Wednesday evening. The optimist says, “It’s Wednesday – only two days until the weekend!” The pessimist says, “Ugh, two more days of this crap.” It’s only the realist who asks, “Who is this Wedne? Why do they have their own day, and are they coming to reclaim it?”

Le sober October (or octobre sobre, if you will) is going well so far: it’s strange to chug coke instead of cider with my lunch. Combined with the absence of ginkgo biloba (which, as I understand it, as an upper), my days are a lot less exciting. Just… flat and steady. No more feeling like my brain is in overdrive, a bit less spontaneity and eloquence, but feels okay on the balance. Is that what I was like in my early 20s?.. Fascinating.

Xgf says she’s feeling better, but she also has a history of withholding important information because she doesn’t want to worry people. On top of that, she’s reluctant to go to the hospital and get tested for covid because her parents said the mandatory quarantine would inconvenience them. It’s pretty remarkable to see such American attitudes here in Ontario. They’d fit right in at one of Trump’s rallies. After all, if you don’t test, you won’t find any new cases – according to him, anyway.

Amazon’s Prime Day sale is about to end. I remain a filthy bourgeois consumer and not the enlightened post-scarcity guru I occasionally roleplay as. Heh. In addition to the instapot and that video game, I’ll also get an 8″ Echo Show and a long string of high-tech Christmas lights. The latter will make my room a little more cozy, since this will be a long lockdown… The former is a digital picture frame with benefits: something to entertain myself with, as well as a way to watch online news broadcasts. (That’s kind of a novelty by this point, since so many of my peers have pivoted from watching cable news to listening to podcasts.) Here is hoping I won’t hoard any other stuff in the months to come. When I eventually move, I’d rather travel light.

In covid news, Washington Post published a story on the Great Barrington Declaration. It’s nice when high-level publications arrive at the same conclusion as yours truly – a fun little ego boost, if nothing else. The epidemiologists they interviewed said the declaration represents the views of “epidemiological fringe.” Heh. Even more interesting, some journos discovered a link between the Declaration folks and the Koch brothers, whose agenda has always been to make money at all costs. The big downside right now is that the veneer of legitimacy from the GBD gives them credibility (if you don’t look too closely) and lets them push their agenda. They’re lobbying Atlas and Azar in the White House, and it looks like Florida’s aggressive reopening campaign was motivated by the same thing. This has a lot of potential to get mighty ugly.

Meanwhile, France is getting an actual curfew: in Paris and eight other major cities, it’ll be in effect from 9pm till 6am. It’s projected to run for 28 days, and it’ll likely get extended further. France isn’t doing so hot: their official death count is 33,037. With one-third of their population being confined indoors for a whole month, things will likely get rowdy. The French are far more passionate about their protests, so… covid riots? I think we’ll get covid riots. That’s one of the few things we haven’t seen in 2020 yet, so that’s bound to happen. I wonder if curfews will be instituted in the US and Canada as well. If so, that’ll probably be at some point within the next four months. Pour one out for all the poor extroverts, eh?