19 Blues 4 Covid

By Garrett Flagg

Hello. Is anybody there? If you are, I hope you’re not an echo. And I am not me talking to me.

Welcome to my stage. I call it Covid19 EmptyTheater. It’s my social deprivation chamber. Perhaps, you know what it is. If you’re like me and can’t stand it any longer, you break out past the barb wire and dump pepper so the dogs can’t find you. My destination?  During WWII, that would be the French underground.

Today, 80 years later, that would be Walmart, where all the frustrated partisans are roaming the aisles just to find … nothing. No Kleenex. No hand sanitizer. No peroxide. No ... you guessed it ... toilet paper. All I can say is--the virus did it. Definitely a Nazi invention. Covid19 is a glutton for paper. We’re done for. The dogs will sniff us out. Gerrys win.    

These are depressing times.

If you live alone, this means television, lots and lots of Netflix, You Tube, maybe. If you live with family and kids, you’ll want drugs, booze, something to grow the hair that’s missing. But enough of Corona, it’s what they used to call the virus, if you forgot. Me, I thought they meant beer. I was disappointed. I was okay with a beer pandemic.

It was about time anyway. After Y2K, 9-11, the comet that was to end life as we know it, the mountain cave we bought into to survive the big blow out, the recession that sent us back to work because we lost our shirts in the stock market, believing the market would correct--yes, it was time. Ah, there’s just no coming back from zero. 2012-- what a disaster that was! We bought condos in abandoned missile silos. We built deep underground military shelters. 

OK. Enough.

I’m retired. And I guess that many of us here tonight are also. Goodbye and good riddance to early get ups and the hectic 9 to 5. I know, some of you creatures of eternal habit miss it. When I retired, I acquired a new set of problems. Time. Lots of it. I began to notice I had fingers. I thought I’d take up bongos, join a Friday drumming group. I discovered online scrabble, words with friends I never meet. Facebook is full of friends a lot younger than they really are. If you want to get even with your English teacher, get them to join Facebook. Almost every post in that site is an incoherent, incomplete sentence. You’ll find rants with misspelled words, people named after brain dysfunctions. America is rich in smart people.

 I used to play tennis so I went to the courts and found a lot of old fogies in shorts playing doubles. They swatted away using midget tennis rackets. Overfed ping pong paddles if you prefer.  Pickleball. I didn’t know they made balls out of pickles. I was corrected, this modified tennis game for seniors, was named after a dog, Pickles. What a game! After one serve, exercise is over. Pickles grabs, runs off, you towel off, drink Gatorade and call it a day. High five! Anyway, I bought a paddle. I played. My flat feet gave out, my knees. I considered a kinder sport: canoeing. WTF, I already had a paddle. Then covid came along and the courts were padlocked. No rapids for me. That’s a B-U-M-M-E-R. 

Recently, I went back to teaching. Basic computing …for seniors. I discovered many of us never got past Lost in Space. that old black and white series featuring a robot that liked to warn Will Robinson of danger. I watched, you watched on television. Television, an easy modern contrivance like the radio, only with pictures. Turn it on, turn the knob, find a station and you were cozy good. Computers, laptops, don’t work like that. If they did, I wouldn’t be teaching the stuff.  

There are many things wrong with the laptop or desktop. A computer’s biggest problem is, well, it’s just not friendly. It is aloof and mysterious. No knobs, just buttons that like to hide. Finding the power button—that was a problem. Start and system, the icon that looks like a gear—near impossible. Email. HQ didn’t like that. Cell phones too. Before prohibition my students bought a lot of stuff, stuff they didn’t need, couldn’t remember buying. Stuff showed up at the lobby. Credit Cards were maxed out. Rent was delayed. It was a fiasco. 

What did I teach? I taught Google, especially Google Earth, where anyone can find the old town they grew up in, the house still being sold. Email? That was a pain. You needed passwords which everyone forgot, so you wrote them down on a notebook and promptly lost that. Eventually, we gave up. We opened our laptops, forgot about lessons, settled for stories. We joked a lot and got lost in high school and college. Life was simpler then. You kicked the kids out to the local park, neighborhood, or woods for some chill time. Now they stay home and go inside their laptops. Many never make it to the dinner table. Although I must say, computers are good for things like banking, research, writing letters and memoirs. It’s a whole office in a box, not to mention a secretary and a library. It would have saved us gobs of library time back in school, trying to find books that aren’t there, books with missing pages. Would’ve saved research quarters and dimes. 

If you want to join me, I’m going back to my salt water pod—to float in my altered state, in eternal dark silence, wearing ping pong balls over my eyes. I think I’m going to get the hang of social deprivation. I’ll dream of wild, crazy parties where the music is Disco and the beer is a dollar plus free food and all the guys and gals want to dance.  

Thank you for dancing with me. 

 By the way, Best Buy has some deals on antivirus software. It won’t keep the toilet paper from disappearing, so … forget going there. Save your cash. Just saying. Find the clicker and sit in your recliner. It beats getting up all the time to change channels. I hope your batteries are fresh. If not, things can get crazy. Good night!