Plans

My father used to say, “‘If’ is the biggest word in the dictionary.” Another favorite was, “If the dog hadn’t stopped to shit, he would’ve caught the rabbit.”

Imagine if:

You had a wedding planned this spring

You had plans to travel this Spring.

You planned to coach your son’s little league team.

You had trained to run your first marathon this spring.

You’d spent four years in college, racking up student loan debt, toiling away at Mechanical Engineering or Physics or Elementary Education or Nursing or Psychology and you greedily wanted to attend your commencement ceremony.

You had tickets (really good seats) to see your favorite band perform in a huge venue this April.

Your kids had been making good progress with their swim lessons.

One of your side hustles, the hustle to put food in your mouth and pay the rent, was waitressing.

You put off going to the emergency room even though you have an emergency.

You were in that band and you’d spent the better part of two decades practicing like mad and gigging in shitholes to be able to play this huge venue.

You’d saved for years, by not eating out or buying any new clothes or clipping coupons religiously, to be able to take your kids to Disney.

You worked in retail.

You worked in event management.

You worked in hospitality.

Your employer covered your health care but had to lay you off.

You drove cab in the busiest city in the world and you knew that city like the back of your hand; you didn’t need a phone because the phone didn’t know where to cut through or how the traffic lights work or when people flooded from buildings or any of it. But your city went dead and no one went anywhere in your cab or other cabs.

You’d fulfilled a lifelong dream of opening your first restaurant this spring.

You were all set to present at your first big conference this spring; the room held one hundred and twenty-five people. 

You became a doctor because as a child you’d suffered from things you don’t really like to talk about. And even though you struggled mightily with organic chemistry in undergrad, you hit your stride in med school and never, not once, lost sight of your vision and worked harder than you knew you could. And you completed your residency and you were doing it, really doing it. You were a doctor. But they didn’t have enough masks to go around.

Your parents got it but there was nothing you could do. You couldn’t even go see them.

Your entire life now seemed a case of being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

You had plans. Plans that didn’t involve hunkering down in April, like there is a hurricane barreling down on your house. Plans that didn’t involve your kids trying to read, write, and arithmetic through a laptop while you try to work from home washing your hands fifty times a day and getting ulcers every time your little one coughs. 

I guess we all had plans. 

If...

Smoke This

March 19, 2020

But here’s a thousand dollars. Don’t spend it all in one place.

And oh how far we’ve come, and oh how high we’ll get. Marijuana, yes, weed, pot, mary jane, herb, the sticky icky is not only legal but essential. Social distancing got you stressed? The isolation a bit too much in these trying times? Well then just replace it with paranoia and mild hallucinations. The grocery stores are empty and the supply chain is teetering on collapse but that doesn’t mean you can’t get the munchies.

And let us not forget that the number of cases are about to rise dramatically. As if anything reported right now isn’t dramatic. Knowledge may be power but what good is it when you’re too depressed from the knowledge to do anything but subsist. I’d like my power with a side of freedom and for dessert I’ll have the autonomy pie a la positivity. 

And whew, for a second there I almost thought we’d lost our racism. But no worries, we can call it the kung flu and insidiously blame asians, you know, on the down low. What’s the worst that could happen? 

Wrong question to ask. Now they’re saying this could stretch into August. August. 

au·gust

/ôˈɡəst/

adjective

1. respected and impressive.

I picked the wrong year to turn fifty. I survive for half a century and now the world is gonna take a shit? A huge, steaming, covoid-infected dump all over me and my mid-life crisis. 

At least relief legislation was signed into law. By an infected congress as the economy collapses and butter becomes a thing of the past for everybody but the one percent.

Ok now, tone it down, take it easy, relax. Just google butter and learn how to make it from spare parts about the house. This is not the time to let your imagination run away with your Beyond Thunderdome images, Walter Tevis Mockingbird dystopia, and Lord Of The Flies savagery, with Cormac McCarty providing voice over. Calm the fuck down. And for christ sakes, get some fucking firearms and ammunition. To soothe the nerves. 

(checks liquor cabinet)

Alaska has a case. Alaska. Where polar bears bitch about the cold. Where the people are so tough they’re rumored to just eat their jeans in times of famine - Alaska. 

We could be fucked and not in the young and in shape, look good naked, horny as hell, estrus inflamed, bout to burst kind of fucked.

Didn’t I just tell you to calm down?

Calm down. Smoke this. Better to be paranoid than realistic. 

Unless of course they or it, really are coming for you.

In which case, smoke this, cuz you’re fucked.

When People Aren't People

March 18, 2020

Three workdays in. Some tension. Worry about their education and falling behind. Sight words at night. Math during the day. Reading. Won’t reading be key? But their friends and friendships, what will happen? What happens to kids that spend so much time with only their parents? 

AMERICA SHUTS DOWN

The connectedness will get to you. You will come to realize, in the worst way, how everything is connected. You will come to realize, with bittersweetness, just how much people matter. People that do things you’ve never thought of doing yourself, or anyone doing for that matter. They call it supply chains but this is metaphor. People, not chains. People supply us with the things we want and the things we need. People connect connect connect. 

What of the kids’ baseball and soccer and swimming? What of their bodies and their physical development? What of the joy of learning how to chuck a baseball and zip it around the infield. What of sports comradery? Sports connects kids? School connects kids? They’ll connect...but as Steven Pinker reminds us, kids don’t succeed with their parents, they succeed with their peers. Peers aren’t around. We might see them on a walk but...must...social...distance.

Aren’t we realizing right about now just how fluid normal is? In mere days we’ve radically altered our concept of normal. And with prognostications spreading (like the virus) into July or maybe August, once dubbed abnormal will morph into normal. 

HUMAN VACCINE TESTED

When? For how long must we “hunker down” and social distance? For how long do we have to fight the virus by fighting the fact that we are social creatures? We most assuredly are social creatures. That is what this is about. We travel all around this globe now, to essentially people watch. We take planes, trains, and automobiles to watch people, eat their food, listen to them, learn from them, and it has all helped us be able to do it so incredibly quickly. One can be across the pond in hours. Hours. One can get to the equator in hours. Travel...to be social. And don’t we just love to bring back souvenirs? Or it would be impolite not to bring a little something when visiting; after all, they’re such gracious hosts. 

Cruel and unusual this virus, one that forces people to not be people. And when people aren’t people for a certain period of time, they become animals.

Essential Personnel Only

March 17, 2020

How does the food chain not get interrupted at some point? Are food workers, people toiling in farms, canning vegetables, preparing meat, considered essential? And the people who get the food, the rice and the bread and the produce, to market, via trucks and boats and planes, are they considered essential? And the people who sell the food, the cashiers, are they essential? Are all of these people just as susceptible to the virus? 

At some point.

Community spread.

What constitutes a community?

A farm?

A meat packing plant?

The trucking industry?

To the kids out playing football the other day, the Governor of Rhode Island said, “Shut it down.” Restaurants and bars: delivery and take-out only. No gatherings of ten or more. 

Shut it down.

Can we shut it down?

Can we isolate and quarantine without food? Can we not go to work though the bills still come in the mail: the electric, the heat, the mortgage, the student loan, the car, the home, life, and auto insurance?

For how long?

If they stop billing, how do they then pay their bills? Everyone’s got bills right? Because everyone buys stuff that people have made, not out of the goodness of their hearts, but because they had bills.

Bills: to be paid.
Bills: to pay with.

For how long?

At some point.

Essential personnel only.

You there, are you essential?

I hope so.

Bernie Sanders and Mirrors

March 16, 2020

The closings continue. Daycare centers and the Y. But we are fortunate. We did talk about the possibility of rationing food last night however. Those words left my mouth: “ration food.” I also went down an apocalyptic rabbit hole. Something like which came first, economy or laws? I was thinking that if the world economy collapses, why would someone continue to enforce the law? Why would someone enforce the law if they did not get paid to do so? Without law enforcement, what is to stop someone or multiple someone’s from taking, whatever they want? It is enough to make one think that in the chicken or egg question, economy came first. But this is only a rabbit hole for now. I think that principles came first, as a society can exist without an economy. Our hunter/gatherer ancestors had principles but no economy. Principles are smaller scale laws. Neither are platonic, immutable, handed down from a god. They are man-made and relative, just like truth.

In The Martian, Matt Damon said, “I’m gonna have to science the shit out of this.” I’m sure scientists are working on this and I’m sure some are doing it for the sake of science and some are doing it for the greater good. Some are doing it for money. The race to find a cure is in part money driven. It bears repeating that our values are on display here. Our healthcare system and our defense budget reflect our values. Let’s be clear, Bernie Sanders won’t be elected president, again, in 2020 because he holds up a mirror and shows us our values. We don’t value health care, enough to consider it a human right. Mirror. Our military budget (738 Billion) is eleven times greater than our education budget (64 Billion), education, the beginnings of the “science the shit out of this” that may help us all survive this plague, is so meager, compared to what we spend on weapons. Mirror.

Values...on display. The wall, the keep ‘em out wall, is part of the defense budget, and a real enemy, a virus, waltzed right in and began choking people to death, and the wall did nothing. Mirror. 

Here’s the thing about mirrors though: we don’t have to look. Sometimes it’s too hard to look in the mirror. Sometimes we don’t have the guts. Sometimes we know that if we look, we’ll have to change. Change is that hardest thing in the world. We don’t have to change. We don’t have to value education and science to the tune of 738 billion. 

Change is possible though. If we don’t change, what is to stop the virus from choking people to death?   

The Greatest Good

As the virus spreads...around the globe and through the spaces in between: from noses and sneezes, mouths and coughs, and hands that shake, as they have for a long time, to indicate and show, that I trust you, believe in you, enough to shake your hand, I sit at my dining room table and look out the window at a spring set to settle, a warming of both heart and soul from a winter in which it began. It began. And things changed. Things like the distance between you and me. Things like gatherings of thousands to revel in athletic feats but also gatherings to learn; classrooms to throw ideas around and push the boundaries of what we “know.” Changed. Restrictions on freedom, for a greater good. We all recognized the greater good. Sacrificed immediately, without a second thought. Not one misgiving. The greater good was obvious. Stop the spread. It can’t spread if we’re not together. Part. So part we shall. For the greater good. How far and how long are not questions we shall ask; not when the greater good is at stake. Science will tell us. We’ll (the royal species) study this virus and learn its ways and model it and get inside it and think like it and solve the riddle of it. So we can get back together. We will. And science will be the tool we use. The tool. Faith will not be the tool we use. To stop the spread of the virus. Faith will not get us back together. Faith will not stop it in its tracks. It can’t be contained with faith. Faith is about the unseen and the unknowable but we need to see it and we need to know it.
It spread so fast. In real time. The bubbles on the maps popped and popped, like cola too high at the top of the glass. Exponential. One became two and two became four and four sixteen...because we foolishly spent time together. Even though ill. Even though sick. Even with symptoms, we ventured out and among...people. What kind of virus forces us apart? What kind of plague makes us realize we get together so much? What kind of insidious spell is cast to drive and force us from one another? Cruel and unusual. This is no time to think of solitary confinement. No time at all. This is quarantine for a greater good. This is no time to question if solitary confinement is cruel and unusual. There is a time and a place for everything and now is not the time and this is not the place. We (the royal species) have to stop the spread. When the spread is contained and the virus mitigated and eradicated, as it will be, then we can address concerns like solitary confinement.
Will you address if it is cruel and unusual? Will you use your beloved science to get inside of solitary confinement, learn its ways, model it, think like it, to solve the riddle of solitary confinement? 

Here’s one for ya: what did the prisoner say to the warden after his stint in solitary confinement? 

Trick question. The prisoner had lost his humanity so said nothing. 

Can humanity be regained once lost? Can the virus be eradicated? Truly eradicated or does it just go dormant, like the humanity of a prisoner in solitary? 

There’s talk of people breaking the rules: still gathering, getting together, being societal. There’s talk that virtual isn’t enough; that people needed to touch. That they just needed to be in the same room, to see eyes and be seen with eyes without a screen. There’s talk. They even talked about the movie Castaway with Tom Hanks and how he talked to the volleyball - Wilson. There’s talk that solitary, now more than ever, may be cruel and unusual, worse, ineffective. There’s talk, in some circles, like corrections circles, that solitary makes for better prisoners—easier to control. Then some talked about the ultimate goal of corrections but it got convoluted when others talked about justice. Plato talked about justice. Retribution is talked about in the bible. An eye for an eye. Some talk like retribution and justice are the same. Talk is cheap, they say.
But the virus, made talk really valuable. Made people want to hear from one another, made them remember the lush satisfaction from gabbing, about things like even the weather, even the virus and the status of things. They talked for hours, forgot about the television and the scores and really got in there and got inside conversations and learned so much about people. People they thought they knew, parents, brothers and sisters, became new and novel and strange with so much talk. “You did what?” Cheap talk came to be cherished. The virus worked in mysterious ways. They talked about people they lost...to the virus. They talked about their prognostications and the future of the species. There was so much talk of the economy and capitalism was talked about in a whole new way. But there’s a time and a place for everything and some felt this wasn’t the time nor the place to talk about capitalism. Some said capitalism makes better consumers—easier to control. Some said capitalism will get us out of this. Some said epidemiology will. Some said they’re the same. Some said that was bullshit. They talked through it. They got together. Against the greater good some said. Some said getting together was the greatest good.