Many of the people we used to travel to see are now here with us and we get to spend our time with them more. Peter’s sister found a job here in 2019 and now lives about 30 minutes away in Brentwood, Tennessee. My father-in-law in Pennsylvania passed away in 2021; the following year, my mother-in-law decided to move closer to her son and daughter and now has a house in Smyrna, Tennessee, 15 minutes away from her daughter and 40 minutes from us.

But Tennessee continues to be a far different place than the California I remember, and there are more stories to tell.

Redwoods and the Tennessee Treemageddon

I wouldn’t have thought that familiarity with redwood trees would be one of the more exotic aspects of having lived in California. Yet when we visited in 2019, my daughter wanted to accompany me to Henry Cowell Park and took pictures of the banana slugs, because her school friends could not believe her tales giant yellow slugs which she had seen and handled since her earliest memories. We have a nice deck at the back of our house, but we can’t get Sequoia wood here, so all I have is a deck I have to paint over and then still having to deal with wood-eating pests like carpenter bees. I was complaining about this to my one fellow Buddhist who lives close enough to come over and practice with me. All he’d ever seen in person was the trunk of a redwood and he had trouble comprehending stories of trees that big and eternal, then and now.

In comparison to redwoods (and palm trees, for that matter), the trees on my neighborhood are delicate and short-lived. Whenever a powerful storm blows through (as one does several times a year), the branches crack and fall down, giving us all the fuel we need and then some for our outdoor firepit. Last month, a particularly strong storm came through and broke two 70+-foot trees in my next door neighbor’s yard. They crashed onto the back of my yard, where they took out pretty much every tree that hadn’t already been broken by the storm. Three weeks and seven torqued-out chainsaw blades later, I now have a bare spot at the end of my property and a massive pile of firewood. And that didn’t include the two trees in the front that broke as well, for which we hired one of the very happy tree companies who make a good living cutting down and hauling away dead trees. My contrite neighbor gave me eggs from her chickens (though it was not her fault her trees cracked and collapsed into my backyard) and my Buddha buddy got a truck bed full of wood for his wood-burning stove, with the promise of more.

It’s Pretty Much All Small Towns

Central Nashville is increasingly being built up with skyscrapers to house businesses and people, but within a few miles, and within Nashville proper itself, you can still find farms and unused acres of land. You can easily get to all the larger towns in Tennessee (large meaning with a population of 20,000 or more) along the freeways. Everything else is a long, slow drive along narrow 2-lane roads, sometimes behind a tractor.

I recently did a 5K in Bell Buckle, Tennessee (population 409) with a friend. It is an hour away, all on back roads, and if you’re unlucky you have to wait for a train to finish passing by before you can continue. The 5K was the precursor to the town’s annual RC Cola and Moon Pie festival, and yes, you can still get those products in Tennessee. The festival concludes with the arrival of a largest Moon Pie in the world in the flavor of the year (for 2023, this is blueberry), which comes from Chattanooga, Tennessee on special truck, over Monteagle Mountain, escorted with much fanfare by state troopers. It is then eaten by the festival attendees, so the world’s largest Moon Pie ceases to exist until it is reincarnated in the next flavor for the festival the following year.

The 5K course took us through the campus of a boarding school and beyond the boundaries of the small town. During the race, two redneck yahoos (from Christiana, population 4701, and unincoporated Cannon County, population < 2711) decided it would be fun to roar through the runners with their motorcycles, but they had to stick to the streets, and the runners just moved over into the fields. The wannabe Dukles of Hazzardous Bell Buckle were quickly caught, and the whoopin’ they got from their respective communities is fiercer than anything Bedford County can sentence them with. I was unscathed, other than having a story to tell, and I left with my friend before the clog-dancing began because she had to take care of another friend’s dog.

Where Wine Snobbery Goes to Die

Being a wine snob was a part of my identity as a Northern Californian. I loved going to many of the small wineries where I could sip exclusive wines and talk about whether I preferred the 2010 Merlot over the 2012 one, and hang out with the winery owner as if he was a friend. That does not exist here.

There is exactly one winery in the area that makes wine I wouldn’t want to immediately spit out (and that’s only half of their wines.) It is called Arrington, after the area of Williamson County it is located in, and it consists of many bucolic acres (only some of which actually grows grapes) with room for picnics, parties and the hundreds of people who convene there every weekend to drink the wine and listen to free music. It is run by country-western musician Kix Brooks, who actually likes wine but more importantly outsourced the making of it and the running of the winery as a business to people who know what they are doing, even if they don’t have the charming quirks of the small California farmers. As for the other wineries in the South I’ve had to endure socially, all I will say is that muscadine is considered a wine grape and they look at me like I’m from Mars when I ask for the spit bucket.

Other country-western musicians kept it simpler and since 2018 have bought up bars on Broadway, at the center of Nashville’s entertainment area, where they can sell beer and whisky to tourists at exorbitant prices. Pick your star and he (or she) has a bar: Jason Aldean, Blake Shelton, Miranda Lambert, Justin Timberlake, Dierks Bentley, Luke Bryan, Brian Kelly, Garth Brooks (coming soon), and the most notorious of them all, Kid Rock. His Big Ass Honky-Tonk is loud and obnoxious, and caters to tourists who think they are getting the “Bawitdaba” experience, but mostly its Franken-honk vibe makes me run to the other side of the street, and I like to think I’m pretty good at being cool about strange things. If you really want to get knifed on a toilet and/or rolled into an alley after having drunken too much cheap alcohol in a place with live music, there are much more authentic places I can direct you to around here, and you can thank me for all the money you save and the meeting of some, ahem, uniquely interesting folks.

Hat Tips and Politics

When I walk through my neighborhood, everyone who passes by in a car waves to me; and likewise, if I’m driving through my neighborhood, I wave at everyone who is walking by on the street. After this acknowledgement, sometimes the driver has to stop to tell me what a beautiful dog I have, or halt my car to tell me I rolled past the stop sign instead of stopping (some Californian habits don’t die). I had become so accustomed to this customary wave that when I started spending time in Florida, I waved at cars as I was walking my dog. In Florida, when you wave at someone in a car, they don’t wave back – they speed up.

Tennessee also mind-blowingly tax-payer friendly. As I write this, we have a state sales tax holiday, which means no taxes on clothes, software, or computer equipment for the next three days, which will be followed by another sales tax holiday on food so frugal preppers can load their freezers up without having to pay the 9.75% sales tax. There is no income tax, and last year, the Hall income tax, which taxes dividend and interest income over $2500 was repealed. Businesses love it, too. In-and-Out Burgers is finally making it east of the Mississippi – with its headquarters planned right in Franklin, and Buc-ees, the Texas gas station acid trip experience built the world’s biggest station in Sevierville (which just made Texans determined to make one even bigger than it.)

And believe me, you will never understand Tennessee politics as a Californian, nor can Tennesseans understand California politics. People do not register with party affiliations here, and the only way your affiliation can be affirmed is by how you vote in a primary, which is the only time there is a record of you choosing whether to vote as a Democrat or a Republican (or otherwise). If you don’t vote in at least two of the last three primaries, you have no affiliation. Don’t try to figure out Tennessee politics unless you are a Tennessean, you will just misunderstand and keep going around in incomprehension circles.

Conversely, Tennessee does not have popular propositions for the voters to decide, so people here cannot understand that the registered voters themselves supported much of California policy including the high-speed rail project in 2008 and Proposition 47 in 2014. I myself voted on these measures and my vote was not the decisive one, given the vast population of California. I had to explain how the effort to repeal Governor Newson went in the context of the 2000 gubernatorial repeal. Don’t try to figure out California politics unless you are a Californian, you will just misunderstand and keep going around in incomprehension circles.

I am far from alone as an ex-Californian here. A friend from the Bay Area moved here to a cabin on 8 acres in Columbia in 2019, but he is moving on to Connecticut for a new job. I befriended another former ex-Californian from Palo Alto who hosts us all (mother-in-law and sister-in-law included) for Thanksgiving. A model/actor from Los Angeles came to my gym in 2021 and recently got me and Peter onto a movie project that filmed here for a few days, at which point I met another actor from Knoxville who has a podcast and invited me to audition for true crime recreations where she found her most recent niche. The accountant we used who used to have an office in Campbell relocated here during the pandemic, and kept all his California accounts, because he can handle them remotely. I recently saw actor Dennis Quaid perform a song from his just-out gospel album with the band Sixwire a few weeks ago, and he lives here now, too. My neighbors with the big broken trees/chicken coop/hot top moved here from Redwood City, and I can hear them listening to 49er games via an internet channel when they are outside.

The pandemic changed the world, but I was also in a different place than I was when it happened. I am happy to be here, but I do miss the life I once had and my friends there as well.

One of the great appeals of Theranos was letting patients select and choose their own lab tests, and to have those lab tests be so inexpensive and accessible that everyone can do them, without the cost and intimidation of having to go to a doctor or hospital, and without the need for a phlebotomist to find a vein and suck up entire tubes of blood.

One of the things that Theranos managed to do was to get the Arizona legislature to revise the state rules on lab testing, so that patients can order the tests themselves without the neccessity of a referral from a doctor. This allowed Theranos to put its “Edison” lab testing machines into Walgreens stores in Arizona. Unfortunately, the machines couldn’t perform all the tests on the extensive menu Theranos offered, and customers were understandably upset when they found themselves still getting poked in a vein by an amateur phebotomist or getting inaccurate results.

There are already a few lab tests that only require a prick to the finger to collect enough blood to get a basic result. My husband and I both took non-fasting blood sugar and cholesterol level tests at a quickie clinic several years ago in order to get underwriting for our independent insurance plan. The cholesterol test was high, so the plan we chose wouldn’t cover statins (a medication) for seven years. It’s been almost that long, and I suspect the cholesterol that was high was the “good cholesterol” so we all win.

More recently, I got an (overdue) mammogram thanks to a doctor (who is booked until November.) I wouldn’t know how to get a mammogram without going through a doctor. The hospital she referred me to had to look for her instructions before they would give me an appointment. But because of current laws, I had my results via email before the doctor’s office called to let me know I was just fine.

Likewise, when my doctor orders a series of blood tests for my irregular physical, it feels like I’m making a donation to dracula. The phlebotomist draws out 3 or 4 vials of blood from my veins, and I end up with a bill for hundreds of dollars (which says it could be thousands except for my insurance discount) and a report that says I’m just fine, come back in a few years. Certainly some of those tests could be cheaper, and maybe some of those tests are more important, but I’m not going to pay to have them done all the time.

If some of those tests were cheap and easy to do at home or with a simple machine, I might do them more often, which would take me to the doctor’s office (or an emergency room) more quickly if something was off (at which point, the pros would do their own test, because they love their lab tests.) And if it’s fine and it’s always been fine and I don’t have the symptoms of what it is the blood test is testing for, maybe we can skip it and save time and money on the next physical.)

Self-testing and easy testing is already standard for conditions that require regular monitoring, like diabetes and heart disease. Diabetics can test their blood sugar with finger sticks and kits any time they want, and now some of them have a Bluetooth device they can put on that monitors blood level all the time. If you have heart disease, you probably have your own stethoscope and blood pressure cuff, as well as the use of an app that can alert you if your heart beat becomes irregular. There are certainly other conditions or blood-testable issues that don’t require much.

This may have been Holmes’ original vision, and there are now several start-ups exploring less expensive and less invasive ways of medical testing. If Holmes had been willing to scale down instead of hyping up, she might have been part of (or the founder of) one of such start-ups today rather than being in jail. And we might have more medical tests available for us already.

I have the perspective of having been part of Silicon Valley culture at the time, as a columnist for a lifestyle magazine, and as a tech writer. My work didn’t intersect with reporting on Theranos, but the hype for it and the overt desire to celebrate a female entrepreneur, and one still in her 20s was overwhelming, and clearly overshadowed any critical consideration.

Start-ups were the hot thing at the time, and venture capitalists and investor angels were eager and on the prowl to find the next “unicorn” — a company that could warrant over a billion dollars in value. Uber, Lyft, and Airbnb were ideas that discovered a need that could be leveraged by crowd involvment. It wasn’t as much about the ability to make money, but rather the ability to disrupt the current way of doing business so that they would eventually become the norm. For reference, neither Uber nor Lyft have made a profit yet, though their product/service is one I use far more readily than taxis. Airbnb (a service I also like) only makes money off its service fees.

As a result of this investor fever, there were a lot of people shopping a lot of ideas around, hoping to capture some of the money the investors were throwing around. Some of these people had viable ideas; some of those actually had the ability to execute said ideas; and some of those caught on enough to keep getting more money; and if they were lucky, they got bought up by a company with a lot of stock money. Many more people were shopping around ideas which were more along the lines of convincing investors to give them money. If they got it, they hired junior people who wouldn’t ask questions when things started going pear-shaped and hoped they would get bailed out with more money or by another company before everything fell apart. Theranos wasn’t alone in this — before I left Silicon Valley, which was before the Theranos case imploded — I had notes for a potential book about the Valley, with examples of just such start-ups, like Skully and Beepi.

This culture was one of the factors in my decision to leave California. At that time, I had put myself out for full-time work in the tech industry, after having taken years off to homeschool my son, and it was frustrating. It turns out that no matter how qualified and endorsed I was for a position, the only people Silicon Valley companies wanted to hire were people in their 20s and 30s who’d look good at the weekly beer bash, not some grind who could read JavaScript and SQL and might queer the party asking the developer to fix bad code. My friends got me invited to recruitment parties from companies who wanted to have more women in their workforce, where the touted female-friendly benefit was egg freezing, all the better to have my younger peers put off creating a family.

You couldn’t not know this at the time, and Elizabeth Holmes was exactly what all the investors wanted — not another geeky guy with spreadsheets and charts and an earnest Powerpoint presentation about how his new social media platform/resource sharing/cheap sourcing app was going to eventually make its money back — but rather a fresh-faced young woman who told them she knew, but couldn’t share the secret, of how she was going to save people from premature death.

Her crime was not her idea, and my next post is about how, with more preparation and research, she could have come up with something more modest that may already be being developed by someone else in this world. It was the hubris of playing the role, and not being able to scale down, or give up.

It must certainly have been hard, if not impossible, to be humble at the time that she rolled into deceptions and lies. She was one of the most celebrated women in the world, at least by tech industry standards. She had glowing articles written up about her in national business magazines like Fortune; CEOs and world leaders clamored for her attention; and the local Silicon Valley press, including the San Jose Mercury News, gushed about her and how wonderful she was almost constantly. Anyone who wasn’t down with the young, new, hot flavor of the tech entrepreneur Silicon Valley wanted to have transforming the world was a loser.

I kid you not, ads for jobs at start-ups literally asked for candidates who were willing to “drink the kool-aid” in order to put in the long hours with the passion it would take to get a new company off the ground. Elizabeth Holmes not only sold the Kool-Aid of Theranos, she drank it, too. And that was her downfall, and perhaps a harsh lesson for the Silicon Valley culture of the mid-2010s that was more about style than substance.

 In the book The Vaccine: Inside the Race to Conquer the COVID-19 Pandemic by Joe Miller, based on the speed of the development and the methods used, I found out that it might have been possible to get the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine out to the public in as little as 88 days from its conception. Based on the 100 Days Mission report created at the 2021 G7 conference, given the decisions the BioNTech team made in order to bring their vaccine to market as quickly as possible, and the timeline they were able to follow, we could have had the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine out to the public as early as April 9, 2020, within the second iteration of “two weeks to slow the curve.”

Historically, it takes two to five years to develop a vaccine, and it can take up to ten years. So when most of the world declared the COVID-19 pandemic so severe and dangerous that we had to shut down most economic and social activities, to think that we could be trapped in lockdowns for up to five years only added to the misery.

This development time involves finding and testing a vaccine that is effective enough against the disease it is fighting to be worth testing, and then testing it in round after round, looking to improve the vaccine’s effectiveness and safety in each round. When enough testing results in a vaccine that is good enough for the public, according to health authorities, like the U.S. Federal Drug Administration (FDA), only then is it finally made available.

But even this long development cycle doesn’t guarantee a vaccine that is safe for everyone. In the book, Richard Hatchett, the CEO of CEPI (Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations) says “the most common side effects were picked up in the initial safety and immunogenicity studies, while the rare events were detected only through careful pharmacovigilance after the vaccines were released.” The main information the enormous human studies provided, he argues, was whether the vaccines were effective, “and we can determine a vaccine’s effectiveness after it has been released – we do this every year for influenza.” [emphasis mine]

This would indicate the “vaccine deniers” who were skeptical about the efficacy and safety of the vaccine were, indeed, correct. Now, in late 2022, two years after the vaccine was first released to the public, we know several things we were not informed about – such as that the vaccine needs to be re-administered every six months (and updated for new strains), the efficacy rate of the Pfizer BioNTech vaccine can be as low as 44%, many of those vaccinated still continue to get COVID-19, and the rates of vaccine-related heart inflammations and heart attacks are so high in younger men that the CDC revised its vaccination guidance to say the initial series of shots should be 8 weeks apart in men under 40.

For those of us, like me, who were ready to do anything in order to be free of zealous mandates, cancellations, and restrictions associated with the COVID-19 pandemic, having any way out of the nightmare would have had me in line for such a shot. If it did anything at all, it would have eased the societal and economic pressure, and the riots and chaos that started in May and continued through 2020 would have been far less likely.

For those who would rather risk catching the disease itself, which was in no way as deadly as had been implied for those who are young and/or healthy, knowing that the vaccines were released without factors and risks we are only being informed about now, mandated vaccinations were grotesque. As of November 24, 2022 the CDC conservatively admitted to having 697 verified cases of myocarditis or pericarditis (heart inflammation and heart attacks) associated with the COVID-19 vaccines, with many more cases under review. Certainly those 697 people who would rather have taken the risk of catching COVID-19 instead of taking the vaccine. And other countries, like Denmark, are saying the vaccinations aren’t necessary at all for anyone under 50.

Like much of the so-called science we were told to follow, the correct distance to stand apart from your fellow mankind in order to avoid spreading or catching a respiratory bug came not out of a study, but rather out of someone’s ass. And everyone took the distance with the utmost sincerity.

By August, with it being clear that this “emergency” was going to go on indefinitely, some businesses were having fun with the social distancing signage they were required to .

When I went to the Tennessee Aquarium with my daughter, they were defining the distance we had to stand apart by the size of the animals we were seeing there:

When we flew to Pennsylvania, the Harrisburg airport had social distancing markers referring to the sights in the area it served:

As of September 2020, only a few places still have social distancing markers on the floor, and often when they do, they are ignored. Soon enough, like much of the COVID theatre, they will fade away, peel off, and be forgotten.

I make a big deal about understanding the source and context of an opinion, so you might want to know a little about who I am and how that influences by opinions. The opinions I state here have nothing to do with the organizations and people who hired me, but that experience and training has a lot to do with my opinions.

The picture above is of me after I fought a house fire. The guy next to me is my husband, who was also on that fire, but with a different crew fighting in another section of the structure. I am the blonde in the picture.

I am the author of “Death to COVID (And F*ck You Fauci)” which you can buy on Amazon and buy signed here.

I used to be an emergency medical responder in conjunction with being a volunteer firefighter. This involved months of training, an annual review as well as several monthly reviews, assisting the ambulance medics, bi-annual CPR certification, and a tough proctored test which also required an annual update and review. It also involved getting emergency protocols drilled in. This makes me think I know something about medical practice and ethics as they were pre-COVID and why you have to follow the rules you were trained to in an emergency and argue about them later. But, hey, what do I know — I’m not a politician or a bureaucrat.

I worked on the editorial side for several national magazines. My first job was doing research and checking facts for an editor who was only slightly nicer than the Miranda Priestly character in The Devil Wears Prada. It makes you pay close attention to sources and details.

I have two children, both of whom are adults now. Between the two of them, they have been in public schools in two different states, in a Christian private school, homeschooled, in a top-tier public university, and in community college. It is all imperfect, but they’re pretty smart and the vast majority of teachers do care about their students.

I have been a shooting sports instructor for five years, and I am fanatical about safety. (If you can’t handle the tool properly, don’t handle it at all.) I don’t shoot until I know I can hit my target.

If this didn’t happen, the reporter and the medium the story was published in could be sued for defamation and/or libel, and sometimes that happened.

But something different happened with the advent of social media. In sort, the stories that get bumped and viral on social media are always inevitably all about an emotional, visceral reaction to someone’s take on something that happened, typically missing all context. Before any one asks any questions, thousands upon thousands of emotionally-charged people are reposting it, sometimes with their own emotional outbursts added.

Foolishly, I have tried to bring friends (and I only do this for friends whom I respect) back from their social media rager. For instance, a few years ago, at least two friends went ballistic over a report that a teenager wearing a MAGA hat sneered at an American Indian drummer at the Capitol. By the time I saw their posts, additional information had come out that it was the boy and his group had been taunted by another group and the drummer had approached them in an attempt to get a negative reaction on camera. In context, the boy was only nervously smiling and trying to be calm. My friends’ first response was denial about news reports contradicting their visceral but uncritical emotional reaction, finally followed by one removing their post as if pretending it hadn’t happened, and the other acknowledging having been played. The boy in the picture successfully sued the mediums that had falsely called him a racist.

And yet, it continues. A story is posted, the mindless masses repost and screech in response, and when the facts eventually come out because the maligned parties had valid reasons behind their seemingly senseless acts, the mindless masses have already moved on to their next pumped-up reason for hysteria.

This week, it is surrounds an activist teacher and a journalist who damn well knew what they were playing the social media game, but went ahead and did it anyway. “Reporter” Wendy Suares @wsoares went on Twitter and announced a “source” had alerted her that a teacher had been removed from her post for sharing a QR link to books available from the Brooklyn library, because she was banned from lending such books to the children in her classroom herself. Instantly, the internet went insane about the horrors of book bans, the tragedy and stresses of teachers who simply want to open their students’ minds, and how extremely evil and backward the Oklahoma legislature and schools are.

Suarez cannot have been unaware that there were valid reasons and concerns parents had addressed to the schools and legislature that led to laws requiring some oversight over the material available to students in schools. Two days after the uproar, after all the socially correct posturing has been done and everyone has patted themselves on the back for spreading the story, it comes out that the parent who complained about the teacher in question didn’t want her child exposed to pornographic material such as in the book “Gender Queer,” which contains explicit pictures of oral sex and masturbation, and “Lawn Boy” with graphic depictions of sex between men and boys. You are all free to read these books yourself, but honestly, it can’t really have been that long ago that distributing sexual images to and encouraging sex acts to minors was illegal.

The parent addressed her concerns to the school, as it is her right to do. The school district says the teacher, Summer Bosimier @MsBosimier_ELA, was not terminated, suspended or placed on administrative leave. Furthermore, according to the parent (as quoted in the linked story), this teacher had covered the walls of her classrooms with the titles of “Books the state doesn’t want you to read.” This teacher didn’t give a single f*ck about any parent who might want to discuss sensitive subjects with their children directly, or be assured that what they had would be age-appropriate for their mental development. She had a political cause to push and she and her feckless journalist friend did just that. Not surprisingly, Ms. Bosimier quit once she was done and has gone off to poop on parents’ rights and concerns in Connecticut.

In this age of uncritical thought and emotion over substance, her cause has been well-served, as is any cause or story that is unquestioned. Readers on social media no longer look at who the people are telling the story or consider any agendas they may have; they never consider there may be a cause, reason, or context for what is going on; and they are easily ginned up into a mob on social media for something they don’t understand. We are all the worse for this

You may also note that the parent asked to remain anonymous because of fear of retaliation, while the teacher is out loud and proud, and is probably tweeting about how much she hates Oklahoma and the people and kids there already. Here she is being interviewed by her friendly journalist:

I will include my own personal take on this, as appearances are not always so deceiving. When my daughter was in sixth grade, the school district hired a first-year teacher who was covered in tattoos and flashed them openly. It’s ok to have tattoos (as many do), but it made me kind of nervous, especially when she also shared she had no idea about what she planned to teach the kids but would “look stuff up on the internet” as she went along, and said something about being an artist of some kind on the side. I decided I would be cool about this until this teacher hired a sub who openly watched pornography on his cell phone, according to several kids. Back then, pornography was not allowed in classrooms, and the sub was fired and went to jail. All the other teachers I had encountered before then were extremely picky about which sub would fill in for them. I don’t think that teacher continued teaching, but by the next school year we had moved to Tennessee where a porn-watching sub was inconceivable (at the time). And all the teachers have looked relatively wholesome, as in if they have tattoos, I can’t see them, and if they have political preferences or a rockin’ music career, I don’t know about it.

In this case, it is no wonder the public increasingly distrusts reporters and teachers.

Update: A few days later, the social media patsies have moved on to finding something else to go on a bender about, and more details are public (long after it could have placated an angry mob). Oklahoma’s Education Secretary asserts that the teacher’s actions violated state law; the books promoted on the site the QR code linked to included “Gender Queer” a graphic novel that includes explicit sexual drawings, including one of a girl fellating the narrator’s dildo, and the parent complainant asserts the teacher should face criminal charges for providing pornographic material to minors. Furthermore, the school district this teacher taught in could lose their accreditation for violating state law. But, hey, let’s all ignore the matter of a teacher providing explicitly sexual material to students knowing that parents and the state don’t want that happening, and pretend it’s all about a perfectly innocent school marm wanting to share her favorite literature with her precocious suppressed students against the will of bad bigoted forces, shall we?

However, as the national emergency of COVID-19 was declared and most of the governors in the United States (including Tennessee) ordered everything closed down, my station didn’t have any N95 masks. Nor could any regular person get them. After saying twice that masks don’t work against COVID, Fauci and the CDC suddenly declared we had to wear masks. And these are the masks all the regular people wore when going outside

At first, all we had was bandanas and scarves. Most people already had these in their wardrobe. Almost every major store chain limited the number of people who could go inside a building and required a facial covering. I remember standing outside in a long line outside Costco with a light scarf wrapped around my lower face. I still have a bandana that was sold by a local brewery for $10 so customers could go inside to buy a pint.

The paper surgical masks weren’t available either, but a whole lot of ingenious crafty people and businesses got to work making masks out of fabric. These were the masks most of us bought and collected and wore until mid-2021.

There were no standards for the masks. I had one (now lost) which was nothing more than a piece of stretchy fabric with slits cut for the ears and with a logo on it. Etsy crafters had a boon creating all sorts of masks for reasonable prices. I had a Thanksgiving mask that was curved to fit the face, and had three layers of thick fabric, along with an extra cotton insert. None of these fit tightly enough to disallow air from going out. Medical N95 masks were not sold anywhere. Industrial N95 masks were quickly snatched up for medical use whenever they were seen, and were thus also in short supply.

Airlines required passengers to wear masks, but bandanas were perfectly fine until early 2021, when the new Biden administration set up new FAA regulations requiring masks to firmly cover nose and chin. By then, the paper surgical masks were widely available again, so passengers with masks that were unacceptable (although they had been acceptable the year before) could be given a mask to wear.

At the end of 2021 or the beginning of 2022, the US government gave out free P95 masks (like the one below.) I got one, but the by the time I got it, I was vaccinated, masks were no longer required, I could find N95 masks at my local Home Depot, and I had two bags full of cloth masks that weren’t being used any more. So that’s the mask history in a capsule. Inappropriate for the situation, unavailable, homemade, mandated, and government-issued…a year after the crisis is effectively over.

In the book, I recount seeing a woman with an entire cartful of toilet paper coming out of Home Depot (who knew they sold toilet paper?), running away in horror when she’s asked why she needs so much; a child’s birthday party that was pitifully celebrated by having his friends do drive-by honkings instead of having cake and ice cream; and knowing that when I returned library books that I had had dropped in the back of my car by a begloved librarian that the books would sit for four days before they can be touched and checked in by a librarian, wearing gloves.

Since my book came out, others have shared their own stories. There was the former grocery store clerk who had to stand next to the toilet paper to make sure customers only took a single package. There was the doctor’s assistant who called a pharmacy for a patient and was told that they would not fill a prescription for ivermectin if the reason the doctor gave was for it being for COVID-19. There was the hiker who had to produce proof of vaccination in order to be able to go out hiking with others in California.

You’ve got stores, too. Share them in the comments below.