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.