Thursday night. Things are getting weird at work. A once-in-a-century pandemic isn’t the best time for a re-org. Not that there’s ever a good time for it, but this is just spectacularly bad timing. Learned a few things today… If my life were a TV show (and who is to say it isn’t?), there’d be a very angry letter-writing campaign to the show’s writers because some plot twists are simply too bizarre.

On the upside, my job is pretty safe, and the company’s lawyers are pretty damn close to submitting my PR application. Just a few more months till I become Canada’s newest permanent resident… Something to look forward to as the world continues its inexorable slide into madness.

Houston’s ICU beds are officially 100% full. Hospital CEOs are trying to sound upbeat, claiming the overflow will be taken care of with utmost safety and efficiency, but that’s neither reassuring nor believable. Only 198 ICU beds (12% of the total) are available in Arizona. It’s just a matter of days now before the same horrifying footage we saw in New York (forklifts with dead bodies, refrigerated morgue trucks on residential streets, etc) start showing up there as well. Texas governor Greg Abbott has paused the reopening plan, which is probably as close as any southern governor will come to admitting their mistake.

It’s morbid, but… If you kill one person, you’ll get to prison. Kill several people, and you’ll most likely spend the rest of your life behind bars. But if you ignore all empirical evidence and make mindboggingly stupid decisions that result in deaths of thousands, you’ll suffer zero consequences. Hell, you might even get reelected. And as if willful ignorance weren’t enough, now there are sheriffs around the US claiming they will not enforce mandatory mask mandates in their counties.

If you’re reading this in the future, I hope this conveys at least some of the overwhelming, ceaseless absurdity our world has become. There’s more and more news coming out every hour of every day – articles and videos that would’ve hijacked the public discourse for days before the pandemic. Now, however, it’s all just more of the same. Yet another video of a cop killing someone in cold blood and lying about it. More insane tweets from Trump. A 6-point earthquake in California. So-called “Karens” printing out misspelled cards claiming they don’t have to wear a mask because of undisclosed health reasons. This really is stranger than fiction, and more disturbing than any dystopian book you’ll ever hope to find.