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.