A Day in the Life of the Global Pandemic

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.

The Road to Nowhere

'Let's go see the painted rocks,' Bess suggests. 'I've never been up there and I've always wanted to go.'

I already know what she's talking about because this isn't the first time we've discussed the trip. The internet has this to say about the painted rocks in question:

On a bluff along the banks of the Concho River in west-central Texas lies the most remarkable rock art site on the Edwards Plateau. The Paint Rock pictographs number over 1,500 and cover nearly a half-mile of a limestone cliff face a short distance upstream from the town of Paint Rock. In tones of red, orange, yellow, white, and black, native artists painted animals, such as buffalo and deer, human figures, some appearing to be clasping hands in a dance or ritual, and a kaleidoscope of geometric designs on the high bluff. Some left their handprints, perhaps as a way of signing their work or merely indicating that they had been there.

The Paint Rock site is unusual in that it is one of only a handful of sites in central and northwest Texas. Rock art is much more prevalent, more ancient as a rule, and better preserved in the Lower Pecos and Trans-Pecos areas. While it is impossible to know the date of the earliest pictographs at Paint Rock, archaeological investigations at the site have recovered arrow points and sherds of earthenware pottery. These artefacts indicate that the site was used at least as early as the Toyah period (ca. A.D. 1300 – 1650), and are reflected in drawings of hunters carrying bows and arrows. Paintings of horses and a church demonstrate that use of the site by native groups continued after contact with the Spanish.

'How far is it?' I ask.

'Two, maybe two and a half hours drive.'

It's Saturday morning, the sun is out, and the boy has gone to Ruidoso with his dad this weekend. It's not like we have anything else on.

'Okay.'

We drive up I-10 so far as a town called Junction, which is about half the distance, getting on for a hundred or so miles; then take the smaller US-83 heading north towards Paint Rock. The strangest thing is that we're suddenly no longer in the hill country. The hills have levelled, the valleys have filled in, and even the plants at the side of the highway seem different. Looking on the map, I find we really are miles from anywhere. We have another hour of driving in a straight line, and we'll pass through a town called Menard, then one called Eden, and that's it, nothing else for miles and miles, just rolling planes on either side. It's not quite desert, but something in that direction with small scrubby trees, cactus, yucca and not much sign of human endeavour aside from the thing we're driving along. It feels as though we're quite high up, and the landscape reminds me of what we saw on the way to Roswell a couple of years ago.

We talk about nothing, or we listen to Lewis Black and Jim Gaffigan on CD. We pass through Menard, which has a population of several thousand, but still somehow seems a bit too small to have been left out here on its own. We're fine for gas so there doesn't seem to be any really good reason to stop.

Eden is about the same, and we make the predictable jokes: so this is where it all happened, and we talk about looking for a garden centre for the sake of a wearyingly obvious photo opportunity.

'I have the Road to Nowhere stuck in my head,' Bess tells me as we're expelled from Eden by agency of internal combustion rather than Himself upstairs. 'Was that the Talking Heads?'

'Yes,' I sigh as the song glues itself to my own internal jukebox.

We're on the Road to Nowhere…
 
Sun, sand, cacti, not much else, and we have about forty miles to go. Eventually we're there. Paint Rock has a population of just 273, according to the sign. I do a mental calculation and work out that this is probably less than the population of my local supermarket on an average weekday. It's a dusty road with buildings and a lot of space, propane tanks behind wire fences and no discernible corporate presence. We stop at the grocery store opposite a building purporting to be a Wool Warehouse. This would strike me as odd given that I've been in Texas since 2011 and am still to see a single sheep, but I'm too preoccupied with trying to imagine what it must be like to live in a town with a population of 273, at least forty miles from the nearest Dairy Queen.

There are two guys sat at tables eating tacos in the grocery store. The cashier is stacking shelves or something. They look at us but don't say anything. I buy tea and some sort of flapjack. The cashier fails to make the usual observation regarding my accent, which is nice. Maybe she realises that you ain't from around here carries a potentially disturbing subtext in a town where only 270 other people can actually be said to be from around here; and by definition almost everybody ain't from around here.

Bess returns from the khazi just as an enormous rooster struts up to the door outside and begins pecking on the glass. We watch him for a couple of seconds, sharing the inevitable jokes about what a big cock. He takes to marching back and forth as though waiting to be allowed in.

'Can you tell us how we get to the painted rocks?' Bess asks.

'Did you make an appointment?' the cashier asks in return. 'You need to call Betty Jo. She arranges all of the tours.'

'Do you have her number?'

The woman looks around herself. 'You know, I don't have it. Sorry.'

We return to the car, Bess fiddling with her phone, looking up a website. 'Here it is.'

She connects the phone to the speaker system by special magic of a kind I don't quite understand, or even see as necessary. Betty Jo answers. She sounds very old.

'Well, I'd just love to show you the paintings but you see I just got back from this morning's tour. I'm so sorry. You see I'm ninety and I can't manage more than one tour a day. I just can't do it.'

We wave our hands in the air as though she can see us. It's an inconvenience, but it is what it is, as they say. We're not going to force a ninety-year old woman into showing us the rocks if she's already knackered.

'Where are you from?' asks Betty Jo.

'San Antonio,' we tell her.

'Oh my - and you came all of this way. I'm so sorry.'

'It's fine. We'll make sure we phone to make an appointment next time.'

We turn around and head back towards Eden. It's been a day out, so we're not complaining. As we reach Eden, we take a left and head down US-87, reasoning that we may as well take a different route back for the sake of variety. The land east of Eden is a little more populous, significantly more farmed, and for the first time ever I see fields full of sheep here in Texas. In fact I see more sheep than I've probably ever seen before in any one day; so that clears up that one particular mystery and explains the Wool Warehouse, although it's only now that I've realised it had struck me as unusual.

We pass through a town called Melvin, which I find pleasing, and then the more familiar territory of Fredericksburg where we stop for something to eat, German sausage in my case. We seem to have had a pretty good day without really doing anything.