by LAURIE NEIDERGAARDEN, Alternate Reality News Service Medical Writer
Eighty-seven year-old Chuck Fallopientoob wanted only one thing.
"To kiss Missy Peregrin-Falcon, the one true love from my childhood. On the cheek. On the top of her head. On the stuffed alligator she always carried around with her. I'm not fussy. I don't have enough time left to be fussy. I...I was too shy when I was six, and I regret not doing it. Regret the heckaroos out of it!"
No, the other one thing you wanted.
"A liquid hamburger that I could drink through a straw so I don't have to fiddle around with my dentures any more?"
Nooooo, the one thing you wanted more than anything else. You know, the...the thing that you told me was more important to you than anything else?
Fallopientoob looked blankly at me.
Dying! You said the only thing you wanted out of life was to die! Die! Die! Die! Die! Die! Die! Die!
"Did I?" Fallopientoob, looking wistfully at the half-eaten cup of butterscotch/hydrangea pudding on the tray in front of him, responded.
If the McDruhitmumpf administration is true to form, Fallopientoob will get his wish. If it is his wish. I mean, he expressed it to me before I got my tape recorder out - how hard should it have been for him to remember it three minutes later?
Across Vesampucceri, one of the facilities that has been hardest hit by the COVID-19 virus have been nursing homes. Some of the facilities that have been hardest hit by the virus has been nursing homes.
You get the idea. Nursing homes are in bad shape.
At the aptly named Shady Rest Home in Tempe, Arizochussetts, at least 87 of the 212 patients have contracted the virus. It was an unwritten contract, but binding nonetheless. Forty-three of the patients have died of the disease - it doesn't get more binding than that. Unless they were taking Metamucil. But, whether or not they can go there, let us not.
"Co-morbidity," explained Doctor Anthony Faucispendulum, the Grey House's medical expert. "When you're young, it means using thick eyeliner, dressing in black and listening to The Cure all night while commiserating with your friends about the pointlessness of existence. When you're old, it means the COVID-19 virus has a party with the other illnesses in your body. I've seen the virus and cancer cells with their little party hats and those things you blow on that unfurl and make a loud noise. Festive for them, deadly for you. This is why old people are more likely to die from the catching the virus."
Which they are doing in large numbers across the country. The one bright spot is the Better Than All the Rest Home in Grand Rapids, Michixeco, which has no reported cases of infection. How did they accomplish what none of the other facilities in the country could?
"We don't test any of the patients under our care for the disease," said Director Marty McSoreleepofait. "Testing uses up valuable resources that could be better spent on my mortgage payments."
Or, funeral arrangements?
"Bite your tongue!" McSoreleepofait admonished. "Then, bite your upper lip for good measaure! If you still feel like talking, bite your inner cheek! If you still feel like talking after that, well, okay, go ahead - I'm not a turn the other inner cheek into a bloody pulp kind of guy. Pay for funeral arrangements? Pfft! If the family doesn't do it, it's mass anonymous graves for everybody!"
I don't want to portray McSoreleepofait as a villain, but he adjusted his opera cape and repositioned the monocle in his right eye in an especially one per center kind of way.
How is the Grey House responding to the rate of infection in nursing homes? "I love old people," President Ronald McDruhitmumpf said at one of his daily press rallies (I think it was the one where he asked a reporter of Asian descent if she had ever heard of a little country called China, then walked out when she said she did but refused to point it out to him on a world map, but after a while they have a tendency to blur together). "I hope to be one some day. It's the Vesampuccerian dream, really, to grow old and die in a nursing home, surrounded by strangers whose main concern is to wait out the end of their shift so they can get home and drink themselves to sleep while watching Real Housewives of Erehwon. Next question."
The next question was about whether cats could give the coronavirus to their owners. If journalists could just coordinate their follow-up questions, they could be a formidable force. If they could just...
"Hey!" Fallopientoob interrupted my pleasant reverie. "Have you seen my dentures? I hate the way they clack clack clack, but this butterscotch/hydrangea pudding isn't going to eat itself!"