California can finally bid an unfond farewell to masks — well, for some of us at least

California’s indoor mask requirements will be lifted on Tuesday, which means the vaccinated among us will sashay around a bit more freely — for a while, anyway.

This epidemiological catastrophe has stretched on for two years and at the cost of nearly one million lives in the U.S. alone. One of the two things health care professionals (not Joe Rogan) asked us to do was wear a mask, which most of us have done. The other was to get vaccinated and boosted.

For me, the son of a research scientist, this hasn’t been unduly onerous. What has been onerous is that millions of thoughtless and/or ignorant Americans didn’t do these two simple things, and thousands of people needlessly died as a result.

The battle over masks and vaccinations has turned into a near-holy war, with anti-maskers screaming about their personal freedoms and government control.

Look, what if the federal government assigned you an identifying number at birth, or if phone companies had a way to track you — even market to you? What kind of totalitarian fascist superstate would we be then?

Oh. The one we’re living in.

Wearing a mask isn’t a big deal, but it has been become ridiculously, politically supercharged.

California had to endure a useless recall last year that cost taxpayers about $200 million because Gov. Gavin Newsom and a few other bigwigs were photographed dining at a birthday party at the French Laundry.

You can buy a lot of masks for $200 million.

Newsom was again photographed maskless with Magic Johnson a few weeks ago at the Los Angeles Rams and San Francisco 49ers playoff game, and Newsom endured the now-familiar brickbats. Many other elected officials have had the same experience. Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams got blasted for the same thing last week. There are countless other unmasked pols in the same position.

As we move to something like semi-quasi-normalish, I would also like to bid the mask an unfond farewell.

I once forgot my mask in a situation where I absolutely had to wear one. Can you walk into a store that requires masks without a mask to purchase a mask? It’s a truly ontological question.

Another time I had the same hey-I-forgot-my-mask situation and had to panhandle a mask, which I did from a very nice guy in a wheelchair outside a clinic. He offered either cloth or paper; I choose paper and thanked him profusely.

Watching fellow Californians wear their masks has been an ongoing funny/not funny hobby as well. We’ve all seen the mask under the nose gambit, which is really more of an inconvenient lobster bib than an epidemiological buffer.

We’ve also seen the cover-my-nose-with-my-sleeve strategy, which is a small social nod to hygiene but otherwise an empty gesture, like bringing a mediocre bottle of wine that will never be opened to a dinner party. It will then be gifted at other dinner parties into eternity.

An early mask favorite was the very comfortable but useless face-sock mask.

I’ve pretty much stuck to N95s (black, rakish, mysterious), which have the corollary effect of making my ears look like a Keebler elf’s. My hair is about 18 inches long and gray, so I look more like a pleasant bank-robbing elf. The blue surgical masks also had the disturbing habit of breaking in the most crowded environments I encountered, but at least my ears looked better.

My least favorite thing about masks is the ubiquity of the discarded mask. Used masks are the new cigarette butts, but much larger and blue.

So, yippee for no masks — with conditions and caveats depending on vaccination status, of course. Now we can go back to worrying about Newsom’s hair instead of his mask, a hobby all Californians can enjoy.