My therapist, who I won’t be seeing for the near future to the detriment of my psyche but for the safety of the fixable patients that traffic his office, has been hounding my ass for months to find a day job to get me out of the house since I routinely I go days at a time without talking to anyone but my cats.
Little did he know my training in the dojo of crippling mental illness would give me the perfect wartime skillset to socially distance myself during an epidemic unseen by anyone currently alive.
I’m 33 years old and have endured the dot.com bubble collapse, 9-11, historic wealth inequality, two endless wars, a global financial meltdown in which no criminal banker went to prison, an opioid epidemic caused by Big Pharma, the election of Donald Trump, and perhaps a global pandemic… maybe Joe Biden can find some empathy in his heart for young people.
Instead I’m sure he’ll blame us when he loses the popular vote to Donald Trump because promising wealthy donors that “nothing would fundamentally change” in a country rapidly heading towards the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression.
I’m sure some of you thought I was being an alarmist last couple weeks about the threat of the coronavirus. Maybe if that fink, Mayor Ginther, had subscribed to The Rooster he would have taken it a little more seriously himself.
Ginther rightfully stood with Mike DeWine in keeping the Arnold Classic and its karate tournament with 20,000 spectators from all over the world out of downtown Columbus. So he clearly saw the threat coming down the tracks.
Yet somehow, after Ohio State closed and Mike DeWine closed all public schools, Ginther decided to walk out in front of the media on the Saturday before St. Patrick’s Day and advised his constituents to put themselves in imminent danger for the sake of the local economy that would soon look radically different.
From Bill Bush, Marc Kovac, Mark Ferenchik and Max Filby of dispatch.com:
The city is temporarily halting shutting off residents’ city water and electricity. Ginther said there is no need to buy bottled water as the city’s tap water is safe to drink.
It’s safe and important to vote this Tuesday in Ohio’s statewide primary election. Ginther said it was important that people go about their daily activities.
“My wife and I are going out tonight to a restaurant,” he said, encouraging people to still support local businesses.
Spoiler: It is not safe to vote in this Tuesday’s election. Most poll workers are senior citizens.
Coronavirus is deadly because it can take to 10 days to show symptoms and you’re contagious the entire time. South Korea’s testing (they do 10,000 a day while we’ve done about 10,000 total) has shown patients, especially younger ones, can also remain asymptomatic while spreading the disease to more vulnerable populations.
I expect the worst out of Ginther at all times. And I’m still stunned the mayor of a city the size of Columbus (metro population over 2 million with 50% of the United States population within a 500-mile radius) to “go about their business” as if we’re battling the ghost of Osama bin Laden and not a contagious virus that appeared 70ish days ago.
It’s likely the flippancy that got reported in the local paper — of course without any pushback or fact-check — will result in the death of an untold number of people.
For example, the Short North was packed all weekend with either selfish or uniformed idiots who would rather pretend they’re invincible than drink beer at home. This poster from the Baltimore Department of Health explains why crowds of seemingly healthy people are a threat to public safety:

If you had told me in 2018 that by 2020 I would be praising Mike DeWine’s call to close all the bars in the state two days before St. Patrick’s Day, I probably would have shot you in the knee for the blatant disrespect.
I’ve since learned pandemics make for odd political bedfellows. DeWine made me proud of the Ohio government for the first time in as long as I can remember yesterday when he shut down bars and moved all restaurants to carry-out or delivery only.
I still wish he had gone further to mitigate the inaction of the states surrounding us.
DeWine’s bans should have also included places like gyms and movie theaters. And if we’re going to keep food joints and other places of business open, we need guaranteed paid sick leave for employees so they don’t go to work with a cough and infect co-workers who take it home to their families.
I worry the Republicans will be drag their feet on these issues because Ohioans will realize it’s something they should have had all along while Republicans stood in the way of common-sense benefits that workers in literally every other industrialized country in the world enjoy.
That’s why, in an effort to keep as few unemployed people from claiming their earned benefits, Republicans’ disdain for working people has left the Unemployment Compensation Fund at a “dangerously low level” according to The Columbus Dispatch in a national pandemic.
Miss me with the “We need to remove politics from this pandemic!” holy rolling, too. Politics is what got us into this pandemic in the first place and going forward will be the arena where we decide who gets to live and who gets to die. It’s literally impossible to remove politics from this response and anybody who says otherwise has a very simple view of the coming effort that will be required to save us from disaster.
Angry idiots who can’t be troubled with concern about a worldwide pandemic predictably packed the bars Sunday throughout the state until the 9 p.m. cutoff.
From Dayton Daily News’ Josh Sweigart, who visited the Oregon District in Dayton:

Good job, assholes. Hope the coronavirus was worth spending your last few days of freedom dressed as a leprechaun and ripping shots you’ll soon realize you could have done at home.
Make no mistake, there is only one group in Ohio that has a right to be angry, and that’s the workers suddenly out of a job:
I warned all my regular bartenders last week that they needed to be prepared to lose their job within the next week. They all nodded in agreement — as people working for tips often do — but I don’t think they believed me on account I’m one of those guys that drinks three Tito’s-and-sodas and morphs into Vladimir Lenin.
I worry for my friends. While financial aid (rent/mortgage suspensions, waiving credit card deadlines, freezing evictions, etc) will eventually come because it simply must come, I don’t think politicians that have spent their entire careers shredding the social safety net realize the precarious economic position in which their efforts have left millions of Americans.
Most workers in my neighborhood of Franklinton probably could only survive for two weeks without an income. And those are the ones who don’t suffer from from drug dependency.
America could have prepared these workers and industries for this reality months ago. We could have crafted legislation to expand unemployment benefits and get the money into hands of workers the day they lost their jobs.
After all, there’s at least $2.8 billion sitting in Ohio’s rainy day fund. And it would definitely have made 500,000 people in those industries feel secure in the belief that no matter what, their government would not abandon them despite bungling the response to coronavirus.
The irony is low-information voters on which DeWine has built his career lambasted him as a “tyrant” on Twitter.


“What other state is doing this?” multiple dipshits asked. Hours later, Washington, California, Massachusetts, and Illinois followed suit.
We didn’t prepare. The federal government that 63 million Americans voted to run like a business failed us. Not only did Trump fire the pandemic prevention team two years before a global pandemic, he’s spent the last three months downplaying the threat to millions of Americans who see his every word as divine prophecy:


Republicans have harvested anti-science dipshittery in their party dating back to televangelist Jerry Falwell weaponizing abortion to unleash the Christian Militant Right into politics and almost defeating Ronald Reagan in the 1980 Iowa Caucus.
Forty years later, here is one of the strongest sperm to ever escape Falwell’s crinkly ballsack:


These ghouls (on both sides of the aisle) have perfected poisoning the well of politics that most Americans can barely stomach having a vague interest in the next presidential election.
That means there are idiots in very powerful positions throughout state and local governments that have been deputized in leading the fight against an unknown plague.
Here’s the governor of Oklahoma on Friday night in a tweet he quickly deleted:

I haven’t seen a primary care doctor since I was 26. Do I feel healthy? When I’m not hungover, absolutely. Would I be shocked to learn I had an unknown heart condition? Not at all.
I planned to visit a doctor in Cuba on Thursday. That’s off the table. I foolishly thought Centrist Democrats would see the light and turn to Bernie Standers so I wanted to wait until after tomorrow’s primary.
Now I have to cancel a dream trip because I was out in public this week at small gatherings but I realized I didn’t know what kind of precautions everyone else had been taking.
I don’t say that to virtue signal as a veteran or whatever. It’s just I can barely live with myself, let alone if I found out I gave the bug to somebody’s nana and she croaked.
I’m self-quarantining myself for 10 days to issue an incubation dawg-check to my immune system because god knows our decrepit government already fucked the pooch on getting tests throughout America and artificially deflating the number of cases throughout the country.
We denied Germany’s free offer of tests before President Business Deals, in a barbarous panic at his shrinking stock market, tried to poach German vaccine researchers and distribute their potential cure only within America’s borders, as if our health isn’t tied to the rest of the world’s. (Which brings me to my next point: Forever cancel all genocidal sanctions on Cuba, Venezuela and Iran. They only harm the citizens of those countries and demonization serves the interests of the United State military industrial-complex.)
So, yeah. This is the current society within Ronald Reagan’s famous City on a Shining Hill:
You should probably avoid rural church gatherings, too. Fox News is an authority in those parts and it appears the Christians aren’t taking heed of a possible biblical plague soon to grip the country.
From Jose A. Del Real, Julie Zauzmer and Amy Wallace of washingtonpost.com:
“One pastor said half of his church is ready to lick the floor, to prove there’s no actual virus,” an Arkansas pastor told me. “In your more politically conservative regions, closing is not interpreted as caring for you. It’s interpreted as liberalism.”
If you’re not scared, you’re not paying attention. However, it’s good to be scared. It means you care about your loved ones and other people around you.
Just don’t let it cross into panic. We must remain calm and do our best to manage anxiety.
If you have conservative family members — especially older ones — please talk with them about the risk they take every time they step outside. Rush Limbaugh is telling millions of old people every day that it’s all a hoax, and when his listeners start dying in two weeks he will seamlessly shift to the invasion of China. God willing, cancer eats that racist pig’s brain before then.
This is not Armageddon. You do not need 50,000 rolls of toilet paper and a cache of weaponry. You do not need a nuclear’s winter-worth of canned beans. We will survive this.
As much as I am surprised by Mike DeWine (with big ups to Dr. Amy Acton) leading the charge on this, it’s still bad news for America that governors in states like Texas, California, Washington and New York City are lagging behind DeWine’s definitive action as this virus doesn’t sleep.
Kentucky’s governor Andy Beshear refused to close bars and restaurants in Kentucky, and thousands of Kentuckians come into Ohio every day. Not to mention the thousands of Ohioans who visit Kentucky every day, too.
If you can socially distance yourself, please do. If you must go out in public, only go for essentials at home and keep your distance from strangers. If you visit with anybody, make sure you know who’ve they have interacted with.
Have they distanced themselves for over 10 days or have they been posting on social media like a jackass about how “nobody in Ohio has died so what’s the big deal?”
Those are the people that could get you or your loved ones killed.
You should have indoor and outdoor clothes now. Put your outdoor clothes in the washer as soon as you get home. I know, it sucks. I also thought we would get at least one year of Roaring 2020’s before our global economic collapse. It’s probably easier than having coronavirus, though.
Take solace that we’re in this together for these next couple weeks while the incompetent Trump administration tries to play catch-up on preparedness they should have been doing since at least January. We’re all we have until then.
If you have somebody besides cats in your quarantine cell, feel blessed. I can only pass the time by posting 10,000 times a day. At least I’ll either be dead or have a medical degree by the end of this.

THOSE WMDs. Deep clean, and then clean again… Liquor, marijuana and guns are also popular coronavirus hordes… Losing the Flyers’ Cinderella season looms over Dayton…. How Nina Turner’s old Ohio rivalries foreshadowed her time with Bernie Sanders… Most Ohio metro areas lost workers in 2019.