Somewhere there will be a diary kept during the second world war in which the average entry reads, still no oranges in the shops, think I might go for a walk a bit later. The current coronavirus pandemic arguably constitutes the single event to have the greatest, most tangible impact on humanity since the second world war, and I've suddenly noticed how dull my own nightly diary entries seem, or at least how potentially dull they will most likely seem to future generations, assuming there are any; Thursday the 2nd of April, for example:
I managed to cycle twenty miles just before the rain set in. Apparently we have five or six days of rain, so that may be my cycling for the week. I guess we'll see. Bess sewed masks. I wrote and edited an MP3 of Bukowski*. We got a take out from Shake Shack yet again, but somehow it wasn't as good. Eddie of Little & Large snuffed it. This is the first pandemic where I've noticed celebrities dying. Having finished The Wire, we watched the first of season three of Ozark. I'm afraid I found it a bit incomprehensible.
Unfortunately for the sake of both dramatic tension and future warnings from history, our current global pandemic hasn't made a whole lot of difference to me. I was never particularly social, so the main points of adjustment have been 1) that my steady mail order supply of eighties comic books has temporarily dried up, 2) that Bess and myself are no longer able to dine out, as we would ordinarily do on Thursdays and Saturdays, and 3) that I have to wear a mask.
Additionally, Bess has been working from home since January, the company having decided to save money on costly office space; and the boy now attends virtual school conducted through the internet at his grandmother's house, and specifically at his grandmother's house because she used to be a school teacher and is as such qualified to apply scholastic pressure when necessary. Bess has also been making face masks, averaging around one-hundred a day, giving them away to whoever should need them, requests from hospitals and nursing homes, that sort of thing. I tried one but the elastic hurt my ears after a while, so instead I cover my face with a bandana, which is more comfortable and hopefully implies gang affiliation, or at least that I'm no stranger to narcocorrido music - anything to keep idiots at a distance, not due to any specific fear of coronavirus, but mostly because I dislike idiots. I'm surprised we haven't seen more convenience store robberies given that it's now possible to wear a mask in broad daylight without anyone giving you a second glance.
I've still been cycling to McAllister Park each day, at least during the week, a round trip of twenty miles which doesn't really bring me into close contact with anyone.
Shopping hasn't been much of a problem given that our household gets through toilet paper at a fairly average rate, and we've seen no need to stockpile four-million additional rolls in the garage. The boy, as he approaches seventeen, seems to be turning into Zippy the Pinhead, exhibiting a peculiar fixation with television advertising while favouring a diet of instant crap which the rest of us tend to avoid unless it's the end of the world and that's all we have left in our bunker - Ramen noodles, Kraft Mac & Cheese, and so on. These have been in short supply, but he's managed somehow. There was one strange week where no-one had any onions, but luckily I had a few already in the fridge. This is as close as I've come to hoarding.
There has so far been one day on which I had to queue for five minutes before being allowed into the local supermarket, allowing them to keep the numbers down so as to facilitate social distancing. The most annoying aspect of this came next day when there was no queue. I asked the security guard if he wanted me to start a new queue, and I had to ask five fucking times before he understood. This turns out to be because Americans don't recognise queue as a word, instead preferring the verb to stand in line.
Now I only stand in line to wait for an available cashier, a practice implemented by the supermarket so as to prevent us all squashed up and breathing on each other in the vicinity of the tills. It's hardly a massive inconvenience, aside from the awkward eventuality of finding myself directed to tills I would ordinarily avoid, specifically the two worked by members of staff whom I've found disagreeable in the past. I was herded to the till worked by the woman with Karl Malden's nose only two days ago, for example. I stood six feet away from the woman then being served. Once she'd paid up, she walked away and I took her place.
'Sir,' said Karl Malden's nose lady, 'you have to stand at the end of the conveyor belt when I'm serving a customer.'
'Yes,' I said, 'that's why I was standing over there,' - I pointed - 'at the end of the conveyor belt when you were serving that woman who just left.'
Every time I've been to the till of Karl Malden's nose lady, there's always a problem. It's hard to not take it personally. On one occasion she kept all of my purchases at her end of the belt after scanning, with me stood at the other end twiddling my thumbs, unable to pack anything into my bag. I could only assume she thought I was going to do a runner.
Try telling that to those people who lived through the Holocaust.
The inconvenience of life during the global pandemic has been, to me, so barely significant as to be hardly worth mentioning - aside from here in the context of illustrating how little point there would be in mentioning it. Social distancing is easily achieved in our part of Texas. The death toll for Bexar county stands at twenty-four at the time of writing, more than half of those from the same nursing home on the south side. This is after a month of this thing, nearly a month of masks and closed diners and all the other measures, a month during which other counties and other states have been hit much, much worse. Prophets of online doom inevitably predict that one morning we'll wake up in a scene from 28 Days Later which will somehow serve us right, but I'm so accustomed to the barrage of fear that I've stopped noticing it, and have instead continued to worry about more immediately tangible problems such as how long it will be before I can resume buying up all those back issues of Alpha Flight.
I know this thing is terrible, and that it's real, and yes I'm taking it absolutely seriously; but at the end of the day - as the footballing cliché goes - it's not actually bubonic plague. For once I'm lucky enough to be in a position where a global catastrophe isn't having much direct or immediate effect on me; and having once spent at least twenty years of my life at the mercy of Darwinian economics and accordingly shitting myself as to what tomorrow might bring on an at least weekly basis, it's quite nice to have nothing much worth writing about in my dairy. I'm fairly sure there were plenty of people already leading miserable existences before we all had to start wearing masks, but apparently it's only the end of the world when it impacts upon people who've worked hard, paid their mortgages, and who therefore deserve better.
*: For the sake of clarity, this sentence aspires to report that I engaged in writing in addition to editing a sound file of a reading by the poet, Charles Bukowski rather than describing a single undertaking.
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