Survival

Direct quote, the other afternoon? “I didn’t survive cheap tequila and Southern Comfort in high school, just to be taken out by a virus named for crummy mexican beer.”

“Corona Beer is skunk.”

Offices around me are closing, a number of retail places have all “temporarily” shuttered, too. Panic at the Costco is the new theme song, as is the rejoinder, “Limit one per customer.”

Panic buying, then hoarding, to some extent?

Reminds me of the lines a few years back, when the then-threat of the hurricane, not the aftermath or eventual destruction, but the threat of the hurricane caused long lines at the gas pumps.

Same event.

Not totally the same event, but similar emotional content. While I haven’t seen this before, does anyone recall the crash in the 80’s? Or the dot bust? What was the name of that dot-com dead pool? Y2K, and its commiserate fallout?

The last lockdown, I remember, I was living in a trailer in old south Austin, and the towers came down. Didn’t really cramp my style, too much.

Saturn is in Aquarius, and Jupiter is in Capricorn. I was thinking more about Jupiter than anything else — the putative “ruler” of Sagittarius — Jupiter retrograde from mid-May to mid-September, making an educated guess that’s the downtime for the virus and its inspired panic.

In the best Shakespearean voice, “All hail Caesar,” with a definite nod towards the play with the same name, Julius Caesar.

Survival

Panic at the Costco, and then, thinking forward with the process of concatenation, which was already an ongoing process, but thinking it through? I have to think about long-term, and what I want, long-term.

While I wasn’t “ground zero” for the AIDS epidemic in the 80’s? I was ground-zero “adjacent,” and that bled over into my own life.

Still, I live in South-Central Texas, albeit, on the other side of town, now, from the airbase, where the quarantined passengers were sequestered, if my data is correct. All my local events have shut down, for the time being, with one promoter agitating to make sure we’re back up and running, seeing people in person, before too long. I’m less inclined to take risks, now. That’s going to be me, taking it in the shorts, with loss of income.

Close to a dozen years ago, as part of an effort to reach out and grow, at one ‘self-help’ (and marketing) conference, I learned that I was already moving in the right direction with much of what I was doing. I did, of course, learn all of this the hard way, but my mistakes have always benefited my clients.

I’ve been device and location independent for many long years now.

Survival

I tend to avoid risky behaviors, except that I did need toilet paper. But other than that, yeah, I tend to avoid high-traffic areas as much as possible. However, it is that season again. The cedar pollen is gone, and the juniper pollen is fading, but now the Live Oak is dropping whatever it is that it drops, leaving a thin film of green dust — pollen — all over every horizontal outdoor surface.

While the seasonal allergy isn’t too much, with the notion already stuck in my head about watching for telltale signs of the virus?

I spent seven long years in Arizona, mostly in the Valley of the Sun (Phoenix area). Eventually, a form of valley fever caught up with me, seasonal allergies that look like a harsh cold, and the body reacts as if it were viral. With that in mind, there’s the local version, of which I’m prone if I’m not careful, Cedar Fever.

No fever, and only the barest tickle in the back of my throat? Nothing I can’t fix with herb tea and western drugs.

All good so far, but, as they say? “We are monitoring the situation closely.”

Two-Meat Tuesday

Two-Meat Tuesday – Kramer Wetzel