s another 90 minutes of pacing around in the dark October rain, deli counter ticket in hand, along with the rest of the people doing the same thing. Everyone’s outside of their car, amazingly bunched together while exhaling a range of unverified bacteria from behind their masks. Nobody knows when their number will be called because each time a person shows up with a stack of papers, they yell out anything from “534” to “213”. No order, just a bit more suspense for good measure.
If he could speak right now, the person who is lying in the hospital bed would tell you that once someone has handed you a small tab of paper with the number “13” on it, you know that none of this is a joke. Nobody is keen suffer in the way that he is doing, and for certain nobody wishes to transmit this virus to anyone else. But it’s happening every day.
Once all the stuff that you hear about in the media translates to first-person testimony, you look at the doubters with bafflement. Especially while remembering that some of the world’s most wonderful people might not wake up from their medically-induced coma. I wear my mask with the conviction of Constantine. I stay far away from the crowds. I do anything that is humanly possible to not only become infected, but also to slow or stop the infection to others.
As humans we are bound to become diseased and die. But this year especially sucks, and I don’t want to hear anybody parroting what they’ve heard about the annual flu numbers and how many people are getting bumped off as a result. Tell that to the folks in the hospital, if only they could hear you. And talk to all of the people who are either standing in the rain, or in some other purgatory that might have been avoided if circumstances were approached a bit differently. I can’t control much when it comes to what will invade the human body—but I’ll do what I can. Because this has got my full attention.
I personally feel as though I could weather the coronavirus fairly well—if and when I become infected. But what I really want to avoid is contributing to a larger domino effect that is currently going on pretty much everywhere. Call me selfish, but the less people I personally know who might go down hard with this disease, the better I will feel. It’s because here it feels the most real—and this unfortunately is what it takes to make us take stuff seriously.
I hope everyone who reads this never has to endure the battery of mental and emotional torment that comes with fighting COVID-19. All of the modifications in one’s life that must then be enacted. All of the mundane everyday thoughts that go out the window because you’re preoccupied about the health of your loved ones. I look to better days, and a world where less of the population has graduated to believing that some things are more real than Bigfoot or the basement activities of Washington DC pizza shop.
I have no certainty whether this will happen, but every ounce of my being hopes that in 2021, the scares will be limited to those fabricated next October. Even if I still have to go forward wearing a mask, I’ll gladly take that alternative if we can return to a world order of better health and consideration for the folks around us. And if that day comes, I truly hope that all of my loved ones will still be there to share it with me.