Death becomes us

Saturday, March 7, 2020

Jimmy died at precisely the wrong time.

With his history of predicting world ending catastrophes he had to pass away before the world caught up with him and developed a hysteria over a new virus taking over the world.

Media is pumping up the fear level to the point of madness.

Last week a woman at the Job Lot kept talking about how she needed to gather together as much water as possible in case the water supply gets contaminated.

Home Depot all the contractor masks have been sold out and not to contractors.

“We just can't keep up with the demand,” one of the salespeople said even though experts say the mask won't keep out the virus anyway.

 With a shortage of masks, one woman in the subway yesterday wore a plastic bucket on her head and walked around that way.

I was the only customer at my local Chinese restaurant last night – and the three bikes for delivery were idle.

Trains are suspended, sports games postponed. Eateries are seeking ways to feed the public without actually having to have anyone touch anyone else – as if the internet didn’t already go too far in isolating human contact.

Most people don't even show the symptoms when they test positive.

And most that do get over it within a week or so like a bad cold.

But because this has become the headline of the moment people are in a panic.

And their Panic scares me more than the virus does.

As I said, Jimmy would be having a field day with this because he has been somebody who has claimed the world will come into some calamity before he dies.

He was right but it wasn't the calamity that he predicted. Panic like all things tends to spread like a disease. And there is no mask to block out the media blitz that we're getting that help spread it.

Of course, this is the only thing that feeds into Jimmy's world view.

We have climate change nuts who are like Chicken Little telling us the sky is falling – or is it the rising sea?

My favorite is the insanity connected with the recent images from Mars.

Nutcase people are going over every inch of those things looking for signs of life that the scientists can find.

It's not that I trust science these days which has become the voodoo of our time. It's because I have heard all of this crap before the wackos from the past who used to wrap aluminum foil around their heads and hear the voices from space without the benefit of any radar.

At least, Jimmy had a sense of humor when he waited for the earth to flip over because Antarctica ice was building up. Or when he took NASA images and put raccoons on Mars. I thought it was absolutely great.

He was convinced that X-Files was real, and that the government was hiding the truth behind lies so as to be able to discredit anybody who actually points to them and says yes Invaders from space or really here.

Whenever the subject came up with Jimmy, we listened to it as if we listen to a fairy story, never taking it too seriously, but enjoying how much effort Jimmy put into telling the tale.

I'm still not sure how much he actually believed or just like old fisherman he was pulling our leg and seeing just how far he could take our imaginations before we suspended belief.

It is almost as if he died on purpose and this is the final chapter in This magnificent tail.

Or like John the Baptist no longer needs to be here because the world has finally reached his level of madness and he no longer has to baptize us into his weird beliefs.

With all his the hysteria that media is pumping out, I miss his voice -- not as a voice of paranoia but as the voice of reason -- because clearly he did not go far enough to actually match the extent people will believe bull shit.

 I am pretty sure somewhere in the cosmos Jimmy is laughing his ass off.