Notes on the general state of the neighborhood, the family, and the masses in the time of the virus.
“So have I seen Passion and Vanity stamping the living magnanimous earth, but the earth did not alter her tides and seasons for that.”
– Melville, Moby Dick
PASSION:
Starting this weekend, Seattle will close portions of two neighborhood greenways to through traffic so people can bike and walk in the road, we’re calling them Stay Healthy Streets.
(I’m not sure about that second comma, guys) They must have heard me say that I wasn’t worried about totalitarianism. “We’ll show him.” There isn’t a grocery store anywhere near the route they’re closing down, ostensibly “To support safe social distancing while exercising or walking, rolling, biking to grocery stores or food pick-up…”
Yeah, it’s kind of an unused route that doesn’t see much traffic from anyone except the local residents, but a land grab’s a friggin’ land grab, and a power trip’s a friggin’ power trip. Besides, this virus has made the single occupancy vehicle the safest mode of transportation available, and now they want to keep us from using it.
VANITY:
After an initial evaluation, we are aiming to convert approximately 15 miles to Stay Healthy Streets in the coming weeks.
In the coming weeks! They’re simply not even considering an end to this. And while I’m no doomsayer, no conspiracy theorist, this is precisely the kind of “temporary” measure that finds a way to stick around after it’s supposed to go away.
Another day in the single digits. So the Mayor’s gonna be looking hard and fast for more things to shut down and strangle before the party is over. In fact, there’s no reason to believe that they won’t use success as a reason to clamp down even more. “We’re doing so well already, more restrictions will obviously be even better!” These people have never felt more important, more needed, and they’re going to clamber for purchase on this greased pole for as long as they can.
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THE MAGNANIMOUS EARTH:
The girl and I made cinnamon rolls today that were dry, but nice, and packed so full of sugar and butter that they couldn’t help but be delicious. I hid one away for tomorrow’s breakfast. Later she and I pulled a small table to the end of the driveway and played cards. The sun was on us, we played war. It was a solid half hour at least of forgetfulness and joy, utterly unaffected affection. I had no fatherly lessons for her, nothing for her to clean or to think about. Just light competition over the simplest of games. She’s brilliant and electric.
She’s at the neighbor’s house right now, in the backyard. I know because we just received a text from the mom over there, containing a short clip of the kids playing “the ground is lava;” balancing on swings, a slide, and in one case, a soccer ball. We’ve just coordinated her return – 9:15, which puts a bit of a twitch in my rather old-fashioned parent instinct, but this is Sprung Broke, after all, and there’s no governor here to tell them that the lava isn’t real and the slide is off-limits.
There’s been a couple of birds flirting with me out here on the porch. It’s 8:20 PM. Juncos or bushtits – tiny little things. Perching between the rails in front of me, hopping about. They just flew past my legs and I could feel them.
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Your “Homeless in Coronafornia” update for today:
People go to great lengths just to spend a weekend like that. He gets to do it all the time.
— Drive through the barricades, Comrade Citizen! —
If repair is possible, under a “best case” scenario we do not anticipate the bridge reopening in 2020 or 2021.
Two years, minimum, without the bridge. I think it’s fair to set the over/under at about three years – say, opening July 2023. I’ll be the optimist and take the under. What say you? Look, I don’t leave West Seattle very often anyway, and almost never via the bridge. Most of my off-peninsula obligations lay to the south (and it’s pretty much all soccer). But this means that going south is going to be murder, because there is really only one viable route over to the city side of things, and it’s a series of very small roads – one lane each direction – with poor signal control and pretty much no room. But anyway, without going on for too long about it, things are going to be absolute madness when the lockdown lifts and everyone starts going back to work. I can’t wait to see the views from the traffic helicopters on the first full-commute morning without the bridge.
You can, perhaps, see where there might be a bit of a problem. That West Seattle Bridge has (oops, had, haha) anywhere from 4 to 7 lanes total for traffic, depending on what segment you’re on, including a bus only lane. If you look at the map there, on the lower left is the Fauntleroy-Southworth-Vashon ferry terminal. That’s where I live. Fauntleroy Way is going to suddenly see a comical amount of traffic twice a day. And it’s not just the commute, is it? That bridge is (was, Andy, was) full of cars any time of day, so it’s staggering to think how the bulk, the weight, the mass of traffic is now going to be worn by this body of land.
The car haters are, of course, loving this little Pyrrhic Victory. I could go on, but I don’t have the energy to pick apart the absurdities in their sweeping, presumptuous statements about how absolutely everyone should be biking or busing. 427 comments on the post at the West Seattle Blog as of this writing. It won’t stop soon. Most of them are calling for public hangings to be resumed, because of course every time you fire a public official, a new piece of modern infrastructure pops up just where you need it. Some of the rest of the commenters are gloating over the coming carpocalypse. Just a few saying “well, this sucks, but at least I didn’t plummet to my death from a collapsing bridge.” Whatever’s left is just one person saying sarcastically to another “I can’t wait to hear where you got your engineering degree.” Overall, it’s a level of dysfunction that baffles me.
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I’ve started and stopped a few different concluding moves here, but couldn’t settle on anything. Sometimes – maybe it’s conscience, maybe it’s vanity, maybe it’s just the critical hiss of tires on a distant road – but something sometimes stays the hand while still letting it stumble on in an impotent Parkinsonian pantomime. Soundless fury – significance hunting.
I was going to say something about
the love we have for our part in a tragedy.
How it’s as if we’re giddily collecting material for our deathbed soliloquies, thrilled at the prospect of mining unearned respect
from stories of exaggerated woe
As We Lay Dying.
We mark them –
the pities,
this plague –
and it’s this marking that fuels our gruesome conceit.
Don’t let me lay dying and recall for posterity the Spring I never left home.
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In an effort to wrap it up tonight, I went to look at naïve haircuts. I don’t have a name for the poet who runs the place, but the poems are always striking and unique. And in the world of poetry, let me just tell you, uniqueness is rarer than whale oil, and harder to harverst. The most recent post mentioned a song, so of course I had to listen to it, and I’ll be damned if it didn’t hit the right spot for me out here on the porch in the slowsprung dark of Wednesday night in April. The wind is light – my god so light that I move my cheek against it like a cat. There is no plague. Nothing is sick. A bashful car drives by slightly sideways with its eyes lowered. I can hear the raccoons coming out from behind the house.
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Your “Homeless in Coronafornia” update for today:
I just found a fifty on the ground Hallelujah Laundry time!
How wonderful for him. That’s gotta feel so good. But he also said that the Domino’s he walks by several times a day has just shut down because an employee tested positive. He swears up and down that he had the virus 2 weeks ago. No way to know for sure.
— That’s not what “unabridged” means, Comrade Citizen!—
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.
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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.
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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).
Over the last 3 days, the new deaths have been 7, 8, and 4. I’m sure Thursday will have some number in the teens, just to frustrate Olympia. King County’s making all the noise on this, anyway. I’m sure the rest of the state would like to just encourage an avalanche to cover the road at Snoqualmie Pass, sink a ferry or two, definitely blow that Tacoma Narrows bridge, hit I-5 just south of Everett, and leave us to stew in our own viral juices. Which of course would wind up not amounting to much. But it would be pretty dismally predictable for Washington, and the West coast in general, to blame the victims while exonerating the attackers (see: every crime, ever, not carried out by a white man) in China.
I have never been to China, and I have never studied it, but I don’t have to hear the word ‘wet market’ more than once to start assuming ghastly things. And I used to watch enough of those “irreverent-western-traveler-foodie-goes-to-Asian-nations-to-eat-weird-crap” shows to know that there are dietary peculiarities in China that I want nothing to do with. I certainly saw some things in the souks in Morocco to make me put up a little cross with my fingers and hug the walls as I passed:
And this is pretty tame. But no ice in sight on a 90-something degree day in Fes. And the flies were like Amityville, but the old meat on my bones wasn’t rotting as much as the stuff in the stalls, so they left me alone.
Anyway, China, maybe start thinking about not eating bats and dogs and shark fins and bird nests anymore. And also the communism: If you had to choose one thing to stop doing today, make it that. You’ll thank me later.
Today, Washington Gov. Jay Inslee, California Gov. Gavin Newsom and Oregon Gov. Kate Brown announced an agreement on a shared vision for reopening their economies and controlling COVID-19 into the future.
That’s the least reassuring news I’ve encountered since I first heard the word Wuhan. Probably – I’m no economist now, but probably – the best thing these three can do is say “all clear,” and then just stay the hell out of the way. But they’re already itching to cement their legacies in the regrowth of the region. It’ll be like the equipment manager from the winning team getting his name etched on the Stanley Cup, except the equipment manager actually had a role in the victory.
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It’s not easy posting music from a band/artist that you don’t know well. I’ve never been much of a fan of Pearl Jam, at least not since their first album back when I was in high school. But then my girlfriend became a little to obsessed with the lead singer, and that was very off-putting. Anyway, the music’s just never hit me in quite the right spot. But Eddie Vedder’s my neighbor now. His house (one of them, anyway, his “permanent residence”) is up the hill from me. I can catch a little glimpse of part of it between my neighbors houses, and past some very tall, very old Western Red Cedars. You’ll make certain income assumptions about living so close to someone so famous, but rest easy knowing that we and the Vedders occupy different financial galaxies entirely. He just found a beautiful place to buy a few parcels of land next to each other and build a modest compound (he’s no Bill Gates), and Bob’s yer uncle. I’ve never met him. I’m told he’s very short. My point is that last night at about 8:15 I was reading on the porch when I heard something odd through my headphones, so I took them off to listen. Sure enough, it was Eddie up there, singing away into a microphone and playing some music. Given the time, and the fact that I caught it already in progress, it may have been a salute to first responders/front liners. Apparently making noise at 8:00 every night is a way to do that. I’ve heard people banging pots and pans off in the distance a few times recently, and I guess if you’re Eddie Vedder maybe you dust off a keyboard or a guitar, plug a couple of things in, and crank it to 11 for a few minutes.
It didn’t last long, and I don’t know what song he was playing, but it was honestly a pretty nice moment. I texted my wife to come out, and we sat and listened there as the light went out of the sky a little bit, and some neighbor somewhere in the quarantevening gave an enthusiastic “woo-hoo!” at the close of the song.
I should have yelled for him to play Free Bird.
So, Pearl Jam. And I’ll ease my anxiety by pairing them up with an old friend, and a song you just heard a few days ago. Not my best moment here in the PVP Diaries, but this is the wet market version of blogging:
I do a pretty solid, and I think very funny, Eddie Vedder impersonation. I’ve promised my family that if I ever meet him I’m gonna do it. The girls are aghast, and the boy can’t wait.
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The weather continues to be great (sorry for those of you seeing the rough stuff right now). Day one of Sprung Broke was ok. A lot of time outside, but still too much of the screens for the kids. Just about time to set ’em all up again, and see what we can knock down.
There is no “Homeless in Coronafornia” update today. As ever, read nothing into that. Could be a lost/stolen phone, lack of wifi access, who knows. We’ll catch up to him again soon.
Ah! Eleventh hour check-in! Minutes before I publish and he chimes in with:
Spectacular
It’s Tuesday
You’ve got the virus don’t you?
Sarcastic on the ‘spectacular?’ Maybe. But I think probably not. Happy Tuesday.
They’re reporting things a little differently now, releasing the data only on MWF. But the data dashboard is still populating. I’ll keep links to my go-to pages at the top. Saturday saw 7 new deaths, and Sunday just 8. These are more comfortable numbers. We’ll see if it’s a trend.
My only bold prediction about the end of this whole ordeal is this: pick any government figure across the globe – governor, mayor, president, chief – and that person will receive roughly equal measures of condemnation and praise for actions taken to minimize the damage. Each one will be either a hero or a horror, depending on who you ask (and they won’t wait to be asked).
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This week we Spring break under quarantine for the first time ever. This’ll be a challenge. Anyone knows you can sit a kid in front of a screen and not be bothered all day, but that’s obviously not the solution we’re looking for. Our daughter will gladly watch dog videos on her phone for a week straight, but again: nope. The prime directive of parenting when the kids are still very young (at 12 my daughter’s pretty much out of that category) is this: Remember you are a parent first. And also second through fifth. And this isn’t because of noble notions of self-sacrifice for the all-important children of the world. It’s just because the quickest way to become frustrated, angry, and miserable, and to have a very bad time of things, is to expect that those high priority personal things that you want to do, can actually get done. You’ll be able to visit them throughout the day, sure. But if your disposition isn’t given over to the fact that at least one kid is going to come to you at every moment you least want them to, then you and they both are in for a very bad day.
The weather will be good, but we can’t go far. The 7 kids on our dead-end street will be tired of each other and getting rather catty by Tuesday, I think. But kids have memories shorter than their attention spans, so it’ll be a roller coaster.
Speaking of cats, this is for all you cat lovers out there:
Ask the things you shouldn’t miss Tape-hiss and the Modern Man The Cold War and Card Catalogs To come and join us if they can
My son has been wanting to venture out a little farther on his bike, being tired of doing small loops in front of our houses. Everything around us is a hill, though, and without directly saying it he only wants to ride on the flat stuff. So we shoot straight out of our little block, past the speed bumps that mark the boundary for all of the kids (beyond those it’s ‘here there be monsters’ territory, actual cars driving, no sidewalks, blind curves – the nightmares of the urban mom) and ride until we hit the curve in 45th Ave SW where things turn eastward and uphill very quickly. He stops there and turns back, afraid of the effort in that slope, and we cruise back to our driveway. It’s maybe a couple hundred yards each way. Now he’s asking if he can do it alone. Of course, yes, be careful and all that. Never forget where you are, etc. It’s easy and he’s fine, of course, but there’s the neighborhood politics of jealous children to think about. Because now even the 5 year old is asking why she can’t ride her bike out there, too. All I know is that I’d rather be under-protective than over, which is a nice and pretty thing to say when all I really want, as a parent, is to get everything exactly right the first time, every time. That can happen, right?
I actually worry sometimes that I’m too close with my Boy, but I also often feel like I’m his only advocate in the world.
…the brutes, the boys,
the noise-born boys
whose shouts we shush –
stamp right out –
He’s gonna be the one who throws the stone in the water right next to your bobber, the one who punches the neighbor, the one who swears at the grown up. He’s taught me that it’s harder for some kids to learn the niceties, and they aren’t necessarily to be blamed for that. More importantly, neither am I. My God, he tries so hard. He knows there’s so many things he’s getting wrong, and he already feels separate from the other kids on the street, because he’s the one who’s always in trouble – the one the other kids get tired of. He’s too much for them. Too much for himself, for now. Too much even for me sometimes, but there’s no way in hell that I’m going to squash or suppress any of it that I don’t absolutely have to. There are bad parents, yes, but most bad kids have good enough parents who are trying all the right things, and simply have some rockier soil to till than others. And most bad kids aren’t bad kids, they’re just behaving badly for the moment. I remember, when I can, that bad behavior is fleeting – good souls are forever. I try to teach to the soul.
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So here we roll into our COVID-19 Spring Break. I’ll be having leftover Easter breakfast this morning, because it looks like this (well, it did yesterday):
Your “Homeless in Coronafornia on Easter” update is a little dull. I asked him if he found any Easter eggs:
I did not I almost forgot it was easter Did you?
I did. Well, I always do. My whole life is an Easter egg. Sometimes the candy inside isn’t my favorite – maybe it’s malted milk balls or something butterscotch – but everything’s somebody’s favorite, so sharing is easy.
3,886 confirmed positive cases (up 198* from yesterday)
258 confirmed deaths (up 14 from yesterday)
14 again? It seems like that number’s come up with suspicious frequency. But I just looked back over things and it only happened once or twice before. There’s been a 5, a 9, an 11, an 8. In other words there’s no need to dust off the tin foil hat just yet. Imagine that – people starting to accuse the government of cooking the numbers. I mean, I’m sure those people are out there already, but they’re like the people who still say “negro.” Alarming in a marginal way, but mostly with the feel of a stationary museum exhibit.
I’m on the porch with my wife right now – a beautiful evening. 7:00pm and looking at this:
All the bike riding activity happens on the dead end street that’s off to the left of the street sign you can see on the left side of the picture. I can hear the littlest kids yelling and laughing. The light’ll be good for a long time yet.
School started strong this morning, and ended badly. The boy chose story revision for his first task, and it was a big one. He’s enthusiastic but a complete disaster when he really gets going, so it took some serious literary rodeo to corral his stampeding (one-page) novella. After that he just fought me on everything and the day really dragged on. Besides that, I’m tired as hell from a late night and early morning, so I was really looking for one of those neatly greased days that didn’t need much from me. It was not to be.
Later I let the pressure washer earn itself a vacation, scrubbing clean the deck and some very slimy rectangular walkway slabs. There isn’t much as satisfying as watching that jet of water take a few layers of crud off of old stone.
A car just pulled off the road out front and two guys got out to pee in the ivy and ferns. With the weather and the weird plague vibe, a couple of drunks stopping to pee somehow seems fitting, even though Spring break isn’t until next week. I wanted to be bothered by it, but they were definitely more than 6 feet apart, so whatever.
Honestly I’m a little spent for today’s entry. There’s a chance I’ll get up tomorrow in time to add something more meaty. For now, be it known that Seattle’s Mayor Jenny Durkan (Boooo! or yaaaaay! depending on your daily whim) has announced the closure of all of the parks this weekend. I can’t wait to see how many people go anyway, and then read all the angry commenters accusing them of risking all of our lives for their sense of entitlement. I’m not all-in on believing the closure is necessary, but if it’s what we’re doing, it’s what we’re doing (and no this isn’t me, stupidly and sheepishly agreeing to the removal of another liberty, on the way to looking at the totalitarian state around me and asking “how did we get here”). If you go to the park this weekend you aren’t being rebellious or exercising your individuality and freedom. You’re just being a dick. This isn’t that hard. Unless you’re being abused at home, and the park is one of your only refuges, in which case I really just don’t know what to say.
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For reader/commenter Marica (and heck yes, the rest of you, too). There’s no lesson in it, nothing relating to current events. At least not intentionally. Just one of what I’m listening to at this place in the timeline:
We left our shoes under the ground Tied yellow feathers to our arms And learned the language of the aching mountain I went out west to try to build a better version of myself My iron tools got swallowed up by spirits
Maybe music’ll get regular here.
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Your “Homeless in Coronafornia” update for today:
Well, it’s 12 hours later and I don’t have one. These things happen, and frankly I’ve been happy to hear from him pretty much every day for the last few weeks. That’s not exactly the norm. For my own part, I can report a brilliant night’s sleep. I had dreams about being in various long lines. In one I was with my whole family. Underground at a mall or some fun center for families/kids. My dad kept taking advantage of people who weren’t paying attention when the line moved, and cutting in front of them. It embarrassed the hell out of me, and I complained to my mom. But also, he was really making progress. Another part of the dream, or a whole new one, had me in a classic ruck march from the army days – just a long, spread out column of people marching under load. My pack was so heavy that I was staggering at first, but it gradually became easier to bear, until I realized that it had fallen off without my noticing. It was lying near the edge of a pond we were walking past, and when I went to get it I slipped and fell into the water. There were turtles and some of that odd dream stuff that I can’t clearly remember. I was stirring up the mud and it was a jet black cloud in the water. Ink. Maybe Moby Dick’s to blame in some way.
Anyway, great sleep. Out cold by about 9:30, no wake ups until 5:45 AM. That never happens – I’m an awful sleeper. And the coffee was, of course, prepped and ready to go with a push of the button, so Imma go pour that first cup. Enjoy your Friday!
The usual place I pull these numbers from didn’t update, but the synopsis at the top of the page had the new numbers:
Public Health reported 202 new cases of COVID-19 today, bringing the official case count in King County to 3688. Fourteen new deaths were reported, bringing the total of COVID-19 deaths in King County to 244.
So…14 more deaths. Every day seems more and more sane and normal, more and more routine, more and more natural. Then you find out 14 more people died in one county in the past 24 hours and you thank God that it isn’t. Isn’t normal, isn’t natural. This is an anomaly, a bump, and it will pass.
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My word, in yesterday’s entry I wrote “Robert Louis Stevens.” Must have been too early for those last two letters – coffee hadn’t kicked in.
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It’s starting to feel like I’m telling you the same things over and over: Neighbors are good, bridge is closed, kids are studying, weather’s nice. We ran out of any functional amount of flour a while ago and haven’t been able to resupply. There’s none available on Amazon Fresh, and I’m not going to the store if I can help it. They haven’t had it any of the other times I went. So I haven’t made any new bread, and there hasn’t been pancakes for breakfast in a while. We’re good on eggs and sausages, though, and fruit and bread and butter and jelly, and I like those better than pancakes and waffles anyway.
I was reading 100 Years of Solitude for what felt like 100 years, and I can’t bring myself to finish it. My interest has all dried up in the absence of any substantial thread to follow in that frenetic tome. It was entertaining for a while – I like magical realism, and Marquez’s A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings is one of my favorite stories, but Solitude just whiplashes all over the place and only occasionally zeroes in on a feeling, and it gets old. A little while ago I read The House of Spirits by Isabel Allende. It was a great read, but practically the same damn book as 100 Years of Solitude. The mountain of similarities between the two was just one more thing that blunted my interest.
A short time ago, a post at American Digest referenced Moby Dick in some oblique way, maybe even only in the comments, and I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it (the link will take you to a different post, more directly cetacean, and specifically Melvillian). I have no interest in reading every classic novel ever written, but every now and then I think of one that I should take a run at. And so I bought Moby Dick and started reading it today. The entirety of my experience so far with Melville is Bartleby the Scrivener (peculiar little guy), so I have no preparation or prejudices to carry into this novel. I just want something I can get into, deeply, for a while. At this point I’ve only just met Queequeg, so there’s nothing to report just yet. The seafaring books hold a strange interest for me – Conrad’s Lord Jim is easily a top 5 read of mine, and I’ve been through a few of his short stories as well. The Open Boat by Stephen Crane is another killer. I’ve never been a sailor, haven’t spent much time at all on boats or around the ocean. But maybe it’s like Melville says in the beginning of Moby Dick; maybe there’s just something eternal and immutable and ineffable that draws us all to the sea, whether we know it or not. Life has spit me out here on the shores of the Puget Sound, after all.
I have no interest in owning a boat, in case you wanted to know.
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Sometimes you hear something, laying in bed, and you stop breathing for a little more quiet. You look at the back of your wife to see if she’s moving or as asleep as you expect her to be. You lay there and listen through doors and down stairs and around corners, and after a few moments you satisfy yourself that nothing bad’s happening and you can go back to sleep. Other times you hear something, laying in bed, that makes you jump out and grab your pants, phone, and Louisville Slugger all in one motion, and head downstairs.
That happened two nights ago, just after 10:00. It was a short-lived rage, as I had already been starting to remember, on my way down the steps, that we had an Amazon Fresh order scheduled for delivery at some point. I recalled my wife telling me, but had purged any details relating to time. We both went to bed without a thought of it in our heads. There was some alcohol in the delivery, which required ID, so the driver had knocked lightly and shuffled around on the porch, which was what got my half-asleep self to leap out of bed in the first place. Heart rate normalized, shirt on, I placed my ID on the ground between us and stepped back so that she could scan it without touching it, or me.
Of course she had already touched all the grocery bags, albeit with gloves on. I brought them in, washed my hands, emptied the contents, washed my hands, folded up the bags and put them away, washed my hands, went back to bed. My wife greeted me on the way into the room: “That was supposed to be 10:00 in the morning.” She stopped short of either accusing them or admitting her own scheduling mistake, and I didn’t care enough to press the issue. It’s the blame thing again, and I just have so little interest in it.
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I’ve been wanting to put some music here. I probably should – keeping a record of what I’m listening to during the plague is as useful and informative as anything else. It’ll certainly be interesting to look back on. I can’t remember what made me think of Buffalo Tom today. I haven’t listened to them in years. It was nice to look them up and see that they haven’t stopped making music after what feels like another hundred years. And not only that, but the album they made in 2018 sounds every bit as good as the one that got me hooked back in 1992. There’s a whole bunch in between there to catch up on. Here’s ’92. I’ll pepper in some newer stuff as we go:
I was in high school back then, hit the Army in ’98, a few years after barely graduating. That song just sounds so much like the 90’s. It’s poppy, but somehow barely better than the mass of drivel that caught on and got popular for a minute – The Spin Doctors, Wallflowers, Jesus Jones, Third Eye Blind, Counting Crows. Throw in some Blues Traveler and you have every high school party I ever made fun of like some reject from a John Hughes movie.
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Your “Homeless in Coronafornia” update for today:
I checked in with him throughout the day, but didn’t hear from him until about 1:30 this morning. I was up, because Moby Dick and Tales from the Loop. I asked if that was his shirt, but he didn’t answer. It’s a pretty instructive or iconic picture for the times: a lone shirt in an empty laundromat after hours, safely distanced from everything else, next to a suspiciously open back door. Ready your escape! The Hawaiian pattern is hopefully festive, but missing the mark in color and composition so that it looks more like the camouflage Army uniform of a 2nd world island nation. It’s all just flourish and fancy in the end, and the fight must be dragged out into the sun, because nothing hides like a virus.
— Bone up on your archaic whaling vocabulary, Comrade Citizen!—
Since our initial recommendation, our biggest concern has become the extent and rate of cracking near the quarter points of the main span could lead to collapse in the near future if strengthening is not implemented quickly.
So the West Seattle Bridge was probably a lot closer to catastrophic failure than we realized. And the engineers say that 80% of its burden is, I think they call it unloaded weight or dead load or something – it just means that its greatest stress comes from its own weight, even without a single vehicle on it. So it’s getting worse even as it sits unused. That sucker won’t be open for years, and at the front end of the plague year that’s a dirty little serendipitous way to heap misery onto tragedy.
Was the bridge built poorly in the first place? It was finished in 1984, after the previous bridge was rammed by a 550-foot freighter called the Antonio Chavez, piloted by an alcoholic Norwegian named Rolf Neslund. Some people believe he did it on purpose because the city was taking too long to get it replaced. He and his equally afflicted wife lived in the San Juan Islands, where they screamed and threw things at each other in drunken rages, and from where he eventually disappeared. It’s a wild story that’s well worth the short read here.
In any case, the city’s hand has been forced again, this time by damage that has set in quite a bit sooner than expected. They’re still trying to figure out what’s causing the advanced cracking (which is still growing, oh BTW), so they know what to prevent when they fix it. Is it the increased traffic from the incredible population growth on the peninsula? Is it pile driving in the harbor below? Is it the sinister red paint of the highly controversial bus-only lanes? Or is it Rolf Neslund, tugging on hazy bottles of spicy aquavit and repeatedly ramming his ghost ship into the concrete knees of that behemoth span, screaming curses at his terrible wife?
You know which explanation I’m going with.
While pretty much everyone is complaining about how it’s been handled, as well as assuming that the only possible explanation is a combination of negligence, ignorance, and malice, I am just glad they caught it and kept everyone the heck off of it. A bunch of armchair engineers complaining on the internet is a lot more tolerable than dredging the Duwamish for bodies. Call me naïve, but I never expect every possible danger to be anticipated. I expect the greatest possible effort to be made to anticipate every possible danger, but when the experts issue a report that says “we don’t know the cause” or “we didn’t see that coming,” I don’t immediately scream accusations of incompetence. As Robert Louis Stevenson said:
The world is so full of a number of things
We can’t possibly see them all coming, and have to content ourselves with reacting honorably when the surprises come.
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One of the highlights of this past week or two has been watching our neighbor’s 3 (I think) year old son learn to ride a bike. Our dead-end street angles upward towards its terminus, and he starts at the top of the hill on his no-pedal scoot bike, shooting with unchecked speed straight down towards a very small speed bump and the basketball-sized rock at the end of my driveway, which sits at the mouth of our sanctuary. It was hard to watch, and thrilling, as he would fly down with his feet out at angles and the little bikle wobbling with that “brink of disaster” shimmy that you always see on motorcycles right before the bike crumples nose-first like a horse getting shot in a movie, and the rider soars over the handlebars. But he’s always been able to get his feet back to the ground and Flintstone himself to a stop. There have been crashes, to be sure. His parents are great about it – no panic, no rushing to pick him up, just a casual walk to the crash site where he’s already picked himself up and is in some diminishing state of tears. He does like to veer towards our rock, though, and apparently one night when we were inside, he ramped himself off of it and took flight, swelling up his hand and scraping pretty much everything. He turned out ok and boasts now of the time he “back-flipped off of the big rock.”
The rock is fine.
He’s pedaling now, without quite enough strength to make it back up the hill, but with the semblance of control that comes with having brakes that aren’t the rubber soles of his Keds. Of course, knowing how to drive and knowing where the obstacles are doesn’t preclude the odd, unforeseen circumstance that ends in tears and broken things. You can’t prevent that forever no matter how much information and experience you have. Sometimes you even run into things that you can see perfectly clearly in front of you. Just ask Rolf Neslund. The key is not getting bent out of shape about it. That’s how you finish Stevenson’s poem up there, in agreement with the line that says:
I’m sure we should all be as happy as kings.
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Your “Homeless in Coronafornia” update for today:
Sounds good , I have to go set up a living quarters. It’s going to be as good as I can possibly make it Have an awesome day
3,331 confirmed positive cases (up 164* from yesterday)
22 confirmed deaths (up 14 from yesterday)
For some reason this reads like some piece of mild guidance, delivered in passing, from the time before this all got serious:
The virus that causes COVID-19 is highly contagious, and each face-to-face interaction is an opportunity for it to spread. In addition, it’s important to wash your hands with soap frequently and avoid touching your face.
Because honestly, here on April 6, 2020, my reaction to that statement is, “Are you new here?” And by ‘here’ I mean Earth.
Imagine, though, coming across someone who had no idea what was going on? Or heck, waking up from a coma today.
“I’m sorry, doctor, a what now?”
“A pandemic. COVID-19. Or Coronavirus. Or the Chinese-“
“Doctor!“
“Yes, nurse. Of course. I almost forgot. Haven’t watched the news in a while. Anyway; big virus, very contagious, people dying, world on lockdown, social distancing, toilet paper’s gone.”
“Social what?”
“You have to stay at least six feet away from everyone. People are walking around with six foot poles. Yelling at each other for getting too close. Some guy in California – I think California. Had to be California – got arrested for paddleboarding. Alone. On the Pacific Ocean.”
“How did they arrest him if they have to stay six feet -“
“I stopped trying to understand a long time ago.”
“Can I have my coma back?”
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My wife’s office is in our bedroom. Wait, let me say that a little differently: My wife’s office is our bedroom. I avoid it as much as possible so as not to disturb her, being on Zoom meetings most of the time that she’s working. From the very beginning, If I do need to go in there for something, I’ve been texting her this gif:
I don’t expect her to know what it is. I barely do. I watched a few minutes of Marathon Man years ago – enough of it to have “is it safe” burned forever into my cultural consciousness, to the extent that I knew there would be a gif for it when I wanted it. Now my poor wife endures that brief madness a few times a day, and we’ll both remember it for reasons far different than most other people ever will. In her case, possibly without even knowing where it comes from. I still don’t know what “it” is. I’m sure she recognizes Dustin Hoffman, though. It’s a pretty good gif for the times, and would make a nice t-shirt:
CORONAVIRUS 2020
IS IT SAFE?
Different shirts could have different pictures: parks, beaches, libraries, malls, schools. TV sets with a CNN logo. The Pacific Ocean.
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Here’s a tweet:
Big change in UW #CoronavirusOutbreak models nationally and in many states. For Washington, models on March 26 projected 1400 deaths. Updated model now project 632 deaths by Aug. 4 https://t.co/Jun0ZlOgme
That’s a pretty steep downward correction. Fewer than half the projected deaths. So I guess I get a sort of limited vindication. You may not recall my prediction that this would end up being a lot less severe than we initially thought. The UW numbers up there seem to be on my side. But if I’m being honest I have to admit that it’s already worse than I expected it to be. I honestly thought a couple of weeks would go by, the virus would prove to be a big nothing burger, and we’d be back to work and school, probably by now. Next week at the latest.
Except Governor Inslee just issued the order to keep schools closed for the rest of this school year. So the severity of the illness might be angling down and making me look good, but the lengthy duration is going to fly well past my Nostradamian soothsaying about when we’d get to “break’s over, everyone back on your heads” time. And the lower death toll may very well be entirely attributable to the draconian reductions in liberty that, let’s face it, are pretty palatable in the end. Good job, everyone.
I think the school news is going to hit a lot of people hard, though. I got a little smug about this in one of my earlier entries: the widely followed model of two working parents looks like a horrible idea all of a sudden. One of our neighbors has already expressed some displeasure and worry about the extended closure. You wonder what things will be like after the all-clear, what will be different. I’ve said that I disagree with the idea of a profound change. With the people who say “life will be completely different after this.” I still believe that. We’re not going to substantially alter the way things are produced and purchased, the way jobs are given and taken away, the way education happens (or doesn’t). Our drive to reduce fossil fuel use will be in the same state as it was in January, electric cars won’t be any farther along on the timeline, and the moon won’t be suddenly colonized by December. Communism will still be evil, and people will still want it (until they have it).
But will some families who’ve had a parent lose a job because of COVID-19 maybe say, “This isn’t bad, honey. Do you think we can make it work?”
A man can dream.
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Your “Homeless in Coronafornia” update for today:
It was great Still no signs of a sick person, I mean besides me
There’s no telling what he means there. He’s probably sick, yes. But that’s always a safe assumption. He likes to say things like that, depending on his mood, because he knows how the conversation will go. I’ll be practical and concerned, he’ll be glib and dismissive, and he’ll enjoy making me look like the one who’s out of touch and focused on the wrong things. Understandably, he gets a little satisfaction sometimes from my frustration. The best – I should say the best-off of us – have vulnerabilities, and we play a lot of stupid games to keep them from being exposed. Imagine if your whole life was a vulnerability. Self-defense would be your default mode.
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?
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:
Andy Havens 