Hammer Mill Days

Well, that’s a start. So, where did you go yesterday evening? Oh, okay. I didn’t know there was a pinball alley in this burg. News to me. Do they have any old Bally machines? Seriously ? Got a quarter? Oh, hi. Well, we were just starting to get back on our feet this week here at the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill in upstate New York, Big Green’s adopted home, in the wake of last week’s medical debacle. Then fate moved its mighty hand, as Bill Conrad used to say in the opening sequence of The Fugitive . Now we’re all at sixes and sevens. In fact, some of us are at eights and nines, and that can’t be good. Pretty soon we’ll be fresh out of numbers. So what’s the beef? Well, it turns out that Marvin (my personal robot assistant) was at some point exposed to the COVID-19 virus. We don’t know how or when, but apparently it was someone at the pinball palace down the street … could be the quartermaster (you know, the guy who doles out the quarters to the punters) or the barma...

FYI , I’m currently home and recovering after minor surgery in this time of COVID-19 lockdown. The highlight of yesterday was a call from the hospital telling me that I had been exposed to someone who tested positive with the virus – presumably a staffer who interacted with me the previous week. I had been interacting cautiously with people since my release last Saturday, including a visit to another health care provider, so they needed to be notified. When I was in hospital, I had asked about getting tested, and they put me off. This is not working. They should be testing everybody, and they’re not even testing the most likely carriers. What’s most concerning, though, is the toll this is very likely taking among the most vulnerable, particularly residents of nursing homes. I don’t know about how these homes are run in other communities. What I can say, based on personal experience, is that in my neck of the woods, people in nursing homes die all the time of respiratory ...