was this trip really necessary? (CoVid Chronicles Vol 2)

it’s going to forever be the debated question from 2020…

…did we fuck things up worse shutting down the economy than if we’d just let the pandemic run with it?

i get the “flatten the curve” thing and such, and the crippled economy and record unemployment might just be another nail in the political coffin of the world’s most dangerous cheeto. this adding to the fact that this was predicted in january, but not acted on in the hopes that it would just “disappear…like a miracle”.

but it really hit me standing in the shop today, behind shiny new plexiglass, with no customers in what should be a busy tattoo shop, and i answer the phone and get to tell somebody, “well, the press conference is at 2pm, and we kinda got our hopes up a couple weeks ago, so we’re cautiously optimistic that today the government will let us reopen our shop!

and that was what hit me. that phrase. “…the GOVERNMENT WILL LET US REOPEN OUR SHOP”.

what the neverlovin’ fuck?

how did we let that happen? just let the government shut down and ruin lives over a virus? i get that it kills people…and it’s contagious…and you know what? it’s still killing people and it’s still contagious and we’re still opening shit back up. and it might flair up again. and fuck it if it does. there is no disease that should suspend the constitution. you don’t wanna get sick? you’re worried about getting grandma sick? stay the fuck inside. you might survive, and i might not. and i took that risk. and i fucking knew it – but you know what? if you never get on a plane you will never die in a plane crash. that’s awesome! but i’d rather it take days, not hours, to get to vegas. my choice.

and i thought that was what this country, and for that matter, evolution, was about.

as we set to reopen taking all these insane precautions to make sure that we’re “safe” i can honestly say i left my house every got damn day of this thing. under normal circumstances spending a wednesday at home, for twenty-four hours, when i don’t have to take os to school isn’t uncharacteristic for me. shit, i used to have at least one straight day at home like that a week. but once they said we kinda HAD to? i made sure i was out every day, for at least an hour or so, every day since march 25th when the shop closed. seven days a week i’d go SOMEWHERE, even if it was just a bike ride for an hour or so.

guess i’m a rebellious dick?

i can say this – my dad would have been seventy-nine the week before we had to lock down (or seventy-one if you ask him because he said after seventy-five you get to start counting backwards), he was extremely compromised in the immune system department, and he worked for a chain of fucking hospitals. he’s also where i got my work ethic, so i know he woulda pushed himself to keep going through this shit and if he hadn’t died back in february (NOT of CoVid) he probably woulda caught it and died since. the only positive to his death thus far was it happened BEFORE all this bullshit so the one person i woulda really been worried about i didn’t have to. so there was that.

and i gotta couple grand in money from the governement i wouldn’t have if this hadn’t happened, so there’s that too.

but overall this was (and i write it like it’s behind us, which it kinda is but mostly isn’t) a tremendous pain in the ass, and i’d like to NOT have to go through this again. if i ever end up with grandkids i get to tell them stories about this shit, like my grandma told me (she was eleven when the 1918 pandemic occurred) and that was a two year fucker that gave us “the roaring twenties”.

guess it’s time to roar again.