I’m starting to shelter from social media for great swatches of the day – in times of crisis and conflict it has a way of reaching out and grabbing me where I’m most vulnerable. Two distinct and disparate value systems are going headers against each other while everything else conspires to kill us, and the images are seared into my permanent record. This one has followed me around for a couple of days…
It isn’t photoshopped.
Eugenics, pure and simple, and we actually find ourselves at this point in history.
I’m the weak for all the reasons… Kim’s the weak because asthma and a heart attack/bypass… John’s the “weak” for potential lack of PPE while on shift. Most everyone I love falls into the category of THE WEAK for one reason or another – who decides who to treat… or not? Death panels, anyone?
A heavy attrition rate in nursing homes, prisons, poverty-stricken communities, minority populations, and among the aging would help the economy recover… that seems to be the mindset at this point. We have met the enemy and he is us. Gives the concept of shelter a whole new meaning – I’m picturing a cave in a remote location, the sooner the better. We old survivors are becoming prey.
Happy 420 Day, boys and girls… thought I’d start with the GOOD news.
No diary entry yesterday… feels like I’ve run out of words.
Here’s the thing… Moms are… moms. You really need to know only one thing about us – don’t fuck with our kids. Mine’s an RN in Atlanta, where they’re expecting the virus to peak sometime this week, and the venom being displayed toward the medical community has ended me.
I’m done. The cruelty of the MAGA movement has helped me to kill my darlings:
a naive belief that if people just hear the truth it will change them
Midwestern guilt that makes me leave the door open to people for too long
any remaining misconceptions about what Christians stand for
a deluded impression that when required to suck it up and deal, Americans knew how
As John (my kid) said to me this morning, “It’s hard to tell how or when a shift will occur in anyone that will turn them into the very creation they once abhorred” … but I’m watching it happen in real time.
“All logical arguments can be defeated by the simple refusal to reason logically.”–Physicist Steven Weinberg
This short column by John Pavlovitz says it perfectly. I hope you’ll read it…
Feels like I’m doing something right when my baby sister texts and says, “Are you okay? I keep waiting for today’s blog post.”
Accidentally took a Saturday off – our 6th in “captivity” – and checked out for a while. I’ve found a group of free games that are all basically Candy Crush with furniture, and their little worlds are so sweet they’re easy to get lost in.
Almost 5 o’clock… the news cycle over the past few days has been discouraging beyond imagining. The country’s being engulfed in a civil war – not just a figure of speech anymore – and in a battle over whether money or life matters more, nobody wins.
Don’t even know what to write. The day-to-day is exactly that, so…
Sadly, the global pandemic has become, in the “United” States, a civil war over the economy versus the value of human life, and the mood is turning ugly. People “defending the Constitution” are showing up en masse with weapons and Confederate flags, yelling and honking car horns outside hospitals, blocking ambulance entrances, and otherwise creating added mayhem for everyone who’s trying to help save lives. And people I don’t recognize anymore are cheering them on. Soul-killing.
I want to cut all my hair off – it’s pelt-ish unless it’s chopped up like bird feathers, and it’s weighing me down.
MOOD: Weighed down. I’ll have to choose an alternate one, however, because the source of my discouragement is not changing anytime soon, if ever. We’re two separate nations and never the twain shall meet – I do get that now.
The sun’s shining for a bit, we have a promise of rain today, there’s no shortage of things to eat or do… so I choose mellow for my functioning mood. It is what it is. It will be what it will be.
Elizabeth Kübler-Ross would be gratified – I’ve worked my way through the five stages of grief a few times in various combinations and on this random Tuesday in April I’m a sentient lump of acceptance, or resignation, or “wot the hell.” Where else is there to go?
The anger stage does hang in there under everything, though, so my instincts have steered me toward ultra-light entertainment. If you can’t find me on Facebook, Twitter, in a book, or writing, I’m playing Words With Friends, or hanging out in Gardenscapes or Fishdom. Tried Township but I can’t take the nonstop responsibility, jeez.
Looks like we get low 50s and some sunshine today, and I hear Kim’s key in the door so he’s back from his morning walk. I may or may not have heard talk of waffles…
Chilly morning after a frigid windy night – sounded more like the prairie than the forest.
DEEP THOUGHTS ON A COLD MONDAY: I started training for this years ago, this social distancing, and every day I settle further into what I know is true. Being a loose cannon in a big extended family makes you figure out who you are or get run over, and you learn that self-defense is a waste of energy. It is what it is. It will be what it will be. My goals haven’t changed… live well now, inside myself, and head for a happy old age.
We’ve heard of at least one Lawrence church congregation that met together yesterday. We’ve been at 39 virus cases here for a few days… we’ll see where we are in two weeks…
Churches aren’t being attacked or persecuted, they’re being asked to live out what they say they believe in – love. Care for other people. Solid stewardship in the world. So yeah… what made me stay so long at the fair?
This must be a Monday. I should eat something and go to work on the hours…
Ate stuff. Played computer games. Left the news on, avoiding city hospital segments.
Folded laundry, paid bills, looked out the windows. Gray skies again.
Balmy afternoon, sans sunshine.
The minutes ticked by, the sun went down, we gave it up again.
*****
… Day 26 – 04/07/2020
The fine line between tuning out and DROPPING out is blurring a little. Yesterday had a never-ending quality to it and I thought far too many thoughts. Not having the answers to the simplest questions is a form of torture…
Being labeled an essential worker doesn’t make you expendable. But maybe we have an endless supply of dedicated humans to feed into the maw, so essential protections for the essential members of society are not an essential part of the picture. There’s no place to hide from that knowledge.
Knowing that nothing under the sun will ever change the conversation in America weighs heavy. It would be a well of strength if we were all in this together… but we can’t hook it up where it counts in a crisis. We’re fighting the virus, the unknown, our fears, ourselves, and each other while Americans of all ages die in a battle they can’t win. If this strikes you as being political, well… point made.
So that was yesterday, my diary friend. This morning is beautiful so far… biscuits & gravy in a bit… and here’s a puppy…
Yesterday baby sis, who lives across town, had a story to tell me that was too long for text, so we made the weird decision to use our phones for TALKING to each other. The belly laughs and the sound of her voice were good juju. I needed exactly that.
Sister Señorita Margarita Rita has called me her second mommy a lot of times since 1995, but she’s also returned the favor more than once, and she helped me take something off my plate yesterday that I wasn’t dealing with in a good way. Perspective… wisdom… and somebody with skin on besides Kim, saying words to me, making me laugh, letting me feel the lub. There was peace when I put my head on the pillow last night.💗
It’s sobering to know how much we need each other as humans and how much we generally despise each other, globally-speaking, on a daily basis. Those things are under there all the time, but we aren’t aware of them moment by moment because life streaks on and we make sure there’s no time for introspection, examination of facts, or new doors leading to unsettling change. We’re all so VERY human.
Solitude is my jam, but with the great world hum dampened to a murmur, I’m lonely for voices… life… people. Watching East Lawrence come alive in shades of green, white, and pink is conducive to sweeter moods, but the absence of all the walkers with their dogs and babies, the missing shouts of kids skateboarding, riding bikes and chasing each other down the street, makes the air feel a little ponderous and not quite real.
Not complaining, just observing. We never know what we have ’til it’s gone, and that holds true for all of life. We figure out how much it meant when it isn’t ours anymore. Stupid human pet tricks.
Fourth weekend of sheltering in place – Kim’s been out for groceries, wearing nitrile gloves and now a mask, and for solitary walks and bike rides, but I haven’t been further than the balcony since we shut the door. It’s okay, staying in isn’t a problem.
Just really not all about humans right now. For instance, I’d rather not know that in today’s economy certain people are considered too costly to save. The coronavirus effort is eating into the 1%’s share of the pie, and the worker bees, who are strictly Not Our Kind, are wasting, by which we mean utilizing in the name of life and death, “our” supplies. The supplies paid for with worker bee tax dollars and stockpiled for the use of the elites, not the states, most especially not the blue ones. Somebody forgot to tell Jared and his father-in-law how this whole “united states” thing works.
I’m not mad, bro, just doing a little self-healing… trying to accept the facts. It’s no surprise that the lives of boomers and other slackers mean nothing to gazillionaires, I know that in my bones. And since the man who would be king is incapable of accepting blame for anything… anything… he’s landed on the medical community as a scapegoat for this virus he said wouldn’t be happening here. I guess he and his tribe will never have need of those heroes. But even that new strain of cruelty isn’t shocking – we’ve seen everything he’s done and said for the past twelve years and longer.
What I’m still sorting is that people I love – and thought were intelligent, caring, compassionate, empathetic people – supported him, voted for him, haven’t backed off their fealty in any measure, and will brook no criticism of him. There’s a word for it.
I may have snipped an inch off my hair… more or less… here and there… I am killing at this stay-in-your-cave game.
That’s okay, I just came to talk, you don’t have to do anything…
Sleep – never my best friend, always kind of a flirty elusive thing – is messing with me again. We became BFFs after I married Kim sixteen years ago, and I slept nine or ten hours a night like magic, plus an afternoon nap. My brain shut off when my eyes closed, no worries, and out I went. Not liking this new normal where I lie down and my brain and body fight me and each other for the next foreseeable hours. So yeah, just thought I’d get that off my list…
I keep expecting to wake up one of these mornings and find that my focus has come back, some oomph, a hint of drive, but the opposite is happening… my give-a-shit is experiencing technical difficulties. Write a few words, read a page or two in a book, play Words with Friends, again, some more, work a jigsaw puzzle, stare out the windows. Meanwhile, I’m pretty sure there are a couple of bills buried on my desk, or on the dresser whose load never lightens while the little stacks become bigger stacks and get overly friendly with each other until nobody knows what’s what anymore. It was still looking slightly purposeful before all this hit, so I could pretend not to see it, but it’s time to sort it out…
Starting to sort the metaphysical aspect. It is what it is. It will be what it will be. People have made their choices, from the top down, and the wheels are in motion. No amount of wailing and gnashing of teeth will slow its roll. A Mariana Trench full of human tears won’t alter its course. The only unknown is how bad. Saw this morning that the Pentagon has ordered another 100,000 body bags.
Beyond a couple of trusted news people, the only voices I care to listen to are Andrew Cuomo and Dr. Fauci. Governor Cuomo’s calm measured tones, telling us the truth morning after morning with no varnish on it, are like a security blanket. He makes me cry every day because he’s a real human, taking responsibility, trying to protect his people, speaking TRUTH. I can handle just about anything if you give me the facts and get out of the way. Once you lie to me or show me you’re all about the cya, I’m done. The governor is respecting his fellow humans by giving it to us straight in a low-key way, and he’s a life preserver.
Slept more hours than not last night, so there’s that. I’ve awakened my Sleeping Sciatic by spending most of my time at my computer, because sure, why not, so it has a say in everything right now including in the middle of the night. Would it kill me to at least FEEL good?
Haven’t yet worked my way past the basic divide in the pandemic issue… one side says it’s about people, the other says it’s about money. What’s being done to our medical community here in the U.S. is heartbreaking, infuriating, crazy-making. All I can do for now is try not to inflict myself unnecessarily upon the world until I can swallow the deeply-entrenched cruelty that’s been awakened in our society – lots of awakenings this morning, huh…
Maybe I just need to cut ’em slack? This from my friend Mylène AF in Quebec:
“Reading some people’s posts, I realize how many have not grasped the severity of this situation. The fact that we are in a time of exceptional circumstances where NONE of the old rules apply and only exceptional measures will do. Everything has changed forever. The world we knew before is gone. Let it go. Those rules don’t apply anymore. Move through the stages of grief if you must. There is a definitive before and after line here.”
**********************************
Jeff Bezos isn’t intellectually challenged, though, so this makes no sense. It strikes this farm girl as a no-brainer… If almost 9 million dollars per hour rolling onto your side of the ledger isn’t enough to take care of the people who make that money for you, there will never be enough. It will never happen. The poor(er) among us will never be cared for, ever. Today there is no one poorer among us than Jeff Bezos – I wonder if he’s even slightly embarrassed about telling us that.
But perspective helps. Kim’s been sending lush guitar notes through the house for the past hour and now he’s making the Saturday breakfast on Wednesday – he knows how to get me to make actual food part of my day, and the flavors are a mood-lifter – sloooow food, with the love cooked in, as my sweet cousin Lonnie Joe always said. Feeling better already.
So yeah, some food, more coffee, sunshine, birds, balcony, Kimmers is going for a walk after breakfast… I’ll accomplish one thing I can point to as participation in living… and we’ll find ourselves at the end of another day. We have only so many chances to get this right, by which I mean everything. We’ll either figure out how to help each other and survive as a species or we won’t, end of story.
Yesterday was Crash & Burn day. Encountered asshole-ishness all over social media nonstop, and by bedtime I gave in to the bruises and cried myself to sleep for the first time in about seventeen years.
My Pollyanna heart can never retain the fact that at least a third of my fellow citizens don’t want what I want. They prove in a crunch that what they want is chaos and license, and they’re making it harder for the rest of us to survive. And while we do what we can to protect ourselves and the people we love most, other Americans are calling us liars and accusing us of ganging up on their president.
Things like this don’t happen here, dammit, this is America. So somebody must be hoaxin’ us, right? Can’t be real.
SOMEthing real is happening. Medical personnel are dropping like flies – at least 51 doctors in Italy alone, I don’t know the current U.S. count – while they try to save the rest of us, without the tools they need. Wearing week-old masks (regs say to change after each infected patient) and draped in trash bags, slogging through hospital hallways clogged with patients on gurneys, hoping to save more people than they lose, and dreaming of just a couple of minutes to sit down somewhere. Or to pee – who knows when that last happened? Food? That was so two days ago.
The mean-spiritedness from the doubters is incomprehensible. Somehow it’s the fault of the medical profession that we’re all leaderless and stumbling in the dark? It’s OUR fault as ordinary everyday citizens that we allowed ourselves to be lied to without end?
The worst part of the pandemic so far – until the body count shocks everybody out of their shoes – is getting to know who we share a planet with. The philosophical/political/cultural divides are revealing more than we may have wanted to know. We don’t all share the same values, that’s being made painfully clear, and we’ve forgotten how to lay the differences aside for the good of all.
We can’t seem to communicate with each other – the two conversations never come together. It’s all about anger and suspicion and ideologies that simply can’t mesh – there are things unleashed in the nation that are tearing us apart at the seams, things that can’t be reconciled with the concept of a republic, a democracy, a united group of states. Unity has been shattered and replaced with a veneer of arrogance, an “I’m right, you’re wrong” approach to all of life.
It all feels unbearably sad. An ignominious end to a fairly good idea. We’ll still be a nation when this is over, in some bright tomorrow… but we’ll never be the same. That’s either the best possible news or the worst. Hope we all get to stick around for the ending…
Had my first sleepless night since the pandemic broke. Couldn’t get comfortable, tame the aching, stop my thoughts. The person charged with overseeing the welfare of the nation is bullying blue-state governors, accusing doctors and nurses of theft, hoarding, and black market activity, because given the chance that’s what HE would do. My disgust and fury are off the chain. City ERs and ICUs are war zones, nobody’s working their own angle, for god’s sake! Their only aim is to stay alive long enough to make a difference.
Jeez, any wonder I can’t sleep? Top epidemiologists in the world and he consults Mr. Baseball…
I never really knew what hate feels like until landing in this era. I’ve seen its effects all my life, especially during the Civil Rights struggle, and I watched the white supremacists come out of the woodwork during Barack Obama’s time. SPOILER ALERT: They never left, they somehow gained influence and they’ve brought friends. I’ve been angry at people, furious, ready to fight to the end… but I’ve never known what it was to hate. I’ve learned. I despise every atom of Donald J. Trump with a white-hot cleansing fire. I find no honor in him, no respect, no character, no intelligence, no self-control, no class. It’s ALL about him, ALL the time. He displays not an ounce of empathy for another living thing on the face of the earth.
Family members, friends, their kids, the nurses and doctors of the world, are on the front lines doing what they’re trained and conditioned to do, with one hand tied behind their backs. They’re putting themselves at risk every hour they work, and they do it by choice because that’s who they are. For them to be slandered with accusations of theft and waste is so out of the norm it doesn’t bear thinking about. They’re reusing nasty old masks and other personal protection gear, strictly against regs, because there isn’t enough stuff lying around to STEAL in the first place!
Lumpy has no idea what those life-and-death hospital scenes look like – just as he has no clue what real Americans deal with day to day during GOOD times. Suit him up, send him in, let him stay on his feet for twelve hours breathing through a funky mask and standing in body fluids. And then send him back in there the next day and the next. With the same mask. And when he whines, slap him so hard his cousins fall down.
I’ve wondered over the years what it would take for me to get political on Facebook again and bring it to my blog. Answer: this. All of it since 2015. It finally reached critical mass and toppled of its own weight. It’s my battle and I’m up for it… but first you cry.
DISCLAIMER: SOME of the white people in red states.
And it was night, and it was morning… fifteen days since I walked into our loft and shut the door. Kim’s in and out for necessities, but I haven’t even been in the hallways. I’ve been sick since we sequestered, but haven’t been tested. They’d just send me home to recuperate anyway. I cough and break into sweats ’round the clock, and in the night I wake up wondering if my next breath’s coming… but it always does.
On a far more critical front, moms of healthcare workers the world over are holding our collective breath, hoping our kiddos somehow get the protection and the supplies they need. It’s a limbo like this mama has never fallen into before and I’m not a nice person right now. Speak truth to me or get out of my face. Help or GET THE HELL OUT OF THE WAY. I’m not dying because of lies and I don’t want other people to either. But they are, dammit, more every day.
Food holds zero interest – I have to make myself eat. It feels counterproductive to tuning out. People are so very gullible and under-informed with their remarks – and so cutting – my belly’s doing flip-flops continuously. The hardest thing about the Trump Era is the cruelty.
Kimmers is filling the spa tub. We’ll soak and talk and I’ll probably cry and we’ll climb out feeling a little better somehow. So grateful not to be living this part of life alone… so many are, and dying without human touch to ease the transition. How much can hearts break and keep on beating?
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Welcome to my weekly blog on life's happiness. We are all human and we all deserve to smile. Click a blog title or scroll down. Thanks for stopping by.
Creative humour, satire and other bad ideas by Ross Murray, an author living in the Eastern Townships of Quebec, Canada. Is it truth or fiction? Only his hairdresser knows for sure.
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