The PVP Diaries #23

The numbers are staying low. I’m pretty easygoing, but I figure I’m about 5 days away – a week tops – from getting annoyed. I’m bored. I’m just about done putting up with everyone’s fear of looking like they didn’t do enough. The National Guard has officially arrived in West Seattle, and that’s just ridiculous. The shark is in position, and the Fonz is fast approaching the ramp. They’re helping pass out food at the West Seattle Food bank. All we needed was for mom to bring us some soup and saltines, but we’ve been getting chemotherapy for a month instead. “Just to be sure,” they keep telling us. “We’re not out of the woods just because the numbers have gone down.” Yes, we are. Yes, we exactly are because of exactly that. THAT’S WHAT THE NUMBERS ARE FOR. Their validity isn’t limited to occasions when they support your prejudices and prolong your stranglehold. I’m tired of hearing people talk as though we still have a long way to go. As though this is just the beginning. I find that highly destructive and defeating. It’s like a global self-pity party. “There could easily be another spike!” Another? There wasn’t a first one. I’m tired of that attitude, of that mindset. It’s failure. Especially because you can tell how much people like having it. What I really sense from people more than anything – the feeling I get from the media and the politicians and the hoi polloi – is that the end of this “crisis” will be very, very disappointing to them. A let down. Millions upon millions of people will suddenly not know what to act deeply concerned about when talking to neighbors and posting on Facebook. The armchair epidemiologists that I mentioned back in entry #6 will have to find some other way to scold people. The entire world’s opportunity to elicit each other’s pity over a global 15 minutes of pain will have passed, and they’ll have to start rooting around like truffle hogs for the next human tragedy to covet. And they’re all hoping that the next one is a little more local, a little more personal, so they don’t have to share it this time. Another terrorist attack or mass shooting will be just what the doctor ordered after the civilized world trudges through a few long weeks of abhorrent peace and ease, on its way to wondering why in the hell we even have a media anymore.

I may not be a full-on Coronacaust denier just yet, but I say unapologetically that I am so very, very tired of being afraid of my fellow citizens. Not because we might make each other sick, but because we might turn each other in.

We didn’t catch the flu – we caught communism.

So buck up, world. We may not be able to make the Coronavirus last forever, but we’ll replace it with some new hell to celebrate soon enough.

………

Was I saying something? Isn’t this supposed to be about

…the general state of the neighborhood, the family, and the masses in the time of the virus?

Sure. Here: We recreated a famous painting for The Boy’s art class. It’s not “Mona Lisa” famous, but it gets some pretty good mileage nonetheless.

First one to identify the painting in the comments will be the first one to identify the painting in the comments. Congratulations. It was a little rushed, because the garbage truck was barreling down the street towards us, but overall I think it’s a nice bit of work. Especially the blood.

I read more Moby Dick. It’s odd – I didn’t expect half of it to be a sort of field manual of cetology. Whole chapters where, let’s face it, the story’s more or less shelved and Melville’s just purging himself of the leviathan mass of research he put into the novel. And it has that 19th century American knack for verbosity (I’m looking at you, Hawthorne)  that drives me a little nuts, but once I get into the rhythm it all rides on rails greased with spermaceti.

Unrelated – My wife stopped suddenly in the middle of hurriedly topping off her coffee in between meetings this morning to say “oh yeah, happy anniversary.” It’s been 13 years. Good ones. I made tacos for dinner.

………

Your “Homeless in Coronafornia” update for today:

Hey you are messing up my
heist here I’ll talk later
gotta make money
No sorry, hustle not heist

He was at the Circle K, doing his thing, I asked him about the social immunity thing, after he said that “they came up with no gatherings of 3 or more people” as a response to the homeless damaging the place that was set up for them. I didn’t read his mood well, though, and he got pretty upset about it, pretty resentful. He’s been a Coronavirus skeptic from the start, and none of this is sitting well with him. Even the socially immune are subject to the stresses of a pervasive environment of increased tension. Not to mention the ubiquitous suspicion to which they are always subject, and its amplification during this time of (hey it’s totally not) martial law (yet).

— Leave your house, Comrade Citizen!—