Irony, thy name is OTG.  Pathetic, thy name is Sally and David.  We are naming a lot of stuff right now while trapped sick and wounded in the city.  

As my readers know, I am NOT a Doomsday Prepper.  If anything, I am merely an old-man escaping something I conveniently label ‘the city’.  Maybe I am a small-time, cautious adventurer (but very limited) – goaded by my fearless partner, to be totally honest (there is no other way to explain the El Salvador trip by swamp buggy and chicken bus a couple years back).

I am also a bit of a hedonist…I like some things and I pursue them.  Yummy.  I don’t like other things and I try to avoid them. Yuck!  I got the avoidance response-thing down pat.  I am much more of a spoiled brat than a hardy, independent Mountain-man, type.  I like Netflix, for Gawd’s sake.  And Malbec.  I have even traveled once or twice with my own pillow!

Still, I did kind of take some solace and comfort in being remote.  It ‘felt’ safer, somehow.  You know….?  Zombies can’t swim…kinda thing?  Seriously….we did rationalize that anyone who wanted to come kill us or something (have their way), would be put off by the trouble of it all.  Getting to us ain’t easy.  Bad guys first have to get boats and check the weather and find a place to land…and for what?  They sure as hell do not want to carry all our crap out as booty and load it into a boat.  Hell, our booty is old!

But, living OTG almost automatically makes you better prepared than city dwellers.  We have a food shed.  Water.  Tools.  Not just a ‘bottle’ of wine but a few cases.  When TSHTF or TEOTWAWKI comes a ‘calling, we’d last a week or two longer than most of you pussies!  Ya gotta take your victories where you can.

OK.  I am also a bit smug and obnoxious.  Not to mention stupid.

The truth is: Murphy Rules.  In the long run, Murphy also takes it all.

And Murphy is here!  There we were all smug and stupid….thinking, ‘this is good’.  And then Sal had a knee op.  And that was good, too.  REAL good!  But then Coronavirus presented itself to China and Italy and all them other places but, like, we were OTG.  We were invincible!  OK, maybe not invincible but certainly exempt from ‘some of it’.  We were safe.  Safe-ish, anyway.  Poor bastards out there.  But NOT us.  We were good.

Well, not quite.  We were NOW temporarily out of the Green Zone and in the Hospital zone – NOT good.  But we could get back in a sec.  No worries, mate.  “Is that a zombie over there?” 

Then Sal was felled by the ordinary wimpy flu.  And so I carried her for seven or so days……then the bug got me.  I am too heavy for her to carry – especially with a new knee.  Worse, it seems, we only have a few rolls of toilet paper.

In the movies, this would all be called ‘foreshadowing’.  The music in the background would start to get a bit weird…..the focus would be misty…more ‘night scenes’ would be filmed.  Bottom line: things are happening all around them and our hapless heroes don’t even know that Freddy Krueger lives next door.

“Honey?  You got any toilet paper?  We seem to be out?”

“I’ll go look.  But the lights just went out.  I’ll get my cane.  And a flashlight.  Back in a second.”