Quarantine Lite Edition

A stranger showed up at our house today but fortunately adhered to the social distancing rule.  He stayed far more than 6 feet away; actually about 93 million miles away.  The sun, of course, who made an unscheduled appearance!  On our work conference call people made mention of it given it’s an event about as rare in Cloudumbus as a lunar eclipse.

So it was all sun, all the time, and I was in it to win it. Feel like it gave me some momentum. Love being able to take dogs on a walk at lunch and thus not have to do it when I get home at 5pm from my commute.

It was like the Spring days of yore so it appears the season has not been cancelled out of an abundance of caution.  I enjoyed the freedom of movement by walking the dogs out in the field where they spied a cat running and pulled and I was dropped into a pit of mud.  But the game must go on (if not baseball this year) and so I continued my walk by cutting through the back side of the field, ending up on a calm and collected cul de sac.

Post-walk I necessarily had to wash all my clothes and doing that is a lot easier when working from home. Our CEO had a video chat today saying, “working from home is hard, really hard” but thus far I haven’t necessarily experienced that.

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Every Drudge has its day I guess. For years I’ve gone to Drudge Report and snickered at all the doom and gloom headlines. It’s sort of like a clearinghouse for what sells - bad news. But I laugh no more because of course the last month even Drudge hasn’t had to overplay the doom and gloom.

So many celebs getting coronavirus that you’d think they were trying to, as if it’s the new elite thing. “You’re nobody unless you’ve got the virus,” is the vibe, since otherwise you must be stuck in rural Nebraska.  Placido Domingo, Harvey Weinstein, Rand Paul, singer Jackson Brown, and now Prince Charles (“forever a prince, never a king” might be his epitaph).
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A tepid “workout” after work - the elliptical downstairs hardly gets me breathing heavy but alas it’s the only gym in sight - and then off to the grocery store where we picked up the order we’d placed on Tuesday. Steph carefully had everything in tubs where we sprayed lysol on all goods that needed to be refrigerated. The rest we're leaving in the car for a couple days to “de-germify”. Steph’s really bought into this after watching DeWine daily.  (The “DeWine Daily”?)

Had dinner and lunch delivered from local restaurant. We’re getting smarter about ordering multiple meals to cut down on delivery costs.

So just another day in quarantine. Or quarantine-lite. The virus is officially in town now, with a case at the rehab center. In addition a parishioner at my Byzantine church tested positive, yikes. They were in church four days before I was there.  Priest has cold-like symptoms with no fever but... ?

Precautions, yes, for sure. But perhaps we can dismissively say of the virus, as Jesus said to Pilate, “You would have no power over me if it were not given to you from above.”

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I suspect that if and when Chinese becomes the world’s reserve currency and the decline of America mirrors the decline of Britain after WWII, historians will look back to 2020 as the decisive moment. You had a country in great economic health if doing poorly spiritually (“diseases of despair” run rampant with a 3-5% unemployment rate -- what will they look like with 15%?). You also had a country that despite the great economy had no will to improve infrastructure or build the southern wall but punished itself with record debt nonetheless. And then the virus hit at which point any imaginary money for infrastructure got burnt up in stimulus money.

It’s sort of a textbook case of how a country or individual gets in trouble: you weaken yourself in good times and then when the bad times come you’re flattened. Internal political divisions prevent America from doing productive things with the public treasury and then, in that weakened state, comes a once-a-century virus.

I still vividly recall in college reading the following passage from John Steinbeck’s “Travels with Charley" (about his receiving a needful fire and brimstone sermon in Vermont) that woke me up to the idea that some people (unaware at the time it included me or would include me) need fire and brimstone and perhaps there’s a role for the mean Old Testament God:

“For some years now God has been a pal to us, practicing togetherness, and that causes the same emptiness a father does playing softball with his son. But this Vermont God cared enough about me to go to a lot of trouble kicking the hell out of me. He put my sins in a new perspective. Whereas they had been small and mean and nasty and best forgotten, this minister gave them some size and bloom and dignity. I hadn’t been thinking very well of myself for some years, but if my sins had this dimension there was some pride left. I wasn’t a naughty child but a first rate sinner, and I was going to catch it. I felt so revived in spirit that I put five dollars in the plate, and afterward, in front of the church, shook hands warmly with the minister.”