Listen, when I was young, I was reckless. Just ask my dead mother who in a Biloxi, Mississippi beach cottage circa 1956 scraped me screaming off a hardwood floor after I had leapt Lone-Ranger-like from the top of my chest-of-drawers onto a rocking horse that catapulted me face first splat. 

Ask Joey Brown, whose Toyota I totaled in Hilton Head on a roundabout in August of 1976.

Or ask Jacob T. Williams II who two years later rode shotgun as I drove my MG Midget down a capital city sidewalk and made an ill-fated left down steps into a parking garage whose bottom floor housed the Campus Police of the University of South Carolina.^[1]

Given that regrettable history, you might think I’d grant slack to others who foolishly throw caution to the salt breeze of Folly Beach, yet, this afternoon, as I walked home from Chico Feo on East Erie, my tongue cluck-clucked as I espied^[2] a family of conservative-looking folks^[3] barreling past in a golf cart with a grandmother teetering on the back seat clutching a squirming child no more than six months old. 

Yes, that’s foolish, I was foolish, but is it any of my business?

No, it’s not. They, though Darwinianly dense, weren’t endangering anyone but themselves (and their progeny), The odds were pretty good they’d get where they were going without a distracted texter, blind-as-a-bat octogenarian, or meth-crazed speed demon smashing into them.^[4]

No, it’s none of my business.

On the other hand, reckless people who refuse to get vaccinated or wear masks indoors in close quarters are everyone’s business. Their refusal, whether prompted by political lobotomization, laziness, and/or unscientific paranoia, has allowed the virus to mutate.^[5]. The needless continuance of contagion dampens sparks, snuffs out fun. Twice now, my 50^th highschool reunion has been postponed – that and 1 out of 500 Americans has died of COVID according to the Washington Post.

So, c’mon people now, smile on your brother [and sister].

Everybody get together and get a vaccine right now.^[6]

Right now.

Right how. 

Because if you roll the dice often enough, you gonna come up snake eyes. 

 

Here’s Rickie Lee doing “The Horses”

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^[1] This little lark cost me a reckless driving conviction, 200 dollars, and six points off my license, not to mention a significant elevation of my insurance rates, but as Rickie Lee Jones so eloquently put it in her best song “The Horses,” “when I was young, I was a wild, wild one.”

^[2] You know any writer who uses the verb “espied” has one foot in the ditch of dementia. 

^[3] And I don’t mean by “conservative” MAGA-hat-wearing gun-toting cretins but regular-looking Jesus-believing white Southerners.

^[4]  However, two blocks west of where I saw the golf cart stands a marker commemorating the spot where someone named Mark Riedel was killed by someone who ran a stop sign.

^[5] The bad good news is that it seems that COVID has taken out a disproportionate number of rightwing radio personalities, which is okay with me.

^[6] Of course, the odds of a vaccine holdout reading this blog are less than the University of South Carolina Gamecocks going undefeated this season.