| CITYWEEKLY.NET |
| NEWS | A&E | DINING | CINEMA | MUSIC |
| CITY WEEKLY |
6 | FEBRUARY 17, 2022
PRIVATE EY
Grass Menagerie I
n the time of COVID, many people took up new hobbies, changed their careers or made lifestyle adjustments. Those are the folks I like—positive thinkers who tried to make the best use of their time when it looked like their time could end at any moment. They might even have recommitted themselves to any number of worthy ambitions, like finishing that surefire bestselling novel, losing weight or finding God. Alas, a good number of folks took to none of that, looked science right in the eye, exclaimed they were strong as a Borax mule team and became assholes. Beside the time they spent missing work or attending COVID funerals of friends and family gone before their expiration dates (it’s verifiable worldwide that COVID preyed especially hard on the fatuous and obtuse), they spent much of COVID time finding fault in everything from mask-wearing to the way teenagers served their fast food at the local drive-in. Such deportment caused a good number of us to fully disassociate from them. We all have friends we no longer care to see. We have work associates whom we hope never return to the home office. We have learned that some of our neighbors who politely wave when driving through the neighborhood become vicious witch hunters during formerly sanguine school board meetings. We have family members who are not welcome at the dinner table, at weddings and nor, of course, at funerals. My own COVID death count now stands at 11. That’s the number of persons I’ve known, worked with or have close connections to who would still be living if not for COVID. No matter how I try, I cannot square that with the sentiment of some people that their dying of COVID—anyone’s dying of COVID—is what God intended. He could have
B Y J O H N S A LTA S @johnsaltas
called them home in a more peaceful way, it seems, not by drowning in their own spittle. While I’m not without faith, neither can I be accused of being the most religious person around, despite a family lineage that until recently included bishops, priests, nuns and monks. But in November, my dad’s first cousin, a wellknown Greek Orthodox nun and the founder of the beautiful St. John’s Monastery in the hills above Megara, Greece, died of COVID. Fifty of the 70 nuns at her monastery caught COVID. I mean, what can you say? So, as this has gone on and on, I say less to those I disagree with. We’re past the point of course correction, apparently, so I only pipe up when something fully egregious or factually wrong catches my eye. The only people I tell to mask up are close family members. If I go somewhere and feel uncomfortable, I just walk away. That’s my protest now—to just let that booger-hanger over in the produce department have all the onions to himself until it’s safe to re-enter and grab a sweet Vidalia. By the way, there are fewer booger-hangers at Rancho Markets than any other grocery in town. In case you ever want to say hello, I’ll be somewhere near their excellent bakery. I’m just stopping to smell the bread dough these days. That’s been a challenge following four surgeries in 2021, including a bastard of a prostate surgery in December that still has me wincing. As if COVID weren’t enough, I’m one of those people who endures depression through this time of year thanks to our daylight hours being shortened. It’s aptly named SAD—Seasonal Affective Disorder. About all I can do is to find new things to engage in, like backyard birding. I took up that amazeballs hobby in late 2020. My backyard is now a year-round home to chickadees, scrub jays, finches, quail, woodpeckers, magpies, sparrows and many others—plus the squirrels that eat the bird food, and the
Cooper’s hawk that eats the birds. Birds bring humankind optimism and, as such, were immortalized in the words of Thomas Farley Foster in 1827’s The Pocket Encyclopaedia of Natural Phenomenon: “Songbirds begin to sing early in the primaveral season, the blackbird often in January and the thrush soon follows.” You might have learned that as, “If winter’s here, can spring be far behind?” Yes indeedy, I feel the days getting longer! There’s probably a word for such a feeling. I’ve discovered many new terms via another COVID hobby, playing word games like Wordle and Quordle. They join other COVID hobbies like birdwatching, taking Greek language classes and searching for the perfect menudo, posole and birria taco. Playing Wordle (not to be confused with Worldle) and Quordle (not to be confused with Nerdle) has at last led me to a word that accurately describes me. I’m a muckspout—a person who swears too much. I validate that description of myself every time throttlebottoms such as Mike Lee, Chris Stewart and Burgess Owens open their mouths. I can’t help it. I swear at them. I do the same with all of Utah’s GOP who bumfuzzle me at every turn, their latest by trying to yank seltzers from grocery stores despite no one bitching about them and which only hurts local business (instead of making a simple word change in the state’s arcane definitions of beer and alcohol). They’re all a bunch of ninnyhammers, who for 45 days each year degrade themselves into any manner of catawampus behaviors. It’s like they hate us. But the damage they’ll do will be forgotten in future years when they move on to ever more fopdoodle antics. Every year they become the very face of rakefire. So today, I’ll relax, fill this space, watch the birds, dance with the squirrel, stir the roux and enjoy another day of apricity. We’ve had lots of them. CW Send comments to john@cityweekly.net.
