Welcome To The Pandemonium

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Welcome to The Pandemonium by rscholz@comcast.net

Had a nice conversation with my old Philosopher Rabbit friend yesterday evening. Her name is Penelope. I call her Pen. I’ve known her since she was a bunny. When I first saw her she was snuggling together, adorably I might add, with her three other “nest-mates” none of whom had even opened their eyes yet. Pen is seven years old now, which is old for a wild rabbit. Her coat looks a bit intermittent and raggedy; like the Velveteen Rabbit near the end of that story. I wonder if it will keep her warm enough to make it through our next winter.

Penelope & Her "Nest-Mates"

Pen and I often talk, you know, about this-and-that. She's pretty smart. But her range of knowledge is limited and quite eclectic. The red squirrels have been bringing her books from one of the neighborhood Little Free Library boxes. Here in Ann Arbor these boxes on poles are filled with a very strange assortment of free books. Lots of children's books, of course. But lots of unusual and erudite and intellectually stimulating books too. I looked in one of the Little Free Library boxes that I walk by on my way to the park the other day and was astounded to find that most of the books in this particular box were written by economists of the “Chicago School of Economics” like Milton Friedman's A Monetary History of the United States... Yoiks and Sheesh! Yesterday, when I walked out to the garden to harvest some carrots for a salad I noticed Pen sitting pensively out by the garden gate. “Hi Pen... what's the hops?” I asked. (Ha!) Pen had been sitting there very much like a stone statue and as I watched she seemed to come back from some far-out trip to the other end of the universe. She then turned to look at me with her liquid soulful eyes and asked, “Why do you wear a mask when you go out in the world… are you a robber?” I laughed. “Well, I have stolen an idea or two in my day, but no, I'm not a robber.” I told Pen that I was wearing a mask because a mask makes it less less likely that I will spread the dreaded Covid-19 virus, should I have the disease and not know it, and that the Covid-19 virus was laying low many of my fellow Apes That Walk On Two Legs, “What’s a virus?” asked Penelope “Well, you’re going to find this a little hard to believe but a virus is an eensy-weensy-teensy bit of stuff that is neither dead nor alive. The virus contains DNA or RNA in a protein coat. When a virus enters one of your cells it sheds its coat, bares its genes and takes over your cell’s replication machinery to make copies of itself which can then infect more of your cells. The bad news for the infected person is that the cells taken over by the virus don’t work right anymore and you get a little, or a lot, sick. So sick, in fact, that the infected person may find themselves walking right up to the brink of death and some of us even go over the brink, “ I explained. 08/12/20

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rscholz@comcast.net


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Welcome To The Pandemonium by Rick Scholz - Issuu