Playing for Time

Day 247 – 11/17/2020

Emerging into the sunlight today, thankful for hot water and long showers. And Asian food. And people walking dogs in the sunshine. This epoch, with its endless hours available for thinking, is bringing it home for me in so many ways… and one semi-detached observation is that I’m clearly not evolving upward for the long haul, so I have to fix that ASAP.

That’s not even the half of it. I’ve “dialed” a wood-encased crank phone on the wall – our ring was one long, three shorts. My playlist back in the day, before transistors and recorders, came from Les Paul & Mary Ford 45rpms spun on a 32-volt player because we had to generate our own electricity on the farm via a windmill and a wall of batteries until rural electrification finally came along and changed everything. Our tiny black & white TV didn’t show up ’til I was in 6th grade and we had one channel, mostly snow, and a max of three channels in the end. Out there in the country, we didn’t know steps were for counting – they just got us from here to there while we blew the stink off. I see food as legitimate art, but nobody told us we were supposed to be documenting it in photos, so the world missed seeing some killer hotdogs and salmon cakes.

It isn’t that I’m feeling old, just succumbing to road-weariness. We have the great relief that Joseph Biden has been elected president of the U.S., balanced by the fact that DJT intends to follow the norms in the same manner he has from the start, which is to say not at all. So the news is good, but everything continues unresolved. In the meantime, nobody seems to be on the job at the White House, nor in any way managing the COVID pandemic while it rages and replicates by the hour. That’s the only reality that matters right now – until we tame the virus, all else suffers. The virus doesn’t move, we move it… and that’s the rub.

Sometimes humans have a hard time believing in things we can’t see, hear, smell, touch, or taste, so the pandemic is a true challenge, but it’s out there and it’s having its way with us. Kansas right now is #1 among nine states in rate of case rise. People are dying of an illness they deny exists with their last breath and they don’t stop yelling abusive crap at nurses until they’re intubated. It’s a challenge to deal with that kind of idiocy, but it’s here, it’s real, and are we going to let the experts jump on it before it wipes us out? That’s really the question now.