Skip to main content

Changes

Berkley MI
Tuesday

 A lot of things have already changed, maybe forever. It’s hard to imagine actually shaking hands again. Or standing in a crowded elevator. Or squeezing body-to-body in the subway.
It’s strange watching TV shows made before the virus (as they all were). Everyone seems so promiscuous with their personal space. They’re less than three feet apart and they don’t seem to care. They might be breathing on each other. To say nothing of the onscreen lovers, with their kissing and hand-holding and other microbe-passing activities. Shouldn’t they be boiling each other first?
Then there are the new routines, the new rituals that stem from what I hesitate to call hardships. They’re not hardships, but they seem to portend hardship.
Who knew that the bottle of rubbing alcohol in our bathroom would become the hero of the household? I now routinely distinguish between modes of disinfectant—the wipes, sprays, bleaches, hand sanitizers, and various liquids you mix yourself and apply, perhaps short-sightedly, with precious paper towels. I now know which of these are okay for my hands, which work best on plastic bags, which need to be in the car for those rare but perilous adventures out into the weird (and getting weirder) world.
Who even heard of an N95 mask before? Let alone been thrilled at the discovery of one in our closet? Part of a survival kit Peggy was given by her firm years ago, in the wake of 9/11. We’re almost embarrassed to have it, but it's now one of our most cherished possessions.
Then there’s the food delivery that is now three days late. While it’s not that big a deal—a stocking-up delivery of no immediate consequence—it is nonetheless a jarring reminder that the action in this movie is getting hotter. That we are growing highly dependent on highly vulnerable people. That they will be coming to our front porch, and we will need to go through the disinfection ritual before moving any food into the house.
Or maybe not. Maybe that food won’t arrive at all. We had resolved to avoid all stores for the duration, but if deliveries stop happening, that could change. Maybe in a week or two I’ll get to have another supermarket moment. Good thing we have that mask.

Comments

  1. jsMarch 31, 2020 at 2:34 PM

    The biggest issue in NYC "before" was the banning of single-use plastic bags. Seems eons ago...

    ReplyDelete
  2. Sean FederApril 7, 2020 at 12:01 AM

    We also happened to have a 3/4 full bottle of isopropyl in med cab. Bravo! Now slightly diluted (keep it above 70%, they say) and in two spray bottles.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Warning: Red States may be Hazardous to your Health

In late September, a Nebraska woman was sentenced to two years in prison for helping her daughter obtain abortion pills. The case was less about abortion than about some bizarre behavior regarding the burial of the fetal remains, but this is still appalling on any number of levels. Even so, that’s not what piqued my interest. Rather, I was drawn to one curious footnote to the story, and I’ve heard nothing about it since. Apparently, the judge in the case had ordered the woman to undergo a psychological evaluation prior to sentencing. Presumably, the results might have helped to mitigate her sentence. Which sounds reasonable, perhaps even routine. But that evaluation never happened. It was, strangely, “cancelled due to lack of funding.” Huh? A person whose future may have hinged on that evaluation was denied it because the state couldn’t afford it? How underfunded are we talking? How many other people moving through the Nebraska judicial system haven’t rece
1 comment
Read more

The Media Wakes Up and Smells the Fascism

  A funny thing happened on the way to the 2024 horserace. The mainstream media brought Hitler into the conversation. Trump gave them no choice. He kept amping up his rants in terms that were so explicitly Nazi, so lifted — practically verbatim — from Hitler’s speeches, that it was hard for them to keep ignoring what they’ve willfully ignored for so long. When Trump used the word ‘vermin’ in his Veteran’s Day speech , he was taking a whole chapter from the fascism playbook. Whether he knew it or not. Dehumanization — the art of equating human beings with insects — is a classic stochastic terrorism technique, beloved of dictators the world over. In Rwanda in the nineties, the Hutu tribe openly called its rival Tutsis “cockroaches” on the radio, inciting its members to exterminate them with machetes, which they did. We’ll probably never know who actually wrote the Vermin speech — Stephen Miller or Steve Bannon are likely suspects — but we can be sure it wasn’t T
1 comment
Read more

Things Have Been Too Cheap for Too Long

  Once upon a time, gasoline cost roughly 35 cents a gallon. That halcyon era came to an abrupt halt during the Carter administration, when oil-rich Arab states severely constricted our petroleum supply, causing hours-long lines at the gas pump that are still fresh in the memory of anyone who was there. When the dust cleared, gas was four times more expensive, and now we count ourselves lucky if it’s only ten times that long-ago price. But we did get over it, more or less. We learned to live with it. Around that time, some pundit I can’t remember said something that has stuck with me ever since. To paraphrase, “This country was built on cheap energy and cheap labor, and we’re running out of both.” It stuck with me because it’s even truer now than it was then. This despite the best efforts of corporate interests — and their Republican flunkies in government — to do all they can to keep both energy and labor as cheap as possible. For several decades, they made
5 comments
Read more