On the Coronavirus (II)

1.
Filthy weather – April 3, 2020.  Cold dawn eking out a little grey light.  Sky no higher than the tops of the trees.  Droplets of ice have frozen shut the cover to the garbage bin and there is a moist, chill bite to the air.

In the alleyway:  a figure in black, head to toe, black sneakers, black sweat pants, black hood concealing face.  The black shape carries a back pack, also black.  It sweeps through the lane between the houses and disappears.


2.
The fog has descended, chaos as the pestilence expands and ramifies.  The news is a wilderness of fearsome conjecture and the contagion now is everywhere, hydra-headed, seizing the totality of human affairs and turning them to its dire purposes.  Everything, all human interactions and institutions, are contaminated.

The schools are closed and the kids, without anything to do, grow increasingly feral and desperate.  In fact, idle hands are the devil’s playground.  The federal government aiming to indemnify the poor, at least, to some limited extent is drowning in debt that will take a half-century to repay.  Hospitals can’t process bills and are slipping into bankruptcy.  Tenants can’t pay rent due on the first and are marching in the streets to demand rent forgiveness and the landlords are failing, abandoning property that they no longer have resources to repair.  The prisons are full of contagion and the criminal justice system must release felons or leave them to die in their cells.  Nothing works anymore.  The Courts aren’t in session except for the most necessitous cases – criminals in custody and divorces involving assault and battery and child abuse; everything else is frozen, in semi-permanent abeyance.  Retirement accounts. and with them hopes and dreams, have mostly evaporated.  Local municipalities can’t pay their obligations and there will be no tax revenue because filing dates have been deferred for another quarter.  The health care system is strained to the point of collapse – this affects not only those infected with the covid-19 virus but everyone else: who will care for the new born babies? those with merely fractured legs or arms? the scalded? those with heart attacks and strokes? the sad battalions of the mentally ill?  Doctors and nurses can’t get personal protective equipment like masks and gowns.  There aren’t enough respirators.  And, now, the doctors and nurses and the ambulance drivers and paramedics and firefighters and cops are getting sick: 10% today, how many tomorrow?

Institutions that require ongoing public support are failing?  How will the museums and concert halls survive being shuttered for three or four months – something that now seems probable?  Foreign alliances are collapsing as nations withdraw into themselves to combat the virus.  The ranks of the military are full of casualties and weakened to a point where our defense capability is in question.  The public trust has been squandered and people are suspicious, hyper-vigilant, armed to the teeth having bought out merchant inventory in side-arms and ammo from their local gun vendors.  Nothing can be built.  Construction sites languish.  Armies of people are furloughed and on unemployment.  The sane, tolerant established religions are too rational to weather this crisis – the mainstream churches have all closed and one wonders if their appeal in these desperate times is sufficient for them to be restored.  On the fringes, of course, all sorts of madness and fraud flourishes –apocalyptic cults, end-of-days preachers, merchants with scam remedies and nostrums.  Armored cars are summoned to small-town banks – the yokels are withdrawing all of the cash.  Credit card companies and lending institutions are on the brink of failure.

And, then, there are personal fears and tribulations: families forced together quarrel and explode into violence and recrimination.  Marriages fall apart.  And I wonder: how will I do when the time of trial is upon me?  Will I be a burden to others?  Will I disgrace myself with a petulant display of fear and selfishness?   What will become of me when the virus takes me in its embrace?

Ships full of corpses are denied entry into ports.  The dead are stacked in make-shift morgues.  No one can attend funerals any longer because proximity to strangers or, even, friends can be lethal.  The dead aren’t properly mourned and so they rise from unquiet graves and stalk the land.  You can see them in the distance, standing in grey, winter-ravaged cemeteries, walking in alleyways and striding along the storm-cursed horizon, gathered at night in mute dialogue under streetlights at empty intersections, huddled at the bar in dark taverns closed by the plague.

These afflictions are legion and hydra-headed and all entangled, swarming around us.

3.
When troubles come from all sides and in legions, there must be some simple remedy, one magic bullet to pierce through all problems and lay them low.  Thus, the calls for dictatorial power, centralized federal authority.  Even the most liberal pundits on the news shows are demanding the appointment of a Covid-19 Tsar – that is, a strong man, perhaps appointed by God with the divine right to order this chaos, punish malefactors, reward the virtuous and, thereby, stop this disease in its tracks.  So the liberal news media is braying for something decidedly illiberal and, I submit, of limited efficacy.  The simple truth is that no one knows how best to combat this plague – and calling some bureaucrat a “Tsar” isn’t the answer.

4.
I can’t avoid the surmise that there is something unnatural about this virus.  I know that the genetic evidence is to the contrary, but doesn’t it seem like this contagion has been tailor-made, that is, engineered by some malignant military R & D to create maximum havoc? Fifty-percent of the infected are asymptomatic and, therefore, unless tested, unaware that they are walking-talking vectors of contagion.  The virus is wonderfully robust – it can live on cardboard for a day, on stainless steel or metal surfaces for as long as three days.  It is ferociously contagious – speaking closely to someone or merely breathing on another’s face or hands can transmit the sickness, the vulgar mechanisms of sneezing or coughing aren’t even required.  And, the virus’ genius is that it only kills rarely and, then, according to arcane algorithms that no one has yet deciphered.

Military analysts and ordinance manufacturers have long known that you don’t need to kill enemy soldiers to stop an attacking army.  You need only inflict disabling and frightening wounds on some of the enemy soldiers.  If a man is blown to bits or shot dead, the attacking force will leave him as he lies.  But wounded men require succor.  Each soldier with an arm or foot shot off will remove three or possibly four of his comrades from the firing line as the injured casualty is dragged off the battlefield.  Well-designed ordinance wounds instead of kills.  And this seems to be how Covid-19 operates – instead of killing outright like Ebola, the disease simply sickens with a substantial number of its victims requiring the resources of several doctors and a half-dozen nurses as well as a huge investment in medical technology: respirators, therapeutics, PPE, negative pressure wards, ICU telemetry.

Furthermore, a really sophisticated weapon doesn’t need to kill soldiers and armies.  It merely needs to kill an enemy’s economy.


5.
The virus has seeded us.  Imagine a festive holiday, Thanksgiving or Christmas: the disease has passed and people are gathered to celebrate and, even, give thanks for their deliverance.  And, then, suddenly, one of the merrymakers falls to the ground and begins writhing and, in the throes of convulsion, his belly bursts open revealing the hideous jaws of a serpent concealed in his entrails.  Then, others fall over, frothing at the mouth, and giving birth, as it were, to a whole horde of monstrous, wriggling worms.

It’s an extravagant fantasy shamelessly derived, of course, from Ridley Scott’s Alien.

What if my nightmare scenario isn’t literally, but, rather, figuratively true?  Surely, people’s psychological response to this plague may prove to be disabling in the future.  What is the effect of this trauma, particularly on children?  What will happen to a whole generation afflicted with some species of post-traumatic stress?  In other words, what are the long-lasting psychic consequences of living with a plague of this sort?

6.
I’ve parked the car curbside to await delivery.  I’m at the Institute of Rhinoarchaeology – that is, the institute for the study of the prehistory of noses.  Before my delivery arrives, I wake up.  What were they going to bring to my car?

I have lots of time to read.  I’m completing Martin Walser’s book about Goethe’s last love, Ein Liebender Mann (“A Man in Love”).  The German is quite difficult.  I can only read five pages in an hour.  I’m working my way through Gogol.  My favorite things to read are books and papers about archaeology and art criticism.  I have Lekson’s fabulously witty and thought-provoking Chaco Meridian.   On order, I have books on the earthworks at Poverty Point and the ancient Olmecs. I also have Thomas Crew’s book on the art engendered by the restoration of monarchy in Europe after Napoleon.  I’m ambivalent about Crews’ hermeneutics and iconographic analysis – he’s far more sober than Michael Fried and Joseph Koerner, both of whom I like to read if only for their fanciful (thought-provoking if questionable) interpretations.  Jeffrey Blomster was the scholar who led a tour to the ruins in Oaxaca in which Julie and I participated.  (It was sponsored by the Archaelogical Conservancy and really wonderful).  He has made a spectacular discovery in the Oaxaca valley at a place called Etlatongo.  Excavations that he directed uncovered a ball-court – the oldest found in the Mexican highlands and, in fact, the second most ancient ball-court identified in Mesoamerica.  It is thought that the rather shadowy ball-game played universally in ancient Mexico originated in the lowlands of Chiapas around 1600 BC at the Olmec city-state at San Lorenzo.  By the time of the Aztec empire, the game seems to have been played everywhere and, apparently, possessed important ritual and political connotations.  (A variant of the game played with rubber balls exists even today).  Previously, it was thought that the game was primarily practiced in the lowlands and didn’t reach the mountainous highlands (the valley of Oaxaca) until 500 BC.  But Professor Blomster’s find, published as Origins of the Mesoamerican ballgame: Earliest ballcourt from the highlands found at Etlatongo, Oaxaca, Mexico (Science Advances, 13 March 2020) shows that the game was played in a formal court as early as 1400 BC.  This is a major discovery of great importance in understanding cultural diffusion of the ballgame and its concomitant rituals and sociology.  (One of the discoveries at Etlatongo were small ceramic figurines of ballplayers wearing the hip yoke used to buffet the ball around and diagnostic of the game.  The ballplayer figurines are hollow and have holes in them – they are also whistles.  Presumably, people watching the game blew the whistles to cheer on their side or moiety.  When I was most recently at Teotihuacan, I happened to tramp the site on a Mexican school holiday.  The place was packed with children and every one of them seemed to have a small ceramic whistle purchased from one of the vendors on which they were merrily tooting.)

7.
The Spring has reversed: ice coats everything and there is snow on the grass.  It takes me 20 minutes to chisel the ice off my windshield.

A portly crow, a distinguished gentleman of the night, ambles across the alley.  I drove toward him but he isn’t fearful.  He makes me stop for him not vice-versa.  The animals have lost their fear of the panicked humans in which they live.

8.
The great face-mask imbroglio: at his daily Rose Garden coronavirus briefing, Trump is asked whether Americans should wear face-masks when they leave the home.  This question arises from the assertion that the Covid-19 virus can be readily spread by people who are asymptomatic.  (Of course, this understanding was always implicit in the concept that people could spread the virus while asymptomatic – that is, not coughing or sneezing.)  Trump, as usual, bungles his answer: I personally won’t wear a mask, he says, but if you want to, you can wear something, maybe a scarf.  Helpfully, he adds “I think many people have scarves.”  Trump is usually dishonest, but this statement may be objectively true – even I own a few scarves.

Immediately, CNN’s Erin Burnett lunges to attack.  She accuses Trump of being negligent, indifferent to the peril, and misleading the American people.  Of course, she asserts, everyone should wear a mask when they go out in public and it is irresponsible to say that this is not mandatory.  Furthermore, Trump should be wearing a mask and, therefore, provide a good role model for his flock of American sheep.

Burnett’s remarks are total nonsense.  First, there are no mask available.  If the public were to panic and buy masks like they have purchased toilet paper, there would be no masks available for medical doctors and nurses who desperately need these things.  Second, wearing a mask that is non-medical grade creates a false sense of safety that would likely kill more people than not wearing a mask.  Julie wore a mask, commandeered from the medical facility where she works, when she took her mother to the Mayo Clinic for a biopsy earlier this week (I am writing on April 4, 2020).  She said that the mask was ill-fitting and she spent much time fingering her cheeks and jaws to adjust the covering over her face.  In other words, when you wear a poorly fitting non-medical grade mask, you necessarily touch your face a lot – something we’ve been told not to do.  And, incidentally, Ms. Burnett is not wearing a mask as a TV role model, nor is Anderson Cooper nor Wolf Blitzer nor Dr. Sanjay Gupta.  Its redolent of hurricane coverage in which the newscasters solemnly warn everyone to shelter-in-place while their reporters (with their sound men and camera crews) are filmed outside enjoying the full brunt of the storm. If wearing a mask were mandatory, I would certainly be happy to accept my news coverage from the glamor boys and girls on TV with their expensive mugs half-draped in cloth or plastic, but they are having none of that themselves.

Burnett summons on-air poor Sanjay Gupta, who seems to be a reasonable man.  In the last few days, Gupta seems to be afflicted by some kind of dental problem or canker-sore, the poor guy’s mouth is twitching and he seems to be exploring a sore spot (or spots) with his tongue within his cheek or gums.  Burnett really only has one demand: say something really bad about President Trump.  She isn’t interested in anything else.  So she spits a few questions in the direction of the handsome medic, all soft balls that he is supposed to hit out of the park with invective against Trump.  Gupta won’t play ball.  He notes that the WHO and CDC both aren’t convinced that wearing masks will do anything beneficial.  Like Trump, he observes that if the masks fit right, there’s probably no harm in wearing them, but they shouldn’t be assumed to be protecting anyone.  He repeats the fundamental message – stay six feet away from other people when you are in public.  Burnett, then, asks him whether its evil and irresponsible for Trump to not wear a mask.  Dr. Gupta replies that Trump has twice been tested, as recently as yesterday, and that he is negative for the virus – he’s not infected.  So, Gupta says, there is no rational reason for him to wear a mask.  This never occurred to Erin Burnett and she doesn’t have a rejoinder.  She glares at the poor doc with rage and, then, sullenly pouts.

9.
I made a non-medical grade mask for myself.  I took a plastic Walmart shopping bag, ripped out a hole to fit around my glasses and put the thing over my head.  Julie took some cell-phone pictures of me watching TV in my simple non-medical grade mask.   Then, we posted those pictures on e-bay offering the masks for sale for $5.95 (plus $3.95 for shipping).  We made a quick thousand dollars but, then, ran out of leftover plastic bags.  (I save and use them as “poop bags” when I walk my dog.)

There are fortunes to be made out of this virus.

10.
Trump says that many Americans will die.  He lacks even the most elementary eloquence and adopts a nonchalant tone that many will perceive as indifference – in his inept way, he is trying to show a “stiff upper lip”, that is, fortitude in the face of adversity but he doesn’t have the resources to pull it off.  He also says that the statistics show that there is “light at the end of the tunnel.”

After the press conference, the media pounce, once again hysterically accusing the president of “mixed messaging.”  But this is again willful misunderstanding: what he means, but can’t effectively say, is that the carnage this week will, perhaps, be the apex of viral impact, and, after the massacre, things will slowly begin to improve.  In fact, Trump calls Anthony Fauci to the podium to make this precise point.  But no one reports Fauci’s words and again Trump is accused of misleading the public.  I’m not misled.  The message is mixed; this is because the report is a compound of the horrific and faintly optimistic – after all, this too shall pass.

11.
One positive effect of the coronavirus, I hope, will be the destruction of the bloated and viciously inauthentic professional sports industry in this country.  If the virus had surfaced in January – which it did – no one would have canceled the NFL play-offs or the Super Bowl; some franchises are too big to fail.

Professional sports is an persistent font of false values, a taint on the nation.  But, mark my words, the virus will receded sufficiently for the NFL to begin its season this Fall.

12.
My dreams show that I am losing my mind.

I’m at a trial in the Rice County Courthouse in Faribault.  My son, Martin, is accused of violating the Governor’s Order, although this Order has nothing to do with the coronavirus – it’s something about conservation in the North Woods.  Although Martin is trying the case on his own, pro se, I am seated at the counsel table as the proceedings drone on, helplessly fumbling through stacks of paper.

At a recess, I suggest to Martin that he sit at counsel table.  He intends to call several witnesses, but doesn’t have them under subpoena and, so, I know they won’t appear.  I think the Court is in-session again but I can’t find the court room – it’s tucked into a little, discreet alcove near the front door.  The Courthouse is crammed with people, everyone standing well within the six feet social distancing cordon sanitaire that prudence and the Governor’s Order requires.  Public TV is conducting a carnival in front of the windows behind which the clerks of court are working.  I push my way through the crowded corridors but I have no idea where the courtroom is located.  Perhaps, the proceedings are underway – within this chaos, I suppose, there are secret patterns meaningful to the Judge, but I can’t see them, have no control over what is happening, and don’t understand anything.

13.
Tuesday, two days after Trump’s Sunday press conference, the morning media breathlessly announces that another several hundred people have died in New York City, killed by the contagion now reaching its “apex”, but that the “curve is flattening”, the number of new cases leveling off or, even, reversing and there is, indeed, light at the end of the tunnel.  This is exactly what Trump said 48 hours earlier for which he was derided for “mixed messaging” – you can’t have it both ways, lots of deaths and some cautious optimism, the news commentators told us.  But this is exactly the situation.

14.
The plague has been a boon to dogs.  It’s socially acceptable to walk your dog, while it may be problematic to go outside otherwise.  I always walk my dog, Frieda, rain or shine, and, so, our habits haven’t changed.  But, now, the streets are full of happy dogs, romping at the end of their leashes, both big and small, puppies dancing on the sidewalk and old dogs placidly padding along.  When I get home, I find a black speck on Frieda’s nose and, when I stoop to brush it away, the little particle suddenly levitates and flies away: the first mosquito of the season.

Will the blood of people contaminated with corona-virus be contagious and can this illness be spread by mosquito bites like the West Nile disease?  This is not a trivial question in soggy Minnesota – even now, billions of larvae are writhing in puddles and lagoons of melt-water spilled into the fields and soon the air will be singing with them.

15.
There is no death sadder than the soldier killed after the battle has been decisively won or lost or the man struck down on the eve of armistice.

16.
Politicians say that the public response to the virus, for the most part, has been heroic.  People have stayed home and not congregated in groups that would further the spread of the disease.  Staying at home is said to be patriotic in this present conflict, the moral equivalent of war.

Of course, some have remarked that our grandfathers were ordered to leave families and home, undergo arduous training, and, then, kill our enemies or be killed by them.  We are being told to sit on our couches and watch TV.

17.
Thunder before dawn and one burst of lightning.  Then, rain magically falling from a naked blue sky.  Later, clouds bury the town.  In the distance, a strange, electric humming like some vast generator.  Mosquitos are being manufactured or filtrable virons.

18.
There’s no where to go with this story, essentially a narrative about statistics, a subject that most Americans can’t fathom.  The news shows depict doctors and nurses dressed in hulking protective gear hovering over reddish patients whose faces are blurred-out by a camera-effect.  Some numbers are announced by a newscaster and, then, a governor appears to plead for respirators and masks.  Another official promises respirators and masks.  A freakishly young victim of the virus is shown in photographs taken when he or she was healthy – now, this person is dead.  (In fact, in Minnesota the mean age for a person killed by the virus is 86).  Family members are allowed to mourn on air for 15 to 20 seconds.  Then, a nurse with her mask tipped down over her throat says that she feels like a “lamb going to the slaughter” every time that she goes into the ward full of gasping and dying Covid-19 0002 patients.  Her anger is purely expressive – she doesn’t suggest anything to improve her plight.  Probably, there is nothing that can be done.

Someone who wishes to salute the nurses and doctors for their brave duty calls them “rock stars.”  That’s a jarring thing to hear: “rock star” is another way of saying someone is ignorant, narcissistic, lacking in any real talent, depraved, and selfish.  This form of praise need to be re-thunk.

19.
He was a mail carrier who lived in Chicago and wrote songs on the side.  Performing at a folk music place in Old Town, John Prine impressed Roger Ebert.  Ebert, who worked as a newspaper critic, wrote a favorable review for the young man and he became modestly famous.  Bob Dylan also praised Prine saying that he embodied “Midwestern Proustian Existentialism”, a phrase that just goes to show that Dylan (at least at that time) knew nothing about Proust or existentialism.

I know John Prine’s music chiefly because my step-daughter, Sena Ehrhardt, performed a wonderful version of “Angel from Montgomery”.  This ballad was one of Prine’s most famous songs, and, also, one of his first great successes – it appears on his first album issued in 1971.  Prine was a great lyricist: “If dreams were thunder/and lightning was desire/This old house would’ve burned down/A long time ago.”

The covid virus killed Prine on April 7, 2020.

20.
The sky is turbulent with big snow clouds like fists gloved in icy black.  The wind is cold and, in the country, the traffic signs flex and quiver with its blows.  The snow spears down, angling into the green grass on the gale.  After a few hours, the sun appears hesitantly between towers of boiling cloud and the snow evaporates but the winds remain fierce and icy.  This is the day before Good Friday.

21.
Trump wanted all the churches open and jubilant on Easter.  This isn’t going to happen.

22.
Walmart is a barometer for the pressure in the community.  By the look of things, the town is about to explode.

The front door on the grocery side is blocked by a sort of corral made from cardboard shipping boxes and orange cones.  A guy wearing a florescent green vest stands in the corner of the corral and directs you away from the exit door.  Generally, at this particular Walmart, people don’t pay much attention to which door is marked exit and which entrance.  Like the girl in Prince’s “Raspberry Beret”, people often “go in through the out door.”  Apparently, the management of Walmart thinks that this forces people into proximity dangerously close and, so, now a separation between the doors is religiously observed and the worker in the vest barks if your path takes you toward the wrong entry.  He’s a very laid-back dude, obviously, otherwise the fraught customers, who have poor impulse control generally, would draw their conceal-and-carry firearms and gun him down.

Inside, the store has more tape marks on the floor than the sound-stage of a live audience sit-com.  The marks direct you where to stand and wait.  Everyone is supposed to maintain six foot distance while in the grocery.  At first, I don’t notice the strips of tape on the floor.  I have come into the place with Angelica to buy only a very few items, a handful of staples, and plan to use the self-serve kiosks to check-out.  That area of the store is manned by a fearless Hispanic kid who thinks he’s immortal and, probably, for all practical purposes, is pretty much indestructible.  There’s a line waiting for the check-out machines and, inadvertently, I crowd the woman ahead of me – the tape on the floor is scuffed and I have stepped over it.  The woman whirls to face me with a look of utter horror and rage.  I see that her cart is full of bleach products and paper towels, instruments for scrubbing and cleansing.  Her lip is contorted and her eyes, fixed in her narrow small head, have something of the glint of a praying mantis or wasp.  I don’t want to be stung and so I step back a pace or two, taking my place behind the tape on the tile floor.

This is why I despise Walmart.  It’s a temple to egalitarianism.  The working poor think that they have every right not to be contaminated by me.  They should be happy to receive the gift of my germs.  There’s a structure to society and these people don’t know their place.

Of course, I recognize that these thoughts are wrong and, certainly, despicable.  I step back and don’t crowd the lady with her pathetic stores of cleaning materials.  She’s right and I’m wrong.  But it doesn’t feel like that to me.

Probably, I should avoid the place at all costs.  At Walmart, I’m too much revealed to myself.

23.
The dreams are worse.

Two swarthy men wearing heavy coats and scarves are threatening another man that I used to know.  (This man was one of the founding members of the Great Books group but has since gone to Minneapolis – we say “gone to Minneapolis” with the reverence that we might say “gone to heaven.)
For some reason, I intervene and the two thugs begin to threaten me, even reaching out to cuff my ear and chin.  There’s nothing to do but pretend to be asleep and so I close my eyes and snuggle with the smaller of the two thugs and I hear his breathing calm as the rage leaves his body and, then, he is asleep.  I drowse for awhile, the warm weight of the sleeping hoodlum, next to me.

Then, I recognize it’s time to flee.  I get up and quickly walk away from the figures huddled in the corner of some kind of big open room.  It’s dark outside and I’m terribly hungry.  On a kind of loading dock elevated above the gloomy street, I find a McDonald’s except that it’s not a McDonald’s but really more like a soup kitchen with three sides of the structure bare concrete block walls and the fourth  an open counter where men in uniforms are working amidst hot grills and steam.  I’m wearing a suit and, before I approach the counter where some customers are waiting, I try to tuck my shirt into my pants.  For some reason, my hands are numb and inept and I can’t get the dress shirt tucked in properly.  I also discover my trousers are unzipped, although this is something that I learn only after I have placed an order and stepped back away from the counter, trying to “social distance” from the grimy, shadowy people also waiting for their food.

Then, I go back to the counter to pay for my burgers.  I take out my wallet because I know that I am carrying several twenty dollar bills in the currency sleeve.  But, for some reason, I can’t make the payment.  The place where bills are kept in my wallet is full of business cards, dry-cleaning receipts, opera and movie tickets, and, even, foreign currency, by the look of it Icelandic Kroner.  I keep pulling things out and setting them on the counter, but the paper that I present for payment is useless – heaps of parking lot tickets, cards from competitor layers, random scraps of paper.  The counter man becomes increasingly impatient.  “Dude, put your house in order,” he says.  I can’t find the currency.  I can’t find any cash at all; everything in my wallet has turned to junk.  Then, I remember that I stuffed one of the twenties into my breast pocket.  I reach there only to discover that I’ve put a hamburger in that pocket and my fingers come out with ketchup on them.  ‘Dude?” the counter man says.  Then, I recall that I put my cash into my pants pocket.  I look down and see that my zipper is open and my shirt isn’t tucked in properly.  I reach into my pants pocket.  There’s another hamburger crammed into that pocket and, again, my finger comes out dripping red with ketchup.

24.
The investment account, a report made to me monthly, shows that since the onset of the coronavirus, I have lost $200,000.  Easy come, easy go.  But old men are miserly by nature.

25.
Around three in the morning, when the nightmare wakes me, I see that a big pink-yellow eye is glaring through my window, looking down full in my face.  It’s the full moon but with a strange tint.  I put on my glasses and the glowing orb shrinks to a round, hot-looking slightly colored hole in the night sky.  People used to think that sleeping with your face under the full moon caused madness – hence, the word “lunacy”.  My dreams suggest that I am losing my mind.

26.
Most of the people are wearing home-made masks the grocery store. All of the older men reek of booze.  They are the exceptions to the rule that the shoppers wear masks.  The drunks lurch around amid the aisles of brightly packaged food.  The toilets are near the check-out stations and the middle-aged drunks vanish behind closed doors and, then, stagger out to glower at the people buying food.

27.
Ten days ago, the mainstream media were united that Trump should seize control of the means of production, nationalize manufacture of personal protective gear, respirators, and medication, and impose a shelter-in-place order applicable to all fifty states.  Citing the Constitution, Trump declined to assert these powers.  Yesterday (April 13), Trump conducts a press conference and asserts dictatorial (his term is “absolute”) power over the States.  But his intent seems to be to require States to abrogate their stay-at-home orders and put people back to work to revive the comatose economy.  The media is now furious and complains that the President is violating the Constitution.  The level of childish hypocrisy on both sides is almost beyond belief.

28.
A man has come from Savannah, Georgia.  He announces that the golf courses in that area remain open.  Of course, it’s a little different now.  The players ride one to a cart and the carts are first sprayed with a mixture of bleach and water before being provided and, every hour, a kid comes along with a bucket in his own Cushman and swabs down the pin and flag.  Pencils coming with score-cards are also dipped in a disinfectant chlorine solution.  Everything smells like a big indoor swimming pool even though you are outside.

After the game, the golfers sit in the bar, each at a separate round table, toasting one another, guffawing, teasing.  But these are old men and many of them can’t hear very well and, so, there is continuous misunderstanding.

29.
A Spring blizzard fills the air with snow for ten hours beginning on Easter morning.  Everything is covered in thick, heavy blankets of wet snow.  The trees slump as if with despair and the roadways are cut into grooves filled with slush.  It doesn’t seem worth risking cardiac arrest to shovel this snow off driveways and sidewalks, although people with snow-blowers needs to justify their investment and so, the morning after the snowstorm, the crisp, cold air is roaring with their sound.

30.
A fist-sized blue woodpecker hammers at the tree on my boulevard.  Snow sifts down.  Perhaps, the tree is infested with emerald ash borer larvae.  That arboreal contagion has now been identified in Minnesota.  The woodpecker is a pretty creature.  Would that all symptoms of infection were so beautifully bright and sartorially elegant.

30.
An old woman down the street dies.  The true toll of the coronavirus is unknown.  Lots of old people have simply died at home.  The old man’s wife says that he thought his wife was dead for almost a week.  She was inert, barely breathing, completely unresponsive.  Without food or water, it was only a matter of time.  She slipped away without waking or, even, moving so much as her little finger.

31.
When I left my home to walk my dog, the sun was bright, light blowing through burly, dark clouds scudding across the sky.  But, after ten blocks, at my place to turn around, the clouds had coalesced and there was no sun breaking through between them and, then, the first flecks of snow began to flicker in the air.  In its groove, the engorged river flowed under bridges, a brown tense sinew flexing itself under the flakes of snow melting on its surface.  A shopping bag was impaled on a tree standing next to some residential housing built a decade ago for the elderly.  The wind made the bag pierced by the tree shudder and twitch.

There’s something exhilarating about the sweep of the wind, whirling flakes horizontally, and the middle distance loses focus and blurs to white and, at the ends of the streets, the clouds have settled onto the earth and froth with snow.  Old Man Winter is ingenious and persistent and, at least, for an hour, he’s returned with snow and wind.  I have something of the wild feeling that still stirs in my heart when the first flakes of Winter come suddenly on a stormy day in autumn presaging the season of cold.  It’s as if a hiker climbing between wooded moraines in the high mountains were to watch the warm sun become suddenly diffuse and wan, and, then, the scent of pine sap and juniper berries exhaled from the forest is, suddenly, chilled out of the air and, although the stream beds are mostly dry stone in September (the snow on the peaks almost gone by this month) and the creeks reduced to rivulets dancing boulder to boulder, the air is suddenly full of white flying pennants of snow, soft flakes that catch on the tree trunks and whiten them and the trail to the heights also becomes pale and you have the sense that the season is suddenly rolling over like a vast pale leviathan in the deepest abyss in the sea...

April 14,2020