Welcome to the new normal.  Everyone is staying home, and Billy’s in a sling 24/7 – it’s a world gone MAD!  To top it off, many people aren’t staying home and, well, I’m kinda getting used to this sling.  More people are dying every day, others are testing positive, while others either can’t or are afraid to take the test.  You know what this sounds like?  The 1980s!  Well, except for the part about me being in a sling…I guess I just needed to ease into it.  Is it just me, or does it seem completely unfair to go through two plagues in one lifetime?

Let’s put this into some historical context.  When the AIDS crisis first hit, nobody knew anything: how you got it, how it was transmitted, how to prevent getting it, how to cure it, etc.  In short, the same questions everyone has now.  Back then, doctors gave us their best guesses, and people either took their advice or didn’t.  But the one thing I remember vividly is that if you were fat, the presumption was that you were healthy.  And even this has a historical precedent.  During the Renaissance, the wealthy were always painted as being large and rotund.  Why?  Because if you were fat, you clearly had enough money to buy food!  So when this whole coronavirus is over and some of us look a bit chunky in our Speedos, it simply means that we were safe (and, in my case, eating my weight in peppermint bark every day).  And there’s your silver lining.