I haven’t paid the least bit of attention to this website for several years. What happened? Life.
But now, today, October 20, 2020, a mere two weeks before a Presidential election that promises to be more akin to a Wrestlemania event than to anything to which we’re accustomed, I’ve got a feeling deep inside of me to put pen to paper, thumbs to touchscreen, and get this baby back on the radar screen.
This then will be my log, my blog, my musings and confusings of the great debacle recorded as the year of our Lord 2020, which began like most but could well end, and not end well, in a civil war. Or, probably not, but there’s talk. If Biden wins and Trump eventually concedes, the interregnum could be devastating.
Comparisons of the current political environment to 1968 pop-up here and there; Arron Sorkin even made a Netflix movie about the Chicago 7. But this feels much bigger, much more catastrophic than 1968. Maybe because in 1968 I was young and idealistic (and most likely high) and now I’m old, weary and wary (and sixteen years sober).
In 1968 Lyndon Banes Johnson was the landslide winning, power brokering, Great Society dreaming, appendix scar revealing President who delighted in lifting his beagles by the ears for the press down on his Texas ranch. LBJ’s biggest mistake was getting himself, and by himself I mean us-the American taxpayer and their boys unfortunate enough to have a low draft number-engaged in the great quagmire, the Vietnam War. As lousy, and deadly (over 60,000 killed), and unpopular as Vietnam was, one bright spot (that went mostly unnoticed at the time) was that Johnson wasn’t interested in becoming supreme dictator for life. On the contrary, he was, albeit misguidedly, aiming to stop the spread of perceived illiberal regimes through a surrogate war against China and Russia in Southeast Asia. He so much did not want to permanently reside at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, that he went on national television to declare he would “neither seek nor accept his party’s nomination” for a second elected term. Sure there was plenty of stinking rottenness in 1968; virtually unfettered systematic racism, rampant voter suppression, Mayor Dailey‘s excessively brutal police force, widespread and generally accepted misogyny. But one thing that was unimaginable, unimaginable-not dissimilar to the unimaginable idea decades later that commercial airliners would be purposefully flown into the World Trade Center’s Twin Towers-is that a major political party’s Presidential candidate, and incumbent, would not accept the will of the voters.
LBJ’s plan to retire prematurely to Texas contrasts sharply with the current incumbent’s overt actions and words to steal the election and, failing that, to refuse to commit to a peaceful transfer of power. We are possibly living through the end of the American experiment and marching briskly not just back to the America’s 1950s style repression of everyone who wasn’t a straight white male, but to 1930s Germany. Yikes-no wonder everyone is on edge.
Actually the first three months of 2020 were going okay. Trumpster was hanging in there with his steady 42% approval rating, his supports were well armed but generally behaving, the stock market was hitting new highs weekly, unemployment was hitting record lows, as were interest rates, the Kardashians were all getting along-I just made that up, I (proudly) know very little about the Kardashians, I’m not even sure how to spell their name and have no interest in looking it up-airports were packed, concert tickets sold out in minutes, everyone ate out all the time, Ruth Bader Ginsberg was alive and dissenting on the Supreme Court. Life was good.
The Democrats were trying on different candidates for size: Biden, Warren, Sanders, Buttigieg, Booker, Harris, too many to remember. Everyone had their favorite, their answer to the agent of chaos in the White House. It was a long way to November.
I was having a pretty good year. I was braving the Pennsylvania-perhaps, some might say, not too cheerfully-winter. I had a bunch of home improvement projects going on and of course the endless “downsizing” of stuff from a 35 year marriage replete with three kids and two dogs to keep me busy. During the third week of January I made a trek to the Tampa Bay Area to run a 1/2 marathon in Clearwater. I went on a Yoga retreat in Puerto Vallarta in February and skied Montana in March.
Then, somewhere high on a mountain top in Montana, COVID-19 caught up with us. A freaking worldwide pandemic. Suddenly everything shut down. Stay home, stay safe. Quarantine in place. The streets of major cities emptied. Whole sectors of the economy collapsed, the stock market plunged, unemployment soared dwarfing figures from the Great Recession of 2008 (at the peak of the 2008/2009 crisis unemployment peaked at around 700,000. In 2020 new unemployment claims exceeded 1,000,000 week after week, month after month).
Sporting events, concerts, Broadway Shows, college classes, secondary schools, church services, weddings, parties, gatherings of any kind were canceled. Offices sent their employees home, colleges sent their students home, schools closed, buildings closed, whole states closed.
Bubbles formed quickly. College students returned to their parent’s home, adult children, many with children of their own, moved into their parent’s larger home, or fled from the city to their suburban roots or, the lucky ones, to their parent’s vacation condo at the beach to ride out their new unemployed status or to work remotely-Work from home or WFH as it quickly became known.
For every home bursting at the seams with new bubble occupants, there were as many people bubbling alone, cut off from the physical world.
I was fortunate. My daughter temporarily moved out of her Center City apartment to WFH and hangout with me and our dog, Penny (a.k.a. Doodlebug©️). I never moved from the family home where Wendy and I raised our three children. One of the things we loved about our 1950 house was the extraordinarily large bedrooms. The house has plenty of room to stretch out and avoid each other.
My companion of the last couple of years with whom I was skiing in Montana when the plague set-in, Debbie, moved in too. We settled in and watched the world fold-up around us. We did a lot of diversion watching on Netflix, Prime, Hulu, HBO Max, and whatever other subscription, cable and network TV we could agree on. We also did Yoga with Willis for the first couple of months.
Willis is Willis Johnston. A few years back, before I met her, Debbie had taken Yoga instructor training in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico. Willis was one of her favorite instructors during her training. In March of 2019, Debbie and I attended a retreat In Havana , Cuba that Willis organized. We had such a blast in Cuba that we went on another Willis retreat in Puerto Vallarta in February, 2020. When the shut down happened, Willis, like everyone else, move the operation to Zoom and we joined in for the first couple of months.
The simplest things, going to the grocery store, getting a haircut, getting the dog groomed, going to church, acquiring toilet paper, going for a run, therapist appointments, guitar lessons, everything had to be rethought. At first very little was known about the virus, including how it spread. Could you get it by touching an infected surface and then touching your face? How long could the virus survive on surfaces? Did it survive on smooth surfaces, like countertops, as long as it survived on porous surfaces like clothing? None of this was known, so to be safe you needed to wash everything but mostly your hands, constantly. We all had to relearn how to wash out hands. Wash at least 20 seconds (sing happy birthday twice) with soap and water and include your wrists, in between your fingers, and the back of your hands. The Obsessive Complusive Disordered were vindicated.
You didn’t have to go to the store, you could order things online, mainly from Amazon, but what if the Amazon processor, or the driver, sneezed on your package and then you touched the package and then touched your face? Advise came down from on high-I’m not sure how this ritual got started-that you should leave packages outside for 48 hours before bringing them in the house. Once in the house, the contents should be removed from the package while the package was in a “dirty zone” and placed in a “clean zone”. The items being removed should be wiped down with a disinfectant before placing in the “clean zone”. This ritual applied, not just to Amazon deliveries, but also to groceries. Each item in a grocery delivery needed to undergo a disinfecting routine before being stored in the fridge, cabinet or pantry. Even then, it was best to let items sit, not touching anything else, in the cabinet or pantry for 48 hours before touching it again.
Nascent delivery systems, in particular grocery delivery, quickly became overwhelmed. You could order groceries online-that had been around for several years-but it wasn’t widely used before the pandemic. Systems broke. Delivery times became difficult, at times impossible, to secure. You would shop online filling your anthropomorphic cart with available items only to discover there were no delivery times available when you went to check out. Frustratingly, you had to fill your cart first before getting in the delivery queue. Failing to get a delivery time you had to come back to the grocery app later and start filling your cart again. When you finally got a delivery time, your order would arrive with items missing because they had run out of stock. Eventually you had no other choice, you had to go to the store.
I placed my first order with FarmArt on April 9th. Farm Art Produce is a commercial restaurant supplier in Philly. I always thought they had a cleaver name when I’d seen their trucks around the city. I’m not sure how I caught wind-perhaps an article on Philly Magazine, perhaps Instagram-that they were doing the COVID-19 pivot from commercial to residential delivery, but I was pretty happy to find my zip code in their list of delivery zones. The deal was simple: place your $85+ order the day before starting at 8:00 am, and before they filled up for your zone for the day, and their hip city driver dropped by in his refrigerated truck late afternoon the next day. Your order came in cool, professional cardboard boxes that had such future potential that recycling them seem like a crime (I eventually was overwhelmed with FarmArt boxes and had to start recycling them).
First FarmArt delivery
Because FarmArt is a restaurant distributor, ordering was a little tricky.. They have minimum order quantities and you have to pay close attention to their units of measure. The minimum order of Spinach is two pounds, which I found out is a lot of spinach. Bananas sold by the pound (at first, later by the bunch) Whole Foods delivery sells bananas by the banana. Ten pounds of bananas is very different than ten bananas. Overwhelmingly different. A few weeks into it I figured the units out, but only after some embarrassing overstocking. I also stumbled upon some local products which quickly became our favorites: Metropolitan Bakery Granola, DeBruno Brothers pasta sauce, La Columba Dark Roast drip grind coffee, local heirloom tomatoes, hydroponic butternut lettuce and, of course, local blueberries.
Going to the store was, at first, terrifying. Only essential stores, grocery stores mostly, were even open. Social media was full of reports about which stores were taking precautions and which were doing business as usual. Business as usual didn’t last long. Within a week or so almost every store installed plexiglass at the checkout stations, had six foot space markers throughout the store and unidirectional markers for isle traffic flow. The goal was to keep everyone six feet apart, and masked. Sanitized carts were lined up by the one open door; access was limited to only one entrance presumably for the purpose of enforcing mast wearing, limiting the number of patrons in the store at any given time, and limiting the number of staff dedicated to monitoring mask wearing and patron density.
For the first month shelves emptied. Some items grew scarce: pasta, rice, flour, disinfectant, and most notoriously, toilet paper. People stocked up on staples and cleaning supplies and did a lot of baking. No one has ever figured out why there was a nation wide run on toilet paper. Some opined that it’s something everyone can control. To this day toilet paper is in short supply.
One of the quirkier implemented measures was senior hour. Grocery stores opened an hour earlier for Seniors-65+-only. I turned 66 in May putting me in the youngest end of Senior hour entry. It was actually quite nice. Not crowded at all, everyone moving slowly and quietly, but best of all the shelves were freshly stocked and sanitized. Senior hour only lasted a few months. Originally it was every weekday, then they cut it back to Monday, Wednesday, and Friday and then they stopped doing it. I should note this is all based on my experience at our local Whole Foods. We have a small, boutiquish Whole Foods two miles from my house which I find comfortable and neighborhoodly. The atmosphere there reminds me of the A&Ps of my childhood-compact, yet comprehensive and friendly. The newer, bigger Whole Foods feel much more like big box stores and, consequently, impersonal. As is true of all Whole Foods, it’s expensive (Whole Paycheck). I can afford it for now, so I indulge and take some comfort there.
Masks were a strangely quixotic issue. For some masks were an infringement on their rights? At first the point of masks was to protect others from you: I’m wearing my mask for you, you are wearing your mask for me. Months later studies found that masks reduce your chances of contracting COVID by reducing the incoming dosage. In the very early days there was a shortage of masks so much so that the general populous was asked to not wear masks so there would be enough for hospital staff. N95 masks were thought to be the best, but the N95 masks used for construction, woodworking and whatnot had exhaust flaps. Since the point of the mask was to protect others from the wearer, those type of N95s weren’t allowed in some stores.
Zoom instantly became the world’s new gather place. Colleges, High Schools, Middle Schools, even Elementary schools started conducting classes, business meeting started meeting, churches started congregating, far flung families started reunioning over Zoom. Zoom had been around since 2011. The company where I work has been using Zoom for over six years, mainly as an audio conference call tool. Zoom is inexpensive compared to it’s older competitors: WebEx and GoToMeeting. There were tons of choices: Microsoft’s Teams, Google Meetings, Facebook something-or-other. But Zoom had the magic combination of price, ease of use and, it works-that last one May sound odd, but if you’ve used the others you know that “it works” isn’t necessary a given. And Zoom it did. Everyone, and I mean everyone, jumped on Zoom. It became a verb. On Friday Zoom’s market value surpassed ExxonMobile.
There were some problems at first. Zoombombing , where unwanted intruders disrupted meetings, were a thing. People, students, learned to use videos of themselves sitting in front of the camera looking engaged as their virtual background. By either blocking their camera lens or stepping out of the picture attendees were able to take a nap or a snack break during meetings all-the-while appearing to be attentively attending.
Background, and virtual background, creativity became a thing. Also, having a meeting shirt that you threw on at the last second next to your computer became a hack. Zooming over commuting was a big hit. Commercial real estate prices took a hit. Two of my adult off-springs (it just seems weird to call them “children”) quickly liked Zooming over commuting. One had just started a job and had never been into the office. However, she was looking at a 45 minute commute. The other only had a 2 minute walk to work. Even so, he preferred the comforts of home to the office facilities.
Young, childless knowledge workers rather enjoyed the new working conditions. The few downsides to WFH (casual encounters, social interactions, personal relationships that develop work weekday-to-work weekday, face-to-face and are invaluable when it comes time for a promotion, or layoffs) are erased when everyone is equalized on a Zoom call. Some, who could, rented vacation homes in fun places and worked from there (WFT never became a thing though).