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Pine Nuts: Examining the coronavirus brain

McAvoy Layne
Pine Nuts
McAvoy Layne

In full disclosure, I opted out of pre-med when confronted with analytical geometry, but have never lost my interest in good health. So I stand in awe of our country’s show of courage in our sudden shift of values.

A new energy is emerging in America, a new altruism. With the arrival of COVID-19, mastery of fear is our new normal, bravery our new mantle.

I, like so many friends my age (older than Grandma Moses) would willingly, and with a calm sense of propriety, step into the path of a coronavirus if we could see it heading for a younger person.



We only wish the coronavirus had a brain so we could examine it, but he doesn’t have a brain, he only has a drive to survive, and he needs a host to survive, preferably an unsuspecting old soul like me. We know he prefers lungs in which to multiply and proliferate. How he is able to locate those lungs without a Global Positioning System is beyond me, but he does it customarily by hitching a ride on a hand, which in turn touches a nose, and bingo, a free ride down into a lung.

Once that virus makes his home inside a lung, the owner of that lung starts to feeling unwell, so the virus elects to find a new home, and incites his host to sneeze. That sneeze enables the now very large virus family to take flight, and perhaps infect several new hosts. The virus is not intending to wipe out the human race, but merely intending to keep his hosts alive long enough to insure free rent for life. To the virus it is a matter of public housing so to speak.



Even the brainless coronavirus could tell us, if he could talk, that he is only looking at real estate, for him it’s simply a matter of location. He knows he could live in my freezer for two years without interruption, but even a virus with no brain knows that life in a freezer for two years is not a thing to offer much satisfaction.

In closing, we are smarter than the coronavirus. We don’t always act like it, but we are. So it is up to us to outsmart the coronavirus and send him packing. We can do it, we will do it, and when we do, and the “ALL CLEAR” signs come out, well, we will party like it’s 1933.

Meanwhile, we salute and send heartfelt thanks, to those brave heroes on the front lines, as we shoulder on with solidarity in the spirit and grace of that Angel of the Battlefield, and founder of the Red Cross, Clara Barton.

Learn more about McAvoy Layne at http://www.ghostoftwain.com.


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