Bandit mask

The weather is improving now that we are into April. I can walk in the night, in nothing more than a t-shirt, bathed in moonlight. Whenever the sun sinks low in the sky, an orchestra of peepers begin. The grass thickens to a carpet beneath my bare toes. The air no longer smells of icicles and mud, but green things, new life.

I want to have picnics and barbecues with people I love. I want to hike, have bonfires, go camping. I want to dance at outdoor festivals.

Of course, there is a plague outside. If I am doing anything slower than biking, I wear a mask now on government suggestion. I have learned from this how reliant I am on my expressions to communicate with strangers. All my gestures are broader. When I must speak with someone, I find myself acting out my words by showing with my hands. We are all mistrustful of other people, all potential carriers or susceptible to our latent infections.

Amber did not want me to go food shopping, but none of the local stores could oblige us in giving us a slot to pick up groceries without going inside.

The news says the peak of this in New York might be next week, but I am skeptical. I am not sure what a peak would mean at this point. More deaths and then, the following day, fewer and fewer yet the day after? But deaths still. New York has more identified cases than most other countries. (Though, as I've said before, "identified" and "extant" are different concepts.)

Our wave may hit a peak, but we are not in a closed system. No matter how the president has tried to demonize and scapegoat New York--because we tested and have a governor who is competent and honest in this regard and is, therefore, disapproving of Trump's mendacity and negligence--we are still part of the United States. People from states who have not been testing or quarantining the infected can drive here with no notice, shedding their viral loads on pristine towns, then going home and blaming us for infecting them. This could be the first of many peaks until there is a reliable vaccine, which may well be a year.

Trump, a man with less medical knowledge than an average high school biology teacher, pushes a combination of an antibiotic--Z-packs--and an antiparasitic--hydroxychloroquine--to combat this virus. No doctor behind him on the dais agrees this is wise. "Try it. What do you have to lose?" he asks, as though the answer is not "Our lives." One of his followers has already died from it. Many others will do the same or, at the very least, suffer permanent health effects from his snake oil. Some suggest that Trump or his cronies have a financial stake in companies manufacturing this drug used to treat lupus. I cannot verify this enough to be confident repeating it as fact.

It is spring--proper spring, not when the calendar says it is--and we are not to leave our homes. It is spring and, because of an inept response, millions do not have jobs at present and may not in a month. We remain uncertain when things will settle. We are coming to accept that they will never again be the "normal" we recognized before.

Sunday, for the first time in my life, I am not having Easter with my family. They are getting together still. My mother assumes that they have all cross-contaminated one another already. My younger brother, a nurse in a prison with rampant COVID-19 cases, whom she says has been tested twice, has dinner with my parents weekly. An abundance of caution insists he shouldn't, but he does anyway. He will be in attendance because he has yet to infect them. My other brother works alone in a warehouse and never sees anyone there. Amber and I are an unknown quantity, having yet to be exposed to their germs (or them to ours).

The loss of Easter is not a huge sacrifice in the long term, though I admit that I am sad accepting it. (My mother is going to meet me in the middle and give me Easter supplies so that I have something of the holiday.)

We have the windows open at night. I've missed this. Every year, I forget the scent and texture of the night air once winter finishes with us. It jolts my mental health enough to induce mild bouts of euphoria, which feel confusing in a time of sheltering-in-place. My brain is too conditioned to associating this experience with the freedom that the winter deprives of me.

I exercise outside daily while I can, as is my wont year-round. I couldn't stand to do otherwise short of government patrols, which I do not think will occur in the verdure of Red Hook. A few days ago, I ran in a mask, which was exhausting, though I do it from necessity in the depth of winter. I felt liberated when biking, it being something I miss keenly in the winter months.

I have thrice-weekly teleconferences with my job, which prick my anxiety, though I've seen most of these people for years. They rarely hit half an hour, but I mute the phone and at first paced while they spoke. (I tend to move around while on the phone, often cleaning.) Now, it has graduated to using a mini-stepper so that I do not knock anything over. I have developed new habits around the virus.

I miss working in small ways, as it gave me a sense of purpose and structure. My students are reluctant learners in the best of circumstances. They will have lost at least a month and a half of direct instruction that they will struggle to make up. Practically speaking, they won't make it up. For some of them, this loss will be no major factor in the rest of their lives. However, for how it will affect the few of my students who should one day exploit the free college we offer them, I regret that they will miss my teaching.

Next week, I have my spring break. All this means is that I do not have to call in. I cannot do anything that would reflect enjoying this time off, only more waiting in my house with brief reprieves of exercise. My tentative date of returning to work is April 29th, though there is not full confidence that this will be enough time to flatten the curve.

Spring should be my favorite season, but it is stunted this year. There will be no spring as such. If we do not behave ourselves, there may not be much of a summer. I don't want to imagine the odds of this. The ghosts of coronavirus will be with us then, haunting our interactions, having murdered businesses we loved and expected. The handshake as a custom may have died--I do not mind this; it always struck me as an odd thing to do with strangers--but I will miss hugging my friends.

Spring is the time in the year where I feel least lonely and most mentally composed. My only company is Amber, putting aside telephone calls and videos, both pale in comparison with in-person company. This is not to imply that Amber is usually less than adored company, but I am as promiscuous in my friendships as I am monogamous in my romances. I rarely feel better or more myself than when I have been around people about whom I care a great deal.

People on my social media said that, after the catastrophe of 2019, this was going to be their year. Now, they half-joke that 2021 will feature an alien invasion or zombie holocaust. Fanciful, because they do not care to acknowledge that it will be a global depression, the increase of xenophobic fascism worldwide that will thrive off this plague, and the necessity of social restructuring around fear of this virus or the next. There will be lasting pain from all these sacrifices whose shapes we have barely begun to imagine. Owing to 9/11, I have had to turn out my pockets and bag a hundred times to make certain that I was not a terrorist. Will I now have my temperature scanned in public places? This is too easy an answer, but people are going to want to be seen reacting. The clearest way to do this is overreacting in the broadest, simplest, and most short-sighted ways.

It is spring, no matter how it does not feel this way inside. Summer will come and other seasons after, but I no longer trust them to come without cataclysm.

Soon in Xenology: Magical thinking and witchcraft. Probably more about COVID-19, since, you know, the world is ending and everything.

last watched: Crazyhead
reading: The Eyre Affair