“Put on your mask, Dude.” That was said to me in an office building amid peak lockdown. “Where’s your mask?” was a question angrily posed to me by a sour-faced shopper in the parking lot of a Whole Foods in Washington, D.C. around the same time. At another Whole Foods in nearby Bethesda, a rather self-regarding customer (redundancy?) let me know that “in Bethesda, we wear masks.” Close friends lectured me on the importance of wearing masks while scoffing at my surely knuckle-dragging disdain for the cloth. For a brief time in the summer of 2020, American Airlines banned me for removing it too much during a flight.
Self-reflection is a weakness. Sanctimonious virtue will always trump the law, truth and statistics. These people are in charge of the FBI and our government.
I’ve been noticing lately that the English paragraph seems to be sinking gradually into the world of the minimal like Michael Crichton’s shrunken people in Micro, a practice that hovers between the si.