Ho ho ho, Merry COVID!

haha holidays haha :’(

This was the first Christmas that I bought all the family children presents for. The presents are unwrapped, still in their virgin Amazon packaging I’d barely begun to open. Of course, I needed to buy gift wrap and tags and prepare all those things most folks with a minimum of common sense and organization have prepared for long in advance. I am not most folks. But for once, I did not forget, I did not run short of funds. I remembered.

Unfortunately, COVID does not care about Christmastime.

Instead of revving up for a manic present wrapping effort and anticipating reactions from the small ones, I am undergoing day three of my COVID illness.

I am decomposing on a full-size bed, and I can feel the bedsores accumulate. What is a sore, a bedbug bite, life? I am alive, yes, but without willpower, and as such I am effectively dead. I have lost my sense of smell, and I have not had a meal that wasn’t some variation of warm broth. I am surrounded by crumpled bags and half bitten gummies, a heap of carcasses that failed to appease my still-absent appetite.

Some strange weather phenomena stole the snow that should have long since fallen. Thanks, climate change, El Nino, La Nina, whatever — it all blurs together. The sky remains a white-gray backdrop to better expose the…