Summer's half gone...

. . . and I haven't been to the beach yet or even in the water other than the shower.  Last summer I took a July 4th car trip to get out of town so I didn't have to listen to our ridiculous liar-in-chief talk on the Mall about patriots securing all the airports during the Revolutionary War.  I swam in the ocean off Cape Hatteras, saw a baseball game in Atlanta, visited the Andersonville Civil War POW Camp, explored the Chickamauga battlefield, toured the D-Day Museum in Bedford and finished up the trip at Appomattox Courthouse where the Civil War came to an end.  But this year, nada.

I've planted many perennial flowers in my yard, walked the streets round my house to get some roadway miles in, went to BLM Plaza in the District twice to try to figure out why military troops were patrolling ("dominating" in our clown-in-chief's words) the DC streets, donate blood once, talked to a Kaiser doctor on the phone to try to get the coronavirus antibody test so I could engage in plasma therapy but she wasn't having any of it (of course--I live in America and there are no adequate tests anywhere for anyone except the for the White House and for major league sports) and I read three books including two pulitzer prize winners, but that's a pretty paltry summertime report.

I got my taxes done, that was a big thing for me.  Basically I moved piles of documents around my dining room table for weeks and then on July 9th shoved a disorganized sheaf of jumbled papers in an envelope and overnighted them to my accountant in Colorado (I used to live there).  He was hopping mad, I thought he was going to discharge me but he got them finished and filed on time and I have even received a refund already.  Trying to do taxes drives me into the thrall of lassitude and days pass by with no progress.  After I spent a day trying to get my 2019 W-2, I learned that retirees like me don't get W-2s, they get 1099-Rs instead.  My 401K continues its dizzying (sickening?) decline but I anticipate a change come January and hope it'll come back then.

So what to do?  Stay home and read more books and each day's copy of the Washington Post?  There's no baseball to go watch in person, which could have otherwise afforded me a satisfactory small side trip.  I've thought about taking a short trip to North Carolina where I could be on the coast and take a dip in the ocean but I don't want to get or spread the virus.  The shortness of breath, which makes it so I can't sleep and I have to get up no matter how exhausted I am and sit upright or walk about downstairs or in the cool of  the early morning air outside, occasionally comes back and causes me to wonder if I have or still have or had the virus and my lungs are scarred,  It exhausts me thinking about it.  There's no testing in Trump's America, have I already say that?  So I can't find out in these lonely hours as the weeks and months pass by whether I'm sick or have been sick or not; am I hypochondriac or normal, stalwart in my enforced semi-isolation or depressed by it?  The whole reality of where we are and what we've become is driving me crazy.  Good job, you 63 million reckless voters of four years ago who brought about, predictably enough as to the ultimate outcome albeit not the actual event itself, our disastrous response (151,000 American deaths in five months headed towards maybe over half a million or more) to this predictable enough worldwide calamity.