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"Delta" Dave Handelman is the regular on Thursday nights at El Hueso de Fraile. Slowly downtown rises from the destructive effects of the pandemic, but the second surge gathers momentum. Border cities El Paso and Laredo are battling the Coronavirus tooth-and-nail. 

The virus hops from one epicenter to another like a Mexican jumping bean. Lame-dick President Donald Trump insists that comparing it to a Chinese wriggling noodle would be more accurate. Regardless of who is to blame, when we venture outside our homes, we are at the mercy of a black rain.

Besides taking the simple precautions except the moment we enter bars and remove our masks and return to the besos-y-abrazos era, everyone is going about their business these days as if we had returned to normalcy. We are victims of COVID fatigue and we're throwing the dice that we won't fall victims to the contagion. 

If we do, we give credence to the odds that we will be asymptomatic or that a combination of azithromycin, Ivermectin (a medication used to treat roundworm and other parasites in animals) steroids and, believe it or not, hydroxychoroquine will cure us of the malady. 

But there is a growing sentiment that unless people are falling from the windows of hospitals overflowing with sick and dying patients, there will be no more grand scale shutdowns. 

To reduce our fears, thus inciting more daring behavior, we're all betting the house on the vaccines that will Make American Great Again, especially with the imminent departure of Trump in spite of his legal shenanigans to convince the courts to change the election's final outcome based on the argument that the Democrats had rigged the result against him. 

"If an individual or an organization was responsible for depriving the president of a second term, we owe that person or persons a profound debt of gratitude for saving our country from certain doom," said "Delta" Dave who had been living contentedly playing his guitar six hours a day and spending the rest of his retired time reading War and Peace after finishing Tolstoy's Anna Karenina, Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment, Cervantes' Don Quijote, Proust's Remembrance of Things Past and Neruda's Canto General. 

"Look at the numbers that Trump ignores except for the haunting figures that he lost the electoral college, 306-232, and the popular count by seven million votes. As a result of his indifference in dealing with COVID, there are 250,000 dead Americans and 11 million others who have been diagnosed with the virus. With a record like that in sports, he would have been fired at mid-season. 

"My sole hope is that Biden doesn't die before inauguration day," concluded "Delta" as he prepared to open his set. "Can you imagine the pandemonium that would cause? In his typical fashion Trump would raise a bible over his head and assert that it was God's will that he continue leading his followers across the Red Sea and for the raging waters to engulf his enemies. 'That Man's Evil' is a new blues song I've been composing. I hope to debut it shortly."

"Delta" took the stage. On the Titanic, the band played on. In the country, Coronavirus rages on.

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