Know Jack #214 Your Mask or Your Mind

I have never been happier that I work in a fantasy world of my own making. Though that world teems with rougarous, ghosts, demons, and paranormal menaces of all sorts, I much prefer it to the lunacy and fear mongering of the real world.

I love to hear people tell me how they plan to vote for the petty tyrants who closed the world to keep us all safe. That people will buy the most ludicrous lies and reward the teller of them is a signal my fiction will never lack for readers.

I am inspired by mothers with five or six kids who wear a mask to Wal-Mart leaving the children unprotected. Such callous disregard for children, especially one’s own, means the market for torture, mayhem, and death is alive and well.

And the mysteries of intelligent selective, viruses…well, Captain Tripps has nothing on the possibilities opened by the hysteria virus pandemic, and the inhumane interpersonal treatment it may spawn.

I’m not sure if it’s my father’s oft-spoken admonitions to think for myself or my nursing background’s insistence that I think critically that makes me shake my head in anger and frustration at the blind followers of the blind who surround me.

Tell me if you can, how a virus (without a brain) differentiates between a ten-year-old and an octogenarian. How does it distinguish between eleven o’clock at night and midnight? How does this virus tell which businesses are family owned and which belong to those which contribute millions to political campaigns?

Then there’s the conundrum--if masks soundly defeat the virus, why do we need to stay six feet apart while wearing them? And, if there is magic in six feet why, wear a mask when the nearest person is a dozen feet away?

As a writer, my editor would never let me get away with these inconsistencies and incongruent behaviors in my fiction. Happily, they are readily accepted in reality because, well, the governor says so. Maybe truth really is stranger than fiction.

That being the case, I will stick with fiction where things, though twisted and macabre, make sense and logic is the rule. Here in the land of fiction there is no call to choose between having a function mask and a functioning mind.

Maranatha