Resisting or Yielding to Temptations

18 February 2022

I was good. Really I was. I had considered showing up wearing a useless facemask, just to wave my dick a little. In fact, I was going to cover it first with safety pins, thus folding in an earlier schtick that was de rigueur a season or so back. That way, of course, I would be twice as safe. I think I’ll do that anyway, adorn my surviving mask with safety pins, so that it’ll be ready when a harried merchant requests or a bureaucratic thug demands it next. But I did not wear it to Sugar‘s ([and BUD‘s!]) house, as much as I was tempted to crow out how much I’d told the world this time. But I was a guest, and besides, I’m a coward, so I wasn’t about to stir up an unnecessary confrontation.

But avoiding provocation didn’t help, because out of the blue and apropos of nothing apparent, FP decided that she needed to look after L’Historienne‘s welfare, in whose home I will be living for the week or so it takes me to secure my own accommodations in Texas. “Has [she] been vaccinated (sic), and does she know that you haven’t been?” I assured her that L’H was fully aware of my jab-free status, and that she was also uninjected and uninfected with these experimental concoctions.

FP then had to go on and regale me with sad anecdotes about some of her “anti-vax” friends who (at advanced ages and with possible other compromises) had taken quite ill and in fact, in one case, actually succumbed. I agreed that that was very sad, then we sat awkwardly until pleasanter discourse prevailed. Maybe I should have expected as much, but I failed to reckon with how enduring a love of fear of Wuhan Flu® could be.