By Mark McNease

It’s always One Thing or Another… a lighthearted look at aging, life, and the absurdities of it all.

I believe we will look back on this time, perhaps calling it The Great Pandemic of 2020, or something equally grand to match a cataclysm of such scale, and view it as a before-and-after moment in our lives. We have those throughout our journeys on Earth, when the paths we’re on are disturbed by eruptions or implosions, or deaths that leave us without parts of ourselves: a parent abandons us to the whims of human existence, a loved one says goodbye for the last time, or doesn’t manage to say anything at all before a final breath.

By Mark McNease

It’s always One Thing or Another… a lighthearted look at aging, life, and the absurdities of it all.

I believe we will look back on this time, perhaps calling it The Great Pandemic of 2020, or something equally grand to match a cataclysm of such scale, and view it as a before-and-after moment in our lives. We have those throughout our journeys on Earth, when the paths we’re on are disturbed by eruptions or implosions, or deaths that leave us without parts of ourselves: a parent abandons us to the whims of human existence, a loved one says goodbye for the last time, or doesn’t manage to say anything at all before a final breath.

By Mark McNease

It’s always One Thing or Another… a lighthearted look at aging, life, and the absurdities of it all.

Have a grandparent to spare? Now’s your chance to volunteer one in sacrifice to the economy. All positions available!

Who needs old people, really? What do they do besides eat, talk about how hard it is to get old, drive RVs across the country, and bother people with questions about the simplest techie things? Think of all the good use they could be put to as frontline workers in the apocalypse.

That’s the thinking in certain conservative circles these days. The Lieutenant Governor of Texas, Dan Patrick, started the doomsday ball rolling when he said he’d be willing to work to save the economy for his grandchildren. I wasn’t aware he hadn’t worked before, or that he wasn’t getting paid while he sat around saying these things, but that’s another matter. The idea caught fire, especially among wealthy pundits and Republicans who have never been, and will never be, essential workers … like grocery store clerks, nurses, police officers, and baristas. Something tells me they know they won’t actually have to risk their lives for their grandchildren, but it sounds heroic. Things that sound heroic but have no chance of happening are favorites with men who fancy themselves soldiers, having avoided any real wars. It’s cool to say you’ll take a bullet, especially for future generations, when the gun’s empty.

By Mark McNease

It’s always One Thing or Another… a lighthearted look at aging, life, and the absurdities of it all.

This one’s for posterity, since the terms ‘coronavirus’ and ‘covid-19’ will hopefully be behind us in a few months.

Who needs that much toilet paper, seriously? I can understand a couple of 12-packs, but an entire shopping cart? Are these people planning on being housebound for the next month? And what do they expect the rest of us to do—the ones who don’t think filling our garage with paper products is the best use of resources at a time of national crisis?

I’m not one to take a pandemic lightly. Not only am I at the age most ripe for paying the steep price of negligence, but I care about my friends, neighbors and co-workers. A good Corona beer joke seemed acceptable a couple of weeks ago, now, not at all. I’ve always been one to admit what I don’t know, and I don’t know, as most of us do not, how this will play out. Will we see a surge in people running to the emergency rooms, overwhelming our healthcare infrastructure and exhausting our healthcare workers? Will fatalities begin to pile up, expanding exponentially as this novel virus spreads like a silent, gaseous killer among the population?