"The toilette paper-apocalypse and the lung-butter that comes with it." (Part 6)
Welcome back readers, to the story of how I came to be living up here in the woods on this mountain.
To catch up, here's part 5: "Serious conversations, room mates, and existential dread..." And if you need more than that, here is the start of all this, Part 1: "How I wound up on this mountain..."
If you are current, below is Part 6.
Well, we all know what happened next. The Pandemic, the "VID 19", the cough that stopped the world. If anything, it affirmed why we wanted to move out to the woods and live in a cabin hidden away with the animals.
It all started in the east, the far east, or so we were told. In a wet-market in China. A place where you can buy all kinds of unsavory meats, perishables, and things that can go bad in horrible ways. Chronic, explosive, diarrhea sort of ways. Anyway, some idiot caught the bug that fucked the world up, not sure how accurate that might be. Some of the tin-foil hats said it was lab grown and released on purpose. Who knows? What I do know is it was reason a lot of Americans had dirty assholes for a couple of years. Yep, that's right, this was the the cough, that came stock with a dirty butthole.
Let me explain.
First off, the VID stopped the world dead in it's tracks, but it also proved how utterly ignorant and stupid we have become and how we forgot not just science, but manners, common since, and compassion.
Late in 2019 we heard rumblings of a plague from the east. It had been a while since some new and shiny disease had popped up- quite a while. Like decades. We can thank science for that. The people who study these things so the rest of us don't bleed out through our rectums or vomit up our intestines. And no, vaccines do not give people autism, that's just stupid and ignorant.
This thing was different. It was new, and people did not have an immunity to it, and there was no medicine that would take care of it either. Before you say anything, just shut up! Ivermectin does not cure the VID. Bleach does not fix the "China-cough" with finger quotes, as the our cheeto'n'chief once called it. It was the new-new cough and people were catching it right and left. It spread so fast. Worse, with millions of people traveling back and forth between countries, there was bound to be one person out there, a walking petri dish who would bring it here.
Sure enough. Early in 2020 we caught up with the rest of the world. There were reports of it here on the west coast. Then BAM! it was everywhere.
That's when the toilette paper apocalypse started and Americans were left with dirty butt holes.
At the time we had plans to sell our little corner house in August / September of that year. We were prepping the house and getting things ready. I was also taking classes at the college to get another college degree. I wasn't going to have to pay for it. In fact if it hadn't been free I wouldn't have done it. America didn't go straight to masks, social distancing and working from home right away. When the VID made it's appearance, we weren't social distancing at the time and we weren't wearing masks, yet. There was, however, a growing tension as more and more people fell sick. Then one day it happened.
It was like the panic reached a critical mass. Suddenly all the toilette paper was gone. That was how we knew we'd arrived. People started scalping the toilette paper. Stealing it from restaurant bathrooms. Price gauging it, and hording it. Yes, it was the toilette paper that broke the panic damn.
Then it was the hand sanitizer. Then the baby food. and from there it was "etcetera", e.t. fuckin' c. But the toilette paper? Of all the things to go first, the toilette paper is what flew off the shelf. Stores had to ration it. This didn't affect my family that much, we have butt-baths on all our toilettes, and have for a long time.
It shocked me how panicked people got, including members of my own family. No one was thinking clearly or calmly. I didn't want to be a part of the panic, and for the most part I wasn't. We did buy a substantial amount of meat, when possible, we got supplies, tooth paste, and other essentials. This mitigated how much we had to leave the house. At that point we still knew nothing about the VID or how dangerous it could be.
We knew it was unpredictable and we knew it was super easy to catch. We also knew that the people at with the highest risk for it were people with compromised immune systems, which meant that members of my own family, living with us were at the highest risk. My biggest worries were how fast it mutated. I knew that it was only a matter of time before it found a better way to be dangerous. That's what makes these "churn and burn" diseases so bad. They may not have your number this time around, but who knows what they will be like the next time you catch them?
Things just kept getting weirder and weirder. People started calling it the "plandemic" as if that made it any less dangerous. People started fights when business owners asked them to put on a mask and social distance, as if it was there right in someone else's place of business regardless of the other people in the store or that science behind disease control. Crazy assholes on the boob-tube started recommending injecting bleach or ingesting horse de-wormer as a cure. And still, others thought that doing nothing was best, like a big stupid ostrich with it's head in the ground and it's asshole up for the fuckin'.
Worst of all, the people who had the best advice, the virologists and the pandemic specialists, the scientists who actually understood what was happening and how dangerous it could get were vilified and demonized. We lost a million people to the VID that year. It was not as bad as it could have been, certainly no 1918 flu, but still we lost more than we should have. I knew people personally that it killed.
So, people started working from home. Supply chains were broken. Stores ran out of items. Hospitals didn't have enough supplies. And irreparable harm was done to the economy. Which led to angry people and bad decisions, but we'll get to that in a later episode.
I can remember what happened when people sneezed in a super market, despite wearing a mask. If it was you, suddenly you'd be standing alone on an isle all by yourself. A cough, well that was way worse. People were not kind to each other during that time. Come to think of it, they haven't been for a while now.
All the while we were trying to sell our house. As it turned out the "lung butter" was super good for the sale of our house, but not so good for us finding a place to rent while we built our new one. Because inflation!
Has anyone seen that movie "Idiocracy"? Yeah, 2020 felt kind of like that. COVID started this weird slide into the dumbest apocalypse ever. A slow grind that turned the world upside down in the dumbest possible way. Shit so weird that the satire comics can't come up with anything stranger. We basically gave the car keys to the drunkest people in the room and let them drive us right into a telephone pole, and I am not so sure the car will start again. Even if it does, competent sober people might never drive it again.
Up next, Part 7: So you think you can inflation? No houses anywhere!
Cheers!
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