...without which reality cannot properly function.
Of course I should see women on bicycles wearing surgical masks in the summer sun. It’s only natural that I should see a woman in a surgical mask jogging two laps on the track at Chapman Park. It’s perfectly reasonable that two grown men in different situations tell me cheerfully that they don’t mind being compliant—that’s the word I heard twice—with the arbitrary mask regulations and “social distancing.” I witnessed all of this over the course of the last full week in August. Despite flu season being long since over, the fear is as fresh as ever.
Sports, amateur and professional, are all but finished. No fans in the stands, why should anyone care? Almost all of the festivals and rituals that make the USA America have been canceled, while vandals and arsonists are permitted to travel from city to city, defacing and destroying businesses and statues and monuments, threatening citizens, and no one does anything about them.
It makes absolute sense that the world has gone utterly insane because Otis is dead. As of today, 3 September 2020, we are six months into the post-Otis world and I don’t think it coincidental that the world was seized and deformed by a panic over a non-existent pandemic one week and a day after the veterinarian and her assistant visited our house.
Nothing will ever be the same because it can’t be the same. Otis T. Cat, our family pet of 18 years, is gone. How else could things be?
Yes, I’m serious, and it’s okay if you don’t understand. You couldn’t. With Otis I mourn the passing of what once was and can be no more. Youth, vitality. Our children at home. Hope for the future. Things looked forward to.
So everyone and everything is stupid and crazy and nothing is getting better, ever? Q’uelle surprise.
Here’s missing you, Otis.
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