How to do the wrong thing right

Having devoted my last couple of columns entirely to Miss Rona, I began noticing a few days ago that a subtle corner has somehow been turned as of late, a shift in perception one might say. A total sea change, actually, as if the general public were finally shrugging in unison to our infectiously life-altering voodoo spectral, “F/U already, girl, dayum!” Here in Gayville, the flag-waving new ’tude out on the streets all but radiates, “Miz Thang, I’m tired. I plumb had it. You ain’t pimpin’ out this here queer, no mo’. Nuh-uh. I’m through with your zombified, global-wide pandemic slave-minion shit: Rona, you and me, ho’? We done, bitch!”

Clearly, this is not just a “minority protest stance” anymore, either. A casual stroll through literally any given, oh, Tom Thumb or Walgreen’s showcases the spectacularly sudden indifference. Sure, lip-service is still being paid to facemasks worn in public … but just barely, and certainly not “protectively.” A swaggering full regalia of Wild West bandit drag’s triangular face handkerchiefs stagger down aisles blindly through fogged-over eyeglasses, or the occasional welder-esque contraptions efforted by the more “sensitive skin” crowd’s raids of hospital supply stores’ overstock sales. Shout-out to shrewdly scored new Lucite face shields, bulwarks of such protectors from Category 5 sandstorms!

Recently, believe it or not, I’ve found myself sofa-binging on a veritable slew of big, tentpole disaster/end-of-the-world movies — always requisitely and appropriately uniformed, of course: Five-day-old sweats with mismatched socks, mangy mullet ’do, a backwards baseball cap, two lap cats secretly filching licks at my blanketed, biohazard-green tub of Mint Chocolate Chip Baskin-Robbins. (Correction: Roo, making no slithery secrets about his petty thievery at all, and stone-deaf, 107-year-old Boo, per usual, just whining his shrill, Father-Time/alpha seniority screechiest about how he’d instead much prefer plain old real vanilla, the way ice cream’s naturally supposed to be — you know, just another same old – same old regularly given Tuesday morning here in isolation paradise. Bang-bang, Corona, shebang-bang.)

In the apocalyptic thriller, 28 Days Later — its opening amnesiac scene a gold-standard of cinematic anxiety — a sveltely naked (and full frontal!) young twotter, surgical tubes snaking out his every orifice, haplessly discovers himself locked inside a hastily-abandoned hospital’s impenetrably sealed hazmat chamber, whereupon it gradually dawns on poor naked Jim that in the span of less than a month (from when a bus first hit him until edgily awakening now from a medically-induced stasis) all civilized trappings on Earth have vanished. Not the least of these is its human population, replaced now by a duplicitously vile underworld of scuttling, drooling, shambling shadow lurking doppelgangers: A destiny so contemplatively horrific that the only note left Jim following his parents’ double suicide was, “Please, don’t wake up!”

(Eh, but, what’s … a “twotter,” you ask? Oh, that’s just some word I invented here at civilization’s epilogue … I’ve had a bit of spare time around the house lately. A twotter is the hybridization of a man-boy twinkie with an otter. You’ve seen twotters. We all have. They’re everywhere: Tall-ish, lanky-ish, awkward-ish, neither clean-cut nor quite at street punk, shimmery but not shiny, simultaneously innocently doe-eyed and dystopian. Think Leonardo DiCaprio in Titanic. He’s the archetypical twotter. Opaquely oscillatory.)

Prescient dialogue from 28 Days Later: Researcher: “The chimps … have been infected.” Activist: “Infected with … what?” Researcher: “Rage!”

In my building’s lobby, our manager’s office front wall (which used to be a transparent sheet of glass) is now straight out of 28 Days Later. You know the scene, an obligatory staple of every disaster/horror movie ever made: The camera rotates full circle around our twotter hero. His expression goes blank, eyes glittering that glazed, mystified opacity of someone just woken who realizes he’s not even on the same planet he went to bed in. My manager’s office wall is opaque now, graffitied over completely, its latest sensory-overload in obviousness being a new daily color chart announcing “Today’s COVID-19 RISK LEVEL” … which, apparently for the benefit of only zombies amongst us, employs a sliding arrow clarifying each day’s current advisory precaution hue: Red: Stay Home/Stay Safe; Orange: Extreme Caution; Yellow: Proceed Carefully; Green: New Normal Until Vaccine. The chart’s arrow, to the numbness of nothing remotely new, has yet to spasm even once beyond the furthest extreme edges of Code Red.

More dialogue: Jim (twotter Cillian Murphy): “What about the government? What are they doing?” Selena: (Naomie Harris): “There is no government.” Jim: “There’s always a government! They’re in a … a bunker, or a plane?”

On May 4, way back when dinosaurs still roamed the Earth, a chart prepared by FEMA highlighted the CDC modeling throughout the remainder of May. Its guidelines were emphatic: “No state should attempt relaxing restrictions until it had observed a downward trajectory of new coronavirus cases over a 14-day period.” Period. At the time, just about 28 days ago, not a single state had yet met said moratorium’s non-gray-area of “two weeks’ steady decline in new cases.” Conclusively, the CDC projected a stark rise of new infections, as social-distancing restrictions began to ease, and states opted out of self-quarantining — every state in variable degrees from one to the next.

Leading the plunge, full-in/all-out? Texas and Georgia — what a shocker! The “following” other 48 dipped toes in first, some deeper than others, variable to the individual whims of their governors’ scattershot ways and methods unique to every person’s innately predisposed impunity. Alabama’s hootenanny, Kay Ivey, crowed: “People always expect us here in the great state Alabama to be more like New York and California — why, bless their precious little hearts. But we good Alabamians just ain’t nothin’ like them folks way out west in Hollywoodland, or up north in Red Delicious New York City.”

And, how correct you are, Kay! For in per capita population density, Alabama’s COVID numbers exactly match those Californicatin’ inner-peace seeking, dippy hippies and them Big City, classless Yankees way up north. Meanwhile, all dingbat-petty pissing contests aside, the CDC implores us be prepared, by the end of May, for nothing less than 200,000 new cases, per day, metastasizing into one million being newly infected every five days, translating into 3,000 new COVID-19 deaths every day. In truth, just 3,000 daily deaths may very well be a low-end leaning number, indeed, considering only 1 in 10 of our global citizenry, suspecting that they may have contracted COVID-19, even so much as bother getting tested for its antibodies.

Final dialogue: Jim: “How did you know? I mean, how did you know he was infected?” Selena: “Look, I didn’t know he was infected, OK? He knew. I could see it in his face.”

So, Howard’s advice this column? Be good, and run out and get tested, kids. Trust me, it’s easy nowadays. No longer must one endure that tremors inducing nostril corncob being shoved so far up into your head that you swear you heard your hippocampus actually pop. That kind of torture’s sooo last week. No, all you gotta do here lately is drizzle a long wad of spittle into a tapered cup. You know how to spit, don’t you boiz? You just pucker your lips together, salivate up … and blow.
Catch y’all again here my next issue, in about, well, oh, just 28 days! Later, boiz!

— Howard Lewis Russell

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