in which i wish i could trust the society i live in to not be ignorant fuckheads.

went to the store today and a shocking number of people were unmasked, like at least 20%

saw three tweets tonight about breakthrough covid. one has damaged lungs, a damaged heart, and is in kidney failure.

went to the cdc site and i’m eligible for a booster, so i scheduled one for next week.

up to half the people who come into my workplace are either entirely unmasked, or they unmask to eat

i’m not high risk, like, i’m not immuno-compromised or ill, but jesus christ, no vaccine is perfect and any one of these fuckers could be asymptomatic and this disease KILLS perfectly healthy people all the time

in fact, if you’re unmasked i just assume you are a carrier and stand as far away from you as i can because your lack of masking probably indicates that you’re not doing anything at all to stem the spread of this disease

covid will never be over, because a third or more of the country “don’t believe” that covid is destroying people’s organs and over a thousand are DYING every day, we’re literally having a 9/11 every single fucking day but people think it only affects sick and fat people who somehow are disposable? what if i happen to LOVE somebody who is ill or old or fat but otherwise has a perfectly normal life expectancy, do they deserve to die because YOU won’t get your shots or wear a fucking mask?

the new normal is that you or someone you love might come down with covid and in the space of a month need organ transplants or be dead, because society just won’t comply with SIMPLE mandates: vaccinate, distance, mask, and wash your fucking hands

this shit is not a cold or flu, it’s putting people, including children and athletes, in the ground every single day

and it’s unutterably disgusting that for many, a death is ONLY sad if the person didn’t have pre-existing conditions. tons of people have pre-existing conditions (because thanks to science, we live with them now rather than die from them)

a person with a congenital heart defect is not less valuable than you, nor is somebody with diabetes, or someone on blood pressure meds, or with asthma, or ANY CONDITION AT ALL. they deserve to live just as much as you do. i mean, how valuable are you to society? what do you do or give that makes you deserve more to live?

probably not much.

if you’re healthy, it’s not a virtue. it’s not your smoothie habit or exercise regimen, it’s not your idiot herb supplements, it’s your genes and your environmental experiences. it’s a combo of luck and privilege. and if you live long enough, you WILL EVENTUALLY develop a so-called pre-existing condition, dumbass.

and you may be against “big pharma” now, but one day, if you don’t die suddenly or in an accident first, you’ll see the results of your blood draw and they’ll tell you that you need meds to LIVE, and you’ll fucking take them. it could be anything from high blood pressure to cancer, but you’ll take the meds. everybody does BECAUSE the morality of capitalism in medicine, while a big goddamned problem politically, becomes irrelevant when you’ve got something that can be managed with meds but will otherwise kill you.

anyway, get your vaccinations and boosters. wear your mask. avoid crowds. wash your hands. just don’t give me covid, because there’s a small but non-zero chance that it might fucking ravage my organs and/or kill me because sometimes that’s what happens because vaccines are not perfect: that’s why EVERYBODY NEEDS THEM to STOP THE DISEASE

you ignorant, insular, selfish fucking cunts.

in which this was gonna to be a twitter thread but it got too long

remembering how broke i was my whole adult life (basically until entering middle age), and how i accumulated debt just being alive because it cost more to live than i ever earned, and how jobs have steadily degraded since i started working, i cannot even fathom how fucked it must be to be 20-something now

jobs REALLY suck now, and there’s no memory of prosperity or meaningful growth, just the mindless, cancerous greed of mega-corps

there are two reasons and two reasons ONLY that i’m doing okay now, and they’re entirely good luck:

– i spent my 40’s living with a relative for free, so i paid off my debt instead of paying rent and utilities
– i lucked into a partner who has more earning power than i ever did

i can now buy groceries without first checking my balance, i can buy clothes i don’t strictly need, and i can even take modest vacations

i have no wealth and no equity (i’ll die if i get truly sick), but i have more than $400 in savings

i consider myself rich because i can donate

i was born into the upper middle class on one side, and lower middle class on the other, but my parents slipped some, briefly, when them not being poor too would have helped me A LOT (college years, mostly) probably due primarily to divorce, and i slipped even further into, at one point, homelessness

because i never had any savings until about five years ago, and i’m 53 now

they keep talking about nobody wanting to work, but places like mcdonald’s and walmart literally have departments that teach their underpaid, no-benefits-having employees to apply for services like ebt and state health insurance

once you discover the hard way that getting a pittance of a raise kicks you off state insurance, why work at all? if you’re really poor, you can get things you can’t get working full-time in a lot of jobs: food stamps and basic health care

if you’ve worked any modern corporate job (walmart, home depot, mcdonald’s) with low pay, a toxic environment full of constant reminders that you’re replaceable, meaningless weaponized metrics, no bennies, random scheduling so you can’t do anything else (like go to school, raise your kids, or attend a funeral), time off requests routinely denied, you know it’s better to just not fucking work

you’re already poor even while working full-time or more (far too many americans have multiple jobs in an attempt to stay above water), might as well get rid of the stress of a shitty, abusive job, right? at least you can continue your ramen diet while reading, painting, or doing something that makes you mildly happy

i don’t blame anybody, especially in food or customer service, who have worked throughout the pandemic and now know that society considers them BOTH “essential” and disposable, who isn’t fucking working, fuck those jobs, fuck corporate america, fuck billionaires

In which I admit it, I’m feeling despair.

Multiple airlines, who want bail-outs because of the pandemic, have announced they won’t be requiring staff to vaccinate. This makes me glad I chose not to fly out to DC in October to visit my friend Stephen.

No, it makes me angry. Fuck those fucking dipshits. I haven’t had a vacation in two years. I could fucking cry, really, but there you are. We were going to go to his cabin and eat and drink and chill and it was going to be restorative and fun and lovely, but nah. I’m going to take a week off and DO NOTHING, IN MY GODDAMNED HOUSE, IN THE SAME GODDAMNED BUILDING I’VE BEEN IN FOREVER. I need a vacation, I really do, but Jesus.

Spread of Covid in Oregon is heartbreakingly, unnecessarily high. The governor is expected to announce a new mask mandate tomorrow.

Everybody who works at Fox is vaccinated, no matter what incendiary, evil bullshit they say on the air. It’s publicly documented. You can see fucking photos of many of them getting their shots after a second’s online search. But they say the most horrific shit to their viewers, literal lies or weasely “I’m just asking questions” bullshit that a lot of people frankly aren’t intelligent enough to see through.

One in four hospitalized with Covid in Arizona, which has already started school, is under twenty years of age. Yes, KIDS GET IT. Whoever told you kids don’t get Covid fucking LIED TO YOU.

DeSantis is literally killing his constituents, live, in real time, and… nobody’s doing anything about it? But he also wants 600 ventilators and a bunch of ICU nurses, because everything’s fine and Covid isn’t really a thing? HOW IS THIS FUCKING HAPPENING. HOW. HOW THE FUCK IS IT HAPPENING.

Several states have no hospital beds left because they’re all full of unvaccinated Covid patients. People ask why they don’t just “put up tents” like they did last year, but “hospital bed” doesn’t mean the literal, actual bed: it means equipment and, more importantly, qualified staff.

The staff that aren’t already dead due to lack of PPE are quitting in droves, because they’ve been in the trenches for over a year and they’re demoralized and exhausted. It’s too much to be intubating unvaccinated people who insist they DON’T HAVE COVID, BECAUSE THEY DON’T BELIEVE COVID IS DANGEROUS, or, perhaps worse, people who beg for the vaccine now that they are personally sick enough to “believe” in it, even though it’s far too late.

Every local and regional news tweet about Covid or Covid policy has hysterical, ignorant, enraged, racist replies underneath it. “Fake news!” they scream. Or “this is because of illegal immigrants!” Or “Covid isn’t dangerous, this is all lies!” I recently read an anecdote by a nurse describing a nurse educator who honestly believes that leaving milk in the hall outside the doors of the Covid ill will attract and trap the virus.

Fucking IMAGINE an adult, with a job in healthcare, no less (!!!) fucking thinking that’s how anything works! Civilization is FUCKED!

Don’t even get me started on the ‘zombies’ bullshit. Anti-vaxxers are fucking wrong and should, under no circumstances, be entertained or allowed in debates or considered in any way whatsoever, full stop.

There’s a doctor that has been tweeting Covid dead for the past year and a half. Just little blurbs, but each one IS A DEAD HUMAN BEING. Now he’s got threads of dead children, dead pregnant women, and dead Covid deniers who recanted on their literal deathbeds and begged people to get vaccinated. I never watch those videos.

A million fucking people are dead, hundreds of thousands are hospitalized, and WORST OF ALL: surviving Covid is often worse than dying of it. This disease does permanent damage to organs. This disease causes fucking brain damage.

But a full third of the population refuses to know any of this, because they’ve been fed some incredibly insane bullshit by Fox or whatever they’re poisoning their minds with. I don’t know why right wing media wants its viewers to be poor, get sick and die, but it clearly does. It lies, literally outright lies, and I can’t figure out why it’s not being stopped. These outlets are tearing society apart, fomenting hatred, deliberately and with malice misinforming the population on everything from a deadly motherfucking disease to immigration, and nobody in authority is even acknowledging it.

For the past month, I have been the only person wearing a mask where I work. (For reasons I can’t explain even to myself, I’ve only been wearing it in the shop front, with customers, and not in the kitchen with co-workers, but shit, my co-workers are just as likely to turn me into a carrier as customers. None of them are distancing or masking, and I’m not even sure they’re all vaccinated.

I worry about this not just because I don’t want to accidentally infect somebody’s unmasked child while handing it some cheese or ice cream, but because there’s evidence you can get long Covid even if you’re vaccinated and asymptomatic. I emphatically do not want that.)

Based on the maps, Umatilla county is lousy with Covid. The mask mandate NEVER should have been lifted. These fucking people drive massive trucks they don’t need, carry guns they don’t need, and have a collective IQ of nine. They’re full of hatred, selfishness, distrust, and racism. I mean, most of them are fine, one-on-one, for a short conversation, but they don’t even know how much they don’t know about reality.

The bar across the street from the cheese shop has been fully open for awhile now. I know this because the new bartender comes in all the time for lunch. He doesn’t wear a mask.

The world is on fire. Russia, Lebanon, Greece, the United States. All burning. Here, we’re on our, what, fourth? fifth? heatwave of the year. Drought everywhere, flooding everywhere else. Shit is VERY, VERY BAD, but everybody’s just trying to get back to their normal rate of obscene consumption of resources. Just look at fucking truck ads, for fuck’s sake.

We’re having a crisis of compassion. We’re having a climate crisis. We’re having a crisis of civic duty. We’re having a crisis of venality and greed. We’re having about twenty crises at once. I’m sitting here in my air conditioning, feeling like a bloated tick on the skin of the world because I honestly can’t figure out what to do to help. I try very hard not to be the problem, but how does one become part of the solution? I can see clearly what’s needed, but I’m none of the things that one needs to be to do any of what’s necessary: stop the filibuster. Kill the police and fund non-military responses. Cut the military by 75%. End the industrial prison complex. Mandate national Covid responses. Universal healthcare. Make healthcare non-profit. End all monopolies and monopsonies. Tax corporations. Tax the rich. House the homeless. Decriminalize drugs. Build high speed rail. Stop pipelines. Enforce anti-pollution policies. Fund the IRS. Fund the FDA and get all those snake oil ads off the air and out of print. Prosecute everybody associated with the insurrection. Prosecute Trump’s entire thing. Make it illegal for anybody in any public office to accept anything whatsoever from anybody because OH MY FUCKING GOD THE SHIT THESE ASSHOLES VOTE FOR. Spank Wall Street into a snotty, cowering mess.

Just for a start.

I don’t know how anybody can look at any of this, let alone all of this, and think it has nothing to do with them. OF COURSE IT DOES. If you get sick or injured in the next, say, year, you might not be able to get a hospital bed in time to save your life. Because either the beds will be filled with terminally ill Covid-deniers, or there just won’t be any qualified fucking staff, because society is so fucking broken that they’ll all be PTSD-ridden and homeless, or they’ll have been fucking deported for being “foreign.”

Maybe where you live isn’t much affected by climate change, yet, but somewhere nearby is, and the people who will be shortly driven from there will be in your fucking neighborhood, and you’ll have to deal with it then. And your ONLY CHOICES will be to either fucking help, like a decent human being, or hate them because you’re a goddamned ignorant, selfish coward who lacks the intellectual capacity to understand that it WILL be you next. One way or another.

We’re all in this together, and while it’s been, for a long time, possible to ignore it, let me tell you: the bill is coming due, motherfuckers. You have to love, and you have to care, and you have to do better, because we’re entering several extinction-level scenarios simultaneously. Disease, climate catastrophe, and worst of all, unchecked, unmitigated Mammon-worship.

There has got to be a way to stop so much of society from being totally fucking evil, doesn’t there? Imagine extracting wealth from healthcare and somehow sleeping at night! How the FUCK is that even possible? How is it a thing that there’s an entire insurance apparatus that just dictates life-or-death outcomes in ACTUAL HUMAN BEINGS for profit? It’s absurd, and yet there it is. How the FUCK is it that we send brainwashed, indoctrinated, armed soldiers to handle things like mental health crises or stolen cars in our cities and towns? How the FUCK is it that Congress just orders billions and trillions of dollars worth of war machinery that even the armed forces publicly admit they don’t want, just to line the pockets of the military industrial complex, and we all know about it and NOTHING IS DONE TO STOP IT? How the fuck is it that our society supports brutally razing homeless camps instead of, you know, giving them somewhere to fucking LIVE? We’re at the point where many of us actively hate people less fortunate than ourselves, and we don’t even question WHAT THE FUCK IS WRONG WITH US?!

If you ever find yourself hating, the very first thing you should do is ask yourself why, because the two worst things are hate and greed, and WE ALL KNOW IT.

A thousand times this.