#MNR: Summer Madness

#MNR: Summer Madness
 
RIP Ditrius Medley, HCHS (South Boston, VA) class of 1995. Ditrius was a veteran of the United States Navy. His civilian roles included Warranty Specialist and Shop Technician. I knew him as one of the Western District’s best football players, a thousand yard running back for our beloved Blue Comets. I covered Ditrius and the team for three years for our yearbook. I have (had) a great deal of respect for his athletic prowess. I have even more respect for the fact that he went back to school in 2017, receiving a B.A. in Business Administration and Management from Walden University last year. Ditrius and I were never close. I knew him, he knew me. I wrote a piece or two about how he ran through WD competition, no hyperbole or cliche. I admired his raw talent. I didn’t come to bury Ditrius today, I came to praise him. Rest in power, big fella.
 
If you close your eyes and concentrate, you can hear Kool and the Gang “Summer Madness” playing in your mind. You can feel it in your soul. Here’s to the close of another summer. Meh born day is the tenth day of the ninth month. Technically, it’s still summer, as the Autumnal Equinox isn’t until 9.22. But no one gives a shit about summer after Labor Day. For a lot of kids, that means it’s back to school time. For the kids down south and other places that begin the calendar year before Labor Day, summer is long gone by the time I thank the Lord for another year of life. I get it. Summer is dundee for most after the first Monday in September. I ain’t mad at that.
 
Yeah kids. It’s back to school time. I hope youse all had a good summer. America was open, so I’m sure most of y’all got out and had a good time. Here’s to fresh kix, a few new outfits, three notebooks, a couple packs of Pilot G-2 pens, and a fly ass backpack.
 
I never stopped working this summer. We returned to the classroom from virtual learning in early April, so I shook that rust off long ago. I worked Extended School Year from early July until 8.16, so there wasn’t any period of off-time to call a vacation. I never stopped my Behaviorist work. I’m in the field five days a week. The grind never stops.
I feel like Uncle Shay and Skip with their perennial Lebron and Brady go-to schticks every time I mention COVID in my blogs. But uh…yeah. I feel like if I don’t speak on it, some ONE may underestimate its devastation and the cumulative effect it’s had and continues to have in America and around the world. This Delta variant is the Arsonal of viruses; it’s SO DISRESPECTFUL. I really feel like the northeast is largely oblivious to how bad things are in the deep south, from Florida to Texas to…Mississippi. There are states where the ICU beds are at 90% or better capacity. I think we fail to do the math (analytics) frfr. Does that mean that if you are on the verge of dropping dead from COVID that you can still get a bed in your local ICU? Most likely, I guess. It’s damn sure not likely though, if you’re “only” suffering from mild COVID symptoms, even though we know that the virus can take a left turn at any moment. But what it also means is that if you are suffering from anything from an asthma attack to a gunshot wound, you may be shit out of luck trying to get an open bed. That may sound absurd at surface level, but simple mathematics are…simple. If every bed in an ICU is filled, there is no bed. Furthermore, they’re not going to give a current patient the boot prematurely. You can’t just go in the cafeteria and make an ICU bed as if it were a cheese sammich. I think a lot of people take the seriousness of an ICU for granted because they’ve never been in an ICU. I have. There’s a nurse specifically dedicated to you in an ICU. If you hit that red button, your nurse is there in a literal minute. Doctors check in often. Plenty of y’all/us/I know what it’s like to be in a regular ass hospital room on a stay. I think I logged the average nurse response time at seventeen minutes during my two-week medical vacation. The doctor stops by once a day and talks for about five good minutes before exiting stage right. Rural areas, as always, suffer the most. The irony is that rural populations largely shun the COVID jabs, mostly due to political affiliation. I’m certain no toothless WASP yokel shuns the vaccine because of his or her skepticism toward the government dating back to the Tuskegee Experiments. In all fairness, I am also certain the same yokel doesn’t shun the vaccine because of Ruby Ridge (IYKYK). At the end of the day, that’s that yokel’s right. I can’t snipe a southern MAGAt zealot without also examining and scrutinizing my folk that live down the way. A lot of us are proud to be ignorant. If you are truly versed in medicine and history and still choose not to vax, I respect it. Even if you’re an ignorant ass nigga and just don’t trust the vaccine cuz you don’t trust the government, I respect it. I can’t get mad at another Black man or woman for declining the vaccination. It’s a matter of choice. But continuing to move without discretion and not giving a flying fuck is non-cipher. I don’t respect it. I don’t care if we’re cool. We’re still cool. I just don’t respect it. I can’t break bread with you. I cherish my life. I cherish the lives of the loved ones in my cipher.
 
Hurricane Ida, you dirty whore, you. CNN calls Ida’s damage “catastrophic.” She has pummeled southeastern Louisiana. Over a million are without power. As of the production of this blog, there is at least one confirmed casualty. Ida was so powerful (Category 4), that she stopped the flow of the Mississippi River near New Orleans and caused the river to REVERSE. The US Geological Survey called it “extremely uncommon.” Ida is now a slow-moving tropical storm over southwestern Mississippi. She poses a serious threat to areas like Tennessee, which is still in the immediate aftermath of flooding last week that claimed scores of lives. God bless all the victims of Ida. She gives me Katrina chills.
 
You don’t have to be a politician to know that the current situation in Afghanistan is an absolute shit show. I don’t have the time to explain it all. You don’t have the patience to read it all. Just know that Biden fumbled the ball on kickoff return immediately after tRump threw a pick-six. God bless all the US servicemen and servicewomen as well as the civilians who lost their lives last week. I’m not speaking in specifics when I say that I basically saw this coming. But I saw it coming.
 
Speaking of football…it’s back. High school kicked off this past weekend. College kicks off this weekend. The NFL begins on 9.9 and truly kicks off my birthday weekend. It’s lit. It’s time.
 
Y’all be good. And if you can’t be good, try to avoid getting caught being bad. Remember: the man who sleeps on the floor cannot fall out of the bed. Peace to the East New York Perverted Monks and Mike Tyson.
 
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