February is a dour month. On the heels of sad January, it languishes in winter, sometimes cold, sometimes snowy, seldom pleasant. It is a month that dashes hope.

We all deal with winter despair differently. Some of us take up drink. Others lie in bed with the shades drawn. Amy Bishop decided to take a RugerP95 handgun to a biology department meeting on February 12, 2010. Amy, who had already been informed that she would not be receiving tenure, was apparently feeling a trifle aggrieved. Pow pow pow- three dead. Pow pow pow- three shot. The affluent child of an art professor, Amy had earned her PhD in genetics from Harvard. In fairness to Amy, academic department meetings do suck.

To properly appreciate this episode, it is important to have a bit of Amy Bishop’s history. When she was 21, she fatally shot her 18 year-old brother with a shotgun. Bishop and her mother told police that the shooting was an accident. Strangely, a live round was found in the shotgun, meaning that Bishop had to have racked the slide after the incident. Perhaps that was just a reflex. We don’t know. What we do know is that Amy’s mother was a big political supporter of the police chief in town. As per normal police protocols, the police chief shut down the investigation and ordered that Amy be released into the custody of her mother.

But there’s more. Amy also allegedly held up a car dealership at gunpoint demanding a car. And then there’s something about Patrick Duffy’s parents (the guy from Dallas) being killed in Montana. But that was really ever followed up on. And then Amy and her husband were suspected in 1993 of sending two letter bombs to a Harvard medical school professor. Furthermore, Bishop assaulted a woman who had taken the last booster seat at an International House of Pancakes. Bishop demanded the seat and the woman would not give it up, Bishop punched her in the head while yelling “I am Dr. Amy Bishop!” Bishop pleaded guilty and received probation. Prosecutors recommended that Bishop attend anger management classes. But she didn’t.

But there’s more. After her tenure was denied, a colleague of Amy’s described her as crazy. Amy complained, alleging sex discrimination. The colleague was unmoved.

“I said she was crazy multiple times and I stand by that. This woman has a pattern of erratic behavior. She did things that weren’t normal- she was out of touch with reality.”

Additionally, her students hated her and said she was a poor instructor. They also said she had “odd, unsettling ways.” Anyway, eventually she was denied tenure which, as we have seen, did not sit well with Amy.

Did I mention that Amy is the second cousin of John Irving, the famous novelist? (He wrote The World According to Garp and A Prayer for Owen Meany). Maybe he is a semi-famous novelist. Literary people have heard of him. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t read any of his books. I’m reading one right now. I am just pointing out an interesting fact.

In the end, Amy ended up in prison. It’s sort of like the story of Ethel Kennedy’s nephew, Michael Skakel. He killed a girl and then got away with it for a long time and then finally he was brought to justice in spite of the Kennedy’s best efforts to keep him from prosecution. Well, actually the Connecticut Supreme Court eventually ordered that Michael be given a new trial. And then they said he wouldn’t be tried again.

So, he’s out. Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. blamed the murder on the live-in tutor at the time. You can never trust the help.

In the book I am reading, John Irving describes a rich girl who can do what she wants because she can always fall back on her family’s money. While a semi-famous author, it appears clear that John is not overly familiar with irony. At least personal irony. He is pretty good at pointing about the irony in his character’s lives.

There are some lessons here.

1- Always get your mom on your side if you shoot your brother.

2- Make sure your mom knows the police chief if you shoot your brother.

3- Pipe-bombs aren’t that dangerous. They don’t even go off some of the time.

4- Michael Skakel is walking around in public.

5- Harvard graduates are the best people and should tell everybody else what to do.

6- The Connecticut Supreme Court likes money.

7- Always bring a weapon to your department meetings.

8- Even if everybody knows somebody is crazy, it doesn’t matter if they fulfill lesson number 5. And they are related to John Irving. Though I am in no way intimating that John Irving approves of Amy’s behavior or really even knows her that well. I do think that he went to Harvard as well.

9- Biology department people are not fast moving.

10- This is just another reason why Americans hate science.

11-Even Dominick Dunne can’t ensure justice in this country.

12- Most Americans don’t know who John Irving or Dominick Dunne are.

13- Nothing will happen to Prince Andrew, either.

14- And, most importantly, always keep your hands up at IHOP, especially if you just grabbed the last booster seat.

Today, my workplace took away the mask mandate. No longer must I walk around, visage concealed, plotting my next armed robbery. It is quite a liberating feeling. Oh, sweet, sweet normalcy that I had taken for granted for 50 blissful years. You have returned like a lost paramour, enveloping me in your warm embrace. Of course, the pandemic is not necessarily over. But I am not in the business of quibbling over minor details. Freedom once again triumphs over all.

Having removed my mask (theoretically for good), I am inclined to review what I have learned from this most inconvenient of pandemics. Reflection, after all, is good for the soul. What follows is a laundry list of the many lessons I have learned from this once in a lifetime experience- those over the age of 102 excepted.

The first lesson I learned is that people don’t pay attention in science class. It is clearly too difficult and ought, I believe, to be stricken from the public school curriculum. Clearly, any lessons about disease and the purpose of vaccinations were lost sometime after polio was eliminated. Prior to that, people were overjoyed to be vaccinated. Nobody wanted polio. That was terrible. Enthusiasm for vaccination began to wane sometime after. Well, unless we are talking about cattle. Cattle are vaccinated for everything. Even Coronavirus. The bovine brain cannot comprehend the dangers of vaccination. Or so I assume. Regardless, while many of the local farmers remain adamantly anti-vaccination, they jab their dairy herd as if the lives of these animals depend on it. Eh. Maybe there is no lesson here. Cows aren’t people. They have udders. And they moo incessantly. At least my neighbors cows do. Two in the morning. “Mooooo. Moooooo. Mooooo.”

Ridiculous. Insomniac, bovine bastards. I can’t sleep as it is. And what in the holy hell are they mooing at? Aren’t cows diurnal creatures? You know what I think it is? All those damn vaccinations.

As noted, science is difficult. And you can’t even see a lot of it. Take germs, for example. I can’t see them. I know they can use microscopes to look at them. But how many of us have a microscope laying around? More importantly, and I am sure this is true of most people, I wouldn’t even be able to tell if I was looking at the coronavirus. It could be a dust mite, for all I knew. Or a water bear. There are some ugly, little bastards. They kind of look like the creatures in Tremors. Except that they are microscopic. And they don’t kill people like Graboids or coronavirus. At least I think they don’t. I am not an expert in water bears. Which is really my point. How do we know that anyone is an expert in anything that we can’t see? It’s unverifiable.

While microscopic entities remain largely unknown to the general public, capitalism remains front and center. We might not care about dying in this country, but we sure as hell care about making a buck. There were people hoarding toilet paper and cleaning supplies and everything else others need, and then price gouging them like JP Morgan on steroids. JP Morgan, there was a nice fellow. But that is history. And Americans hate history class nearly as much as they hate science class. I don’t know why. History actually happened. Unlike the Big Bang and polio. Speaking of history, do you know that Columbus left a kid to watch the Santa Maria and this resulted in the Santa Maria being sunk? Then we named a day after that guy.

Another lesson, and related to the Santa Maria story, is that Americans love to celebrate stupidity. If it is not their own stupidity, then the stupidity of others. The dumber, the better. Inject myself with horse steroids? Why not? Dewormer? Awesome. Protest the medical community trying to keep people dying? Yeeeehawwww!!! That’s the Cowboy Way. It was also the Cowboy Way to not take a shower for a month and then contract syphilis in Abilene after the cattle drive was over. In those days, there was no cure for syphilis. It was either a slow, horrible death spiral or put a bullet in the brain pan. That was why whores were often known as “Brain Pan Bettys.” Another little known fact lost to the annals of time.

Anyway, we made it through. Well, most of us made it through. Or most of us have made it most of the way through. It’s not important. What is important is that it’s not whether you care about anyone else, but how much toilet paper you have in your garage. Or it isn’t whether you die or not from a preventable ailment, but whether you never admit you have it. Maybe it is bleach is good for killing lots of things. It could be that Cows Lives Matter. Masks are Nazis? If only Nazis wear masks, then only Nazis will have masks? That one didn’t make much sense.

I guess I didn’t learn any lessons. It was a pretty good Super Bowl, though. Super Bowl 56. I can remember watching Super Bowl 11. Raiders over the Vikings, 32-14. Sammy White got his head knocked off his body by Jack Tatum. I loved football when I was a kid. That was before the halftime shows. Now they have Snoop Dogg and Mary J. Blige and Eminem. Think of the money that went into that halftime show. Incredible.