The Month That Wasn't

I'm housebound due to adherence to my governor's lockdown orders, for the good of all of us (the herd), I'm not going out like those asinine Trump cultish losers with all my guns strapped to my fatigue clothes (I have one or two, having been a police officer for 9 years) and, displaying my guns prominently (big gun little dick), scream Open Up ('liberate") the state!  Nope, I've been hunkering down in my house and I go off my property twice a week for staples.

Every day blends into the last and the next, and I think I might be going bonkers but each morning I try to remember what I had for dinner the last night and that gets me oriented once I go downstairs to view the deitrus of the last night's dinner preparation and determine what I ate. Because I'm utilizing this housebound opportunity to work on getting rid of all of the formerly discounted old dented cans on my back porch and all the 2017 and later frozen meat in my basement freezer.

It's working, I threw out some 2011 boxes of rice a roni and a 2013 dented can that hissed when I opened it.  On my birthday this month, I spoke to some persons on the phone and fielded a birthday text from a Trumpite relative who wished me well then demanded that I list the accomplishments of the president and then I'd see, and I didn't see, or touch, or have in-person communication with anyone else.

The month that wasn't.  I tell my girlfriend we have two more years of this existence, under President Biden, and she howls that Trump will be re-elected (which depresses me that she thinks that because I don't think so), and that we'll be out of our desultory existence by early 2021 at the latest which I absolutely dispute.

Inject disinfectant?

What?  Is the president of the US, on a nationally televised public broadcast, actually suggesting that shining a powerful light inside the body or that disinfectant placed inside the body will cure the patient of the novel coronavirus?  This is crazy stuff.

World headlines trumpet banners of "dangerous," "bizarre," "insane" and "horror" in reference to this manchild's bloviating for two hours of dangerous claptrap and medical nonsense.  Who voted for this giant three-year old toddler who somehow got ahold of the car keys and is behind the wheel with the engine running and everyone in the family strapped into their seatbelts looking on in horror.

Maybe we could pour a little spic and span in a glass, top it off with water to the fill line and--down the hatch-- or shine a heat lamp into, what, your rectum?  Your open mouth?

Yeah, that'll keep covid-19 at bay.  "Thank you, Mr. President [Dear Leader]."

50,000 deaths and counting now in about forty days to the virus, and 20% unemployment in the same time frame due to the virus.  No national strategy on ramping up reliable testing or mapping out a game plan for when the virus comes back strong in a second wave.  Even when a sane person takes the White House in January, it'll take a year or more to immediately mobilize national resources under a coherent hand to ramp up a rational response to this deadly peril.

Pandemic Protocol

Today I was wheeling my trash barrel down my driveway to the curb when just as I was within feet of the sidewalk a pedestrian was walking by, to arrive at that space at near the same time.  I was ready to stop wheeling my unit in the driveway and wait for him to go by from 10 feet away when he seamlessly cut into the street and gave me a wide berth so neither of us had to pause.  Good protocol. Situational awareness.

The trash men came by and emptied my receptacle so I went down the driveway to retrieve my trash barrel before some dog walker had a chance to discard their bag of dog poop in my barrel, which happens occasionally and I hate.  Coincidentally the same approach situation arose as an hour earlier, only this time with a runner running down the sidewalk instead of a walker, with us both slated to arrive at about the same time at the same space on the sidewalk, and I stopped 10 feet away to let him go by.  But it annoyed me that he ran between me and my barrel, down the narrow sidewalk, instead of taking to the street to give me a wide berth (there's rarely traffic on my street), sweat droplets undoubtedly streaming off his body into the air in his wake along with forceful exhalation due to his heavy breathing from exertion, undoubtedly putting more droplets into that space.  I didn't know if this runner had the coronavirus, but I didn't know that he didn't either.  I waited a full minute to go get my barrel, muttering, because in these days of a novel virus shedding its menace everywhere from infected people who may be asymptomatic, including by aerosol transmission, runners should take better care of where they're running when the whole street is empty.  Bad protocol.  Hasn't thought this through.  That's why I don't walk anymore on the nearby W&OD bike trail because I imagine a potentially deadly plume of airborne droplets trailing behind every runner and bicyclist who goes by, because nobody knows who is infected or not.

Parking in the Safeway lot on my weekly trip there for essentials, I noticed the lot was littered with several disposable gloves at points where shoppers would be climbing into their cars after shopping before driving away.  I've seen those gloves around other parking lots as well.  Bad, bad protocol.  Take your damn gloves with you and dispose of them in an appropriate receptacle instead of just anywhere.

In the supermarket with my mask on, I was overhearing a couple loudly discussing buying enough lamb to last the pandemic, by freezing it I guess.  Hubby located a shelf with 6 or 8 mutton chop rolls on it, about 2-3 pounds each package.  Wifey called out from over by the fish tank, How many are you going to get?  "All of them."  He collected all the packages and put it in their cart, leaving that meat shelf bare.  I almost went over to him, but didn't, to tell him that in these times, take what you need but leave the rest, as the Band song goes.  My girlfriend says I did the right thing by not imparting my values to this jerk couple, but I dunno.  Bad protocol for sure, very Republican, I got mine, Jack, nothing for you?  Work harder next time (get there first next time).

I scored some tp my last trip to Safeway, the first I've seen in weeks.  Maybe ten packages of six rolls each.  I took one and left the rest.  If I was low at home and had three or more  people in my house, depending upon me, I would have taken two at most.  I believe this is good protocol.

My sister makes 8-10 cloth masks a day and gives them away, even to strangers.  I haven't seen a mask for sale where I live during this lockdown and she sent me two, with two more for my girlfriend.  This is good protocol.  I have located large ponytail elastic hair bands at my Safeway, suitable for her to use as earpieces for the masks she makes, which she cannot locate where she lives, and each time I go to Safeway I buy one package of 40 and send them to her.  I do not take all or more of them from the shelf in any one trip in case someone else needs them for the same thing.

These are different times, with new social rules being worked out.

A walk in the sun...

Last weekend I took a walk with a friend, for the first time in two weeks, who is stressed out beyond what's healthy because she is still working, from home now, and as usual in American management these days they want more with less while giving mere lip service to how much they know more help is needed and they're working on it and oh, BTW, now that you're working from home you can be on duty and on the job any hour and all hours.  It was a nice pleasant, warm spring day with the verdant outside world of lawns and bushes bursting forth with the colors of the season of resurgence.

We went three miles and listened to birds chirping and watched whole families bicycling by single file, dad in front and mom bringing up the rear, like a couple of ducks shooing ducklings across a roadway, and just worked off the gloominess and despondency of always being inside with no physical contact with others (she lives alone, as I do, and that induces a special languor that easily settles into a blue funk not overcome by calls to or from your friends).  We saw a thirty-something man come out of his home in his green scrubs and get into his car at the curb and called out to him from a safe distance inquiring if he was was going to work, and when he indicated yes, we called out to him to Be Safe.

Everyone maintained respectful distances from everyone else, except for some more closely spaced couples or family units, and mostly went to opposite sides of the street as persons passed by other persons.  And almost everyone had a mask on, the new norm which could be with us for years going forward.

There was some good news.

 My last walk took me past a house whose front yard was littered with little riding devices of all sorts, a baby seat, bicycles, tricycles, little scooters, plus pet containers like water bowls, and I wondered if the parents inside were able to cope with all those kids cooped up on the premises (plus doing the cooking, cleaning, homeschooling etc.) and as we walked by that house, the parents were in the yard, alive, well and apparently ably managing the chaos created by four young children, three dogs and any stray tiny friend that wanders by or in.

You say it's your birthday...

I had a birthday earlier and it was a most unusual affair.  I didn't enjoy the company of anyone else in person, and except for the morning stroll to the head of my driveway to pick up my morning Washington Post, I didn't leave my house the entire day.

After a desultory morning during which I enjoyed my usual two cups of coffee and watched the news about how dire our current situation and how endless were our dismal prospects for escaping our self-imposed and self-dealt quarantine (no tests), I had my "party" at noon by making myself and enjoying a special sandwich made of braunschweiger, a liverwurst pate, and mayonnaise seasoned liberally with coarse ground pepper and sea salt.  It was a glorious party, like something out of the Mad Hatter's realm, although during the day I did have several phone calls from relatives and friends wishing me a happy birthday, with more than one refrain of Happy Birthday sung to me over the phone.

That was it, happy birthday to you, cha-cha-cha as the Beatles song goes.

You say it's your birthday
It's my birthday too, yeah
They say it's your birthday
We're gonna have a good time
I'm glad it's your birthday
Happy birthday to you

I want to thank my sisters, my girlfriend, and my other friends who called for their well wishes and good cheer as I hurtle towards my seventies.  And as I approach sooner rather than later my turn to shuffle off this mortal coil, I'm also so glad that I fostered three children (now adults) and wiped their bottoms and drove them to school and helped with their homework and coached them in soccer (bleh) all those years and provided for payment of full tuition and fees for college and during this deadly pandemic, they have expressed nary a word of concern or care about how I am, as always.

Seventy days in lockdown

The days of sameness drag on by.  I keep track of the days by two weekly benchmarks, beyond my looking at my Timex Ironman watch which has the days of the week on it as part of its date feature on its display field and which is cheating and mentally lazy, because trash and recycling barrels need to be rolled out to the curb every Wednesday, and the weekend does come and with it I'm usually cognizant of when it is Saturday, an ingrained holdover from my working days.  Not Sunday, mind you, because there is no live church service to go to anymore (my church does stream Sunday services but it's not the same thing and I don't attend).

On Facebook, as part of my daily post, I am listing the twenty albums that had the most meaningful impact on me musically while I was growing up; I list a picture of the cover of the LP and a YouTube clip of its most impactful song to me.  All of the albums so far are from the sixties and I wonder if anyone even knows what LP means, although I only have a following of two or three people who regularly click "likes" on my posts, and the shallow medium has kicked up a tempest in a teapot with some relatives who despise my anti-Trump posts, which I think are righteous, self-evident portals into the truth and which they think are anti-Godly screeds that they attribute to the news "filters" that apparently surround me because I live in the Washington DC "bubble."  So far, I have listed in order the Mamas and the Papas debut album (California Dreaming); the Best of the Animals (The House of the Rising Sun); The Velvet Underground & Nico (Heroin); Procol Harum (A Whiter Shade of Pale); The Doors Light My Fire album (Backdoor Man); and Neil Young Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere (Down By the River); Are You Experienced (Hey Joe); The Chambers Brothers (The Time Has Come Today); Derek and the Dominos (Layla); and Sgt. Peppers Lonely Hearts Club Band (A Day In The Life).  Speaking of songs, as I wander around my otherwise empty house, a song from the seventies keeps going around and around in my head, 30 Days in the Hole by Humble Pie.

I put on my mask and go to the grocery store on Tuesdays and Saturdays.  I don't need much because I have a back porch full of dented cans from the clearance rack in my local grocery store that I've accumulated over the years and a freezer full of frozen meats from 50% markdowns on packages nearing their expiration day.  I must have seen the pandemic coming, right?  It's a routine, we all need routines in our enforced lassitude.  I feel these days like a refuge from an Edward Hopper painting, waiting for the 1918 Spanish Flu Influenza to run its course.

To go back to my reasons for adhering to this lockdown, it's not fear, except the fear of infecting others; I do it to be a part of the common good and to set an example.  A relative told me that I was living in FEAR (my relative put it in all caps in the text), that we all die sometime and it's time to get out there and get our economy going.  The seven years I was a state trooper I patrolled high mountain roads solo thirty minutes from any back-up at times, especially late at night, and I had a couple of terrifying moments to be sure and I was exposed to extreme danger more than once, so I don't think I'm afraid.  I think it's a faustian bargain to trade a percentage of the population for a few weeks head start on restoring our economy.  The economy will come back sooner or later, the lives lost will never come back.

Lassitude

I haven't set foot off my property in days. I try to walk 3 miles three times a week on non-busy local streets, keeping twenty feet away from everyone I encounter, but a certain languor is setting in as I don't see any familiar faces anymore and the best I can do is take virtual trips in this time of disquietude.

This is my favorite photograph from my favorite trip, a trip of eight days and seven nights down the Grand Canyon in 2008 with former classmates from the University of Colorado. They mostly graduated in 1974 or 1975 whereas I didn't make it out of CU until 1978, having a hiatus of several years working in the restaurant business wintering in Aspen and summering in Nantucket, "between semesters." It all worked out okay for me, except for the part of meeting my ex-wife on Nantucket, who turned out to be in my opinion a raging (high on the Trumpian scale) covert narcissist, which I believe is an impossible, destructive (to others) personality disorder.

I also enjoyed a trip to the great Northwest in 2012 as I completed my checklist of visiting everyone of the 48 lower states in my lifetime.  My most poignant day was spent visiting Mt. St. Helens and realizing by first-hand observation the vastness of the natural disaster there in 1980.

The most spectacular thing I saw on that trip was Crater Lake in Oregon, a vast caldera filled with blue-as-the-sky rainwater and snow runoff.  Other than the Grand Canyon, it is the most memorable natural landscape I have seen.  It was created by a volcanic blow-up fifty times greater than the Mt. St. Helens explosion and gradually filled in with water over the centuries to its current level.

The year that ushered in the new norms

America is under existential threat from its own choices in leadership, first Dubya ("W" for Worst Ever president), a minority president having lost the popular vote (but being given the presidency by the vote of one Supreme Court right-wing deity, the curmudgeonly arrogant Scalia) and then the current bloviating, moronically stupid (and incredibly lazy) bankruptor of our country's fortune and values.  He lost the popular vote by a lot, almost three million votes, and in three years he's ruined the US economy, cast the country into a recession if not a Depression by his inept and criminally negligent handling ("I don't feel responsible at all" and my grades and phone calls are "perfect") of the pandemic, gotten himself impeached, made Bush look like he belongs on Mount Rushmore compared to him, ended the American Century which started with our entry into World War II and demoted our great Republic to something resembling a third world banana republic that has to beg for ventilators from Russia and face masks from China for our world-class medical providers due to the president's unbelievable lassitude.

It's the new normal.

8,000 Americans dead in three weeks from the coronavirus with the death toll rising rapidly and no current ability to corral it or even measure it because we have grossly insufficient tests for it available and there's no reliability to the American test's testing ability, with the belief being that fully 1/3 of its negative results are false and it takes a week or more for the results come back anyway which pretty much renders the test useless.  Who was in charge of this train-wreck, which people were warning about in January?  Oh, our train-wreck-in-process do-nothing chief executive.

So we all shelter in place for weeks on the coasts, hand make our own masks to wear as recommended, and practice social distancing which is the only defense we have from the lethal onslaught of this deadly Covid-19 disease, while many states in the south and the west lallygag  around having not shut down, thus creating the petri dish from which the deadly second wave of deaths from this virus will soon come.  But at least the spring flowers are in bloom.

A new month

I still remember when I went to my motel in Newport News after 11 pm on that first Tuesday night in November in 2016 after an exhausting 17-hour day being an inside poll observer in the poorest precinct in town.  The results were promising in this impoverished, largely African American part of the town, the votes were ten to one for Hillary Clinton for president over Donald Trump, with a smattering of wasted or unsophisticated votes for third party candidates like the stoned-out pothead from New Mexico or the Russian-plant woman who liked to attend dinners in Moscow.  Apparently there are no Democratic lawyers in the Hampton Roads area, as I and a half-dozen other Northern Virginia lawyers had to travel two hundred miles to be poll watchers.

As I turned on the motel room's TV to watch the election returns, I reflected wryly none of us Arlington area poll watchers had been invited to the victory-celebration in Virginia Beach at a fancy hotel downtown.  Thank you very much, have a safe journey back.  I was glad that my task was at an end, I have never liked Hillary Clinton and I couldn't wait to stop working for her.  She's so secretive and shady, but she's also smart, informed steady and advocates people-first policies.  There was no comparison between this former first-lady, senator and Secretary of State and the often bankrupted conman from Queens who was ignorant, inept and foul-mouthed, never held office, and was a misogynist and racist.  Clinton was always way ahead in the polls despite misinformation campaigns launched against her and James Comey's follies, but I always wanted to be able to look any of my children in the eye on the outlandish chance that the obviously unfit Trump should win the presidency and be able to say, "I did everything I could to prevent this catastrophe."

Clinton won handily of course and she backed down the Russians in Ukraine, using the hard-nosed skills she honed as Secretary of State.  She put American advisors in that beleaguered country under invasion from Russian proxies and also invited in other NATO advisors as well, keeping the European unity against the Russian Bear at a high level.  She warned Putin against continuing to attempt to dabble in our elections, pointing to the Western troops as Ukraine advisors to their army, and the electronic chatter from the Russian troll farms noticeably fell off.  The Obama economic boom continued under her stewardship, at double digit returns from the stock market for the first three years.  She installed two USSC liberal justices in their thirties to the highest court, easing the heretofore intolerable pressure by conservative old men to control the bodies and decisions of women.  Unions thrived, wages went up, tax rates were cut for the middle class and health care under the new and improved ACA reached even more uninsured people and out of pocket costs for it declined measuredly.  Then the coronavirus pandemic, the first global one in over a century, washed ashore on our shores in February of 2020.

President Clinton, having run the White House as First Lady, a senate office and then the State Department as Madame Secretary, was not surprised by it at that moment nor ignorant of its potentially devastating import.  The pandemic response office in the White House, set in place by Obama after the Ebola virus outbreak, had been expanded and enlarged and had been briefing her since December on the troubling occurrence odf a novel virus in China.  Clinton had set up a WH task force to study it and make recommendations, and in December she was informed that if or when the virus came to America there would be strains on the US medical supply lines, specifically in ventilators, swabs, antiseptics gowns, face masks and shields, gloves, testing chemicals and other necessary medical paraphernalia.  Noting that the 1918 Spanish Flu cost 670,000 Americans their lives due to lack of decisive national leadership under President Woodrow Wilson who was preoccupied with his vaunted Fourteen Points at the end of World War I, she appointed Bill Gates as the national Pandemic Czar in early January with full power, after she swiftly activated the Defense of America law, to order US manufacturers to shift production to these and other necessary equipment and supplies and build up a national stockpile of supplies in advance.  The Pandemic team expressed concern to her in January about the  CDC's coronavirus test as being too complicated, too self-centered to the agency and not taking full advantage American expertise and innovation in the medical field and she put in a standing order for millions of tests from the WHO and had the Pandemic Chief to contact leading educational institutions with requests for them to start working on tests for the virus and potential vaccinations, with attendant grants.

The first hotspot to emerge was in Seattle but in conjunction with the proactive governor of Washington, hundreds of thousands of tests were administered and the extent of the outbreak was learned and through contact tracing, contained.  The phrase, "Testing, testing, testing," was heard often in the public discourse, and President Clinton bragged that, "Anyone American who wants a test can get one."  And it was true, through foresight, preparation and production.

Italy went into a fortnight of house confinement due to being ravaged by the deadly virus and America maintained its customary role of being the leader of the developed world and sent medical personnel and necessary items from our full stockpiles to our valued and grateful ally.  When President Clinton said she was considering, and then undertook, a three-week national lockdown in early March, the stock market tanked one day, dropping two thousand points to 25,000, but it has bounced back to 27,000 since then, still down a thousand points but slowly recovering.  The prognosis for America weathering this pandemic with a minimal death toll is fair, naysayers claim that 100,00 to 220,000 lives might be lost ultimately instead of the 20,000 to 50,000 deaths the medical experts predict based on modeling.  They urged the national lockdown, and the president promptly got the 50 state governors to institute it, thus delivering a blow to the economy but undoubtedly saving hundreds of thousands of lives.

April Fools.  Trump got elected and we're all paying fully for this catastrophe during this catastrophe.