You know what’s crazy? I’ll tell you what’s crazy
Covid 19 Masks
Most health experts recommend a mask in these uncertain times of spit and spray and random runination.
Most health experts say after social distancing, it is the best form of protection against airborne contamination.
I’m no expert, but I don’t think the mask thing is working all that well.
Have you stopped to think about how these masks work?
It’s not brain surgery, but there is a trick to wearing them correctly and using them effectively.
If you are in a surgical suite and you have a nurse standing next to you handing you focepts and wiping your brow, then a mask works well.
The doctor never touches his face, and he never contaminates the patient.
That’s how it works in a medical setting.
But in real life, there’s never a nurse to dab your forehead when you need one.
When you are doing real life things and trying to wear a mask, they are hardly reliable.
Have you been to your local supermarket?
It’s the antithesis of your local surgical suite.
Next to the produce section is a great place to see just how good a mask works.
One woman I am watching is a prime offender.
She has a designer mask on her face. I can tell she is proud. She is woke. She is doing her part to rid the planet of the dreaded Covid 19. Just one problem; she is the poster child for cross contamination.
I watch as she touches a cereal box in her cart, then wraps both hands around the handle in her buggy.
That’s going to be trouble, I think to myself.
On cue, she has an itch, so she lets go of the buggy handle, presumably, free of Covid 19, and then places that surgically sterile finger under her face shield. She itches her skin. The mask moves violently across her face like an Earthquake shaking a circus tent.
After several scratches, she removes her hand from her mask, and places her palm back on the buggy handle.
On cue, she gets a cell phone call. She picks up her phone, presumably covid 19 free, and places it to her ear. With her other hand, the one that was cross contaminating with the cart, she pulls her face covering down to her throat. She has a conversation, with big gyrations and lots of hand movements. She adjusts her mask around her throat two or three times.
Finally, she finishes the call, puts the phone in the child seat of the cart. With the same hand that has now touched everything but raw chicken, she pulls her mask over her chin, wiping against her lips, then stretching the equivalent of sneeze cloth over her nose. She uses both hands to reposition the mask, and make sure there is a good seal.
Within 3 minutes, she has touched her face a dozen times.
Is her mask a focal point of protection or contamination?
It’s a car wreck.
In the same time period I touched my face zero times.
The reason?
I am not wearing a mask.
I believe in social distancing, though I think the 6 foot boundary is a made up distance.
I am a big fan of frequent hand washing, as I know this is the true way to cut down on bacterial contamination.
Wash your hands and don’t touch your face.
Bam.
It’s just that easy.
In my mind, masks are a good idea gone bad.
In the hands of trained professionals, masks can be effective.
EMS workers, Nurses, doctors. These trained medical personnel understand how to use a mask.
The rest of us are morons.
A mask hanging from the face of every moron, is a recipe for disaster.
It’s like hanging a feed bag of Covid 19 over your ears and saying, “gobble up!”
I was that moron recently.
Like most of you, I was 4 weeks overdo for my haircut.
I looked like one of the Beatles during the Sgt. Pepper days.
I had curls on curls and a duck mullet beginning to quack on the back of my neck.
When my stylist called and said she could see me, I was like, “Yes!”
“But you’ll need to wear a mask,” she says.
I don’t give the idea too much thought, until I am actually in the lobby and they are requiring me to wear the mask.
And the moment I put it on my face, its a thing.
I feel self conscious.
Though it is made of light weight cotton, it feels more like a scuba mask, pressing against my flesh.
The moment I put it on, I feel like I am suffocating. I feel confined, as my own heartbeat reverberates in my ears.
When I breathe it expands and contracts. It gets to the point that I am watching the mask with every breath, and not concentrating on important things, like walking into walls.
But it is the rule, so I sit in the stylist’s chair and begin to get my first hair cut in 10 weeks.
I look around the room. My stylist is wearing a mask. I am wearing a mask. The people behind us are wearing masks. It looks like a stage coach robbery from 1876.
I am getting claustrophobic, but I am handling it.
She moves the mask around my face, as she begins cutting from side to side.
“Man did your hair get long,” she says moving the mask below my nose, to expose hairs on the back of my head.
We try and talk, to catch up, but the sound of my words are muffled, falling flat inside the wind catcher stuck to my lips.
We both sound like the teacher in the Peanuts cartoon.
WAAA WAAA WAAA
At some point, the haircut begins to go bad.
The problem is, what was once a clump of wet hair, that fell harmlessly onto my lap, is now dry. Those dry hairs, totaling in the hundreds, are now floating, dancing before my face, like a dandelion blown apart by the wind.
At this point, the hair is falling over my forehead like a waterfall of rag weed.
Hundreds of dry hairs, are now sticking to my eye lashes.
The random hairs are tickling the bridge of my nose.
And then the dry clippings, hundreds of them, each like a tiny hairy terrorist, begins infiltrating my mask.
With each snip of the scissors, hairs from my head float over my eyes, onto the bridge of my nose, and enter the vacuum chamber of the cloth mask surrounding my lips.
In seconds it’s as if a long haired cat has crawled onto my face.
My lips are suddenly covered in fur. My nose has tiny hairs sucking up each nostril.
I suddenly understand what it might be like to groom myself with my own tongue.
I’m breathing in my hair. It’s like air only with a lot more texture.
dry hair is circulating inside my mask like a vortex cloud.
I start to shudder and shake.
I begin to cough.
Because I’m wearing a mask, my stylist cannot tell what’s happening.
I could be clearing my throat for all she knows.
I could be giving myself a tracheotomy for all she knows.
My eyes are tearing up as the hair ball collecting in my nostrils grows with every snip of the scissor.
She continues to cut hair.
I see the flash of the scissor near my eyes.
I dare not jerk away for fear of being harpooned like a hairy sea creature.
I cough, and my mask expands like a balloon around my face. The air currents push hair out of the sides of the mask. Some dance into the atmosphere, free like spores to contaminate someone else’s work station.
Hundreds of other tiny, rebellious hairs are now floating into my eyes.
It’s like opening your eyes in a saw mill as a gust of wind blasts saw dust into your face.
I am suddenly being attacked by my own hair, sticking to my lips, nose and eyes.
This is what it is like to be a sheep dog, I decide.
I can’t stand it anymore. The risk of getting knifed in the neck with a scissor is outweighed by my need to breathe.
I pull my mask away from my face.
A thousand loose whiskers drop onto my lap.
“you ok?,” she says.
Her face is shielded by her own mask. I can’t tell if she’s concerned or laughing at me.
I start spitting like a cat with a hair ball.
I stand up from the chair and begin swatting at my face.
Loose hairs are falling from my face.
I begin wiping my cheeks and eye brows.
More hair falls to the ground.
I try shaking my head sideways, to get the hairs floating in my ear canal to exit.
“Got hair in your mask?” she asks.
I would respond, but hair is in my mouth, and I am actively pulling hairs off the top of my tongue.
I’m spitting and coughing and whimpering.
She hands me a paper towel.
I drag it across my face, wiping my eyes, and lips.
I sit back in the chair.
“That was awful,” I say.
“I know, this is a terrible way to cut hair,” she continues.
I leave my mask around my neck for the remainder of the haircut.
As she cuts my hair, once again saturated with water, I think how the mask is a quixotic quick fix to a problem that is much larger.
In that single hair appointment, my face was touched dozens of times. Not only did I touch my face incessantly, but my stylist also touched my nose, my ear, and other parts of my face while attempting to maneuver around my mask.
In my 20 years of coming to this one stylist, my face has never been violated more times. I feel like I need to file an incident report with the department of cosmetology.
And all because I am wearing a mask designed to keep me from transmitting Covid 19, but which promotes something equally as deleterious; CONSTANT AND CHRONIC FACE TOUCHING.
Since this haircut, I have seen mask shaming. That’s where people who wear masks, publicly ridicule those who don’t publicly wear masks.
Since this haircut I have seen business owners arrested because they did not promote either face masks or social distancing practices.
And since this haircut, I have seen riots around the country, where the mask was used not to prevent Covid 19, but to obscure the identity of thugs and looters who violated the law under the guise of a good cause.
And now, tens of thousands are marching shoulder to shoulder promoting BLM and other causes.
Some protesters wear masks. Some marchers don’t wear masks.
I’ve heard health experts wonder if there will be spikes in Covid 19 because of the recent insurrections.
As far as I’m concerned; if you can protest without a mask, you can do everything else without a mask, too.
As far as I’m concerned, America is open for business.
Socially distance, wash your hands, and don’t touch your face.
Go get a haircut America.
Leave the licking of hair to your cat.
Life’s Crazy