These are diabolical times. It’s impossible to find anything positive to say about the killer microbe — the lonely deaths, the suicidal isolation of being shut away inside.

Not to make light of any of that, one possibly positive result is that it killed the rat race.

Now, instead of rushing around crowded, noisy, savagely competitive cities like lunatics trying to make as much money as we can, we sit around in our safe houses happy to have what we’ve got. Most of all our health.

BREAKING NEWS

Water flooded New York’s Lincoln Tunnel on Tuesday as drivers were bumper-to-bumper during the evening rush hour.

“Well, that’s concerning,” commuter Anthony Consiglio said in a clip posted to Instagram. “I’m inside the Lincoln Tunnel, which is underwater. I’m pretty sure there’s a movie about this and everybody dies.”
Port Authority officials closed the tunnel’s left lane for “emergency maintenance” after a water main in the Center Tube ruptured. The water was eventually pumped out and commuters went on their way.

THE OFFICE OF THE FUTURE

We work from our homes, teleconferencing and all the rest of it. Some of us teach ourselves to be chefs, thereby eating healthier. We read more, thereby becoming amateur philosophers and thinkers instead of professional go-getters and stinkers.

In pre-covid times we bitched and belly-ached about the pressure and dog-eat-dog world of riding packed subway trains or buses or gridlocked freeways to get to work where we slave like hell only to see most of our earnings go to the government. And then we fight our way back home for a harried meal and a sleepless night and get up early the next morning and do it all over again.

Now, instead of rushing around crowded, noisy, savagely competitive cities like lunatics trying to make as much money as we can, we sit around in our safe houses happy to have what we’ve got. Most of all our health.

WE YEARNED TO ESCAPE

How many times did we say we were going to quit the rat race and escape to a saner more livable life? How many times did we wish that?

Well, ladies and germs, that wish has become a reality, gruesomely disguised in the creepy corona of a microbe. Let us determine to destroy the invisible beast, but let’s hang onto the new lifestyle, enjoy it, revel in it, make it work, make it prosperous, turn it into new opportunities, become home bound entrepreneurs.

Just don’t let it become a nightmare of illness. Take the necessary pain-in-the-ass precautions. Wear the damn masks when you go outside, resist the natural social instinct to congregate in large groups — that’s the hardest of all for us gregarious humans — and not only will you survive, you may prosper and be happy.

One last thing — don’t watch any more TV news, it will drive you insane. Watch old movies on TCM, or reruns of ‘The Munsters’ or Simon Templar’s ‘The Saint’ or as my friend Daniel Taylor in The Netherlands suggests, check out the podcasts.

Don’t be a rat, be a cat.

We now return to regular programming…

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