The Final Solution: Porn Hub and Coronavirus

Pornography has its uses, especially for those who are sexually inhibited or need stimulation for other therapeutic reasons. And there is artful smut, to wit the literary works of Henry Miller and Charles Bukowski. But pornography can also be an addiction and up until the current pandemic Porn Hub loomed high amongst those who had found their lives being consumed by easily accessible stimulation and escape. Porn Hub commands such a huge following that it wouldn’t be surprising if the company didn’t occupy one of those huge towers on the New York, Chicago or LA skylines with its logo emblazoned on the façade. Imagine seeing Porn Hub in neon on the horizon as you fly into JFK! But now with life so circumscribed X-rated sites are beginning to provide a new service. Porn Hub may be one of the only places on earth free of coronavirus. When you type in a proclivity and find yourself on the site, you're in a world totally free of worries about contagion or anything else. The subjects in a porn video have only one function, which is to complete a sexual transaction that will provide a turn-on to a particular demographic. It doesn’t matter whether you like tall ones or short ones, fat ones or skinny ones, MILFs, DP shots, gay or straight or trans, the one requirement in the auditioning of actors for X-rated videos might be the ability to act like the virus doesn’t exist (to their own peril if it's been filmed during the pandemic). In our current day and age Porn Hub promises a kind of utopia, a vacation spot where you don’t even have to wear a mask (unless it’s leather).

The Final Solution: The New Normal

What if things never get back to normal? What if the coronavirus has a resurge, which occurs before a vaccine is discovered and tested (as is currently predicted? Or what if by the time a vaccine is discovered a new strain breaks out which is even more deadly and virulent? Due to global warming and melting of the Arctic icecaps, there are floods which wipe out those coastal civilizations which haven't yet been eradicate due to tornadoes, cyclones and hurricanes. Amidst all this, faults in the earth’s crust deepen causing major earthquakes. Social distancing no longer is a question. It’s essential for the survival of even the most renegade hyper individualist biker. Places of congregation like theaters and houses of worship themselves become museum pieces and the human race is reduced to living in self-enclosed pods, biospheres in which procreation is facilitated simply through the exchange of sperm and egg. Remember those times in the history of civilization when male offspring were prized? Now the reverse is true.  If you have a daughter, her child will populate your brood. If you have a son, no such luck. Eventually life as a biologic form becomes too difficult to maintain and consciousness is freed from the body to inhabit the blogisphere. Humans are suspended in an ether and live in a permanent state of virtual reality. Of course, this new normal will have everything that once comprised the old life. Romance will bloom with such intensity that would be lovers, in their moment of passion, forget that their corporeal essence has already been expended.

The Final Solution: Mr. Clean

Children are taught to clean up the mess they’ve made—soon after they get out of the high chair and are no longer allowed to think it’s funny when they throw their food. But the operation involves prehensile motor skills that are part of human development and allow for a fairly expeditious remedying of most spills. You tip over a class of milk and you learn to get a sponge or washcloth to wipe away the puddle. That’s what’s disconcerting about life in a pandemic like the one the world is currently enduring. There aren’t simple solutions. Corona appears to be a wily virus which is able to attack many different vulnerabilities of the immune system at the same time. The latest evidence comes by way of a number of cases of Kawasaki Disease--that involves inflammation of the blood vessels in children who have contracted Covid-19. The MTA is closing subways from 1-5 in the morning to allow for sanitization of cars. New Yorkers and inhabitants of most populated areas are cautioned to shelter-in-place and social distance by keeping six feet away  from others. Masks are de rigueur. However, one problem leads to another. South Korea lauded for its comprehensive testing which allowed an opening up the country experienced a resurgence of the outbreak, which catalyzed a return to more restrictive social distancing policies ("As South Korea Eases Limits, Virus Cluster Prompts Seoul to Close Bars," NYT, 5/9/20). Hurricanes leave paths of destruction in their wake, but once the storm has gone away the protocols are usually clear. In the case of the virus, no obvious plan or path is suggested. As soon as one mess has been cleaned up, another manifests.

Is Florida the Problem?

When someone moves to Florida and then starts to decline the tendency is to blame the move on the more sedentary lifestyle. The fact is, a move to Florida is often occasioned by climate. Plainly cause and effect have become confused. It's a good idea for a person who's increasingly sensitive to harsh winters (due to their age or health) to move to Florida. The logical fallacy is rendered with the Latin words post hoc ergo propter hoc. If something follows then it's caused by the preceding factor. He got fat because he ate too much is another form of the same misplaced causality. These kinds of misdiagnoses lead to eating disorders. He may have gotten fat because he had a problem with his metabolism. Similarly, the snowbird’s decline may have been hastened further if he or she insisted on sticking it out up North. One of the reasons why this kind of fallacious thinking is often deployed is to distance the renderer of such analysis from an upsetting condition, i.e., the fact that human beings are mortal. Cancer is another condition which fishes for causes. At first one commiserates with a victim. Then quickly there’s a shift to blame. They got cancer because they smoked or drank liquor or diet coke or ate fatty foods or failed to exercise. The fact is that in many instances people unfortunately contract diseases and it has little to do with their behavior or habits and the same is true for those who die at a young age and indeed those who stay way beyond their welcome. It may be an awful thought, but how long or short one lives is something which is often out of control of the person who's the beneficiary of such good or bad news.

The Final Solution: Social Distancing Disorder

SDD is social distancing disorder and one of its symptoms is actually a form of ADD. Anecdotal evidence suggests that when people sit far apart from each other they grow bored, inattentive and sometimes fall asleep. Sometimes this is the result of the fact that you can’t hear what the other person is saying. In other instances, it derives from the disjunction between body and verbal language—a form of the old mind/body dilemma. You hear an idea, but there's no emotion connection to it. SDD is an attendant diagnosis to the well-known condition of TN, Therapeutic Narcolopsy which can affect either patients who fall asleep during sessions or practitioners whose the eyelids grow heavy because of the ennui of repetitive (and often boring) encounters. It must be stressed that human beings have an uncanny ability to imagine what their counterparts are going to say, particularly since most people repeat themselves and those who know and “love” them have already heard it all before. In fact, social distancing or not many people are self-involved by nature. In this regard they might as well be talking to themselves when they’re under the delusion they’re trying to communicate with others. Such conditions can make treatment protocols challenging for those who are considering inteventions to combat the onset of this condition.

The Final Solution: Is Social Distancing Making You Fat?

Is social distancing making you fat? Do you find yourself noshing before and after a Zoom? These are some of the questions that are being answered by prominent dieticians and cook book authors with first names like Ethel, all across the country. It’s not surprising since what's there to do when you're alone for hours on end, but eat? The fact that your regrets may become so real that you actually think by going over them again and again in your head you can somehow change things is also a product of the pandemic—which has produced a vicious cycle of eating and reliving the past. You know how Word sometimes informs you about the lapse of a particular function. “Not Accessible” signs may begin to pop up when you attempt to remember a particular era of your existence which now seems so far away as to comprise a separate geologic era. Anecdotal evidence suggests that apart from avoiding drugs like hydroxychloroquine, it’s best to remove Ritz and Saltines from your cupboard until the lockdown comes to an end and you can again begin to act out your frustrations on other people and creatures who lack the ability to defend themselves.

The Final Solution: White Heat

Have you noticed that you feel irritable and want to take out your feelings of discomfort on creatures smaller and more helpless than you—like ants? If you’re in solitary and it’s a rodent, you simply crush it, rather than let it thrive as you might if you’re were motivated by more halcyon or benevolent spirits. You kill and crush and destroy. It’s no wonder that the Big House is a violent place. Remember the scene in White Heat (1949) where Cagney learns his mother had died. Human beings don’t like being locked up, despite the internet of everything where even coffee pots are intelligent and you can shoot the shit with Alexa, your virtual assistant or old girlfriends like Simi or Zoom yourself into oblivion. Yes Zoom starts to become like talking to yourself in the mirror or one of those dreams where a burglar is stealing your stuff and you try to strike him and your punches do nothing. Zoom is like striking air and it does indeed generate lots of hot air in the one isolated little room from which it emanates. You’re told to accommodate and have patience and not be like those assholes who hope that they can just go about their business and “away go troubles down the drain,” as they used to do in the old Roto-Rooter commercial, but it's hard not to lose your temper.