“Put on your mask, Dude.” That was said to me in an office building amid peak lockdown. “Where’s your mask?” was a question angrily posed to me by a sour-faced shopper in the parking lot of a Whole Foods in Washington, D.C. around the same time. At another Whole Foods in nearby Bethesda, a rather self-regarding customer (redundancy?) let me know that “in Bethesda, we wear masks.” Close friends lectured me on the importance of wearing masks while scoffing at my surely knuckle-dragging disdain for the cloth. For a brief time in the summer of 2020, American Airlines banned me for removing it too much during a flight.
So many more anecdotes like this could be mentioned, and there’s a strong desire to talk about them. Loudly. There’s also a yearning to gloat around those who thought me doltish for rejecting the alarmism that led to so many so obediently masking up in 2020 and beyond.
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