This game is called Nuclear Dungeon Farmer, and you win by sneaking into the dragon’s chamber in the middle of the board, poisoning him with mutant mushrooms, and then finding that one damn river tile that the Instacart driver needs to find your house.

Like everyone else in the known world, my wife Lena and I have been relegated to our home in our battle against the Chinese Coronavirus.

(On a related note, the compass, gunpowder, paper, pasta, and printing, are now to be known as the Chinese Compass, Chinese Gunpowder, Chinese Paper, Chinese Pasta, and Chinese Printing. It is unknown as of this writing if your Chinese Inkjet Printer will give you the coronavirus. Excuse me. Chinese Coronavirus. 

In case anyone has missed it, the joke here is that calling the disease the Chinese Coronavirus is stupid. Where it came from is immaterial, and some extremely imbecilic racists have decided that this makes it okay to be assholes to Asian-Americans. We call them American Assholes.)

Anyway—we’ve already binged Picard and are on our way through Buffy again, and Supernatural can’t be far off. I keep a sword close to the front door in case any corona-carolers stop by to lift my spirits or wish me happy Distance Day or any goddamn thing like that.

Did I mention that I am a hero for staying inside my house? I mean, I used to do it because I don’t like wearing pants, but now I do it as a superpower.

Corona question: If someone with the Chinese Coronavirus has sex with me in my eye, can I prevent transmission with an eyepatch soaked in rum?

Corona answer: There is no definitive proof that an eyepatch soaked in rum (also known as an American Rumball) will either cure or prevent transmission of the Chinese Coronavirus in the event of oracular sex. But hey, we’re not telling you how to live.

Not every test subject is going to be a success story.

 

 

Me and Lena have picked Red Dead Redemption back up from where we left it ages ago in order to lift our spirits and get our minds off of people everywhere contracting and dying of deadly diseases. For those unfamiliar (spoiler warning), it is a video game tale about an outlaw who murders his way across the old west before contracting a deadly disease and dying. (Spoilers done.)

Board games are good too. Lena still wants to play even though I always kick her ass.

Chinese Coronavirus makes you competitive in a very mean way. That’s why everyone is playing American Toilet Paper Keep-Away. It is not because they are suddenly eating a lot of fiber.

Corona Cooking Experiment:

  • Half-fill a gallon-sized bag of pork rinds, leaving plenty of room for shaking
  • Add 3T of melted butter
  • Add 2t of monk fruit sugar sub (Or just sugar if you’re that way.)
  • Add 1t of cinnamon
  • Shake that shit up and eat home-made Taco Bell Cinnamon Twists!

No, wait. I think this recipe was supposed to start with a bowl of weed. Whatever.

This guy has never had a pork rind in his life. He eats churros on a park bench in Seattle.

The real point here is that I have spent my entire life thus far in preparation for spending the entire rest of my life under a rock. I am not ignoring the catastrophic implications for the world, the country, and the economy—I have sick friends too—I’m just saying that the slender silver lining to this omnipresent doom-laden black cloud is that I may never have to wear pants again.

The trade-off isn’t worth it, but if someone burned your house down and gave you a hamburger, you wouldn’t throw it away.

Now I gotta go. I’m playing D&D with my game store group, who have all relocated to the online Roll20 platform.

So now they can’t tell I’m not wearing pants either.

 

Kevin Pettway is the author of the Misplaced Mercenary series, published by Cursed Dragon Ship Publishing. The first book is titled A Good Running Away, and is already out. You should definitely buy it. You would like it.

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