COVID Senior Lockdown, Day 40

40 days and 40 nights since the bars and restaurants were closed. Are masks now required where you are? Not N95 masks, the magic ones that keep YOU from getting IT. I mean the simple, handmade, flimsy masks and/or face coverings that are supposed to keep US from giving IT to OUR NEIGHBORS. Guilt on a par with my mother telling me to make sure my underwear is clean in case I am in an accident. This has become the last straw for certain folks of a certain age. I have noticed - not that I’m getting out much - that the mask thing is being treated more as a wink-wink social nicety than a medical imperative. I’ll do it if it makes you comfortable. I’ve been in more than one small shop lately where the proprietor is wearing a mask/buff/handkerchief around his/her neck when I walk/sneak in. I have a mask/buff/handkerchief around my neck, too. We assess each other via unspoken eye signals. You want me to wear a mask? No. You want me to wear it? No. As long as we don’t hug, kiss or otherwise violate social distancing, we’re comfortable. Common sense is taking over in a small, rebellious minority. But, I digress.

I posed this question to my Thursday Zoom Happy Hour buddies: What shows are you watching to kill evenings? I was surprised how many of them have found Ozark, a Netflix Original about a metropolitan family that runs afoul of a Mexican drug lord and moves to rural Missouri to launder money. Got that? It’s scary, funny, intriguing, surprising, and features many of the kinds of characters you’d expect to find in the Ozarks and some that you wouldn’t. Stars Jason Bateman, who I’m told was a child star on some shows I never watched, but plays an entertaining middle-aged guy with problems you and I wouldn’t want, like a crypt full of cash and poppy growing hillbilly neighbors. Highly recommended.

A show like this is akin to the soap operas our parents (and some of us, he admittedly guiltily) watched in their heyday. Those characters’ totally screwed up lives, what with affairs and murders and mysterious newcomers, made housewives (and occasional college students, he conceded hesitantly) appreciate their comparatively boring but predictable lives while vicariously living implausible adventures. Somewhere in the archives of Guiding Light, One Life to Live, Days of Our Lives, General Hospital, et al, is a storyline about a global disease lockdown and a president who suggests ingesting bleach as a cure. Ridiculous.

We’ve been wondering about our neighbor PJ a few houses down. He’s a do-it-yourself kind of guy. Needed a big tree taken down and brought in a contractor and a bunch of buddies as support staff. The tree came down by afternoon with only one close call, but the slicing and dicing of parts continued well into the darkness. Cue The Boss:

Hear the chainsaws in the night (all night)
In the night (all night)
Buddy, we don’t know how you do it.

Runnin’ chainsaws in the night (all night)
In the night (all night)
Count your fingers and we hope you live through it.

Found an old bug zapper while cleaning out the shed. I wonder whether Dr. Fauci has thought of that….