Unsolicited Advice

Still not dead. Yay. Still horrified by the course of history. Not so yay. Although I recognize that the odds are overwhelmingly in favor of me surviving this mess regardless of what goes on outside, I find the suggestion that old people should totally be okay with drowning in their own frothy lung fluid as long as it keeps the money flowing abhorrent. Do they know they're saying this out loud? Do they understand that the main mass voter base that put them in power to begin with is angry that gun stores are "non-essential" businesses because they're running on a paranoid survival instinct? Has it not registered that they, too, will run out of toilet paper (or food, or clean water and sanitation) if the proletariat just sits the fuck own and refuses to work under these conditions? On my part, I've been home for the past two weeks. I have an anxiety disorder that tells me to avoid all human interaction when I'm over-stressed, and just this once it's fuck...

I am not handling any of this at all well. As previously mentioned, I am not at high physical risk from SARS-CoV-2. I have plenty of medical issues, but none of them are relevant to respiratory infections. I have also not been outside of the house for over a week. Either I haven't caught it and I'm fine, or I have caught it and I'm still fine. It has become increasingly clear that I am at high risk psychiatrically. I've already got a diagnosis of "anxiety disorder NOS", which as far as I can tell is med speak for "fuck if I know, have some Xanax". I have spent exactly 0% of my life receiving effective medical care for this, and that includes the percentage of my life I have spent receiving literally any medical care for this. Usually what happens is that I muddle through life by stubbornly doing things, self-medicating when there is nothing to do, and self-monitoring for points where personal stressors plus world events conspire to create a cr...

Hello from the plague-ridden city of Boston! I wish first reassure everyone that I am fine. I am at no particular risk of catching the novel coronavirus, and if I somehow defy the odds and come down with COVID-19, I am mainly in danger of spending a couple of weeks with a really shitty cough. The hospitalization pattern for this thing is a lot like that of the seasonal flu -- the very old, the immunosuppressed, and those with restricted lung function, otherwise known collectively as 'people who get pneumonia a lot' -- with the interesting twist that, much like varicella zoster, young kids seem to be much less affected. The COVID-19 experience according to both CDC graphs and trip reports from redditors who have tested positive for it is that otherwise healthy people who aren't super old and fragile get to sit through the flu. I did that back in November with the regular rogues gallery of viruses and am not eager to do it again, but at this point I have better odds of landin...