Youtube and Netflix, being ever poised to take advantage of (exploit?) any trending topic or event across the globe, are offering up every epidemic/pandemic/global threat film they can exhume. It’s crass in a sense, but the response appears to be better than average for these still early days of COVID-19. Views are up, at last partly because there’s fuck all else to watch with sports and television disrupted (more on that in coming days).

I can readily admit that I’ve watched few myself, hunkered down here in my lair in Brooklyn. The one commanding theme across all epidemic films is panic, hoarding, looting and violence. Noticeably absent from any of these, however is people making a run on toilet paper. It’s easy to imagine why we haven’t seen it in cinema. The very idea is just fucking strange. Think about it. We can’t even imagine a shortage of food here in The West. We can’t even come close to getting our heads around it. Food is… well it’s ubiquitous. We step outside of our houses in the morning and it’s just there. That’s why we are all fat. Well, many of us are fat. But even after we’ve been force fed images of famine and disease for generations, we can’t imagine a food shortage. Even our brains are obese.

So what is our greatest fear beyond having nothing to eat or dying of viral pneumonia? Apparently it’s no toilet paper. We all saw the clips on the news of the person practically mugging an old woman in Costco for a 12 pack of toilet rolls. We’ve seen endless memes. It still seemed unreasonable to me. I figured a few isolated incidents were getting blown out of proportion (much the way Trump said that the virus itself was getting blown out of proportion and he may now be infected). I passed through Target today though and saw flotillas of shopping carts loaded down with toilet paper and paper towels, or any kind of paper on a roll. Hell, they would have had rolls of fax paper on there if it was 1992! It wasn’t just one or two carts in a very long line. It was every fucking cart! About 80 people lined up at 10:15 this morning all loaded down with toilet paper. Carts loaded. People pushing the carts with extra packages in their arms and pushing more along the floor towards the registers…

Tell me again that we aren’t living in a simulation. This is too damn stupid to be true.

File this under IJustCant.com.

Of course I might be sitting here a month from now wiping my ass on the cat, but for now I can only shake my head. Humans are fucking painfully stupid.