Finished writing “Falling Toward Oz” last week. It happened on another day when I thought I was again going to not work on it at all, stuck in a pandemic rut, and then that evening just went to work on it and buckled down. It ended up clocking in at 8,000 words, exactly, which had become my target, but it felt weird, typing the last few and seeing the total. I reached the climax and thought maybe I’d rushed toward it too quickly, but kept on writing and, I think, ended up with something better than I had previously been thinking. Anyway, it’s always a nice feeling, as a writer, to finish something and feel pleasantly surprised at the results. I posted about it on Facebook. Some people were like, Oh, you’re still writing? This, despite the fact that I’ve literally linked four flash fictions I’ve done this year alone. Well, what can you say? My Colorado writing buddy was among them, and suggested we collaborate on one last anthology. I told him I’d think about it. Thinking, at the moment, the results of the serialized story I’m currently blogging (the one about the pandemic), which doesn’t currently have enough vampire for Pat (hi, Pat!) but will circle back to them in a few days.
Still at home. Starting to feel weird. Again, I’ve spent long periods of time more or less in this mode before, but never with so few options outside the home. As noted above, began to feel stuck in a rut, but then began to challenge that. Late last week I finally went out and sat in a park (my oldest sister has been sending pictures of her family at a lake they just discovered in their backyard) to do some reading. The book I’m reading now, it had a bad start (more common than you’d think) so I was concerned it was actually a bad read overall, but the park proved otherwise, so I’ll be diving back in eagerly after I finish up blogging this morning. Anyone who knows me knows I read a lot, and probably most people just assume I’ve been doing a lot of reading during this time, but they’d be slightly less right than they’d guess.
This is more or less the point I’m starting to wonder how little others think about me. I’ve had to initiate every communication during the lockdown (except this one lady who periodically contacts me so she can vent about personal problems, though I think perhaps I may have put a dent in that last week talking about pandemic things). I know I’m ordinarily a fairly private person anyway, an introvert who spends his free time alone by choice anyway, never developed routine relationships with regular conversation, but...Am I really so disposable? Does everyone really just assume I will happily continue like this? I realize I began my pandemic journals lamenting about family, but it’s...not even just that. It’s everyone. If I’m rattled by anything in this whole thing, it’s that. And yeah, it increasingly sucks that everyone else, in just family terms, has other people living with them, and so when they want to, for instance, initiate a family game night over the internet, they have that instant leverage. I usually do best in those circumstances playing off of someone else. Well, I don’t have someone else, and so I can’t participate. This is partially a complaint of my own making, I understand. But it also emphasizes what I lost last year above and beyond my niece...
Of course I used up a little more of my financial wiggle room last week, and panicked a little, because again, I’m also increasingly worried about what follows this lockdown, if I’m setting myself up for another financial hole, which I’m lucky enough to not be experiencing now, but many others are, and it’s still weird to think, that for many people the pandemic isn’t minor complaints but real ones, and I have no practical experience with that side of it, and that’s a large part of why it doesn’t seem real to me, despite the pandemic being a worldwide experience. Knowing, and even having a small fraction of the impact on my life, that this is happening, it’s tough to reconcile. It feels very much like the kinds of privileges and disparities I didn’t previously apply to my life, and that’s kind of inexplicable and humbling at the same time.
We’re at the point where arguments are being made to lift restrictions, but realizing that even when we reach that point things will still be different. The workplace sent a memo detailing what that might look like there, and it actually feels more intimidating in that sense than it did when we were merely consolidating for lack of children. Then, at least, it was still business as usual if limited and altered by scope. Now there looks to be entire procedures, and perhaps even those mandated masks people keep arguing over, which are increasingly common as I poke my head out every now and again...
To top it off, there was a network TV special on the weekend. Lady Gaga, at least, seemed to have totally forgotten the recent context of the song “Smile” (as employed by the film Joker). Maybe she’s right. Maybe this is all a hard reboot. If so, I hope we use it wisely.
Oh, and hey! Here’s some fun trivia for you! I have always, always eaten breakfast. For the first time in nearly forty years, lockdown life had changed that. For at least the past week (see? I can’t even remember when it started now) I have been skipping it, and just headed straight through the morning to a noon lunch. I know this’ll revert back once I’m working again, but it’s tangible proof that I have fundamentally altered at least one aspect of my ordinary life because of the pandemic. No breakfast! Not even brunch! Madness.
Monday, April 20, 2020
Monday, April 13, 2020
A Journal of the Pandemic #5
Last week, no work at all. Finally, at the end, we got word that yes, we’re still being paid, and yes, we’re going to have to do some things. I know a lot of people have been working from home (never mind the people working every day in the ongoing essential services), and a lot of them with kids at home, and those kids being expected to do various permutations of schoolwork, and some of those people are going crazy...For me last week was a really long week, not even like a vacation (I’ve done that, “staycation”), but the longer it went the more I had to remind myself, this was only the first week of this for me! And some people have been doing this far longer. And a lot of them have been a far better job of actually staying inside all day every day...
I went out on shopping errands far more often than it might have seemed. Once was to get another bookcase, even though I started out spending far less time reading than I might have previously thought, or done. But I’ve been getting better at that. I’ve also been getting far better at being productive, writing. Like I’ve been doing for a decade, I decided to tackle the A to Z Challenge again, but unofficially, unlisted on the official site, but at this point I wonder how much that matters. The whole month has gotten progressively less social over the years. Anyway, talking about movies again, at the movie blog. Got some fun subjects lined up for some of the trickier letters. Pat (hi, Pat!) wasn’t amused that on the first day I used “A” for movies that literally began with “A” like A Christmas Carol (though none of the dozens of takes on it were in my selections), because that’s how I categorize my movies, and there are lots of movies with titles like that...
Anyway, tackled a serialized pandemic story, don’t know how long it’ll be. Most chapters are turning out bite-sized, which is about what you’d expect from something being written on a phone. Wrote a few other things. Worked on Falling Toward Oz, and hopefully will finish that this week (though, again, doesn’t seem terribly pressing; work says we won’t reopen for about another month at least).
I kept waffling on doing a pandemic story, but a few days into A to Z it just seemed like a natural blogging companion project. That’s the only reason it happened, plus of course having the time, having time to come up with an idea, having time to get started right away with little excuses in the way, and actually coming up with an idea, although the early material makes it seem like a thinly-veiled pandemic journal (other than this one) (which of course it is).
I bought more things last week because I have financial wiggle room. Part of me has started worrying that what’s wiggle room now will be desperation, should this thing continue to draw out. Definitely. But at the same time, with so few options out there, and so much uncertainty, and no idea how much the world is going to change because of this, I keep thinking of it as bulwark for the world I hope to find on the other side.
Helped suggest another family chat for Easter yesterday, and by this point I’ve gotten over being the grump of a month back, upset at the budding disruptions, and was able to enjoy it. Starting to notice how it’s affecting other members of the family, in the opposite direction, which is unsettling. But realistically, this thing is having and is going to have a massive psychological toll, and that’s going to be something we as a global society will be dealing with for years to come. For every introvert like me, there are extroverts who were not at all prepared for a disaster party. (“Disaster Party” by Magic Giant is one of my pandemic songs, having been coincidentally performed on one of the morning shows a month or so back. “Crazy Train” is another; it’s the song the crazy kid was singing on a loop via karaoke when the cruise ships were being quarantined and I was talking with a coworker about that back in January).
So, yeah. To quote my sister-in-law on Facebook the other day, quoting Dumbledore: “Alas, earwax.”
I went out on shopping errands far more often than it might have seemed. Once was to get another bookcase, even though I started out spending far less time reading than I might have previously thought, or done. But I’ve been getting better at that. I’ve also been getting far better at being productive, writing. Like I’ve been doing for a decade, I decided to tackle the A to Z Challenge again, but unofficially, unlisted on the official site, but at this point I wonder how much that matters. The whole month has gotten progressively less social over the years. Anyway, talking about movies again, at the movie blog. Got some fun subjects lined up for some of the trickier letters. Pat (hi, Pat!) wasn’t amused that on the first day I used “A” for movies that literally began with “A” like A Christmas Carol (though none of the dozens of takes on it were in my selections), because that’s how I categorize my movies, and there are lots of movies with titles like that...
Anyway, tackled a serialized pandemic story, don’t know how long it’ll be. Most chapters are turning out bite-sized, which is about what you’d expect from something being written on a phone. Wrote a few other things. Worked on Falling Toward Oz, and hopefully will finish that this week (though, again, doesn’t seem terribly pressing; work says we won’t reopen for about another month at least).
I kept waffling on doing a pandemic story, but a few days into A to Z it just seemed like a natural blogging companion project. That’s the only reason it happened, plus of course having the time, having time to come up with an idea, having time to get started right away with little excuses in the way, and actually coming up with an idea, although the early material makes it seem like a thinly-veiled pandemic journal (other than this one) (which of course it is).
I bought more things last week because I have financial wiggle room. Part of me has started worrying that what’s wiggle room now will be desperation, should this thing continue to draw out. Definitely. But at the same time, with so few options out there, and so much uncertainty, and no idea how much the world is going to change because of this, I keep thinking of it as bulwark for the world I hope to find on the other side.
Helped suggest another family chat for Easter yesterday, and by this point I’ve gotten over being the grump of a month back, upset at the budding disruptions, and was able to enjoy it. Starting to notice how it’s affecting other members of the family, in the opposite direction, which is unsettling. But realistically, this thing is having and is going to have a massive psychological toll, and that’s going to be something we as a global society will be dealing with for years to come. For every introvert like me, there are extroverts who were not at all prepared for a disaster party. (“Disaster Party” by Magic Giant is one of my pandemic songs, having been coincidentally performed on one of the morning shows a month or so back. “Crazy Train” is another; it’s the song the crazy kid was singing on a loop via karaoke when the cruise ships were being quarantined and I was talking with a coworker about that back in January).
So, yeah. To quote my sister-in-law on Facebook the other day, quoting Dumbledore: “Alas, earwax.”
Monday, April 6, 2020
A Journal of the Pandemic #4
Well, it finally happened. I went into de facto quarantine.
Last week was the first full week of alternating work schedule, and it gave me two three-day weekends in the process. We have three buildings in the child development center system on base, and last week also saw all three combined. The best thing about all this was the chance to see some kids who had shuffled to other buildings over the past year or so. On Thursday I got to see one I had been particularly missing, an adorably sassy little girl. (But they’re all adorable, of course!) Then Friday evening we received notice that one of our staff had tested positive for COVID-19, and Saturday evening were informed that the program had been put on hold until further notice.
So here I am at home, like so many others, waiting for things to change for the better.
Last week also gave me a clear example of how irrationally some of this is unfolding when the apartment complex made it clear it had locked up the laundry room. There was a true April Fool somewhere when the sign posted indicating it would reopen on the 1st turned out to be a nasty lie. Management had previously sworn there would be no interruption of laundry service. I called on Friday to find out what was happening, and the receptionist unlucky enough to be manning the desk at this time had only vague answers, and asked if I wanted my information passed on? Well, it’s kind of beside the point now, isn’t it? I hauled my extra load of laundry to a local facility, and of course paid more, but at least it was finally done. Then of course I found out I wouldn’t be going back to work soon.
The numbers have started to pile up. Testing is still less than comprehensive, but the response remains level, at least officially. We still believe our drastic measures are completely justified, even while petty bickering suggests not enough was done soon enough, which is still completely insane. This is a completely unprecedented event. Literally everything we’ve done is already far more than has ever been done.
We’re stuck in a holding pattern. I have plenty of experience with free or merely extra time on my hands. I have no commitments outside of work, no family living with me, or living with family (which itself is anomalous in the general outline of my life; literally everything about it seems to have aligned precisely to make this entire experience as easy as possible). I’m not worried about how I will pass the day or the week or however long this lasts.
I didn’t write last week. I really should have, right? I worked two days. But I guess I kept waiting for the other shoe to drop. Now I have no restraints on my time at all. I can write to my heart’s content, which is every writer’s dream, and perhaps nightmare. Anyone who’s read this blog previously knows I tend to accumulate projects. I’ve got the one I’m actively working on, more I want to tackle, and of course last week I had a breakthrough on another...
Heck, I didn’t even read much last week! But over the weekend I started to rally in that regard. I watched a lot of stuff. Story of a generation. And now I’m going to do other stuff. I ordered literally tons of comics on Friday, will hopefully get that by the end of the week. I have, at the moment, financial wiggle room, and I want to spend it where it will help, where it will foster the kind of world I hope is still around in a few months.
Hopefully when I do another of these, I will be able to say I wrote a good amount of material, and maybe even share some good news about the pandemic. Stranger things have been happening...
Last week was the first full week of alternating work schedule, and it gave me two three-day weekends in the process. We have three buildings in the child development center system on base, and last week also saw all three combined. The best thing about all this was the chance to see some kids who had shuffled to other buildings over the past year or so. On Thursday I got to see one I had been particularly missing, an adorably sassy little girl. (But they’re all adorable, of course!) Then Friday evening we received notice that one of our staff had tested positive for COVID-19, and Saturday evening were informed that the program had been put on hold until further notice.
So here I am at home, like so many others, waiting for things to change for the better.
Last week also gave me a clear example of how irrationally some of this is unfolding when the apartment complex made it clear it had locked up the laundry room. There was a true April Fool somewhere when the sign posted indicating it would reopen on the 1st turned out to be a nasty lie. Management had previously sworn there would be no interruption of laundry service. I called on Friday to find out what was happening, and the receptionist unlucky enough to be manning the desk at this time had only vague answers, and asked if I wanted my information passed on? Well, it’s kind of beside the point now, isn’t it? I hauled my extra load of laundry to a local facility, and of course paid more, but at least it was finally done. Then of course I found out I wouldn’t be going back to work soon.
The numbers have started to pile up. Testing is still less than comprehensive, but the response remains level, at least officially. We still believe our drastic measures are completely justified, even while petty bickering suggests not enough was done soon enough, which is still completely insane. This is a completely unprecedented event. Literally everything we’ve done is already far more than has ever been done.
We’re stuck in a holding pattern. I have plenty of experience with free or merely extra time on my hands. I have no commitments outside of work, no family living with me, or living with family (which itself is anomalous in the general outline of my life; literally everything about it seems to have aligned precisely to make this entire experience as easy as possible). I’m not worried about how I will pass the day or the week or however long this lasts.
I didn’t write last week. I really should have, right? I worked two days. But I guess I kept waiting for the other shoe to drop. Now I have no restraints on my time at all. I can write to my heart’s content, which is every writer’s dream, and perhaps nightmare. Anyone who’s read this blog previously knows I tend to accumulate projects. I’ve got the one I’m actively working on, more I want to tackle, and of course last week I had a breakthrough on another...
Heck, I didn’t even read much last week! But over the weekend I started to rally in that regard. I watched a lot of stuff. Story of a generation. And now I’m going to do other stuff. I ordered literally tons of comics on Friday, will hopefully get that by the end of the week. I have, at the moment, financial wiggle room, and I want to spend it where it will help, where it will foster the kind of world I hope is still around in a few months.
Hopefully when I do another of these, I will be able to say I wrote a good amount of material, and maybe even share some good news about the pandemic. Stranger things have been happening...
Friday, April 3, 2020
2019 Box Office Top Ten
With movie theaters closed, now’s a great time to continue my tradition of chatting about the biggest hits of a particular year, which in this case is last year. I usually give at least a month into the new year to help late releases finish up their runs (last year I blogged about it here for the first time, apparently as late as July!), which if this whole thing had played out a little differently (we heard about COVID-19 as early as January, remember) might have produced different results. Anyway, like last year I will list domestic and international results, with numbers rounded out from Box Office Mojo. As with last year, I’m talking about this here on my author’s blog both in an effort to incorporate my personal interests and as a reflection of popular tastes, which between books and movies, is far easier to do so with movies, which more people are liable to have seen than readers are to have experienced the same books. (Believe me: as a regular participant of Goodreads.com, overlap is rare, and critical response tends to be fairly worthless.)
2019 Domestic Top Ten
2019 Domestic Top Ten
- Avengers: Endgame ($858 million) This one came as no surprise. The MCU was a whole phenomenon built in part on the gradual build toward, well, this moment, a direct sequel to Avengers: Infinity War. This is a formula that will likely never be successfully duplicated.
- The Lion King ($543 million) Disney’s extended family was responsible for the vast majority of major box office success throughout the year, and in the last few years as well. That success model will likely be winding down. The hype that led to Lion King’s success, for instance, didn’t really lead to the mind of widespread response the original animated version earned.
- Toy Story 4 ($434 million) The third one was a cathartic moment for a lot of fans, culminating a central thesis that had been building since the first one, about the inevitability of leaving childhood behind. This one was more or less received as a victory lap.
- Frozen II ($430 million) Another big success, but it’s impact is considerably muted compared to its predecessor (sensing a theme yet?).
- Captain Marvel ($426 million) Aside from once again demolishing the notion that mass audiences won’t turn out for a blockbuster with a female lead, this one proved how invincible the MCU phenomenon had become at this point.
- Star Wars: Episode IX - The Rise of Skywalker ($390 million) Was probably always going to lag behind the MCU climax in the popular imagination. But the thing is, the MCU won’t be producing something forty years from now like this. (Annoyingly, Box Office Mojo changed how it listed yearly totals. Including 2020 grosses, Rise of Skywalker made $515 million, and up to third place. The only other film in the top ten that has a similar adjustment is Frozen II, which bumps up to $477 million.)
- Spider-Man: Far from Home ($390 million) Considering that 2002-2007 Spider-Man was a headlining blockbuster act, this can only be considered disappointing, but on the other hand, he has more sustained viability than probably anyone else will have in the MCU.
- Aladdin ($355 million) Will Smith cleverly used this as a launching pad to an eventual popular comeback. That’s where the real value is in these things. Even Toy Story 4 was, for some fans, merely another vehicle for Keanu Reeves’ popular resurgence.
- Joker ($333 million) The closest this year came to a traditional blockbuster, a version of the classic Batman villain as seen through a Martin Scorsese type lens, fueled by a widely acclaimed lead performance from Joaquin Phoenix.
- It Chapter Two ($211 million) The first one may have gotten all the acclaim and buzz, but the second one was still enough of a success to reach the top ten.
2019 International Top Ten
- Avengers: Endgame ($2,797 billion) Obviously still the top box office draw.
- The Lion King ($1,656 billion) Still no variation.
- Frozen II ($1,450 billion) Here you can see wiggle room for a property of more recent relevance.
- Spider-Man: Far from Home ($1,131 billion) Here you can see Spider-Man’s vast continuing appeal more clearly.
- Captain Marvel ($1,128 billion) The MCU was an unstoppable juggernaut.
- Joker ($1,074 billion) Here you can see how significant this one’s cultural impact really was.
- Star Wars: Episode IX - The Rise of Skywalker ($1,074 billion) I think the popularly of Star Wars may have been more limited to Americans than it might have otherwise seemed, and the more the international perspective was taken into account, the more it affected perception, a phenomenon that has increased in recent years without anyone realizing it.
- Toy Story 4 ($1,073 billion) Case in point: This is a franchise that began in the comparative distant past of 1995.
- Aladdin ($1,050 billion) On the one hand, it’s ridiculous to say a movie that made a billion dollars is somehow not wildly successful. But we’re literally at the point where it sounds like, “That’s all?” Coupled with the fact that Disney ploughed through its popular animated back catalog for these live action remakes, it suddenly doesn’t seem like the wisest course of action. It’s going to be very difficult for the umbrella studio to match this level of success again anytime soon.
- Jumanji: The Next Level ($796 million) Back when the first one was released a few years ago, Dwayne Johnson also had a Fast & Furious movie out, and both came close to scoring a billion internationally. The same was true this year: the next movie on this particular list was Johnson’s Fast & Furious spin-off, Hobbs & Shaw. That’s the definition of modern movie star, folks. The twelfth and thirteenth biggest international releases were both Chinese (making the vast majority of their profit in China), including The Wandering Earth.
Monday, March 30, 2020
A Journal of the Pandemic #3
This past week work finally made tangible concessions to COVID-19, insofar as everyone now works every other day (scheduled skip days are covered financially), as there are very few kids coming in, it was the first week effectively combining two of the three centers, with today marking all three sharing the same building. So now I have some of that free time the pandemic has been promising.
There are a lot of parents out there who aren’t particularly happy about this state of affairs, and I’m not talking about the situation with my childcare center(s) specifically. They’re parents who don’t...really know how...to parent. I’m not talking about overt abuse, although neglect is emotional abuse, and it has obvious and at best unfortunate results all the same. Some of the kids coming in last week have behavioral issues stemming from parenting of this kind, and their parents have been the kind who don’t see all the new social restrictions as affecting the decisions they’re used to making. I truly hope that one effect of COVID-19 is to begin a process of awakening real responsibility in such parents, when they begin to run out of excuses to actually be present in the lives of their own children. On the one hand we suddenly don’t have to worry about school shootings, which to my mind is a direct result of this kind of systemic neglect, whether from parents boxed in by economic conditions or personal choice (I honestly can’t say which is worse). The thing about this situation is that summer vacation and other holidays are always sending kids home from school. The only real difference is that the parents have been sent home, too. Parenting is never easy. It demands an honest and complete surrender to someone else in ways that don’t exist in any other context, and if you choose to ignore this responsibility, the effects will resonate throughout many other lives, not just yours and theirs, but the many other lives that intersect over time...
Anyway, that’s the kind of thing I’m always thinking about anyway, regardless of pandemics causing massive disruptions to everyday life. Since I have no kids and rarely participate in social gatherings (the great irony in all this is that for some people, the few things they randomly had lined up in that regard were cancelled), my ordinary activities are much as they’ve always been. Since I don’t have internet at home outside of my phone, I used to go to the library on the weekend to catch up on blogging. Another of the ironies of this situation is that I had bumped up my data plan on the phone before the dominos started falling, and I’ve found out in recent days that...I have a lot of internet time available to me. I’m composing this post on my phone. I’d upgraded the data plan to ensure I could video chat with my niece undisrupted (heh), and here we are at the end of the month, and all the extra time I’ve had at home has seen me wasting time on the internet (nothing terribly new there), seeing how people are interpreting the pandemic, what Facebook has been up to (I’d say that chatter has been slowing; aside from the fact I myself stopped posting funny things, a lot of others have, too, perhaps because apparently you can only joke about toilet paper so many times, even on the internet, a phenomenon that culminated in toilet faces, which if you’re reading this in the future I apologize, because I am not going to elaborate).
I actually have been writing during all of this. I wrote “Just a Regular Joe,” which along with “If Sidekicks Never Existed” (a title based on a book I really wanted to like more) I was greatly looking forward to submitting to a comic book company whose submissions were supposed to open up again mid-month. But now comics have temporarily lost their main distributor, and most stores are either closing or desperately, gamely soldiering on, and I don’t think submissions are opening soon. So maybe I have a chance to write even more stories and have an even greater chance to get published. Unless the company changes its submission policy because of the pandemic, or actually ends up going out of business.
I also started work on “Falling Toward Oz.” I had a false start that didn’t feel right, so I started over again, and was immensely pleased with the results, and the words absolutely flowed, as they do when I’m truly engaged. I haven’t written, yet, during this extended weekend (see: first paragraph), but I swear I will a little later today.
Instead I’ve been catching up on my Obsolete Physical Media purchases, DVDs of TV shows, in this instance. I just watched the two seasons of Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency (great first season!) and the only season of Men with Brooms, the second-best Canadian sitcom I’ve watched recently, although it was always going to be tough competing with Letterkenny (suck it up, Pat; and yes, it was your garbage-fire review that made me interested). I watched the second season of Titans before those. Continues to be a great show, best when it’s focusing on particular elements of the plot, whether flashback material or the debut of Superboy. Deathstroke was handled particularly well. Really want to tackle reviews for some of the movies I watched earlier. I finally caught the Psycho remake. And of course I liked that, too. Still need to catch up on the final two episodes of Picard, which I had been avoiding before I got a better idea of what the new data plan could handle, or how plausible blogging on my phone was (maybe it works better on my new phone? because I tried this previously and was not at all satisfied).
This whole business is so curious. We’re locking everything down in order to limit the spread of a virus that kills in small numbers. People keep arguing that “flattening the curve” and “social distancing” are measures meant to limit the effect on limited medical facilities. That’s what they say in the States. But literally every country is getting around to this. You keep hearing meaningless sampling about countries that are handling it better, handling it worse. Another of the ironies is that when we talked about healthcare before the pandemic (antecovidian, perhaps), people would argue how barbaric and backwards the American system is compared to everyone else. The American pandemic statistics are beginning to take the world lead, but this is meaningless without considering population size and density (hardest hit is of course New York; there has been an argument for about the past month that Florida would be the next hotspot, given its prominent retirement population, and here we are headed into April and it hasn’t happened yet despite the rapid spread, which of course seems to contradict the rapid measures taken to combat the problem, with plenty of eagerness to suggest we somehow haven’t done enough soon enough; this is literally impossible in a truly unprecedented response).
I talked last time (or perhaps in the comments on someone else’s blog; my phone doesn’t like giving me the option to comment; please don’t be offended if I seem to be saying nothing, because I’m still reading) that I didn’t want to begin writing about the pandemic in my fiction. But you can be absolutely certain that in the years and decades to come that we’re going to see an endless flood of pandemic material. And it seems wrong to ignore it, other than these blog posts, in my own work. This shouldn’t become the only thing we care about (me, I’m still hoping, best case scenario, that this is what finally gives us The Snyder Cut), because life, or something like it, goes on, but it’s a thing, and it’s happening, and it may not be interesting (it’s very, very boring), but it’s impossible not to think about.
So I end this long entry with the hope that I can continue to use this time wisely. Or at least, with more refrigerator art. I don’t want to brag, but there was a kid on Friday who spontaneously drew my portrait.
There are a lot of parents out there who aren’t particularly happy about this state of affairs, and I’m not talking about the situation with my childcare center(s) specifically. They’re parents who don’t...really know how...to parent. I’m not talking about overt abuse, although neglect is emotional abuse, and it has obvious and at best unfortunate results all the same. Some of the kids coming in last week have behavioral issues stemming from parenting of this kind, and their parents have been the kind who don’t see all the new social restrictions as affecting the decisions they’re used to making. I truly hope that one effect of COVID-19 is to begin a process of awakening real responsibility in such parents, when they begin to run out of excuses to actually be present in the lives of their own children. On the one hand we suddenly don’t have to worry about school shootings, which to my mind is a direct result of this kind of systemic neglect, whether from parents boxed in by economic conditions or personal choice (I honestly can’t say which is worse). The thing about this situation is that summer vacation and other holidays are always sending kids home from school. The only real difference is that the parents have been sent home, too. Parenting is never easy. It demands an honest and complete surrender to someone else in ways that don’t exist in any other context, and if you choose to ignore this responsibility, the effects will resonate throughout many other lives, not just yours and theirs, but the many other lives that intersect over time...
Anyway, that’s the kind of thing I’m always thinking about anyway, regardless of pandemics causing massive disruptions to everyday life. Since I have no kids and rarely participate in social gatherings (the great irony in all this is that for some people, the few things they randomly had lined up in that regard were cancelled), my ordinary activities are much as they’ve always been. Since I don’t have internet at home outside of my phone, I used to go to the library on the weekend to catch up on blogging. Another of the ironies of this situation is that I had bumped up my data plan on the phone before the dominos started falling, and I’ve found out in recent days that...I have a lot of internet time available to me. I’m composing this post on my phone. I’d upgraded the data plan to ensure I could video chat with my niece undisrupted (heh), and here we are at the end of the month, and all the extra time I’ve had at home has seen me wasting time on the internet (nothing terribly new there), seeing how people are interpreting the pandemic, what Facebook has been up to (I’d say that chatter has been slowing; aside from the fact I myself stopped posting funny things, a lot of others have, too, perhaps because apparently you can only joke about toilet paper so many times, even on the internet, a phenomenon that culminated in toilet faces, which if you’re reading this in the future I apologize, because I am not going to elaborate).
I actually have been writing during all of this. I wrote “Just a Regular Joe,” which along with “If Sidekicks Never Existed” (a title based on a book I really wanted to like more) I was greatly looking forward to submitting to a comic book company whose submissions were supposed to open up again mid-month. But now comics have temporarily lost their main distributor, and most stores are either closing or desperately, gamely soldiering on, and I don’t think submissions are opening soon. So maybe I have a chance to write even more stories and have an even greater chance to get published. Unless the company changes its submission policy because of the pandemic, or actually ends up going out of business.
I also started work on “Falling Toward Oz.” I had a false start that didn’t feel right, so I started over again, and was immensely pleased with the results, and the words absolutely flowed, as they do when I’m truly engaged. I haven’t written, yet, during this extended weekend (see: first paragraph), but I swear I will a little later today.
Instead I’ve been catching up on my Obsolete Physical Media purchases, DVDs of TV shows, in this instance. I just watched the two seasons of Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency (great first season!) and the only season of Men with Brooms, the second-best Canadian sitcom I’ve watched recently, although it was always going to be tough competing with Letterkenny (suck it up, Pat; and yes, it was your garbage-fire review that made me interested). I watched the second season of Titans before those. Continues to be a great show, best when it’s focusing on particular elements of the plot, whether flashback material or the debut of Superboy. Deathstroke was handled particularly well. Really want to tackle reviews for some of the movies I watched earlier. I finally caught the Psycho remake. And of course I liked that, too. Still need to catch up on the final two episodes of Picard, which I had been avoiding before I got a better idea of what the new data plan could handle, or how plausible blogging on my phone was (maybe it works better on my new phone? because I tried this previously and was not at all satisfied).
This whole business is so curious. We’re locking everything down in order to limit the spread of a virus that kills in small numbers. People keep arguing that “flattening the curve” and “social distancing” are measures meant to limit the effect on limited medical facilities. That’s what they say in the States. But literally every country is getting around to this. You keep hearing meaningless sampling about countries that are handling it better, handling it worse. Another of the ironies is that when we talked about healthcare before the pandemic (antecovidian, perhaps), people would argue how barbaric and backwards the American system is compared to everyone else. The American pandemic statistics are beginning to take the world lead, but this is meaningless without considering population size and density (hardest hit is of course New York; there has been an argument for about the past month that Florida would be the next hotspot, given its prominent retirement population, and here we are headed into April and it hasn’t happened yet despite the rapid spread, which of course seems to contradict the rapid measures taken to combat the problem, with plenty of eagerness to suggest we somehow haven’t done enough soon enough; this is literally impossible in a truly unprecedented response).
I talked last time (or perhaps in the comments on someone else’s blog; my phone doesn’t like giving me the option to comment; please don’t be offended if I seem to be saying nothing, because I’m still reading) that I didn’t want to begin writing about the pandemic in my fiction. But you can be absolutely certain that in the years and decades to come that we’re going to see an endless flood of pandemic material. And it seems wrong to ignore it, other than these blog posts, in my own work. This shouldn’t become the only thing we care about (me, I’m still hoping, best case scenario, that this is what finally gives us The Snyder Cut), because life, or something like it, goes on, but it’s a thing, and it’s happening, and it may not be interesting (it’s very, very boring), but it’s impossible not to think about.
So I end this long entry with the hope that I can continue to use this time wisely. Or at least, with more refrigerator art. I don’t want to brag, but there was a kid on Friday who spontaneously drew my portrait.
Monday, March 23, 2020
COVID-19 Updates
Now that you've read my initial thoughts on COVID-19, a week (or so) later it's time for updates!
Everything's weird. There have been times in my life where COVID-19 would've been pretty disastrous, or would've affected me personally a lot more. I'm not in school, which I can't even imagine. These kids will be talking about this the rest of their lives! I've had jobs that might very well have left me stranded under these circumstances. To my mind the absolute worst thing, in the US, about COVID-19 is the economic havoc being caused, and as always I'm not as concerned about the big guys as I am the little guys. When I was on unemployment in Colorado I found it surprisingly easy. It was even easy to obtain, later, food assistance funding. Reports here in Florida are indicating that such smooth sailing may not have existed before, and the response now is only going to get worse.
My job has been relatively unaffected. "Relatively," but insofar as I've continued working, so far it is for all intents and purposes business as usual. I work in a childcare center at a military instillation. One of the moms works at the medical clinic, and her babies were the most consistent charges I had last week, and I've been talking with mom about COVID-19 for weeks. The biggest complaint she's had is mass access to testing. Obviously that's become the obsession for all those curve-flatteners. Everything we've seen happen in the US over the past week (and the things that were happening before that) has been an effort to flatten that curve, curb the spread of COVID-19.
I've been slow to accept the seriousness of the situation in large part because as far as I can tell, the US has been affected, by far, more by the curve-flattening measures than by COVID-19 itself. The response you'll no doubt have encountered in your own lives is the reaction to toilet paper hoarders. To a certain extent, some of this hoarding is because some people really don't spend that much time at home, usually, and thus don't really know how much they use, when they're the ones supplying it, rather than, say, the facilities at work or a restaurant (or, you callous moochers, your friend's house). And all those kids suddenly at home are requiring far more bread than normal (we now have a generation used to school lunches rather than packing their own; my own childhood was a mix of both, but I still vividly remember "bubble & squeak" in the cafeteria).
The libraries closed last week, and so I didn't get to hang out there this weekend. I more or less blew the last two days watching movies and reading comic books. I've been reading a really good book, but didn't want to spend too much time reading it (when you're reading a really good book, there are two ways of doing so: slowly, to savor it, or quickly, because you're insatiable). I didn't tackle my writing projects. I'm still waiting to see if we're going to get a "tactical pause," which will give me plenty of time. But then I also start different hours (again) this week, which translates to an additional hour in the morning (which I'm taking advantage of right now to do some blogging), and I intend to use that for as long as I have it to get back to writing.
I did spend time frantically tracking down old notes, which I'm happy to report I found, plus others I hadn't really been thinking of, and some I'd plum forgotten about. Some notes have faded from their original vivid visions, but that's an opportunity to discover them all over again. I'm always the optimist, even when I'm feeling cynical. Some day these ideas will bloom! Some day they will sit on a bookshelf, and not just mine!
The family put together a group call to our dad on his birthday. Grumpy as I've been, I decided to participate. But I receded into the background, because I was still grumpy, and I've never been good at asserting myself in groups, and less so when I'm even less in the mood. I called him, separately, yesterday, and had a good conversation. I talked with the Burrito the day before, and she's apparently begun to notice how women's lips look. I thought she was doing Fish Face, but she made herself clear later. Don't grow up too quickly, Burrito! (That's my beloved niece, remember.)
I've been posting a lot of nonsense on Facebook, and I'm not sure everyone's understood it as nonsense. For instance, I called Knives Out "fun for the whole family," which is ironic, if you’ve seen the movie. But if anyone actually watched it, based on my recommendation, I hope they ended up enjoying it. Good movie. COVID-19 is kind of like the hole in the donut for all of us at the moment, right?
Life goes on...
Everything's weird. There have been times in my life where COVID-19 would've been pretty disastrous, or would've affected me personally a lot more. I'm not in school, which I can't even imagine. These kids will be talking about this the rest of their lives! I've had jobs that might very well have left me stranded under these circumstances. To my mind the absolute worst thing, in the US, about COVID-19 is the economic havoc being caused, and as always I'm not as concerned about the big guys as I am the little guys. When I was on unemployment in Colorado I found it surprisingly easy. It was even easy to obtain, later, food assistance funding. Reports here in Florida are indicating that such smooth sailing may not have existed before, and the response now is only going to get worse.
My job has been relatively unaffected. "Relatively," but insofar as I've continued working, so far it is for all intents and purposes business as usual. I work in a childcare center at a military instillation. One of the moms works at the medical clinic, and her babies were the most consistent charges I had last week, and I've been talking with mom about COVID-19 for weeks. The biggest complaint she's had is mass access to testing. Obviously that's become the obsession for all those curve-flatteners. Everything we've seen happen in the US over the past week (and the things that were happening before that) has been an effort to flatten that curve, curb the spread of COVID-19.
I've been slow to accept the seriousness of the situation in large part because as far as I can tell, the US has been affected, by far, more by the curve-flattening measures than by COVID-19 itself. The response you'll no doubt have encountered in your own lives is the reaction to toilet paper hoarders. To a certain extent, some of this hoarding is because some people really don't spend that much time at home, usually, and thus don't really know how much they use, when they're the ones supplying it, rather than, say, the facilities at work or a restaurant (or, you callous moochers, your friend's house). And all those kids suddenly at home are requiring far more bread than normal (we now have a generation used to school lunches rather than packing their own; my own childhood was a mix of both, but I still vividly remember "bubble & squeak" in the cafeteria).
The libraries closed last week, and so I didn't get to hang out there this weekend. I more or less blew the last two days watching movies and reading comic books. I've been reading a really good book, but didn't want to spend too much time reading it (when you're reading a really good book, there are two ways of doing so: slowly, to savor it, or quickly, because you're insatiable). I didn't tackle my writing projects. I'm still waiting to see if we're going to get a "tactical pause," which will give me plenty of time. But then I also start different hours (again) this week, which translates to an additional hour in the morning (which I'm taking advantage of right now to do some blogging), and I intend to use that for as long as I have it to get back to writing.
I did spend time frantically tracking down old notes, which I'm happy to report I found, plus others I hadn't really been thinking of, and some I'd plum forgotten about. Some notes have faded from their original vivid visions, but that's an opportunity to discover them all over again. I'm always the optimist, even when I'm feeling cynical. Some day these ideas will bloom! Some day they will sit on a bookshelf, and not just mine!
The family put together a group call to our dad on his birthday. Grumpy as I've been, I decided to participate. But I receded into the background, because I was still grumpy, and I've never been good at asserting myself in groups, and less so when I'm even less in the mood. I called him, separately, yesterday, and had a good conversation. I talked with the Burrito the day before, and she's apparently begun to notice how women's lips look. I thought she was doing Fish Face, but she made herself clear later. Don't grow up too quickly, Burrito! (That's my beloved niece, remember.)
I've been posting a lot of nonsense on Facebook, and I'm not sure everyone's understood it as nonsense. For instance, I called Knives Out "fun for the whole family," which is ironic, if you’ve seen the movie. But if anyone actually watched it, based on my recommendation, I hope they ended up enjoying it. Good movie. COVID-19 is kind of like the hole in the donut for all of us at the moment, right?
Life goes on...
Sunday, March 15, 2020
COVID-19 Blues
I think the first time I heard of it (which is probably true for a lot of us) was during the cruise ship quarantine. I remember it vividly because there was an obnoxious kid doing karaoke outdoors, singing "Crazy Train" over and over again, and a colleague joked that we were at a terrible resort.
Then it got worse.
In just the past few days, it's gotten even worse. I'm still not sure most of the people talking about it are doing any real good, and it just goes to further prove that we live in an age of so much information that most of it is just plain...bad information. Human beings don't seem capable of demonstrating any real command over rational thought. You might even say that we're dominated by irrational thought. Animals know what they need to do, and they do it. Humans can think of a million brilliant thoughts, sure, and are capable of making the impossible happen. But we're also capable of epic stupidity. Half of what has been said in the history of humanity is probably a collective remark to exactly that. It doesn't even matter if any given remark is fair in that regard. It's absolutely true.
The family had a family reunion planned for the end of the month. It was going to be a surprise birthday party for our dad. The big selling point that was going to definitely get everyone to go was that it would be the first time everyone had been together since, well, our mom's funeral. The brother who had already been the first to back out of the last attempt, my sister's wedding back in December, was the first to back out of this one. He cited COVID-19 as justification this time. He always has very good reasons for making decisions, and he has also been living a life for the past few years that some would consider a living nightmare, including himself, with an inability to get a proper night's sleep, likely because of the incredible strain he keeps letting work put on him. But never mind that!
Information about COVID-19 has been trickling in based on the level of danger it poses. I was still calling it coronavirus, along with everyone else, just a few days ago. We had a case at work of a child being provisionally diagnosed with it, and to prevent the spread of hysteria (because I think that is actually the basic function of what is supposed to be called civilization because we're civil), the decision was made to omit the term on the sign that ended up posted outside the room. We had it explained to us that coronavirus itself is not horrible, but COVID-19 is. I don't even know, and I don't care at this point, if the persons making these decisions were aware of the distinction, or if it even mattered, since COVID-19 seems, like most of these things, to mostly concern the mortality risks of the elderly (my dad reports an unusual amount of funerals from a mild winter in Maine), and as far as I now understand, it's not "coronavirus" at all that's the problem, but COVID-19, which of course is the version that's running amok.
The situation escalated quickly late in the week. The term "social distancing" entered the lexicon. People started buying toilet paper. A lot. Other people pointed out how ridiculous that is. But people tend to hoard and hunker down for these things. When I worked at a video store (when those were still a thing), we always knew when bad weather was developing, because suddenly we were a popular destination. It happened without fail. I currently live in Florida, and here hurricanes are a problem. I experienced a hurricane scare. I know hurricanes are real, and that they cause real devastation, since one had just torn through when I arrived here, and another had torn up the last place I had been in Florida, which wrecked a dear friend's house. But bad information does no one any good, and I watched as the hurricane's path was projected...everywhere. Basically, to be safe, it was said to potentially hit...everywhere.
I've had a lot of bad things happen recently. Bad things that really happened. To me. There was the hemorrhaging event last fall. There was an active shooter event at work. I was struck by a car. I never talked about that with anyone. I didn't know what to say about it. I was pretty sure the response would be, "You should be more careful! Why don't you drive???" Anything that didn't really address the trauma of the event itself. The hemorrhaging thing had a response, that was sympathetic, and then petered out. The active shooter event was almost completely ignored. It was a real thing that I lived through, stuck in a closet, and the family was basically like, "Okay." So I didn't really care to say anything about the car incident. Why bother?
Then this. This thing that has everyone cancelling everything. Social distancing. I consider it a case of unusually active response (I almost wrote "proactive," which will need more years before it sounds anything less than stupid) mixed with mass hysteria. Once one thing was cancelled, it made it okay for another thing, and then another. The funny thing is, the thing everyone is trying to prevent, the jamming of hospital services due to people who don't have it, won't get it, going to a hospital anyway, that's going to happen anyway, and is guaranteed to happen if you keep talking loudly about it. Hospitals are always being visited by cranks. You can't stop that. All you can do is prevent real information from reaching people who really need it, because you're too busy trying to get on top of a story that you're making bigger than it really is by painting a big fat target on it. Which is what we do with everything today, which to my mind is what this is all really about. You tell people they can't go to a hospital to get themselves checked out because it's inconvenient, that's insane. That's literally what they're there for. But then you do have to screen between what's a common cold (because, of course, this is the season for that, and I had one, too, am still getting over it) and what's COVID-19. And they will still tell you that...you treat it...like a cold. Unless you're in the demographic for whom it's most likely lethal. Do we have people pointing that out? Is that the leading message? Of course not!
The party should have been affected, since our dad is turning 70. That's pretty close to elderly, and he hangs out with people who definitely are elderly. But it didn't need to be cancelled. Probably none of the stuff that's been cancelled needed to be cancelled. Unless you're prepared to argue that something that's supposed to be lethal to one demographic disproportionately can't be rationally kept at bay with rational precautions. But you can't tell old people, in an election year, to stay clear of everything. So you tell everyone to stay clear of everything. Obviously.
We could have had a gathering at our other brother's house, which is in Maine, like my dad. This would have been a rational, viable option, until Friday, when the military cancelled trips outside a two-car-hours radius. We could've compromised and did a video celebration with our dad. But decisions, in my own family, were already escalating past rationality, past any reasonable conversation.
On a selfish level, I wish I could get "quarantined" for a few weeks. I could get a lot of writing done. I mean, this whole thing is an introvert's dream, right? The only people really suffering are the extroverts.
Chances are, you're reading all this and some of you are wondering if my brother was right to say how badly misinformed I've been, how reckless I've been not to take all this more seriously. I'm here to argue that everything about COVID-19 demonstrates the good as much as the bad of modern society. We're so interconnected we have to deliberately disconnect in order to make sense of anything, or at least believe we are. We'll pat ourselves on the back if that curve flattens appreciably, and say our measures worked, that we were absolutely justified in our response. But that's like saying if I put a sock on my hand and didn't die from COVID-19, that it was the sock that saved me. I love that we're taking such an active interest in everyone for a change. It really does seem, sometimes, that we really couldn't care less about anyone else, especially if they have different beliefs. It's a very peculiar age. At this point it sort of feels like the COVID Age.
But all I can hear are the COVID-19 Blues...
Then it got worse.
In just the past few days, it's gotten even worse. I'm still not sure most of the people talking about it are doing any real good, and it just goes to further prove that we live in an age of so much information that most of it is just plain...bad information. Human beings don't seem capable of demonstrating any real command over rational thought. You might even say that we're dominated by irrational thought. Animals know what they need to do, and they do it. Humans can think of a million brilliant thoughts, sure, and are capable of making the impossible happen. But we're also capable of epic stupidity. Half of what has been said in the history of humanity is probably a collective remark to exactly that. It doesn't even matter if any given remark is fair in that regard. It's absolutely true.
The family had a family reunion planned for the end of the month. It was going to be a surprise birthday party for our dad. The big selling point that was going to definitely get everyone to go was that it would be the first time everyone had been together since, well, our mom's funeral. The brother who had already been the first to back out of the last attempt, my sister's wedding back in December, was the first to back out of this one. He cited COVID-19 as justification this time. He always has very good reasons for making decisions, and he has also been living a life for the past few years that some would consider a living nightmare, including himself, with an inability to get a proper night's sleep, likely because of the incredible strain he keeps letting work put on him. But never mind that!
Information about COVID-19 has been trickling in based on the level of danger it poses. I was still calling it coronavirus, along with everyone else, just a few days ago. We had a case at work of a child being provisionally diagnosed with it, and to prevent the spread of hysteria (because I think that is actually the basic function of what is supposed to be called civilization because we're civil), the decision was made to omit the term on the sign that ended up posted outside the room. We had it explained to us that coronavirus itself is not horrible, but COVID-19 is. I don't even know, and I don't care at this point, if the persons making these decisions were aware of the distinction, or if it even mattered, since COVID-19 seems, like most of these things, to mostly concern the mortality risks of the elderly (my dad reports an unusual amount of funerals from a mild winter in Maine), and as far as I now understand, it's not "coronavirus" at all that's the problem, but COVID-19, which of course is the version that's running amok.
The situation escalated quickly late in the week. The term "social distancing" entered the lexicon. People started buying toilet paper. A lot. Other people pointed out how ridiculous that is. But people tend to hoard and hunker down for these things. When I worked at a video store (when those were still a thing), we always knew when bad weather was developing, because suddenly we were a popular destination. It happened without fail. I currently live in Florida, and here hurricanes are a problem. I experienced a hurricane scare. I know hurricanes are real, and that they cause real devastation, since one had just torn through when I arrived here, and another had torn up the last place I had been in Florida, which wrecked a dear friend's house. But bad information does no one any good, and I watched as the hurricane's path was projected...everywhere. Basically, to be safe, it was said to potentially hit...everywhere.
I've had a lot of bad things happen recently. Bad things that really happened. To me. There was the hemorrhaging event last fall. There was an active shooter event at work. I was struck by a car. I never talked about that with anyone. I didn't know what to say about it. I was pretty sure the response would be, "You should be more careful! Why don't you drive???" Anything that didn't really address the trauma of the event itself. The hemorrhaging thing had a response, that was sympathetic, and then petered out. The active shooter event was almost completely ignored. It was a real thing that I lived through, stuck in a closet, and the family was basically like, "Okay." So I didn't really care to say anything about the car incident. Why bother?
Then this. This thing that has everyone cancelling everything. Social distancing. I consider it a case of unusually active response (I almost wrote "proactive," which will need more years before it sounds anything less than stupid) mixed with mass hysteria. Once one thing was cancelled, it made it okay for another thing, and then another. The funny thing is, the thing everyone is trying to prevent, the jamming of hospital services due to people who don't have it, won't get it, going to a hospital anyway, that's going to happen anyway, and is guaranteed to happen if you keep talking loudly about it. Hospitals are always being visited by cranks. You can't stop that. All you can do is prevent real information from reaching people who really need it, because you're too busy trying to get on top of a story that you're making bigger than it really is by painting a big fat target on it. Which is what we do with everything today, which to my mind is what this is all really about. You tell people they can't go to a hospital to get themselves checked out because it's inconvenient, that's insane. That's literally what they're there for. But then you do have to screen between what's a common cold (because, of course, this is the season for that, and I had one, too, am still getting over it) and what's COVID-19. And they will still tell you that...you treat it...like a cold. Unless you're in the demographic for whom it's most likely lethal. Do we have people pointing that out? Is that the leading message? Of course not!
The party should have been affected, since our dad is turning 70. That's pretty close to elderly, and he hangs out with people who definitely are elderly. But it didn't need to be cancelled. Probably none of the stuff that's been cancelled needed to be cancelled. Unless you're prepared to argue that something that's supposed to be lethal to one demographic disproportionately can't be rationally kept at bay with rational precautions. But you can't tell old people, in an election year, to stay clear of everything. So you tell everyone to stay clear of everything. Obviously.
We could have had a gathering at our other brother's house, which is in Maine, like my dad. This would have been a rational, viable option, until Friday, when the military cancelled trips outside a two-car-hours radius. We could've compromised and did a video celebration with our dad. But decisions, in my own family, were already escalating past rationality, past any reasonable conversation.
On a selfish level, I wish I could get "quarantined" for a few weeks. I could get a lot of writing done. I mean, this whole thing is an introvert's dream, right? The only people really suffering are the extroverts.
Chances are, you're reading all this and some of you are wondering if my brother was right to say how badly misinformed I've been, how reckless I've been not to take all this more seriously. I'm here to argue that everything about COVID-19 demonstrates the good as much as the bad of modern society. We're so interconnected we have to deliberately disconnect in order to make sense of anything, or at least believe we are. We'll pat ourselves on the back if that curve flattens appreciably, and say our measures worked, that we were absolutely justified in our response. But that's like saying if I put a sock on my hand and didn't die from COVID-19, that it was the sock that saved me. I love that we're taking such an active interest in everyone for a change. It really does seem, sometimes, that we really couldn't care less about anyone else, especially if they have different beliefs. It's a very peculiar age. At this point it sort of feels like the COVID Age.
But all I can hear are the COVID-19 Blues...
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