Hello friends. As I begin writing this it is the 165th day of March, 2020.
I am in another one of those “notes from quarantine” moods. Nothing too serious, just looking at the world from the window next to my desk and thinking about traveling. I said in my Morning Briefing the other day that I’d like to travel just to get tangible confirmation that I haven’t merely been imagining other places all these years.
One theme that has been coming up again and again with my friends and colleagues is that we may not be out of this as quickly as we think or want.
To be sure, some Herculean efforts to put lipstick on this pig that is 2020 have been made. But they’re not working. Some kids are going back to school in a kinda/sorta/maybe fashion that will probably only last a few weeks. Once a certain number of public school teachers test positive, the unions will strike and take to the streets in a series of “mostly peaceful protests” to demand better social-distancing protocols.
Yeah, I know they’ve already been doing that, but I mean in even greater numbers. Once that happens, the kiddies will be back at home and a thousand new craft cocktail recipe-sharing Facebook groups will be born overnight.
The return of baseball — which I yearned for — has done nothing to assuage the ennui. I was excited at first and listened to a few Dodgers games. Then I began watching highlights on ESPN, which is my habit this time of year. Not gonna lie here, sports fans: those cardboard cutout fans in the stands are like something out of a Stephen King novel. Watch too much of that crap and I guarantee that THEY WILL SHOW UP IN YOUR DREAMS.
Hearing crowd noise without any crowd being there is beyond distracting to me. I can’t enjoy the games. I’m actually grateful at this point for the Pac-12 canceling the football season so that I don’t have to deal with fake college football noise.
I have been joking for years that I have these moments when I am convinced that we are all Sims who are being played by some alien super-being teenager who’s bored out of his/her/its mind.
This endless year is making me move more toward believing that. My moments of feeling it seem to occur more frequently.
Worse yet, I feel like we’ve hit one of those points familiar to those who have played the Sims games where the Sim hits a glitch and gets stuck in a room.
That’s my feeling here at this point in 2020. The alien teenager playing the game is just going to leave it on to go eat alien Pop-Tarts and not bother to hit alien Google or YouTube to figure out how un-glitch us.
Stupid alien kid. Probably named Chaz.
Here’s a sentiment of mine from earlier this week:
It's only Tuesday and this week is already the longest month in the decade that is the year 2020. #KruiserFeelings
— SFK (@stephenkruiser) August 11, 2020
What all of this means is that I think I’m coming to grips with the fact that my formerly pessimistic view that our COVID woes wouldn’t be resolved until early next year may have been a bit optimistic. We could still be in the same place this time next year.
What worries me even more is that I’ve been right about so much of this.
If, as I now believe, this nonsense is going to steamroll into 2021 with no regard for New Year’s Eve and the “hope anew” vibe that goes with it, then I’m going to spend more effort finding ways to shake things up from this Sims glitch room.
If I can’t get back on stage with any regularity to work out material, I’ll start making more videos. Maybe the new normal is me telling jokes to the Ron Swanson bust and memento mori skull on my desk.
If Joe Biden becomes president, I promise to organize a talent night at the re-education camp.
There will be fun though, I promise. If I have to do it all myself I will.
Have a wonderful rest of your week, my friends, I’m off to start a Facebook group.
___
Kruiser Twitter
Kruiser Facebook
PJ Media Senior Columnist and Associate Editor Stephen Kruiser is the author of “Don’t Let the Hippies Shower” and “Straight Outta Feelings: Political Zen in the Age of Outrage,” both of which address serious subjects in a humorous way. Monday through Friday he edits PJ Media’s “Morning Briefing.” His columns appear twice a week.
