I hope you slept well last night. When you woke up this morning, history had been made on biblical proportions.  It is zero hour. While you were off in dreamland, as the rain washed over the East Coast, in the quiet blanket of night, dozens of very special refrigerated trucks made off along the interstates. They departed the previous day from Portage, Michigan: legions of them, fanning out to destinations near and far across America, carrying their valuable and historic cargo, en route to over 600 hospitals and clinics. Right now, as you read this, the COVID vaccinations are hitting the arms of its first American recipients. One year ago, nobody outside of a biology lab had ever heard of the novel coronavirus, a.k.a. COVID-19. Now it is standard household vocabulary. In December 2019 we knew nothing. Social distancing was something you did when somebody pissed you off. You occasionally viewed people donning face masks on TV news-  Japanese massing in their commuter railways at the heig

Daddy worked like a mule mining Pike County coal He fucked up his back and couldn't work anymore He said "One of these days you'll get out of these hills Keep your nose on the grindstone and out of the pills."                         -Tyler Childers Boxer was the workhorse in George Orwell's Animal Farm . His answer to every problem, every setback, was `I will work harder!' which he had adopted as his personal motto.  He labored his entire life for his cause like no other animal on the farm, only to collapse in exhaustion and be ultimately sold to a slaughterhouse, so the ruling pigs could buy themselves a case of whiskey. I will work harder, for myself and my loved ones- not for some pointless politician's pointless vision. I clawed my back from unemployment, loss, and alcoholic oblivion, and found not one but THREE E.R. jobs I love. I work my ass off at all of them, taking on far more hours than any emergency physician should, well beyond  the official r