I’m listening to “Desolation Row” to cheer me up. Dylan has always been there for me.
But after more than half a century of trying to figure out what the Hell he’s singing about, I can mutter the words under my breath while still typing about this fire in a sinkhole of a year. Read on and you can decide if that’s a good thing.
Two questions about Bingo cards. First, did anybody have torrential rains, flash flood warnings, and overnight tornado watches in the middle of the second worst Covid surge while fires consumed huge tracts of the West at the end of the nation’s longest war? Second, do we continue using 2020 Bingo cards, or is there a new one for 2021?
More generally, what do we yell when the cards fill up? I don’t think it’s “Bingo!” I’m going with shithelldamnfuck myself, which the biennium from Hell, or in Hell, has turned into one word.
Yes, I know some people aren’t getting vaxed because medically they can’t. But let’s face it, they’re not the ones going to the grocery store unmasked and sneezing into the cling peaches. And some people have religious reasons, of course, but I wish they’d keep in mind that the snake they’re handling can also bite innocent school children. And me, for that matter, but I’m sure that concerns them less.
No, really, the people spreading this are the ones getting their science and politics from obscure shit-for-brains nail technicians and street-corner hustlers masquerading as doctors and pastors, respectively, on social media. The same people who can’t trust organizations that have been reporting the news since before the Civil War because their apprentice president told them anything was fake news that exposed him as a misogynist, racist rabble-rouser with severe narcissism and a worse dye job.
This was preventable. Those people could have been vaxed before they took their masks off. Intensive care and emergency departments wouldn’t be full and Covid wouldn’t be spreading in K-12 schools throughout the Valley.
“Desolation Row” has finished and Dylan is singing “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall.”
This didn’t have to happen.