A Journal of the Pandemic #21

Hey, you may have heard of something called COVID-19? Kind of a thing that’s been happening this year?

I haven’t written an entry in this series since September. As I write this one, we’ve become entangled in the winter surge, that thing that was looming nebulously all year, and now it’s arrived. Or as HBO might have put it, “winter is coming.”

Obviously plenty has happened since September. Biden won the election. As a result, we’re scheduled for a shutdown early next year. I’m kind of looking forward to it. At work it seems as if in order to get any real response done management needs for someone else to make a decision about how seriously to take the pandemic.

And let me explain that. We lost a couple staff members mysteriously this week. Nobody knew what was happening. By the end of the week we learned unofficially that they of course were tangled up with COVID-19. Nothing was done except replacements brought in as necessary. And they were staff members who absolutely intersected with the whole facility. We had a whole class quarantine for two weeks without signage being hung explaining why. Measures were subsequently put in place to prevent cross-room contamination in playground areas...after it was totally ignored that the one class had absolutely interacted with other classes in playground areas before its quarantine.

(Here I’ll include a parenthetical update on my baby room. As I reviewed what was happening when last I wrote we had just gotten our first two new babies! We ended up getting two more regulars, although it was three until one went on reserve status, their dad sort of permanently out of work because pandemic time has made it difficult for him to be a barber. Three young wiggly babies making strides at tangible mobility, one older baby making strides to standing! Walking! Independently! For all the occasional hiccups, it’s, for me, an inexpressibly irresistibly magical age.)

And I get that the bottom line is always money, that it would be inconvenient to have made any other decisions than have been made.

But.

Here I will once again clarify that I never believed for a moment that draconian methods were ever necessary, but once the decision was made, nearly everywhere, globally, it became irresponsible for anyone to deliberately skirt them without justification, without a clear, honest, transparent method behind the reasoning. Which I’m certain I am not alone in experiencing.

Because of the heavy political polarization at least here in the States, we tend to assume that skirting mandates equates a conservative agenda. That’s the kind of useless simplistic reasoning that absolutely needs to end. I guarantee it isn’t that black and white, and never was. 

My private life continues apace. I published a collection of short stories a few weeks back, collecting material that had previously been earmarked for a friend’s anthology they decided against pursuing in favor of a movie website. (I still have no idea why they couldn’t do both, but apparently some people can’t multitask; I’ve been dwelling recently on the amount of blogging I used to do, and still trying to rationalize how none of it really made an impact so it’s just as well to not continue in that fashion.)

I also published my Christmas collection and sent it out to family. The past few years I was circulating it only to my niece, but figured this year of all years I could expand back outward.

Working on those two publications was a necessary culmination for the year I’ve been having. They were, in their finished forms, a response to the death of my previous computer. I had to totally rewrite the Christmas collection, but in a weird sort of way it was a good thing, therapeutic, as part of it allowed me to simultaneously resurrect the best of the lost Squire’s History of Oz material, the short story I’d written, now reworked as an original story, one I had been planning to write for a while.

I’ve also been plugging away at Space Corps, including replacing ideas that were eaten by the previous computer, which again turned out to be okay. One book I’ve been outlining I had the chance to completely rethink again, and plans for two more had chances for fresh perspectives as well, including the last one in the whole cycle, which took on a drastic new shape inspired in part by some genealogy work I did a few months ago, trying to figure out where exactly my roots lie.

I’ve been staying mostly home. No huge change from any other year, just more so, some by necessity (libraries here are only just beginning, cautiously, to reopen, so my weekends remain home bound, a stark contrast to what was happening a year ago). I did shop on Black Friday, at a comic book store, where I seemed to spend the bulk of my time away from where everyone else was, catching up with recent comics and seeing what I could find in the used collections (where I scored a copy of Steven Seagle’s It’s A Bird). Ironically, the generous back issue sale that enticed others I had already decided to stay away from, having read, perhaps, enough random old comics this year.

This week I kept being reminded how much I miss my niece. Last Sunday was a good call with dad, who hasn’t gotten to see his two Maine-based grandsons since March, partly because my brother has decided he can do without him. We had a rare phone conversation about that a few months back. I tried to make a case for dad, but it obviously left little enough impression. I wonder how many families are losing shape because of the pandemic, and how long, if mended at all, these altered states will endure.

Edgar Wright watched a lot of art movies. I watched a lot of movies, too, but not a lot of overlap there. Kenny Omega just made history. So things are interesting.

And maybe they’re going to be interesting in a positive way.