Disclaimer: The following is me poking fun of something that is clearly serious and bad. I am aware that it is serious and bad, but choose to poke fun at it anyway because, well, I need to. You have now been legally disclaimed.
As I write this, today is Friday, March 13, 2020. By now, if you have access to a television or a smartphone and I’m pretty sure you do, you’re a little freaked out by the Coronavirus. Admit it. Something about it is freaking you right the hell out and rightly so. Could be the virus itself, could be the entirely proportional and measured news coverage of the virus, or it could be the very strange and inexplicable run on toilet paper, which is, apparently, the most critical of all items in times of national crisis.
Kinda makes you wonder how everybody in “The Walking Dead” is wiping their butts, because I’m pretty sure they ran out of Extra-Soft Charmin, like, five years ago.
So, anyway, yeah, it’s a weird time to be alive in the world, especially in America, where we are simultaneously fighting this pandemic and dealing with an election year, which is nearly as unsettling and where both sides are literally opposed to each other 100-percent of the time, no matter what the subject.
So as a good, upstanding community citizen, I’ve decided to do my part by providing you, dear reader, with Doofus Dad’s Top 9 Handy & Useful Tricks for Dealing with Coronavirus. So here are my tricks, ranked in order of the easiest to the most-difficult to accomplish. Remember, these are all to be taken with complete and entire stone-faced seriousness.
9. Get a job like mine, where you rarely ever leave the house and experience human contact outside of your own family, not that there’s anything wrong with that.
It’s fairly easy to remain healthy when you spend your days in a home office located in a small, country town in Tennessee, deep in the woods, creating snarky blog posts and podcasts and writing silly books. If you actually want to make money, and therefore risk exposure to things like human contact, then keep doing whatever it is you do.
8. Wash your hands often with soap and water and don’t touch your face.
Wait, you already know that, forget I said it, moving on!
7. Watch Season 9, Episode 10 of “The Office” where most of the Scranton branch gets lice. It’ll take your mind off the real thing.
This episode is essentially a microcosm of our world, as it is right now. Pam, who inadvertently brought lice into the office, represents China. Meredith, who gets blamed for it, represents the U.S. government. Dwight, in his hazmat suit, represents whichever country closed its borders first. (I’m not sure which that was and don’t feel like doing the research.) And Erin, with her vast background in dealing with lice, represents whichever country has the most pandemic experience and knows what to do. If you’re not familiar with this episode, go watch it on Netflix and all of these references will make sense.
The more I think about it, we may all survive this thing by simply covering our heads in mayonnaise for 30 minutes. Has anyone tried that yet?
6. Have any dedicated news channel removed from your cable package immediately.
Actually, I may have placed this one in the wrong spot in this list. It should probably be Number One — slightly ahead of moving to Mars — if we’re going by what’s most difficult to achieve.
5. Greet your neighbors only by making brief eye contact from behind double-paned glass.
It’s best to steer clear of your neighbors because Lord knows what kind of funky germs they have. So when you see them through your window, don’t wave. This could disturb the air molecules just enough to somehow transport their infectiousness across the lawn, through the glass, and into your virginal bloodstream. Don’t look directly at your neighbors for very long either because we really don’t know how this virus operates; it could be delivered via waves of reflected light, thus making extended eye contact dangerous and frankly, a little awkward and aggressive, if the silver-backed gorilla is to be believed.
4. Have all your supplies delivered to your home.
After you’re certain you haven’t made direct eye contact with the delivery person and that person has exited your safe zone, creep out to retrieve your package in the dead of night, thus avoiding infected light waves from any nearby people looking in your general direction.
3. Obtain a crossbow and learn how to shoot it.
This is important in the fairly possible event that the virus will turn us all into zombies at some point, based on early breathless media speculation. The crossbow is clearly the most elegant of the zombie-killing weapons, is reusable, and looks cooler than a pointy stick.
2. Become a hermit.
Since the idea is to not find yourself within sight of the next human being, locate yourself a nice little 50-acre plot of land in, say, Alaska and become a hermit. It may take a couple of days to get yourself up to speed on building a log cabin with traditional tools and living a subsistence lifestyle, but you should be able to do it. If the Unabomber could do it, so can you. Move in and start right to work on your anti-Coronavirus manifesto and your shaggy beard. Or shaggy legs, if you are of the gentler sex. And my Number One trick for avoiding the Coronavirus…
1. Move to Mars.
This one might be a little tricky. First, you have to become an astronaut, and that could take a little time and effort. Second, NASA or SpaceX would have to hurry up and schedule a Mars colonization mission within the next few weeks, just to be safe. (After all, the entire human race is likely to become zombies by the first of April, according to the breathless news.) Third, they have to choose you — and ONLY you — out of their pool of available, Coronavirus-free astronauts. They will also have to figure out a way for you to clone yourself repeatedly to keep humanity in existence on Mars, because sending another human of the opposite sex is clearly too risky, and direct eye contact might be made at some point.
If all those stars line up and you are the person chosen to carry on the human race, be sure to take a good book with you to Mars, because things could get a little boring. I highly recommend, “Doofus Dad Does Everest Base Camp,” by Mark E. Johnson. 😉
Were he around today, Alaskan legend Dick Proenneke would be having no problems with the Coronavirus at all.
Wonderful, as usual. I did not manage to read it without laughing, though. You obviously look at this current crisis the way I do, with a jaundiced eye, waiting for the next major snafu to come along and distract 300,000,000 nincompoop from their toilet paper obsessions.
Keep up the good work. I need more things to smile about because Ted is driving me nuts watching news channels and telling me everything they say.😭