The Duration: Things of Which I Am Mightily Tired

Snippy self-satisfied pundits who tweet out news stories with prissy little swipes referencing something said three weeks ago by someone they hold in superior contempt. Just post the gad-dang story without preening your feathers.

Masks.

People who don’t wear masks.

People who wear masks walking the dog, making you feel stupid for not wearing a mask, but c’mon, man

People who were tweeting three weeks ago about how this was basically Ebola-TB-HIV-Norovirus that would turn every hospital into a stinking morgue because we had six, maybe seven ventilators in the country, and are still striking the same apocalyptic tone on a day when this happens:

The inexplicable disappearance of my favorite TP brand. It just ceased to exist. Same with Purell. Did they reset the Matrix and someone forgot to load certain brands?

Plastic shields at store checkouts. We all wonder if those are up for keeps now.

Busybody news stories about the things we shouldn’t be doing, as if we should all be riding stationary bikes for an hour every day while watching self-improvement documentaries about “self-care strategies.”

Morose news stories about how we shouldn’t feel positive, because everything sucks, which would be more compelling if the author hadn’t been preaching the gospel of Miserabilism before this struck.

Broad assertion of powers over everyday life in the name of Science, because we all know Isaac Newton was one of the authors of the Constitution and slipped the “Trust the Models” clause in somewhere in invisible ink, and it has absolute authority.

Anything having to do with Joe Biden, which seems like a review of a play that has been running on the East End since 1967.

TV shows full of people living ordinary lives as we knew them, because they seem like documentaries of Jazz-Age Flappers doing the Charleston a week before the crash of ’29.

And so forth. In short: