Do Not Resuscitate, Part 1: Lockdown Blues

[Trying something new -- pairing the usual current-events common-tarry with a short fiction piece. This will be serialized in six parts over the next week or so. As always, all comments, suggestions, observations, and critiques are welcome.]

It may be a vestige of the sad cliché of "white liberal guilt," or (more likely) just my own personal inclination toward an overall sense of justice -- or at least an intense natural aversion to injustice -- but I feel like I've been doing quite well throughout this COVID crisis so far, while a lot of people are suffering and/or dying and/or going broke and/or going crazy.

There is a collective fixation on "returning" to "normal" and "restarting" the "economy," without slowing down for a moment and perhaps exploring or even pondering what people think they mean when they use those words. Maybe one (1) enterprising corporate journamalist, while they're sitting there waiting to stenograph the daily barrage of lies and insults and nonsense, could ask such a question:

What is the economy? When you talk about "reopening the country" and "restarting the economy," what precisely does that entail?

Of course, no one realistically expects anyone, certainly not the oatmeal-brained chief executive, to dive with any real granularity into the subject, nor does anyone seriously expect a paid emissary from Corporate America to ask such inconvenient questions.

Broad strokes would suffice, and not merely to emphasize that Trump is insufficient even to talk about economic issues in general terms, but to point out the fact that the "normal" economy was already not working for a substantial chunk of the population, that maybe there's more to life than mere survival in a gig economy, that perhaps humans were meant to do more than serve as delivery monkeys and rickshaw drivers to the petit bourgeoisie.

Here's how it's gone for me so far:  I'm on a two-man IT crew. The other guy has been telecommuting, since we do most of our work remotely anyway. There has been a significant amount of on-site work lately, but nothing I couldn't handle myself, with a bit of prudent scheduling. I see fewer than a dozen people in-person in an average week, and I've always been OCD about hand-washing. So, since our second-floor office is positioned between a training lab and a conference room (neither of which, obviously, has been used or will be for some time), I've literally had half of an office floor to myself.

I brought up an old weight bench and a pair of dumbbells, about a hundred pounds of plates, set them up in the training lab about six weeks ago. Fifteen laps in the conference room equals a quarter of a mile -- jog five laps, drop and do a set of burpees or lunges or whatever, lather, rinse, repeat. Knock out a few sets of dumbbell exercises, music fucking cranked. Rough balance of 25% cardio, 50% bodyweight, 25% free weights, but those ratios change slightly throughout the week.

Also actually working -- with half the staff telecommuting, there's plenty of that. I get in a half-hour early, usually stay a half-hour late. Aside from a few scheduled conference calls during the week, I have total flexibility in my schedule, so I can work for a couple hours, then take fifteen or twenty minutes to work out.

Every Monday morning I go next door to the supermarket while it's still mostly unoccupied. Despite the noisy clowns we see on our screens and feeds, everyone is extremely well-behaved. Most people are wearing masks, many are wearing gloves. Everyone is keeping their distance. I spend about twelve bucks on a week's worth of healthy snacks:  berries, bananas, cherry tomatoes, carrots, nuts and raisins, protein bars. During the month of April, I lost about five pounds net, but it was more like losing ten pounds of fat and gaining back five pounds of muscle.

The wife and daughter have been stuck at home since mid-March, and both have been surprisingly good sports about it. There is a fair to even chance that my wife's job might get eliminated in funding cuts over the summer, but we can get by on my salary. Not great, but again, so many people are already enduring so much worse, and have nothing on the horizon.

Again, I feel guilty about all of this. Not so much that I'm going to stop doing what I'm doing, mind you, because there's nothing I could change that would make a difference on that front. I come to work, I eat well, I work out, I go home. Not a bad deal.

We also support the local restaurants, which have switched to a pop-up/take-out format with prepared meals. Tip generously, folks, seriously. Many of the recent COVID cases are happening at giant meat-processing facilities (surprise!). Well, chances are you have at least one butcher in your locality, someone who processes locally-sourced meat in a non-assembly-line workspace. Support them.

If you have any Latino population in your area, there's probably a carniceria nearby too. Same thing, check 'em out, support them. I like Costco too, but you don't actually have to get everything there. You ever grill up real carne asada or carnitas? A Mexican friend once showed me the secret -- orange juice and Coca Cola. Caramelizes the meat just right. Get some Negra Modelo and some decent salsa to go with it. Maybe a nice bottle of Patrón or Cazadores.

In California, there are strawberry vendors all over the place right now. Few things are better than a fresh strawberry.

---

He awoke with a start in a desert landscape, brightly lit by what felt like a morning sun, yet he couldn't actually see where the sun was in the sky, nor did he have any way of actually knowing what time it was. Or how he got there, wherever "there" was.

He stood up slowly and looked around, seeing what appeared to be a shallow ravine, two-thirds up the side of a scrubby ridge. Down looked passable, yet pointless, as it just went to the floor of the gully, same hills on the other side.

He looked at what he was wearing -- long-sleeve work shirt, jeans, work boots, sunglasses, hat -- wondering where such items came from, why he was outfitted like a ranch hand. Whatever, it was the right outfit for this desiccated moonscape.

He saw what looked like a Gila monster -- had he ever actually seen such a creature up close? -- skulk into its hole under a large boulder. Looking at the ground around, thinking about what other dangerous animals -- scorpions, tarantulas, rattlesnakes -- might be waiting to pounce, he started up toward the near crest of the hill.

There was nothing resembling a trail, nothing indicating that a humanoid footprint had ever trod this baked hardpan, but vegetation was sparse and easy to walk between. He saw sage and blackbush and a few yucca trees, and wondered for a split-second how he knew to identify these things as such. Plenty of cactus, of course.

It was probably only a hundred yards to the crest of the hill, and not steep, but it seemed to take longer, like it had been a half-mile or a mile. He took it slow, again watching for rattlers and scorpions, but seeing only a prairie dog peeking up for a glimpse, and immediately ducking, as if assuring itself that it had not been seen.

Finally he got to the top of the ridge, and was instantly dismayed -- more desolate, empty, alien terrain, as far as the eye could see. Shit. Just how far was "as far as the eye could see," anyway? Let's find out. It's not like I have another choice here. He began to slowly make his way down the other side of the ridge.