You can’t drink coffee through a face mask. I’ve tried. You can give your upper lip a fairly good burn and make a royal mess of a shirt front, but it is not an enjoyable way to have coffee. A hot chocolate would be degrees worse.

With my unreliable stock of patience near its limits I decided to face reality head on and in fact scoff and mock the users of mere N95 gear.

The N95 crowd and their like are able only to fend (an interesting word to look up, ahoy) off tiny little invisible particles of germ world while the moist eye portal is left vulnerable.

With the addition of a fencing mask (I was never very good at it but did find pleasure in slashing people who expected a prick from a foil) I feel admirable safe from large airborne germ colonies and their satellites. That’s protection!

A semi-transparent garbage bag worn over that rig adds a higher order of safety except for not being able to see very well and increasingly bad air quality.
Protective gear puts enjoying the great outdoors on the problematic side. But better safe than sorry, right?

The uncertain future is best faced when suitably protected. This is in fact something readers are familiar with, though possibly not with personal recall. We wore protection for our own sake and out of consideration for those around us. It was called a diaper.

On bottom or face, the function is much the same. In my case a face diaper could be an improvement.

I’m a bit puzzled, having too little else, I suppose, to occupy me, why the sanctuary movement has stagnated on immigrants when there’s such a large fertile field of other worthy candidates for succor.

If classification as a person voids legality (no such thing as an illegal person they say) then why is this useful concept not applied to all classes of people?

I wait for a city to open its encompassing Californian arms to embrace illegal beauticians/barbers and medical practitioners who merely lack documentation.
What’s important, people or papers?

It’s high time indeed for sanctuary salons to form a new cutting edge of people’s power. A trendy salon could even be named cutting edge or people’s power or both. Think of it, pure democratic freedom at work.

But being realistic I think we’d need an entire sanctuary state or two to accommodate all the drivers formerly seen as unlicensed or uninsured. Hair needs are common, but our getting-about needs are greater still. A sanctuary state for “illegal” drivers could prove a safety measure for the rest of us.

It was with some surprise I heard the U.S. Canada border was to remain closed for another month. There goes many a spring fishing trip and possibly the futures of the small resorts and camps used (and I have to add loved) by visiting fisher people. (It’s Canada, after all, where fisherman and human are sexist racist insults.)

But as resort owners and guests can be seen as already overprivileged it’s OK, a small price for justice.

Of course it will hurt if it is your livelihood, hard work and future shut down in lock down. That’s why we have sage voices of authority to remind us of the greater good.
Having your income lost or knee caps smashed by thuggery may hurt for a time, but later on you’ll be thankful knowing the true value of a penny or of taking a step without pain.

I don’t know where the idea came from or how it struck me, but was suddenly hit by the vivid impression of Canadian Premiere Trudeau, a precise model of what a government under the sway of Greta Thunberg would do with imminent human pandemic demise added to global climate catastrophe.

A whiny 16-year-old with a solid footing in fear should be able to whip those forces into fight-everything form. Trudeau and Thunberg are much the same person or emotional being (hard to decide) with a slight separation of decade. (Does this make Justin and Greta spiritual equals? Theologians help me.)

Proper minds (an area where religious and political thought sometimes meet – scared now?) tell me not to make fun of others’ fears. Fears are real. They should not be mocked.

It is a human (we’re in the U.S. so it’s still OK to say that) requirement to take others seriously and believe what they say (their truth) as whole-cloth legitimate.

I am obliged to emphatically agree that fear is absolutely real. At age 10 if I woke with a foot near or over the edge of my mattress I was up and awake so quickly I hit the ceiling and had to aim for the safe dead-center (an irony) of the bed. Nothing else mattered but the secure safety of middle mattress, far from the deadly edge.

An equal mystery of how I was able to leap completely free of pajamas as I flew ceiling ward was completely overshadowed by the certain horror of the thing lurking under my bed that would pull me down to doom and damnation were I to carelessly let a foot stray to the edge where the monster thing could get me.

What it did during the day or why I could find no evidence of a lair or gap beneath my bed for it to live were small matters compared to the wild fright knowing that damned thing lurked waiting for a misstep that would turn me into snack time for a mysterious monster beast.

I wouldn’t have cared if my entire grammar school class saw me a huddled pink ball trembling huddled in the middle of my mattress so long as I escaped the horrible thing under the bed. The fear was real and recurrent. It shaped my behavior and thoughts.

Well, you know what happened. I don’t have to tell you the outcome.

A fear will need be faced. A way forward will be sought.

I prefer a future minus diapers, but we’ll see.