I would just like to share a couple of experiences I had during this mess. I took and extra trip to Family Dollar to 'stock up' (usually I rotate buying a group of necessities to last for a month every week), so really I was just getting the things I would normally get throughout the rest of the month right, so I had two packs of toilet paper in my cart as I stood by the door waiting for my ride.
I don't mean two giant packs either. 12 packs. But that's like, almost a whole roll a day for a month! But also, one of my cats has a weird thing for seeing how many things he can get into the bathtub, often when its wet. My other cat refuses to poop inside of his litter box and poops right next to it, so I pick it up with toilet paper and flush it. We put one roll in our room and one in Rose's for the month for stuffy noses or whatever it may be needed for. We also usually don't run all the way out of toilet paper before I buy more.
Why the long drawn out explanation of toilet paper usage? So that you understand clearly; I had a very normal amount of toilet paper in my cart. NORMAL AMOUNT. Under three or four 1/4 filled brown bags with more very normal things like garbage bags and swifter pads in them. Then...
THIS BITCH... some random ass not quite elderly but still old leathery skin, "its prescribed", Marb red smoking, fixed income food stamps still think I'm better than those pigmented people across the street looking as bitch opens the door, rolls her eyes into the back of her empty ass head and growls (not even to me mind you, looking straight ahead as she walks by me)...
"What the fuck do you idiots think you're going do, stop the coronavirus by wrapping your heads in toilet paper?"
What... the... fuck?
I stood there, stone faced in shock. NORMAL AMOUNT OF TOILET PAPER. Not even the stores current package limit of three. I probably should have gotten three in case my immobile Grandma with COPD and heart disease who will die if she catches this virus runs out and my uncles can’t find it, but two. I got two. I got the normal amount of toilet paper that my family uses for the month two weeks early so that I, who is hospitalized with sever asthma attacks at the slightest respiratory illness, do not have to venture forth into the cesspool of “Oh I’ll be fine so I’m just going to carry it around to people who it will really suck for while I either scoff or laugh at them” assholes in the coming weeks.
THEN, after returning home and putting away the things I bought there I foolishly decided to continue my adventure. Instead of a Lyft I had a friend who needed supplies pick me up so I could bring her to the spots where stuff still existed. We went back to the same Family Dollar without incident, but my household is running out of rice. Boyfriend lives on rice, eats rice just about every day and will not have it any other way. We buy a twenty-pound bag of rice every month, month and a half. So, we went to the nearest grocery store, PriceRite. There was a fifty-pound bag and two twenty-pound bags left. I hoisted it onto my shoulder and headed over to the health isle because thus far, I hadn’t been able to find the one thing I desperately needed: a thermometer. There were none. Cringing at the idea of continued store hopping my friend and I went to go pay for a bag of rice and four lemons. When we realized that the line was wrapped around the store almost back to the entrance I stopped (I can’t imagine my face as she was still laughing about it an hour later).
“Can we just… ditch the rice?” I asked as I lowered the bag, dropping it onto what I assume was at one point a full display pallet. She placed her four limes next to it and we quite nearly ran out of the clusterfuck that was once my preferred (for lack of humans) grocery store. I had abandoned my hope of acquiring rice for my love, but I still needed the thermometer. We continued to a Walgreens and, by some fabulous stroke of luck I found what was quite possibly the only thermometer left in a twenty-mile radius that was under forty dollars. It was ten. I had a massive internal celebration as I grabbed it and one of the last of two packs of probe covers, I had seen anywhere. I also grabbed a fresh bottle of daily gummy vitamins for Rose and in that moment, I had to stop and shake myself a little. The vitamin isle was full. Full, full.
What?
It took me a moment to register, to try and wrap my head around the fact that stores were completely cleared of things that wouldn’t protect anyone, if providing any actual benefits at all in quantities more than the norm, yet here I stood looking at full shelves of multivitamins. Do… do people know that they usually don’t get the amount of things their bodies need from their confused, consumerism fueled diets? Do… do they know that taking a daily multivitamin improves the overall health of your immune system making you less susceptible to common illnesses and reducing the severity if they do come? It was with a hurting brain that I checked out.
I finally couldn’t handle anymore. I just wanted to go home. So, I did. I went home and I watched the Presidential conference where Trump declared a sate of national emergency and he, accompanied by many others, tried to provide comfort by explaining the steps they were taking too little and too late. I picked Rose up from school, almost immediately after getting the notice that her district would be closed Monday so that teachers could prepare work packets in the event of extended closure, that the kids were to report to school on Tuesday to pick up these packets and Tuesday night a closure decision would be made.
I’m not sending her after Tuesday. I’m one of those at-risk individuals. Not one of those high probability of death at risk individuals, but one of those 20% you’re going to go to the hospital kind and quite possibly one of those 5% ICU care kind. I don’t want to be a part of the flood; I don’t want to sit in a panic ridden hospital hallway unable to breathe while they decide who gets the next ventilator and who dies hoping that I’m at thirty-years old the only caregiver for my six year old daughter is enough to save me, and praying one of my fifty-year old fathers who’ve spent a lifetime smoking and have heart disease aren’t somewhere down the hall being bypassed for me. I don’t want to be the space taken up where someone else must die so I can live.
Flash backs of boyfriend coming home to find me passed out on the bathroom floor because my daughter brought home a normal cough that as they we’re both recovering from hit me and triggered a bronchial spasm that left me with chest pain and difficulty breathing through steroid treatments, emergency inhalers, and once a days for months after he sent me away in an ambulance.
All of this runs through my head as the “healthy” population laughs, scoffs, and hoards fucking toilet paper calling this a common cold, just a little flu. So many people are going to die for arrogance and selfishness that it makes me sick, all the while those people are acting like people like me are being dramatic… but if I heard them cough and choked them until they almost died so they’d understand what ‘a little cough’ can do, I’d be arrested.
I fucking hate humans.
That was a good read!