Queen Mediocretia of Suburbia

The Road [SPOILERS]

Seven years ago when I was on my Pulitzer binge, I read The Road by Cormack McCarthy. I had some issues with it.

1. First, I confused Cormack McCarthy with Carson McCullers, so I was a generation off to start, and then I was really taken aback at how dark she must have gotten in her old age.
2. Second, Hero’s Journey plot? Hate them.
3. Third, you might expect that I had a problem with the [SPOILERS] Roast Baby, but I didn’t: in fact that was the most memorable part.

So, that was seven years ago, and last night Gary mentioned he was “almost finished with The Road.”

“Oh, yes, I hated that.” I said.

”Did you make it to the end?” He said this in a haughty manner, as if to suggest he had made it to the end and it was quite an accomplishment. 

I assumed by his tone that he was done and wanted to discuss it. I said something like, “What did you think of the ambiguous ending? When the father died, did you — “

”THE FATHER DIES?”

Seriously, he hadn’t gotten that far yet. And since that and the Baby Kebab are the only things that happen in The Road, I spoiled the end of the book for him.

I felt bad, but it was his own fault. “Did you make it to the end,” indeed.

Earplugs

I’ve had awful sleep lately.

One night there were animals rattling around in our attic (or possibly on the roof), chittering loudly enough to wake me.

The next night Gary was the animal rattling around. He can’t get comfortable, so he switches positions in bed, and then he hurls himself in the bedroom chair, and thrashes and sighs, and last night it woke me up all the way across the hall.

I stomped into his room and sighed “JESUS” in a very non-reverential way.

Evidently, when he repositions himself he still maintains all his REMs, because he sounded like he was taking in his sleep when he answered, “...earplugssszzzzzz.”

As it turned out, I had an entire box of earplugs I forgot I bought on Amazon Prime day, and they worked perfectly. They worked so well I forgot about them until this morning, when I was momentarily alarmed when a neon green cone of foam sprang out of my ear into my coffee.

 

Gary and the Men

Gary’s a loyal true husband, with one exception: if he can throw me over to make friends with a workman he will do it in a heartbeat.

It’s particularly ridiculous because the man has no friendships with any other men.  I don’t know if he was a plumber or a repairman in a previous life, but he longs to bond with them. The quickest way to do that is to ridicule me, pat my head, wink at them, and chuckle about The Wife.

Pisses me off. 

This was particularly evident when we met with the drainage men. My stance was, “Hmm. We paid many monies to fix this basement puddle, and yet here it is again.”

I was friendly. If I’d been hateful I could see how he would have wanted to counter my venom, but I was pleasant. 

When he decided we lived in the fifties I said, wryly, that if he would “let me” use the Shop-Vac this wouldn’t be a problem, but he did not get the hint. Instead, he doubled down and ended up explaining to me that this huge expenditure we laid out to fix a problem was actually a step in debugging what was wrong with our basement, and now we needed to move on to the next step in the debugging process, for many more monies. 

Oh my God. It’s infuriating. 

Weekly Paint Progress: 1/28

This week the peonies went from this:

... to this:

Now it looks like there’s a monster jaw. That trifurcated petal at the bottom might have to change.

The dog bank went from this:

... to this:

 

Home lab

Way back pre-pandemic we would go to the doctor and have machines check our vitals. Then Gary got sick, and he got a blood oxygen meter. Then he got one of those fingertip electrocardiographs, and we both played with that for a day. Now he has added a home blood pressure machine to his collection. 

I asked, “When’s the home EEG machine coming?”
He said, “We need a home MRI first.”

 

Nuisances

Evidently, my home landline (shush, I need a landline) is so busy with robocalls that my  provider suggests that instead of blocking bad calls, they could just block everything and let me flag the people I want to get through. I don’t know if I like this idea. Paying for a phone line that advertises that its best feature is that it doesn’t allow phone calls. 

Like the phone line, my email is also cluttered with nuisance mail. There was a recent spate of mail encouraging me to join class-action suits. If I had ever used this antacid or that web service I could make some bank. (“Bank” being a maximum of sixteen dollars so far.)

Miss Manners claims that answering machines and spam blockers are like butlers, in that they keep the rabble out. Seems that I am so beset by rabble that my butler is not even putting any calling cards on a silver tray by my front door. 

Missouri Dead Last

Doesn’t matter that I’m not in the few few waves of vaccines: our state doesn’t have any vaccines at all.

Here’s yesterday’s local newspaper headline:

The online version doesn’t use the word “DEAD”.

I’m glad to know that other people winced at that headline. I mean, it’s true, but do I want to wake up to it?

New Press Secretary

Dear New Red-Headed White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki,

I have scanned your press briefing for Inauguration Day, and I am quite that you missed an opportunity.

But it isn’t too late. I will love you forever if you say, “That was the smallest crowd to witness an inauguration, period.“ Think about it, Ms Psaki.

And while I’m at it:

Dear Rachel Maddow,

I already love you forever, but I will love your forever and an eon if you start your next show with this:

“We wrote an entire show, and then, at 4 p.m. ... we did not have to tear it up and start again, because there was no breaking news at 4 p.m., and on top of that it was not a “crazy news day.” It was actually pretty boring. I’m going to tell you now about something boring that happened in the Grover Cleveland administration, and then after twenty minutes I will tie it in with something boring that happened today.”

Think about it, Ms Maddow.

Rewriting the Novel: Exhilaration

Well, evidently writing is quite easy if you schedule it into your day. I find I get quite a bit of writing done if I start at 11:00 pm and then write to ... well, let’s see, it’s FOUR A.M. NOW.

Some people say you shouldn’t write for a certain length of time, but aim instead at a certain number of words, say 300 (about one page). That’s crazy. I just wrote for five hours and I have three pages. 

This is not going to be sustainable, but it is quite exhilarating. 

 

Rewriting the Novel: I Have Had to Buy 100 More Tiny Magnets

Is this progress?

I find I have had great success writing crabbed notes on scraps of index cards, though. The notes mean I don’t need to write things chronologically, which is a chore.

It’s good to have two ways to be productive. On left-brain days I outline, or right-brain days I write.  I don’t even see how people could sit down and start writing, without sketching it in first. That would be like painting a painting, and painting the bottom left corner in full detail and leaving the rest blank. Just .... how could you even do it? 

I’m slewing crap on the page with a broad brush. And all I write is the dialog - that way I don’t have to deal with tapping in to the narrator’s emotional pain. That’s later. I think what I’ll have at the end of this is a plot synopsis, all in dialog. Sadly, I’ll already have to gut it, because I have written 20k awkward words now, and that puts me at half the words for the age I want. 

Then a round later for description, and another for making the dialog distinctive, and then characterization, then reaction and emotion, then a vital one for subtlety, to de-telenovela, and then each one again, and then again one last time. 

I wonder if it’s like painting in that the last twenty minutes , when you do the details, is the most fun, when it comes alive. I hope the book isn’t like the block peonies, in which I plan and do the easy stuff and then give up when it gets hard and is ugly.

Weekly Paint Progress: 1/21

The big peony went from this:

... to this:

I’ve decided to stop glazing by the book for a while. I need some positive reinforcement, so I’m going to use my cardboard box to combine some things I’ve painted before: the croquet ball, the dog bank, and the small mason jar.

And this time I’m not starting with a white canvas, I’m starting with a neutral color so I won’t be confused by the white of the canvas and white paint.

I am this far!

Thank God It’s Over

I am old - how old? So old that I’ve taken a White House tour.

To further emphasize my oldness, I was there during the bicentennial in 1976. I remember touring the White House, the Supreme Court, the Library of Congress, some of the Smithsonian. The outside photos would suggest I toured the Capitol, though I have no recall.

What I remember best about my visit 44 years ago was how very boring it was.

Remember? Boring?

Remember four years ago? The grumpy scowl on Michelle Obama’s face, and the fading smile on Melania’s face? Remember George W’s pithy review of Trump’s speech? And, to be balanced, remember how very Jackie O Melania looked in that blue outfit? That was hot. Very TV friendly.

I pray that Biden/Harris Make Americans Bored Again.

Review: 63 Up

I have now the latest installment of the Up series, 63 Up.

(If you don’t know what 63 Up is, it’s a documentary that has followed a group of 14 British children every seven years to test the saying, “Give me a child until he is seven, and I will give you the man.” It’s a remarkable capsule of society. Find it, watch it, but good God don’t binge it.  It’s meant to be seen every seven years , so it’s very repetitive. Mom and I loved it.)

So, now that director Michael Apted is dead, will the latest episode be the last episode? Or should the Up series go on without him? Should there one day be 105 Up, with everyone dead except for Tony? Instead of Neal there would be, say, a group of Neil’s friends at a table giving a synopsis of what he died from? (Neil is not dead.)

I did not sing “Waltzing Matilda” in Latin, as these seven year olds do. I sang “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star.”  As for, ”Give me a child until he is seven, and I will give you the man,” I’m nothing like I was at seven. I was quiet and shy, and now I am an aged Attention Whore. Then again, I seem to remember getting a lot of attention at seven for being so painfully shy. Perhaps it was all a scheme to get adults to talk a lot in an effort to pry information out of me.

I have decided I do want them to continue the series until everyone is dead, and give the last one standing a prize, like a tonteen. (It will be Tony.)

The Benefit of Brainless Work

Most of the time I have very interesting work projects. I have a database that routinely runs into its own limitations, and I have to test my limits wrestling it to my will. I enjoy that.

SadLy, I’m also I’m routinely asked to do things that require “Vision” and “Strategic Thinking” and other qualities I do not have. No longer will I win kudos for my skills at “Dealing with Reality” and “Wringing Success Out Of Limited Resources.”

However, I’ve fallen into a break. In the last week, while others are busy strategizing and visionizing, I have been doing a mindless, brain-raisining task: formatting about thirty Word documents. The only challenge is getting bullets, outlines, and numbering to play together in one document. 

It’s so dull that, get this: I’m not tired at the end of the day. Instead, I am dizzy with creativity. I feel compelled to write, paint, strum, and cook all at the same time. I usually end up with some combination of those every night. I don’t claim to do any of those things well, but it’s amazing how much more creative I am at night after I have trudged down row after row of monkey-drudgery during the day.

 

NOVA DNA

A few months back I used ancestry.com to accuse my 6th great-grandfather of incest. I based that on the doubling-down of DNA and some iffy generational numbers. “How can my 5th great-grandmother bear my 5th-great grandfather? Oooooohhh.” 

This week I watched a NOVA episode on DNA that explained that it’s a range of DNA matches that determines a generation, and each range can overlap with the next range. So five generations back might be 32-43 matches, and six generations back might be 41-52 matches, and 42 matches might fall in either generation. Plus, the DNA analysis only goes back five generations, so that woman was outside of the DNA analysis anyway. 

The NOVA episode also mentioned that when Ancestry.com checked my BRCA breast cancer genes, they only checked the three most common BRCA gene anomalies out of thousands.

Still, it was an interesting episode of NOVA,. I am ashamed to say I don’t always find NOVA fascinating anymore. Back in the 70s I loved it. The best episode was about Washoe the signing chimp. When I see the chimps at the zoo I always sign “BABY IN MY DRINK” in solidarity.

A visit to Wikipedia reveals that what I actually loved was a BBC show called Horizons, repackaged and re-dubbed for an American audience.  

I have to admit that I conflate episodes of NOVA, Frontline, and American Experience. I have to take a moment to analyze the narrator voice I remember. Sonorous male voice? Frontline. Confidential soft female voice? American Experience. And, based on the most recent episode, NOVA is narrated by a chipper young woman. Encouraging for the girls today who need to get into the STEM field, but it doesn’t match with my ‘70s NOVA memories.

Life of a Mouse

Well, the mystery chipmunk/rat/wee squirrel has been identified, and it is most assuredly a mouse.

 

Clapping

This morning I suddenly heard someone clapping right outside my window. ClapClapClapClapClapClap! 

I immediately pulled the blinds to see WHO the HELL have the nerve to clamber up in my landscaping and mock me with applause right outside my window, and why. 

No one. No one was there. No flutter of shrubs to show they’d run off. No one could have run off, it was ClapClapClapClapClapClapBlinds!

All I can think is that I encountered one of the clapping birds mentioned in this article.

My money’s on the short-eared owl: they fly in the daytime, they live in Missouri, and it was in the morning. 

Gary heard some raccoon sex last night, perhaps the owl is saying “thank you for breeding the baby raccoon snacks.” 

I tell you, it was really strange.

Weekly Paint Progress: 1/14

This week the big peony went from this:

... to this:

There’s a part I like. Can you guess?
I plan to paint over that part I hate and start that over.

The small peony went from this:

... to complete failure. I give up. Pulling the plug.

It’s just like when you say a word too many times and it stops making sense. It was supposed to look like this:

Of course I realize not that while this was a painting in the glazing book, it wasn’t a step-by-step example. I am going to gesso over this one and reclaim the canvas.

Emotional Urination

Yes, I’m going there.

I know fear makes people pee.

In addition, there are a lot of medical articles explaining how anxiety causes excessive urination.

I am looking for the article that explains why every time I have an argument with Gary, and I get angry enough to cry, I also get angry enough to pee. 

I mean, it’s handy, because I have to leave the fight to visit the bathroom, and perhaps we both cool down a bit.

But it takes me only thirty to forty seconds to pee. (I’ve timed it. I don’t know if that’s good or bad.) 

Rage pee.  It’s a thing. 

Bumped!

The Missouri rules had Gary and I in phase 1B:

Only now, the rules have been released for my specific county, and Gary and I have both been bumped from Phase 1B to Phase 1C.

If I did not admire first responders and the elderly I might be resentful.

Amazon Head Games

We all remember the shipping nonsense that happened over Christmas. In addition to KC’s difficulties, I had Facebook friends posting maps that showed the twisted paths their packages took to get the last few miles — jetting off to Georgia on the day they were to be delivered. 

I did have something that they sent to a center in the next state instead of the one 13 miles from my house, and I thought,”Well, my center must have been overloaded.” 

And then I muttered, “Or, maybe they’re lying. Maybe it’s at my center but they can’t get to it for a day, and instead of saying ‘This will be delayed a day because your center can’t keep up,’ they thought it would be more palatable to say, “Whoops, we momentarily lost it.’”

I have been buying into that paranoia for a few weeks, and then I checked on My Orders in Amazon, because that’s the only pleasure I have in these plagued times, and saw that two packages would be delayed for a month. 

My husband’s sweat pants: “On the way but running late”

My brother’s socks: “Expected February 8th.”

Remarkable, given that at that moment my husband was wearing those sweatpants and my brother had already thanked me for those socks.

So of course now I assume they are manipulating me to think, “Ha HA! I got those packages, I win to Amazon track the package game.”

Am I paranoid? Or is tracking being used to manipulate and lower our expectations?

A Review: History of Swear Words (NSFW)(No spoilers)

Where has this show BEEN? No, really, Netflix has been around for years, why are they just now getting around to this series of delightful 20 minute episodes, each devoted to a curse word. 

I have seen almost all of them.

Episode 1: FUCK - here we are presented with the show’s premise: we follow a curse word through history, from when it is coined to modern day, noting when the meanings change. Professors and bookish types say FUCK very seriously and shamelessly. 

Episode 2: SHIT - at this point the novelty and humor of bookish types saying SHIT wears off and is surpassed by the humor of how the show just goes there, “there” being over the top. An embarrassment of cursing. 

Episode 3: BITCH - I was waiting for this one, because first it was a bad word, then we took it back, then some women said we don’t want it, thank you, get that word away from me. It was more philosophical than the previous ones, but it does have the best delivery of any joke of the entire series.

Episode 4: DICK - In case you didn’t know, men love their DICKs, and it shows. They love them, and they love the word. Evidently men and their dicks have little conversations on the regular, did you know? Also, there’s a nice bit with resentful narrator Nic Cage.

I have not seen the last two episodes, PUSSY and DAMN, and I really don’t know why they sign off with those two, unless they are going from least acceptable to most (even though I think they posited that SHIT was more shocking than FUCK, my stars no. Not here in Missouri. FUCK Trumps SHIT any day.)

And where, you say, are the two C words? Whither CUNT and COCKSUCKER? The big guns? I can only guess there will be a season two.

Politics — Seriously?

You know what I’ve done a lot of this week? I have watched a lot of Fox News. 

Step 1: see utter batshit madness on CNN or MSNBC.
Step 2: change the channel to FOX just to see how they were going to spin it.

FOX kept up. I didn’t hear them use the words “liar” or “sedition,” but at least they were displeased that Trump supporters had blocked Constitution avenue with a Winnebago. 

I stayed up all night watching the electoral tally after they resumed. (You know, after the mob stormed the capitol, as they do. As they do in South American dictatorships.)  I expected to be lulled to sleep. Nope. States accused other states of unlawful voting  And why? Judges legally added voting places. They enacted mail-in voting, like they did in my state. I am taking names, especially the name Hawley (Republican senator for Missouri).

And now, the news stations are going on and on about the 25th Amendment or Impeachment with Removal. The odds of either are the same as a Brokered Convention. Exciting to talk about, but not going to happen.

I hear that Trump will have his own inauguration by the Washington Monument and use Mar-a-Lago as his new White House. Silly.

Second Civil War. Hahahahaha.

But what do I know, I thought Wednesday was going to be boring.

Rewriting the Novel: Midpoint

Well, the emotional drama is just as telenovela-esque at the midpoint as it was in the resolution. It’s useful for charging ahead, because I am not tempted to revise it, because it makes me cringe to read it.

I have hit the point at which it’s a problem, and what do we do with problems? We throw money at them.

I bought a book on plots, which chided me immediately for not writing an hour every day, so I have done that for three days and I have three pages. As a result, I have no free time and I haven’t read any more of the book.

I also replaced my non-magnetic white board with a magnetic one and one HUNDRED tiny little ceramic magnets. I can re-position tiny bits of index cards and not go through the mawkish exercise of making my heroine/mother cry.

Weekly Paint Progress: 1/7

This week the big peonies went from this ....

... to this:

Same thing as last time — looking too structural early on. And cartoonish. And, another thing I did wrong; I painted it like a watercolor instead of being patient and glazing it in layers. Plus, I haven’t been standing back and actually looking at it. Next week I’m turning my attention to the non-peony flowers instead.

The small glazed peony went from this:

... to this:

I know ... what is that yellow doing there? I tell you, I can see it in the original. It all looks like a bunch of ears now. 

So I’ve decided that painting is like cooking, and sometimes you have painting sprees and sometimes you have painting slumps. I also have decided that after these peonies are done I am painting simple shapes like buffalo. (I remember the barbecue place that sells chicken skin has loose paintings of imposing buffalo.)

Loose Ends

Revisiting loose ends.

In the furniture wars: I did not win the loveseat battle — the chair still is planted where it would block potential guests. However, it is a new chair. In the win column I have completely trounced him on the revolving spatula holder.

I did indeed make my own chicken skin appetizers, twice. Chicken thigh skin is better than chicken breast skin.

Even though I bricked in the gap where the patio sank, I can still hear gnawing critters. They don’t scuttle, though, so I’m telling myself they are sitting on the outside with their backs up against the siding, gnawing on bones or whatever.

After I complained that young white folks are missing out on Uncle Remus, my NPR station played a re-telling of the Tar baby / Briar Patch story during A Season’s Griot on Kwanzaa.

In what I hope is not the end of the story, after spending horrifying amounts of money on correcting our lawn drainage, I woke up to this nonsense after the recent New Years ice storm.

Nonsense

Electoral Protest

Twenty years ago there were congresspeople who protested Al Gore’s electoral college loss even while he was certifying the electoral college decision. They protested, but because it required a senator to back them up, they were out of order. Gore, as head of the senate, had to shut them down, even as they were referring to him as the deserving winner of the race. I still remember it. 

Now we are here again, and the protestors do have a senator to back them up, my own damn senator, Josh Hawley. Do we think Pence will uphold the constitution they way Gore did?

From the New York Times, 20 years ago:

The alphabetical roll call of states began with Mr. Gore handing the electoral vote certificates to four lawmakers to examine and read them aloud. In one moment of levity, when California's 54 electoral votes were awarded to him, Mr. Gore playfully pumped his fist in the air ...

The vice president told his supporters as they attempted 20 protests that under the rules they could not debate their points. Republicans loudly called for order.

Still, the dissidents managed to spit out pointed words before being gaveled down, reminding the chamber of complaints that newly registered black voters were turned away from the polls in Florida or that registration lists were flawed or that there was a sudden police presence in black neighborhoods.

Occasionally, Mr. Gore showed some humor. ''The chair thanks the gentleman from Illinois, but, hey,'' he said at one point to Mr. Jackson. As the objections came near their end, Mr. Hastings called out to Mr. Gore, ''We did all we could.'' With a smile, Mr. Gore said, ''The chair thanks the gentleman from Florida.''

In all situations, it doesn’t matter, because protests are very nice but certification isn’t needed to win an election. I mean, it’s needed for an orderly transfer of power, but ‘orderly’ is no longer a value with the current government.

Georgia

So the election nonsense continues into January, with tomorrow being the vote that definitively determines who wins the Florida senate votes, and thus the Senate overall.

Seriously, this senate has been balls-out nonsense the last decade or so. 

Do I think the Democrats can win both Georgia Senate seats? No, not really. If they do, do I think they can stick to the party lines the amazing way the Republicans have? No, not really.

I hope I’m wrong, otherwise it will be Joe Biden vs Mitch McConnell for the next four years. 

Assumed Level of Knowledge

Gary and I differ.

If I know something, I assume Gary knows it. We have been having those old people conversations in which one of us says, “Who was that one guy in that one show?” and the other says, “Jerry Stiller.” So I assume we have the same neural pathways and cultural references. (To be fair, recently I didn’t know “that big French woman” was Juliet Prowse.)

Recently I was trying to think of the name of a particular band. I said, “You know, the thing in that one weird book everyone has sex with.”

To my surprise, he said, ”What are you talking about?”.

By then I’d remembered the band name. “Steely Dan. You didn’t know how Steely Dan got its name? I assumed you did.”

”No one knows that.”

“Alexa, where did the band Steely Dan get its name?”

Alexa answered, “Famously, Steely Dan takes its name from a sex device featured in Naked Lunch.”

I said, “‘Famously.’ Common knowledge.” 

As you see, I think all knowledge is shared with Gary. If I know it then he does. However, if Gary knows something, he assumes that means I must not know it.

This is how the conversation would above would go if Gary had just learned this Steely Dan trivia.

Gary would say, “[blah blah blah], Steely Dan. Steely Dan got their name from a sex device in a book.”

”Yes, I know. Naked Lunch,” I would say.

”No, it was Naked Lunch.”

”Yes, Naked Lunch, William S. Burroughs.”

”No. Alexa, who wrote Naked Lunch?”

”Naked Lunch was written by William S. Burroughs and published in 1959.”

My fear is that we both treat the rest of the world the same way. I know Gary “mansplains,” and I suspect I gibber on making arcane references until people ask if I’ve had brain damage. I suppose both of us would be more tolerable if we prefaced everything with Today I Learned or Did You Know. 

Paint Thinner

My brother was again talking about the radioactive creek near our childhood condo, and I mentioned the only person we know who lived there who actually had cancer was our stepdad, Dan. 

Dave said, “Yeah, but he said paint thinner is what gave him the cancer.”

”What are you talking about?”

”When he got cancer he did some research, and paint thinner’s a carcinogen. He said he’d been elbow deep in paint thinner when he painted grandma’s house.”

”Seriously, he didn’t think the cancer came from the chain-smoking instead? Hey - that explains why he stopped painting.”

Now that I’ve been oil painting, I’ve wondered why Dad dropped it as a hobby. He used a palette knife for the later paintings. I remember he had some paintbrushes wrapped in tinfoil in the freezer, so he wouldn’t have to clean them. When he painted anything outside the house he either froze his paintbrushes or threw them away.

Blaming paint thinner for his cancer, not the smoking. Remarkable. I suppose the painting was easier to quit.

The Year In Review: 2020

2020, of course, divided nicely into pre- and post- Pandemic.

Pre-pandemic! 

Early in the year, a friend threw her husband a birthday party that included a concert performed by a member of their favorite band. I was so effusive in my praise the artist posted it on his website under the Living Room Concerts heading. Remarkably, during this party we all sat next to each other on the inside of a barbecue restaurant! On the inside! Next to each other!  Breathing! (Can you imagine?)

I watched movies at the theater. (Weird, right?) I saw Cats, 1917, Joker, The Turning, and The Gentlemen. Sitting right next to people.

And, I sent spit through the US postal system and it arrived in a timely manner, which is to say I looked at my DNA and was unimpressed.

And then, on the last day of February, I made an oblique reference to some virus that seemed to be troubling cruise ships.

And then, The Plague. 

At first, I was annoyed that it took away my writing class, fancy ice cream, the aquarium, concerts, and toilet paper, 

At first, I thought the lockdown might last two months, even, but eventually I wised up. 

At first, I didn’t believe Gary had the Virus, but then I realized he had, even with a negative test. Late in the game I thought I had it myself.

Eventually, I changed to a medication with easier access to a normal immune system if I needed it, and later a vaccine was promised, by Election Day even.

But, there were still some High Points, none untainted by the plague, except I suppose for the space launch.

Covid was great for the animals. The famous Bruno the bear got within miles of my house.   Raccoons and ducks wandered the neighborhood one morning. A Coopers hawk ate a raven in the backyard. 

The plague gave me some excellent on-line concerts, like the Steven page concerts and, the best thing of the year, Dave’s Family’s concerts.

Speaking of concerts, the Barenaked Ladies Christmas concert was only forty-five minutes long, but Deck the Halls sung to the tune of War Pigs was worth fifteen dollars alone. (‘Oh lord, yeah” was replaced with “Oh San-ta!”)

What else happened ... I gained sixteen pounds, as so many did, and less typically, I read through the cardboard box containing my inheritance from Jerry and decided to both fur and plagiarize his novel out of spite.

2021? It all depends. Let’s say everything goes back to normal. If I ever get on a plane I’ll wear a mask anyway. I’ll draw something on it like “your cold is my covid.”  If movies go back to releasing at the theater before streaming, then I think people will rebel. Maybe theaters can change, allow the occupants to group-text in the theater so there’s more of a sense of community, give foot-rubs mid-movie, I don’t know.

People say the 2020s will be the Roaring 20’s again, but I don’t know. I don’t plan to double-down on freedom. I like working from home, I like having all my groceries delivered, I like not shaking hands, I like not catching colds, I like walking into my closet and saying, “oh, that outfit’s cute” and it’s something I’ve already bought. 

Also, after nine months, Gary says he is starting to feel like himself again, and that’s the most important thing.