Tuesday, April 21, 2020

it's my birthday, and things are going along with a very tumultuous air; maybe this is usual for late april. demonstrators are out there, trying to get states to open things back up. nurses are out there, blocking the demonstrators, saying, no, go home, stupid, give us a chance to save your life. the press is out there, looking for cases where demonstrations caused deaths, or failing that, where bad attitudes led to deaths. they aren't too hard to find.

of course there is a chance that what you read and hear is all baloney anyway. i think that's kind of what the demonstrators think. the press cooked up this virus thing, they don't know anyone who's sick, and the libs are just trying to bring down trump and the economy with it.

if that's the case, it's working pretty well. but i think it crashed on its own. who wants to get on an airplane anymore? who even wants to go to a movie? i'll tell you, i'm doing what i can to even avoid shopping in the market, even though it's getting hard to live without doing something. theories are flying around about how it started. some say the chinese did it on purpose. others say the americans started it and it got out of hand. still others think it was a dem plot just to bring down trump - coincidence, one woman asked me, that it happened right after they failed to impeach him?

the g5 hoax is the hardest to believe. people think g5 causes this virus? i guess stranger things have happened. or at least, as conspiracies go, it's one of the ones that a person could fall for. i used to have to go under these enormous power lines on my way to high school and back. they fed power, basically, from niagara falls to the entire east coast. and i knew, that whole time, that it wasn't healthy. they had thick, tough wires. but they couldn't keep the trouble away from affecting people.

now i have no such qualms about g5, and that's because we've gone g1-4 without that much trouble. yes i know that g5 was fixing to cause some trouble. but it wasn't fixing to cause a virus. a virus is different.

so it's my birthday, and we're knee deep in a pandemic, and the water's rising. the number of deaths per day rose to four thousand something, over double yesterday. meanwhile i'm trying to sit back, relax, enjoy the breeze. april is dry and sunny in new mexico. at our house, it's a little windy too, and sometimes cool at night - it snowed the other night - but basically, it's so dry, the snow couldn't amount to much, or do much except blow around. it gives some things a greenish tinge, when there's a little bit of moisture. but there's so little of it that it's a half-green kind of green, just barely started. only the toughest plants can live through the dry spring with so little moisture.

I'm sixty-six, which means that it's a highway year - that's a highway that comes on through the panhandle and down through northern new mexico, and when it gets to albuquerque it has all that famous neon, which i believe they tried to preserve. i have good memories of the movie cars, and the way it celebrated that highway, and the wide-open southwest where you can open up, drive too fast, and still take in the monuments of red desert rock. people on quarantine are imagining those trips, drives up the desert and such, and we're finding out how long they can really take it, cooped up in their houses with no sports, nothing to do. the answer is, they've had enough. they're out there demonstrating because they've already had more than they can stand. and for the most part, i think a lot of these people don't know anyone who's been affected. i have friends around here - against the quarantine, against the shutdown, and they feel the quarantine has been imposed on them by people who don't understand what it's like to try to make a living - or to live a week without a paycheck - and they'll be the first to get out there and demonstrate. our county only has three at the moment, and it's a county that's maybe two hundred miles in every direction. in the country, a crucial factor is your isolation. if people don't come through here with it, we don't have it, and it's possible to believe we won't even get it, or if we do, it won't spread like wildfire.

on the other hand, country people do collect in crowded spaces, like feed stores and convenience stores, where people are all breathing the same air, and where one person could leave it in the air for another to pick up. my wife is convinced it's all over - that we have it, but we have only three confirmed cases. well, time should be able to tell that, and if it doesn't, maybe we can go back to life as we always knew it.

as for that, i'd say, not likely. for one thing, department stores, theaters, and sporting events are pretty much gone. they can open these places back up, but if the majority of us are home ordering from amazon and netflix, they won't make much money. restaurants, i'm less sure of. it seems we are a lazy culture, and totally willing to let people cook for us. and also, that it's reasonable that they can cook a meal and not transmit the virus at the same time. reasonable, possible, perhaps even likely. i think mcdonald's drive-through will survive, if not even thrive.

our walmart order is again a day and a half late; it was due today at noon, but now won't arrive until sometime tomorrow afternoon. and who knows what they'll have in it. we order pickup because we don't want to go in the store. the kids hock my wife about having their friends over and staying six feet from them, and she says, no way, it's not going to happen. we go another day with the supplies that we have; we have no victory garden (i'll be lucky to grow a couple heads of garlic), and i don't know how to hunt; we are now officially retirees. we have a hard time motivating our kids to go to school. i would jump in there and do more disciplining, but when i do, my wife defends the kids. having a lifetime of father-oppression, she won't tolerate it here, and therefore i am ruled out of that kind of role, because it will trigger not only her, but also the kids, or at least one of them, and she can't take that. so our kids are spoiled, undisciplined, and may even fail a class or two. meanwhile i, frustrated at having no say in it, or no ability to move on them, do other things. there is five acres to clear; there are stumps to pull, and if she wants total control over that sphere i'm ready to let her have it. but actually she needs help and she knows it. she is just unable to relinquish the control. she wants, somehow, for me to do the motivating disciplinary stuff, while she takes care of nurturing them on up the pike. it's not going to happen that way, unfortunately. we're stuck on the not getting anything done situation.

it's happy birthday to me, with people dying, and others demonstrating, and everyone seething, and millions at home either starving or worrying about the possibility. spring is indeed busting out all over, in its dry, spare pretty way (out here) - clear, forested, fresh air in the valley, with deer and rabbits hopping through grabbing what's green in the off hours. the dogs, sometimes, are on to them and make a lot of noise. i prefer the relative quiet, and i've even come to like the occasional gunshots we hear - of people practicing hunting, or actually hunting, or just firing up their guns out of frustration. these country people don't handle sitting still for very long.

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