The end of another shelter in place week and we’re officially two months in. This week the weather decided to turn back the clock to the beginning of our lockdown nine weeks ago, mid-March. When it hasn’t been raining this week it’s been blustery and chilly, for the Bay Area that is, a qualifier that I have to add because there are people who live in places where cold is really cold and not the mid-50’s. The rains have turned the front yard project into mud and the weekend rains aren’t going to allow for any drying.
Two things to take away from the weather. Well, three if you count my cursing the messenger, the various weather forecasters who can’t seem to get it right. One positive takeaway is that it keeps people from going to parks and beaches and the homicidal/suicidal from hitting the streets to protest, maskless and shoulder to shoulder. Continue reading
dipstick noun dip·stick | \ ˈdip-ˌstik \ Definition of dipstick 1: a graduated rod for indicating depth (as of oil in a crankcase) 2: [euphemism for dipshit] : NITWIT
Another morning, another bout of depression. This one weighs especially heavy, keeps me in bed until past seven, a good hour and a half beyond my usual rise time. It isn’t the coronavirus per se that’s causing the malaise although the virus is, as usual, the root cause. Nothing has changed between our household and COVID-19. We only do what we can; limit our trips, maintain social distance, wear our masks, wash our hands and continue in our quest to find a gallon of bleach.
But there’s a creeping, single minded hopelessness about those things that we can’t control; the protests, the suicidal/homicidal nuts who frolic on the beaches against orders, the science deniers, anti-vaxxers and the outright lunatics who assault rent-a-cops doing their subsistence pay jobs in asking shoppers to wear a mask.
But it’s the extraordinarily stupid who trouble me the most, the ones who bluster about their rights and their individual freedoms and all the while allow themselves to be led by the nose by a cadre of assorted knaves; corporate interests, politicians worried about where the next feathers for their nests will come from, a yo-yo in the White House and an ever growing cast of charlatans and rapacious aspiring apostles who manage to infiltrate youtube.
I see trees of green Red roses too I see them bloom For me and you And I think to myself What a wonderful world
It’s mid-afternoon and I’m taking Jessica to an eye appointment in Oakland. She’s certainly not “my little girl” anymore. I long ago stopped being surprised by her cogent views and the way she so forcefully and eloquently expresses them when we have serious, and sadly infrequent discussions on politics, society, culture and news. We’ve crossed into that stage of life when I’ll ask her for her counsel on the occasional life crisis. I suppose that makes sense. She’s been through more in her 33 years than I’ve been in my 66. Jessica has degrees in Political Science and International Negotiation, neither of which are directly applicable to her current job. That’s like many of us. How many fellow history degree holders do I know who are doing something besides teaching history or practicing law?
I wonder how her life might be different if she’d pursued something applicable to her education. Sometimes life pushes you, hard, in directions that you never anticipated. Now my daughter the aspiring baker dreams of having her own little shop. Politics to pastry seems like more than a fair exchange.
Like the rest of us (well, the ones who follow the rules) the COVID life has her staying home on weekends when she might normally be out and she’s filling up part of her spare time baking. It fills the house with luscious inviting smell and our bellies up with countless carbs; bulging chocolate chip cookies, cakes, cobblers, honey laden Greek desserts. Used to be that my mom would let me lick the batter bowl, now my daughter hands me the bowl and the spatula. We need to leave shelter in place ASAP. I feel pounds coming on.
During our drive she tells me about a documentary she saw about how the news is often delivered with an end game of shaping public opinion. It brings to mind Walter Cronkite and Huntley and Brinkley – dour, no nonsense and not even a hint, spoken or unspoken, of any bias. That’s not to say there was never any emotion. I remember Cronkite falling into tears when he reported on the Kennedy assassination.
We both agree that it’s often, too often, difficult to separate fact from partisan fiction. That’s unless you’re watching CNN or Fox in which case it’s an open and shut case of bias, one from the left the other from the right and there’s nothing really right about either. They aren’t supposed to be in the business of shaping public opinion or makingnews when they should simply be reporting news. Jessica tells me that she’s sick of the back and forth bickering, as sick of the “fuck Trump” stuff as she is with the “fuck Pelosi.” I have to agree although I’ve been, and probably will continue to be, guilty of the former.
We’re turning off of Highway 80 onto 580, normally a crawl but in the COVID days the traffic flows. As we cross into Oakland I tell her that it’s my belief that America is so ideologically divided that we’re far beyond the point of any rapprochement. The silos too hardened, the anger too malignant. Anyone running for office claiming that he/she will be the unifier is either lying or delusional or a mixture of both.
“It’s my opinion, and it’s frankly just recently come to me, that, not necessarily in my lifetime or yours, but at some point the United States will no longer be united. I just wonder how it’s going to divide. From a philosophical point of view California, New York and the northeast and maybe Colorado could make up one nation and let the rest fend for themselves. It just doesn’t work out geographically.”
It’s a notion that I’ve thought a lot about lately. How would it work? Would it be like the EU with open borders and a common currency and a NATO-like defense compact?Currently America is “a house divided” and we know what Lincoln said about that.
It isn’t a notion that hasn’t been explored. In 1981, journalist Joel Garreau wrote The Nine Nations of North America, which proposes a North America being divided into nine nations based on economic and cultural similarities. The problem is that the divisions would include Canada and Mexico. Do those two nations really want to adopt a petulant, child such as America?
May’s begun with the promise, if that’s the right word, of another month of quarantine. Looking out the window at the brightening sky, it gets bright by five these days, it dawns on me that, there will be things that I’ll miss once the shelter in place ends. That’s if you don’t count not being able to find bleach or Cup of Noodles (some might argue that the two have the same nutritional value). Life is actually much simpler now. Makes sense. There aren’t very many choices. It’s stay at home or…stay at home or….stay at home some more. No internal, “hmm what to do today,” debate. Traffic is light, we’re not spending as much money because there’s nothing to spend it on and there’s that knowledge that we’re putting a lot less stress on Mother Earth. Maybe Mother Earth forced the issue on us but that’s for another discussion.
It’s five in the A.M. My elbow is at the edge of the bed and Lexi is bumping it with her nose. Some people have an alarm clock that makes chirping noises, others a simple traditional bell. My alarm physically butts me. I have to be certain that I don’t stretch my arms before getting up. The wrong stretch sends a bolt of pain from my torn shoulder down my arm and up into my neck. One thing that I won’t miss is the moratorium on elective surgeries. I don’t have hair to cut, I don’t care about going out to eat and I don’t play golf. I just want my shoulder fixed.
In past months when I was getting ready to go out for a run I’d turn on the early news but I’ve not watched or listened to the news for six days now. It’s like breathing clean air. I’ve decided that I’m going to step away from news for as long as I can hold out. Until around late January when the dumpster fire of the election cycle started sending foul fumes into the air waves, I’d gone months without the news.
And then the coronavirus hit along with the Iowa caucuses and I was hooked again – a news-aholic binging on Anderson Cooper, The New York Times and of course social media debates. I couldn’t get enough. I was like those pathetic guys in Mackinaw jackets who hit the dive bars at six in the morning and by seven have their heads drooping over their fourth shot and a beer. Except my dive bar was CNN, the shot was Poppy Harlow and the beer was Jim Sciutto. By late last week I decided to go cold turkey. Continue reading
“Never let the future disturb you. You will meet it, if you have to, with the same weapons of reason which today arm you against the present.” ~ Marcus Aurelius
My first few Covid Chronicle posts began with the daily butcher’s bill, that is the number of coronavirus cases and deaths both worldwide and in the United States. I stopped doing that for the simple reason that it was and still is mostly superfluous. We know that the numbers are rising and the world knows that the United States is the global hotspot. These are the unfortunate facts despite the fabrications that roll off the assembly line of Trump’s propaganda machine.
But since we’ve reached some grim milestones it might be worth revisiting the butcher’s bill with a comparison of where we were a month ago. Sunday, March 29th, 2020 The Butcher’s Bill10:30 AM, PDT (only a momentary snapshot) World Cases: 691,867 Deaths: 32,988 United States Cases: 130,478 Deaths: 2,314
Tuesday, April 29th, 2020 The Butcher’s Bill 8:00 AM, PDT (only a momentary snapshot) World Cases: 3,164,597 Deaths: 219,459 United States Cases: 1,038,281 Deaths: 59,438
I mention this because I ran across a Facebook Group called Open California…NOW (the group’s emphasis). The preamble to this group reads, The evidence is clear: COVID-19 is nowhere as deadly as government officials proclaimed, and the high demand on our healthcare system never materialized. Is it a cold case of not equating numbers with lives lost? Or is it a complete and total absence of any semblance of reason, as one of the posts on the Open California page calls the pandemic a conspiracy. Continue reading
“I didn’t want normal until I didn’t have it anymore”
~ Maggie Stiefvater, Lament: The Faerie Queen’s Deception
Same old same old new normal
Thirty-five days sheltered in place; or is it 33? 34? 38? A borderless block of time. We have to look at our phones to figure out what day of the week it is. Remember when the phone was that ugly thing on the kitchen wall that served no other purpose other than talking to the neighbor or the person trying to sell you insurance? You talked on the phone and looked on the calendar when you needed to know the day of the week? Now the calendar is almost worthless as the days melt into a shapeless slab. Is it Wednesday or Friday? No Monday blahs or hump days or TGIF. You can still have taco Tuesday but Friday Happy Hours at the bar are relics of the old normal.
Governor Gavin Newsom issued his weekly update and much to everyone’s disappointment there is still no real timetable for starting to reopen the state. That’s not to say that the flicker of light isn’t getting just a smidge brighter. Newsom announced that hospitals can “can consider resuming medical care that residents have delayed during this crisis, such as heart valve replacements, angioplasty and tumor removals.” I don’t need any of that work done but just the fact that overhauling hearts is back on the schedule then how much further out can fixing up a rotator cuff be? Sooner than later I hope because just putting on a shirt is a new experience in pain. In my case soon is still no sooner than October at best, but at least they’ve allowed me to fall into the queue.
While most of us were disappointed by Newsom’s briefing, the anti-vax group that’s been ramrodding some of the irresponsible protests around the state must be apoplectic. It shouldn’t surprise me that the rabble rousers are anti-vaxxers. Public health hasn’t been their strong suit so why change over a pandemic. If the anti-vaxxers can’t kill society with measles they might just as well give coronavirus a shot – wait, they don’t like shots.
If we lose our sanity … We can but howl the lugubrious howl of idiots, the howl of the utterly lost howling their nowhereness. ~ D.H. Lawrence, “At Last”
I knew this train would be coming down the tracks long before I saw it, long before I heard the whistle or felt those faint vibrations that they say you can feel by touching the rails. I have to say that it took a little longer than I’d expected. I figured it would be just a week or two but kooks being unpredictable by nature stagger to the beat of their own broken drums. As soon as the shelter in place orders went out over a month ago I knew that sooner or later there would be a backlash. And when I say as soon as, I mean I called it the very day that Gavin Newsom announced California’s shelter in place back on March 19th, an order meant to try and get a handle on COVID-19. I even correctly predicted the makeup of the agitators.
“When there’s no light at the end of the tunnel, it’s hard to keep things going.” ~ Joe Sestak
In California we’ve just passed one month of shelter in place and while we’re still more or less shut in we’re seeing a flicker of distant light. Strategies for reopening are becoming a real part of the discussion from coast to coast. In some circles it’s been reasonable and in others it’s been irrational hysteria, a hysteria that has the potential to blow out that little flicker. With a few deranged exceptions here in the Golden State the plans for reopening seem to have been relatively well accepted. The word “reopening” is the light that’s keeping us going.
Gavin Calls the Tune
California Governor Gavin Newsom laid out the basics just a day before the calendar marked one month of lockdown. I don’t know what I expected from his briefing. I knew what I wanted, what I hoped for and what I was certain that I wouldn’t hear. In my wildest fantasy I wanted to see a stage festooned with red, white and blue balloons and Newsom announcing that he was ordering the doors all thrown open by the end of the month, without restriction and we would all be safe and cozy.
As it turned out the grand reopening that many of us Californians were hoping that Newsom would announce was like the lottery ticket that yields two lousy dollars instead of the multi-millions that we spent in our dreams.
While there were no balloons there were graphs and charts and a very officious doctor person who reviewed the nuts and bolts of a staged reopening in such minute detail that she lost me a few minutes in. It was sort of like watching the TV weather forecaster who likes to flaunt his meteorology degree by talking about ridges, highs, lows and anomalies when all you want to know is whether or not it’s going to rain on Saturday.
When it was all over, despite being prepared for the underwhelming I was still left staring at the wall, crestfallen. The briefing was less about reopening and more about modified behavior. Maybe the most disheartening statement of the whole briefing was “I know you want the timeline but we can’t get ahead of the dream just yet.” Newsom’s presentation was the long version of a simple old saying, “Hold your water.” Yeah, it’s understood but the understanding doesn’t make it any more palatable. Continue reading
Plans to reopen are in the works but we still need to be vigilant, patient and in the confines of our domestic bunkers. In the meantime here’s another breakout from the outbreak.
I went on a safari through my archives to find some photos of our animal kingdom.
“Birds were created to record everything. They were not designed just to be beautiful jewels in the sky, but to serve as the eyes of heaven.”
~ Suzy Kassem, Rise Up and Salute the Sun: The Writings of Suzy Kassem
“The best offense is a good defense, but a bad defense is offensive.”
~ Gene Wolfe, The Urth of the New Sun
“The best offense is a good defense, but a bad defense is offensive.” wrote Gene Wolfe in his book The Urth of the New Sun,” unwittingly summing up the current strategy for dealing with the coronavirus. There isn’t much choice in the matter according to Doctor Anthony Fauci, our medical covid-19 guru. There are of course the holdouts who disagree most notably some ultra-conservative pundits, a whacky ministry of some right wing preachers, a handful of out of touch governors and all their nitwitted sycophants. If I sound bitter, I am. It’s these heretics that are keeping the virus alive and virulent and helping to extend the lockdown.
Muhammad Ali taught us in the Rumble in the Jungle when he rope a doped power puncher George Foreman, that a little patience and some well executed cover can tear victory from apparent defeat.
And so we remain patient and wait for coronavirus to punch itself out. What choice do we have at this point? A good offense would assume a cure or vaccine and those are months or more than a year away (despite the ravings of a looney president).
Rope a doping covid-19 has changed the way in which we exist in order to maintain existence. For some, those who heal or whose occupations require serving the public the changes include varying degrees of risk. The rest of us? All we have to do is stay home and whenever we go out treat our fellow humans like, well, the plague.
What sorts of changes? As I jot down notes for this piece I’m sitting in my car in the parking lot of the vet’s office. Lexi is having an ear issue that seems like an infection. The veterinarian has changed the protocols that we’ve always followed when taking a sick pet to the doctor. The new waiting room is my car. The new protocol is to park, call the receptionist and wait for a tech to come out to the car. The tech and I review the reason for the visit and then Lexi, with tail firmly between her legs, follows the tech into the office. After the exam the doctor calls me, explains that Lexi has a slight infection that needs treatment and once Lexi is brought back to the car the receptionist calls, takes my credit card information and then Lexi and I head home. My bank account is $200.00 lighter – some things don’t change.
For some, change includes random acts of stupidity and selfishness. On the way home from the vet I take a glance in the rearview mirror to see a large pickup bearing down. He approaches to within a few feet of my rear bumper, swerves right, passes me and then swerves two lanes over to the far left to pass more cars. Looking ahead I see him weaving in and out of what traffic there is doing what must easily be ninety miles per hour. As a part of the new normal with most of the population doing jigsaw puzzles in the living room the freeways are largely empty and a few of the selfish and irrational are treating the roads like they’re NASCAR tracks. Since the lockdown there’s been an uptick in solo spinout accidents caused by excessive speeds; accidents that divert EMTs and police and impact already chaotic emergency rooms. Poetic justice might be to hand the reckless driver a roll of bandages, a splint, a few aspirin and let him fend for himself. We’re too busy to deal with your stupidness.
My granddaughter Lucy turns 9 this weekend. She was supposed to have a Little Mermaid themed birthday party with her friends at our house but of course that’s out of the question now. And so we’ll make a video of birthday greetings for her, spread out a blanket and have pizza on the lawn and celebrate with a Little Mermaid cake that my daughter Jessica will bake. If we’re back to a semblance of normalcy in the summer Lucy gets to have a pool party in the backyard. Whatever happens she’ll have a helluva story to tell her children and grandchildren about her ninth birthday.
The disorder has introduced a whole new order. Signs are all around admonishing us to practice the obvious. Restaurants don’t hang out the welcome sign and there’s no hostess to ask how many in your party. Still as often happens, discord brings with it acts of kindness
Stadiums and public buildings are being lit up in blue to honor healthcare workers.
Those with means donate money to causes that help those who’ve fallen on hard times.
Quarterback Drew Brees donated five million dollars to the city of New Orleans to help deliver meals.
Tyler Perry paid the senior-hour grocery bills at 44 Krogers in Atlanta and 29 Winn-Dixie markets in New Orleans.
There’s the paradox of community in a forced state of isolation.
From Wall Street to corporate ledgers to checkbook registers on the kitchen table finances are orderless, inverted and, unless you’re in the toilet paper business, turning varying shades of red. Our own expenses have taken some odd turns. During the severe hoarding period when we had to keep up with the hoarders our grocery bill spiked.
Now that the hysteria has levelled off a bit we’re working down the excess inventory and the grocery bills are decreasing. Still you find some helter skelter pricing beyond the capitalism gone wild profiteering. You need a bank draft to get a dozen eggs but oddly enough the bottom has fallen out of the price of the egg’s BBF (breakfast best friend), bacon. If you don’t need to watch sports to enjoy chicken wings they’re a bargain at one dollar a pound.
The Saudis and the Russians picked one hell of a bad time to get into a pissing contest over the price of oil. A gallon of gas costs $2.89 (cheap for the Bay Area), making it the perfect time to take the road trip that you can’t take because road trips are against the new rules. Our total fuel bill for the month should be around fifty dollars which is what I used to spend weekly on my Challenger. Rumor has it that with people driving less some of the insurance companies are mulling rebates, a phenomenon that I’ll have to see in writing before I believe it.
“X” marks the spot; the spot where one stands in a line. At store checkouts the floors are marked by a series of taped X’s spaced at six foot intervals to remind customers to maintain the six foot social distance. X marks, strips of tape, signs admonishing social distancing and retail workers disinfecting shopping cart handles and customer’s hands are the nouveau protocols of shopping.
While the practice of hoarding has finally been consigned to being a breach in shopping etiquette a trip to the market is still challenging. A recent trip to Foodmaxx got me almost everything on my list along with something I wasn’t shopping for – a 45 minute long checkout line. Normally I would simply bail out and come back another time but I’d already invested a good hour in just finding what I needed. Still by the time I reached the counter my frozen burritos had thawed out.
Yes, frozen burritos; part of my own new normal. It had been decades since my last frozen burrito and then the manic hoarding began. One afternoon as I picked through the ravaged remains of the frozen food section I saw a few scattered frozen burritos and was suddenly swept back to my younger, unmarried days when frozen burritos smothered with canned chili were a staple. Now we have an ample supply of frozen burritos but I’m eschewing the canned chili in order to avoid being banished to the couch. Yep, there’s nothing like a frozen burrito, and there’s different ways of interpreting that statement.
My sudden craving for frozen burritos must be my own personal manifestation of a covid era phenomenon. People are falling back on their guilty pleasures to relieve stress. At least that’s what the news reports tell us.
The local news is also reporting a 42% rise in alcohol sales in the Bay Area which one would assume means a 42% spike in drinking. A little Makers’ Mark warms the belly and the soul and laps away the bad news in an amber wash. It’s the new chicken soup – “couldn’t hurt.”
The news is a crapshoot these days, one moment encouraging with a seeming light at the end of the tunnel and then in a blinking it’s gloomy with no endgame in sight. Great news, the curve is flattening, fewer cases, no need for all the ventilators that the National Stockpile boys hadn’t stockpiled anyway. But not so fast, don’t expect normalcy for a month, two months, well into the summer, into the holidays.
Santa Clara County executive officer Dr. Jeff Smith made a prediction that we will be lucky, LUCKY, to have sports in that county by Thanksgiving. And if that holds true for Santa Clara why should the rest of the nation be any different? It’s not that I’m having sports withdrawals. I like sports but if it permanently drops off the face of a reordered Earth, I’m fine with that. If a return to sports is a milestone for normalcy and that return might not come until the middle of the holiday season does that mean we’re going to be looking forward to Christmas before we’ve had our first barbecue of the summer? Ugh.
When I do watch the news it’s not without a fair amount of skepticism. CNN panders to my political leanings but that doesn’t mean that I’m all in with their reporting and so, as I wrote in a previous post, I’ve put CNN on a short leash.
If CNN is on a short leash, their anchor Wolf Blitzer (How do you get such a name? Was his dad a panzer commander?) is on a choke chain for his flair for asking questions with self evident answers. Earlier this week Blitzer reported on British Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s sudden admission to intensive care for coronavirus. He went on to ask CNN’s medical guru Sanjay Gupta, “What does that tell you?”
With a slap to my forehead I turned to Cora. “Jesus H. Christ, Blitzer asks such probing questions. Here’s what admitting Johnson to the ICU says. It says he’s fucking sick.” (I’ve seen more than I want of Dr. Gupta. No offense to the good doctor but I figure that once his regular usefulness is gone, we’ll be in a relatively healthy place again).
But if Wolf and CNN are on a short leash, Fox should be put down for being the diseased, rabid beast that it is. Earlier this week on Sean Hannity’s show, former Fox host Bill O’Reilly dismissed the dead and dying victims of the coronavirus, saying that they “were on their last legs anyway.” How very Karl Brandt of you Grupenfueher O’Reilly (Karl Brandt was tasked by Hitler in 1939 to implement a program of involuntary euthanasia of people considered to be incurably sick or as the Nazi’s liked to say, “life unworthy of life.”).
With shelter in place some of the news, particularly local news, is being broadcast from newscaster’s homes. There’s a common formula for the reporter’s backdrop, that being a neatly arranged bookshelf. No slap dash stacks, no half eaten sandwich on a plate, no half empty pint bottles of cheap vodka or random toys left by a bored child. Most certainly the books that show up on camera have been preselected to reflect sophistication, intellect and enlightenment. No Jacqueline Susann or other trashy fare. Is it a downside or an actual benefit that I find myself distracted from the actual broadcast by browsing the book collections?
Covid-19 has mainstreamed terms and concepts that most of us used about as often as we’ve used Latin, which is to say, never. “Social distancing” is the practice that will help us “flatten the curve.” What exactly is THE curve? THE curve is an exponential curve which to someone who was a history major means absolutely nothing. After an internet search I found that the graph with the curve that we see every hour of every day represents the two equations, y1 = abx1 and y2 = abx2. This could be true or it could very well be an alternative fact because during my school years I avoided math as if it were a virus. Every website explaining the curve might just a well have been written in hieroglyphics so I picked one that looked legit. In any event we’re told that things won’t open up and show some semblance of normalcy until sometime after THE curve has been flattened.
The scientists are calling for robust testing to determine the proper time to, as Trump likes to put it “open the country.” Trump is dismissing the notion of testing as the final barometer yet continues his puffing about testing in the U.S. during a press briefing. “We have a great testing system. Right now the best testing system in the world,” brags the man who stood stock still and looked around confusedly when the starting gun went off. When he touts the two million tests performed I turn to Cora, “Well, only 298,000,000 more tests to go, because way back when he told us in no uncertain terms that, ‘Anybody that wants a test can get a test. That’s what the bottom line is.’”
When Trump was asked what metrics he would use to make the decision on reopening the country he pointed to his own head, “The metrics right here. That’s my metrics.” The blood ran cold and I wondered if my will is in order.
In the Rumble in the Jungle, Ali let big George Foreman pin him to the ropes and pummel him for seven rounds. In the eighth round only after sensing that Foreman had punched himself out and was vulnerable did Ali pull himself off the ropes and hit Foreman with a barrage of punches that ended the fight.
We don’t know what round we’re in and we don’t know when we’ll get to our own eighth round. We don’t know when we can get off the ropes or what our counterpunch is going to be. We have capable, dedicated men and women working on that counterpunch.
Ali had one manager, the great Angelo Dundee. In our fight we have a committee of managers that more often than not seem to be at odds. In the end it seems that it will boil down to either the scientists or Trump and his clique. The scientists want us to keep up the rope a dope for as long as is necessary while the president seems to want us to get up off the ropes, put down our guard and risk getting hit with a knockdown blow. I think we’re best served to rope a dope rather than heed a dope.
“They call it the rope-a-dope. Well, I’m the dope. Ali just laid on the rope and I, like a dope, kept punching until I got tired. But he was probably the most smart fighter I’ve ever gotten into the ring with.” ~ George Foreman
The Life in My Years 