Computer Says "No"

I was going to spend some time before I started here fixing the post I threw up (almost literally, more on that later) last week in the panic realization that I'd forgotten to post on Thursday, which I've been doing almost every Thursday for like... Jesus, 13 years here now. I tried to post from my phone, which never works, likely an artifact of the reality that Blogger predates the iPhone by like decade and a half. And I tried to lead with a gif* of some Nazis' faces melting and heads exploding, in what used to be an automatically acceptable sight back in the days where being anti-fascist used to be a default assumption in the discourse of western political thought. But then I was kind of depressed considering the recent events reversing a lot of default assumptions about the way our polity functions. Plus I kind of accept now the technical failure of the posting as a penance for my lack of timeliness in its creation. The fact that I'm not sure how to reliably get a gif to work in this format is just going to have to be a technical footnote subdued by the emotional reality.

Emotional reality is of course the only one left with any kind of currency anymore. There aren't a lot of other reasons why people would be rejecting a proven-safe and effective vaccine in a pandemic and opting instead for horse medicine. We've reached the thing they've been warning us about since the invention of mass media back when the first broadsheet was printed (and probably before that, let's be honest), where the messaging is loud enough to drown out the message, even the critical ones.

Sometimes the facts on the ground bleed together with the emotional stuff. Events this week went like this: meet someone online. Set up a nice first date. Have a nice first date. Come home to a live-in offspring experiencing some kind of symptoms. Send awkward text to very-recent-first-date saying I'm going to have to get a COVID test just in case and I'll be in touch with the results. Get a text the next day politely rethinking a potential second date.

I get it. This shit is stressful. We're at the point where even among the vaccinated, there is no clarity, no real freedom of movement, no safety. No safety. The one thing we had to learn to live without, the one thing we were promised (to some degree) when the vaccine came flying out of labs and into our (temporarily deadened) arms.

I can be slightly stoic about this stuff, the push-pull of online dating, or as it's known by now: dating. This one kind of stung as it's someone I had some actual hope for, who aligned in personality and logistics. The second one seems unromantic, but at 47, there's nothing quite as lust-stoking as someone who doesn't have a roommate and all their kids are adults. And if they live within a half hour, Jesus, that's ground for marriage even if they talk with their mouth full or are a Republican or a dude.

Well, maybe not a Republican. It's not that I don't think I could adapt, it's just that I know they don't take the medicine.

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*I'm an agnostic on pronunciation here. Go with god.