3/26-29/20
I have felt like death all month and really haven’t been up to writing anything. Of course, I have no idea whether I have covid-19 because it’s nearly impossible to get tested unless you’re already in critical condition. We have stocked up on staple food items and won’t starve, although flour and yeast, for example, have become nearly unobtainable. (The less said about toilet paper shortages, the better; suffice to say we stocked up before the rush and shouldn’t be faced with the grim possibility that we lack the means to wipe our posteriors.)
3/30/20
Up until a few days ago, the official party line coming out of Washington was that people need to go back to work ASAP to prevent securities markets from tanking and save the economy. Whoever decided that the ultimatum my money or your life would be an effective motivator is a genius, and I hope you find out who they were and put them in the Propaganda Hall of Fame along with P.T. Barnum, Edward Bernays, Albert Lasker, and Joseph Goebbels. Meanwhile, millions of people are being laid off and you can’t slather enough mustard on that shit sandwich to make it palatable.
It is increasingly clear that our ruling class and the “leaders” we’re stuck with have no ideas or imagination and no real talent for leadership or management. Being in government was merely a profitable career choice for them. Now the rot and corruption is plain to see.
3/31/20
Medical personnel are now being threatened with termination for speaking publicly about what’s happening in the hospitals, which is a sure sign that the party line is bullshit and things are worse than we’re being told. It’s also pretty comical, given that there’s a severe shortage of medical personnel in the hardest hit areas. My younger sister is a hospital RN with two young daughters and that scares the hell out of me.
Indiana is apparently about to get hit hard—unsurprising, given that so many Hoosiers are not taking this at all seriously. Evangelical ministers have been holding tent revivals for hundreds or even thousands of the idiot faithful. I would be totally fine with this Darwinian experiment were it not for the fact that these morons are an immediate danger to the rest of us.
I’m supposed to write about “how the covid-19 pandemic is impacting [sic]1 [my] everyday life.” The fact is, I’m not an overly gregarious person, so my social life hasn’t changed much. My wife works from home now, so we set up a new and improved home office area where she can videoconference with her students. Her mother has pulmonary disease, so we’ve been doing our best to encourage my parents-in-law to stay home and avoid contact with their grandchildren, which has been difficult for them. Unfortunately, my sister-in-law’s husband is a covid denialist, and it turns out that my sister-in-law (who lives near my wife’s parents and had been buying groceries and running other errands for them) was not taking precautions, so that has been a source of family friction.
You may have noticed a theme here: namely, that half of America is still living in the Middle Ages and the rest of us are shackled to them as they do stupid things that will get the rest of us killed. Misinformation and denialism abound, thanks to a media ecosystem that promotes ignorance, hatred, mistrust, and obedience to the cretinous and evil regime in power. It turns out that the early cheerleaders for the World Wide Web—who proclaimed that “information wants to be free” and that the new media would usher in a Golden Age of enlightenment, knowledge, democracy, freedom, etc.—were so, so wrong. Instead, the Internet has brought us a world of conspiracy theories and information silos, where every stupid idea is allowed to fester and disseminate widely. It’s a soul-crushing thing to realize that the strength of the herd, the mob, will always conquer intelligence. I’m feeling a desire to simply relay some of what’s been happening on social media, since it’s an even more prominent feature of our everyday lives now that we’re all stuck at home, but I’m sure you have the resources to sample the craziness we’re inundated with. It’s frightening and disheartening. Here’s just one random meme making its way around:
Just so I NEVER forget….. March 31, 2020
-Gas price down the street from home was $1.79.
–Most in-person university classes suspended effective March 16.
-Self-distancing measures on the rise.
-Tape on the floors at grocery stores and others to help distance shoppers (6ft) from each other.
-Limited number of people inside stores, therefore, lineups outside the store doors.
-Non-essential stores and businesses mandated closed.
-Parks, trails, entire cities locked up.
-Entire sports seasons cancelled.
-Concerts, tours, festivals, entertainment events – cancelled.
-Weddings, family celebrations, holiday gatherings – cancelled.
-No masses, churches are closed.
-No gatherings of 50 or more, then 20 or more, now no gatherings of 5 or more.
-Don’t socialize with anyone outside of your home.
-Children’s outdoor play parks are closed.
-We are to distance from each other.
-Shortage of masks, gowns, gloves for our front-line workers.
-Shortage of ventilators for the critically ill.
-Panic buying sets in and we have no toilet paper, no disinfecting supplies, no paper towel no laundry soap, no hand sanitizer.
-Shelves are bare.
-Manufacturers, distilleries and other businesses switch their lines to help make visors, masks, hand sanitizer and PPE.
-Government closes the border to all non-essential travel.
-Fines are established for breaking the rules.
-Stadiums, parks, convention centers, and recreation facilities open up for the overflow of covid-19 patients.
-Press conferences daily from the President.2
-Daily updates on new cases, recoveries, and deaths.
-Government incentives to stay home.
-Barely anyone on the roads.
-People wearing masks and gloves outside.
-Essential service workers are terrified to go to work.
-Medical field workers are afraid to go home to their families.
-the bank is drive thru only
-This is the Novel Coronavirus (covid-19) Pandemic, declared March 11th, 2020.
This is America. This is where we are.
4/1/20
I’m hoping that this year is the Year That Finally Killed April Fool’s Day.3
I think the stay-at-home order has made everyone who doesn’t work an essential job4 a little stir crazy. The sameness of the days (no one seems to know what day of the week it is), the lack of structure, and disrupted sleep schedules are wearing on some. Personally, I’m fine with it. The AARP tax preparation service I volunteer with is obviously closed indefinitely. The tax filing deadline has been extended three months to July 15.5
My biggest complaint—aside from not feeling well most days and worrying that I have covid-19—is that it’s been too wet and cold to put in the garden yet. I fear what will happen if agricultural production slows and food and medicine supply chains are disrupted, which is a real concern to many. I’m planting more starchy staple crops (potatoes, sweet potatoes, parsnips, beets, carrots, beans) than last year, although I doubt we’d be able to survive on what I can grow in our small backyard, should that eventuality come to pass. I stocked up on enough rice and pulses to last a while, but as I said, people are already hoarding flour, yeast, and other staples. I started a bread sponge so that we’re not so dependent on yeast for bread, but there’s considerable price gouging going on with flour, if you can even obtain it. If you want supermarket delivery and pick-up services you have to schedule at least 4-5 days in advance, they’re so swamped with orders.
On the bright side, gasoline is cheap because nobody’s going anywhere, many commuter flights have been canceled, and the petroleum industry is tanking, but things are looking better for the environment. Yin balances Yang.
Also, my friend R, who is a chef and political activist, came up with a shareable web document of staple pantry items and some basic recipes that can be made with those items, which I thought was a brilliant idea. One thing that the natural disasters and political activism of the past two decades have brought to the fore is that in the absence or dysfunction of regular top-down government, ordinary citizens are perfectly capable of self-organizing into mutual aid networks and helping and governing each other. I find this to be a comforting revelation, as it gives the lie to the paranoid style of most conservatives, who believe that the solution to every anarchic situation requires the “rugged individual” using force of arms to survive in a Hobbesian war of all against all.
While I was walking the dog this morning, we went near the river, and I had the unbidden thought that, if all else fails, we could eat the Canadian geese that congregate a mere few hundred meters from our house. although I’m sure I’m not the only person this has occurred to. There are also of course fish in the river, although I’m not sure I’d want to eat them.
4/2/20
A beautiful day outside. As I write, and my wife attempts to work from home,6 the students in the rental house next door are playing beer pong7 in their front yard and listening to the bland, repetitive pop EDM8 the kids listen to these days. They are being loud and not practicing social distancing; this is because young people are immortal, as we all know. It is the reason they have always been useful for waging wars and performing other unpleasant, high-risk tasks. But these particular young people are just being annoying and probably spreading disease. They’re fortunate that I make it a policy never to call police unless someone is actually being murdered, since the police these days seem to have a habit of using unnecessary force and getting people killed. Also, I was young and annoying and immortal once myself, so a part of me understands the youthful need to be publicly drunk and loud and spread disease through social contact; the difference being that my generation’s music was better9 and one could generally spread disease only via much more intimate contact than what is going on in the yard next door. Mercifully they’re not doing that in the open.
A disturbing note about the police: even as I was writing the above paragraph, “law enforcement” (as we once quaintly called the fascist pig element in society that protects Capital from the rest of us) was throwing itself a little parade, driving their vehicles around downtown and our old neighborhood on the East Side, sirens blaring and hillbilly rock soundtrack playing.10 Apparently they are either so lacking in imagination that they couldn’t think of anything better to do with themselves during the lockdown-induced lull in crime and misdemeanors (the more generous, benign interpretation), or they decided it was high time to introduce the populace to the full automotive might of the local branch of the new fascist police state. Welcome to the Pandemic Thugocracy™?, brought to you by Disaster Capitalism®?!
A disturbing thing I’ve learned over the past weeks is that everybody in the country seems to be only just now learning about proper handwashing technique. I come from a medical family, and I’ve worked in the food service industry (including some jobs in nursing homes), so handwashing is something I’ve always practiced regularly and with great vigor. I am shaken to the core that, all along, almost nobody else has been.
4/3/20
The U.S. Navy—i.e., Donald Trump, may his name be a curse upon the lips of all future generations—relieved CAPT Brett Crozier from his command of the aircraft carrier Theodore Roosevelt for leaking that covid-19 is running rampant among the sailors on that ship. The following day, today, Donald Trump, may his name be a curse upon the lips of all future generations, fired Intelligence Community Inspector General Michael Atkinson for revealing to Congress the information that an anonymous whistleblower had raised concerns that Donald Trump, may his name be a curse upon the lips of all future generations, had extorted slanderous information from the newly-elected president of Ukraine concerning Joe Biden’s son.
Why do I mention this? Because it occurred to me that my late grandfather, a Pearl Harbor survivor who died last spring at the age of 100, having served this country as an Army Medical Corps comptroller throughout the Allied occupation of Germany and the Korean and Vietnam Wars, who—though a temperamentally conservative yet politically neutral man, as befitted his position as an Army officer—spent his last lucid days as a vocal critic of Donald Trump, may his name be a curse upon the lips of all future generations, warning that it would come to this. The dismissal of CAPT Crozier—who disembarked from his ship to hearty cheers from the men formerly under his command—for alerting the nation to the public health risks facing those men and, by extension, the U.S. Navy, would have sent my grandfather into paroxysms of rage. He is likely spinning in his grave with velocity sufficient to generate power for a mid-sized city. My grandfather had few illusions about his country or the role its military—his military—served as international policeman and enforcer of the interests of large corporations, but he loved it, and I am not sorry he’s not around to see what we’ve become.
Anyway, I used my sorrow and rage to power me through turning over my garden plot this morning, despite not feeling well.
For entertainment I’ve been reading Mac’s Problem, by Enrique Vila-Matas, a surreal novel about an unemployed man who begins writing a diary to practice for the task of writing an ostensibly unfinished, posthumous novel, and is revealed via his paranoid delusional obsessions with an early work written by his novelist neighbor to be either the author of the novel we are reading or just a crazy person, or maybe both, or neither. I can relate.
4/4/20
This morning, woke up late (okay, so it was actually a little after noon) in a cold sweat—as in drenched, soaking wet—as if a fever had broken in my sleep. My dreams were certainly fever dreams, their features those of my typical anxiety dreams, only more so: malevolent, grotesque caricatures of my nuclear family members; houses, vast enough to get lost in, that combine features of my parents’ house and the old Victorian my wife and I used to own, but made strange and confusing, with huge new rooms, wings, and floors opening up like Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves; confusing airports where I board flights to unknown destinations and am often waylaid; and bruise-colored thunderstorms seething with tornadoes. Often these dreams combine more than one of these features; last night’s had all three. I say “typical” anxiety dreams, but really they’ve been quite rare over the past decade prior to February, when they returned, becoming almost the norm.
I sometimes jokingly say I get my news from cryptic symbolism in my dreams.11 If there is any truth in this, then my friends, we are in trouble.
4/5/20
Woke up drenched in sweat with a fever again today. My right lung hurts, like it did when I had pneumonia. We’re calling my doctor tomorrow to get a covid-19 test, which are finally becoming somewhat more available. I talked on the phone with my father, a retired physician, and he recommends also getting a chest X-ray. I got my living will, medical directive, and power of attorney out so my wife has them handy. She’s scared.
My sister apparently has three covid-19 patients on her hospital unit in Michigan City, out of a total of nine at the facility.
Testing is still uncommon and we really have no idea how many people have this thing, or even definite death counts.
4/6/20
Got a covid test after a video consultation with my doctor. Should know results within 48 hours. In the meantime, she put me on azithromycin. After I went to the doctor’s office (where a nurse came out to my vehicle in full hazmat gear and stuck a swab up my nose so far it poked my pituitary gland) I went to pick up my grocery order. Flour is still not available, but I received five pounds of chicken thighs I didn’t request at no charge. Win some, lose some, get free chicken as a door prize.
4/7/20
Made some bread from a whole wheat sourdough sponge I started last week. Planted some seeds for the garden to put under the grow light.
Felt a little worn down and experienced a little shortness of breath today. I think a nap might be in order.
I’m a bit annoyed that the college kids next door seem to think they’re on spring break and are almost constantly hanging out on their porch and front lawn, which means we can hear them if we open the windows (it’s 76º F outside).
4/8/20
Covid-19 test came back negative. Which is strange, as I feel worse today than I did yesterday. Heavy feeling in lungs persists. My trachea feels…itchy isn’t the right word but it’s the first one that comes to mind. Dry cough. I feel tired.
Bernie Sanders dropped out of the race today. I would feel less bad about that if Joe Biden didn’t just release a video in which his wife Jill does most of the talking and is clearly there to mind him and keep him from saying anything stupid. The race started out with so much promise: Elizabeth Warren, Kamala Harris, Julián Castro, Cory Booker…but Americans are obviously uncomfortable with a candidate who isn’t an old white man with brain worms. Donald Trump—may his name be a curse upon the lips of all future generations—is going to beat Grandpa Joe like a rented meringue even if he doesn’t cheat, which he will. Every day he corrupts this country more and I wish I could convey just how stupid and helpless it feels to be alive right now, wanting to do something, anything to make this stop, knowing it’s hopeless and already much too late. We’re sorry. We didn’t try hard enough, didn’t care when it mattered.
4/9/20
Still feeling awful. Doctor prescribed a new antibiotic12 and ordered a chest X-ray. That is all.
4/10/20
I have pneumonia.
4/13/20
Still feeling horrid. Sleeping a lot. Doctor appointment tomorrow. Eating Cheerios in oat milk and wondering whether or not it’s kosher. (That’s a little joke.) My mother-in-law wants to rent a movie for me to cheer me up, so I’m trying to decide between three movies—Mishima, Le Samouraï, Throne of Blood—or if I should maybe just take a shower and go back to sleep. Life abounds with such momentous choices; it’s a wonder anything gets done at all. Meanwhile, my wife tells me, “But look, there are all these new movies to choose from that are still in theaters!” (Whatever that means at this point.) “But I don’t want to see a new movie,” I reasonably retort, “I want to see an old movie, a good movie.” Sometimes my insistent sensibility is perplexing to others. The fact is, I’m not really feeling up to a movie, but free is free.
Bernie Sanders endorsed Joe Biden today, which confused many people. Meanwhile, Trump’s insistent bleating about how we should end the lockdown soon and resume “normal life” has made otherwise reasonable people in the political news media cover this completely insane idea as if it could be a rational option. They fall for the false identity “constant and emotionally-charged repetition of risibly dangerous/preposterous assertion = fact-based statement” every—single—time. In this way our norms die, day by day by day.
4/14/20
Précis of my doctor visit:
My doctor is a tall, thin, Russian woman whom I’ve never seen not dressed as if she’s going out for a night on the town. Today she was wearing scrubs, two masks, latex gloves, no makeup, hair in messy ponytail, glasses instead of contact lenses, dark circles under eyes. This in itself was deeply unsettling.
Her reaction to my negative covid test result: *scoffs in elaborate Slavic gutturals and gestures*.
She seems reasonably sure that I have covid; says tests have a high false-negative rate. Says she will administer antibody test when it becomes available to be sure. In any event, I have viral pneumonia, so there’s no further course of action to take other than rest and avoiding getting infected with something else.
On the plus side, my blood oxygenation was 98% and I did not have a fever. My lungs were not “making any bad sounds.” I am to get another chest X-ray on Monday (4/20) and see her again next Tuesday (4/21), and report immediately to the ER if I have trouble breathing.
4/16/20
Skipped a day, sorry. Feeling OK, if a little weak and short of breath. The general atmosphere of things, as perceived through the lens of social media and news: impatience and low-grade anxiety curdling rapidly into full-blown anger and inanity. There is a vacuum of leadership at the national level that is attempting to pass itself off as strength. Control, as the late William S. Burroughs liked to say, is being controlled by its need to control—but it is a brainless, flailing façade of control that convinces few and does nothing constructive.
Reading some Gary Indiana essays (Utopia’s Debris) these days, which has been entertaining. Indiana gives uniquely nuanced and respectful consideration to many of literary Modernism’s and Postmodernism’s bêtes noires: L.-F. Céline, Thomas Bernhard, W. S. Burroughs, Rudolph Wurlitzer, Emmanuel Carrère, Curzio Malaparte, et al.—my kind of guys. He also incinerates many a political sacred cow, acidifies every capitalist bromide, and desecrates every Puritanical more within striking distance. I regret having only seldom read his columns and reviews until now.
I would like to be gardening, but it’s been too cold and I haven’t felt up to it anyway.13 Making bread today, although I’m running low on flour and flour is still nearly unobtainable (as is toilet paper, still, which those of us who can remember Cold War criticisms of the Soviet Union find richly ironic).
My parents called me this afternoon to check on my wellbeing. During the course of the conversation, my father says, “So, your mom’s brother says his hairdresser told him that [Microsoft CEO] Bill Gates is behind the pandemic.” I groaned. Conspiracy theory. But we had a good laugh over it, because one of the few things my father and I agree on is that we both intensely dislike my mother’s brothers.14 And then of course he told me that he thinks (based on unknown, but likely suspect, sources) that covid-19 is a Chinese biological weapon escaped from the lab.15 Sigh….
4/17/20
It is 0045 hours and I have finally fucking broken down and purchased a 20-pound bag of bread flour I found on the Internet for an exorbitant price but with promise of quick delivery. And I think I forgot to mention that slaughterhouses and meat-processing plants—now mostly owned by huge multinational agricultural conglomerates instead of actual farmers or even smaller, regional companies—are rife with covid-19, largely because many of their workers are immigrants who can’t afford medical treatment or days off and in any case fear harassment/arrest/possible deportation if they show their faces at a medical facility.16 Now anticipating, and hopefully ready for, food shortages. And so to bed. #MAGA
[later]
My epidemiologist friend at University of Arizona was just furloughed, because experts in disease control and public health are the people you want to furlough during a pandemic. Some states are unveiling plans to “reopen for business” in two weeks, despite the still-increasing numbers of cases and deaths. Stupid, stupid, stupid.
And as if that weren’t enough, the recently-extinguished wildfires that were blazing in the Exclusion Zone near Chernobyl—blanketing Kyiv in radioactive smoke and making it temporarily the city with the world’s worst air quality—have been reignited. But wait, there’s more!17 The fires are now believed to have been intentionally set by a death cult based on the 1972 Soviet science fiction novel Roadside Picnic, by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky. And that’s not all!18 The conflagration is nearing some of the most radioactively toxic areas of the Exclusion Zone. Stay tuned!
4/18/20
Feel like shit today, worse than yesterday. Chest hurts. Throat hurts (concerning that I couldn’t remember how to spell throat just now). Making bread anyway, because Fuck you, SARS-CoV-2.
4/19/20
The thing about keeping this diary as a regular exercise over time instead of as a one-day shot (and the reason I have never been good about keeping a regular journal) is that it is tedious, especially when almost nothing is happening in one’s daily life. Today I put in a grocery order to pick up tomorrow. I cleaned the litterbox and took out the trash. I watered my seedlings. I made a loaf of bread and a roasted head of cauliflower for dinner. I even walked the dog.
The only remotely interesting thing that happened today was that when we were eating dinner, a cat wandered onto our front porch that had the same distinctive markings as my wife’s cat, who died 10 years ago, shortly after we moved to Muncie. This was doubly weird because we were just talking about him the other day for the first time in probably years. The cat (the original one, my wife’s late pet) was a rather unpleasant creature, the kind of animal that would only revivify to spite us, or because some sort of unholy anti-Rapture was going on, so this would probably not count as a good omen, if I believed in such things. But I don’t, so it was just an odd coincidence.
4/20/20
Today: Skype with neurologist, chest X-ray, hand-holding grocery shopper via text messaging while she bought our food for curbside pickup.
Today: April 20, the unofficial annual feast day of marijuana. I wouldn’t mind celebrating it myself, but my lungs hurt too much. No weed for me. Maybe next year.
4/21-4/22/20
I’m going to wrap this up now. My X-ray results came back clear; my doctor says it will be 4-6 weeks before I fully recover. When I got home I took a long nap and had one of the most awful, vivid nightmares of my entire life, in fact it involved a convalescent fever nightmare inside of a nightmare—nested nightmares; I won’t go into detail, but it was about (what else?) the end of the world.
Today I turned over my garden, and even though my back hurts and I’m kind of exhausted, the exercise and fresh air made me feel better than I have in weeks, maybe months.
My wife is justifiably angry with her family for not adhering to strict social distancing protocols. Her mother has lung disease and her sister’s family…well, they don’t seem to get this lock-down thing at all. It’s terrifying to watch what was once history’s most scientifically-advanced and ostensibly high-minded civilization dying of collective denial, on so many fronts.
I leave you with a few choice quotations from the last novel I read, which encapsulate my feelings right now:
“No one else is out except the gardeners. Legions of them on the lawns, working quietly. There is one house where a famously liberal rich person lives. On this lawn, the gardeners are allowed to play their Mexican music.
[…]
“There is a period after every disaster in which people wander around trying to figure out if it is truly a disaster. Disaster psychologists use the term ‘milling’ to describe most people’s default actions when they find themselves in a frightening new situation.
[…]
“And then it is another day and another and another, but I will not go on about this because no doubt you too have experienced time.”19