Quarantine Diary #43 4/25/2020 Stick me, I’m done.

Pretty soon I’m going to need to invent a new title for this Quarantine Dairy.  I don’t want to be writing Diary #273 and #401 – even though I am beginning to understand that in many ways, we are going there.

I read this Twitter question. 

What will go away from here on out?  The answers were things like:

• Shaking hands to greet each other
• All-you-can-eat restaurant buffets
• Church and other organization’s potluck dinners
• Commuting to jobs that one does not need to do from a particular office

Here are some more thoughts that are mine:

• Trying on clothes and shoes and then putting them back if you don’t want them
• Political campaigns run by knocking on doors, and holding meet-n-greets in peoples’ homes, and big rallies.
• Cruise vacations
• Airplanes filled with people flying to meetings they could probably do via internet connections
• College will change. I can’t fathom how that will look, but there will need to be less crowding with just as much interaction. I don’t know.
• Expecting public school teachers to risk their lives with Covid AND gun violence for low-to-middle-range salaries.
• Racism against and blanket expulsion of documented/undocumented immigrants will have to cease. Thoughtful and unthoughtful Americans want their grocery store produce and meat sections well stocked.  We can’t have one without the other.  Unless, OMG, what if we paid farm workers well enough?  I wonder where white supremacy will burrow into next.
• Also, have you noticed that so many medical care providers are people with accents?  Is it time for you to read or reread Abraham Verghese’s novel, “Cutting for Stone”?
• Restaurants. I’m sure they will come back in some ways but how anxious are you to sit at a table in a crowded dining room among a hundred unknown fellow citizens all talking and chewing at the same time?
• Gyms. Locker rooms?
• Public restrooms along interstates. How’s that going to work?

What ordinary routines and rituals do you think won’t come back?

Did you notice this whole spiel is about how to be middle class in the USA? 

When will I/we think globally?

…

I’ve decided to not repost or retweet any more stuff about quarantine protesters. At this point, we know what the question is, we know how dangerous it is to assume the pandemic can’t get worse, some states are opening, and we will watch in real time what happens. 

We know the protests are organized by particular groups who are using this moment to further their agendas.

Every time we pass along comments and stories we are giving them free publicity.

I’m suggesting here that even when the stuff is witty or perceptive, we don’t pass it on.

70% of us oppose lifting restrictions willy-nilly.  We have this. 

…

I was outside two hours yesterday and two hours this morning burning sticks. We had that half-a-tree in our yard after Chet the Magnificent did his arborist thing last week. Len and I separated out what we wanted to keep into various piles; that left a pile of sticks almost as tall as me.

I ordered the firepit (firepot?). It arrived and this evening the sticks are ashes. When they are completely cool I’ll put them in the compost.

The sticks were bigger than the firepit, so one would grab one branch at a time, break it down, stick it in the fire.  Sometimes I had to use the loppers to get the branches down to size. This was on top of my five-mile hike yesterday.  So yup, I’ve got sore muscles. Ibuprofen helps and so does wine and brie and the sourdough bread that will be coming out of the oven any minute now.  

Here's a side-truth. I’m not overwhelmed by pandemic-related worry, fear, or anger.

It seems to me this might be a good time for communities to arrange clean-ups, invasive-vegetation removal, and bird counts.  Not hard to do those things at a social distance and we humans do better when we can get some outside into out insides.