Minipocalypses

Remember when you were a teenager and everything bad that happened seemed like the end of the world? And you just couldn’t make your parents understand how much your life was OVER because you let out an audible fart in the middle of English class right as the guy or girl you had a crush on was giving a presentation?

That’s not an example drawn from personal experience, by the way, but there were other occasions as embarrassing, and certainly there was a lack of perspective on my part that maybe the zit breaking out on my nose before the Winter Formal wasn’t on the scale of, say, the Black Death. Call it the minipocalypse, I suppose.

So yeah, it’s weird seeing people in the U.S. gathering in rallies, often with guns, for the purpose of… demanding a decent haircut. It’s honestly the sort of stuff I would have written as satire, but is really happening and is happening in all seriousness. It’s downright surreal.

We’re not exactly caged up despite some of the hyperbole spewing around. Hell, my friends in France aren’t allowed to be more than 3 miles away from their home right now or the police can fine them. No such restrictions are in place in America. Heck, if anything we’re shifted in the other direction and hell bent on returning to business as usual.

I can’t help but feeling we realized (belatedly) that the bridge was out, but all we did here was pump the brakes a bit and now we’re not only coasting blithely towards the plunge but hitting the gas. There’s a lot of minipocalypses to speak of as a result of the crisis, and not all as petty as a shaggy head of hair. Lost revenue, lost jobs… these aren’t non-serious matters in their own right, but on the other hand I grew up part of a family where your health and the health of those you loved were always the top of the list of considerations, so if you tell me my favorite sushi restaurant can welcome me back to dine-in at the cost of a mere 100 more people dead, well, I’m going to wait on that bowl of fresh miso soup.

I’ll go further than that perhaps. My program where I was going to eat drink and be merry as much as possible through the crisis (provisioned through cautious trips to the store plus delivery) ran smack into a diagnosis of adult onset diabetes. I’ve never been the healthiest person with the healthiest lifestyle, but I was holding steady on the glucose front last year and so I think this year’s housebound state broke me as I dropped to next-to-no exercise and drinking way too much soda and alcohol. I was just trying to cope, and now I’m denied that particular route of coping.

But still, if I step outside my own perspective, even something as serious as diabetes is a minipocalypse. I’m in no hurry to potentially contribute to a capital-A Apocalypse by venturing blithely forth before a COVID vaccine is available, especially now that I’m squarely in the “high-risk-of-death” group.

I figure I can survive a few more bad hair months in exchange for surviving, period.