I’m watching Hulu. I don’t pay to be advert free. The same commercials are often played. The one in play now is a Carl’s Jr. Bacon Cheeseburger. Breathe in the bacon, breathe out the bacon, is the basic play, while showing a cheeseburger close up. All I can think of when I watch it is, fifteen hundred mg of sodium (65% RDA), 34 grams of fat, 740 calories, and fifteen grams of sugar. Have some soda and fries with that.
Yeah, I’m fucking old, thinking about health over flavor and judging people who make that stuff, and the ones who eat it.
With 97,000 plus deaths attributed to COVID-19 in the United States in 2020 and states starting to re-open, I believe we’ll probably start seeing a new meme about ‘Memorial Day’ as we’ll certainly cross 100,000 deaths before Memorial Day.
Which prompts me to recall Trump’s February 26 comment. “You have 15 people, and the 15 within a couple of days is going to be down to close to zero.”
Today, three months later, we’re at 1,637,593 cases in the United States, which is a long way from zero.
Masked up and went walking yesterday. Of the ten pedestrians I encountered, one was masked. So, about eighteen percent are masked when out and about, contrary to guidance.
Our little town has a reported ten COVID-19 cases. That’s an unofficial count. The county has had fifty-two cases. Social distancing and sheltering-in-place has been practiced, but most only wear masks when in stores, because the stores demand it. So, I suspect our low count is due to our rural nature, limitations on travel, and luck. I hope it all holds.
While out exercising my legs, I realized I was humming a song and identified it as the Rush song, “Freewill” (1980). I have one friend who was a devoted Rush fan and another who can’t stand Rush because they don’t like Geddy Lee’s voice. The Rush lyrics rushed in with these memories (sorry for the pun).
These lyrics are taken in different ways by different people. (Well, words, right? That’s how it goes with words.) I’ve always thought that the song referred to thinking for yourself. I like to believe I think for myself. I wear a mask because that’s recommended; studies show it helps reduce viral transmission.
Maybe I am sheeple, as non-mask fans charge. Perhaps my twenty plus years in the military conditioned me to obey orders without question. Don’t think so, myself; I was known for challenging orders.
Then again, we select and frame the information and memories that best suit what we want to know as the facts, don’t we? We’re each in our own bubble. We try to control what comes in and goes out but there’s quite a bit beyond our control.
Nebulous? No, complicated. One thing that I’ve discovered as I’ve aged is that I’m not the person who I think I am. My window into myself is as limited as my windows into others. My body is often doing things that I don’t know, responding to chemicals in ways that science knew but I didn’t, and my brain often reacts before I think. We depend on surface impressions and isolated moments to inform our decisions. Some of them are magnified in importance – in our heads – rising on waves of emotions and intellect.
Such complicated beasts we are in a complicated world. Which takes me back to “Freewill” and Rush. You make a choice. Sometimes it seems to work, other times, it seems to flop, but a lot of times, we’re forever waiting to learn the results.
The weekly beer group would’ve met last night under ordinary circumstances. These being ordinary circumstances, they did not.
As a group, we range in size from six to sixteen attendees on most week. Volunteerism and traveling to visit family are the usual culprits pruning our numbers. We range in age from sixty to eighty-eight. Several college professors, computer programmers and coders, a physicist, doctor, and wildlife management people and biologists make up our group. Death has taken two since I joined it, an eon ago.
Businesses are re-opening in Ashland, Oregon. Technically, we could’ve met last night, wearing masks and social-distancing. These limitations made me laugh, right? We’re already on a group that struggles to hear one another. Imagine us now six feet apart trying to do that. Add the mask. Then, let us drink the beer.
You’d think with all this intelligence in the group, someone would devise a solution, something akin to the shower curtains being deployed in some restaurants, or the little greenhouses in Amsterdam, but no. We didn’t meet.
Hearing stories from around town…horror stories. It’s one thing to not respect the CDC and WHO guidance about wearing masks and social distancing, to not credit the countries, cities, and states who did this (and here, I shout out to New Zealand) and managed to keep infections and deaths down. It’s quite another matter for people (who claim to be for freedom, don’t you know) who aren’t wearing masks to attack others.
Yeah, attack them. We’ve heard about the shootings and the stabbings. Locally, there are people without masks going around coughing on those with masks and verbally abusing them.
Yeah, this is Trump’s America, a sorry state where bullying undermines intelligence, where childishness and immaturity is applauded as protest.
To close the loop, then, I was thinking about understanding, which lead to a song riff and remembered lyrics, and then the song, “(What’s So Funny ‘Bout) Peace, Love, and Understanding”. I’m more familiar with the Elvis Costello cover, so I went with it as your Sunday theme music offering. Like the dash of humor at the start. Cheers
Have a friend who has tested positive for COVID-19.
She the first friend that has confirmed she’s tested positive. I have third hand tales that a group of friends I sometimes hang out with had two people test positive.
My friend is traveler, visiting Africa, Europe, Japan, and other parts of the U.S. this year. Retired, she enjoys being active and seeing the world. After returning from her latest trip (to Arizona), she experienced symptoms that were listed as possible signs of COVID-19; besides that, she’d been with someone else before that exhibiting the signs.
So, she decided to go into isolation and get tested.
Deciding to get tested was one thing; actually getting tested required days of telephone calls and insistence that she be tested. After being tested at a drive through testing center, she remained in isolation while awaiting the results. Receiving the results took more days of telephone calls and emails. Ten days later, they confirmed what she suspected.
Although she’s over seventy, her symptoms weren’t too severe. The worse part was the dry cough, she said. It felt like her ribs were being torn apart on some days. Mended now, eight weeks later, she considers herself lucky.
Meanwhile, as nobody else seemed interested, she conducted her own tracing program and notified others she’d been with. Of the seven that she notified, six tested positive for COVID-19. The seventh didn’t want to be tested. He was showing numerous symptoms but refused to be tested. Coincidentally — and it must only be a coincidence — he’s a Republican and Trump supporter.
And that first person? Yes, he tested positive for COVID-19. Like her, the worse that he experienced was the dry, hard cough.
Michael Seidel, writer 