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.