SOYA

I’ve been out on a roof shingling.  It seems like I’m not bothering anybody. But the guys on TV are screaming, STAY AT HOME!!  Well, it isn’t my house, it is a rental.  Fortunately, what I am doing is considered “essential” but that is just some bureaucrat’s classification.  I could just yell at my renters, PUT OUT SOME BUCKETS!  If I carry coronavirus, there exists about 12 miles of atmosphere above my head in which it can diffuse, and nobody is within 60 feet of me let alone 6.  But here’s my question.  Since we now have lowered estimates to 60,000 people dying from COVID-19 this year, isn’t that about like flu?  And should we be asking what the trade-off is compared to depression, drug use, alcohol use, etc. from having people cooped up?  Maybe you are one of those people who say drug use never cost anybody their life.  Or you think the sum of all these things is only a fraction of a percent compared flu or pneumonia?  My instinctive thought is that this comparison is important.  80% (my estimate) of men are hard-wired to want to follow their dreams in life.  There’s another 20% that want to SOYA, “sit on your aimlessness.”  The rest of us are driven to be tops in a skill, produce and protect someone, to go where none have ever gone, or to leave the world a better place.  I have one renter who is on disability and dialysis.  He constantly frets to me about needing something, Anything he can do of value.  I suggest a lot of things-- seasonal tax preparation, helping his church, mowing lawns.  Liberals don’t spend time worrying about forcing some entrepreneur into bankruptcy by demanding he shut down too long. Well,I guess dreams don’t make noise when they die. Worse still, the media people seem to be locked into an urban world.  Yet we aren’t all concrete jungle bunnies.  Being outside doesn’t solve all coronavirus transmission problems but it enormously lowers probabilities of it. But no one on the tube ever mentions by how much.  And they run stories about how distraught a zoo was when a tiger got coronavirus, they think from the zookeeper.  Ho! Animals catch it! Hey, I actually long for the news that pit bulls spread the virus. I’ll prepare a memo to my renters. And I need to write Major League Baseball that if they want to play w/o fans, why not play at that place that was once a corn field in Iowa? Meanwhile, I’m up on a roof, enjoying clouds move in, gleeful that I fixed my nailgun with lithium grease. Not SOYA.