My friend Scary has been predicting the apocalypse his whole life. Volcanoes, black holes, the mysterious Planet X colliding with Earth, and yes—pandemic.
He didn’t predict a heatwave, but he says it falls under the ambit of “apocalyptic climate change.”
Now he’s pretty sure we’re all going to die. It got up to 45 C (114 F) in the house yesterday, and today will probably be the same.
We had to put the gerbils in the basement. Otherwise they were gonna die.
But Scary says we’re ALL gonna die.
My fellow inebriates,
My local booze store has responded to the COVID-19 outbreak. In the interests of news/health literacy, my friend Scarybear and I are sharing our respective interpretations of the store’s announcement.
(In case you’ve forgotten who Scarybear is, he’s my apocalyptic housemate. He tends to focus on asteroids hits and gamma rays when he’s contemplating the End of All Things, but he also loves a good pandemic.)
They’re going to clean more frequently and disinfect customer-facing areas and equipment.
Good. I won’t get sticky when I shop there.
It’s too late. You humans are all going to get it. Luckily for us bears, we’re already riddled with germs. COVID-19 won’t make a dent.
They’re going to make their employees wash their hands more often.
Good. Although it feels like we all kind of knew about hand-washing already.
You have to recite the intro to Star Trek while you do it. That’s the ONLY way to ensure you wash for long enough.
They’re cancelling training and meetings for employees.
OMG. Much of their training is booze-tasting. That’s going to suck for them. This pandemic is making me feel… empathy.
They just don’t want them to talk to each other and figure out what’s really going on.
They’re going to make customers respect each other’s space.
But I like cuddling.
I like to eat people sometimes.
They’ll let customers wear masks in the store, but they might ask people to remove them if they’re checking ID.
Sounds fair. Gotta check for coronavirus-fearing teenagers.
And liquor store robbers. It’s the slippery slope to mass surveillance. That’s what happens when you manufacture something like COVID-19 in a lab and slip it to the public. Authoritarian regimes have a heyday. COVID-19 is mild, too, so you can consider it a dress rehearsal for the government-sponsored zombie apocalypse.
Scary had more to say, but I told him I was implementing a word count for this blog post. He said that was fine, I was lucky he even bothered, and that I’m an idiot. Then he went back to watching Alex Jones.
On my head is a very small bowler hat.
No, my fellow inebriates, my parents wouldn’t just buy me a hat. The hat in question came perched atop a long-awaited treasure—a product that’s been absent from BC Liquor Stores for over a year and has finally been restored to its rightful shelf thanks to the heroic efforts of Business Development Manager Julia Gale.
If you’re new to this blog, you can’t possibly know what an odyssey the wait for Broker’s Gin has been. Why did BCLS cease to stock Broker’s? We’ll never know, but the bureaucracy involved in reinstating it seemed, at times, Sisyphean. Oh, MFI, if you could only know the suspense, the suffering, the torture! The holdout for Broker’s here at LBHQ! The resultant desolation and uncomfortable sobriety followed by bludgeoning despair when the product failed to reappear! The debauched embrace of at least six other brands of gin, all drowning the sorrow of one who’s had one’s heart broken repeatedly—a descent that spiraled into multiple gin shootouts, documented and otherwise, until finally last year’s hot weather ended, at which point my parents declared “gin season over” and we consoled ourselves with nothing but beer, wine, rye, Scotch, Canadian Cream, and whisky balls. OMG, MFI, I went through all five Kübler-Ross stages of grief over Broker’s Gin, plus a couple of others (fixation on thongs, washing-machine paranoia, Scarybear-provoked apocalypticity, stalking Julia Gale beyond ordinary levels). And FINALLY the wait has ended.
But you never get a totally happy ending at LBHQ. Just ask Dolly. According to my evil parents, it is still not warm enough. They don’t feel like a gin & tonic yet. And here I thought they were spiraling downward with me into seasonal indiscriminateness. Apparently not.
So I will update you when we crack that bottle, which is, of course, foiling my thumbless little paws. For now.
Liquorstore Bear 