Never know what mood morning will deliver after a night’s sleep full of murky but seemingly significant dreams. I slept well last night but woke up near tears, so who knows. We have sunshine and low 50s this afternoon and Kim’s out west playing PickleBall on SPL’s outdoor courts – and temps through at least next Thursday say that could happen a few more times, depending on wind. I’m never so happy for him as when he can be outside living his best life.
Meanwhile, I’m here looking at a desk that needs attention and hoping today’s energy allotment hits soon. May have to fall asleep to TV news while I wait…
Yeah, that happened. Still don’t hate the condition of my workspace enough to fix it.
Some days, Diary, are just days. And yet not, because life is still out there and things are happening and I can’t stop thinking about ANY of it. I was struck yesterday by this quote:
“Joseph Campbell said that the command to love our neighbor is obviously one of the hardest of all religious concepts. But to recognize our connection to others goes to the core of life’s mystery, and when you live as if it’s so – you are threading yourself into the long-train of history and the fabric of civilization. Perhaps the simplest way to say it is that ‘We’re all in this together. We are all first responders to one another.'” – Bill Moyers
Ended my afternoon with this – joyful, amazing, incredibly moving. Powerful therapy.
Can’t remember why it’s called Black Friday but I’ve never done one and this year would be an incredibly stupid time to start. Kim said Mass Street was quiet this morning so the stores didn’t open early for sales – maybe #lfk isn’t going to the dance this time around.
I’m seeing lots of Twitter comments about crying jags and teary breakdowns on The Day After. I have a feeling we stayed home and did it right, all brave and stiff-upper-lipped, and today the knowledge of everything we’ve lost is proving too heavy. Will there ever be a road back to what we knew and believed to be real?
This day feels ponderous to carry so I’ll have to break it up into livable chunks – sixteen unbroken hours of staying awake for it is unmanageable. Tried not to write about it, but I can’t go all day without breathing. Tried not to talk about it to Kim but he’s the only one here. Looking for a diversion in the bottom of the toy box that will take me outside myself and into the sunlight. Feels like it will be a long winter, with days and days of isolation and uncertainty, so I gotta figure it out, I can’t whine my way through another year of this. And by the time a vaccine gets final approval, a distribution system is in place, and we’ve all received our two shots with a month between, it will most likely take that long. Then we’ll have to keep wearing masks and social distancing until we achieve community transmission reduction. Long haul ahead, Mama, pull up your big-girl undies.
Everything from the sublime to the ridiculous makes me cry now. For months into the pandemic I couldn’t keep my head corralled long enough to read a book, and since I got back to it every one I’ve picked up has made me shed good tears, from Alice McDermott’s After This, to Barlow Adams’ Appalachian Alchemy, to the book I finished today The World Without You by Joshua Henkin, which had me sobbing more than once. Even when I have trouble sticking with them, I can’t imagine a world without all the books we want to read – they’re the best thing for taking us from here to there, and I have a big need for that.
It feels all wrong for this to be Thanksgiving week when it should still be summer. Since we’ve never made a big deal of holidays beyond our first Christmas together, the solitude of this holiday season will affect us less than most. And they’re 24-hour days like any other – they pass. Blessings on them all, I malign no traditions.
At least once a week someone asks on Facebook or Twitter “Do you personally know anyone who’s died from COVID?” Rod A, who was a year behind me all the way through school, died a few months ago, and last night I was notified that Loren D, a friend from another lifetime, had died of the virus in Hutchinson’s Stormont-Vail Hospital. There have been friends of friends, parents of friends, but these two I knew well. The longer it’s allowed to rage uncontrolled the more people we’re going to lose and my sense is that it will become real to every one of us before it’s over.
Wet out this morning and just above freezing. There are days when the gray skies put me under. Hope this won’t be one of them.
We’re headed for 76º and sunny, so if it isn’t too windy for PickleBall Kim will get a reprieve from the four walls – plus his walk and a bike ride. He already took pictures at the river this morning.
I updated my iMac to Big Sur OS and it wouldn’t boot back up so I left it because I’d already clocked out for the day. This morning Google and I found the key and we’re in business again, whew! This baby’s my lifeline for the foreseeable.
“Lawrence’s hospital is projecting a more than 500% increase in COVID-19 inpatients in the next two weeks, Douglas County Health Officer Dr. Thomas Marcellino, an infectious disease expert, said Tuesday night at a town hall meeting on the pandemic.” – Lawrence Journal World
I’m really not cranked about any excursion that requires packing a diaper bag.
We can’t save people from themselves, we can’t even save ourselves from them. They seem bent on killing us to prove a point, although that point is elusive – the actual why. Simple health protocols have become too difficult for Americans – what was it that generated this visceral lack of concern for the human race? What has incited nearly half our population to this level of animus toward the ones who try hardest to save us from ourselves, and to literally keep us breathing? What activates that desire to inflict harm, to punish other humans for being? It’s in all of us, we want to be right. We want to have our voices heard, whether we’re saying anything or not. We want to be justified in our choices and decisions. And most of all, we don’t want anyone telling us what to do. And we’re losing the fight for life.
Kim’s photo of the granite bedrock below the dam is talking to me this morning. Took it millions of years to get that way, and man’s machinations don’t affect it much. Granite will still line the riverbed millions of years from now if nobody pushes the red button. So is the lesson simply to BE THERE? To hang in for the long haul? To let it all wash over you and on to the ocean? Mr. Granite Slab does well with that – feelings aren’t part of his chemistry, Mr. GS don’t care. The rest of us are on our own.
Foggy and gray this morning. Great breakfast, and now I’m drinking iced coffee ’cause my tummy likes it better that way. Farmers Market is set up in the wet chill – I think they run until the week before Thanksgiving – so there are people back and forth. Life rolls on.
With everything that’s been going on in the past few weeks, I accidentally spaced off my fibromyalgia meds and brought on a nasty flare. By now I’m wondering if I’ve kicked myself out of remission through my own stupidity, which will truly disgust me. Hello purple gremlins, please play nice.
I lifted this First Nations poem from my friend Paige…
And these words from 89-year-old Dan Rather went straight to my heart…
“COVID is sadness. Profound sadness. It is suffering, and sacrifice. It is perhaps the greatest abdication of presidential responsibility in American history. I have seen a lot of death and tragedy in my lifetime. But this shakes me to the core, completely and irrevocably.”
Life is never linear, thank goodness… but some things move the graph so far they have to be processed in small chunks. That’s probably what the gray days are for…
Today is Friday the 13th in the year 2020 – what could possibly go wrong? In truth it feels like a lucky day to me and I’m expecting good things to happen. Or maybe I’ve finally gone ’round the bend and this will be the day the meteor hits. If so, we’ve had a good run.
Our human connections help define us, and without them for so long I’m drifting a little – the people I love help anchor me, and sometimes I miss The Before when some of us didn’t know each other so very well. I miss our three boys and nothing yet indicates when we can be together again. A cousin was going to drive across several states with her daughter for a visit and I had to tell her no, one of the hardest things I’ve done. All because of a “so-called pandemic” that was really only a hyped-up flu, participated in by the entire world as a fvck-you to Donald Trump… that didn’t magically disappear the day after the election like a massive caravan of invaders from Mexico… even now, after all the math says Biden & Harris have won.
Instead, because conspiracy theorists and grumpy-ass naysayers politicized a virus and the idea of protecting ourselves against it, America is in the middle of a humanitarian crisis that’s spiraling out of control. We have a medical system that’s overburdened across the nation and personnel who are burnt beyond even talking about it.
It’s going to be an uphill battle for President-Elect Biden to bring this wholly unnecessary disaster under control, but we know he won’t throw up his hands, slide it off onto states that didn’t vote for him, and absolve himself of any responsibility – because he’s an adult, he knows how this works, and he’s the man of the hour. I cannot wait for sanity to be the standard operating system again. Even with a vaccine on the horizon, we’ll likely be into the 3rd quarter of 2021 before doses can be delivered worldwide and infection rates fought to submission, while the isolation becomes fallout that has to be addressed on its own… and already has. Had America simply paid attention in March… April… May… and taken the guidelines and mandates for what they were – an effort to save lives and our economic viability – instead of interpreting the benevolent wisdom as a ruse to somehow steal their freedom… we wouldn’t find ourselves at this frankly terrifying juncture now.
We’re losing a 9/11’s worth of American lives every two days, and soon it will be 2,000+ people every single day. That should be a difficult statistic for even the most jaded among us. They’re running out of refrigerated morgue trucks in El Paso, turning away car accident victims at Utah hospitals, burying entire populations of nursing homes plus their caregivers, repeated ad infinitum across the nation. Aside from our temporary lost standing in the world, the racial injustice and warfare in our streets, and the wreckage of our economy, a non-response to a global pandemic, with its resulting carnage, seems a very high price to pay for the demand to be right and make the liberals cry.
It’s 10am and the sun’s shining bright on a 33º morning, so I need to soak up every minute of it… the days are short, and losing the light by 5pm lets the melancholy creep in and dim my inner lights for a while every evening now. My optimism is increasing hour by hour and the knowledge that the grown-ups are finally stepping in cheers me, but the flip-side is knowing how much opposition is out there to truth, progress, innovation, freedom of expression, and room and opportunity for every kind of human. But ya’ start somewhere…
Hello this morning to a world once again filled with possibility. President-Elect Joe Biden named his pandemic task force today, all of them doctors, all of them experts in their field. He and Vice-President-Elect Kamala Harris are assembling their transition teams and discussing cabinet appointments. Meanwhile, as my friend The Hoarse Whisperer said, “Is it just me or can everyone else feel the collective world losing interest in even hearing Trump? Feels to me like the world is just ghosting him.”
What I’ll remember most about November 7, 2020, is the car horns, jubilant cheering, and dancing in the streets, not just here in #lfk but around the world. The mayor of Paris sent his congratulations “WELCOME BACK, AMERICA!” and world leaders other than Putin, Bolsonaro, Erdogan, Ji Xinping, and Obrador, all five of whom had a vested interest in a continued DJT romp, have expressed gratitude for our release from the nightmare. Finally the adults will be in charge again and that’s going to be huge.
Still processing the flip-side… learning that it wasn’t 30% of our fellow Americans who wanted another four years of chaotic dismantling of democratic government, it’s closer to 45%, meaning about every second person in the country other than Black people likes what we’ve been watching and experiencing since 2016. That’s weapons-grade knowledge… what do we even do with that?
We’ll have to find ways to live peaceably with each other, starting with thoughtful communication. It won’t be easy. Trust and respect have been broken and won’t be magically restored – it will take work to put things right, if ever they can be again.
I’ve been up for a few hours now, long enough to start processing last night’s events and what they’ll mean. My ruminating, reactions, and responses are still all over the place, so for today I’m letting social media friends help me turn it all into words, and there’s no reason to soft-pedal anything at this point – that ship has sailed.
Langston Hughes, who grew up just down the street from where I live now.
What’s looking likely is that Joe Biden and Kamala Harris will eventually win the White House, Dems will hold the House, the GOP will remain ensconced in the Senate as obstructionists for at least two more years, and the Supreme Court will continue as an enigma unto itself.
Here we are… the months, weeks, days, and hours have passed, one by endless one, and we find ourselves on the doorstep of KNOWING. We’ve agonized our way through every bit of it, pulling for America, afraid to hope. We have collective PTSD, not just from the election of 2016 but the four years that followed, and we need a divorce from our abuser so we can get well. The polls are in and tabulated and will change only infinitesimally before tomorrow, so we are where we are. Gonna hide and watch, and hope the growing sense of peace in my gut isn’t just a protective device to keep me intact.
It’s a sunny Monday, the start of a five-day warm-up, and I’m taking the light pouring through the blinds as a good omen. Maybe I’ll get something done today, strike it off the list and use it as momentum. Not sure why it matters, but it still does. Something about self-respect.
The PickleBall players should have a good week of it, with the sunshine and warmer temps, so things are looking up all over, dare I say it? I’m ready to put hour-by-hour awareness of what’s emanating from the White House on the back burner, relax a tad, and leave it to people who know what they’re doing. Ready to enjoy and talk about books, music, art, movies, all the things that make living a joy. Ready to live an unexamined life for a week or two. As we’ve seen clearly now, all of human existence is politics in one sense or another, and this will be my platform for the duration:
Listening to the experts and daring to hope. It’s a bold course, but I’m here for it. One more day…
Welp, Diary, I spent yesterday crying. It was apparently my pre-election meltdown, and once the dam was open it was all over, I couldn’t stop – just too much of too much for too long. Cried ’til I was dehydrated like a prune and I hope that’ll be it for awhile – I realize now that it was a slow-rolling panic attack. The shock of 2016 still resonates and I’m afraid I’d jinx everything if I were to easily believe in the possibility of rescue and peace and the milk of human kindness again. If we ever do get back there, we have to safeguard it with our lives.
No crying today, we were busy all morning and the sun’s shining. I was around more people this morning than I’ve seen in seven months, all of them masked and super congenial, and it wore me out! I may need a refresher course for fitting back into society when this is all over. We’ll be occupied again tomorrow, so that’s one more day down, with three to finesse after that. Feels like a long ol’ way back home.
Over the past sixteen years or so I’ve shed a lot of baggage – like the gremlins that wake me in the middle of the night with recriminations over stupid things said or done. That rarely happens anymore and I was struck by this thought just now… “Don’t fret. Let it ALL go. You learned something every single time, right?” And other than the people I love there’s no loss I really fear, so humans have little they can hold as leverage against me. Speaking the truth can get me badly damaged or killed but nobody can cancel my spirit, so on we roll.
A line was crossed last night with Amy Coney Barrett. The GOP hasn’t just poked the bear, they’ve awakened a sleeping giant that they won’t know what to do with. Americans don’t take kindly to, nor easily forgive, fellow Americans who take our earnings, bury our freedoms, and slap us around like punching bags while encouraging us to die in ever greater numbers, and we’re out there by the tens of millions, standing in endless lines, saying exactly that.
Wherever this ends up, nothing in the U.S. will ever be the same again. The year 2020 is the capstone to the preceding four in showing us what we’ve become, and we can’t unsee any of it. People have laid bare their rabid prejudices, their stunted worldview, their willingness to tolerate any amount of ugliness in order to preserve their place in society, and all of that will be a challenge to deal with and put behind us. If the forces of autocracy win out, there’ll be no dealing, we’ll simply be looking for a hiding place.
My mood this morning is fairly toxic. Nothing appeals, nothing’s interesting or compelling, I’m a cipher. Just let it be over – the weight of not knowing is squeezing the stuffing out of me.
Watching the snow fall, seeing how it gradually covers the flaws and imperfections in the landscape, and thinking: We’re on the cusp of change, either a new embrace of democratic government and individual freedoms, or a sharp swerve into fascism, with no real middle ground available for the foreseeable. This election will come down hard on one side or the other and Americans will deal.
Question: What happens then with what’s been lost? What about all the connections that remain but the relationship part has drained out? What about friends who were friends before we knew we were idealogical foes? Likely most of those ties won’t survive the intense reckoning, in part because there’s no easy way to pick up the thread and go on. Where do we start? What do we talk about? We’ve all shown our colors now and there’ll be no going back to the naiveté of simply not rocking the boat. Life’s too short to be that afraid and disingenuous, and look where it got us.
Will I be big enough, someday when the world feels a little safer and saner, to throw off the slings & arrows, not against me but people I love, toss all the other ugliness onto the funeral pyre with it, light a match, and walk away? Toward more solid relationships, not back into my cave? Right now it feels like no, not right away, maybe not ever if we’re plunged full-bore into an aberrant form of government.
I honestly don’t know what’s going to happen. Will this election be fair and true, or has somebody laid the groundwork for sabotage again? PTSD from 2016 makes me overly cautious about even expressing hope. So far, I’ve managed to write myself through it, but that will no longer be a panacea if everything goes badly wrong.
This is all borrowed trouble from my active imagination, but it’s also a way to prepare myself for any eventuality. Considering the *what ifs* in any situation makes for a better Girl Scout.
I’ve watched a number of people walk out of my life over the past sixteen years… I’ve booted a few to the curb myself… I’ve put some on hold in 2020 until all this is over. Each time, it’s a stark reminder of how sharply divided we are in America, and it doesn’t happen without stirring up a deep sadness. Things will never be so incredibly ideal that we don’t need each other, and those relationships happened for reasons.
Since not everything is meant to last forever, I’ll be focusing on what does – it’s the rational thing to do. I’m hoping for a groundswell of healing energy from people who know that a hard heart will kill you and closed minds lead to blind alleys and dead ends. We can live without a lot of things, but hope isn’t one of them.
The intrepid PickleBallers are in dire need of a safe place to play indoors, but SPL is open for limited fitness activities only. Our typical short fall is morphing into early winter for now and outdoor play is becoming no bueno. So Kim borrowed my headphones and went for a long walk while I was sleeping this morning, and now he’s playing electric guitar, I’m noodling as usual, and we’re both waiting for hunger to strike and then it’s omelet time. Our high temp today is expected to be 49º so the spa soak will be from HEA-vun!
Less rain this year so the leaves are not quite as vivid and they’re dropping fast. Fall is such a metaphor for what’s happening in the world, and a present reminder that hope carries us until spring… every time. Thinking of all that’s changed in eight months, that’s one thing that remains – hope – and I’m trying to wear it on my face these days. I started realizing a couple of years ago that I have little need for mirrors now – my hair’s a no-effort deal, I bother with zero makeup except on rare occasions, I’m well-acquainted with my face after all this time, so mirrors are slightly superfluous and I forget to look, which naturally follows when one is neither jarring nor arresting to look at.
But the thought that follows from that is this: how much have my countenance and underlying substance been altered by the hours, days, weeks, and months here in my ivory tower? When we finally see our “boys” again, will I catch an “Omigod, Mom!” glint in their eyes before they check themselves? Have I gradually and imperceptibly melted and re-compacted into a zombie-like being who absorbs the hits, one by one, and keeps slogging forward? Or is that just how it feels from inside my head?
Rita stopped by yesterday for some fun catching up – she looks amazing despite her stress and exhaustion, and she’s getting on the downhill slope of things. Spring holds out hope for ALL of us! Odd to be thinking in those terms, maybe, since summer barely ended, but in the words of a favorite author:
“The very least you can do in your life is figure out what you hope for. And the most you can do is live inside that hope. Not admire it from a distance but live right in it, under its roof.” – Barbara Kingsolver
Live right in it… the hope. While the wind blows, the rain spatters, the snow falls and whips around us… live right in the hope. By spring we’ll know what sort of nation we are and what we personally will do with that. By spring maybe we’ll start getting a handle on the current pandemic before the next one hits. Maybe spring will bring some room for healing… repairing and rebuilding some of the vital relationships… putting things back together in this society we’ve made. I hope so.
Here we are, Diary, closing out another week under wraps, and prospects for a change of venue aren’t looking good any time soon. The KC Metro area, 30 minutes away, is a Coronavirus Cauldron again, with their highest number of cases since the pandemic started, and our levels in Douglas County have been steadily keeping pace… 51 new cases, 97 new cases… zero new for a day… 45 new cases…two days ago it was 704. We’ve had almost 19,000 cases total in the county and more than 200 deaths. Dayum, I am never gettin’ out of this house!
But things are rough all over and I’m not whining. I lose friends when I talk about it, but John & colleagues have been at this for almost eight months nonstop at the hospital, along with all the other active medical personnel around the globe, and a portion of the population despises them for it, maybe because they’re a constant reminder that yes, Virginia, there is a pandemic. Nobody’s coming to make it all better, make it go away, disappear… like magic. It just rolls relentlessly on, taking victims as it pleases, leaving devastation in its wake. And the one thing that could have saved thousands of lives and endless grief – the simple mask – was politicized early on, assuring maximum damage from the enemy among us. It defies belief, the situation we find ourselves in, but it’s real, and thanks for just absorbing all this stuff, my muse…
Temps were in the 30s this morning, have now crested 40, and might soar to 60 and beyond before the day’s over. Too nipply for PickleBall this morning, so we’re both tapping away at our keyboards, listening to stuff, and sighing…
No idea what today will hold, but I saw the Dr. Teal’s Orange Epsom Salts next to the tub, so odds are good that “Calgon” will take me awaaaaayyy after while.
PLAYING FOR TIME claims no credit for any images posted on this site unless otherwise noted. Images on this blog are the property of their respective owners. If there is an image on this blog that belongs to you and you do not wish for it to appear on this site, please E-mail me with a link to said image and it will be promptly removed. Thank you.
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.
Playing for Time 
Join the conversation …