I have named it: Mask Derangement Syndrome! On my morning walkabout, I used to leave my house like Rocky gritting up the last two steps of the Philadelphia Art Museum, “Gonna Fly Now” ringing in my ears. Now I slip out the front door, look both ways & up, then slip around the building for the alley-streets.

I will admit that I wasn’t ready, & then I was. Ready for masking. I knew when I reached the point of not letting it possess me, that I had won my victory. There is a reason why humanity is letting this get to them with such unhinged fear & it cannot be only of this fear.

In The Exorcist, the sound of angry bees was layered into the soundtrack as a subliminal. People were up out of their seats without knowing why, attributing it to the horror of the story. A young girl, possessed by demons… our very spines react in fight/flight. But how much of it was simply our nervous system vs. the sound of angry bees?

A whole world, possessed by fear of a virus born suspiciously of ill intent from a beast of darkness. We aren’t computer programs;  we don’t need constant viral updating & then “vaccine fixes.” (My real computer returns from each Microsoft “update” a bit more befuddled than before.)

While healing is not a business, although it is mistaken for one, it can neither become a whip with which to beat us. We take our chances with illness – we always have. Virulent, mild, all the in-between, all the symptoms & cures have been experienced & taken. What works is a bit of each & more common sense than all else.

Quarantine the sick, the healthy are needed out in the world to help them get better. Stop this masking. Your spit won’t make me sick & mine won’t you. This topic, plus the 6′ distancing are from books about fictional outbreaks, not from the current symptom list.  They were novels.

Sooner or later we all die. If I need to chance the death statistics of this one, I’m up. Because so much out in the public domain is lies laced in with damned statistics.

Can the doctors recover a reputation for truth in medicine if they report the truth of this? Is it worth believing them now when we could not before? When they endorsed Camel cigarettes? Do you believe the hospitals reporting a plague status, or the nurses all dancing in a complicated routine around an IV pole? Do you watch the empty hospital ship motor off while patients requiring isolation are walked in the back door of the local senior care centers to join the general population?

Where are you? My capitulation is announced by the mask on my face. I await the turn of circumstance that will return my world, whatever new scars it bears, back to me.