Like getting drunk with the Brady Bunch

No one could have prepared us for this. I’m not talking about the dispiriting global roll out of a life destroying pandemic and its crippling economic consequences.

It’s the petty, the trivial, the so far off the map it was beyond our imagination corollaries that had escaped us until we were slap bang in the middle of it.

We always knew that politics was show business for ugly people, but we really had no idea just how ugly until our news services became replete with interviews conducted with iso subjects using some God-awful cam chat software like FaceTime or Skype.

There is little or no work for camera operators these days – a guild of men and women who hold the secrets of framing and light on the human face or make-up artists who apply almost invisible covers to some otherwise nauseating facial skin eruption.

On Wednesday I saw an interview with Kevin Rudd with the former PM sitting so close to his laptop or phone camera, I could see every blemish and burst capillary and count every nose hair. The answer is 278 if anyone is interested.

It’s enough to drive us all to drink but even that is becoming weird.

Later this afternoon, many workplaces will resort to Friday night Zoom drinks where colleagues will sit in front of their computers and pretend to enjoy themselves.

It is just about the saddest thing I can think of and I’ve been to Disneyworld. It’s like getting drunk with the Brady Bunch but somehow even more pitiful. I said this on Twitter two weeks ago and was piled on by Friday drink Zoomsters enjoying their first glass or two of the sponsor’s product. But that was when the convivial, social aspects of alcohol consumption had just kicked in.

After a few more glasses and with them the arrival of some of alcohol’s less agreeable effects, many returned to Twitter to apologise. Some were sobbing. In desperate attempts to create a pre-pandemic social environment, the Zoom drinks hook-ups merely left people feeling even lonelier than they were before.

In the first quarter of the year, Netflix added 15.9 million subscribers to its global running total of 190 million subscribers. I predict this will go into fairly steep decline next year now that all worthwhile productions have entered enforced hiatus. Netflix programming in 2021 is likely to begin and end with socially distanced sock puppets.

For now, people are attempting to replicate the cinema experience in its most irritating and annoying form by downloading an extension to Netflix called Netflix Party. People form groups and watch movies together although on screens far apart. Fair enough, we are social animals after all.

This extension shrinks the screen, which is bad enough but worse, adds a chat box where people can annoyingly type out their feels in words and/or emjois as the plot unfolds. This is scarify like replicating the appalling behaviour of cinema goers pre-COVID-19 who would scroll through their phones, chat aloud to anyone who listened and generally behaved like they were sitting in their own living rooms.

It is creating a fantasy world that is actually worse than reality and that’s tough to pull off in a pandemic.

But by far the most unpredictable consequence of COVID-19 is that almost everyone is dispensing pharmacological advice. It is like revisiting the snake oil salesmen who travelled around on bullock drays in the 19th Century offering universal panaceas which turned out to be either cocaine or heroin in alcohol solutions, depending on what they had on hand at the time.

Take the case of chloroquil or hydroxychloroquil. Remember that? Fabulous to ward off the malarial fevers if you got ‘em. It was pronounced a possible miracle cure for COVID-19 and created massive hoarding among nations and health services alike.

“It’s a very strong, powerful medicine. But it doesn’t kill people,” Trump said less than three weeks ago.

But it turns out it does kill people, especially those suffering arrythmia or pre-existing heart conditions. At least these were the findings of a yet to be peer reviewed study of treatment provided to 368 patients at veterans’ hospitals across the US.

The report reads: “Specifically, hydroxychloroquine use with or without co-administration of (an antibiotic) azithromycin did not improve mortality or reduce the need for mechanical ventilation in hospitalised patients. On the contrary, hydroxychloroquine use alone was associated with an increased risk of mortality compared to standard care alone.”

Look, when I want my car serviced, I don’t park it out the front of Spec Savers and throw the shop wallah my keys. I am not going to get a haircut from a lawyer or dental work from a panel beater. So it is sensible not to gob down dangerous medications on the advice of a politician or one of his or her barrackers in the media.

But I understand the need to find a cure, to scour the global medicine cabinet for something, anything that might make everything go back to where it was six months ago.

There is, of course, a solution. And it was one practised by the Hells Angels in San Francisco way back in 1968 and the Summer of Love.

The Angels had by fair means but mainly foul, stitched up the burgeoning hallucinogenic market and did so by securing the services of the King of Acid, amateur biochemist, Augustus Owsley Stanley. Stanley manufactured the LSD hippies and assorted freaks (of which there were many in 1968) lusted after and which bore his name, Owsley Blue.

Save a few hours spent at a UCLA library, Owsley had no training in biochemistry and his efforts in establishing a functioning laboratory could be a bit hit and miss.

And so, after Owsley whipped up a new batch, the Angels would stomp in, grab a tab and feed it to a young pledge named Trevor.

The Angels would then sit back and watch Trevor closely. If Trevor was giggling away or engaged in passionate embrace with one of the posters on the walls, all good. But if Trevor took to the fourth-floor rooftop in the firm belief he had developed powers of flight, Owsley had some work to do.

As quality assurance goes, it’s about as good as it gets with amateur pharmacology. In a world where amateur pharmacology is de rigeur, Trevors become the food tasters of the 21st Century, our gateway to health security in a COVID-19 present.

“Have a nibble on this Trevor and sit over there. Let me know if you need a bucket.”

If you’ve just picked up some bread from the shop but someone had coughed in your vicinity, ask Trevor if he would like a sandwich.

“I’ve just washed my hands, can you push the trolley around the supermarket, Trevor?”

“Can you sit in the middle, please Trevor?”

“Leave the dog alone, Trevor.”

The one thing we could not have foreseen in times of pandemic is the acute need for Trevors. The dearth of Trevors is a growing global concern. And here in this country, we’re going to need more Trevors than ever. But if there aren’t enough to go around, a Kevin will do at a pinch.

This column was first published in The Australian on 24 April, 2020.