real life

This is a post that almost wasn’t. This morning I had the strong desire just to say screw it and call this an unofficial vacation day. My morning routine in pandemia has been greatly modified from my normal one. Traditionally I get up, kick the children out of the bedroom, start the Keurig and then go hop in the shower. After the shower I make coffee for both my wife and me, give Kenzie her insulin shot and feed the cats. Then I go into the bedroom and try and roust my wife from the bed and get her into the shower. Over the last several this step has become more challenging and stalling the whole fixing our breakfast and heading up to my office. What used to be a few minutes has started turning into a fifteen minute stall fest. I get that she is exhausted because I too have an exhaustion that is eating away at my core. It sorta reminds me of what it is like when you go without sleep for too long. There is just a weariness that never seems to fully go away and I am guessing it is thanks to six full weeks now of isolation. In these morning interactions I attempt to be the adult and get us up and moving… but this morning was an extreme struggle. I wanted nothing more than to give in and return to the warm embrace of our bed. Why the hell does the bed feel so good in the morning, but a complete shit show at night when you are struggling to get to sleep? The thing is… I feel horrible for feeling horrible. My life is a freaking charmed existence because while I am taking a 10% cut in pay, my wife and I both have jobs that we can do remotely and stay safe and sheltered within our home. I am risking nothing while there are folks who are struggling to feed themselves, while we have stockpiles of food that we are slowly working our way through. That said I am glad I checked the “best before” date on the pasta I almost stuck in the oven from the bottom of our freezer… because the date was some point in 2010.

I have to admit that I am scared on many levels right now. I am scared that our economy is crashing around us and I am scared about how long it is going to take for this to recover. On some level I am scared wondering if this is going to lead to societal collapse. Then on other levels I am scared even more that we are going to open up everything too soon and start the entire process all over again. I live in a state with a Governor that is hell bent on pushing folks out the door, but I am not interpreting the numbers in quite the same way he is. I see that we are still in full swing of infection and that while the numbers are not increasing, they are not really decreasing either. I am tired of being afraid and I think more than anything that might be the source of the weariness that I can’t quite shake. Early in the process I made a decision to start tracking the numbers for myself. I felt like I kept seeing completely different numbers being reported by different sources, and the only real way to keep from getting “spun” is to look at the raw data. So each day at 11 am, the state health department releases new data and each day I copy this down into a google sheet, and now I have my own charts that I can reference. The problem with the data still is the fact that we are testing a woefully small number of individuals. However based on what I am seeing I am not seeing an infection in the decline, but one that is still more than happy to keep going like the energizer bunny. The shutting down of everything and the social distancing orders have kept things stable, but my fear is that once we stop these things in what is likely to be the coming weeks… we are going to see a significant spike.

I realize I just did a bait and switch with this post, given that I posted photos of my adorable co-workers but have really not talked about them at all. Right now they are likely the only part of my personal equation that is keeping me sane. Sure it is annoying as hell to have Kenzie screaming at me at the top of her lungs to toss a hairband while I am on a conference call… but it is also super sweet when she wants to crawl up into my arms and snuggle. Kenzie and Josie are very much a team, and here lately I have ended up with both snuggled on my legs together while I am hanging out on the sofa. I just wish Mollie could find a way to get along with the two of them, because we have this circle of abuse going on. Kenzie picks on Mollie and in turn Mollie picks on Josie. There are times I think Mollie just is trying to play with Josie… and then there are other times that she absolutely seems like she is terrorizing her. I am sorry that this isn’t the most interesting post to be reading today. I am likely not going to syndicate it, because I generally don’t when it is something deeply personal and not at all game related. I figure posts like this are only for my most regular readers, the ones who are going to check in regardless if it sounds like I have something interesting to say. I still think in the grand scheme of things I am doing pretty good, but the edges are most definitely fraying. Week five is when things started to get real for me, and I am worried about my friends who are on week nine now. I partially heeded the warnings coming from my friends in the Seattle area, so at least we have toilet paper. Getting food and stuff has mostly been a number of no-contact pickups from Walmart Neighborhood Market. We are doing fine, but both suffer from an exhaustion that we probably will never shake until we are able to move around freely again. I love you all, and I hope you are doing okay out there.

There are going to be times in your blogging career where you need to make a post but have nothing much to talk about. For me this is one of those mornings. It is effectively my Friday after having not really had a weekend last week due to issues arising that caused me to work Friday night, Saturday and Sunday. My brain is fully in tilt mode, and as such my goal is to do as little as humanly possible today. So in honor of “Topic Brainstorming Week” I am going to teach you all a not so well kept secret. Cute animal pictures are a reasonable replacement for actually having something to talk about on a given day. So this morning I am going to more or less ramble about how life has been going for me and share pictures of my cats. The other night I sat down on the couch for a few minutes and this happened.

I’ve said before that we are living in interesting times, and I am sure in hindsight this will be something we talk about for the rest of our lives. However on other levels we are living in exceptionally dull times. The highlight of my week thus far has been managing to get a grocery pick up slot for tomorrow since there is always competition for those. The cats and my wife are in theory keeping me sane, or at least I hope this is the case because I am not sure I would know otherwise. At first the cats were extremely confused as to why the hell we were never leaving the house. Now I think they have more or less settled into the same routine we have. Side note it has been extremely important that we keep a routine, because without that day and night would sort of blend together. I still get up and go through the same routines as usual, it is just that I never actually leave the house.

We occasionally go around the block and my wife spends a lot of time out on the front porch, where we are constantly visited by this guy. He has a proper name I am sure, but we more or less just refer to him as “big boy”. This is the same cat that I posted photos of earlier giving me headbutts when he wants attention. He always wants attention and he always wants food… because he seems to be a bottomless pit for both of those. He is adorable however and I am super happy that he comes to visit regularly, because if not for me I might never leave the house at all. My wife had been successfully getting me out each day on a walk, but right now I have a puncture wound on the bottom of my foot from stepping on something I shouldn’t have stepped on… and am now waiting on that to heal. It is fairly important to actually leave the house to do something each day however to remember that the sky and fresh air do exist.

The cat that always gets left out of these posts is Mollie, in part because she rarely sits in one place long enough for me to take a photo. She is exceptionally skittish and does not get along well with the other two, but can be sweet and affectionate at times. Mostly in our household she is that weird roommate that keeps to themselves and occasionally comes out to be friendly. I had to dig back a bit in my photos to find some good pictures of her that had yet to be shared. The thing around her neck is an elastic hair band from the dollar store… and Kenzie LOVES playing fetch with them. I came downstairs from my office one day to find her sitting up on our bar with one around her neck. I am guessing Mollie was playing with it, because I have seen her toss them up in the air and catch them when she thinks nobody is watching.

Here is another rare photo of her laying on the rug, and I happened to snap it as I entered the room because I just happened to have my phone in hand. Moments later she darted away because that is a thing that Mollies do. I’ve never actually managed to catch her when she is snuggling, because the slightest movement and she bolts. This is sad because at this point we have had her for I think four years? There are days when it seems like we have made progress with her, and other days she seems just as skittish and crazy as the first day we got her. I take every opportunity however to give her attention, and being around during the day means I am getting a lot of those opportunities. She however is a cat that play bites and as a result I have several battle wounds right now.

For the most part though things are going fairly well. I wish it was all over tomorrow, but I feel like I am better equipped for this sort of lifestyle than most. I am thankful that we have had a bad habit of buying shelf stable or freezer food and never actually getting around to eating it. This has served as a good opportunity to dig deep into our freezer and find things we had forgotten about. I am also super thankful for delivery services, which gives us the opportunity to feel like things are normal and we are just lazy not too scared to leave the house. I’ve been working remotely for a month now, and there really is no clear end in sight. I expect to be doing this same thing at the end of May as well and then MAYBE just MAYBE we get to go back to normal in June. Maybe leaving my house will be a birthday present. All things considered though we have fallen into a rhythm that is our new normal, and I am exceptionally thankful we are both healthy and still have jobs. It is at this point that I feel like I have to acknowledge those who don’t have one or either of those things. I am scared about how many people I might lose during this event, and if I myself die I want to make sure you all know how much you mean to me. I am thankful that you have all been along on my journey and love you dearly for the interactions that you share with me. Maybe that is too real talk to end a post on, but I have run out of things to say. I hope you all stay safe out there and we all make it through this on the other side. Now that I have bummed everyone out, just go back and look at the adorable cats. So again we loop back to the original lesson… adorable animals are a reasonable replacement for content.

I think I might be fresh out of general advice when it comes to blogging, at least for this first week of Blapril. Instead this morning you are going to get a brain dump of something I have been thinking about at length but have been uncertain of when or where exactly to throw it out for open discussion. I’ve been using the term Pandemia to refer to this time we are living in and I even probably shortsightedly named my Island in Animal Crossing after this. In my mind it made sense given that ACNH has been helping a lot to keep me calm in a time of crisis. However one of the things that I have been devoting a decent amount of my mental processing to is trying to think about what the world looks like after this.

The previous event for me that has had any relevance in explaining the changes that are rapidly happening in the world is that of 9/11 when airplanes were used as suicide bombs to attack key targets in the United States. After that event there were sweeping changes that rapidly went into place in a failed attempt to help us feel like we had some control in the world. Now this might not be true for everyone, but I live in flyover country and as a result we are pretty slow to adopt things and as a result of these events metal detectors were installed in pretty much every public building as well as a good number of retail stores. This is somewhat ironic given that we are also an open carry site and you don’t need a license to carry a firearm. However it was a noticeable change that sorta happened over night.

I am wondering if after the events of this pandemic if we are going to see Thermal Imaging like FLIR installed much like those metal detectors at the entrance of public buildings. Will we effectively begin screening individuals with higher than normal body temperatures as a sign of infection? How is this going to change sick leave policies across the board? Traditionally we have been a country that has frowned upon taking off time from work when you are feeling a little under the weather because we have to make sure productivity stays high. Where I work has some fairly draconian policies surrounding sick leave where you accrue it at a staggering rate but can only use a certain amount each year without getting into trouble. Will we see restrictions like that eased as an entire generation is reminded of the dangers of communal spread?

The other change I wonder about is how exactly the workplace is going to shift over time. In flyover country we are still very much traditionally a “butts in seats” economy. This is driven by the fact that most of the management are still in the baby boomer generation, and feel that they need to physically see a person sitting at their desk in order to feel like they are doing a good job. As managers go, I’ve always been a “judge progress on projects” type of person because I know LOTS of people who occupy space with perfect attendance but are otherwise useless. This event has rapidly proven that we can in fact keep the lights on and keep business moving forward with literally the entire office working remotely. Does that begin to shift what the office means as far as culture goes? Do see a shrinking of office space and a widespread shift away from the soulless cube farms? In theory there isn’t much of a reason for my team to ever return to the office because all of the systems we work on were remote in the first place. I feel like this also is going to be a huge boon for the disabled individuals that need to work from home in order to fit their schedule or medical requirements. For years employers have come up with excuses as to why this would not work, or invented reasons why someone had to be physically located in the office. The last month has proven without a doubt that we can keep carrying on business as usual through the use of technology that we have had access to for years. Those of us who were already savvy in such things have been using it for the better part of two decades. I just wish that business teleconferencing software was half as evolved as Discord or Teamspeak, because I am constantly frustrated by the fact that everyone has a damned open mic all of the time. Years of gaming and talking with strangers on voice chat have taught me an etiquette that I wish I could force upon the coworkers that are not directly in my team.

The other thing that I’ve been wondering about is how this shift in working conditions is going to effect the distribution of the population. Over the last several decades there has been a migration away from rural areas into larger cities, and even within that a sub trend of migration away from the suburbs back into the central core of the city. In the time of pandemic it feels inherently more dangerous to be in more populated areas. I know personally as much as I love QuikTrip we have been avoiding them because they are always busy, and instead seeking out those gas stations that never have anyone at them. Similarly we have been avoiding Walmart or Target and getting whatever we can at Dollar General which has significantly less volume than the bigger stores. However we live on the outskirts of a larger city because that is where the jobs require us to be. The biggest challenge is infrastructure, but I am wondering if a migration trend would drive investment in higher speed internet in rural america. I could see myself living out in the middle of nowhere because the main case against that used to be the lack of access to goods. Amazon however has acted for years as the great equalizer of access to material things for those who are isolated, because they seemingly ship to anywhere. With decent internet, I could absolutely see a case made for moving away from the big cities and buying cheap property in the more rural communities. Our 1800 home sq/ft in suburbia can be purchased in the tiny town of 2000 people that I grew up in for just a bit over half what it currently appraises for. So the question is will living in such close proximity of other people start to feel more dangerous than it did prior to Covid-19? Will we see a trend of moving away from these cities and repopulating the relatively neglected rural corridors of our states? Ultimately these are the questions that I have been pondering. I don’t know what the world looks like after this, but I doubt it looks the same. Things are going to change in weird and interesting ways. Some are going to be for the better and others are going to be likely problematic. However I don’t think we return to business as usual after having effectively shut down the world for several months. I am bracing for the financial impact of these events, which are likely to be extreme. I know this post is a bit of a divergence from the sort of thing that I normally write about in the mornings, but these are things that I have been pondering while sitting at home in isolation and social distancing mode. Once we go forth and can populate the earth once again… what is that earth going to look like? Tomorrow I am sure we will return to posts about the games I am playing or blogging advice as part of Blapril, but today I just wanted to dump all of these thoughts onto the digital page and walk away. You know the whole blogs as self therapy thing and all.

There are times that I feel like I need to warn my readers that they are about to go on a weird ride. This morning is one of those times because I have been in a strange head-space of late. Anytime I start plumbing the depths of my psyche you know something strange is going to come welling up from below. I’ve probably even written about this topic before, but when you have as many posts as I have it is bound to happen. Music used to be of the utmost importance to me and from the moment I got my first Walkman around 1983 until sometime circa 2008 I had music going almost 24/7.

I lived my life to my own personal soundtrack made up of whatever I happened to be listening to at the time. This was often times blaring out of a “boom box” into whatever room I happened to be in. I spent copious ours listening to music and drawing and at the same time thinking about all sorts of things. However at some point over the years I lost both of those things. I know exactly the moment when I stopped doing much in the way of artwork. It was our first year out of college and I had begrudgingly agreed to paint a mural in the activity center. We were supposed to be the only people in that area for the next two weekends and I decided to leave my paints, brushes and materials locked up under the bar area. When I came back a few days later it was all gone and I never quite recovered from the loss and pretty much shut down artistically.

The music thing however was more subtle. I don’t know exactly when I stopped actively listening to music but it is sometime over the last decade. I am not sure if I traded podcasts and youtube videos for music, or if I just stopped listening for other reasons. I do know that I am still pretty much constantly wearing headphones while seated at the computer, but often times there is nothing playing through them and I just sorta find the subtle pressure on either side of my head comforting. I was an early adopter of the MP3 and I remember in college setting up a script to rip new CDs I had bought to MP3 over night. However at some point I stopped caring about my archives of that as well and I just started streaming music first through Pandora and eventually through Google Music and now Amazon Music.

The problem with Google and Amazon is that they are not exactly great engines for showing me new things. I tend to go there when I want to listen to a specific song or album, whereas with Pandora I was constantly experiencing music that was effectively “new to me”. The algorithm that tried to gauge taste actually did a fairly good job of predicting the sort of music that I would normally want to listen to. I spent several years fine tuning it and even had a premium subscription back when those were like $20/30 a year instead of the monthly fee that exists now. I wonder if returning to Pandora would make the whole experience feel fresh again rather than just something I do when I specifically want to hear a song, because right now when I have one of those random moments I tend to just look something up on YouTube instead of a proper streaming service.

I know that sometime within the last ten years I started to struggle with listening to music with words while working on other things. More specifically I had trouble coding while listening to music with lyrics, and I ventured out into movie and video game soundtracks in a big way. The Destiny Soundtrack and the Tron Legacy Soundtrack have become my go to music for when I need to buckle down and concentrate on something. The only problem with that however is that soundtracks don’t make me think in quite the same way that lyrical music used to. While doodling away in my room I would explore the structure of songs and try and dissect all of the possible meanings that they could have. There are so many words and phrases that I use today that I first heard and stole from a song.

I grew up in the country without a steady flow of options when it came to music. So when someone got something new we used to make copies and pass it around and each time I got my hands on new music it was like a beam of light shining down on my otherwise dull existence. The same was true with movies and video games because they were all equally uncommon, and it wasn’t until I could drive that I regularly had access to get a fresh supply of those things. I was stuck in a small town that during my High School years didn’t even have a Walmart because it had closed during a consolidation when the Super Center opened one town over. So as a result things that are probably not important to anyone else are important to me, because when I did buy an album… I tended to listen to it until I had the transitions between songs memorized. Still to this day there are times when I hear a song and my brain expectantly waits after it finishes for the next song on the album to start playing.

The problem is… I am not quite sure how to get back to the place where music held the important role in my life that it once did. I’m almost not quite certain how to get over the mental block that has kept me from doing actual artwork for the last two decades. There are times when you have lost something and you are not even sure how it happened. I realize this has been a weird and lament filled post but it is what has been thrashing around in my brain. One of the things about daily blogging is that occasionally I feel like I have to be honest with my readers and just let these odd posts make their way onto the page. Instead of images I am going to perforate this post with some songs that have been kicking around in my head of late.