A Collection of Fluids

I never really thought of myself as the kind of person who has a lot of friends. I don't bring that up to elicit any kind of sympathy or as self-deprecation, it's just that people, by and large, are not really my kind of people. The kind of people most suited to being my kind of people are kind of like... have you ever spent a lot of time in, like, a park with a pond, with maybe some benches around the shore of the pond? And you go there wandering on your own, maybe in early spring, and from a distance, you can just enjoy ducks being ducks, observed but uninterested in the observation or the observer, just going about their prosaic duck business without introspection or abash? My kind of people are the ones in the park leaving me the fuck alone so I could look at ducks.

Wait, you didn't think I was going to say my people were like the ducks, did you? And not just ducks, but grubby, scrawny, scavenging park ducks? Fucking city ducks? Come on, I'm prone to misanthropy maybe, but I do have standards. City ducks. Come on. Fuck you.

What I'm finding surprising and comforting is that this roaring cacophony of nightmare entertainments has really been bringing into focus who my friends are the depths to which we rely one another. Every event/outburst/calamity/happening/instance/confluence-of-shit-rivers in the news feed spurs a debrief of one tenor or another: sometimes rage, sometimes tears, sometimes incredulous laughter... OK, it's almost always rage. But sometimes we laugh in ways that are not the resigned laryngeal chuckle of utter defeat, like an almost genuine "ha-HA!" instead of three lower-case "ha"s followed by a sigh long and low enough that it can only be the sound of a human soul deflating. It sounds sad, but if you do it with someone else, it can really bring you together in the ways that only shared psychological trauma really can.

But not so close together that we're going to risk giving each other the fucking plague. It's a mediated, electronic together, with phones and little tiny cameras and sometimes dozens of miles of distance in between, well out of the range of transmission. The only virus we're giving each other is some viral meme of a fly in Mike Pence's hair or some shit. We're all pretty aware of the dangers of the actual coronavirus. That has been around for like 10 months now. And is in the news. A lot. A lot.

What kind of a fucking asshole would knowingly put themselves--or worse, people they love; people whose livelihoods rely on their care and vigilance; or people too ground down by their own sense of worthlessness that they cease to take any heed for their own safety or the safety of those around them--at risk by flouting the most basic guidelines of not just public safety but basic hygiene?

Come on, you know this is rhetorical. You know it's the same type of a person who honestly (and I believe this is honestly how his rotten butternut squash of a mind works) processes information like: I had a sick... I had a medicine... I has less sick... Medicine is cure!

The friends I'm genuinely surprised to have, I cherish. There aren't a lot, but even if they were legion, I would not have a one to spare. This is the only thing every debate should be about: one of the parties is indifferent to poison. I've lived long enough to learn some of the subtleties of politics, so I can tell you that's usually a dead giveaway for what kind of a regime you're dealing with.