Silly To Serious, But Still A Bit Silly!

So we've been attacked by the Covid virus, and we're doing our best to not let it get us down. So we joke about it, don't we? That's how people often keep our heads straight with the sh*t hits the fan, we laugh.

But this is serious. Covid-19 is killing people, or making them sick. And the experts are doing their best to protect us, but they're not entirely sure what is happening, and who the heck knows the truth of it, if those experts aren't sure?

So look at April, a year ago, it was frightening and I felt useless, not knowing what to do, if there even was anything I COULD do ... But I had a strong need to do something!

So I thought about it. I had this phrase in my brain, Plague Invasion, it felt like Covid-19 had attacked us all, destroying us. I had to do something, so I did, what I know I can do, I called out to others, writers, mostly, but not only.

I asked for people send me creative writing in response to Covid-19. Poetry or prose, up to three pieces of each, and not more than certain size contraints. I thought I might get enough pieces for a small chapbook sized book, maybe fifty pages.

What I actually received was far more than that. Today, over a year later, I have the book that I am going to have launched at the end of July. It's a great book, looking at what people have been thinking about in this worrying time. The phrase became the title, the most common theme became the strongest image, that went on to become the cover image. The book, Plague Invasion, looks like this:

See, silly! The first response of many people, particularly in Australia, I don't know about the rest of the world. But when it looks like things are going bad again, with another breakout of positives tests to Covid-19, and lock down looks like it may happen again, bang, the hordes invade the supermarket and buy up all of the toilet paper again ...

This is serious, and all they can think about is their delicate bottom? This is crazy stuff. Their grandparents, or at least great grandparents would remember how things were in the 'olden days' before toiley paper even existed. No delicately soft toilet paper for those bottoms, newpaper cut up into squares was the paper of choice for those tough bums, the ones who'd lived through the second world war, and new far greater privations than those sho've come along after.

I makes me ashamed to be a baby boomer, to be honest ... But my thoughts from this previous post on Vocal talks about how this book came about, and I am just glad I was able to do something, something important, showing some of what has been in our minds during this worrying time.

I'd reached out to people online, through various social media channels, including my writer blog, Facebook, Twitter, asking for poetry and prose, and giving guidelines for what I would accept. It made for a wonderful collection of thoughts and ideas, as I said at the beginning, from the silly to the serious, and back to silly.

So these crazy huge buy ups of toilet paper the very moment a possible lockdown gets mentioned, buying up more toilet paper than is even needed in a month, what madness is this? It made for a eyecatching front cover for the book produced though, don't you think? All of those arms and hands reaching for the treasured toilet paper. Super silly!

As I indicated, it isn't all about toilet paper, but gee, a lot of it is!