The month that wasn't.

March is about to exit the stage, good riddance.  Come on and finish the play, April, May and June.  We're on lockdown till mid-June in Virginia; the entire country should be in a similar lockdown but there's no leadership forthcoming from our unfit and inept president.  The exceptions (including allowance for outdoor exercise so long as you're with members of your immediate family and are properly spaced) to the rule, however, swallow the rule.

I'm in the risk group to succumb to the virus, being in my late 60s, with a lot of people talking about how the young will get priority for scarce or non-existent ventilators while the elderly are left to quietly die.  Hey MAGA America, those reckless dullards who voted for the disaster that is Trump,  are we great again yet, while we discuss rationing or denying health care in deadly proportions?  I feel embarrassment for my three sons, although I hope they are all well, who haven't expressed a single concern for their father or their elderly aunts and uncle, some with compromised health systems. in these extraordinarily perilous times.  I prefer to think that I didn't have much or perhaps anything to do with how these unnaturally shallow and callow persons turned out to be as affectless adults, captured at a tender age by their mother whose values didn't preclude her from actively submerging them in the years-long divorce for her own selfish purposes.

My medications got mailed to me so that's alright.  My vision bothers me; after my fifth and hopefully last eye procedure on my damaged right eye early this month I had an appointment for corrective lenses but that was put off indefinitely recently until after this pandemic is concluded which could be months or a year or more.  I fell face first down the cement basement steps several weeks ago in a spectacular accident and everything healed up nicely afterwards, except for my shoulder which I suspect has a torn muscle.  It's weak and aches all the time and bothers me a lot, especially each night because I'm a side sleeper and that arm hurts whether it's under my body because of the weight on it, or atop my body because it feels loose like it's ready to slip out of my socket.  I was going to get it checked out, perhaps heading towards surgery for it, but now I can put off any hope for palliative relief of it probably till next year because all medical personnel are either not seeing anyone except for immediate emergency problems or off on the front lines in the war against our silent, invisible enemy, that is, except for when they're not slipping pallets full of M-95 masks out the back door of hospitals for sale on the black market as our wannabe "wartime president" has accused New York hospitals of doing to cover up his own egregious shortcomings in failing to provide the supply lines for this war.

So I prowl about my yard in this time of stress and disquietude, listening to the birds sing and feeling the warm spring breezes.  I read my Liberation Trilogy by Rick Atkinson; the Allies have learned on the fly how to acquire some combat heft and pushed the Nazis out of North Africa after some shockingly rough handling by the first German troops they met, they pretty easily conquered Sicily, taking most Italian troops there prisoner but allowing the two German divisions to escape to the mainland where they will meet them again, and again, and again, and after breaking out of the beachhead at Salerno where they landed to start the long, bitter slog up the Italian boot they are talking optimistically about taking Rome in 1943.  I make plans to organize my disordered garage.  I brew coffee in the morning and have lunch during the day and make dinner each night.  I walk a mile or two every other day and shave about as frequently.  I watch my 401K slowly start to crawl back from its shocking 70% drop in a single month.  I think about getting my tax information together but I have months in which to do that.  This feels to me like a surreal existence, like the month that never was.

The winter that wasn't.

The last three months were the winter that wasn't, in a year that won't be except for long interludes stress, strain, isolation, loneliness, and misery for very many.  It only snowed a traceable amount once all winter, and my furnace only came on maybe thee dozen times (I keep the thermostat 49, the lowest it will go).  I attended a fancy (black tie preferred) wedding in a hotel on the new Washington Waterfront on the Anacostia in January, I had my fifth eye procedure in February and came down with a dreadful two-week crud with copious up-all-night coughing fits on Valentines Day.  I think that's about sums up the winter.

Now I'm sheltering in place at home under the governor's orders in Virginia.  I didn't step foot off my property yesterday but I have adequate tp on hand (about 30 rolls--not cases), a sufficient amount of bourbon and flavored seltzer water in the cabinet and lots of dented cans picked up from the clearance shelf in the supermarket on the back porch, not all of it expired, only most of it, and none by more than two of three years.  I guess I'll be okay.  Being a former cop I still have my service weapon and I laid in fresh .357 bullets, that weren't 30 years old, the last time I was in West Virginia (just try buying ammunition in the DMV) so I'm doubly alright.

So I think that's about it for the entire year while we hunker down to ride out this virus, because it caught us completely unprepared thanks to the reckless voting choices many hinterland voters made in 2016, wishing upon pixie dust.  Gone are my intentions to attend my high school class's 50th year reunion in New Jersey, my law school class's 30th year reunion here in Virginia and the wedding of a nephew out west.  It looks like that 6 hours of extravaganza on the waterfront on a bitterly cold January evening is about all the socializing there'll be for this entire year.  I haven't even been in physical proximity with my girlfriend for the last three weeks because she has a brother in the risk group and an octogenarian relative.  I walk two miles three times a week down the roadways (the neighborhood streets are not busy) because my lungs feel too tender to start running again after my February sickness.  Was it the virus?  I'll never know because there are no adequate tests anywhere, still, in America.  I have a relative who is terribly sick currently who lives in a red state so she got a test, that took NINE DAYS to come back, negative.  Now we all wonder if it was a false negative because in MAGA America, everyone is paranoid and no one trusts anything.  Anyway, there'll be no secondary test 14 days later because still, there isn't adequate testing for the coronavirus test in America while thousands die from it.

But the phlox is in bloom, flowing over retaining walls.  Life springs eternal.  The cherry blossoms in DC waxed then waned, though the DC mayor shut down the Tidal Basin, appropriately, because thousands of idiots the weekend before last were perambulating the basin, cheek to jowl, viewing them.  America will get through this with less casualties with proper regard, or with mass casualties with reckless disregard.  Be safe, everyone.

Happy happy, Sharon

Have a happy birthday, mother of my three children. I have nothing good to say about you so I won't say anything further except to say that the last time I went to church I prayed for you.

https://law.justia.com/cases/virginia/court-of-appeals-unpublished/2004/1714034.htmlhttps://law.justia.com/cases/virginia/court-of-appeals-unpublished/2004/1714034.html

We could have told you back in 2016...

I get 20 times the information from the daily Covid-19 briefings by Governor Andrew Cuomo of New York than I do from the president's nightly rant on the same subject as he fiddles and makes false accusations to journalists of Fake News as he pathetically plays the victim while the country burns from the Coronavirus, for which he prepared us not a whit during the wasted 3-month run-up to its devastating arrival at our shores.  This incompetent charlatan is responsible for both the dangerous misinformation believed by his ignorant base and the shocking shortages of necessary medical equipment and garb to deal with the pandemic. 

There are no tests to be had, no medical equipment to be found and a rapidly escalating number of deaths occurring daily with many more coming. This MAGA nation is akin to a third world banana republic in its continuing non-response to this crisis. 

A person whom I know well and who is very sick and quarantined at home in a bedroom with no one permitted entry, received a test on Wednesday of last week. Eight days later, there are still no  results that have been forthcoming. 

This is totally unacceptable and useless as well, this person will either be dead or recovered by the time the result comes in.  Meanwhile this person is self-isolating out of regard for the protection of our community, unlike Republican Senator Dr. Paul Rand at the Capitol who used its gym and pool and dined with other senators in the days between his test and the positive result.

The new normal

I went for a two mile walk today, the only excursion I undertook out of my yard in two days, along a route predicated to avoid contact with others as much as possible.  It's the new normal, certainly for the rest of the year at least.

The 40-mile long W&OD Trail is nearby but I kept off it as much as possible as it had too many knots of people on it and I didn't like plodding runners overtaking me and lumbering by on the confined pathway, some breathing heavily and sweating.  But the path intersects with many neighborhood streets which aren't too busy and those are more conducive to keeping isolated on a perambulation, including crossing the street to the other side upon the approach of others.  The only real annoyance was a man with a leaf blower busy blowing leaves off his driveway into the street, stirring up the dust all around with who knows what he was blowing into the air for passerbys to breath in.

My neighbors have a cherry tree in their yard so I started the walk with a viewing of its blooming beauty.  Along the way there were other beautiful spring flowers to view as well.

I ended the walk by cutting across the parking lot across the street where I saw a portentous harbinger of the near-term tragic consequences of the international pandemic which is out of control in our nation thanks to the reckless neglect of our "leader."  Five franchises in a row were tucked into block of the storefronts, four fast food shops and a vape outlet, with the four food concerns sporting new, identical "Grab and Go" signs signifying their recent closures except for takeout orders.  I have no doubt that four of the five shops, the sole exception being the Dominos pizzeria with its established delivery exercise, will be out of business permanently long before this national crisis has ameliorated, mirroring the short-term (12 months or more) devastating ruination of our hitherto robust economy inherited from the previous administration.

A further sign of the times

My sister called yesterday early in the morning (for her) and I answered and we had a 50-minute chat; I hadn't spoken with her since Christmas.  Her daughter's family has moved in with her and it's going pretty well, these are times when we all have to do what we can to take care of each other.

Her whole household was pretty sick last month but no one was able to get a test for the Coronavirus no matter how symptomatic they were--they all ran implacably up against the impenetrable barrier of answering negatively to the qualifying question of, "Have you traveled to China recently?"  Hence No Test (hence no containment or mitigation)--only here in Trump's America; it's like in three short years we have become a third world banana republic bereft of the acumen and advantages of the industrialized world.

My niece has a two-year old who my sister watches while the baby's parents are at work on shortened hours, money is tight everywhere and that might be our new forever-normal in Trump's Amerika.  Shelves are bare in the supermarkets in her town, even canned goods have been picked clean, and there are no baby wipes to be bought anywhere in her locale so the three adults are frantically trying to toilet train the resisting toddler, and turning to using paper towels and other such articles of necessity.

When I went on yesterday's supermarket run here in the DC area, I had the misfortune of losing another ten percent of my 401K even while I shopped but I had the good fortune to find a 10-pack of hand soap bars in the CVS (the supermarket didn't have a single soap bar for sale), ten rolls of TP and several packets of 72-count gentle (no alcohol) baby wipes, and I bought two packs of wipes and boxed them up in a small book mailer for shipment to my sister's house in the west.  I was shocked to find the post office cost to ship the small, thin cardboard box of about two pounds would be $30, so I settled on the nearby UPS store cost of $15 to ship the $4 worth of baby wipes, to get there on Monday.

I was later talking to another sister who set me straight on how backwards I am, how twentieth century I have remained, when she asked if I'd looked on-line for the wipes, which I hadn't.  She has Amazon Prime, she said, and I could have found them on-line and told her and she would have ordered them and had them shipped for free to my western sister's address and I could have paid back my sister later.

The nineteen dollar cost for 144 baby wipes could have been reduced to their natural cost of four dollars, delivered, if only I would crawl into the 21st century.  I hope my niece and her husband, being smart millennials, don't tell my sister how stupid I am when the aid package arrives and they intuit its cost, which otherwise I am happy to bear if the wipes prove to be helpful.

A sign of the times

Our world has changed beyond measure. Maybe we'll never get our old world back.  Two thirds of my 401K is gone, in the last fortnight alone.  Two decades of work towards my retirement years gone in a flash.  (The flowers I planted still grow anew each spring next to my front porch steps.)

I was looking forward to three trips within the next two months which now are gone forever.  My fiftieth high school reunion in Lawrenceville, New Jersey; my thirtieth law school class reunion in Charlottesville, Virginia; and the wedding of my oldest nephew in New Mexico, somewhere on its southeastern plains.  All three trips, and any future trips beyond a short local drive, are gone due to lack of money and as being too risky in the current state of affairs, except for, perhaps, a trip of absolute necessity born of heretofore unseen circumstances.  (The Cherry Blossoms have started to bloom.)

Life changes, sometimes forever; sometimes it comes very fast and seemingly out of the blue, like on September 11th, 2001, or December 7th, 1941, or October 29, 1929.  That's what this pandemic seems like, now that it's here within our country this week in its full, uncontrollable form after we frittered away the late fall and the winter hitherto in foolish whistling-past-the-graveyard barking or tweeted denunciations of it as a democratic hoax, a fake-news creation or a plot by the radical-left socialists to take down our faux president by any means even if the country was destroyed in the process.  For the past few days I have been going out once a day to depleted stores to lay in provisions, whatever I can find, for the long winter ahead of sheltering in place while the disease walks the world largely or wholly unchecked and a million or more Americans die, along with many millions more people worldwide, in the greatest human kill-off since 60 million persons died in the Spanish Flu pandemic in 1918.  (The quiet burble of the fountain in the Mary Livingston Ripley fountain on the Mall is as pleasing as ever.)

What's been happening since I last posted on my oldest child's birthday last month?  My youngest child  had a birthday (he was a no-show at his party too), February 29th came and went, perhaps never to be seen again by me (I'm in the suspect group in terms of lethality for the Coronavirus pandemic), I was sick as a dog the last half of last month but I'm better now and I wonder what I had but--no tests for us Americans, once I was well I had my fifth eye procedure in the last eighteen months (the other four were surgeries, this was a laser shot into my lens pocket to obliterate building up scar tissue that was obscuring my sight), St. Patrick's day passed by unobserved, practically all public accommodations in my community have been shuttered (no school or community classes or church services, the libraries are all closed, keep your checked-out or overdue books at home until further notice and public transportation has been severely throttled down and restricted), practically everybody I know is working from home, my next-door neighbors have been furloughed from their jobs with no further paychecks forthcoming, everybody gives you as wide a berth as possible in public, and I wonder if I, or any of my siblings will ever hear from any of my three children ever again (hopefully they're alive and well).  Those are three very strange and weirdly unnatural and unfathomable thirty-something men, none of them has any interest in whether their blood kin on the Lamberton side are well or even live or die in these desperate times.  (The Martin Luther King statue on the Tidal Basin is as imponderable as ever.)