Tag: #plaguediaries

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:

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.

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.

………

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!—

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!—

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

Yesterday’s numbers:

• 2,159 estimated positive cases (up 82 from yesterday)
• 141 estimated deaths (up 5 from yesterday)

We’re estimated again, the website is updating again.

This is entry #11 in the diary, let’s see how we look compared with entry #1:

• 420 confirmed cases (up 32 from yesterday)
• 37 confirmed deaths (up 2 from yesterday)

Those were the March 15th numbers. 104 deaths in one county, from a single cause, in two weeks. Jst about 7 per day. Now I know there’s a lot of ways to kill enough people all at once, that would make 104 in two weeks look pretty insignificant. But for me, this is quite enough motivation to stay home and let my car enjoy its little vacation. I keep hearing gas prices are down. I don’t know.

I want flour though. If you have flour, send flour.  Baking’s been fun.

Here’s a short article with that kind of tepidly good news that’s nice to hear, but doesn’t uncross any fingers or get any rabbits’ feet put back in their drawers.

Do they still do rabbits’ feet? They do!

I don’t know how advertising works at all, but I suppose it’s nice that you can pay a few extra bucks to have your wash basin (and such a nice one) pop up when someone searches for rabbit’s foot. After all, you gotta clean ’em after you lop ’em off, no?

Everything’s gotten so normal that I have to remember that I’m writing this to be interesting 15 years from now, not 15 minutes. So what’s going on? Well, we landscaped quite a bit more over the weekend and are almost done with our little project. The weather’s gotten strange on us, too. Cooled off a lot, hit us hard with some rain last night, and today the hail came from nowhere. It was spectacular. I know you know those days of peculiar weather, when the wind blows like the loudmouth who knows he’s just the bully’s little sidekick; the sun blares down through a sky that’s far too friendly for the suggestion of darkness that’s creeping into its edges like an old photograph, and suddenly everything’s an unnatural slate color. Then the rushing. It sounded like the ocean if a single wave never stopped breaking. Things don’t usually hit our windows unless the wind’s blowing strong, and today it was. The hail came down a bit smaller than marbles, bounced around like popcorn on the hedges, and then just went away.

It’s just raining now. I’m out on the porch listening to it. Some of the gray light is still stuck to the roads and pooled around the bottom halves of the cedars, but the sky has something silver and grand happening over where the sun’s going down.

I remember being young, around 8 years old probably, and stuck at home with my two brothers during a hailstorm. This one was bad enough to break a couple of windows in the house and get a whole bunch of new roofs in the neighborhood. The three of us were terrified. I guess dad was at work and mom was at the store or playing tennis or something. We had no idea what to do, really. It’s a kind of paralysis that nobody will ever know again – no text messages, no cell phones. There was no way I could just push a couple of buttons and know that my mom was going to respond in seconds. And how she must have felt – knowing that all the frozen Titleists were spilling out of God’s golf bag and onto her poor sons, alone in the house. She could at least get to a phone and call home, which she eventually did, being probably in not too much of a hurry because it couldn’t have seemed as apocalyptic to her as it did to us. That was a wild time.

Our storm today was more of a novelty than a worry – nobody’s out checking their cars for broken windows and dented hoods. It’s cold now, though, and our gas fireplace is wonky. It’s 15 years old. We’ve only lived here for 2 of those, but I’m guessing it hasn’t seen service in its lifetime. Blows out sometimes, then roars back to life. I’ve verified at least that the pilot stays lit throughout. The internet’s given me plenty to do in the way of possible fixes before I go calling in a professional (which won’t happen until after all this quarantining, anyway). I kind of wish I wasn’t fretting about the fireplace in April, and really it’s not a big deal, but it’s something that’s not working right in the house, and as such it needs some attention.

………

Your “Homeless in Coronafornia” update for today:

Its desolite
Dark and gloomy
So I choose to cue music
And I wish I had spam

He used to read my blog sometimes. He does a phenomenal job of staying upbeat and positive, and I think he’s got a pretty good soul at his core. I know he hates it, where he is and what he’s doing, but I sure do wish he’d hate it to the point of changing. Ohhh, it’s so much more complicated than that.

Have you guys ever quit an addiction? Smoking? Drinking? I have – both of them. It was tremendously difficult up until the time it worked. It’s amazing how easy it suddenly seemed once I finally aligned all the tumblers. So strange. The hardest part is remembering afterwards that you’re not an expert, especially when you know someone who needs it. Quitting doesn’t make you better than them. It doesn’t make you better than anyone. It just makes you better than you were yesterday.

—Be a comfort, comrade citizen!—

 

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

Yesterday’s numbers:

• 1,577 confirmed positive cases (up 218 from yesterday)
• 109 confirmed deaths (up 9 from yesterday)

Yesterday’s update from the county includes these reassuring words:

“Some initial indications suggest that these types of community mitigations are having a positive impact on decreasing the spread of disease, even if we can’t measure it precisely yet.”

I know a lot of people will be skeptical of that kind of statement and will want specifics – what information, what data, has led to this optimism? For my part, I don’t care. I resist clichés where I can, and the reflexive haughty suspicion of the government’s every attempt to send positive messages is just plain boring. Or any message, really. Look at how it always plays out: 1) Some government official makes a statement. 2) The masses rise up in righteous doubt, demanding data! numbers! science! to back it up. 3) Government official provides numbers! data! and science! to back it up. 4) The masses rise up in righteous doubt about the credibility of the numbers! data! and science! that they asked for and were given. The masses love their righteous doubt, and faithfully follow it up with reluctant compliance.

There’s a website for tracking cases by zip code. It’s down. NO! IT”S UP! (Prolly down again by the time you click that). Here’s me, as of 3/27/20

Yesterday was a trying school day. The boy does not like art. Like most of us, he believes he is terrible at all of it, which makes it impossible to be motivated. We worked at putting together a still life – salt box, glue bottle, apple, and spoon – and he drew up a full color rendering of it all, with shadows and form. Was it good? It was my son’s, and it was genius.

But today is Friday, so I want to make it a little more fun. Mark it as better. There’s not much I can do about it while still expecting him to finish all his work. I think I’ll just sprinkle Fudge Stripe cookies throughout his day, maybe drop a little glass of root beer in front of his grammar worksheet, break out an Oreo during cursive practice, right when it looks like he’s getting discouraged.

Did I say Friday? Our first day without school was March 12. We’ve had a full two weeks of The Change. It’s been smooth. My biggest personal loss has been writing – these diaries have been consistent, but the isolation that helps build a more creative mindset isn’t available. I get up early to eke out an hour or two before the kids get out of bed, and it’s a beautiful little calm before the storm. The book I had started writing, however, is on hold until I get back to my mornings at the bakery. I do miss that place.

Probably the job that I have taken most seriously over the course of these two weeks has not been stocking the larder or cooking the meals, rather it has been prepping the morning’s coffee the night before. This is crucial. We are nearly out of whole bean (two bags of pre-ground on backup duty), but the grinding of it absolutely means doing it the night before, so as not to fire up the bean-chipper in a dark house at 6:00 AM (I know, I know – Six o’clock is already too late for a stalwart traditionalist like you. You get up earlier. Cows to milk,  pails of water to fetch from the well, hardtack to gnaw, politicians to be smarter than). There isn’t a much more gratifying way to start the morning than by breezing past the coffee pot and just switching it on.

 

Ten full entries in the books now. I’d say that I didn’t see this coming, but I didn’t see anything coming because I wasn’t looking. I’ve said how little I care for speculation, and speculation’s all tied up in expectations, so I prefer a strategy that focuses more on just taking things as they come, with a smattering of sensible preparation. Hence the coffee. I am, however, girding myself for the coming admission of wrongness that I must make. I made one prediction: that this would end sooner than we thought it would at the beginning. I never did put a date on it, thinking that it would all be fairly obvious. But we are definitely creeping up on a point when I’ll have to admit it’s gone on long enough. At first I figured that the initial return-to-school date of April 27th would easily be met. I’m starting to doubt that a little. We shall see.

………

I am saddened to have no “Homeless in Coronafornia” update for you today. My brother has not responded to my messages. This always sends a spike of worry into me, but it is also very much SOP to lose contact with him for a while. He might be in jail. He might have been robbed of his phone. Anything could have happened. He might also just have better things to do, I work hard to remind myself.

— Prep the coffee, Comrade Citizen!—

It’s going to come to this eventually:

The city of Seattle – mainlanders, as we here on the peninsula of West Seattle will be referring to them soon enough – has seen fit to shut down the West Seattle Bridge. The usual alternative, known colloquially as “the low bridge” (poetic as hell, I know), will be restricted to transit, first responders, and freight.  The low bridge also happens to be a draw bridge, adding hilariously to the complications. This means a significant southward detour for 80,000 residents, via and onto roads that are laughably unequipped for heavy traffic volume. But Governor Inslee simultaneously issued a state-wide “please stay home, and stuff” order, so it shouldn’t be a problem. Right? Right. He didn’t use the mot du jour, shelter-in-place, but that’s because it’s been said so many billions of times over the past week that it’s literally impossible to say anymore. We’re just fresh out. Instead he issued a – and I’m quoting here – “stay at home order to fight this virus.”

They’re going to be assessing the bridge due to cracks that they’ve openly admitted to having known about for several years. It’ll be closed as long as it takes for the assessment, and remain closed as long as it takes for repairs. Or, as the SDOT director said in a garish flourish of education-proud degree speak, “until further notice.” The bottom line is that as far as West Seattle is concerned, this here quarantine can go on as long as it wants. We’re going nowhere, and we have everything we need right here anyway. Heck, there’s times I’ve gone weeks without leaving this peninsula, and that’s when we don’t have a plague to celebrate. So roll on, quarantine. Carry on, stay-at-home order. And claim your victims, Coronavirus. We’ll gladly hole up here “until further notice.”

But be advised, mainlanders, one day you’re going to want to come back across that bridge yourselves, to enjoy the beauty of Alki Beach and Lincoln Park, our attendance at which has drawn your ire for a solid week now. You’ll want to take in the best views in the city while hoping to bump into Eddie Vedder. You’ll want to stroll through the Junction, shop at the last Easy Street Records, grab a cone from Husky Deli, and watch the sun go down over the Olympics from Three Tree Point.  And we are going to refuse. You will march pathetically through the rubble, over our glorious bridge that you say is barely holding itself together, waving your white flag (check with the Seattle City Council, they have extras from that time they were on Sawant’s side about the head tax), and begging us to let you surrender. We will respond as succinctly as sir Anthony up there, by simply telling you to “Go to Hell.”

White Center will happily (and quite easily, you’d know if you ever deigned to go there) hold our Southern border. That town has resisted white people’s best efforts at gentrification since before Richard Hugo called it home, and it’s residents will be finished with you before their pho gets cold.