Sunday March 22, 2020
Well Covid has knocked me down again. And hard.
But I’m up. Fast. No standing eight count this time. That was no normal punch. He looks like some stringy puss with not much to him but there is steel there.
Time to recognize. Time to sack up. This is a heavyweight who means business and it’s time to get in the game.
In short, bud, you keep going the way you’ve been going you’re in danger of becoming the knight from monty python’s holy grail — both arms cut off and saying he’s perfectly fine and ready to fight on. Nothing to see here, it’s all just a flesh wound.
All I want is for this non-nucleus son of a bitch to leave my pastoral green shores and suck my balls on the way out.
Well fine. If you want that, then you’ve got to start by admitting…
Click boom bust, a swing and a punch, and the fight is on:
I woke up this morning feeling chastened. With images of Paul and his grief-stricken face, obscured by that surgical mask, staring back at me. Imploring me to listen.
Last night I stayed up and checked the news. Yep, only 160,000 ventilators and worst case scenario is the U.S. might need something in the range of 700,000 for all who become infected in the next few months. Yes, the virus lives on steel for 72 hours. Yes, 800 people died in Italy yesterday. Yes, Spain is on lockdown, yes providence and other hospitals operate at capacity and there is not much room for error, yes we have done some things to mitigate against an explosion like Italy, but we’re no Taiwan, so yes this thing is coming.
Well. Fuck.
What else can I say but that I sure felt glad this morning that I hadn’t been in charge of crafting national health policy. Looks like I underestimated this cold virus just a bit. Yes, it’s not ebola. That’s true. But the devil is in the details and the details are making themselves known to you…
You want to have covid sucking your balls, you better shut up and listen to what exactly this thing is telling you it is.
So that is what I did.
The sun was coming up, another beautiful day was beginning. A Sunday that on any other Sunday would have meant going to the park, running errands, taking a walk to the rose garden and maybe a later trip to the zoo. My wife and daughter were still sleeping and I sat down and wrote up a list of things that I have gotten wrong about covid, that bitch ass non-nucleus tool — to this point.
The infection rate.
The limitations on hospitalizations.
The true risk to the elderly and those with pre-existing conditions…death for some who could have survived, especially because of the hospital issue.
I sat and wrote up a list of why I got these things wrong. What sort of thinking encouraged me to miss it. What can I take from it for next time?
Busy. Distrustful of the media. Disgusted with hysteria. A bit of a risk-taker. Oblivious to the shortcomings in hospitals. A father who wants the best for his kid. Math.
Not a fun place to be in. But way better than charging ahead, beating your chest, and refusing to listen to anything else before you. 800 people in Italy? Similar curve? Okay. I get you.
I looked at covid and said he can suck my balls. I said I know what my answer to fear and to death is, and it is that I’m living. And I still mean it. It’s just going to get a bit more complicated, a bit harder, a bit more complex…it’s going take more to beat him, to help your town, to help others, keep these shores green and pastoral and so on and so forth.
A lot more.
Well, I meant it. It came from the very depths of my guts. Life matters. This life matters. The good things that I have built with my family matter. I have despised the decisions of others, because they seemed to be born of hysterical thinking, they damaged those I thought we still needed to protect the most — kids — and Covid didn’t seem worth it. But now, here, no…that’s not it. And that’s clear. Covid is the problem, and he’s a hell of a lot worse than I thought. And there are way more holes in the system than I knew. And bottom line, I don’t like a world where Pauls walk around with sanitizer looking to tell others, because they have to, they have nothing else to do, that their mom is somewhere she doesn’t want to be with a tube shoved in her throat trying to breathe.
But fuck a duck if I don’t still mean it. Fuck that fucker covid. And yes, I want him sucking my balls. And I want life to continue.
Well, enough of that. So this morning I tell myself to shake it off and get up and the girls are up and we sit down and talk about where we are and where things are going. This is going to get serious. In the next few weeks the infection rate is going to erupt. A lot of people are going to be sick who are fine right now. The hospitals might not be able to care for them. And as much as Covid seems to be nothing for any of us personally, we don’t really know. It’s bad. It could be another Italy. And we now all need to be ready to step up. My daughter asked questions, wanting to know if we could still be together if one of us got it, or if that person would have to be shoved in a room somewhere, and we said no, we all climbed all over each other anyway, so that’s that, and my wife, bless her, asked smart, cutting questions that got right to the point (yeah, we don’t know, maybe our mitigation measures have helped vs. Italy) while keeping an eye on our kid and asking questions she knew our daughter wanted to ask but was too nervous to bring up.
A much more sober sunny morning. Which makes me grateful even more that we had yesterday to ourselves. After our talk everyone needed some air. To get out while we still could, if even just for a moment.
My wife and daughter took a walk and I went for a drive. And everything felt just peachy and fine. Okay. This is it. And it’s this simple.
Then why does it feel so incomplete? Why does it feel slightly off? And still sort of wrong? When I think through this whole situation, with all that I’ve seen, why does it feel so…well…yes…not good.
I left Seattle and turned east on 90 to head toward the mountains and didn’t feel calm and cool and like, yes, okay, now it all makes sense. At all. Fine. Here’s the threat. Got it. this is what we do. got it. Then why the unease? What’s up?
I could bullshit myself and say, no, this is it. This is how it is. I could guilt-trip myself and say, like a popular opinion writer said today to all of Seattle’s readers, that I’m just some flaming narcissist who only cares about my own feelings. I could do this.
I know how it felt to see Paul. I know how sad it was. I know how grateful I was for his arrival, and his reminder, his testament to what this whole thing is, a slap in the face to get in the game, to step up. Hey, you want Covid sucking balls, then…well, it’s a bigger task than just shouting it while letting your daughter chase you across the sand at alki, bud.
But still, there is something about this that feels so weird and strange. It’s not complete. It’s…almost…ominous.
I said I wasn’t going to lie to myself through any of this. I could have jumped on the kumbaya wagon a few days ago, and I said no. I said I was going to explore this situation to its depths, I was going to try to understand it, I was going to live it, I was going to care for my girls and those around me, and I was going to find a way to get covid…well you know. So when something feels off, I’m going to follow it, and I don’t care if anybody reading this is pissed or insulted by it, if facebook blows up at me, I don’t really have any friends there anyway, to hell with it. I know my desires are sound and good here, so I am going to follow them.
I went for a drive out toward some old places I like and decided to just shut up and check in with what was around me. Pay attention. I noticed that people on the road have sped way up. The average speed limit is now 75 or 80. This is how we’ve adapted to the lack of traffic. On the freeway a guy pulled over, a blown out tire. Overhead there are signs talking to us. Stay home. Limit Travel. Save Lives. At a parking lot I stop at frequently, a guy in a red station wagon sits there, with junk all around him piled up. His car is his home, and he’s there again today. Moms with their kids unload their shopping carts. People I notice are just the tiniest less nice than yesterday. On the radio nobody’s talking that much about coronavirus. More news has to do with football, with the weather, with funny names for cars. The feeling is that, like with all things, this is starting, for the moment, to fade into the background. As if to underline the point, on the street corner when I pull up there is another sign talking to me…this one held by a homeless guy. It reads “Greeting Earthlings, my spaceship broke down and I need spare parts”.
On my phone the article of the popular opinion writer goes on about the selfish people who went outside yesterday. We are all assholes and it is all our fault. We’re narcissists and pricks and we’ll be to blame when things get so much worse. The poor little prude was clearly getting off, clearly retaining a sense of control, a sense of reality, a sense of power over an increasingly powerless situation by falling back on the age old standard of finding a scapegoat and blaming the hell out of them.
Ridiculous. Even with shelter in place laws, people are allowed to go outside. Nobody was congregating together, everyone was giving each other space. Everyone who hits a hospital this week will be there as a result of catching this thing a week ago, but the self-righteous prick certainly had a chance to take the high ground and attack all and sundry so he did. How humane of you, you duesch.
The comments section is poisonous. Trump sucks, its his fault, trump 2020 screw the democrats say others, several people post at length asking how can you ask people to stay inside and follow gov’t suggestions when the gov’t doesn’t enforce any of the laws in its own city regarding heroin, drinking, homelessness or assault. Well, we can definitely say that life is returning to normal. And I guess that is good? Or, more to the point…that life, no matter what we do…continues. That no matter what happens around us…it goes on. The guy with the flat tire, he doesn’t care about coronavirus right now. His tire blew out. He’s dealing. The moment passes and another one arrives and that is the nature of life. It can’t be stopped.
Maybe then the way now to get covid to suck your balls is to just keep living, to just be yourself. I don’t know.
I don’t. I wake up. I live this thing that is happening. I try to care for my girls and care about the world, the habits, the beliefs, the values I’ve found that work, I try to keep pushing on, and at some point each day something hits…and right now it is…
Paul.
Paul keeps lurking in my brain.
There is something missing there.
It’s irksome. Like trying to remember something you wanted to write down.
There was something familiar about the way Paul approached us. About the whole experience, that made it so strange. So off-putting. So at odds with what the moment really was…a heartbreaking connection between two people…one who was in the shit, and the other who understood. It took me most of the drive to figure out. But finally heading back toward Seattle it hit me.
It felt a lot like a conversation with a missionary.
You’re at the park, you’re playing with your kid, and here come two guys in white shirts, smiling across the way, eighteen years old…hello, how are you, nice day, do you have a few moments for the gospel? No what is it they say — spare five minutes to hear an uplifting message? Leading bullshit like that. Your hackles go up because you know there is someone here with a message. Someone who wants to point the finger at you and tell you how to live.
Paul.
Iraq.
Paul.
Iraq.
When things got hysterical, I gave it all I had. Talked about Iraq and the dumb shit that could happen. How we could go into this trying to stop coronavirus and come out finding ourselves mired in another Iraq war…an explosion of stupid thinking driven by an irrational and impossible premise. What was “We must stop terror” becomes “We must do everything we can to stop this virus” and who knows where that might head if it didn’t work, if we failed, if it was used to…later…justify actions that had nothing to do with the virus itself.
There are some weird funky messages being sent in all of this. And I don’t care if I am saying things I’m not supposed to. It’s true.
It felt like Paul was there for himself. And he wanted something from us. Okay. Well and good. I’m happy to do that for a heartbroken guy on a Saturday. Sure. Give it. Let’s go. But where does this exchange go? Because at the end of the day what he wanted us to do was to stop filling our lives up with the kinds of memories he no doubt had plenty of time to experience with his mom. He was a man in his mid-thirties. My daughter is 8. It’s weird. It’s cloying. I can’t help but feel like some boundaries are being crossed.
I’m not violating the social distance rule. We’re using sanitizer. And we’re avoiding old people and staying away from everyone else and just farting around on these swings alone.
But he has a message. And his message was a rebuke. It felt a little like a zealot coming and telling me that I was going to go to hell, that I had sinned, and I was going to send others to hell too.
There’s a dam bursting, cracks run from top to bottom, the thing is going to blow, and there is nowhere to run, but someone is sticking their finger in the smallest of cracks. And they want you to come and join them. Hey, I applaud you buddy. I do. But if the dam is bursting, maybe I’ll make up my own mind how to spend the few moments I have left before it’s gone. Or someone comes to you and says hey isn’t it horrible about the rainforest, yes you’re right it is, want to go to Brazil with me, I’ve got a plan…umm…well…
Sure, in these examples, people would argue well what if YOU are the one cutting down the rainforest and YOU are the one cracking the dam with YOUR SELFISH behavior toward old folks by being out.
I can’t help but feel like all of that may, in this case, be an overreaction. And that it is in danger of becoming a crutch that people cling to to feel like they have something to cling to, not just to cling to, but if we’re not careful to bludgeon others with. And we can enter the point where other people’s lives are judged not as valuable in their own right, but only in terms of the services they provide to others.
This is shady ethical ground.
Science helps solve that dilemma, but what is the science behind any of this, anyway? If a dad and his kid with hand sanitizer go out to the beach, stay away from other people, go on slides, and then drive home — what are the odds they will spread the virus to others? What is the point here? What service does any of this really serve?
Where does this go?
Here is a true story:
A boy, two, was running around at the park the other day, he had heard about the virus and said he would protect his family, so he has a plastic sword and is shaking it around and protecting his family and everyone is laughing and an old lady, while the whole place was in lockdown, while the coronavirus is out and about, while deciding to go to a busy park, starts shouting and shaking her arm at the boy, shouting, saying you need to stay six feet away from me, if I’m out you need to stay away from me!
Does anything about that feel off?
I don’t know. I don’t have any answers. Clearly. I have been wrong about a lot of things to this point. But I’m learning. And I’m trying to sort through it all the way. And I want to see things come out in the end better than they have in the past, when we faced calamities and ended up spawning even worse outcomes.
There is a feeling, a real possibility, that as this outbreak settles in, it will be turned into a weapon. People will use it to attack and blame. That the negative spiral will accelerate. That when a position we’ve taken “we must stop this virus no matter what”, fails, its failure will be used to unload the ugliness that lurks beneath and sometimes comes storming out. Then life in this city will truly become unbearable.
We’ll see.
The reality of it all is driven home this afternoon because I don’t feel well. Not sure if it is exhaustion or something else. I am even more glad we went out yesterday. My daughter will remember running in the sun on the beach with her dad, who gave her his blue sweatshirt so she could have something to wear when the wind was cold against the water, who chased her (and let her win a little bit), and when he did beat her accepted that they had tied, who bought her some ice cream, who had, in short, the kind of day that Paul built up over a lifetime with his mom.
For now, I am going to bed. And not caring either way. I get you Paul. I get you man. I feel you and I hurt for you and will do what I can. And the truth is all of this is really neither here nor there. Tomorrow I am going to wake up and get to work, for real, knocking out just what I can do, in the landscape I recognize I am in, with the week I believe is coming, and the facts I accept about who this fucking Covid really is, to beat his ass down, help my town, stay on that rung, love, ladder up, and yes see that non-nucleus tool sucking balls.