Like Keats listening to the nightingale, “My heart aches and a drowsy numbness pains my sense as though of hemlock I had drunk.” But I am listening to the snorting and oinking of bacon, not the avian cluck of doom in recent years past. The influenza that originated with the porcine staple of subsistence farmers, such as my grandfather, who relented to my mother’s pleas and didn’t slaughter the pig she had raised in the depths of the Depression, has put us in the slop.
Given the panic infecting the markets, I fully expect to see pedestrians with surgical face masks when I venture out for my bacon (make that steak) and eggs this summery, un-flu like morning. But I got a shot back in the Ford administration when the swine flu alarum first sounded. Hope it took.
Miss Market can turn on a dime from seductress to you know what with lipstick. I don’t mean you, Gov. Palin. I look forward to your presidency and admire you for sticking up for everyone challenged by the mess we make of things. Plus you look as good as Obama in a tailored suit.
The day is not over, but I remain cheered. Unlike Keats, whose psyche (to which he wrote another ode) was absorbed with the fleetingness of youth, my gaze is fixed on tomorrow. I remain in the green, thanks to F and SLV. Even the redoubtable PALM refuses to bend. The only virus it fears is the one that could infect its operating system.
The airlines are suffering. NYT is down after Ms. Dowd’s wry farewell address to her profession on Sunday. Oil is dipping, but precious metals could be a refuge.
And Yankees’ fans, your ballyhooed pitching staff is suffering from walking pneumonia. I’m stealing home on them and I’m having a BLT for lunch.
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