Is it Christmas yet???

Maybe election time?

It could even already be Halloween, considering we’ve all got the masks ready for it and everything! Just fill up a big bowl full of candy and wait for everyone to come by your door to plunge their dirty, little hands into…

…yeah, trick or treating’s not really going to work this year, is it?

That’s ok – at the rate this year seems to be moving along, it’ll be 2025 by the time we’re spooking each other with sugar highs and pumpkin spices anyways. Because apparently one of the more visible traits of The COVID-19 Pandemic is that time … moves … monolithically … slow … now.

Here, I used to have “busy weeks” in my life between work and family that I wasn’t entirely sure what day it was, but now thanks to COVID – I don’t even know what season it is anymore!

I mean, sure, it’s ridiculously hot out, which here in Florida tends to indicate summertime … but being the digital hermit that I am, I tend to avoid going “outside” if at all possible regardless of what season around here it happens to be.

The kids aren’t going to school yet, but thanks to COVID – ha! My guess is as good as yours whether they’ll actually be “going back” or if we’ll be seeing Virtual School 2: Electro Boogaloo with everyone playing hot potato for who has to sit through the day’s Zoom calls while their teachers attempt to do something that mimics education from their own living rooms!

I’d like to say that we’re not all that concerned about hurricanes this year, but apparently as I write this Hurricane Hanna is forming off the coast of Texas. No joke here – good luck with that one, y’all…

And of course, everyone is upset about politics, which means that we haven’t made it to the 2020 General Election yet. Even without COVID, every new day with President Pompous Ass in the White House feels like a thousand years of suffering, so considering we’ve still got 102 days left until Election Day, multiplied by the 1,000 year Trump penalty plus a 1/32nd COVID rate of time deficit, by my math we’ve still got roughly 3.264 million days of sadness left to endure before it’s clear on whether that whole nightmare will be allowed to end.

Which by the way, P.S. – There will be no moving to Canada this year if he manages to win again because, well, they won’t let us in right now…

I hear Albania is nice this time of year … whenever this time of year actually is!

There’s a saying – “Time is but a construct…” – and it’s probably a good thing that it wasn’t constructed by man during a pandemic because if you thought your conference calls at work just drone on and on forever now, imagine if Pandemic Time was in fact the expected standard by which we made all of our plans and reservations and hit the snooze button to get just five more minutes of peace away from…

In regular time, you’d be considered late if you show up to meet a friend more than maybe ten or fifteen minutes after your expected time, depending on traffic and how much you actually care to see them.

In pandemic time? Two and a half weeks is the going rate for being late, and that’s assuming you didn’t forget your mask at home and were able to find a restaurant with outdoor seating on a day in Florida when it’s not 95 degrees outside.

In regular time, we’re all expected to put in about 40 hours for a full-time job.

In pandemic time? Fourteen hours is a pretty good work week, however that number skews less if you spend the majority of your time on Zoom calls that could’ve been emails.

In regular time, I could get my grocery shopping for the week done after the kids go to bed in about an hour on a good night.

In pandemic time? Pack a lunch, and a sleeping bag, and a flare gun for good measure. The flare gun serves dual purposes – as a way to signal my wife that I’m ok and still scouring the shelves for hand sanitizer, and also to help ward off the morons who want to exercise their freedoms by not wearing masks in what was already most dangerous superstore in the land…

One final point to consider – I was a young and moderately energetic man when I first started writing this column. In the pandemic time that has passed since those early days, my feeble bones crack with every keystroke, I’ve managed to braid a mask out of my facial hair, and Donald Trump is still president, though I think the public is slowly starting to agree that his secret police squad is probably a bad idea.

Wake me when it’s time to put up the Christmas lights.