There is now a 99.9% certainty that you will die within the next one hundred years. There’s simply no escaping it: YOU ARE GOING TO DIE. So please don’t judge imbeciles buying three tonnes of toilet paper and locking themselves up in quarantine because they sprained a toe. Celebrate their vast concern for the community, even as they run you over with their overflowing Costco cart and water bottles on their heads.
As an abundance of caution, urban surveyors are now scouting caves, preferably ones with smooth walls to hold the rock art that will replace Netflix and Disney+. Anyone know how to scrawl a pangolin with a burnt stick? Your career is looking a whole lot more promising than mine. At least according to the media, which is doing a cracker job keeping the score charts ticking over. Every morning I wake up and can’t wait to see how many more are infected, and how many more are dead. Is South Korea threatening China’s dominance? Is Northern Italy giving Iran a run for its money. Europe v South America? It’s the World Virus Cup. As we count the beans, who has time to worry about gun deaths or drug wars or Syrian refugees or the Big Mango inviting oil and gas consortiums to drill for gold in the San Diego Zoo. Cheetoh Mussolini is obviously taking this seriously, appointing a Vice Presidential robot in charge, a bureaucrat who doesn’t believe in science, evolution, the dangers of smoking, or women. COVID-19 is just where we want it, shaking on its microscopic knees. Over in China, doctors are incentivized to raise future health alarms with one-way tickets to hard labour Kashgar re-education camps. In Russia, anyone claiming the weather is too warm is permanently Putin-dipped into frozen Lake Baikal. Fortunately North Korea is quite content, as the more of its people who die of COVID-19, the less mouths there are to not feed. As for travel? Well, we’ve been freaking out about overtourism for a while, the impact of relentless masses descending on places that used be great when we went there, but now that you’re going there, isn’t so great anymore. Since the only Chinese person still travelling is a mid-level pantsuit designer from Chongqing, overtourism has fast being relegated to history, along with other formerly pressing issues, like Rachel’s haircut, and Justin Trudeau’s fancy dress. It’s a rough, tough time to be selling meaningful global interaction, or any interaction at all.