YOU CAN’T WIN
Maybe I should start arguing with the science
How does this even happen after more than a week in quarantine? Ten days to be exact? Am I an asymptomatic long-hauler? What would that even be? Shall I start taking Hydroxychloroquine? Ivermectin? Laetrile? CBD? CDB? CDC? PDQ?
Let’s try this again
Dear Vaccine Refuseniks,
I direct this letter exclusively to you who won’t get vaccinated, not at you who can’t¹.
I run across you from time to time even here on Medium, that bastion of reason and good sense. I’ve tried to be reasonable and point out the indisputable facts, but you know what? I give up. I’m done. People much smarter and more knowledgeable than I have explained it. Dying people have appeared in PSAs where they tell how they wish they had been vaccinated when it would have done them some good. One in 500 Americans are dead from…
Of rapid tests and PCRs, of choirs and bands, of theater, driving, and RSV
Imagine my shock at receiving a positive PCR test result. A real sucker punch, given the negative result of my rapid antigen test on the same day I took the PCR test. As an added bonus, it struck me full up-side the head with the iron fist of irony. The day before I had published a piece wherein I excoriated and wished death upon the willingly unvaccinated. As I worked on this article, that one fell under investigation for violation of Medium rules and was deemed inappropriate, so I deleted it.
Returning to the matter at hand, I got my…
UPGRADE FEAR
IT professionals debate intubation
When I saw this message it was like being in junior high school, asking a girl to dance. Such a head-spinning blend of fear and hope!
Unlike those heady days, here there was no choice. I mean, don’t you hate that? They make it sound like an invitation. “Improve your experience.” Whenever an app starts in about improving your experience you know you’re in trouble.
In app land there is no choice so I take a deep breath and click the big green Continue button. I blew by all that crap about who I was following and which interests because…
I KNOW FROM COMEDY CAMP?
You were my hero
“It’s all about what you grab, and what you leave behind”
- Janis Joplin
At least that’s what I think she said during the little bit of banter leading up to Get it While You Can on the album Pearl. Something like that anyway. None of the YouTube videos seem to include the banter and I don’t own the album¹. Even if I did I would have to hook up my ancient turntable to my ancient amplifier to my ancient speakers in order to play it.
All of those components are disconnected from each other due to the turntable having…
ALL ABOARD!
What lies crushed beneath?
I don’t think contemporary America contains many junk piles. If so, are they easily accessible to children? I tried doing my own research but became convinced the deep state is hiding the alien technology that once filled junk piles before Democrats ruined everything with their commie environmental laws. When I came to I realized this is no doubt a very good thing. I’m not sure that the thrill of childhood adventures made up for the effects of the toxic chemicals to which we boomer children were exposed courtesy of the so-called Greatest Generation.
Every lumber yard, gas station, manufacturing facility…
There are deaths and there are deaths
Telling your life story to a random stranger at a bar. What could be more classic, more cliché? Yet there we were. How did it start? I came here to meet up with a few of my band buddies. She may have been a friend of one of them. Whatever the case, what started as contemporary small talk — “It ain’t hardly over.” “We’ll be wearing masks for a long time, vaccinated or not” — soon morphed to enter upon the deaths of children.
How is it that the parents of dead children know each other? …
BEAT THE REAPER
A newsletter
Everywhere on Medium you find relationship advice, life hacks, entrepreneurial advice — in short, all sorts of life advice. But what about death advice? What about death hacks? Entrepreneurial death advice? What would that even be called? Entrepreneurial deathing? Yes, that would have to be it. Always verb the nearest handy noun if you want to maintain your coveted position on the very tip of any cresting wave of fashion.
Never fear, friends. We at MuddyUm will not leave you stranded in the fetid tide pool of death. Nor would we jeopardize our position on the very apex of fashion.
FLOPPIN’ KICKERS
If I see HUMOR in the kicker slot one more time I shall slap myself in the face with a dead fish
If you did your homework, you read the excellent articles concerning kickers by Susan Brearley,
And Rachael Ann Sand,
but this is not about the mechanics. This article concerns something else entirely, something that lay across my chest for some time like a sodden towel. I must unburden myself.
You really are dears, you MuddyUm Writers, but please. You know who you are. I’m in the pulpit now. If you detect a whiff of burning brimstone, that is not your imagination.
Consider the following selection of kickers
HUMOR
SATIRE
SATIRE
HUMOR
SATIRE
SATIRE
SATIRE
HUMOR
HUMOR
Do you see a pattern…
WHO?
Don’t look now but I think somebody just, like, died
The Providence Journal, Friday, August 9, 2041
Paul L. “Quasimodo” Hossfield
HOSSFIELD, PAUL L. “QUASIMODO” died in the dingy, crap-stuffed flat he rented in downtown Providence on Wednesday, August 7, 2041, aged 91.
Born at Hackensack Hospital, Hackensack, New Jersey on May 31, 1950, no one ever thought he would amount to much, and they were proven pretty much right. After abandoning his dreams of becoming a famous rock musician constantly besieged by screaming female fans, he put away childish things and went through a series of humdrum jobs, eventually settling into a position as senior manufacturing engineer at Mahr/Federal Products, Inc. of Providence…
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