CHAIN REACTION

God only knows when it began, but I can tell you this: it is never going to end. I don’t mean the pandemic, the origins of which are more or less clear, and I don’t mean our great hunkering-down, which hadn’t even started back on the Groundhog Day it now so resembles. I mean a minor, unexpected and vexing by-product of them both: the feel-good chain email, some version of which you have almost certainly received while you’ve been stuck at home.

Friends! I know these are trying times, so, in the interest of bringing a little joy into all of our lives, I’m inviting you to join in sharing a beloved poem/recipe/inspiring quote/home workout/ elephant joke/photo of yourself in your favourite Renaissance Fair outfit/drawing of a cat in a litter box. This is meant to be FUN!, so please don’t spend too much time on it. It shouldn’t take more than 50 hours of wondering how to graciously decline this request followed by another 30 hours of ignoring it followed by six hours of obsessively refining your recipe for microwave chocolate-chip cheesecake in a mug. When you’re done, simply add your name to the seventh empty slot below, copy and paste this note into a new email, move my name to the third slot above your own, hit ‘reply all’ to send your response to the carbon-copied strangers on this note, then forward it to 20 friends you never want to speak to again.

Because they are basically well-intentioned and inoffensive, it is impossible to criticise them without seeming mean-spirited

I am being, perhaps, overly harsh. These trying times, and, assuming you steer clear of pyramid schemes, I can think of no good reason, if it makes you feel even the slightest bit better, to discourage you from sending Joyce Kilmer or craft project or Chicken Surprise winging around the internet. I can, however, think of a very good reason to discourage you from sending any of those things to , which is that your Great Chain of Being Emailed will promptly rupture. In every one of these that I have