When I Say Normal...

I want this time of day to feel optimistic to me again.

Because times are what they are at the present juncture of Space and Time and Us, a kid can take a lot of flack for wishing to be "back to Normal," because there's an inevitable refrain from the chorus that "Normal wasn't working!"

And I get it.  The old Normal wasn't working.  Life wasn't fair and the world was a shit-show and people were assholes.  And right now, people are assholes, the world is a shit-show, and life isn't fair... but with COVID-19's specter hanging over us.  There's an exhausting emotional aerosol in the air that sets us on edge and makes us ugly toward one another.  

When I say I want to get back to Normal, what I the mean is that I want to be able to go out and about and not feel like I'm out in the hall without a pass in high school.  I'd like not to have to wear a mask or see everyone else wearing masks.  I'd like not to have feelings of anxiety and panic as they relate to paper products and how much I have left in my house.  

I'd like not to have to worry about whether or not there'll be enough food for us all, come winter.  Think of all the meat-processing plants shut down in the Midwest right now.  Think of all the news-stories of crops being plowed under because there's nobody to pick them and nobody to process them into canned food or frozen food.  In the Northeast, canned and frozen is what helps us survive comfortably in the long winters.  

I'd like to be able to just pick up and go to the grocery store and have the biggest worry be that I remembered my reusable bags.  

I'd like to be able to go to Target and just wander around like I do, and buy nonessential things just nonchalantly, and not feel like an asshole for doing so. 

I'd like to be able to watch this season's hockey teams play.  It'd be Playoffs right now.  

Yeah, it'd also be kind of rad to be able to go get a haircut.  This isn't something I'd take to the streets or the steps of the Capitol to protest, because when I hear the voices of the Scared, it really is petty to put split ends ahead of Saving Lives.  

But holy shit.  

I think that in addition to hair and nail salons and dentists offices and schools, the "If It Bleeds, It Leads" news media should have had to be shut down during this quarantine, as well.  It isn't the bad news that bothers me; it's that the bad news is all there is.  Bad news gets attention, attention gets advertising, and advertising is where the money is.  They've got us whipped up into a frenzy.  

And I hope there's a special place in hell for Social Media Fear-Mongers.  People.  Just because you read it online, doesn't make it true.  Just because someone's wearing scrubs, or a white labcoat, it doesn't mean they're a doctor.  It doesn't mean they have any authority at all to say the things they're saying.  It's likely those people are just after their fifteen minutes.  There are a lot of sick othertruckers in this world who have zero f*cks in their pockets to give about Truth or What's Right, so long as it gets them attention.

I want to get back to Normal, where there's some excitement in the air when the Back to School stuff turns up in the stores after July 4th.  Heck.  I want to get back to Normal where we can celebrate things like July 4th with parades and fireworks and picnics.

I want to get back to Normal where we're allowed to have a sense of humor.  We haven't had that in a while.  It used to be fun to laugh.

When I say "Normal," I want this reptilian Fear that has us all by the throat to go away.  I want us to be better than we were before, and I think we will be, for a while.  I hope it sticks, after this present cataclysm.  

I'm not looking for a fight when I voice my desire for Normal.  When I say "Normal," I mean I want it to be the opposite of whatever the hell this oddness is that we're existing in right now, with no option to Just Get Weirder.

That's all, Friends.