Plague Diary: Wasted Daze

There is no reason good can't triumph over evil, if only angels will get organized along the lines of the Mafia. -- Kurt Vonnegut, Man Without a Country

Saturday March 21
Wife and daughter furloughed from work and school for the time being. "Temporary," as if they'll be able to knock four to six weeks out of the school year (at least), and just pick up in June where they stopped back in March. No one knows anything right now.

Slept in until 8:00, had a nice breakfast sandwich and coffee, talked about what we're going to do with our day and weekend, per usual Saturday breakfast. Unsaid is the idea that "weekend" may last a bit longer than normal, and I'm still not sure about where my own job will be come Monday. I have two months of hours banked, between sick and vacation, so not too worried. Push comes to shove, I have time to work on home projects and record some music, finish some writing efforts, etc.

Watched a couple YouTube videos on lawnmower repair, to save a hundred bucks or so and get some of this grass knocked down. Very mild winter, so not the usual foot-in-a-week growth we tend to see this time of year, but it's getting shaggy. You can learn just about anything you want for free on YouTube. I don't know why that isn't mentioned every day in every media outlet. Music and instructional videos, all for free, and people are screwing around watching cat videos.

I have a large lawn, roughly a third of an acre, mostly even terrain with a few trees. It usually takes two blocks of about two hours each to cut it all, so I do it over a weekend. I prefer to use a regular push mower, which perplexes some of my friends, who wonder why I wouldn't rather spend five times as much on a riding mower. For one, there are some areas that aren't accessible with a rider, but mostly it's that I happen to enjoy mowing the lawn. As with a good walk, it allows the "monkey mind" to disperse its chatter, and open up to more constructive wool-gathering.

I get a lot of good, very creative ideas doing any of four things -- sleeping, showering, walking, mowing -- none of which lend themselves to immediately recording those brilliant emanations for posterity. This too is a strength -- it forces me to think them through and develop them a bit while I do whatever I'm doing. The ideas worth remembering and using tend to stick.

The weather is fantastic, and after mowing I confer with the wife and we decide to walk about a half-mile up the road. Already traffic has thinned, at least motor vehicle traffic, on our little country road, which is usually busy with assholes driving like they stole it, and truckers using our proximity to the highway as a handy turnaround. They can all go fuck themselves, and lately it appears they are doing just that.

But there are plenty of families walking and bicycling around, which is wonderful to see. Sometimes these small groups bump into each other, maintaining proper distance, but chatting. It's nice.

On the way back, a neighbor's horse comes to the fence to greet us. I always feel like I should have an apple or carrot or something, but I never do. I don't know much about caring for horses, but I know their stomachs can be sensitive and unpredictable. I'd hate to give a horse a treat, and then have it come down with colic. So we pet it and scratch it and talk to it, and the horse never gets tired of it.

Return from the walk, shower, rest of the day is wide open. Finish the quick-read Lehane novel I was halfway through, break out the guitar and fool around with some new chord progression ideas. Check out some tabs for a few classics -- Waterloo Sunset and Sunny Afternoon, some old Van Halen. Can't be shy about nicking someone else's ideas, as long as they're good ideas. Barbecue some chicken for the coming week, a couple beers and a couple fingers of Jameson's, Butch Cassidy and some more reading. Pretty damned good day.

Sunday March 22
Second verse, same as the first. Breakfast, exercise (Sunday is "heavy day" with weights), finish mowing, protein shake, shower, reading, guitar, movie, more reading and guitar. We'll see how things look back at work tomorrow, but there are worse things to get used to than this.

You speak like someone who has never been smacked in the fucking mouth. -- Puscifer, Remedy

Monday March 23
Back to the grind, to see how the governor's "shelter in place" orders affect us. We are considered "essential" personnel, so everyone is still onboard -- in fact, since they want as many people as possible to start telecommuting, they need to order dozens of laptops, all of which will need to be configured and networked on our VPN client. It's a good problem to have, and the fact is that in our IT unit, there are plenty of days where we don't see anyone face-to-face.

Wednesday March 25
Turns out there is more work than ever now, so the days are going pretty quickly. I look up and it's already four in the afternoon. Seems like we just got in at seven-thirty this morning.

There is an interesting balance forming, in being aware of the day-to-day changes happening "out there," and yet not immersing in it or feeling the need to react to it. Nobody knows anything for certain yet, except that this is going to be bad, and nobody who can actually do anything about it seems to really care.

The suddenly ramped-up workload proves to be helpful in winding down. I fart around with some music ideas, checking into a few Pro Tools projects just to review the progress, see what needs to be added before a final mix, etc. Still checking out all the cool sounds and features on the keyboard I picked up before Christmas; it came with a ton of sound modules with thousands of sounds and patterns, and I've only had time to scratch the bare surface. Another good problem to have.

I sleep like a rock, dreaming of a clear, uncluttered landscape, not necessarily a "utopia" but a place where people are happy and have enough. Seems simple, but apparently too much to ask of the current society and government.

Friday March 27
Never a dull moment, both "in here" and "out there." What kind of society do we want to live in, really? It should be unacceptable that wealthy people are so brazen in profiteering from a disaster of this scale. And yet it's accepted with a shrug, as it always is. Just when you think that this will finally be the thing to get people motivated enough to give a shit and do something, there it goes, off into the ether, as we all wait for the next outrage in the next news cycle.

We all know that corporations are people, my friend, but maybe people would get a fair shake out of this deal if they could be considered corporations. Capitalism is when taxpayers are forced to bail out billionaires; socialism is the other way around. Imagine a society where -- well, shit, just imagine a society, rather than a loose confederation of transnational merchant princes and feudal lords and usurers, pitting the serfs against each other with poison and lies. The mission of the media is to keep the rabble confused and docile. They do a pretty good job of that, it turns out.

I enjoy watching all those wife-swapping pervs in "The Villages" with their voluble refusals to maintain a decent physical interval between each other. It's all tricked-out golf carts and house-to-house thunderstickin' for these gross Viagralympians. I'm a hugger, dammit. Cool story, gramma, keep on huggin'. No one will miss you, you know. If the virus don't get you, the tertiary syphilis is probably making its move anyway.

Do they have lemon parties in hell?

'Cause you were bred for humanity and sold to society. One day you'll wake up in the present day, a million generations removed from expectations of being who you really want to be. -- Jethro Tull, Skating Away

Sunday March 29
Another great weekend, more barbecuing, reading, guitar, et al. Sucked it up and made a Costco run, to stock up before the real wave breaks in a week or three. The line to get in wasn't too bad, maybe ten minutes, everyone keeping their proper distance. Of course they're out of toilet paper, because this is a country mostly comprised of unserious doofuses and profiteering scumbags. Everything else was there, though, and aside from a quick weekly produce run, and my daily back-and-forth to my private office (the next best thing to actually telecommuting), we won't have to leave the house for another month if need be.

I feel bad for all the restaurant workers and service workers who are out of luck on all this. If only there was a political entity that cared about them and looked out for their interests. Serves them right for not being billionaires I guess.

I like how Good Ol' Joe, when given a softball by Chunk Toad of all people, couldn't even muster simple anger at the ongoing spectacle of Kim Don Un openly coercing states and their governors, insisting that they kiss the ring before he'll lift a finger to save American lives. It shouldn't be too much to ask that the front-runner of the opposition party oppose this sort of thing -- you know, murder and extortion. But as always, it is too much to ask. Anything more than bare crumbs is always too much to ask.

This crisis could have been an ideal opportunity to rethink how and why we do the things we do as a society, as a country. There is enough to go around, and there always has been, and it could be done by lightly taxing people who already have more than they can ever spend or use. Instead, it became merely another opportunity to do more of the same. Same as it ever was.

Hard, deep sleep again, dreaming once more of that mythical place where people get to live real lives of genuine self-actualization. I wonder if that's ever actually happened, going back all the way to Sumerians cultivating the alluvial soil between the two rivers. Seems doubtful. Do we ever wonder whether or not there ever existed a single child whose aspiration was to grow up to be a task monkey or a box stuffer for the more fortunate? No. It is easier to simply keep consuming, devouring, and to never look down, never look back.

Monday March 30
Lolwut -- the fucking MyPillow asshole is now a super-duper virus helper or some shit. "Retooling the factories." Jesus H. Christ. Do they think he's doing that for free, that the masks are going to be given away or something? No, they'll force the evil blue states to outbid each other, maybe get their governors together and make them eat bugs or something, earn that PPE. Dear Leader "picked on" Yamiche Alcindor again. I guess I should feel bad for her or something.

The "media" works against the people of this country, against their own stated self-interests, against their own job descriptions even. They need to stop running these rallies live. They need to stop showing up to the rallies, period. There is no useful content; indeed, much of it is active disinformation. Leave it to QANN and Newsmax and the rest of those potted plants. They are doing nothing but broadcasting and amplifying and legitmizing blatant lies, dangerous, deadly lies. People are dying because of those lies.

Maybe Yamiche Alcindor -- yes, the daughter of Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, perhaps my all-time favorite NBA player, very cool! -- could deploy her considerable journamalistic expertise in a more productive fashion. Literally anything else, including staying home and doing nothing at all, would be more productive and useful and helpful to the American public, than sitting there and transcribing the prevarications of evil people. Maybe she could throw a dart at a map and visit a hospital in that city, talk to the nurses and patients, instead indulging this tedious charade that Baghdad Don has anything helpful to say.

Just a thought, lost in the void like all the others.

Tuesday March 31
The possibility of an economic contraction of over twenty percent and an unemployment rate of over thirty percent -- an honest-to-Moloch depression -- by June is hard to conceive, but not nearly as difficult as processing the idea that the "people in charge" somehow manage to be even more greedy and short-sighted than even the most hardened cynic could have supposed.

Every problem that this country faces always gets the sneering how ya gonna pay fer it? response. But the dirtbags that already own everything and everybody in this goddamned country get trillions of dollars shoveled at them the very second they get a slight haircut. Fuck them. They'll never get it, but they deserve tumbrels and guillotines.

Something to consider as this becomes the new normal -- where will the wealthy go to spend their pilfered hoards, when every glamorous port is an incubating hot-spot for the next zoonotic virus, when the oceans rise and swallow the seaside resorts, when the remaining enclaves become fewer and smaller, more stringent security measures but somehow less secure? When you have given billions of people nothing to lose and nothing to win, just so you can dump a little more into your Scrooge McDuck swimming pool, how sweet is it if you have to look over your shoulder in the few places you still even want to go, knowing that everyone despises you?

How much is enough, and what are you willing to do to acquire it, and what do you do once it's yours? What do you tell yourself to believe that it's worth it?

I'm glad the work is there, endless, stretching off into the distance, both professionally and personally. I could take three months off right now, work eight to ten hours a day every day, and still not finish up everything that's on my list, between home and creative projects. It's still a good problem to have, but it would be good to get traction on some of it as well.

One piece at a time.

Every time I pick up the guitar lately, I come up with several decent riffs and chord progressions. It's a joy paring them down to the best one or two, take some notes, work 'em a few times to get them tight, move on to the next one.

Turns out starting up a musical idea is a hell of a lot easier than seeing it all the way through -- developing, arranging, recording, refining, mixing, mastering. And that's just the instrumentals.

It's a good problem to have, though.

I think a lot lately of Kurt Vonnegut, one of the more humanistic of the 20th-century American writers. Most of his work plumbed the absurd joys of humans and their complex motives and emotions, finding the humor in things that were frequently not all that funny.

But in his final collection of essays, Man Without a Country, Vonnegut described an incurable frustration with the lies and violence, and with the witting acceptance of those things by people that Vonnegut had previously trusted to be fellow absurd travelers who had simply chosen a slightly different path. He gave up on humanity itself.

He was no longer able to reconcile the rank, unapologetic hypocrisy and spite, the flat-out refusal to repudiate indecent people and deeds and circumstances. He had, in his ninth decade finally given up on a species that propagated stupidity and venality as virtues, lies as convenient operational principles, an inhumane economic system as the most just and perfect.

Vonnegut suggested that maybe the planet was tired of our shit, and was trying in various ways -- earthquakes, tsunamis, hurricanes -- to shrug us off, to rid itself of our toxic presence, to cure itself of our centuries of poisoning it. Using its immune system.

Maybe we're the virus -- we continue to allow ourselves to be "led" by people who don't care about the planet, or about anyone else, or really even themselves, beyond their own appetites. We continue to think that cheap dunks on Twitter somehow accrue imaginary points in a fruitless competition, while our pockets and those of future generations are picked clean. This is because we've been almost completely disempowered and disenfranchised otherwise. But stupidity is always a factor.

The people who watch the daily agitprop sessions from Doctor Bonespurs, or get their virus facts from Sean Hannity or from their grifting pastor, or still read the New York Times, deserve what they get. The warnings have been abundant, libraries are still free, and they keep choosing the easy path of bullshit and noise. Go ahead and go to your megachurch, see what it gets you.

The many people trying to do good in a genuine crisis are routinely undermined by the most awful examples of our species, yet everyone who has the ability to do or say something that could affect that situation chooses not to. The awful people may very well preserve power, at which point the choice to do something will continue to attenuate, until one day they go to look for it and it's gone.

The stated goal now for the chief executive, who declared just a month ago that this was all a hoax, that only fifteen people had the bug and it would be down to zero before you knew it, is now between 100,000 and 240,000. That's the goal, over the next few months. There's going to be a 9/11 or two every week for the next couple months. You like apples?

By way of comparison, the US lost about 116,500 soldiers in all of what we now call World War One, but was really just the first chapter of a century-long war for oil and imperialism that is still going. This might be an opportune time, incidentally, for the opposition party to step up collectively and (again) forcefully and volubly oppose this insanity. This was preventable, avoidable, He screwed the pooch and now -- even now -- holds political fealty over aiding American citizens. Silence is complicity.

The "doctors" who still stand with this thing, providing aid and comfort to his deadly lies and naked self-dealing, are culpable too. They are costing more lives than they think they are saving with their abject participation. They know it. You can see it in their eyes. Good thing they are old enough to scuttle off and retire after they finish disgracing themselves, sparing future citizens from their self-serving bullshit. Shame on them.

This is a dry run at best, this extended mass quarantine. This weird combination of sociopathic indifference and unspeakable incompetence is how they've chosen to handle it. And as far as they're concerned, it's working, so it's how they'll handle the next one, and the next one, worse each time but with the same or worse process and the same or worse outcomes. The next one will be another excuse to plunder, to clamp down, to stick a fat thumb in the collective eye of whatever decent people remain. Everything is up in the air right now, but that's one thing you can count on for sure.

I wonder how the stock market did today.