I’ve been away, dear readers, and I’m sorry. It’s been a bit chaotic as of late, but know that only something truly important could keep me from my sacred duties as a Man With an Opinion. While I can’t reveal much for “legal” “reasons”, you might want to keep your eye on the advancements in moustache science coming out of Europe in the next few years. Thanks to the efforts of a certain someone-who-might-be-yours-truly in volunteering for moustache follicle tensile strength, it’s about to get real cuckoo bananas over there.

As dear cousin Brodo Borgins would say, “The years start coming and they don’t stop coming; fed to the rules, and you hit the ground running.” Life, am I not right?

As long-time readers of my short-lived column (#TaugyoDrift) will recall, I am the parent to a real human child. Around here, October can mean only one thing: Spooky season, and this year is looking to be the spookiest one yet! People will be gleefully choosing a Halloween costume – I hear it’s a real bumper crop of “Sexy (Insert Literally Anything Here, Seriously, Go Ahead, No Bar Is Too Low)” costumes! — and people will be festooning their gazebos with traditional Halloween decor. But perhaps the scariest thing about Halloween in 2021 is how shamelessly similar it is to the scariest year in recent memory: 2020.

As a side note: My favorite costume for this year, so far, is “Unrepentant Adult Child.” It’s pretty easy – here’s how you can put together your own: Wear a solid color tee shirt tucked into the waistband of your most comfy jeans. All that’s left is to go and shout down the teenaged greeter at any restaurant that hasn’t been closed because I haven’t done the barest minimum.

I know from many of the dialogue-driven interactions with other humans who, like myself, are definitely real human parents to equally real and certainly not eldritch construct human children, that last year was a challenge for so many. I can say with some warmth in my heart, unrelated to my acid reflux, that I have seen so many rise to meet challenges no one could have anticipated.

Yup. No one at all. Not one single doctor or scientist advised what challenges we would see. If only someone who graduated at the top of the class, and served under five presidents could have warned us how to respond best to the spread of a disease. If only we had some kind of, oh, I don’t know, center that would help control the spread of diseases, a center for disease control, if you will. Or perhaps a health organization that assembled some of the finest medical minds to help the world. But I’m a dreamer. Some kind of world health organization, WHO ever could imagine such a thing!

The important thing is to focus on how people fought for their right to insist everything is normal when it definitely isn’t. I would like to think it really showcases the strength of American determination. Why, just the other day, when I was out at a restaurant discussing the latest information on the COVID Delta variant, my waiter was determined to tell me about the lunch specials. They would not be swayed by some cloth mask or a plastic face shield in front of the mask!

Since the day that President Trump declared a national emergency (March 13, 2020, but who’s counting), the sheer tenacity of the American people (Ameri-can? More like Ameri-couldn’t-stop-me-if-you-tried, am I not right?) has been on full display.

The ability to persevere no matter how difficult life may get? Check. As if something as negligible as a wildly transmissible virus could stop us from that most noble pursuit of a Sense of Normalcy.

The power of optimism and hope? Check. It takes true strength of spirit to ignore the council of experts, decades, if not centuries, of collective experience and knowledge, because a greasy thumb print of a human made a YouTube video.

Challenging the status quo? Check. Only sheeple sit when they’re told to. If you think we will be mildly inconvenienced without a fight, you’ve got another thing coming! (No, I’m not talking about another wave of COVID, I meant “something else” in more of a figurative sense, there’s no disease that can stand up to the pluck of the American Spirit.)

Now, don’t get me wrong, there’s been a mountain of hardships and challenges through all of this. We are everyone one of us tired and weary of constantly fighting and being on guard. It would be so easy to focus on the nearly cartoonish level of absurdity that is our having to still deal with this 18 months later.

To be clear, I’m not saying it’s absurd because the actual response of COVID deniers is second only to actual COVID in terms of keeping COVID going strong. Sure, it’s a highly communicable illness and doesn’t need any actual help in that regard, but who doesn’t love a team player?

I’m saying this is absurd because had we banded together and employed some of that fabled American self sacrifice for a whopping 6-8 weeks, we would be roughly 16 months on the other side of this.

But hey, at least your patriotic mouth-breathing wasn’t inconvenienced, and as long as it’s all about you, who cares about anyone else?

Paul Wartaug is a Nashua native. His column appears periodically in The Sunday Telegraph.