Excuse me while I channel my inner grumpy old man:

I won’t “self-quarantine,” but I will be staying in. Thank you for asking. Before you jump down my throat, it means the same thing, smart guy.

As an author and freelance editor, I’m fortunate enough to work from home, so I don’t need a lecture about “social distancing.” I’m also an introvert, so I stay the hell away from people as it is. That means the same thing, too, genius.

Frankly, it’s absurd most of us still work in offices, anyway. We spend hours in traffic, polluting the air, just so we can spend hours in meetings, numbing our minds. Brilliant, that. (I’m not talking about people in service industries, who are, unfortunately, in a really bad situation because of all this. That should be obvious.)

After hearing how the air and water are getting cleaner since this Coronavirus hit, it makes me wonder if Mother Earth isn’t using it to cleanse the old palette. Less pollution is a good thing. We should have figured that out before we got smashed over the head with a damned infectious disease.

No, I don’t need your criticism. I wash my hands in warm water a bunch of times a day, and I wear a face mask when I go out. Don’t get on my case for depriving health workers of a mask, either. My wife bought a few to do yard work months ago, so no, we’re not being “insensitive” about that. Thanks for caring.

I’m not “flattening the curve,” I just don’t wanna get sick. Or make you sick, either. That’s why I stay away from B.S. media buzzwords like the ones I’ve put in quotes: They make me want to wretch. Speak plainly, or STFU.

I’ll stay home, but spare me your artificially euphemistic PR-speak about “sheltering in place.” The very use of “sheltering” as an intransitive verb is a buzz kill for me.

Yes, I want information about the virus. But I want details, and lots of them, not rah-rah slogans and sound bites. Not shaming and peer pressure.

Don’t worry: I won’t be getting within 6 feet of you, but I probably wouldn’t have, anyway, because I actually value my personal space. Imagine that. I won’t be coughing in your face, but I wouldn’t have done that anyway, either, because it’s rude as hell. Common courtesy not to, y’know? Maybe this virus has spread so fast because we forgot about that. A shame, really.

So now people are communicating even more on social media, where they’re blasting each other left and right over how they’ve responded to this thing. I heard recently that most of what people post on social media is criticism. That seems accurate enough. And the more you insult each other, the more social distance you’ll get, so I guess that works. Except you won’t get the corona kind of virus online: You won’t cough, but you might get hacked. 

People online either get pissed at you for wanting to stay healthy. So you can survive. Or they get pissed at you for wanting to go to work. So you’ll get paid. So you can survive. Tough choice.

Is social media shaming really what people need when they’re going through something like this? I kinda doubt it, but that’s what they’ll get … which makes me glad I’ve distanced myself from all that toxic middle-finger-pointing. I need it like I need a case of Covid-19.

And please don’t tell me we’re all “in this together.” We’re not. The people who are getting sick and losing their jobs are in it one helluva lot deeper than NBA players chillin’ at home or members of Congress with those free health care plans they’re denying the rest of us.

That kind of inequity is what had grumpy old introverts like me keeping our distance from society in the first pace. I didn’t need a pandemic to tell me people are dangerous. All I had to do was look at the way we polluted the planet long before this thing started. And the way we treat each other: like objects, marks and scapegoats.

So keep your P.C. rhetoric about social distancing to yourself. We cynics and introverts invented the concept.

We just put it differently: Get out of my face, and stay the hell off my lawn.