On the Coronavirus (3)

1.
A grey-brown stippled bird accompanies me as I walk my dog.  The little bird has a beak like an awl and it chirps as it flutters up and down again, always remaining about ten feet ahead of me in the margin of snow remaining streetside. The day is cold and the bird doesn’t take flight – perhaps, it is husbanding energy against the oncoming night.

Snowblowers and plows have cast up angular shards of ice that line the gutters of the streets.  The ice is shattered into tilted strata piled up along the edge of the road.  These miniature landscapes are like the sea of smashed ice in Friedrich’s famous painting of the wreck of the Hoffnung (“The Hope”).  The tiny bird bouncing up and down amidst the snow may be a house wren, probably migrated to this climate a week ago from the jungles of Mexico or the sultry woods in Georgia and the Smoky Mountains.  The wren has come here on the edge of Winter, wagering that the weather will warm enough to allow it to survive this climate.  For much of its life, the little bird flies on the edge of a climate that would destroy it, on the margins of destruction, as it were – build your cities on the rims of the volcanos, Nietzsche admonished. 

My dog takes no interest in the house wren.  The animal is small, mostly beak and claw and inedible feather.  And no dog is swift enough to pounce upon such an animal, although I understand that the cruel and stealthy cats devour them in great numbers. 

In nature, much of life is lived on the threshold of death.

2.
The death count from coronavirus is about 26,500 as I write these words.  (No, I’m wrong – this afternoon, April 15, 2020, the death toll is 30,035 – with 2800 new casualties reported overnight.)

3.
Meat-packing plants near Omaha and Sioux City have shut down due to the Coronavirus.  Workers have become ill.  Are we on the verge of some kind of compromise to the food distribution center?

4.
There are bright red drops of blood in my dog’s urine, a bright and pretty color against the fresh-fallen snow but disturbing.  I try to ignore this symptom for a day or so, but the situation doesn’t improve and so I have to take my dog to the veterinarian in Clark’s Grove. 

It’s a clear day, bright with windrows of snow still draping the fields.  The little lagoons of melt-water are bright green and blue, like cold pools of water where flotillas of tiny icebergs float in stone basins high in the mountains.  At the veterinarian’s office, I have to call the front desk from my car.  A girl clad in capacious and billowy blue lab scrubs emerges, her face hidden behind a mask.  I surrender my dog to her and she vanishes behind a closed door in the side of the clinic.  A little later, the veterinarian calls to tell me that he suspects a urinary tract infection in my ten-year old Labrador, that an ultrasound shows no sign of gravel in her bladder or kidneys, and that he’s injected her with some antibiotic.  He transfers the call to the front desk where someone tells me the bill and asks me for a card number with which to make payment.  I list the numbers on the debit card but the payment can’t be processed – there’s something wrong with the card.  So I have to provide another set of digits, the number on a credit card.  The masked girl in the pajama-like blue garment appears once more.  She has the dog on my leash and a sack full of medications for heart-worm, ticks and fleas, dog-painkiller for the UTI and a bottle of antibiotics. 

Back in town, I have to pick up some contact lenses prepared by the ophthalmologist.  The entrance on Main Street is locked and no one comes when I knock.  Finally, I call and am told to circle the block and come to the back door where someone will respond to my knock.  I go around to the rear of the block, the rear entrances of the old taverns now all padlocked, and, again, knock at the door.  The clerk calls me and wants a debit card number which I provide, but am, then, told that the card has been declined.  I provide a credit card number.  A girl wearing green and blue plastic pajamas appears on the threshold of the clinic’s back door –she is brandishing tongs by which she holds the box of contact lenses.  Only her eyes are visible and her hands gloved in tight pink plastic. 

5.
What’s wrong with my debit card?

My secretary, Susan, sends me an email about what an ex-boyfriend has told her.  The covid-19 crisis is all a hoax – the deaths that have occurred are merely those to be expected during the flu-season.  The supposed peril is all manufactured.  The media has been enlisted by the government in a plot to banish currency – henceforth, all transactions will occur on the basis of electronic fund transfers.  These transfers allow the government to track purchases in the most exquisite detail – soon transactions that are deemed anti-social (that is, purchases of guns and ammunition) will be wholly banned.  This is the first step in the conspiracy to confiscate firearms and reduce the population to dependency on the centralized federal government. Soon the food distribution system will be mobilized to starve into submission those recalcitrant folks still clinging to their guns and religion – already churches have been ordered to close and, even, Easter worship, was, for all intents and purposes, banned.  Black market crypto-currencies are under attack.  Anyone making use of dollar bills or gold or any sort of paper-money will be targeted for re-education or eliminated.

Military convoys have been sighted, long lines of trucks and ordinance moving through the night.  On sidings in small towns, long black trains are awaiting orders from authorities at the Federal Reserve Bank.  Drones sent aloft by patriots show that rock quarries, once abandoned, are now crowded with tanks and armored personnel carriers guarded by soldiers wearing uniforms no one can identify.  Troops have been mobilized and, even, now death squads are active.  In South Dakota, near the Smithfield pork processing plant, hogs have been executed by the million, masked men with submachine guns killing swine and, then, bulldozing them into mass graves so vast they are visible from space-satellites revolving around the earth.  The food supply must be reduced to destroy resistence.  Toxic agents have been introduced into the water supply mimicking flu symptoms in those drinking from the tap, all to sow chaos and bolster the government’s claim that we are under attack by some kind of novel coronavirus. 

This is socialism rampant, industries nationalized to make respirators and hospital personal protective gear, but I ask you where are these respirators (have you seen one?) and where are the gowns and N95 masks (do you have these things?)?  This war-time production is actually manufacturing gear for concentration camps.  Is it any surprise that so-called field hospitals for covid-19 victims are, in fact,  built behind walls, hidden from the view by canvas ramparts, and designed like concentration camps, complete with crematoriums to destroy the corpses manufactured there. 

These are the end-times, the tribulation foreseen and described by the Good Book.  My secretary receives by email a manual describing small-unit guerilla tactics, how to apply first aid to battle casualties, how bleach can be used to purify urine for drinking, advice for manufacturing explosives and distilling home-made whiskey and vodka.  There’s even a chapter on how to butcher a human being for consumption as meat – man-flesh is said to taste very good, like veal.

On April 17, 1847, rescue parties reached Alder Lake, one of the locations in the high Sierra where the
Donner Party survivors were holed-up.  At Alder Lake, Lewis Keseberg, Sr. was found in a shelter surrounded by half-eaten corpses.  Keseberg had smashed open George Donner’s skull and extracted his brains.  Remarkably, an intact ox leg was found untouched amidst the gory debris.  Keseberg said that the ox leg was “too dry” and that he much preferred eating human heart, liver, and brains. 

6.
I know a man whose son was employed by a major American airlines and assigned management of operations in a populous Asian country.  Now, the 45-year old airline executive is living in his parent’s basement in Austin. 

7.
Ninety minutes before dawn, I am awake with worry.  The moon is a pinkish-mustard colored blur in the sky very near the south horizon.  The moon is wounded, a big wedge bitten off on its right side, and it seems to be leaking pus into the sky.  Perhaps, I fall asleep, then, awake, then sleep again.  Every time I turn my face toward the sky, the injured moon has moved – it seems to be plowing through the sky above the dark horizon like a freight train.  Something is unnatural about the speed with which the moon scuttles through the darkness – it’s like a luminous crab or cockroach.

8.
Sky-trumpets sound over Jerusalem and Anchorage.  There are sky-trumpets blaring above Vancouver Island and Nashville and a half-dozen places all around the world.  The trumpets bellow, changing pitch a little and, then, generating overtones and resonances that vibrate around the central pitch.  The videos posted to You-Tube show darkness, dotted with remote lights, or sometimes stormy grey skies over old buildings or vacant fields.  “What is that sound?” someone whispers.  “The covid...the covid...” another voice declares.

In Pittsburgh, a child is heard crying in the streets.  The sound is loud, distressing, and distinct.  The police are called and don’t hear anything.  As soon as their squad cars depart, the child cries again echo over the narrow streets among the old houses tilted together on the steep hillside.  It’s an old working class neighborhood with sidewalks like ladders and yards full of melting snow and every two blocks the brick chimneys of church steeples looming over rectories and ancient convents. 

9.
The painter, Egon Schiele, was one of Gustav Klimt’s apostles in Vienna before World War I.  As a young man, his sensibility was morbid.  He painted himself as an ecorche, flayed like one of Honore Fragonard’s anatomical specimen, raw bloody muscle and sinew with gore pooled in the tips of his long fingers and testicles.  Schiele made studies of himself masturbating and executed a series of sketches of pubescent girls sprawled on their backs with their legs spread.  (He also liked picturing lesbian couples in the throes of passion.)  These sorts of decadent images were not unusual in fin de siecle Vienna, after all, the place where Freud became famous.  Schiele’s pictures are pornography – the little girls have faces with button-eyes like dolls and, even today, the images are more than a little disturbing.  When he was 22, Schiele was arrested for molesting a little girl, one of his models, and jailed in a small village near Vienna for three weeks.  (He spent his time in his cell drawing detailed still lives.)  There’s no evidence that Schiele committed any actual crimes and so he was released.  In 1915, he married and was, then, conscripted into the armed services.  Schiele wasn’t assigned combat duty – instead, he worked as a clerk in Vienna. 

Klimt died early in 1918 and Schiele was positioned to assume a dominant role in the so-called Viennese Secession, the art nouveau movement of which the artist was a part, but also transcended in many ways.  Schiele, a gaunt man with hands with huge tapering fingers, portrayed himself as Saint Sebastian, pierced by arrows and his face contorted into a rictus of agony.  He was 28 and maturing.  His late paintings take up the theme of Der Tote Stadt (“the dead city”), images of empty city streets and tenements with hollow, dark windows, painted in glistening, macabre pigment that suggests enamel or intaglio woodwork.  (“The Dead City” is derived from novella by Georges Rodenbach “Bruges-de-Mort” published in 1892, a ghostly work that was adapted into a successful opera in 1920 by Erich Korngold.  Schiele’s canvases, however, presage some of the pictures of empty streets and inexpressive buildings that we see today during the covid epidemic.)  Schiele’s portraits become less provocative; his strangely lit landscapes are wonderfully expressive and, some of his studies of gaunt trees and foliage, verge on Mondrian-like abstraction. 

Schiele was precociously gifted and, even his pornographic sketches, have an exquisite balance, clarity, and elegantly calligraphic style – his haggard, attenuated figures look like modernist versions of the saints and martyrs that El Greco painted.  Schiele’s landscapes and city-pictures are revelatory.  He was chosen by the Vienna arts community to headline the great Secession exhibition planned for the Spring of 1919 and, in fact, completed a poster advertising the show.  (It’s an odd image, an aerial view of a L-shaped table with people ranged around it, something like a skewed picture of the Last Supper.)  The Spanish flu was abroad and Schiele’s young wife, who was six months pregnant, died on October 28, 1918.  He didn’t mourn her for long.  He was dead on October 31, 1918, also a victim of the great pandemic.

Schiele’s aborted career, cut-off just as he became famous, is one of the great question-marks in art history.  What would have happened had he lived?  On this question, the pandemic is silent.

10. 
One day, I don’t know exactly when, I woke and didn’t know whether it was the weekend or a week-day.

11.
The plague story is so dull, so utterly repetitious as to be completely uninteresting.  So-called “front line heroes” are lauded.  Deaths are (insincerely) mourned.  Pundits call for more testing.  A vaccine is always 18 months away – it was 18 months away in February and 18 months in the future today as well. Trump’s pronunciamientos against the virus (he has declared himself “a war time president”) are predictably divisive and equivocal – we must continue “social distancing” at the same time that he tweets “Liberate Minnesota,” that is, denouncing “social distancing” so long as it is the product of a Democratic gubernatorial decree.  Immigration is shut-down, or threatened to be shut-down, although immigrants have nothing to do with the contagion.  When called upon to justify this perverse proposal, Trump says that he doesn’t want immigrants taking jobs that Americans would perform once the work-restrictions are lifted.  But, in fact, most immigrant workers have notes declaring that they are “essential” to our economy –these are meat-packers, food processors, people who kill hogs and bone fish and labor in the fields.  These are the people whose jobs are so significant that they have to keep working or the rest of us will go hungry.  The immigrants, legal or illegal, aren’t part of the problem – they are indisputably part of the solution.  But Trump’s proposal is the very purest form of dog-whistle.  The great majority of Trump supporters are ignorant and xenophobic fools – they need someone to blame for the plague and, in times of crisis, it’s always the stranger who is the source of all our problems.  In fact, Trump’s daily program pivots around saying something so dangerously irresponsible that the Press is distracted from the death toll, increasing by increments of 3000 every 24 hours, and spends the next news cycle summoning a parade of self-righteous talking heads to denounce the president: Presidential power is “absolute” and the President can do anything, Trump says on one day, then, that he can overrule the States and make them open their economies, or that Minnesota and Michigan and some third State that didn’t vote for him should be “liberated”, the US should de-fund the World Health Organization (in the middle of a pandemic), and, at last, that immigration to the United States must be suspended.  It’s a noxious strategy but the Press takes the bait – during the last several days, it’s pretty obvious that the steadily rising death toll is, as they say, “boresome” and disheartening as well and its best to report Trump’s latest provocation with all suitable sound and fury.   You can only amuse the public so long with tributes to brave medical doctors (all of whom seem to be immigrants or the children of immigrants), check-out clerks, and tales of people who died alone, separated from kin, in sterile plastic tents filled with oxygen tubes and Iv bags futilely infusing some kind of poison into their veins.  People stand on balconies and sing to firefighters and cops; someone plays a cello alone on a porch.  A pop star releases a timely song.  More people die. 

12.
Now the news is that the virus can infect you a second time, even after you have earlier survived the illness.  (This seems questionable but who knows?  Half of what is reported is reliably and wholly wrong.)  Covid-19 is studying us more astutely than we study it.  The virus is learning to become more fiercely lethal and its learning curve is steep.

13.
The Banks are entrusted with delivering stimulus loans.  (Disclosure: my firm applied-for and has received such an operating loan – it’s free money, although I think the distribution’s tax status is not yet established.)  The banks are merely conduits for the proceeds but they are entitled to charge up to 5% on small loans, fewer percentage points on the big grants.  So the banks are now earning obscenely huge amounts of money with no risk and little labor.

Covid-19 just magnifies the world’s inequities: the rich get richer, the poor get poorer and for those who have nothing at all, everything will be taken.

14.
As New York City and State start to relax some of the social distancing rules, the contagion now sweeps the country.  Although the media dutifully covers outbreaks in places like Sioux Falls and Boise, there’s no urgency, none of the full-throated fear and indignation and desperation that characterized plague horror-stories in the Big Apple.  At least not yet.  The media hasn’t yet learned that New York City doesn’t produce anything but third-rate, derivative musicals and TV chatter.  So far as I know, there are no slaughter-houses (even Kosher ones) in New York’s seven boroughs.  No feed-lots either and no row crop fields extending to the horizon and green with corn and soybeans.  New York’s celebrity chefs are about to find out where their food comes from.

15.
A few hundred deplorables gather to protest the shut-down.  The men are all bewhiskered and look as if they have just come from their woodland den and mail-bomb factory.  The women are better-looking, blonde with broad hips, breeders, it seems.  Some of these people have guns and ammo- bandoliers strung across their brawny chests.  A lot of them carry hand-lettered dyslexic-looking signs that read “My Right to Work” or other pithy expressions of a desire to contribute to the mighty economy that once drove the world (but now no more).  An enterprising reporter should talk to these people and find out exactly what kinds of jobs these folks purport to hold – mink-farm operator? proprietor of taverns catering to bikers and snowmobile enthusiasts? antiques vendor? dog groomer? trap-line operator or big game guide in the North Woods or marina owner?  It doesn’t look like most of these people have ever been gainfully employed.  In fact, some of them seem to be folks with bad backs who have been on work comp for awhile and, possibly, acquired heroin habits in the course of their interminable convalescence.

In some Eastern state, there’s a demonstration of this kind and the goons in their cars who are aiming to block some major intersection encounter a couple of health care workers in pristine blue scrubs.  The health care workers are cut from the heroic mold and I presume that they are actors hired to stage this piquant confrontation between those who protest being forced to stay home and those who are “fighting (as they say) at the front lines.”  The goons in the cars and pick-ups shriek imprecations at the health care workers who stand their ground in stony silence.  The stand-off results in the intersection being blocked anyway and, probably, for a longer time and so everyone walks away from the confrontation with their objectives achieved.  Mission accomplished.  (A few days later, predicatably, someone writes an opinion piece for the Wall Street Journal noting that surgical scrubs are sterile and not supposed to be ever worn outside of a hospital ward and operating theater.)

Some of the protesters seem to be confused about what they are protesting.  Among their signs, I see some placards extolling the second amendment, a misbegotten error in the Constitution that accords morons the right to bear arms.  One hapless guy is carrying a sign that says “All Lives Matter!”  Maybe, he’s just recycled that slogan from the last racist and right-wing demonstration in which he participated.

16.
No one is traveling and so oil is just a black tarry substance that pollutes rivers and kills sea-fowl.  Briefly, the cost of oil in the markets for the commodity dips below zero.  This means that oil producers will pay you to accept delivery of the stuff.

Enterprising folks have their swimming pools filled with oil and several small towns dump their reserves of water to have oil pumped into their water towers.  The producers are paying $37 dollars a barrel to purchasers and so a city on the prairie with a couple thousand residents can score ten- or twenty-thousand dollars buying the stuff and injecting it into the tank on the tower next to Main Street. The problem for the entrepreneurs in Dallas and Phoenix who have filled their swimming pools with petroleum is that its not good for swimming and you have trouble getting the oil out of your hair.  It takes the citizens of the small towns a few weeks to accustom themselves to drinking oil instead of tap-water but with fortitude the task can be accomplished.

17.
On Monday, Trump told the governors to start opening their economies and suggested that lock-downs (so-called Shelter-in-Place orders) be rescinded.  So the Republican governor of Georgia proposed to open his State on Friday.  Trump appears on TV on Wednesday to say that he thinks it’s too soon for Georgia to re-open.  The governor had authorized such essential services as nail salons, spas, massage parlors, and tattoo joints to re-open.  “It’s too soon to open,” Trump says on TV during his daily two-hour plus press conference.  MSNBC, the loyal opposition, and Fox, of course, cover the press conferences from beginning to end – they are grotesque affairs involving the president praising himself for his sagacity and acumen as to the plague, contradicting the physician experts or humiliating them by making them reverse previous statement (perhaps only the day before) that have offended the Commander-in-Chief.  (One poor sawbones has to retract his statement that the probable confluence of flu and covid-19 resurgence in the Fall would be “very bad”.  “I didn’t say ‘bad’,” the doctor tries to explain.  “I said ‘difficult’.”  Q: “Well does ‘difficult’ mean ‘bad’?”  A: “Yes.”  Q: “But you said ‘bad’?”  A: “Well, I meant ‘difficult’.”  Q: “So were you misquoted when you said that the fall flu season with covid-19 would be ‘bad’?”  A: “No.  I wasn’t misquoted.”  All the while, Trump looms beside him on-stage with his orange complexion turning a bit purplish with rage.)  CNN won’t cover these press conferences, regarding them as political rallies, albeit of a muted sort.  But this strategy backfires since CNN commentators, then, spend each evening and late into the night analyzing and mocking Trump’s comments. 

As always, but even more obviously with this plague, Trump takes all possible positions without regard to coherence or consistency.  Then, later, he can always point to some declaration that he made that has been borne out by subsequent events.

What is needed, I submit, is the humility to recognize that there are no maps to this terrain, that no one in a modern technologically advanced society, has ever had to deal with these sorts of strains and that the future is simply unknowable.

All we can predict is that another 3000 people in the United States will be listed as dead tomorrow.

18.
The toilet downstairs doesn’t flush right and almost overflows but doesn’t.   I’m relieved.  I flush the toilet a couple more times and am alarmed to see that big noxious bubbles agitate the water in the bowl.  It’s as if the system is burping or farting and distressed in some way.

My relief turns out to be premature.  In the evening, I find that a drain in the floor of the basement room where I store my books has backed up and there is a hideous puddle of water, likely raw sewage spreading out across the floor.

A couple years ago, one of my bookcases collapsed.  It took me more than a year to remove the books from the broken shelves, stack them on the floor, and, then, disassemble the wooden frame of the book case.  I had nowhere to put the wooden parts and so I simply leaned them against the wall.  The books ousted from their ordinary shelves were stacked on the floor. Now, these tottering towers of books are standing in water that is, perhaps, about an inch deep and none too clean by the look of things.

Clearly, the waste-water drain running to the city sewer is clogged.  When a toilet is flushed upstairs, the stinking drain burbles and surges, sending another sheet of filthy water across the tiles.  I have to walk in the water, bare foot, and I presume that the bacteria will infect my toes and cause infection.  The contagion is spreading.  It’s in my house now.  The shit is, literally, coming for me.

19.
There are 24 million people unemployed.  Casualties in the United States stand at 56,000.  The Minnesota State Fair, the “great state get-together” that takes place in the first week of September has been canceled.  The damage to the economy is unprecedented, far worse than the Recession of 2008, worse that the Great Depression in the “dirty thirties.”  A heat wave is rolling across the southwest.  It will be hotter than a 100 degrees tomorrow in Phoenix and Tucson.  Trump has two suggestions for defeating the covid-19 virus: scientists should discover a way to irradiate the human body from within with ultra-violet rays (I think he means infra-red light) or, in the alternative, people can inject themselves with bleach or other kinds of disinfectant.

20.
All plumbers in Austin have Irish names: there is McDermott, Callahan, and M. J. O’Connor.  McDermott, who is now mostly retired, sent out invoices bearing a green four-leaf clover and the yin-yang emblem.  O’Connor also uses a four-leaf clover to advertise his services. 

McDermott is older than me and has weak lungs and, so, he isn’t stirring from his home.  (His ex-wife whom he helps is very sick and her health is fragile and he doesn’t want to risk infecting her.)  McDermott is a life-long friend, a person with the best temperament and disposition of anyone I have ever known.  The sordid problem in my basement is not something I would want to impose upon an enemy, let alone a good friend and, so, I’m relieved when he tells me that his business is closed.  He suggests that I call Callahan.

Callahan comes out to my house with motorized “snake’, a kind of roto-rooter with a cutting head to chop through any clogs in the line.  I chain up my dog on the front porch and Callahan goes downstairs through the side-door that I haven’t used for many years and, together, we splash around in the sewage, now about one to two inches deep.  He yanks out the drain and puts the cutting-head down in the black hole and, then, powers up the roto-rooter.  I go upstairs and sit at the dining room table, listening to the rhythmic rumble of his tool.  Then, I hear Callahan shout: “Goddammit!  Jesus Christ!”  He’s still cursing when I get to the water at the bottom of the steps.  “It’s stuck,” he says.  He reverses the torque on the coil and, also, yanks on the rotating cable.  After a minute or two, the cable starts to retract although reluctantly.  Then, the rooter catches again and the motor clutches.  Callahan pulls on the cable some more, tugging until it the snake is freed and, then, the spinning rotor, the dark, lethal-looking blade emerges from the drain.  There’s an inky gush of mud into the sewage standing around the drain.

“They are clay pipes,” Callahan says, “and either crushed or blocked by roots.  You have trees out there.”

He said that the blade advanced 23 feet before getting stuck in the muck.

Callahan drags his motor and the coiled roto-rooter out to his panel truck.  I ask him what I owe him.  He shrugs.  “Gimme fifty dollars,” he says.  I can see that he’s desperate to get away from this basement, the pool of sewage and the dark and vicious drain.  I write him a check.

“Now what?” I say.

He says: “There’s a company called ‘Jetter’.  They use pressurized water to blast through clogs.  Ask them to look at it.”

Relieved to be dismissed, he shuts the back of his panel truck and drives away.

‘Jetter’ wants nothing to do with the problem.  I tell the man on the phone about what happened with Callahan.  “So what do you want me to do?” he says.  I sense his worry.  The drain is clogged, probably on account of a crushed pipe or tree roots.  If he jets 1000 gallons of water down the hole, he will simply create a sink-hole in my yard or collapse the street and sidewalk or, perhap, create such back pressure on my basement walls that they will simply fall inward.  At minimum, his high pressure jet will flood the basement.

“Nothing I can do,” he says.

21.
Julie checks into a motel with Angelica.  I make some more calls.  O’Connor is the premiere plumbing contractor in town – they install big commercial plumbing systems.  I call O’Connor.  He’s out on a job but his wife says she’ll give him my cell-phone number.  He doesn’t call until late afternoon.  O’Connor has a “scope” that can be used to transmit a TV image of the interior of a pipe.  He tells me that he’ll send out a worker the next morning to put the “scope” down the drain.  But he says that if the water is full of muck, the “scope” probably won’t show anything.  “But it’s worth a try,” he says.

I have no water in the house.  I wait until it’s dark and, then, go in the back yard to urinate like a dog. 

22.
The Israelis have perfected a tracking device that identifies where a person has been so that “contact tracing” for the virus can be accurately accomplished.  “Contact tracing” is determining each and every person with whom the sick person had contact during the incubation period of the disease – thought to be five days, but, as long, possibly as two weeks.  Phone data can be downloaded to identify every place, every store, bar, restaurant, and street corner where the infected person has been.  Of course, use of phone data of this sort will be helpful in many other ways – counter-terrorism, surveillance of political dissenters, supervision of unruly members of the public.

Freedoms lost now may not be restored.  Although who knows?  No one can know the future. 

23.
A feeling of claustrophobia is abroad.  The world is now a place of closed borders and locked doors, empty arcades and plazas as in a de Chirico painting.  The disease has seized the entirety of our imaginations – we can’t conceive of a world without this unceasing peril.

24.
O’Connor’s man comes with his monitor and camera on the end of a roto-rooter cable.  He warns me that the water may be too murky to see anything.

I have to pick up some medications.  You drive to the window at the pharmacy, announce your name, and the woman behind the plexi-glass at the counter, hands you the pills in their bottle in a sack and the sack set inside of plastic box.  The woman at the counter is wearing a surgical mask and blue gloves.

When I return to the house, the plumber is putting away his scope and TV monitor.  “The screen was just bright red,” he said.  “Nothing was visible.”  He tells me that he thinks the blockage in the main sewer line is 23 feet from the drain.  Then, he gets out a can of green spray paint.  He intends to mark the place on the lawn above the blockage – this is so the excavator can dig down to find the crushed or root-infiltrated clay pipe.  The young man is vigorous with a black moustache and a big tattoo like a decal signifying deadly radiation on his bicep.  He has a cell-phone that is supposed to pick up pinging signal from the tip of the ‘scope’.  But the cell-phone and the locator, a sort of listening tube, aren’t calibrated correctly.  The plumber paces around in my front yard, searching for the signal to show him where to mark the lawn.

But the locator leads him in circles and, then, to the foundation walls of the house.  I know that the pipe can’t be in that place. 

“We know where the pipe enters the floor of the basement,” the plumber says, “and I know where it feeds into the city sewer.  But who knows what sort of loops and curves and twists it takes to get to the city sewer.”

After 15 minutes pacing around the sides of house, he gives up.  He says that his boss, Mike O’Connor will call me in an hour or so with a proposal.
 
25.
For about eight years, my son drank heavily and used dangerous drugs.  He would often pass out or wander around the neighborhood and town staggering drunk or almost comatose from drugs.  During this period of time, my wife and I were terrified that he would overdose or kill himself or be horribly injured as a result of his intoxication, falling into water or dying in a ditch or snowbank or plunging off an overpass or bridge somewhere.  In those years, we lived in a state of abject and degrading fear.  During that time, my son had problems with the law and, ultimately was committed to a locked psychiatric ward – he was held in awful conditions of confinement for over 180 days.  When these horrible things happened, Jack hid vodka bottles and other booze in a space under our front porch, an enclosed trench-like room full of spiders and centipedes and dusty cans of paint and smashed up furniture.  When he was drunk, my son and his cronies broke things, left shards of glass everywhere, and ruined chairs and lamps and tables.  All of this wretched detritus was shoved into the “cold room”, as we called it, hidden there, put out of sight and out of mind, on an icy concrete floor where sinister pools of water sometimes appeared.  Pretty soon, the cold room was so filled with ruined furniture and bottles and other debris that you couldn’t really open the door any longer.  Spider webs cloaked the debris.  Dust settled over everything.

O’Connor doesn’t call me back.  I presume that he really isn’t enthused about the basement full of raw sewage, the clogged pipe, and the fact that no one can really chart the course of the waste-water system in my house.  I call him and there is an enormously long delay; presumably, he’s stiffening up his courage with respect to the sewer problems that have rendered my house uninhabitable.

When he comes on the phone, O’Connor says he’ll have to send out a crew to jackhammer open the concrete floor in the “little pantry under your porch.”  He is referring to the unlit “cold room” as we call it, the place bearing the loathsome evidence of my son’s mental illness, the site of ruins and decay.  “The ‘scope’ only advanced four feet,” O’Connor says.  “I thought he was 23 feet into the pipe,” I say.  “No, only four feet,” O’Connor tells me.  “This means the blockage is under the concrete floor of the pantry,” he says.  I feel physically ill, reeling. “We’ll come on Monday and jack-hammer it open, maybe put in a drain and clean-out in the pantry.  But, then, we’ll have to deal with the rest of the pipe and, presumably, that will be all tangled up with roots and crushed also,” O’Connor says.

O’Connor says that the clog was so bad that his man almost lost the ‘scope’ with its camera-head in the drain.

I ask for an estimate.  “I can’t give you an estimate,” he says.  “It underground.  I can’t even begin to estimate what will have to be done.” 

I’ve talk to my insurance.  I have $6000 coverage for sewage back-up with a one-thousand dollar deductible. 

I’m guessing this problem will cost about $17,500 dollars.  And tomorrow, I’m going to have to drag garbage out of the cold room, clear out the wolf-spiders and the centipedes, drag heavy items through the sewage to open up a place under the porch where the workers can smash out the concrete over the blocked sewer pipe.  The weekend now intervenes with no water in the house and standing sewage in the basement.  “It must be really blocked,” O’Connor says.  “I would have thought that the water would seep back down but it hasn’t.”

“No, it hasn’t,” I say.

26.
The sewage in my basement, my terror at confronting the “cold room”, the chaos and dismay in the world: it’s all heaping up on me.  I can’t breathe.  Pretty soon, I expect, that I will be sick.

27.
During the last two days, the roads have been flooded with traffic.  It’s warm, about 65 during the day-time, and, suddenly, people are out and about.  I have the sense that only the very ill and the very elderly will follow the governor’s orders about staying-at-home.  People have become inured to the slaughter in the hospitals.  Some dictator observed that the death of one man is a tragedy, the death of thousands a statistic.  And that sort thinking prevails this weekend. 

New evidence suggests that covid-19 virus, once it has swept through a population, doesn’t confer any immunity.  People are getting re-infected with the virus – at least, that is the current news, although I wonder about the accuracy of these reports.  I know that testing to ascertain whether someone had the novel covid virus has been flawed and that there have been many inaccurate results recorded.  (Current tests are trending 15% false negative – this implies many false positives as well.) Accordingly, I wonder if the people now testing positive for covid 19 really had the illness previously.  We live in the realm of conjecture and fearful surmise.

28.
I’ve now used a Shop-vac to extract about 400 gallons of raw sewage from the room where I store books and my DVD collection.  The process was to vacuum water in five gallon increments, disassemble the Shop-Vac receptacle so that the water could be poured and, then, dump the filth into buckets.  Each bucket was big enough to contain fifteen gallons, a load of water that I, then, hauled up the stairs and, then, thirty feet or so into my back yard where I splashed the sewage down on grass and shrubs.  Angelica assisted me with task.  After about two hours, no standing water remained in the basement except in the black fatal drain in the floor.

I took breaks ever ten or eleven buckets of water because my back hurt and my legs were sore from squatting and, then, climbing steps.  Angelica and I also pulled garbage out of the cold room.  There was a surprising amount of fairly good furniture in that room – at least three black upholstered office chairs with swivels and wheels, two beautiful wooden chairs that were part of dining set, a lamp, and an antique chest as well as two big suitcases.  In ruinous condition were two bookcases, both of them of particle board and immensely heavy.   We also dragged out onto the boulevard a box of antiquated stereo equipment, what used to be called Hi-Fi receivers, a green plastic Christmas tree and two boxes of ornaments, as well as several partially disassembled book cases made of metal and plastic.  Half of the room is still piled floor to ceiling with rotting boxes containing god knows what, but we’ve made progress.  Most interestingly, I’ve uncovered a large clean-out plug in the middle of the cold room.  I wonder if this entrance into the underworld, about four feet from the drain in the paneled basement room is the stricture where the roto-rooter equipment has been entrapped. 

29.
As I’ve earlier mentioned, more than 85% of patients put on respirators die.  (I’m aware that like everything reported about this virus, these figures may be unsound.)  Of course, a month ago there was a vast alarum about whether enough respirators would be available to treat patients who needed them.  Now, it’s pretty clear that respirators weren’t particularly effective in decreasing mortality and, in fact, may have increased deaths – we just don’t know at this time.  Doctors need to feel that they helping their patients and this requires some form of “doing”, that is, some kind of active therapy.  The respirators, at first, were probably more beneficial to the physicians than their patients – they provided the illusion that there was some kind of task that could be performed to alleviate this misery.  People want action, not analysis and not sympathy.  This is why the media and the president are constantly proposing additional measures that may stem the tide.  But it’s obvious that much of this is just theater, illusory and without efficacy.

Patients put on respirators died alone with painful apparatus drilled down their throats.  Medical comas were induced to keep the patients’ gag reflexes from vomited back the tubing.  But the patients succumbed anyway.  Probably people over 65 should be issued cyanide tablets sufficient for suicide with the option of swallowing that poison to avoid the inevitable.

30.
Lulu Garcia-Narvarro, a newscaster with National Public Radio, ends her broadcast by advising people to be “kind to themselves.”  I have no idea what this is supposed to mean. People think they are being “kind to themselves” even when they are rending their flesh or preparing to put a bullet through their brains.

31.
Morning news on Sunday, April 26, 2020: Jake Tapper is quarreling with Ann Birks, a physician who is part of President’s team of advisors.  His questions are mostly in the aftermath of Trump’s bizarre remark that people might consider injecting disinfectant or ultra-violet rays into their bodies.  (As is always the case with Trump is thought-processes are so strangely illogical and his communication skills so negligible that no one call tell precisely what he means at any given time.)  I heard the exchange at the Thursday, April 23 press conference and thought that Trump was musing out loud without suggesting anything to anyone except himself – this kind of narcissistic self-absorbed monologue is characteristic of this president.  So far as I know there’s no evidence that anyone ran out, filled a syringe full of bleach, and injected it into their body, but the media perseveres in the possibility that this could have happened.  So on April 26, now three days after Trump’s bizarre statement, Jake Tapper asks his final question: In effect, tell us what a moron Trump is to imply that people should inject UV or disinfectant into their bodies (something that Trump didn’t really imply.)  This is the fundamental question that underlies each and every hostile encounter between the Press and Trump’s medical team or supporters: surely you must think your boss is a fool and, so, could you kindly tell us publicly that you think your boss is a fool?  If not, please say the worst thing that you can about Trump.

Dr. Birks won’t say anything bad about Trump and Tapper gets more and more outraged, dismissive, and indignant.  He demands that the doctor denounce Trump.  But Birks won’t be bullied into this statement and she points out that the media are probably doing more harm than Trump’s original tentative and questioning remark.  (The media are outraged that Trump later claimed he was being “sarcastic” – there’s no shred of evidence for sarcasm either.  The media need to cease being outraged that Trump lies.  Of course, he lies – he literally doesn’t know the difference between truth and falsehood, a point that raises an interesting semantic and philosophical question: is someone lying when they don’t know that they are lying?  The media should simply note the misstatement and move on.)  Finally, Dr. Birks forgets Tapper’s name and calls him “Michael.”  Tapper’s huge earnest eyes almost fill with tears; he seems about ready to weep.  He would be so, so wonderfully happy, if the physician would simply something very bad about the president.  But she isn’t interested in making that statement.

The media’s message is this: You are going to die or starve and the President of the United States has done this to you.  The relationship between the media and the President and his minions is totally dysfunctional and, probably, clinically insane.  The Watergate debacle, at least, was about the health of the body politic; this debate is about the health of our actual corporeal bodies.  There are no metaphors here.  Trump is literally making you sick. 

32.
The smell in the house is turning sour, a bit like an expensive French cheese.  When I drive to McDonald’s for breakfast, I keep pulling out in front of oncoming cars.  It seems that I want to crown this misery with a car crash.  Scott Simon, a NPR broadcaster, says that he dreamed that an elevator had stopped on his floor.  The door to the elevator opened and Simon’s father, who had died when he was 16, was standing in the elevator.  He said to his son: “At least, I don’t have to wear a mask, because I am already dead.” 

33.
The dog is alarmed.  She barks and whines and paws at the floor until I see the cause of her distress – an elegant-looking wasp with a yellow-striped abdomen is creeping across the living room floor.  The windows and doors have been open to air out the house, but this wasp has the appearance of a fledgling, as if it hatched from some hidden hive in my dwelling.  Normally, I pick up insects and put them outside, but the wasp might sting my dog’s nose and, so, I crush it with tennis shoe.  The flattened wasp has a little fleck of turquoise at its mandibles.  When I look more closely, I see that it is wearing a tiny surgical mask.

34.
On Monday, the plumber comes with the intent of jack-hammering out the floor under the porch, the concrete in the noisome “cold room”.  But, first, he levers open the pump-out in the middle of the floor and sees that the water is relatively clear so that, perhaps, his camera-scope can be deployed once more.  And, so, he departs for the shop and returns a few minutes later with the device.  A half-hour passes and the plumber calls me at home – “I’ve got to 40 feet and can see in the water; the pipe is open to the city sewer.”  I drive the five blocks back to my house and look at the TV monitor: the water trapped in the pipe is a reddish stew of floating debris with big pink earthworms that sometimes spin into view.  The worms rotate in the murk like planets in outer space, elongated by the subtle gravitational fields in the sewage. 

The plumber spends another two hours rooting out the pipe until the lines flow through to the city sewer.  Some picturesque words describe the situation underground: “root curtains” for places where tree roots have infiltrated the old clay pipes and “mud prisms” (or, possibly, “mud prisons”), describing, I think, the lenses of mud that have seeped between the pipe segments.

The rooter has extracted a half-dozen “root curtains” and they are very delicate, masses of tiny black tendrils, not the nasty fibrous bundles that I imagine, but small spheres of fragile-seeming threads.

A Service Master contractor comes in the afternoon and power-washes the floors with disinfectant solution.  The ruined carpet on the basement steps is removed.  The clean-up is underway.

35.
A long metal dumpster has been delivered curbside.  We are going to clean out some of the house, discarding thirty years worth of stuff that we have acquired and no longer use.  We have set items to be discarded on the curb for people to scavenge if they want – so far, the only things taken are a folding chair and a single old lamp.

36.
Most states are re-opening albeit tentatively on Friday, May 1,2020.  Businesses are supposed to provide curbside delivery – although how well this will work is unclear.  Testing for the virus is supposed to be ubiquitous but there’s no mechanism to manage these measures.  If I wanted to be tested, I don’t know where I would go or how I would accomplish this.

Vice-President Mike Pence jets into Rochester to glad-hand with the Mayo bosses.  He doesn’t wear a mask and visits a ward where there are sick people.  The craven Mayo Clinic tweets that VP Pence was told to wear a mask, but declined to do so, but, then, this act of lese majestie is rescinded: the Clinic takes down the tweet.  But the damage to Pence is done and the media denounces him and, then, adding insult to injury, repeats the best jokes made about his visit on late-night TV: Jimmy Fallon, for instance, “Pence isn’t allowed to wear a mask because his lips must always be available for ass-kissing (President Trump)” and so on.  David Letterman tells Howard Stern that Pence’s failure to wear a mask when visiting covid patients at the Clinic is tantamount to “taunting them” – I don’t see the symbolism in exactly that way. 

Spring is underway.  The season advances regardless of what we do to hinder or encourage it.  In one week, the trees have put on some of their brightest green and most tender leaves.  The birds are trilling overhead and squirrels chatter.  In wild places, the virus has eliminated human visitors (everyone is in their setts at home) and bears and deer are frolicking among empty tourist cabins at Yellowstone and Yosemite.  A catastrophe for mankind is a boon to animals, although the slaughter-houses are running on skeletal crews and the news reports that 1.5 million hogs will have to be simply murdered since they can’t be more productively butchered in packing plants now crippled by sickness.  What if the animals were simply released into the wild – imagine vast herds of feral pigs roaming the alleys and thickets, devouring small dogs and babies, gorging themselves on growing crops, growing increasingly wary and cunning and, ultimately, seizing control of whole tracts of southwestern Minnesota, most of Iowa and the eastern slope of the Dakotas. 

37.
The wind howls.  The buckets used to carry water out of my basement are blown so far away that I can retrieve only one of them – it’s resting against a curb, a block away.  The others have vanished. The sky has opened up its corridors to the wind and howls like a banshee.  Cables slump down over the parking lot at my law office, hammered off the utility poles by the relentless gales.  Cardboard kites up into the air, empty boxes skipping merrily down the street.  Because of the virus, people have been buying things on-line and there are vast amounts of cardboard discarded next to garbage bins and all of it has now taken wing and is soaring through the air.

38.
30 million people unemployed. 

39.
Now the trees are stitched with green, not clouds or veils of it yet, but brittle slippery-looking pale celadon buds.

40.
At Waterloo, Iowa, about a hundred miles away, the Tyson meat-packing plant is ground zero for the infection.  Six-hundred cases are traced to the plant and the contagion has spread into the nursing homes where it will, undoubtedly, reap a deadly harvest.  The plant is shut-down and farmers are selling hogs on e-bay or killing them to avoid feed costs – there’s nowhere the transport the animals.  Undoubtedly, someone will just release a thousand or ten-thousand swine into the woods somewhere, possibly in the brushy valleys and remote valleys around the Mississippi River.  There the freed swine will breed and build their empire and, if the winter doesn’t carry them off, they will overrun the country, root out the growing crops, and, perhaps, the boars will grow mighty tusks with which to threaten the townsfolk.

Trump has vowed to keep the meatpacking plants open.  But what this means is that he intends to issue executive orders insulating the ownership of these firms from liability if workers get sick on the job.   The key is to avoid defining covid-19 as an occupational disease – if the sickness is treated as an occupational disease, then, employees will be entitled to worker’s compensation if they become ill.  This would bankrupt the industry. 

41.
The Hormel woods are resplendent with bright blue flowers, blue-bells, growing where the forest floods.  The flowers look metal-grey in the distance and spread in sheets between the trees.  The swales in the woods where standing water is often seen have dried.  The fiddle-head ferns are not yet swaying in the breeze. Winter winds have uprooted many trees.  The park is full of bikers swishing here and there on narrow trails from which foot traffic is barred.  Whole families are out with dogs, riding along the main pedestrian trail and there are immigrant men from southeast Asia toting fishing gear, lovers strolling between the blue-bells, and, on the creek, some canoes and kayaks paddling downstream to the place where the stream rolls under the freeway bridges and spreads out to flood a low-lying forest of oak and maple still winter-bare.  On the terrace overlooking the creek, the cemetery is lush-green, studded with white and grey tombs, a few obelisks standing here and there like exclamation points against the blue sky. 

I know someone whom I meet by coincidence on the Hormel Woods trail.  We chat as the bike-rider pedals slowly about ten paces ahead of me.  His wife is farther along the trail, towing a cart in which a baby is riding.  The wife tells me that at the University of Madison veterinarian school experiments are underway to determine if the growth of hogs can be chemically slowed or reduced by certain forms of judiciously applied starvation – the idea would be anti-growth as opposed to the pro-growth hormones usually applied to boost weight-gain.  If the animals can be kept relatively small and lean for a longer period of time, perhaps, they can be kept in the food pipe-line until the quarantines are lifted.

42.
It’s startlingly cold this morning. The governor is maintaining shelter-at-home restrictions for another two weeks – until the 15th of May.  Minnesota has seen about 6663 cases with 419 deaths.  (80% of the deaths are in nursing homes.)  Twenty-eight cases are confirmed in Mower County where I live, but no deaths.  The second largest number of cases by county after Minneapolis (Hennepin) is Nobles County where there is a meatpacking company and over 900 people tested positive. 

May 4, 2020