The Perfect Vision Plague Diaries #12

Notes on the general state of the neighborhood, the family, and the masses in the time of the virus.

Yesterday’s Numbers:

• 2330 confirmed positive cases (up 171 from yesterday)
• 150 confirmed deaths (up 9 from yesterday)

Updates complete, numbers “confirmed” again.

I’d do some math and kick out a percentage, some kind of hack-job fatality rate that takes exactly nothing into consideration, no context, but you’ll notice as you go around that whenever someone does that it is only to preface an “I told you so” kind of article about the virus being either far more dire or far less interesting than the perceived morons who disagree with them believe. Besides, what would “6.4%” mean anyway, in the big picture? (oops)

………

I’m in far less of a hurry these days. I wonder if that’s a common feature of the quarantine. There’s a lot of time saved by not having to commute. My wife is…sedate, almost. Usually I don’t even get to see her before she leaves for work. Hers is a commute that uses the now-closed West Seattle Bridge, so the longer this quarantine goes, the better. That’s a fiasco that will be interesting to watch as it unfolds. You’ll be surprised to hear that, here in the early stages of the review/recommend repairs process, there is a general hue and cry to see the rolling heads of anyone connected enough to the issue to be in the meetings. Everyone at the DOT is an idiot who kept the city council in the dark about this danger for far too long, but also the city council are all evil people who knew from the beginning but chose, maliciously and with true foul intent, to ignore the issue and divert funds to painting curbs and bike lanes. It’s alarming to read how many people come right out and say “it’s important to find out who is to blame for this.” My God, we love us some blame, don’t we? I don’t know why I’m so averse to it. Maybe because blame is completely unrelated to solutions, so it seems kind of irrelevant. Of course if it’s murder? Rape? Robbery? You find the culprit, duh. But…

“The West Seattle Bridge is going to collapse this week!”

“Naturally, we need to fire somebody. Close it off, and fire somebody.”

“And fix it?”

“Well, sure, but we’ve got all these pikes that last year’s voter-approved property tax hike paid for, so let’s put some heads on ’em before the voters start worrying that we’re wasting their taxes on things other than their original intent.”

“Won’t we still be wasting their taxes on —”

“Yes, yes. But there will be heads. They like that sort of thing.”

It’s funny that the primary target of the mob is a guy named Sam Zimbabwe. I keep reading “it’s Zimbabwe’s fault,” and I think “wait a minute now, if ‘Wuhan Flu’ is racist…”

Here’s a particularly hot take:

An nobody at SDOT will even get a slap on the wrist for this debacle.  Anyone associated with this needs to be shown the door.   But we all know that will never happen.  Unbelievable. 

Why do I keep forgetting to buy low on pitchforks and torches?

………

Without school, and with the lack of sports and other extracurriculars, I am down a minimum of 26 car trips between Monday and Friday. And that doesn’t include the grocery store, hardware store, etc. Lots of gas, lots of miles, and lots of time saved. Normally, by this time on a Tuesday morning (8:17) I would have cooked 3 breakfasts, made and packed 2 lunches, and issued at least 4 orders to brush teeth (one command is never enough, of course). We’d be making sure everyone’s backpacks have all of their supplies, and anything that needs my signature gets it (it’s surprising how many things require a signature, and not just missing homework/bad things). “Are we picking up so-and-so this morning?” “No, that’s tomorrow.” The routine is well-established and we’re never exactly frantic, but it’s nothing like now: breakfasts as they all trickle down (usually me first!), no bags to pack, no time-eating drives to two different schools. Instead it’s coffee already made, and me – on my second cup, butt half-swallowed by the big chair next to the fireplace (normally I’ve just gotten back from dropping off the first child at school), and casually pecking away at the laptop like someone who gets paid for this (maybe I should pitch this to someone, now that I think of it).

I won’t see my daughter again until lunchtime, she’s starting school by way of a zoom class in her bedroom right now. The Boy will bounce down the stairs in a few minutes, fully dressed and singing or shouting or throwing things in general jubilation (he is an absolute cliché of boyness, thank God, rarely quiet and always moving). He likes checking emails and doing his own thing and so he’ll more or less get started with his school on his own. I’ll slide in to introduce his schedule for the day and make sure he’s productive well past his 5 minute attention span. We sit together at the round kitchen table throughout the day and team up pretty handily on his duties. This is not me on a “my son is perfect” kick (we know too many of those parents). He would get nothing done at all without significant guidance, and ten minutes don’t go by without some kind of complaint or him asking to play Fortnite. Yeesh. But if I step back and take the broad view? Yeah, he’s doing alright.

I have 15 minutes before his school starts.

………

Boy, that day got away. It’s almost exactly 12 hours later. I finished the landscaping earlier (haha, right). The boy joined me for a short but necessary walk up the hill and down the Thistle Street stairs. I think it still rates as the second longest staircase in Seattle (outdoors, anyway), at 367 steps. Judging by the fresh wood on that handrail, this is a fairly old picture.

My daughter has just finished decorating her own birthday cake, and my wife is taking her picture. Letting her do it herself is a bit of a birthday present. She loves baking, and especially the decorating part. She’d probably be mad if we bought her a cake or made it without her. She has an April Fool’s Day birthday, and one of these years I’m going to come up with something huge. So far we’ve spared her.

I suppose tomorrow we can expect a bunch of Coronavirus April Fool’s jokes. China jumped the gun by saying “it’s totes no big deal” months ago (Good one, China. A real knee-slapper), but the CDC should really issue a huge notice announcing a vaccine tomorrow, only to have Trump appear on Maddow at about 10pm Eastern time and say APRIL FOOL’S!

………

I was hoping to have a “Homeless in Coronafornia” update for today, but it is not to be. We’ll catch back up with life on the SoCal streets tomorrow, hopefully.

Well I’m glad I didn’t quit on him too early, he comes through at exactly 9:00 PM with your HIC update. It’s a comforting bit of nothing interesting:

Sorry phone was out of commish
just back at the ol’ laundromat
You?

I never want to tell him exactly what I’m up to, because it always comes out as “plenty of food, nice warm house, happy family,” and that seems a little insensitive considering his circumstances. I know he’s happy for me, but there’s gotta be a line. There’s always a line.

—Shore up your bridges, comrade citizen!—