Month: April 2020

The Perfect Vision Plague Diaries #15

Andy11 Comments

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

Yesterday’s Numbers:

  • 3,167 confirmed positive cases (up 269* from yesterday)
  • 208 confirmed deaths (up 8 from yesterday)

*Many of the new cases being reported today were diagnosed in days prior and do not necessarily represent a spike in new cases. The “new confirmed positive cases” figure we publish each day represents all new confirmed cases reported to us through 11:59 the night prior. Some of these test results were processed on days prior but were delayed in being reported to us.

Plus 25 other deaths on Friday and Saturday (combined, not each).  This thing is still rolling steadily along. I’m a natural skeptic, but I’ve acquiesced to the reality of it. Not with any real panic or fear; just shrugged shoulders and acceptance – like going to see a band that you don’t really like, but doing it with the best friends you have.

The best – and to some extent only – friends I have are my family. This isn’t me selling low on self-pity; it’s just that without a job or a particularly outgoing personality I don’t have any kind of a network outside of the home. I quit drinking a few years ago and things dried up quickly on the social front, too. Turns out sobriety is a kind of mild leprosy, which is ok because if the lepers could boast of anything, it was a better relationship with the saints.

The neighbors are good, too. I’ve already said as much here in the Plague Diaries. Good neighbors are a form of good fortune that even money can’t guarantee. Solitude’ll seal the deal, but that’s not everyone’s bottle of sanitizer. For most folks, you buy a home and cross your fingers, and if it turns out like it did for us you acknowledge the presence of luck in at least one corner of your life.

In a quarantine it is hard to want, expect, or ask for much for your birthday. Well I suppose you can want a whole lot, but unless it’s coming from the pharmacy or Home Depot, it’s best to aim low. All I really asked for was a break from the chores. A day without dishes and laundry. I also wanted the kids to be helpful and to not fight with each other, but as I said just now, it’s best to aim low. I spent the day watching movies and TV. Watched Onward with the Boy. It was a pretty solid effort about trying not to wish for something impossible to such an extent that you miss the fact that you already have it in a different form. I don’t know that my son picked up on that message, but at least now he knows what a manticore is.

I half-watched Toy Story 4, but that franchise doesn’t pull me like it used to. When I woke up for the ending it seemed like pretty basic stuff – Woody still can’t cope with the idea of being replaced or left behind, and he makes an ass of himself and endangers all of his friends because of his obsession with his human. Plus super-capable-strong-independent female Bo Peep makes derpy-clingy-hapless male Woody look like an idiot over and over again, which is a trope that got very old with the sitcoms of the 90’s. Until the part when everyone who had just finished dressing him down for his selfish foibles finally understands the value of loyalty. They see that Woody isn’t simply obsessed – he’s dedicated and faithful. Sometimes to a fault, yes, but he’s a Good Man. And a cowboy, to boot.

Which brings me to His Dark Materials. I love me some fantasy, talking animals, and parallel worlds. I was honestly enjoying this one for little other than the visuals, the polar bears, and the British accents, and then I finally made my way to the final episode. This is the one where a mostly palatable and engaging series turned into another droll criticism of religion and adulthood, linking the two by laying on them both a sentence of ineradicable ignorance. I suppose it was always there – the good guys were the gypsies, children, and the University, while the bad guys are all well-dressed adults who believe in sin and control the population through fear. There is the gray area though, populated by two people, one of whom is clearly meant to be capital-G Good, but does some awful stuff along the way; and one very, very Bad person who shows glimpses of virtue that clash with an otherwise cruel march towards maniacal goals.  But (gasp!) are they really after the same thing, after all? I’ll watch more.

I also started watching Tales from the Loop, which looks ok. Fun, thought-provoking, and not overly moralizing. Yet.

Did somebody say birthday?

Plague Birthday

Limited supplies meant a cheesecake made from scratch with no sour cream. My wife said that she found a recipe for just that sort of thing, and without divulging any other information she teamed up with our daughter to make that beauty up there. I like cheesecake. A lot. The more plain the better. All those crazy concoctions at the Cheesecake Factory are nothing next to a well-executed, unadorned, New York style cheesecake with a graham cracker crust. Maybe a little fruit drizzle, but not much. Yesterday’s Plagueday cake was glorious. My girls hit it out of the park, and – holy cow, why haven’t I already had a slice for breakfast?

I was also bidden to rise from the couch and head outside sometime during a clockless afternoon. On the way out the door my parents serendipitously FaceTimed me, so I walked with them out the door, where the neighborhood was gathered (with some, but probably not legally enough, distance between them) to sing me a rousing happy birthday song. There was even a shiny tuxedo and a tiny guitar in the mix. Babies, children, adults, and pets. It was unexpected, wonderful, and more than enough to make me rethink all that stuff about friends that I said in the beginning.

HERE COMES THE BOY! I can always tell the way the day is going to (at least) begin by his demeanor. Today he marched right down the stairs and said “I guess I’ll have some emails to check,” on his way to grabbing the Chromebook that his school sent home for him. Today shoud be a good one. Let’s see what his sister’s first words are (she’s just arrived on his heels). It took a few minutes, but she’s started making her scranbled eggs without a word until her brother walked past her and she said “go away.” Good morning to you, too, sunshine.

This has gone on long enough without saying anything. So here’s your “Homeless in Coronafornia” update for today:

Hope your birthday was a good one!

I didn’t even have to ask for that.

—Tune up that ukulele, Comrade Citizen!—

Intra-apocalyptic Seattle

AndyLeave a comment

Thanks to my beautiful wife for showing me that. It’s obviously odd to see the streets so empty. I’ve been awake and about downtown early enough before to see things quiet like that, but in normal times there’s a rush or a hurry that goes on, knowing that you’re an hour or less from the crowds and horns. An empty Pike Place Market seals the deal.

The Perfect Vision Plague Diaries #14

Andy2 Comments

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

Yesterday’s Numbers:

  • 2,656 confirmed positive cases (up 175 from yesterday)
  • 175 confirmed deaths (up 11 from yesterday)

Every day I expect this thing to slow down.

Now, you know I’m not one to bring you the darkness, but I read today (via the omnipresent West Seattle Blog) that the SPD is reporting a 21% increase in domestic violence calls in the past month. I remember back in the beginning I joked with a neighbor that while my family and I were enjoying the time together, the stay-at-home orders would probably be a sentence for some people. I was thinking more of superficial aggravations and frustrations, but in many cases  it’s obviously not something to joke about at all. The only kind of misery you can really laugh at is your own. But if you don’t have any of your own, and you become complacent about it, you find yourself laughing about the misery of others. The wrong kind of laughter is a virus.

Today was hard. Maybe the hardest yet. I think the key issue was that I didn’t start the morning very punctually. Normally the boy’s school starts promptly at 9:00, earlier when he feels like starting on his own. Today I took a more casual approach while I focused on a few things I needed wanted to do. The low-intensity vibe felt pretty good at first. But the day went screwy. He wasn’t into his schoolwork and fought it all day long. At recess he was having a hard time with the other kids on the street – and I know my boy, so I know it was largely his fault. He’s stubborn and volatile. It’ll be what makes him great one day (with a lot of good help along the way), but for now it just makes him look like the neighborhood problem child. I’ll kill, by the way, anyone who calls him that.

He did work hard on his owl project, but that was the last of his earnestness:

Owl Project
Doritos always lighten the load.

They’re all a little bit to blame, the kids. The five of them have had only each other for 3 weeks now. All you have to do is eavesdrop on about 15 minutes worth of them thinking they aren’t being watched, and you realize that each one is nasty in turns. They gang up on each other, tease each other, and push the hell out of each other’s buttons. They know the buttons so well by now. The other 90% of the time they’re awesome together, and it’s such a trite little ecstasy to watch them at play.

I took a little break from cooking by ordering fried chicken through Uber Eats. 45 minutes after the food was due, my order was canceled. That really sunk me. I threw the rest of the birthday cake in the trash, went outside to find a dog to kick, and binged on a tub of hummus as a strange kind of voluntary suffering. None of which is true, of course. It was pretty deflating, to be sure, but I just ordered some pizza instead, and it was good.

Speaking of Uber Eats: in a discussion on the West Seattle Blog about alternate routes during the bridge closure – this is one of those conversations that’s being had in the comments of nearly every article on the blog now, no matter what the article’s about. The main alternative, which is the lower bridge, is reserved for transit, freight, emergency response, and Harbor Island access. Nobody else is supposed to drive on it to get in and out of West Seattle. We’re being asked to honor that request on our own, without the threat of law enforcement looming. Predictably, we are not honoring that request on our own, and law enforcement is coming. Bet on it. Back to my point: in a discussion under one article, a commenter mentioned something about his Uber Eats driver either taking or not taking the lower bridge to bring his order into West Seattle. The details are meaningless, because what happened was that his comment was immediately followed by harsh condemnation for daring to give his money to a business outside of West Seattle.

If you’ve read much of me, you know my take on “local” business. Every single business in the world is local. No matter how rich the CEO or where he/she lives, no matter how small the revenue, no matter how many stores it has nation- or world-wide. Every single one is staffed by someone’s friends and neighbors, and ranking the worthiness of human beings based on how close they are standing to your front door is gross. We’re all better off if Birmingham is as healthy as Seattle, and if Bisbee, Arizona is as healthy as Naperville, Illinois. Outside the US? Well things get murky there. Call me a nationalist or a patriot or a hypocrite, but I do privilege American made goods over others. Not because the rest of the world is unworthy of my money, but because loyalty needs some kind of limit, otherwise it doesn’t exist. I just think that if your limits are whittled down to three or four zip codes on a very small map, well, your rhetoric about tolerance and inclusion, your yard signs about everyone being welcome, it all starts to ring a bit hollow, doesn’t it?

Anyway.

I found this treasure yesterday, lurking in the deepest shadows under the kitchen sink, behind the silver polish (why?) and a big bottle of cleaning vinegar:

Treasure
I’M RICH!

They’re still wet and useful. The scent, I will argue, is not noticeably fresh, no matter what the package says.

………

Your “Homeless in Coronafornia” update for today:

just preparing to camp out again,
nowhere really else to go Sept head for the hills
Its peacefull up there anyway.
I can stretch out and breathe

I’d say something kind of transparently vapid, like “we could all use a chance to stretch out and breathe in these trying times.” But who am I kidding? The house is big enough and the doors still work, so space isn’t the issue. We can rest, relax, “stretch out and breathe” when we need to. Because the people around us make it possible.  What we learn from all those cases of domestic abuse that the police are suddenly swamped with, is that the problems don’t come from having nowhere to be, they come from having nowhere to go. From, dare I say it, being  too local.

—The kids are all fight, comrade citizen!—

The Perfect Vision Plague Diaries #13

Andy7 Comments

Lucky 13!

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

Yesterday’s Numbers:

  • 2,496 confirmed positive cases (up 166 from Monday)
  • 164 confirmed deaths (up 14 from Monday)

14? I keep looking for the new deaths to stay in the single digits. The governor does consistently ac-cen-tu-ate the positives, letting us know regularly that what we’re doing is working. The best measure of that, as I understand it, is the transmission rate – how many new people are infected by each confirmed case. In Washington state it’s gone down a good deal. From 2.7 in February to 1.4. And:

In order to sustain a drop in new cases, each infected person, on average, must infect fewer than one person.

That’s a bit of the bright side for you. Some people will look at that and pick it apart for its cracks and its “yeah-buts,” but I will do you the favor of sparing you any dark side. I don’t watch the news, have abandoned Facebook, and pay no attention to Twitter, so I don’t know much about any dark sides, anyway.

Another bright side: I’ve written a few poems during and about the plague, you’ve seen them if you ‘ve been reading here lately.  I’m submitting those poems, along with a couple others that line up thematically, to a competition looking for a group of poems that share an idea or topic. I read last year’s winner, and I like my chances. Still, these things tend to go to previously published, well-established writers with MFA’s and teaching careers, no matter how much lip service the journals give to “emerging and new writers.” But that all sounds like the carping of a loser. I’ll slip through a crack somewhere someday, and it’ll get easier from there.

Here’s that cake the birthday girl put together the other night while I wasn’t prepping the coffee:

Adri's Cake 4-1-20

She has fun. Her birthday will be pretty humdrum, not being able to go anywhere. But I’ll exempt her from her chores and feed her sweets all day. I know her school will be having everyone sing a plague-era happy birthday via Zoom this morning, and her soccer team will do the same thing later tonight.

‹LATER›

She started school today with an April Fool’s joke. When she signed into Zoom for class, her little brother was at the screen with his head down. Her teacher asked her “Are you hiding from us this morning,” and then her brother popped his head up and waved, saying “April Fool’s!” She came on screen and introduced him, and then everything went along as normal. Ohhhhh, those plague-time antics!

Form my part, I made bread. The boy wanted to see the picture I took of it, and now I know why.

60746654324__E613DBFA-567D-4923-8B2F-0704306A00E8
Hilarious, son. Just hilarious.

This is a yeast bread, light and airy and holy cow is it good. I still haven’t found yeast at the store, but a friend had some the other day and he gave it to me when I brought him a sack of flour. What wholesome, old-timey bartering this virus has led us to.

I spent a few minutes here, reading up on what Amazon’s been doing about the plague. If you figure that Microsoft, Starbucks, Alaska Airlines, Google, Facebook, Apple, Et al. are making similar efforts, then continuing to beat that “capitalism and corporations are evil” drum starts to seem a bit silly. No doubt there’s some of those horrible-awful-mean oil companies and world-killing car manufacturers joining in on the goodworks, too. It will do nothing to change the AOC’s and the Kshama Sawants, the Bernies and the college professors, because screaming at giants who have no interest in hurting you has always been a handy substitute for courage (just ask Greta).

For all the birthday cake and April fooling around, yesterday ended on a somewhat low note. The whole situation bears down a little heavy at odd times, and in the quiet house just before bedtime, when the old people are tired and lights in the kitchen are being turned off, the low mood can start to stir.  The soul feels like an early dough: wet-heavy, hard to shape, and impossible to keep from sticking to your hands. The day-to-day can be too much at the best of times and you’ll never see the mundane ague descending soon enough to stop it. You sit, you hang, you slump, and you ride it across the slow river like an old ferry that can only be pushed by a long pole and a short memory.

And you wake up the next morning with nothing to do but turn on the pot, because you prepped the coffee the night before, just after eating birthday cake.

Yaycake
Happy 12th, young lady.

………

Your “Homeless in Coronafornia” update for today is short and sweet:

Not too bad.

I know he talked to Dad yesterday, and Dad says he’s doing pretty good. Which lines up nicely with what I like to think about life – perhaps more than ever in a plague: Sometimes “not too bad” really is pretty good.

—Make lemonade, Comrade Citizen!—

The Perfect Vision Plague Diaries #12

Andy3 Comments

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.

Stairs

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!—