Many of our readers might notice that I’ve been rather scarce here at The Hayride in the past week, which would seem conspicuous given that the Louisiana legislature is now in session to begin the long-needed process of unpacking the Longite legacy in our state government.

I should be writing about that every day. I agree.

Why am I not? It isn’t that I have other things going on, though I do – I’ve got three columns a week going at The American Spectator, not to mention I’m serializing a novel over there: King of the Jungle, which if you haven’t checked it out you’ll enjoy the heck out of it. See it here.

Plus I’m still working on RVIVR.com, our national conservative site, which is a great aggregator of news and video. Check that out here.

But none of those projects are what’s in my way.

The truth is a lot dumber than that.

I’ve got COVID. I picked it up last week, and while I’ve mostly knocked it down to the point where the worst of its Chinese-plague symptoms have gone away, what’s left is a doggedly-persistent sinus thing which has made for a ceaseless river of mucus pouring out of me.

And you’d think, “Eh, that’s not so big a deal.” It isn’t, really, at least not compared to liver cancer or Ebola. But if you’re a writer and you’re trying to concentrate on knocking out a column or a blog post you’d be pretty surprised how much havoc constantly needing to blow your nose, or the periodic wet cough that a fast post-nasal drip triggers, can make it close to impossible to get anything done.

A couple of days ago I wrote a piece for the Spectator about how Donald Trump is owed an apology by the bedwetters in our legacy corporate media who threw a fit over his 2018 remark that Haiti was a “shithole country.” That thing should have written itself and I should have been done in 45 minutes.

Instead it took me three and a half hours.

Those of you who’ve had a sinus thing like this know that once you get to the point where all you can concentrate on is what’s in the way of easy breathing out of your nose, it’s over. You turn stupid in no time flat.

I call it a snot-induced mindfog.

And because of it, I’m all but worthless right now.

I have people calling up here: “Are you OK?” And the answer is sure, I’m fine, but until this sinus thing finally goes away I’m not even going to try to power through it.

I don’t want to write crap posts here at The Hayride. We’re not desperate for volume, thanks to Jeff LeJeune’s superlative efforts at reeling in content from various places and his daily offerings. So you’ll know, when the current academic year ends Jeff is retiring as a teacher and he’ll be taking over the day-to-day running of this site – freeing me up to pursue some other things while still writing daily here.

So this week is a little bit of a dry run. Complete with wet coughs and lots of nose-blowing.

Again, if you’ve missed my stuff the last few days I apologize. By next week I’m expecting I’ll be back to full volume.