each succeeding year in our young century gets stranger & stranger.  i am nearly at a loss for words & words are my business & my life.  humanity has suffered famine, war & disease.  yet, this pandemic, our reaction & actions to it, is unprecedented in my 50+ years on this blue marble.  a couple of weeks ago i was reading some dude on the internet advising those who would listen to start to stock up on necessities like food & paper products.  i thought yeah sure.  two weeks later the store shelves are bare.  it is panic buying but panic buying forces its own logic, & those who would resist it might succumb to panic buying because the shit that we need may not be there when we run out at home.  it might've been an overreaction but i did buy about a month's worth of paper products, & earlier this week, before social media started posting pictures of long lines, filled carts & empty shelves sans food, i purchased a couple weeks extra victuals.  the guy who posted his warnings a couple weeks ago stated that if he is wrong you got some extra stuff you will use anyway.  i agree. i hope the stores don't run out of beer & coffee.  horrors!  now, the news changes by the hour.  schools announced they would close for three days next week to do some deep cleaning.  today, the school district issued an announcement that schools will be closed until the end of the month.  again, in my 50+ years on this clamshell i've not seen this kind of reaction to a virus.  ever.  until now.  as a society we are on pause.  the song, 'life in wartime' by the talking heads is on constant loop.  we are shuttering our doors.  even disneyland is closing for a couple of weeks.  we are such a capitalist society that when multi-billion $$$ corporations willingly close up shop & lose millions $$ in revenue is a wake up that we are in some serious shit.  listen to the scientists.  we still have some good ones working for us.  in the meantime, in between time, read some poetry.  listen to music.  watch a really bad movie.  remember why we work to live & love.  paul eluard, who survived ww2 & saw his own serious shit, might not have imagined the level of surrealist society we have today.

stay safe, brothers & sisters & non-binaries.  we are all we have.