THE QUENTIN QUARANTINO LOCKDOWN BLUES

Stay Home Ticket

Now that the Coronavirus self-isolating routine has grimly settled into the heat and humidity of the long hot summer of 2020, the promise of a viable vaccine in record time by year’s end is a small distant thread to hold onto.  The Quentin Quarantino Lockdown Blues is comfortably settling into most living rooms around the world but we will persevere with the assist of all those creative folks out there with a sense of humor.  One sage wrote that “we can all agree that in 2015 not a single person got the answer to ‘where do you see yourself 5 years from now.’”  

A quick check of all the social media outlets where we now have time to burn reveals lots of quirky material.  Unfortunately, some have discovered that years like 2020 last for an entire year!  This has prompted many city dwellers to throw open their windows and shout “I’m tired of 2020 and I won’t take it anymore!”  A quick check of video clips from the 1976 movie “Network” has a Deja vu fact check that the world hasn’t improved much since then.  Peter Finch’s character, a veteran news anchorman who discovers that he’s losing his job, goes off with “We know things are bad - worse than bad, They're crazy! It's like everything everywhere is going crazy, so we don't go out anymore. We sit in the house, and slowly the world we are living in is getting smaller, and all we say is, 'Please, at least leave us alone in our living rooms.’”

As the boredom sets in, it has been observed that many children are named after places where conception occurred with names like Paris, etc., so we can now expect a lot of babies soon with names like Quarantine, etc.  Another deep thinker has raised a very pertinent question, asking “Has anybody let the Amish know what’s going on?”  And someone else pleads to “whoever started your game of Jumanji in January please finish it ASAP!”

Bored homebodies are starting to alphabetize their medicine cabinets.  A frequent flyer road warrior who is missing the airport destination codes like LAX and ORD has devised codes for our current travels like LVG, BTH, and MBR for living room, bath room and master bed room.  One meticulous housewife detailed a seven-day menu of “steak, burgers, spaghetti, Ramen, creamed corn, road kill squirrels, and dried grass with clover salad.” 

And folks are getting just more than a little irritated with celebrities being tested without even having symptoms while most are told to stay home and wash their hands all day.  We’re advised that the best way to get tested is to cough near a celebrity and wait.  While we’re on the subject, everyone is just about up to here with these millionaires living in West Coast McMansions singing “Imagine” on social media and lamenting that “we’re all in this together”. If this quarantine is the hardest thing you’ve ever had to do in life, you haven’t had a very hard life.

Finally, there’s an account of a nurse trying to comfort a man who’s coming out of a six-month coma as he slowly says, “Man, I can’t wait to go to a baseball game!”  Given the current dearth of sports on TV this weekend, I’ll be watching the World Origami Championships on Paperview. 

REGAINING CONTROL

Toilet Roll Frenzy, COSTCO

As I was navigating a local grocery store aisle this afternoon during what I thought was a slow period, I noticed more people than usual were shopping and they were stocking up on basics including a disproportionate amount of toilet paper.  I mentioned to the young cashier that I could understand folks buying basic food items and sanitizers in light of the coronavirus pandemic, but not the excessive amount of toilet paper, given that the need wasn't related to the flu symptoms.  She just shook her head and said she didn’t get it either but that it had been this way since the beginning of the week.

Driving home I thought about the rapid events that have unraveled over the past few weeks as this country watched the inevitable Trojan Airplanes and Cruise Ships disembarking infected passengers from around the world, knowing that there could be no escaping such a virus at the height of our flu season.  We are now embedded in a world economy and no longer isolated.  And when people are confronted with outside circumstances they can’t control, they turn to the one thing that remains—their response.  Psychological studies have shown over the years that reactions like the toilet paper frenzy is a subconscious behavioral attempt to gain a sense of control over this pandemic uncertainty.  It’s a sort of survivalist psychology.

And once the frenzy begins and gains momentum, everyone else is driven by the fear of a shortage which manifests into a self-fulfilling prophecy.  Soon social media kicks in to fan the flames of hoarding from images of long shopping cart lines and empty shelves surrounded by crazed shoppers wrestling bags of toilet paper from each other!  Then there is the hapless woman in Australia that attempted to hurriedly order a bag of 48 rolls and incorrectly hit the “Buy Now” icon for 48 bags instead, translating to a sixteen-year supply for her family and a bill for $3,264.  The good news is that due to the frenzy, she was able to sell the excess at a nifty profit to help finance her daughter’s education.

Just within the past week two phrases in the news have bubbled to the top of our lexicon—social distancing and self-quarantine.  But social distancing hasn’t gone too well in the big box toilet paper aisles and the threat of self-quarantines and locked down communities has fueled the flames of hoarding shoppers.  All of this frenzy in spite of the fact that the supply chain was working fine.  Gallows humor, grim or satirical humor in a desperate or worrying situation, has also surfaced such as the emergence of a quarantini drink that has replaced the martini, only you drink it alone.

As one muse opined, “Rumors, fears, and conspiracy theories have been spreading faster than the virus.  People will do what they do, especially when it comes to doo-doo”.