After this pandemic started and its scope, potential duration, and repercussions became obvious to those being realistic about what was about to unfold, the permanent loss of many beloved shops and restaurants was an obvious certainty. It was going to happen. The only unknown was which places would close their doors for good.

This morning, I found out via posts made by its employees Facebook that last night O’Faolain’s Irish Pub and Restaurant became the first such casualty in my world.

Calling it my favorite Irish pub doesn’t properly convey its importance to me. It was literally and by far my favorite place to go for well over 10 years. Pub quiz, date nights, meeting up with friends, lazy Saturday afternoons reading a book while having cider and fries, and just plain needing to get out of the house… It was all of these things and more.

O’Faolain’s started to become a major part of my life in 2007. In the aftermath of my first marriage finally falling apart, what I needed most was a place to escape to when feeling overwhelmed by the circumstances of that time — which happened often. Before that event, it was just one of any number of places to go eat and have a couple drinks. However, the atmosphere, the fact that hard cider was on tap, the quality of the food, WiFi for public use, and the ability to settle in at somewhat secluded spot quickly made it my first choice when the need (and the opportunity) to flee the apartment arrived. It turned out to be the wonderfully cliched right place at the right time.

What made the serendipity of it all the more special is that I hadn’t had a favorite hangout since college. In the early ’90s, the Irish Pub on the 1100 block of Walnut Street in Philly (which coincidentally closed last summer) served as that focal point in life. Predominantly, it was the place my friends and I frequented to have drinks on a Friday or Saturday night, but it also served as a pleasant rest stop to enjoy some food, drink and maybe even a book after spending a few hours walking around the city. However, after moving to New York City in the summer of ’96, nothing else ever came close to replicating the importance the Irish Pub had during that time. There were certainly other places that saw plenty of my business, but none of them felt special in the same way.

O’Faolain’s became special while dealing with life as a refugee from a failed marriage. A number of evenings were spent there until it felt right to reenter the dating world. Copious amounts of cider and shepherd’s pie were consumed. Large chunks of books were read, and because this was the tail end of the LiveJournal era, a time when longer posts like this were far more frequent, thousands of sentences were strung together as well. Most importantly, it was where much necessary healing took place.

In retrospect, it all happened rather rapidly. In less than a year, it had become the most important place outside of home. Within less than two years, it became an integral part of my history when Sally and I had our first date there. Since then, there have been countless nights of trivia (with more than our fair share of victories), a couple friendships made, additional books read, Eagles games watched with Brandon, the much less frequent blog posts written, gatherings with friends and family, and even times where I went simply to fulfill the need of being by myself for a while in a place that felt comforting.

Alas, the last visit there was completely unremarkable, and I don’t recall exactly when it was or the reason for going. To merely know when it was, I will need to look at credit card statements from the month before O’Faolain’s thought it was closing its doors temporarily while it waited out the opening stages of the pandemic. There was no way to anticipate that it would be my last time there.

The official announcement placed this afternoon on their Facebook page attempted to strike a hopeful tone:

We ask for your understanding in this very difficult time for our hospitality industry and we look forward to providing “a little bit of Irish hospitality” in Sterling soon again. This does not mean the end.

I want to believe that it isn’t the end. However, looking at the situation realistically, the pandemic will go on for another year, at a minimum. At lot can happen in that time, despite current intents and plans. Realistically, it will be longer before it can return, and if it does, there’s no guarantee that it will be in the same location. Even if does, at best it will be something new that manages to be wonderfully reminiscent of the original. As good as it may be, it won’t be the same.

If I’m lucky, I will find some place like it again.

“Everybody is a Ferengi now.” “The high holy church of unfettered capitalism.” Both are flippant remarks about the current state of America I’ve been muttering for a number of years. Sometime in the aftermath of World War II, a significant percentage of Americans began to see and defend our capitalist system with a kind of emotionally-driven religious fervor. We were the greatest country on earth, therefore our economic system must be the best that ever devised. However, no economic system is 100% stable. A variety of forces are always modifying and tweaking it. Groups of people, as well as extremely powerful individuals, constantly compete against each other in an effort to curb the system’s excesses, exploit and enrich themselves further, or simply to make minor tweaks to remove value-neutral inefficiencies.

Since Reagan’s election, however, those looking to exploit the system and modify it to further and entrench their personal enrichment have increasingly possessed the upper hand. It was at some point during the second Bush presidency that the effectiveness of there efforts became undeniably obvious to many of us. At that point, this country had been experimenting with trickle-down economics for 20 years, and the data showed an upward transfer of wealth was clear and undeniable. The richest 10% of the country owned more of the wealth than at any time since the Great Depression (the situation that’s only grown in severity since then.) Yet, many Americans had utterly bought into the notion that our capitalist system was the best and only way to do things. That was when I first started noting the Ferengi and religious aspects to what the American version of capitalism had become.

The truly gobstoppping thing, though, was how entrenched this blind fealty to the economy had become. This has been a godsend to the new oligarchy, which cannot exist if too many people do not have faith in the system. Should that happen, they will rebel eventually, in some form. The best way to inoculate the system from such dissent is to convince as many people as possible that they too can be just as rich and powerful if they just worked hard enough and smart enough. You don’t need to convince everybody; you just need to convince enough people to prevent the system from being completely overhauled. So far, they managed beautifully.

There is no better example of this than Jeff Bezos and his sprawling Amazon business empire. Amazon is literally the kind of company that anti-trust laws were originally established to combat. It long ago became something far more than an online retailer. Its tendrils infiltrate and inhabit our economy in a myriad of ways: they control an an steadily increasing share of the global Internet traffic; it is a significant media company, in the entertainment business both as a producer and distributor; it acts as a middleman to anybody who wants to sell on the Internet; it provides data hosting and cloud services to some of the worlds largest companies; it’s one of the world’s biggest aggregators  of individual’s data; it produces news; and it enriches Bezos personally at the rate of billions of dollars per month.

This is the type of Cthulu-like, multi-tentacled business that should be keeping people awake in fear at night. The reach and scope of their business is quite literally inescapable. Yet, people to continue to act as if Bezos has done nothing wrong. On a literal level, this is true: he has done nothing legally wrong. By those rules and laws. He has just been a shrewd businessman, and he deserves every penny he has made. Besides, hasn’t he made our life’s better, easier, and more enjoyable? What is the harm in that? By the high holy tenants of the religious belief in our economic system, he deserves every penny he owns. This isn’t hyperbole, by the way. I witnessed it myself last week in the comment section of a Facebook post which stated the need for proactively taking our business to away from Amazon. In retrospect, I wish I took a screenshot to illustrate the point.

These people see nothing wrong or disconcerting about the fact that Bezos is on the verge of becoming the worlds first trillionaire. He is accumulating massive amounts of wealth on a scale unseen since at least the Gilded Age — well over 100 years ago — and he continues to do so at a time when the economic inequality of our system is wrecking havoc upon peoples lives in a way not seen since the Great Depression. This becomes even more repugnant when you consider the ruthlessness and immoral treatment of the workers in his distribution centers in Amazon warehouses. The fact that those workers are getting infected by the coronavirus at higher rates than the majority of the population is well-documented. Yet, he is going to slash their meager “hazard” bonus in June. Apparently, he’s not making money fast enough.

Yet, Bezos is just a rather large symptom of a system that is horribly out of whack and unable to handle the current health and economic crisis. The religious fervor of those that support the billionaire class has blinded them to the reality of the fact that they are rubes who have been horribly duped. They are like the character Rom in Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, when advised by Federation officers to form a union and strike for higher pay. They refuse to acknowledge the full reality of their situation because they want to someday become the exploiters, even though the chances of that happening are realistically nil.

Sadly, this is just history repeating itself. The Great Depression happened primarily because the ultra rich got too greedy and in their efforts to enrich themselves created the conditions that allowed any major shock to bring it all crashing down. The collapse of the Weimar Republic and the ensuing economic shockwaves merely pushed over the first of a long chain of dominoes perfectly aligned to easily topple the global economy into disarray. A more stable and robust economic system could have better survived the shock to the system. This is not to say that there wouldn’t have been economic hardship, but the pain wouldn’t have been as bad. The same thing is happening here. The extreme greed and Smaug-like hoarding of wealth didn’t by itself start the collapse our economy is experiencing. However, it did mean that when the pandemic spiraled out of control, the system was horribly ill-equipped to handle the economic reverberations.

Frankly, it’s hard to see how the current situation doesn’t proceed along the path similar to that of the Great Depression. Even more disconcertingly, that event may even be less painful and trying than what we are currently facing. Aside from the rise in fascism and nationalism (look, more parallels!), humankind was not facing a slew of other challenges and crises that could very well spell the end of civilization as we know it. Global climate change, ecological collapse, environmental damage wrought by decades of a capitalism — especially in regards to convenience and disposability (planned obsolescence)… All these things were easily capable of eventually causing the exact same kind of shock to the system that COVID-19 did.

In short, what we perceived as normal for the past few decades (which, as noted before, was anything but constant or stable) is long gone. We are entering a new and scary period in human history. One that will require societal change on a level of magnitude that Europe underwent in the decades following the Black Death. Much like the nobility of that time, those who have most profited from the current system will fight tooth and nail to preserve everything they have achieved and “earned.” In much the same way the nobility ruthlessly (and ultimately unsuccessfully) used its connections to the church to bolster and defend their position from economic and societal change, today’s oligarchs will use the firmly established high holy cult of the American capitalist belief system in pursuit of similar goals.

Troubling and turbulent times lay ahead. In some ways, I feel like Sarah Connor gazing off into the distance of the desert at the end of the first Terminator movie. Dark times are coming, and it’s prudent to prepare for them. However the coming storm is like nothing that has come before. Short of becoming a full-blown prepper, how do you actually prepare to handle something of that magnitude? Or, is becoming a prepper the truly prudent course of action at this time?

Whatever the future holds, society has to become kinder and far more thoughtful. We have to be better than Ferengi, and we cannot allow ourselves to rely heavily on faith in that our way of doing things will just work out in the end. If we don’t, human civilization may very well be in a frightful state far sooner than many of us ever imagined.

I have the day to myself today, and it’s the rare type of Saturday where normally I’d engage in one of my preferred acts of self-care: going to O’Faolain’s to read a book over a couple ciders and an order or two of fries. Even if my favorite pub was open, however, this still wouldn’t be an option — it’s just not safe to do.

The whole situation is depressing as hell.

To an extremely limited degree, I understand the red-hat wearing wankers who are bleating about their rights, freedoms, and liberties while demanding that the country reopen. Staying home, not going to your favorite places, and not engaging in your usual activities for months and with no end in sight is trying as hell. It’s a situation that barely anyone alive today has previously experienced. However, demanding that we completely reopen the country is utterly asinine. It will cause the death of hundreds of thousands.

Even if Northern Virginia was one of those regions attempting to fully reopen, I would continue to stay home. It would be just as depressing as the current situation. I want nothing more than to take a book to O’Faolain’s today, and not doing so is making me miserable. Compounding the misery: many of my other preferred activities are also verboten. Going to the Lego store to look and potentially buy, visiting downtown Frederick or Winchester (though, truth be told, those always involve Sally as well), going to any kind of bookstore… all of these are simply not options, regardless of their current state of operation.

So, it’s a day of pushing through the situational doom and gloom, and doing other things. I’ll still get some reading done, and there are more than a few other enjoyable projects here in the house. I may even push myself out of the current funk. I’ll just have stop fixating on the things that just aren’t possible, and be thankful that other options are available.

I am done with maintaining even a thin veneer of civility. I have had it with right-wingers in this country, and I despise nearly every single one of them. Each time one of them starts bleating about their rights, freedom, and bringing the economy back, all I hear is incredibly narcissistic, overly-entitled, short-sighted whining.

Back in World War II, when this country last faced a serious crisis, we did whatever it took to win. Industries were nationalized, taxes were raised, lights out curfews enforced in coastal cities, rationing was common, and people sacrificed because it was understood that there was a greater good. It was a hardship, but it was necessary. Everyone understood that not chipping in and doing what was right likely meant putting lives at risk.

But, now… Well, according to the current deranged logic being spouted by the John Birch Society, Tea Party, Libertarian, (somehow) the Christian right, and whackadoodle GOP crowd, freedom is all that matters, and if they don’t get what they want they are going to march on state capital building while proudly bearing their arsenals in an effort to intimidate and scare everyone else in an effort to get what they want. They don’t give the tiniest shit about the health and well-being of others or society as a whole. It’s all about them, and fuck everyone who doesn’t agree with them.

Well, I just don’t have it in me anymore to attempt to be understanding or talk civilly to people like that. Their selfishness and preschool-level understandings of rights, freedom, and civic responsibilities and duties is getting other people killed — and the worst part is that they don’t care. They feel like they have a 99% chance of surviving if they should somehow get sick, and they are comfortable with those odds. Of course, if they get sick and come into contact with 300 other people during that time, they will kill three other people because of their selfishness and inhumanity to others. But, that’s not their problem.

I don’t have to be nice to such people. Fuck them. All of them. Especially those who know me personally. I don’t care if you are a friend or a family member. If you are of the mindset that your liberty and freedom is more important than doing the right thing, then you are a killer, and I want nothing to do with you. I’m holding you to a higher standard because if you know me, chances are excellent that you’ve seen other things I’ve posted here or on Facebook. You know how I feel about this. This is not a simple matter of “it’s just an opinion” or “let’s agree to disagree.” I have no fucks to give to that bullshit. Your attitude will cause others to die. If you are some kind of Christian who can’t be bothered to understand this… Well, I hope the God you believe in is far more forgiving than I am.

Hundreds of thousands of people are going to die in this country because of a deranged right-wing way of thinking that devalues society and the general well being — all for the fetishization of individualism. I don’t have to talk nice to such people anymore. I’m tired of trying to get them to understand and see the light — tired of trying to get them to develop the smallest shred of empathy. Sometimes, you just have let the lemmings go rushing headlong over the cliff to their death.

It just sucks that they are going to take so many people who are sincerely trying otherwise with them.