I am sitting in the Cmon Inn in Casper, Wyoming. I am up very early, my norm, and so left our room so I don’t disturb my wife and grandson. Thus do I observe the background workings of a motel, surely following the dictates of Mrs. Wilson’s second grade class at Broadview elementary in Wheat Ridge, Colorado. This, I have decided, must be the source of all of the stupid procedures businesses must follow.

People are walking around in masks with buckets and mops following, scrubbing every floor, counter and exposed surface. Bottles of spray disinfectant are all around. If we die of any foreign agent in the coming months, it will be Purell.

It is a scene from a dystopian movie. These are germophobes, convinced that microbial alians are all about and able to attack. Fear is omnipresent. Our menus last night at Texas Roadhouse were wet, with Purell.

How can people live like this? What will this incessant unrelenting fear do to them? They were already addled by schooling and media. This has to be the final chapter, the end of the sentient human, the beginning of paranoid robots passing as alive.

Big Swede has given us the next chapter, a new strain of swine flu discovered in China (remember 1976, anyone?). This must be our future, one strain after another, new lockdowns, masks and distancing in perpetuity, only a few of us hanging on to our wits and sanity.

The world as we knew it, such as it was, is ended. This is our new reality. I am told that Montana, our destination, is crawling now with refugees of the big cities, looking for escape from the insanity. I can only remind them that the state’s governor, Steve Bullock, quarantined the state during the worst of the violations of civil liberties. Montana might be a trap. He might do it again once we are safely inside the borders. Bullock too is a sinister and monstrous creep. And a liberal Democrat.

Montana right now places no restrictions concerning face masks or social distancing. It feels like a trap. Isn’t this what O’Brien did to Winston Smith, enticing him with escape?

One of our commenters in Washington, where the governor has ordered all businesses to stop entry of non-masked patrons, refused to don the mask. He was turned away and said “Welcome to Nazi Germany” or something like that. The masked moron guarding the entrance called the police, claiming he had threatened her. He had long left the premises.

It isn’t long now before “If you see something say something” becomes the norm, snitches all about, contact tracing on every device. I have turned off location services on my iPad, which does not have cellular. I will turn my IPhone off and stick it in the back of the truck. Yet, why do I suspect that such moves are false security? We are, after all, now in a dystopian universe. Fascism arrived, wearing a white lab coat. I never saw it coming.

PS: We planned this trip with our grandson around a stay at Pebble Creek Campground in Yellowstone National Park. According to the Park website, it was to open on July 1st. Today we got to the park entrance and found the campground information sign said Pebble was closed. I asked the ranger, he had no idea why. I told him the website said open, he shrugged. He was wearing a mask, the moron. The only campgrounds open are way down in the south part of the park, which we avoid due to crowds and heat. So we rushed around today and got motel reservations here in Cooke City. We’ll end ip camping one night, at Island Lake high up on the Beartooth Plateau. The grandson is resilient, thankfully. Nothing phases him.

There is no sane reason for any of this – they are making our lives difficult for some reason having nothing to do with any virus. It would be easier to deal with if people were not such sheep.