Since Saturday, I thought about whether to attend the concert in a mask. Since the pandemic is ... waning, I guess (and I will get the shot ... soon ... as soon as I have time), I have largely gone back to normal -- with one exception: I mask up. Not as much as the thick of the pandemic, though. And my mask-wearing has ebbed in many ways. If I go indoors to eat, for example, it's about 50/50 that I even bring a mask, let alone wear one. I am eating, and if a mask is there to protect you from the coronavirus but only if you put it over your nose and mouth, it won't help a lick if you're eating, so why bring it? I have to admit, though, that peer pressure goes into my thinking a lot more than, uh, common sense. I wouldn't care about wearing a mask to, say, Hooters if I didn't think I would get shit over it. (And that's why I hope that the motherfucker who shouted at me "COVID's over!" at the State Fair, well, dies of COVID. Fucking bully can go fuck himself.)
There are a couple of calculi I thought about for the concert. It is a concert, and even though I got a cider to drink, you're there to watch music being played, not to eat. It would make a lot more sense, then, to wear a mask that'll be in your face a lot more than it wouldn't be. And if there was a, uh, gentler band I was going to see, I would have gone all out, N95 and everything. But while I like Queens Of The Stone Age, and I think they have some, uh, progressive stylings to them, they're still a rock band, and I felt as though I would get shit for wearing an all-out mask to the concert.
I was going to wear my KN95, which appears to be the mask du jour for the (few) people who do wear masks while going out, but I don't know where it is. I'm afraid I lost it, or threw it away. I've had it for a while, so maybe I needed to get rid of it. Anyway, without that in my car, I thought about double-masking -- a surgical mask underneath those cloth ones that have a pocket for a filter inside it. (Remember those? No one talks about them now. I wonder if scientists have come to unanimous agreement that they don't work.) But I have one cloth mask that is dotted with the logo of my alma mater, and I was afraid I was going to get ridiculed. And then the other cloth mask I have in my glove compartment has a tear of blood. I wanted to look bad-ass when I ordered it way back in the teeth of the pandemic, but 1) that blood tear isn't lined up right, and 2) I was really scared that someone would look at me and think I was trying to be bad-ass when, if you look at me, I'm not, and that guy was going to come up on me and challenge me. Didn't want that if the crowd at the QOTSA was full of Republican tough guys.
So I wore just a surgical mask. I'm not ready to declare them useless, but I think there is a long-standing consensus that they don't work all that well compared to N95s and even KN95s when it comes to preventing contraction of the virus. And I was not razzed at all at The Armory. But the few people I saw there were wearing the better KN95 masks, and seeing so many people breathing out in the enclosed rock hall, I conjured up paranoid visions of breathing in the virus. So why in the hell didn't I just go all out and wear my N95? I have many of them at home, and I haven't used any of them in weeks. A concert would have been the perfect occasion to use them. And so what if I get beat up for wearing one? At least I wouldn't get COVID-19 too, right?
I am so disappointed in myself for caving into public perception at the cost of my health. My main concern when thinking about wearing a mask is, "How would other people think about me wearing one of these things?" and not, "Would I be safer wearing a mask?" And I've thought that way for too, too long. I need to have the balls to wear a proper mask out in public, and fuck what strangers think.
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