Two Mental Health Tips to Help You Through the Covidemic

Hi! Don't be shy—come on in! 

Welcome back to Disaster Burger! Yeah, sorry about that, door's a little sticky.

Belly up to the counter! Okay, that's a little too close, huggy boy? Take a couple baby steps back and adjust that sporty gaiter you've got going on. Yep, you're gonna want to tuck the old schnoz in there, too. Oh, hey, here's a little rhyme to help you remember: 

My mask is like undies, 

That go on my snout. 

I'll look like a flasher, 

If something sticks out.

Cool, thanks for hiding the hambone. there. Anyway, let me tell you about our new specials; the menu's expanded quite a bit since the last time you came in. 

First of all, we've got a Western Wildfire Smoke Burger—It's a half-pound of extra-porous ground chuck meat. We left a tubful of it out on the sidewalk last week for an hour or so, giving it a nice gravelly crunch that exfoliates the uvula when swallowed. Served with filthy fries or grits with grainy, green gravy.

There's the Vaccine-by-Novemburger—Our slogan for this masterpiece is, you might get a little hot and plaguey, but he promised it would be readily maybe. Whatever that means, it comes with Mitch McNuggets, specially sourced from chinless chickens.

We've got the Double Deck DeVoswich, made only by people off the street with zero cooking experience. Served with Ben Carsunchips (I know, that one's a reach).

And finally, there's the Supreme Court Burger—Actually, you know what? Forget this one. Why order something that's missing its best ingredient? 

Okay, enough of the parodies, even though humor does tend to serve as one of my go-to coping mechanisms. 

The reality is, there's no making light of the most turbulent era I can remember, this indefinitely prolonged moment of suffering and uncertainty. While the pandemic and social unrest alone have caused tectonic societal shifts, so much other stuff is piling on top of it—the upcoming election, the real, undeniable consequences of climate change—okay, just say it with me: "This suuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuucks!" 

It just does. And it's not going away, not tomorrow, not next week or even next month. 

How many mornings have I awoken 17 to 23 minutes prior to my alarm going off and begun ticking off one reason after another as to why I shouldn't get up that day? More than a few. Hell, that's why they call it a laptop, right? My employers wouldn't have lent me one had they not expected the computer to perform its intended duty all propped up in my bed.

I've mentioned before that I'm prone to depression, that it's as big an ingredient of my genetic recipe as high arches and meatless Irish lips. Fortunately, thanks to a generous dose of counseling, I've come to understand that wallowing the day away in a dark room is worse than fruitless, it's harmful. 

Self-talk is crucial, and it can determine the course of a day. Let's say that, in the midst of one of my early-morning mental roundtables, I decide to take an approach of gratitude, to examine the big picture and my place of relative comfort in relation to those who've come before me.

I could think no further than my own grandfather, who immigrated from Ireland as a young man. He quickly found work but lost a leg in a wagon accident. Even so, he and met and married my grandma, uprooting them both to set up a homestead in a remote area of North Dakota (actually, isn't the whole state kind of remote?). They went on to have seven children, enduring the deaths of two. He labored tirelessly on their arid strip of land, supplementing his hardscrabble farm bounty by working as a janitor in the tiny town where they'd settled.

How inspirational can one guy's story be, right? Shouldn't my inner self be saying, "Wow, I've never dealt with a single one of those challenges, let alone all of them. I'm going to get my ass out of bed, go for a bike ride and rejoice in my overabundance of good fortune"? 

Yes, absolutely I should. Unfortunately, my inner roundtable host (let's call him Merv) is more likely to proclaim, "Oh, no, you're not going anywhere, Sparky. Instead, you're going to lie in bed for another couple of hours and flog yourself for being a mollycoddled cheese curd of a man who couldn't hold your grandfather's goat milk bucket. Now go get yourself some Ben and Jerry's Chunky Monkey and come back to bed." 

Appreciating one's station in life should exclude self-degradation and shaming, which is why I'm currently in the process of interviewing new roundtable hosts. 

Another area of self-care I'm employing is to curtail my participation in social media. How healthy can it really be to linger on Facebook for half an hour just to stalk an argument between two politically polarized "friends." I can still taste the lemony vitriol coursing through my gullet with each tone-deaf comment spewed by the fascist, then regaling in the righteous, yet predictable, talking points rattled off by his commie adversary. 

Things usually get personal in no time, with the leftie exploiting the rightie's spelling and grammar errors. Stating that he'd seized the their-there-they're gauntlet by third grade, the pinko continues to lambast the nazi's habit of capitalizing every third word. Inevitably, the never-masker feels his back against the wall and responds with offensive slurs uttered in judgment of the socialist's sexual orientation or undiagnosed mental disability. 

Social media still has its place for me now, but it's on a lighter footing; posts to this blog will still run through my Facebook group. I love the brilliant photos of Instagram and pithy snippets of Twitter. But ruminating all day on some anti-vaxxer meme that I stumbled across is not good for me. These sites are minefields of toxic, non-productive debates, and while the participants might switch up, the fight never ends. And because of that, I'll be happily, healthily walking away from that lifestyle.

Oh, by the way, before you go, I need to remind you to come by Disaster Burger in six weeks, right around the first week of November. We're hoping to add a new special called the Trump Loses in a Fucking Landslide Burger. 

Stay safe.