Quarantine Activities

(I originally wrote this piece for another site, but it was turned down so I’m posting it here. Seemed like a timely and much needed bit of humor. I kept it as is and didn’t modify it to fit the aesthetic of my site, except for one minor addition to the final sentence.)

The quarantine has forced many people indoors, and the housebound life is not for everyone. Paranoia, despair, and all around stir craziness have affected many people, but some have come up with inventive strategies for preserving their sanity.

One way to liven the time is to reinvent past recreations. Playing an old board game by the same rules over and over gets monotonous, so change the rules until you come up with a new game. Strip Uno, Chutes and Jello Shots, Landmine Twister, and Monopoly with a real jail are just some of the new and exciting versions of old games, and the kids love them. Today’s youth are much more sophisticated than the yesterday’s youngsters and need more bells and whistles to keep them entertained. One of the more entertaining new versions of an old game is Operation with a real human body, and its new follow up game, Autopsy.

Tired of looking at the same old boring family pictures? Family picture mash up! Insert yourself into old sepia toned photographs with your great grandparents, combine feuding relatives into one image, piss off your racist ancestors by putting them in pictures with people of color, or even mash up your family with celebrities and historical figures. If you and the family want to drink up at the Yalta Conference, cut up with the Marx Brothers, or get shot up with The Hole In the Wall Gang, don’t let reality get in your way.

But if productivity is your thing then you can finally tackle the most time consuming and thankless of all household tasks, cleaning out the refrigerator. Now you have the time to burrow through your foodstuffs to the back of the fridge, where the leftovers are so old that they’ve morphed into science experiments that may require a hazmat uniform for safe removal. This is the kind of activity that requires the extra time that one normally doesn’t have, plus it’s a great excuse to hide from your family, and they won’t mind your absence because you’re taking on a task that would probably make them all puke.

But you don’t have to be tied to indoor activities, you can also prank your neighbors. Project low moaning sounds toward their house in the middle of the night, which they’ll think are either ghosts or old people having sex, both of which are equally haunting. Another middle of the night activity is going around and cutting crop circles into your neighbor’s front yards, and be sure to leave behind some strange hieroglyphic symbols to make them think it was space aliens or Chupacabra. And a loose plank on the backyard fence is a perfect place to slip in a rabid stray dog or hyperactive wolverine to create a little harmless mischief.

No one knows when this age of quarantine is going to end, but no reason why you can’t make the best of a bad situation to help preserve your sanity. When life give you lemons, throw them back and demand oranges…preferably ones that have been injected with vodka.

©2020 Robert Kirkendall