They took away my camping trip?
To quote Bugs Bunny, “Of course, you know this means war?”
I started this thread/album as a way to stave off boredom, channel energy, and entertain people, so I apologize for deviating ever so slightly in the following paragraphs.
By the beginning of March, I had already mentally shifted my biannual camping trip with “the guys” to TBD status. We are all adults here, and you have to “play the situation, not the cards”, as the poker pros say. I figured we were all doing that. So I was stunned when our governor donned his blackface mask– or was it a black facemask?– and announced that in addition to schools, “non-essential” businesses, parks, and campgrounds would henceforth be closed until June 10.
There you have it: stationary groups of fewer than ten people seated more than six feet apart outdoors out of cellphone range from the nearest dot on the map represent a threat to the health of fellow citizens in this here Commonwealth until an arbitrary date. If Daniel Boone were still alive, he’d take off for the Cumberland Gap again, only to find it closed.
That was stunning, but even more so was the willingness– and in some cases, the enthusiasm– that we have thrown ourselves into the (I hate this cliché!) “new normal”.
Well I can take it: believe it or not, I’ve had worse things happen to me than losing a camping trip. But that can’t even begin to address what graduating seniors, and 8th graders, and springtime athletes, and Olympians, and small businesses who have shuttered and may never reopen, and 9-year-old boys who have no baseball– not even catch in the park with one friend, let alone on tv!– are facing. Not because of a virus; viruses have been with us forever.
What makes me really shudder, though, is the thought that in a matter of mere weeks it has almost– almost— become inconceivable to think of squeezing into a crowded bar to get the last seat and have a pleasant chat with a stranger, or grumblingly picking up your beer and hot dog to let the guy in the seat in the middle of the row at a ballgame apologetically push by you, because we are collectively scared of a disease that at current “worst” estimates may kill .00018% of the population.
I told my daughter: stop griping, hey, you’re not Anne Frank. But on one level, she is Anne Frank, as we all are, hiding in our houses wary of an invisible enemy, and of being complicit in its spread.
Hopefully, though, we will also emerge stronger for the fear we exhibit of living our lives.
What did that one guy say one time about all we have to fear is something something something? I don’t know, I’m a little shaky on American history.
Anyway, I lit a fire in my back yard and played this 12-bar blues improv on my homemade cigar box guitar Resonator Red. It’s called “Four-String Solo Firepit Blues”.
molṑn labé.
Thanks to the uncredited cardinal singing backup.
