Isolation Report, Week #12

[You could also read the most recent report, or even start at the beginning.]


Well, as promised (threatened?) last time, I took a week off from bitching about the virus and did a normal long post last week.  So now I have two weeks to report on.  What’s been going on?

Well, both the Mother and I lost parental siblings: she lost her favorite aunt, and I lost my only uncle.  In her case, it may have been COVID-related; in my case, it definitely wasn’t.  In neither case were we able to attend the funerals, both due to enforced smaller funeral sizes and just having travel be way too much to deal with right now.  So there’s a bit of grieving going on, which doesn’t do much to lighten the mood.

A few days ago I finally had to buy gas for the first time since this whole thing started.  It was under $3/gallon, which is a price I haven’t seen around here for perhaps 10 years.  I spoke to a friend on the East Coast and he said he also had just had to buy gas for the first time in a while, and it was under $2 for him.  Wacky.  I guess that’s what happens when the price of oil futures goes negative.

Possibly the biggest news, though, is that our governor (among many others, I hear) has finally reopened things, at least partially.  Restaurants can now have people dine in, for instance.  On the face of it, this seems like good news.  But ...

We’ve always eaten out nearly every Friday: it’s our family night, and having a nice meal is typically part of that.  Occasionally we’d cook something special, but often it was eating out—if we were managing to be good, it would be the only time we’d so that week—and, every other Friday, which was payday, we’d almost always go to a decent restaurant and sit down to eat.  It’s become something of a ritual for us.

Well, we didn’t necessarily want to let the virus stop us, though of course going somewhere to sit down and eat was obviously out.  But I could still go out and pick up some food from somewhere: I have a mask (not a very good one, granted, but good enough), and I know how to wash my hands when I get home, and anyway the local restaurants could use the business, because they’re struggling just like everyone else.  So we’ve been picking a different local spot every week and ordering a decent meal and sometimes we get it delivered, but usually I go get it.  Mostly these haven’t been chain restaurants, but I don’t necessarily have anything against the chains, and franchise employees gotta eat too.

This Friday I decided I wanted a good Cobb salad, and one of the places that had a decent one on the menu was TGI Friday’s.  And it just so happens that’s the one we picked.  I haven’t been there in a long time, but, again: nothing against it.  It’s slightly generic, but the food is often perfectly lovely.  So we ordered, and I trekked out into the night, not even thinking about the fact that this was the first Friday—if not the very first day—in our county that restaurants were allowed to have actual customers inside.  Foolish of me.

When I arrived there, the first red flag was that the parking lot was full.  You don’t realize how fast you get used to everything being deserted all the time, but I sure noticed when it wasn’t, all of a sudden.  Then I come up to the front door, and there are at least 16 (yes, I counted) people hanging around, waiting to get in.  And I don’t mean hanging around in widely spaced groups: I mean, bunching up, two or three feet from the neighboring group, just chatting gaily.  I actually heard one person high-five another and say “feels good to be out again!”  The accompanying “woohoo!” that I’m hearing in my head is almost certainly a false memory, but that was the sentiment, for sure.

Inside, there were a few tables with signs reading “this space reserved for social distancing,” but I have to tell you: it still felt pretty packed.  Outside, I didn’t see any tables marked off that way.  All the employees had masks, but very few of the customers did: I saw perhaps 4 or 5 out of the dozens and dozens that were there.  Most disturbingly, to get inside far enough to attract the attention of an employee, I had to pass through the little waiting area ... you know, the roughly 6 x 10 foot area with a bench on either side where, under normal circumstances, you cram in to sit and wait to be called to your table?  Well, these were not normal circumstances as far as I was concerned, but this place was just as cramped as it would be on any Friday night before the pandemic: I counted at least eight people, no more than 2 masks, and additionally two infants, in car seats.  And I could not help but think to myself, what sort of maniac takes their INFANT out into a crowded place during a time when a serious virus is out in the world?  Sure, this virus is hitting children way less hard than most do, but, still ...

Look, I have spent a lot of these virus reports saying that I fear that we’ve gone too far with draconian measures and pointing out that, no, you’re not staying home because you may kill someone if you go out—that’s still completely hyperbolic and, actually, ridiculous.  It might appear hypocritical of me to now complain about people going out and congregating in mass numbers.  But I’m not backtracking on any of my previous statements.  Remember that I’m the guy who believes in balance.  Both of these extremes are bad, in my view.  Just because “never leave your house or you could KILL me!” is completely crazy doesn’t mean that “the governor said we can go and eat so let’s see how many people we can infect!” is any more sane.

There has to be a middle ground here, people.  I hope we find it soon.

Snaptone Glimmerbeam I

"All I'm Sayin', Pretty Baby"

[This is one post in a series about my music mixes.  The series list has links to all posts in the series and also definitions of many of the terms I use.  You may wish to read the introduction for more background.

Like all my series, it is not necessarily contiguous—that is, I don’t guarantee that the next post in the series will be next week.  Just that I will eventually finish it, someday.  Unless I get hit by a bus.]

When it comes to music, I don’t actually care that much for instrumentals.  I like to be able to sing along to my music—despite not being very good at it—and it not having any words sort of puts a damper on that.¹  Still, there are quite a few places where downbeat instrumentals can land in my mix universe: if they’re dark and somber, they go on Shadowfall Equinox (which is almost entirely instrumentals); if they’re dark and trippy, they go on Smokelit Flashback (which is typically anywhere from a third to half instrumental); if they’re dark and creepy, they go on Phantasma Chorale (which is composed mostly of songs that, even when they have vocals, don’t have intelligible words).  But what if they’re upbeat instrumentals?  You know, the sort of song you might like to listen to as you snap your fingers, walking along in the summer sunshine, pleased with the warmth on your skin and the world in general ...

Well, in that case, they go on Snaptone Glimmerbeam.

One of the first instrumentals I can remember really digging from my album collection was Faith No More’s “Woodpecker from Mars.” The great thing about this tune is that it feels like, at any minute, Mike Patton will launch into some cool-ass vocals.  He never does, of course, but the song rocks anyway.  Next in that vein was Hot, by Squirrel Nut Zippers.  This is an utterly amazing album, which I’ve talked about before,² but I don’t know if I properly explained how good it is.  “Life-changing” would be only mildly hyperbolic here.  It includes not one but three instrumental tracks, the best of which is almost certainly “Memphis Exorcism.”³  It rollicks along, almost demanding that you snap your fingers in time with it.

But the honor of being considered the mix-starter I give to Combustible Edison’s “Vertigogo,” which is the opening music for the movie Four Rooms.  In fact, that soundtrack is almost entirely composed of Combustible Edison, who do a sort of retro-exotica with a lot of jazz and lounge leanings.  They’re only about 80% instrumental, once you leave the sounddtracks and get into their actual albums, and some of Miss Lily Banquette’s vocal numbers are quite stunning.⁴  But it all started with the Four Rooms soundtrack, which is a cornucopia of bridges, as we’ve heard several times in this series.⁵  But the opening theme is longer and more upbeat and just way too fun not to put somewhere.  Thus it gave me the idea to combine it with the two tracks above, give it the opener slot, and thus this mix was born.  Fun side note: the only songs on the Four Rooms soundtrack which are not by Combustible Edison are two by Mexican band leader Esquivel, one of which is so awesome that I threw it in here as well.

Which brings us to electronica.  I never dug most electronica: techno can be fun for about a minute and a half (which is when I start to get sick of it), house and D&B are often too loud and chaotic for my taste, and EDM can be awfully esoteric.  And what they all have in common: nearly all of it is quite repetitive, and I don’t dig that.  Except ... well, ambient and other forms of minimalist music can be repetitive, and trip-hop can be repetitive, so perhaps I’m painting with too broad a brush.  What’s the difference?  Well, obviously, all those electronica forms are strongly upbeat, while the ones I like are way more downbeat—hell, a lot of ambient doesn’t even have a beat.

So I quickly learned that there’s one form of electronica that I do like, quite a lot: downtempo, sometimes called “chill.” Of course, after (at time of writing) 5 volumes of Smokelit Flashback and 7 of Shadowfall Equinox, this is probably not news to you.  A lot of downtempo is instrumental (as is a lot of ambient), and that’s lovely.  Most of it finds its way to one of those two mixes.  But, every once in a while, a solidly downtempo album will have a more upbeat track on it.

Now, don’t get me wrong: “upbeat” downtempo is only upbeat in relation to other chill tracks, obviously.  But, still, what am I to do with them?  Assuming they’re good enough to go somewhere, they certainly won’t fit on either SFb or SfE.  So, here they are.  The two most obvious choices were probably Bonobo’s “Kong” and “In the Bath,” by Lemon Jelly.  Both are amazing downtempo artists that we’ve seen on Smokelit Flashback⁶, Paradoxically Sized World⁷, Cantosphere Eversion⁸ and Moonside by Riverlight⁹  But “In the Bath” is a bit of silly fun that wouldn’t fit on any of those, while “Kong” is not so much upbeat as just smooth and happy-making.  Both work well here.

Other downtempo artists and tunes I thought worked well here are Amon Tobin, who brings us “Keepin’ It Steel,” which is sort of the chill version of industrial; “Something for Madeleine” by the Karminsky Experience Inc, which gives us a rolling beat punctuated by organ and trumpet; and A Forest Mighty Black, whose “Fresh in My Mind” is too good not to appear somewhere, and, while still pleasant, is a bit more mellow and thus makes a great closer.

For a more freeform, jazz-like approach to instrumentals, there’s a few great options that I had to throw in.  Banyan, the solo project of Jane’s Addiction drummer Stephen Perkins, is sort of psychedlic jazz.  They give us “Lovin’ Them Pounds,” with some great clarinet, trumpet, and bass by Mike Watt (formerly of the Minutemen).  Shadowy Men on a Shadowy Planet, most famous for doing the theme to Kids in the Hall, are more of a bass-heavy guitar band, with strong surf rock leanings.¹⁰  “They Don’t Call Them Chihuahuas Anymore” [sic] is a fairly typical outing for them, and it leads beautifully into the somewhat bizarre sound of Gary Sredzienski & the Serfs, who fully embrace their surf music sound and combine it with, of all things, polka.  “A Good Looking Cossack!!” is, in my opinion, about the best example of their sound, sounding just a little bit like both at once, without ever really sounding like either.  Finally, Smokey Bandits¹¹ are here with the very first tune of theirs I ever heard: “Holidays in the Sun.” It’s great, happy tune that I’m glad to finally have somewhere to put.

Another solid instrumentalist, Chris Joss puts out songs that sound like they ought to be in movies—I don’t think I can describe it any better than that.  In particular, he’s quite eclectic, and few of his songs sound the same.  I think I first heard “Count the Daisies” (which showed up on Paradoxically Sized World I) on my old cable provider’s “zen” channel (the source of many great finds, and I was sad to see it go).  Then I picked up the album and found gems like “Magic Tubes,” which ... well, I don’t think I can adequately describe it.  There’s a lot going on in this song, which you really have to check out.

Snaptone Glimmerbeam I
[ All I'm Sayin', Pretty Baby ]

“Vertigogo [Opening Theme]” by Combustible Edison, off Four Rooms [Soundtrack]
“Lovin' Them Pounds” by Banyan, off Anytime at All
“Memphis Exorcism” by Squirrel Nut Zippers, off Hot
“She Walks on Fire” by Royal Crown Revue, off Walk on Fire
“Mexican Sausage Link” by Chingón, off Mexican Spaghetti Western
“Holidays in the Sun” by Smokey Bandits, off Debut
“Sentimental Journey” by Esquivel, off Four Rooms [Soundtrack]
“Keepin' It Steel (The Anvil Track)” by Amon Tobin, off Supermodified
“Something for Madeleine” by the Karminsky Experience Inc., off The Power of Suggestion
“Magic Tubes” by Chris Joss, off Teraphonic Overdubs
“In the Bath” by Lemon Jelly, off Lemonjelly.ky [EP Compilation]
“Kong” by Bonobo, off Black Sands
“They Don't Call Them Chihuahas Anymore” by Shadowy Men on a Shadowy Planet, off Sport Fishin'
“A Good Looking Cossack!!” by Gary Sredzienski & the Serfs, off Cruisin' the Creek
“La La Love You” by Pixies, off Doolittle
“Woodpecker from Mars” by Faith No More, off The Real Thing
“Rock & Roll, Part II” by Gary Glitter [Single]
“Mick's a Hippie Burning” by Big Audio Dynamite, off Megatop Phoenix
“Lost in the K-hole” by the Chemical Brothers, off Dig Your Own Hole
“Fresh in My Mind” by A Forest Mighty Black, off Mellowdramatic

Total:  20 tracks,  74:11

Now for the less likely candidates.

I can’t even tell you why “She Walks on Fire” by Royal Crown Revue is on this mix.  It’s not instrumental, first of all.  Not even sorta-kinda instrumental like “La La Love You” is.  Perhaps it’s because the words are so irrelevant to the music—they’re completely unnecessary, and, once you start paying attention to them, sort of silly.  So definitely don’t pay attention to them.  Consider them just another instrument that comes together to give this song a peppy, expansive feel.  (Which the words totally don’t support, by the way: yet another reason to just ignore them.)

This also explains why the only truly non-instrumental song on the volume doesn’t provide the volume title.  “La La Love You” by the Pixies does.  And it’s not really instrumental either, but, since it only has about 3 or 4 lines repeated over and over, I don’t really think of it as truly vocal either.  But it’s an absolutely amazing track, for sure.

Robert Rodriguez’s Chingón, with their spaghetti western æsthetic, may also seem like an unusual choice here, but I think they work perfectly well: I’ve already referenced Four Rooms, which features one segment directed by Rodriguez, after all.  “Mexican Sausage Link” is a short tune with some fine mariachi-style guitar work as well as some lonely trumpet, and it flows beautifully after the Latin-flavored “She Walks on Fire.”

Big Audio Dynamite’s insanely good album Megatop Phoenix is probably most useful for its plethora of bizarre bridges between songs; I stole two for Cantosphere Eversion, and I’m stealing another one here: “Mick’s a Hippie Burning” is really four or five different things all jammed together, and yet they flow, and then flow beautifully into “Lost in the K-hole” by the Chemical Brothers.  In a similar vein to what counts as “upbeat” for downtempo being a good fit here, what can be considered “downbeat” on an album primarily consisting of acid house also works out to just about the right tone for this mix, and I’ve always considered this track somewhat psychedelic, but in more of an optimistic way than a mellow one.

Finally, I’ll mention the “guilty pleasure” of the set: Gary Glitter’s “Rock & Roll, Part II,” which is these days commonly associated with live sporting events.  I never quite got that.  I don’t think of it as a football song or anyhthing like that: it’s just a fun track that makes you happy.  I suppose you can use it to be happy while watching sports if that’s your bag.  But I think it can be much more than just that.

Next time, I think we’ll finally go back to the 80’s.

__________

1 Although I will happily “sing” the guitar parts, trumpet parts, or any other bits I can find.

2 E.g. on Salsatic Vibrato I.

3 Althought the other two are great too, and we’ll probably be seeing them on future volumes.

4 As I’m sure we’ll hear in the fullness of time.

5 Specifically, on Phantasma Chorale and Salsatic Vibrato.

6 Lemon Jelly had two tracks on SFb I and II, while Bonobo was on volume V.

7 Bonobo appeared on volumes I and II.

8 Lemon Jelly on that one.

9 Bonobo showed up on MbR II.

10 Although, amusingly, they’ve constantly rejected that label, even specficially titling one song “We’re Not a Fucking Surf Band.”

11 Who I talked about most extensively on Paradoxically Sized World V.

Isolation Report, Week #10

[You could also read last week’s report, or even start at the beginning.]


This week ... well, honestly, it’s been pretty much exactly like last week.  Which is sort of the problem, I suppose.  I would appreciate it if time would move forward.  But I don’t think that time is predisposed to accede to my idle wishes.

The never-changing sameness we seem to be stuck in doesn’t lend itself to much in the way of news, and I’ve already philosophized as much as I care to.  I may even stop doing these reports weekly; perhaps I can go back to my previous habits of long post / short post, with the short posts being these “isolation reports.”  But I can’t make any promises: these are uncertain times, and who knows what tomorrow may bring?

In a vague attempt to make this post not entirely worthless, I’ll let you know some of the things I’ve been watching to try to keep my mind off the fact that our country is in the midst of a crisis without anyone even remotely competent in charge:

• The Mother and I finished up Altered Carbon season 2 [Netflix] this week.  She said it was perhaps even better than S1.
• I started on the final season of Blindspot [Hulu].  Honestly, these last few seasons haven’t lived up to the promise of the first two (or even one), but I’m a fan of Ashley Johnson (and her character), and it’s only half a season to find out the ending of the whole saga.  So I’m sticking with it.
• I watched the entirety of McMillion$ [HBO] this week.  When I first saw a commercial for it, I was intrigued, and then I saw that it was 6 one-hour episodes.  And I was like, interesting story, maybe, but does it really need 6 hours?  But it actually turned out to be pretty good.  Documentaries are normally not my bag, but I enjoyed this one.
• The kids and I started on season 2 of The Hollow [Netflix].  If you dig animation that’s kid-friendly without being dumbed down, this is not too shoddy.
• If you’re looking for more of a “here’s what we’ve been doing during the quarantine” type thing, the first episode of McElroy and McVarney came out this week.  Being two folks who I find entertaining anyway, it was a no-brainer for me.
• There was a new “Narrative Telephone” this week.  (See virus isolation week 8 for a bit more on what that is.)
• If you happen to like actual play D&D (or maybe just want to give it a try), there’s a new series of D&D parents and their kids all playing together which I’m finding pretty entertaining.  It’s called Roll in the Family, and there are five episodes so far [1 2 3 4 5].  I think there will be one more next week and that will wrap up the storyline.  The DM is top-notch, and all the younger players (and almost all the older players) are damned entertaining.  Plus, it’s for charity.

That’s all I’ve got for you this week.  Perhaps next week, I’ll take a break from all this virus talk.  Maybe.

Isolation Report, Week #9

[You could also read last week’s report, or even start at the beginning.]


This week the Slack channel at work informed me that I was going on PTO.  You see, the work calendar connects to the Slack and, when there’s an all-day event, it announces it the day before around 6pm.  So, paydays, company holidays ... and people’s PTOs.  Helps us remember that so-and-so is going to be out for a few days.

In this case, I was completely caught off guard.  PTO? what for?  Finally, I worked it out that The Mother and the smallies were supposed to be going to Great Wolf Lodge for a homeschooling conference (slash vacation), and I was going to take a couple days off from work to just chill out at home.  But, you know, those plans were made a long time ago ... as of now, there’s no conference, no Great Wolf Lodge, and no need for PTO.  It’s a bit of a sad reminder that, you know, even though this interminable situation seems unchanging from week to week—to the point where it’s super easy to lose track of what day it is—time still is marching on, and more and more of our lives are being eaten up by this crisis.

Will it be over soon?  There are rumblings of reopening various things, but that’s primarily because our moron-in-chief seems to think that killing his voters is preferable to having them upset at him.  Who knows? maybe he’s right.  For the rest of us sane humans, though, it doesn’t seem like this ordeal is going to be over any time soon.

On the plus side, we’re gaming pretty regularly now.  I still have my two campaigns going, my eldest is up to two as well, and this week my youngest suggested that she’d like to try running a game.  At 8 years old, I’m sure she wouldn’t be the youngest GM ever, but surely in the ballpark.  We’ll see how serious she is about it.

Other than that, not a huge amount has changed.  The Mother’s sister had her baby, so that’s taken up some of her attention.  Sadly, she also has an aunt who’s in the hospital and not expected to make it.  This is an older woman, so the sickness is not coming as a shock or anything, but the fact that no one can visit her in the hospital is quite depressing.  And, if she does die, they will likely only allow a fraction of her family to attend the funeral.  It’s not clear if the illness is related to the ongoing virus or not, but respiratory failure is a component of the illness, so it’s certainly possible.

But, other than that, we continue to solider on, taking the good with the bad.  Hopefully we’ll last another week before having to return to the grocery store, and we’ll likely keep eating a lot of takeout and not nearly as much produce as we should.  But we’re together, and safe, and I’m sure there are plenty of folks in the world who are in worse situations than we are.  So we’ll be thankful for what we’ve got and hopefully things will return to some sense of normalcy before too long.

Isolation Report, Week #8

[You could also read last week’s report, or even start at the beginning.]


Not too much new to report this week.  I’m just going to give you a couple of pairs of links: one in the serious category, and one in the fun category.

First, the serious.  Now, the first thing I’m going to tell you is, always be suspicious of Internet links about the coronavirus (or anything else, really), and I certainly don’t except myself.  I’m going to be fully transparent here: I got this link off Facebook.  But, more specifically, I got it from my cousin, who works in healthcare (originally in admin, but I believe she’s now an X-ray technician).  So apply as much salt as you like.  I personally find it to be fairly balanced between conservative and liberal viewpoints, but I urge you make that determination for yourself.

The original article is by a doctor-turned-statistician, who was also involved in helping model the 2008 financial meltdown, so he knows a thing or two about getting burned by faulty computer models.  It’s a bit thick, though, so, if you’re not a statistician, you may appreciate the video version, by a different doctor, which attempts to condense the info into a format more friendly to the masses.  Or watch and read both, as I did: it’s totally worthwhile, in my opinion.

Next, the fun.  As you know, I’ve become somewhat of a fan of actual play D&D videos, and the biggest of those (and probably my second favorite) is Critical Role.  Now, a lot—nearly all, in fact—of these types of games are played online, so they weren’t terribly impacted by the current situation.  But CR is one of the few that’s always done in person, around a table.  So they can’t play right now, and, like everyone else these days, they’re looking to do something to keep themselves from going crazy (and to keep their fans engaged).

Their solution?  They call it “narrative telephone”: one of them tells a story, recording a video of it, then sends it to another member of the group.  That person can watch the video only once, then they have to record their own version of the story, which is sent to the next person, and so on, until the eighth and final member tells their version, which is of course barely recognizable as the original.  Now, they tell these stories as their D&D characters, but this is not actually D&D, so if you were thinking you wouldn’t like it because you don’t dig the game, never fear.  Just relish how each person takes the story farther and farther off track, and then watch the whole group listen to each version and give each other shit about how badly they messed it up.  Trust me: it’s hilarious whether you know anything about D&D or not.

• Narrative Telephone #1: Pumat’s Stroll
• Narrative Telephone #2: Jester’s Tall Tale

There’s only 2 episodes up so far, but hopefully they’ll keep doing them.  It’s the hardest I’ve laughed so far during all this.


Anyway, that’s all I’ve got for you this week.  Perhaps more next time.

Isolation Report, Week #7

[You could also read last week’s report, or even start at the beginning.]


The bad thing about everything being the same every week ... okay, one of the bad things about everything being the same every week is that it doesn’t necessarily give you anything new to talk about in your weekly virus isolation report.  The weather has radically improved, and the kids have spent a lot of time in the pool, and are actually getting quite brown.  Other than that, almost nothing has changed.

So I’ll keep it brief.  The only new thing that’s disturbing me is an increased use in the from-home media of phrases such as “you don’t have the right to risk my life.”  I find that to be a dangerously hyperbolic way to represent the situation.  I understand that there are good intentions behind it, but I still don’t think that makes it okay.

First of all, at the risk of sounding like one of the crazies (about whom I was lamenting last week), it really is fair to point out that, by this logic, no one would ever be allowed to drive again.  Every time I get in my car, I’m risking your life ... just as, every time you get in your car, you’re risking mine.  Now, to be fair, it appears that, at least currently (and at least in the U.S.), your risk of dying from COVID-19 is greater than your risk of dying in a car accident.  (Although probably not as great as many of the numbers you’ve been hearing: you can read about the difference between case fatality rate and infection fatality rate in several places, and it’s not a bad idea to do that, as it’s a bit encouraging to find out the overall rate is lower than the media often quotes.)  But the point is: we already live in a world with known risks of fatality, even ones caused by other people.  But in no other circumstance do we use that to claim that people are risking our lives.  (And, yes, I know that idiots like Dr. Phil are also using this argument, and, yes, they’re idiots.  However, that doesn’t make this perspective incorrect.)

Secondly and probably more importantly, we seem to have forgotten what the point of this exercise was.  We’re not trying to keep everyone from gettting infected.  We’re trying to keep everyone from getting infected at once.  The chances that you’re never going to get this infection are pretty slim, overall.  But the point is, as long as your infection comes as late as possible, you have a much better chance of surviving.  That’s sensible.  But to act like getting infected is a death sentence: that’s wrong-headed if you’re a civilian, and downright irresponsible if you’re a media personality.  We needed to flatten the curve, and it appears we’ve been moderately successful in doing so.  People who insist on going out unnecessarily are indeed risking lives ... in the abstract, because they risk raising the infection rate and blowing the curve up again and straining an already overstrained healthcare system.  What they are not doing, however, is specifically risking the life of any one person.  This is oversimplification, and I think it does more harm than good.

Because the ultimate thing that bugs me about it is this: this is exactly what those conservatives who are dangerously fanatical do, and we liberals (rightly) hate it.  They say things which are not quiiiiite entirely untrue, just exaggerated to the point of incendiary language designed to get people up in arms about things which really aren’t as bad as they’re being made out to be.  And, while I understand the desire to fight fire with fire, I still don’t think this is a particularly good approach.

Again, I’m certainly not saying let’s all go outside.  I’m not saying we need to stop being cautious.  I’m just saying, let’s not blow things out of proportion while we’re staying safe.

And hopefully each of you are staying safe too.

Isolation Report, Week #6

[You could also read last week’s report, or even start at the beginning.]


Okay, this shit is starting to get scary now.

Way back in week #1, I wrote:

Now, on the one hand, I find this somewhat silly.  It’s a cold, people.  Yes, it can be quite serious for some—mainly the elderly, those with compromised immune systems, etc.  I have a kid with a heart condition, so I’m not callous to that side of it.  But the chance of disease is always out there.  The flu (which is caused by a slightly different class of virus) can be fatal as well, and we have that every year.

You probably noticed that I’ve moderated my rhetoric over the last few weeks.  That’s not because I changed my mind so much as it is that, as the crisis wore on, I noticed that some of the things I was saying were being echoed by crazy old white politicians, mostly (but not all) men, mostly (but not all) Republicans.  As Twain once said about majorities, once you find yourself on the side of crazy old white Republicans, it is time to pause and reflect.

And, don’t get me wrong: I have come around a bit more to the common line of reasoning.  The explanation that, if too many people get sick all at once, our medical system (in the U.S., I mean) couldn’t handle the strain, thus causing more people to die than would otherwise, is a very rational and sensible argument.  (It says some disturbing things about our medical system, of course, which the conservatives are always assuring us is “the best in the world” whenever they’re explaining to us why everyone can’t be allowed to have it, but that’s a separate issue.)  But, as I’ve noted several times, treating this issue like we either all stay home or all go out at once is a logcial fallacy (specifically, the fallacy of false dilemma).  So I think there’s a more nuanced discussion to be had, but, honestly, I’ve avoided it, because “nuanced discussion” and “the Internet” go together like anchovies and ice cream.  If I say I have issues with this continued state of lockdown, most readers are likely going to lump me with people like this idiot (from a recent Huntington Beach protest) or like the Speaker of the Wisconsin State Assembly, one of the main Republicans responsible for not delaying their primary, who infamously told voters it was “incredibly safe” to go out and vote while dressed in full protective gear.  Even worse, I could get lumped in with the multiple (and remarkably dangerous) idiots, mostly from or appearing on FOX “news,” who keep on saying that it’s okay if some people die as long as we keep the economy going (if you’d like a montage of such idiots made as humourous as possible given the subject matter, The Daily Show has got you covered).

So, no, I don’t want to be lumped in with the idiots, especially not the dangerous ones.  But ... I have to talk about this anyway.  Because a few things have come up that I find pretty disturbing.

First off, there was the announcement that Google and Apple were going to get together and start tracking infected people via their phones.  I don’t know that I was as disturbed by the announcement itself—although, any time Google and Apple want to work together, you should already be suspicious—as by the media reaction, which was, from what I could tell, “hey, that’s neat ... technology! am I right?”  Obviously what it should have been was, “holy fuck! 1984 much??”  And, yes, supposedly it will be voluntary, and supposedly there will be all these controls in place to protect privacy, but, honestly, any time a concept like this comes up and people actually think it’s a good idea, I get worried.

There’s also my lovely governor Gavin Newsom saying that, even once the lockdown order is lifted, restaurants might be taking my temperature before I can come in.  What the fuck?  How is that even a thing that people are considering?  Also, he said that all menus might have to be disposable.  Well, why not plastic utensils too?  Yay.  We’ll be safe from viruses and drowning in garbage.  Maybe we’ll finally get the plastic straws back.

I already talked about governor Newsom saying he expected my neighbors to put “social pressure” on me if they see me out and about for anything other than “essential purposes.”  Now New York’s governor, Andrew Cuomo, has announced that wearing masks in public is mandatory, and gave essentially the same response when asked how such an order would be enforced:

People will enforce it. They’ll say to you, if they’re standing next to you on a street corner, “Where’s your mask, buddy?” in a nice New York kinda way.

Again: don’t get me wrong.  Cuomo is certainly one of the heroes of this crisis.  But I can’t help but feel that people in our country don’t need more excuses to get in each other’s business.  Is it really okay to encourage this kind of public friction?

Still, I understand that, if I really am saying that I fear this solution may be doing more harm than good, I absolutely sound like one of the crazy people I described above, many of whom have used that exact phrase.  So allow me to very explicitly differentiate my position from theirs in two important ways:

1) I am not in any way advocating for immediately “reopening the country.”  Not even advocating reopening it any time soon.  Again, I have to stress: there are other options.  There are partial measures.  We can still be safe without becoming completely paranoid.  There is a better balance we can strike.

2) I have no desire to “protect the economy.”  Fuck the economy.  I could care less about the economy, at least on a macro scale.  I do care that restaurants and specialty shops (such as my local aquarium store, which I just visited today) are having a tough time.  I care that many people are out of work right now.  But I absolutely do not care that rich people are losing money in the stock market and large corporations are going to make smaller profits, and let’s be honest: when some idiot on FOX “news” talks about the economy, that’s what they’re really talking about.

So what do I care about?  Well, aside from my worry about people who may be losing their jobs and/or their small businesses, I’m honestly mostly concerned about everyone’s mental health right now.  We have a very good idea of how many people are dying from the virus, but almost no information on what “social distancing” could be doing to suicide rates.  How about the increase in domestic violence?  And it doesn’t even have to be that serious to be concerning: the mental stress is easy enough to see on the faces of those folks who are doing their best to keep us entertained, and those are the people making us laugh.  For those who are under no such obligation, the strain is even more obvious (for instance, check out how hard it is for Liam O’Brien to stay upbeat in the first “unplugged” episode of All Work No Play).

But I needn’t go out to the Internet to see depression setting in: there are signs here in my own house.  Irritability is on the rise.  There’s lots of sleeping at odd hours ... because, why the fuck not?  My eldest dropped their classes because online learning just doesn’t work for them, so now they really don’t have much to do other than sleep.  The Mother can plan no more field trips, nor park days, nor outings to DojoBoom for our younger two children, so even though homeschooling our kids is something she was already doing anyway, it’s still become difficult and frustrating for her.  I’m fortunate enough to have a job that I can do just as well from home as I can from the office, and yet ... it’s been very hard to maintain focus, and seeing your coworkers inside a box on the computer screen isn’t the same as going to out to lunch with them.  I absolutely dread weekly trips to the grocery store (in fact, we skipped last week altogether), which I used to vaguely enjoy.  Look, I don’t need everything to go back to normal all at once.  I just need things to get ... better.


One a more positive note, the experts are telling us that all this staying at home is having a positive effect, and that the computer models are showing not as many deaths as they had originally predicted.  Of course, the cynical side of me wants to point out that computer models were significant contributors to the 2008 financial crisis, so we probably shouldn’t just blindly trust them, but I suppose even cynical old me has to count that as good news.  Still ... I worry that we’ll take it too far.  I said privately at the beginning of all this that I feared we were in the midst of the first dangerous mass panic caused by smart people.  Because, you know, normally panics are caused by people who don’t know what the fuck they’re talking about.  In this case, the people making most of the decisions are absolutely right in their understanding and their reasoning ... and, yet, that doesn’t necessarily mean they’re making the best decisions for us all.

Everyone out there: take care of yourselves.  Not just physically, with your handwashing and your masks—I mean, do that too, but don’t forget to take care of your mental self.  Stay sane, and stay as happy as you can manage.  And here’s hoping that we see some positive changes in our situation sooner rather than later.

Isolation Report, Week #5

[You could also read last week’s report, or even start at the beginning.]



This week didn’t get a whole lot better.  But primarily I blame that on the return of the rain.

You may recall me whining about the rain before.  On March 10th, which was a Tuesday (if this is week 5, that would have been week 1 ... the week that I actually made it to the office one day), it started to rain.  It was supposed to rain for 8 days; it did rain, off and on (but more on than off) straight through to the end of week 2 (so closer to 13 days, although maybe there were one or two days in there when it only drizzled or something).  Again, it may seem to some of you that I whine over trivialities: were I back in DC, for instance, it would have nothing unusual in the least to see rain for the better part of 2 weeks.  But I don’t live in DC.  I live in southern California.  You know why I moved to southern California?  To get away from the damned rain.  (Okay, there were many other reasons too, but let’s not ignore that one.)

Week 3 was dry, but still overcast and unseasonably cold.  Week 4 it started to warm up, and we actually got some decent swim time in.  I actually did some laps in the pool, which makes me feel a tiny bit better about laying around the house all week.  Then on Sunday it started raining again (as I noted last week), and it racked up another 6 days: it was still coming down pretty hard Friday night when I went to bed.  Yesterday and today have been a bit brighter, granted, but I just don’t feel inclined to trust the weather at this point.

Tendency toward depression is only compounded by dreary days when you can’t really go outside, even moreso than usual these days.  There’s a lot of sleeping odd hours in my house these days, and I’m starting to worry about people, myself not least of all.  I’m mostly staying focussed on work ... mostly.  The Mother declared it to be “spring break,” so no homeschooling this week.  This gave her time to concentrate on the fact that her baby sister was having her own baby (her first, even) in the midst of all this (life goes on, as they say), and the younger two kids have mostly spent the time digging out old videogames (and entire game systems—the PS/3 has been hooked up again, the Wii was out, and I won’t be surprised to see the Gamecube next) and rediscovering old classics.  My putative sister-in-law did deliver her girl, by the way: over 24 hours’ labor and over 9 pounds, but completely healthy and not seeming to notice that she has entered the world at a somewhat ... challenging time.

Grocery shopping is not getting any better; after a surprising uptick in week 2, it’s been constantly devolving into a queasy soup of restrictions and paranoia.  The first couple of weeks there was a bit of a feeling of camaraderie with your fellow shoppers ... a touch of “hey, we’re all in this together.”  There seemed to be precious little of that left when The Mother and I went out on Wednesday.  We specifically set out to get 2 weeks’ worth of groceries so that we can skip it altogether in week 6.  The Mother may have to do one more Costco run, and I’m sure she’s not looking forward to that, but the online delivery service reports that it’s already all booked up for the week.  So I fear we may be stuck with it.  Maybe they’ll have toilet paper.

Sorry.  Bad joke.

The one bright spot for me—not so much for The Mother, granted, but she has a new neice to long-distance-dote on—was another installment of the Family Campaign.  So far, we’ve done “flashbackstories” for everyone, and we had the initial “you all meet in a tavern” session (I put as much of a twist on that as I could, but it’s a standard trope for a reason), but this is the first actual “let’s travel together and start to get to know one another” type session.  It was a lot of fun, and I didn’t get nearly as far as I’d hoped, so we’re going to do another one next week (and then we’ll go back to doing some other campaigns to give me time to gen up some exciting bits for the next leg of their quest).  This was a nicely balanced session, I thought: some shopping, some fireside chats, some revealing character moments, some traveling-can-be-uncomfortable moments, and finally a good old-fashioned ambushed-by-bandits encounter (only this one was on a river barge, adding the extra danger of possibly falling off the boat into the strong current).  It was fun, but there’s more to be done before they get on the ship for the month-long journey that will take them to their final destination.  So I’m looking forward to next week, and hopefully the 3 of them are as well.


Enh, that’s enough for this week.  This was supposed to be the worst week of the crisis, so it’s all downhill from here, I guess?  We shall see.



[Update: It’s now Sunday night and it’s started raining again.  Shit.]

Isolation Report, Week #4

[You could also read last week’s report, or even start at the beginning.]



This week was surprisingly difficult.  You would think by week friggin’ four I would have gotten used to the whole thing, but somehow it just took this long for me to crack.  Or something.

First of all, the days are really starting to run together, as The Daily Show recently pointed out.  There’s little incentive to go to bed at a certain time, or to get up at a certain time for that matter.  I thought the return of those shows that I consider my window onto the world would be helpful—and they’re all back, at this point—but of course the world that they’re windowing is not so much one I want to hear about.  Surely there must be some other things going on in the world ... right?  Even John Krasinski’s quite welcome new YouTube Some Good News show is good news ... about the ongoing pandemic.  Better good news than bad news, I suppose, but you know what would better still?  Other news.  Non-virus-related news.  News about something ... else.

Okay, how about I make a list of all the advantages of being stuck at home?

• I only have to do laundry every other week now.
• I haven’t been to the gas station in about a month.
• I’m saving a butt-ton in lunch money.
• My house key has always been a bit flakey—I think it just wasn’t cut properly in the first place.  But now I don’t need to use it any more.  It is literally never the case that I come home when no one else is there to let me in any more.
• I’m starting to get a little sun on my shoulders from sitting out by the pool with the kids.

No, I don’t think that’s helping.  I could almost get excited about starting summer early ... but it just started raining again.  I hear it’s supposed to rain until Thursday this time.

So overall a hard week.  I had to cut my middle child’s hair for him.  I had to keep The Mother from freaking out that our eldest child had booked a flight to New Jersey—because, hey, flights are really cheap now!  (Happily, the flight was cancelled.  Unsurprisingly.)  I had to cook a little more than usual, I had to go out for food a little more than usual, I almost had to bag my own groceries, but the checkers at my local Trader Joe’s said they didn’t care if they had to touch my bags, so I lucked out there.  I had to talk to my parents for the second week in a row to make sure they hadn’t caught pneumonia and died, and I reckon I’ll have to call again next week, and if that’s not depressing, I don’t know what is.  I had to keep on working in a vacuum and hope I’m making sufficient progress.  I had to buy a new CPAP mask because my old one developed a leak.

On the other hand, I also had to play videogames with my baby girl—because she’s going just as stir-crazy as I am—and that wasn’t all that bad.  It was pretty nice, actually.  I got to play D&D again, but I’m actually locked in with my gaming group, and we all agreed that we’re going to play before dinner as well as after dinner from now on ... because, what the fuck: time has no meaning, so why not spend more of it playing games?  I had to go through 13 pages of games on Target’s web site because The Mother had the idea that we’d also start playing board games more often, and that was actually kinda fun too.  I’m trying to find some bright spots, but it isn’t always easy.  Hopefully this is a temporary dip, and next week I’ll be on the upswing again.

Till then.

Isolation Report, Week #3

[You could also read last week’s report, or even start at the beginning.]



This week was slightly better.

First of all, Trevor Noah has not in fact given up doing shows; he’s just been hiding them where I couldn’t find them—on YouTube.  They’re not full shows either ... just little snippets here and there.  But, still, quite refreshing to get some news, even if it’s 100% virus-related.  Surely there’s something else going on the world ... there was another Democratic debate, for instance.  But I’ve heard literally nothing about it other than seeing the clip where Biden and Bernie bump elbows instead of shaking hands, and that Bernie promised to fix this ebola pandemic while Biden swore he’d do something about this SARS outbreak.

That latter factoid from Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me, who are also soldiering on, bless ’em.  But that’s all I’m getting: Colbert’s Internet snippets seem to have petered out, and John Oliver is in hiding, I think.  I was so desperate for news I actually watched a YouTube clip of Jimmy Fallon.  Fallon, I say!¹

It has also, finally stopped raining and warmed up at least slightly.  Which means the plumber came out to fix our gas leak, finally.  Which means we can use jacuzzi again, which we damned well did, although only once so far.  After that, I switched the heat over to the pool; it’s probably too early in the season for the water to retain the heat overnight, making it infeasible to really keep the temperature up, but I decided I was going to do my best to let my little girl swim at least once this weekend.²

Because it’s her birthday weekend this weekend, you know.  She’ll be turning eight, officially, on Tuesday, so she picked this weekend to be hers.  And what a shitty time to have a birthday weekend!  We can’t go out to sit down at any restaurants, and we can’t go out to see a movie, and she can’t have her friends over for a party.  On the plus side, The Mother was so afraid that all her presents wouldn’t get here in time (due to shipping delays caused by ... well, you know) that she went out to Target and bought some just-in-case presents.  And then the real presents did make it,³ so then she had way more presents than she really ought to have.  But obviously she did not complain about this.

So that was a minor bright spot.  And she still gets to pick the meals ... we just have drive-thru and bring them home to eat.⁴  So far we’ve had Taco Bell and Panda Express ... not sure where to next.  Jack-in-the-Box, I’ve heard.  We’ll see.

So, you know, things aren’t as bleak.  But I’m still a little concerned.  Our president⁵ is going on about we need to reopen the country and get everyone back to work.  I started to wonder if people—such as you, dear reader—might think that this is what I was advocating, given some of my previous statements.  I hope not.  Besides not wanting to be associated with any opinion that Trump is holding, I think the larger issue is that I’m concerned that we’re acting like there’s only two options here.⁶  On the one hand the U.S. administration is saying no one should be staying at home and everything should go back to normal.  On the other hand, the majority of the social influencers—including, admittedly, all the folks I praise above—are beating us over the head with the message that we all have to stay indoors or we’re all gonna die.  But I’m the balance and paradox guy, remember?  I haven’t figured out a way to do both at once yet, but surely there has to be a middle ground in there somewhere ...

Perhaps I’m just feeling a bit sad that listening to my favorite media personalities has now devolved into hearing people yell at other people—especially young people—for daring to live their lives.  It’s like The Daily Show: Grumpy Old Men Edition.  You kids today!  You and your going to beaches, and having fun ... why can’t you cower in your houses like normal people!  The mayors of Italy are going out into the streets and yelling at young people.  The mayor of New York has threatened to walk around the city removing all the basketball hoops.  I mean, seriously, people!  Again, I really do understand the necessity for action on this disease (for a particularly informative—and refreshingly less hysterial—discussion, check out Trevor Noah’s interview of Anthony Fauci), but is a society of people shaming others for having fun where we really want to end up?

In any event, I can’t go on about it too long.  I have a ruthless master to serve.  There ain’t nothing like an eight-year-old to really milk the max out of being in charge for a birthday weekend.  At this point, she’s gotten into the habit of prefacing everything she says with “birthday request.”  You know, like: “Birthday request: bring me that glass of water.”  Or, “Birthday request: stop talking so I can hear the movie.”  It’s a ... special time.  I’m not sure I can say we’ll treasure the memories, but we sure as shit won’t forget them.

__________

1 To be transparent, that was really only because Trevor Noah was his “guest.”  Such as guests are in the time of social distancing.
2 Addendum: Yes, both she and her elder brother got in the pool this afternoon and swam for over an hour.
3 Just barely.
4 For her brother, who managed to sneak in his birthday weekend just before everything went to shit, this would be fine.  It’s how he prefers to do it anyway.  But my baby girl is more of a social animal.
5 See, now I know what the fuck our president is up to, because I found Trevor Noah’s hiding spot.
6 I did allude to this issue last week, but I thought it worthy of further elaboration.

Isolation Report, Week #2

[You could also read last week’s report.]



Well, it’s week two, and I don’t think it’s getting any better.

First of all, let me say that the major development in actual virus news is the release of a study by Imperial College in London that paints a pretty grim picture about what could happen with COVID-19 if we don’t take extreme measures.  If you don’t enjoy slogging through statistical analyses, NPR did a nice summary of it, but personally I like the summation by history professor Jeremy Young: there’s a text version, and also a more graphical version illustrated by artist Danny Colee, if that works better for you.  If you’re not much for clicking on things, the takeaway is that (according to these projections) doing nothing kills 4 million Americans—about 4x the number of Americans killed in the Civil War, or 2/3 the number of people killed in the Holocaust.  If the pattern extends worldwide (and, to be fair, the study only looks at the US and UK, so there’s no reason to believe it would ... just no reason to believe it wouldn’t, either), that works out to 90 million deaths: 15x the Holocaust number, or 1.5x the total numer of deaths in all of World War II.  And the reason (at least here in the US) is that extreme cases of COVID-19 will need respirators to survive, but when everyone gets sick more-or-less at once (that is, over about 3 – 6 months), the number of respirators we would need (again, talking about the US) is 30x more than the number we actually have.  So more people die than would otherwise.  Taking moderate social distancing measures could cut those numbers in half, but only the extreme measures really bring them down to where everyone who needs a ventilator gets one and no one (or at least very few people) dies when they didn’t need to.

So, first let me say, I get that.  I understand it, and I believe it, and I in no way am attempting to argue against it.  I don’t think the study is biased, or that it’s wrong.  Please keep that in mind as you read on.

But this is supposed to be a report of our family’s experience this week.  So how’s it been going?  Not great, honestly.  In the first place, we live in southern California—you know, that place where we don’t have weather?  Where the plot of both a movie (L.A. Story) and a song (“It Never Rains in Southern California”) revolve around the fact that it “never rains” and it’s always “72 and sunny”?  Yeah, that place.  Normally, not a bad place to be stuck at home, especially when you’re fortunate enough to have a pool with a jacuzzi in the back yard.¹  But, here’s the rub:  Monday of last week (that is, two weeks from the day after this post), I went to work.  At our status meeting that day, we were told that we could stay home any time we were uncomfortable coming to work, due to the virus or whatever.  The next day, it started raining ... and I’m not talking about a little drizzle.  To call it a torrential downpour would not be exaggerating overmuch, especially considering how little it normally rains here.  The weather report said it would rain for a week.  I stayed at home that Tuesday, not wanting to fight the rain and the resulting traffic, and Wednesday was my normal work-from-home day anyhow.  On Thursday, the rain let up enough that I decided to go into work; I don’t like to wait too many days before I see my coworkers again.  But, as I was preparing to leave the house, I got the word: nobody’s coming in any more, for the foreseeable future.  So I stayed home.  And it kept raining.

The following Tuesday (i.e. 5 days ago as I write this), it was still raining, but the next day the weather cleared, as promised.  I went out to the grocery store, as I always do on Wednesdays, and let me tell you that wasn’t a barrel of fun.  And the next day it started raining again.  Even as I’m writing this, the rain is pouring down outside.  Now, while on the one hand it’s nice that by now we’re bound to be out of the drought conditions we’ve been under for the past ... months? years? I can’t even keep track any more ... but this is not a great time for stormy, overcast days and buckets of rain pouring down.  It’s difficult enough to keep one’s spirits up, but at this point it’s difficult to even get out of the house into our own yard.  It’s difficult to take the dogs out, and there’s certainly no sitting by the pool, or going out for walks in the fresh air.

Of course, getting out at all is problematic now.  Last week, when I told people I was worried about us (as a society) getting to the point where people couldn’t go outside for fear of other people freaking out and calling the cops on them, I sounded like a raving lunatic.  Now, an article in The Atlantic tells us that people going to restaurants and walking on nature trails are “more unnerving” than “empty streets and storefronts,” Stephen Colbert is yelling (his word) at young people in Florida to say at home, and Max Brooks is telling me that I’m going to kill his father Mel (and Carl Reiner and Dick Van Dyke) if I leave my house to become a “spreader.”  But, much more to the point, the governor of my state has ordered that my family (and the remainder of the residents of my state) are not allowed to leave our homes unless for “essential purposes,” under penalty of misdemeanor, and, when asked how in the world he planned to enforce this, he advised my neighbors to apply “social pressure” on me to feel bad about leaving my house.  So I’ve managed to go from raving lunatic to fucking prophet in the course of a week: not only could people conceivably be calling the cops on me if they deicde my purpose isn’t “essential,” but also they have permission from the governor to get in my face about it.

So, again remembering that I agree with and understand all the points about mitigation, and I agree with and understand that we must do something, perhaps you’ll understand that I’m worried that we’re going too far.  That same Atlantic article says:

But experts are saying that Americans can’t really over-prepare right now.  Overreaction is good!

But I don’t buy this.  That article tries to convince us that “overreacting” isn’t inherently a bad thing because the original meaning of the word wasn’t negative.  But this is a bit like saying it’s okay to use the word “faggot” because it originally meant “a bundle of sticks.”  The word means what it means, now, and there’s no point in yearning for “the good old days” when it meant something else.  And what it means, now, is “to react or respond more strongly than is necessary or appropriate.”  So, while I can’t argue that we’re reacting more strongly than is necessary, I still have to wonder if we’re reacting more strongly than is appropriate.

My kids have barely left the house in 2 weeks.  My little girl has a birthday in nine days, and, despite the fact that her presents were ordered before this lockdown started, it looks like some of her gifts won’t make it in time.  I talked last week about how many of the shows I watch regularly are going to be gone now—The Daily Show has given up, Colbert taped a few half-hearted attempts at monologues via his iPad, there’s no Last Week Tonight this evening, and even Critical Role, my go-to, forget-the-world-and-just-watch-some-folks-play-D&D show, has gone dark.  Now, I know that last one sounds like me just whining about not being able to watch my favorite shows ... and, sure, it is that.  But these are also the things that are keeping me sane, and, judging from Internet comments, I would say I’m not alone in that.

The grocery shopping situation isn’t helping either.  My usual trek to Trader Joe’s was ... interesting.  I had to wait to get in, of course, but it wasn’t too awful.  Most of the people waiting in line were friendly enough.  Once inside, there was plenty of room to roam the store, of course, and there weren’t even that many things that were totally gone: no toilet paper or even tissues, of course, but there was enough milk and eggs, and those were the main things I was worried about.  Perhaps it was because of the restrictions: “loose” items, such as bananas or tomatoes, were unlimited, but pre-packaged items were strictly limited to 2 per customer.  Also, no more than 2 “uncooked meat products” of any kind, and hot dogs count as uncooked.²  The restrictions also included sparkling water, of which I couldn’t buy more than two bottles regardless of flavor, despite the fact that my attempt to get six was in no way hoarding: that’s just how many we normally get through in a week.  But, then again, the restrictions didn’t seem to help certain things: the pasta shelf was devastated, and I got one of the last 3 containers of sour cream.  There were plenty of frozen pot pies, but no frozen burritos or microwave Indian food.  There was plenty of canned tomatoes, but no cans of tomato sauce or tomato paste.  Plenty of regular milk, but no lactose-free milk.  There were plenty of bags of potato chips ... except for the BBQ chips, which were all out.  I have no idea if this was because the store didn’t get any of those items, or they just sold out of them before I got there.

The following day The Mother braved the lines³ at Costco, where the restriction was per SKU, so you could get different flavors or different sizes of the same thing, but there the limit was only one per customer.  Still no toilet paper.  We’re trying not to hoard anything, because that’s just shitty, and, also, where the fuck are you people hoarding milk and eggs putting them?  I just don’t have that much refrigerator space even if I wanted to hoard that sort of stuff, which I don’t, because it’s a shitty thing to do.⁴  On the other hand, stocking up on things just seems prudent at this point, given how horrifically annoying it is to get to the store.  And, given the aforementioned limited refrigerator space, a lot of what we’re stocking up on is prepackaged crap.  I’ve eaten my first really-truly Pop-Tarts—as in, actually made by Kellog’s—in probably more than a decade, and there’s plenty of other stuff out of boxes and cans and, in a few cases, freezer packs, that I wouldn’t normally touch.  But we’re saving the fresher food for special occaions at this point.

You know what isn’t limited?  Alcohol.  TJ’s made it very clear that we could buy as much of that as we wanted, and they were fully stocked in that department.  I bought a couple of bottles of wine and some hard cider.  Costco also excepted alcohol, and The Mother came home with a giant bottle of Absolut.

So, basically, my state government seems to be pushing me to become an overweight paranoid agorophobic alcoholic.

Because, you see, nothing is black and white.  All our overreacting will almost assuredly save lives.  But everything has a cost.  A lot of restaurants won’t survive this pandemic, and I’m almost positive that the movie theater industry is toast.  At least one local amusement park may disappear.  Will suicide rates spike during this period?  Maybe not.  But if I find out later that they did, I shall certainly not be surprised.  Will depression increase?  What will the long-term effects be on our mental health, on our economy, on our children?

The problem with saying such things, of course, is that people will assume I therefore advocate doing nothing.  The study says we have to! they’ll cry.  You quoted the results right at the beginning!  Yes, I did.  That report studied three possible scenarios, and there really is no doubt that, among those three, the shit-storm we’re stuck with is the best option.  But there are an infinite number of scenarios—an infinite number of things we could do.  Those are not the only options.  And I personally think it’s worthwhile to explore some other options, because this one ain’t really working for me.

But, then again, if it would just stop raining here, maybe I would take my giant bottles of alcohol and go work by the pool and be perfectly content.  Honestly, I’m not much for going out under normal circumstances.  But, you know, when people tell you can’t ... after a couple of weeks, you start to realize what you’re missing.

__________

1 Okay, realistically, the pool is our back yard.  But still.
2 You guys know hot dogs are actually cooked ... right?
3 And don’t even get me started on how moronic it is to pack 50 people into a line together so that you can make sure they’re all 6 feet away from each other once they get in the store.
4 Did I mention how shitty it is?

Isolation Report, Week #1

Well, it’s week 1 of being isolated due to COVID-19.  In case you’re reading this from some far future timeline and you’ve forgotten (or never knew—lucky you) what that is, back here in 2020 a new strain of virus (specifically, a “coronavirus,” which basically means “head cold”) which is, unusually for these types of virus, occasionally fatal.  Other coronavirus disease scares in the past (notably SARS) were also scary in this way, but none of those previous diseases lived up to the hype about how fast it would spread and how many people might die from it.  This one, on the other hand, has.  Numbers are flying around right now, and you don’t always know whether you can trust them, but by some estimates as many of 70% of the entire population (worldwide) will get it, and of those who contract it maybe 20% will have severe reactions and perhaps 2% will die.

Here in the U.S., after a fairly poor showing of taking it seriously when it first appeared, we’ve now swung in entirely the other direction, with conferences, concerts, sports events, parades, and so forth being cancelled (including, ironically, at least one coronavirus conference), public institutions such as libraries and museums being closed, and huge swaths of the workforce being told to work from home.  I made it into the office one day this past week, and it looks like that was it for the foreseeable future: my office sent everyone home on Thursday (before I even managed to get in) and told us not to come back.  Trying to go grocery shopping has been ... challenging.  Happily, I went on Wednesday (my normal shopping day) before things got particularly crazy, and I just did fairly normal shopping, not really trying to hoard anything.  We went back out again on Friday for a few things just so we could cook at home, and it’s a good thing we didn’t need any eggs, or milk, or bread, or potatoes ... those were all gone.  No clue what it’ll look like next week.  But even on Monday when Christy tried to go to Costco, the toilet paper was all gone.  At this point we won’t even go out there any more: you have to wait in line to get in, apparently.  You can order online and have it delivered, but they’re not currently offering toilet paper via that method.  Amazon had to take down all the third-party sellers offering toilet paper to stop price-gouging.  I mean, judging from the state of things, you’d think it was an apocalypse.

Now, on the one hand, I find this somewhat silly.  It’s a cold, people.  Yes, it can be quite serious for some—mainly the elderly, those with compromised immune systems, etc.  I have a kid with a heart condition, so I’m not callous to that side of it.  But the chance of disease is always out there.  The flu (which is caused by a slightly different class of virus) can be fatal as well, and we have that every year.

On the other hand, I do understand what the health care people are saying.  There are basically two scenarios here:  In the first one, everyone gets the virus all at once, the number of serious cases spikes insanely, and the health care system is overwhelmed.  With insufficient resources, some people could die not because the virus killed them, but because they couldn’t get the care they needed to weather the sickness.  In the second scenario, the virus spreads more slowly; the number of total cases of serious sickness doesn’t change, but it’s way more spread out, and the health care system has adequate resources to care for everyone, and only the absolute worst cases are lost.  That makes perfect sense to me.  We’re not hiding in our homes so that we won’t get the disease—we’re probably all going to get, and there’s nothing to be done about that.  But the more we avoid large groups of people, the slower it’ll spread ... we’re hiding so we don’t get the disease too fast.  This is all very sensible, and I’m glad to see we’re taking scientific advice seriously (for a change).

Still ...

I’m struck by what Trevor Noah said on The Daily Show one night this past week: COVID-19 has killed somewhere in the ballpark of 5,000 people in the past 3 months, worldwide.  In the U.S., just one country in the world, 3,000 people die in car accidents every day.  Automobiles look at puny coronviruses and laugh at how pitiful they are at killing us.  And yet we do not cower in our homes for fear of driving to work each day.  Perspective, people ... that’s what Trevor said, and I thought it was a great point.

But I won’t be hearing any more great points from Trevor for a while, nor from Stephen Colbert, because all the New York late shows have gone dark.  They all have audiences, you see.  And audiences are large gatherings of people, and large gatherings of people could cause the virus to spread more quickly.  Colbert aired a single show with no audience (as did Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me), but that’s it (at least for Colbert; not sure if WWDTM will continue, albeit audience-less).  The Daily Show said at first they would continue to do shows sans audience, but they too gave it up late on Friday.  And here’s where I worry that we’re going too far.

You see, these are the places where I get my news.  Sure, I could sit around and watch CNN or something along those lines, but I gotta tell you: I spent a long time doing that right after 9/11, and all I got for it was way more stressed and not particularly more well-informed.  In fact, study after study has shown that “fake news” shows such as The Daily Show produce more well-informed viewers than almost any other outlet.  So right now I’m losing not only my major source of news about the world, but also the coping mechanism I was using to deal with the stress of said news: being able to laugh at it.

And, at the end of the day, that’s what’s hitting me the hardest.  Not seeing my coworkers and not being able to go out to lunch with other adults sucks.  Being cooped up with my family for essentially 24 hours a day with our only “breaks” being when one of us goes and hides in our room is not all bad, certainly, but it can be ... wearing.  Losing my opportunity to go to conferences or libraries ... well, honestly, I wasn’t taking advantage of those opportunities as much as I should have done anyhow.  But losing access to the shows that were keeping me sane: that is what I worry will send me over the edge.  And I’m sure I’m not the only one.  And I’m just wondering if this is the right choice for us to make, as a society.  Because, at the end of the day (or more likely month, in this case), it will be difficult for us to quantify how many lives our choices have saved.  But I worry that the fundamental changes to our way of life will be all too apparent.

Enh.  I’m probably overreacting.  I’m sure that being alone in my bedroom for the majority of the past 6 days isn’t impacting my stream of consciousness writing at all.  I’m probably just fine.

Hopefully next week is more ... hopeful.