coronavirus

Another COVID Cancellation

A.B. Kelly · January 31, 2021 · Blog Entries, Musings · california, camping, coronavirus, COVID-19, male bonding, quarantine, reopening, snow camping, Winter Olympics · No Comments

Some of my normal camping guys came up with a crazy idea last year, which was to go camping again.

Normally, this wouldn’t seem totally asinine, but in this, the International Year of the Covid, all bets are off.

The wrinkle to this particular camping trip was the date it was to take place. Late January. Snow camping!

I’ve never done it before. Nor has the other guy who was gung ho about the idea. The third guy grew up on the western bank of the Sierra Nevadas, where it snows a bit but nothing major. It should be noted that the two other Camptathalon mainstays, who grew up in Idaho and Wisconsin, couldn’t say no fast enough. A wise man might note the discrepancies. But fuck it, I’m sure I can get gassy enough to keep that tent as humid as a summer’s eve.

We opted for Yosemite. For one thing, I don’t really know how many campsites are even open this time of year. Our usual haunts don’t open until six to eight weeks after the last snow. In the midwest, there’s snow everywhere, so you can pretty much camp anywhere. In California, to get to snow, you’ve got to go up to 4,000 feet elevation or so, and the roads to those spots are a wee bit pesky. But the roads to Yosemite are plowed regularly. Commerce, as Teddy Roosevelt intended.

Our second reason for choosing Yosemite was that it’s about as far from “roughing it” as you can get while camping. They’ve got two well-stocked stores and a half-a-billion rangers per square mile. Shit, they’ve got 4G reception and an ice cream stand. Guessing we could get pizza delivered if necessary. Not exactly a spot I’d need to worry about getting lost in a blizzard and wandering off a cliff.

Speaking of which, the valley floor is only about 4,000 feet, so the Wisconsoner and Idahoan really didn’t need to whine about traveling uphill in the snow both directions. It wasn’t supposed to drop below the mid-twenties at any point during our visit. The high was scheduled to be above forty on Saturday.

But alas, my first sojourn into the camping where you don’t need to purchase ice each day did not happen. Neither rain nor sleet nor snow would shut Yosemite down. COVID, on the other hand…

Yep, Yosemite is closed to overnight reservations as part of California’s on-again, off-again flirtation with pretending we’re taking it seriously.

Because, you know, there’s no chance for us to socially distance when we’re camping in the fucking snow. Why, it’s got to be like Disneyland, right? I imagine thousands of people are all ass-to-elbow, because if we know one thing about Californians, it’s that they LOVE being out in the snow in the middle of the night.

To be sure, it’s ONLY the overnight stuff that’s closed in Yosemite. Visiting the park in the daytime is still totally legit. It’s only the campers who can’t be trusted to social distance. Is there some sort of midnight orgy I was unaware of? Maybe it’s a good thing they won’t let me in, as you never want to be the guy who shows up for the orgy wearing snow-camping gear.

When I first made the reservations, I already had to deal with a weird COVID restriction. They were only booking fifty-percent capacity. Fine. Whatever. Except either I didn’t read the fine print or it wasn’t clearly spelled out, because if I were to ask you how to ensure fifty-percent capacity in a campsite, how would you go about doing it? Close every other campsite, right?

Nope! They booked the entire campground for a week, then went an entire week without accepting reservations. I guess so they could… sanitize the dirt. Besides, who wants to go to a half-filled orgy.

Just remember this when you go into a restaurant that’s cordoned off every other table to allow for maximum spacing. Tell them they’re doing it wrong. It’s much better to go standing-room only on Tuesday and Thursday, while taking Wednesday off.

This missing week became an issue while reserving, because Yosemite releases an entire month’s worth of reservations at the exact same time. I wasn’t sure what the demand would be for winter camping, but in the summer, if you log in five minutes late, the entire month is taken. So at 7:00 am, I started refreshing like I was loading a pornographic picture back in the dial-up days.

7:01, 7:02, and I’m still not seeing the dates in question available. I noticed that the previous weekend was available, but I thought maybe they were residuals from the previous month’s availability. At 7:04, I decided to see if the FOLLOWING weekend. The campsite was available. It’s at this point I realize their asinine definition of “fifty percent capacity.” Good news is by that time, there were still campsites available. Bad news was I had to drop down to our third choice.

As an aside, the weekend we originally wanted to go was this weekend, the one in between the AFC/NFC Championship games and the Super Bowl. What better time to go camping than when there are no sports? But Yosemite only made the weekends of major football games available for camping. Maybe this was to further depress demand. Make sure no casual fans come up for the non-socially-distanced camping that is somehow less safe than day visitors.

Too bad I’ll never find out. At least not until next year.

And really, I don’t know why, ten months into the pandemic, I should expect anything less than arbitrary rules that have as much effect on containing the spread of COVID as taking off our shoes prevents terrorism. Remember back when they said we’d have regular testing by the end of May?

Back then, Hawaii told everybody to stay the fuck away on pain of execution. Now Hawaii’s begging people to come work remotely, but only if you’ve been tested in the past seven days. Unfortunately, desire to go to Hawaii isn’t one of the prerequisites for getting a test. Tests, like vaccines, can only be doled out piecemeal, to those deemed worthy of saving. You need to have licked the bunghole of somebody with all three strains of the virus who is currently in ICU.

Or you can be friends with the Governor. I have a funny feeling that everybody who was at Herr Kommandant Newsom’s French Laundry soiree has already received their vaccine. And snow orgies.

Speaking of which, sorry if my forthcoming rants are a tad California-specific. But a) that’s where I live, and b) we are the poster child for FUBARing the whole COVID thing. If you live in a place that’s got its collective head out of its ass, then maybe this’ll only serve to make you feel fortunate.

It’s interesting how most of the media say we’re no longer following the rules because of “COVID Fatigue.” Instead, most of us are making constant judgement calls, weighing the trade-offs between having a life or being dead. There’s a sliding scale. Even if we all strictly followed the rules, we have to grocery shop at some point. And I don’t think that I’m out of line that camping in the snow, with the closest human being fifty feet away, is probably safer than going to the grocery store. I’m not being ignorant. I’m trying to follow the rules and guidelines that the government established.

Not that those rules and guidelines mean jack shit. We’re told to meet certain goalposts, then we’re told that, sorry, that’s not the goal we’ve been looking for. Or sometimes we DON’T meet that goal, and Herr Kommandant’s like, “Yeah, you know what? It’s cool. We didn’t really need those ICU beds anyway.”

Over the Christmas holiday, Canada set up space heaters at outdoor parks. The message was clear: You want to be able to see your family and friends, so please be safe about it. In the United States, we opted for the tried-and-true “You want to be able to see your family, so we will tsk-tsk and shame you and not help you do that safely. Abstinence only has worked so well over the decades in this country. Just ask the millions of Americans who had premarital sex or smoked pot.

The ironic thing is we simultaneously tell people to social distance while also banning them from it. I’m on the Board of Directors for my curling club, and we perused the sports rules for hours. They have all sorts of rules for how to do our sports. Limited capacity? We’ve accounted for that. Social distancing and masks? We’ve changed our rules to implement those. But then, at the tail end of the document, they give a list of which sports can operate in which tier. It’s like telling us how we’re supposed to shop safely, but then closing the stores anyway.

In California, we’ve had at least three different classification systems over the past year. First it was a convoluted “phased reopening.” That was tied more to which companies could open, and as far as I could tell, it wasn’t tied to any sort of caseload count. It was basically “Starbucks can open its drive-thrus, and if the shit doesn’t hit the fan, they can sell a couple Bacon Goudas, but not the bagel store in the same parking lot because Starbucks contributes a lot of money to politicians and fuck you, small businesses.”

Then we went to the color-coded, county-by-county system. Some people whine that the colors make no sense, but I think they’re fine. Yellow, orange, red, purple. It’s pretty standard “danger” stuff. The problem I have is that they set the classifications such that everyone will always be in purple.

If you have more than 7 positive cases per 100,000 residents, you’re in purple. Seven! Currently, 54 of the 58 counties are in purple, which kinda makes the whole “purple” designation pointless. Sacramento County was at 55, while San Francisco County is at 38, and Los Angeles County was at 150.

The red tier is set at 4 to 7 per 100,000. Orange at 1 to 4. Again, Los Angeles County is currently at 150, which is the same as 10. But 4 and 7 are hugely different numbers that drastically change what can open.

It seems to me that 150 cases per 100,000 residents is substantially worse than 38 per 100,000. But according to the state, they’re EXACTLY the same. It would be like maxing out the Richter Scale at 4. Or the hurricane classification at 2. “Boy, I wonder how big that natural disaster was?” “Exactly the same as every other natural disaster.”

So again, if they’re going to make their classification for the purposes of scolding us, then we’re going to try to make sense of it ourselves. At one of my staff meetings, my principal was running through the numbers and, at 93 per 100,000, referred to us being in “Deep Purple.” He talked about what preparations we might make if we get into “light purple,” but it was too late. I was already humming, “Smoke on the Water.”

At my curling club, we’re talking about reassessing opening when we get down in the 20 per 100,000 range. Although truthfully, I don’t know if that’s a good or a bad number, because it’s all arbitrary. If there’s no difference between 20 and 150, then is there really a difference between 7 and 20?

Then again, the numbers I’ve been quoting aren’t the real numbers, they’re adjusted for the number of tests. I have no idea what that means, but earlier this week, the New York Times showed Sacramento County with a rate of 23 per 100,000, while the California website claimed Sacramento County was still at 42. That’s a pretty large discrepancy and, unfortunately, the New York Times ain’t the ones who get to put us into red.

And don’t get me started on the ethnic breakdown of the positive cases.

Yes, the state that claims to “follow the science” says that they get to make up the numbers. Counties aren’t allowed out of purple tier unless all of the ethnicities in the county are catching COVID at the same rate. And before you get started, yes, I know that Blacks and Latinos are more likely to catch it. But most of that discrepancy stems from issues of poverty.

Blacks and Latinos are more likely to work in the service and retail industries, which have remained open. Maybe if we want fewer Blacks and Latinos to catch the virus we could, I don’t know, try to make those activities safer. Like Canada did at the holidays, focus on HOW we do these activities instead of just telling people not to do them. I remember being a sexually-active teenager who had difficulties getting condoms.

Or we could look at fixing poverty and the reasons minorities are stuck in it, but ha ha, just kidding. Why would we try to fix poverty when we can just condescend people from behind the French Laundry barricade. “If you were taking this we were taking this more seriously, you would avoid the grocery store. Honestly, who has to buy fruits and vegetables more than once a year, anyway?”

So after the phases and the tiers failed to not only curb the surge, but actually seemed to make things worse, Herr Kommandant came up with a new metric, which was ICU capacity. So now if you’re in purple, everything is closed, but if you’re in purple and your ICU capacity drops, then… everything is still closed. But maybe they chain up the door now?

A recent article I read posited that closing everything down might’ve actually driven the latest surge. Before the shut down, people could eat outdoors. After the shutdown, they had to go indoors, where they’re much more likely to catch it.

Don’t get me wrong. ICU capacity is hugely important. It might even be something we should’ve been tracking all along. But we weren’t, and because the state couldn’t distinguish between nine sick people and two hundred sick people, they decided to change the playbook again.

But once again, the ICU capacity numbers appear to be a heaping pile of bovine excrement. The Sacramento region (not county this time) sunk below the 15% availability in early December. We were put on Saint Gavin’s naughty list for a minimum of three weeks, after which it would be reassessed. I kept checking the ICU capacity over that three week span, and it usually oscillated between 14-17%. So I was shocked when Jan. 2 rolled around, and our region was suddenly at 4% capacity!

Four percent? How the fuck did we drop ten percent in two fucking days?

Well, you see, that 4% number wasn’t our actual ICU capacity. It was Herr Kommondant’s PREDICTION about what he thought our ICU capacity WOULD BE four weeks later. So, you know, sorry y’all worked so hard to reach that milestone I told you would get you off probation, but now I’m making up a new milestone that is literally impossible to reach.

Of course, the reason they were predicting our ICU rates would plummet was because they didn’t think we were following their rules over the holidays. In other words, “we don’t think you’re following our rules, so we’re going to keep the same rules.” Wonderful.

Then he reversed gear. A week later, he claimed that the ICU rates weren’t spiking as expected and he was going to reopen Sacramento only, because now his magical eight ball says that four weeks later, we’d be at 17%. I’m sure this decision had nothing to do with the fact Herr Kommandant currently lives and works in the Sacramento region.

And no, if you’re wondering, the French Laundry is not in the Sacramento region.

The irony of the naughty-list/nice-list switcheroo was the actual numbers. When we were told we couldn’t reopen because we hadn’t cupped his balls correctly, the actual ICU availability was around 14%, but when we got the all-clear, we were just under 10%. So why exactly did we set the 15% threshold?

Then a few days ago, he waved his magic wand and reopened the entire state. Poof. Our long, national ICU crisis is over! Even though not a single region (aside from Northern California, where nobody lives) had even come close to sniffing 15%. But now the magical four-week prediction says all is honkey-dorey. The outlook was almost comical. Sacramento is still predicting 17%, the exact number that was predicted two weeks ago, so I guess not a damn thing has changed. But all of the other regions, who were below Sacramento, are predicted to be higher. Bay Area is supposed to be well over 20% ICU availability, but the true kicker is Southern California, which is predicted as having 33% of their ICU beds free in just four weeks! This is the same Southern California that has had 0% capacity for six straight weeks! What the fuck? Are there only three ICU beds in Southern California and Bob is starting to look a little ripe?

I teach social science, so I’m totally comfortable with trends and projected statistics. For instance, Gamestop’s stock is predicted to drop by ten percent, but instead it increased by… what the holy hell? Okay, maybe ICU beds can jump from 0 to 33%. Gavin just needs to get reddit dorks on board.

The latest completely arbitrary shift came with the vaccines. They very clearly laid out the first five groups, confusingly named Tier 1A, phases 1, 2, and 3, followed by Tier 1B, phases 1 and 2. Not sure why they couldn’t just name them one through five, but I guess everybody’s gotta feel special. In the end it really doesn’t matter, because they changed up the order. The first two groups were an amalgamation of front-line workers. Then it was supposed to by those 75 and over in that third group. I know this because I was in the next group, 1B part 1, along with those between 65 to 75. Not sure how teachers and baby boomers were included together, but whatever. How many 75 year olds can there be? I assume teachers will be up any day now.

Except then they decided that those 65-year-olds get to jump ahead of teachers. No real reason. Just because. And I don’t know if you’re aware of age demographics, but there’s a lot of fucking baby boomers. So when it was teachers and boomers together, I was looking at a late March vaccination. Now that it’s boomers, THEN teachers, I just got pushed back to July. JULY! And I’m still in a “special” category. There’s still going to be a group behind me, which I think includes a large swath of retail workers, before getting anywhere close to the general population. So if you’re 50 years old and work a normal office job, you’re probably waiting till 2022.

Remember back in November when people were saying there was a light at the end of the tunnel, and this might be our final lockdown? And Biden promised 100 million vaccinations in 100 days? Well, I hope his math wasn’t dependent on the most populous state in the nation getting its head out of its ass.

I’m pretty sure the real number Lord High Protector Gavin was looking at had nothing to do with positivity rates or hospital beds or millions of vaccines he has in his own personal batcave. It’s the number of signatures on the recall petition. Here’s how I think this went down. The president of the California Restaurant Workers Association called him up and said if he didn’t open the entire state, she was going to tell every restaurant employee to sign the petition. And voila!, state is open.

I should note that the reason I know that person is a she is because it was her, not the governor, who announced the reopening. He followed a few hours later. Ironic, considering many of the legislators and health officials were angry at Newsom not telling them when big announcements were coming, so they weren’t prepared for the slew of phone calls, making Newsom look large and in charge. But if he outranks them, we now know who outranks him. Be sure to tip your server.

So huzzah! Restaurants are open! Hair salons are open! Swimming pools are open! Unvaccinated teacher coming soon to a recently-opened ICU near you! Just in time for a newly-mutated strain that requires two masks!

But don’t worry, we’re all still safe.

Snow camping is still closed.

Some Statins, Stat!

A.B. Kelly · October 8, 2020 · Blog Entries, Musings · 2020, aging, Big Pharm, cholesterol, coronavirus, COVID-19, getting older, health care, prescription · One Comment

Earlier this week, I wrote about my wife’s summer-long ordeal with her bored general practictioner, who spent his COVID Vacation searching through her medical file to find shit to tamper with. I also touched on tipping your servers and hookers. Well, not tipping your hooker, but the economics of prostitution. Although you should probably tip your hooker. And no, not “just the tip.”

Regardless, after living through Wife’s own medical-solution-in-search-or-a-problem, I probably should’ve been more on guard when my own doctor asked to set up a phone call. To be fair, although I’d like to be a writer, a chronicler of the human condition, I’ve never claimed to be all that observant.

Doc wanted to talk to me about cholesterol medicine. Doc’s been wanting to talk to me about cholesterol medicine for quite some time. A few years ago, I went in for something, probably gout, and he pulled a “Hey, I don’t give a flying fuck about what you came to me for, your cholesterol’s a smidge high, so let’s randomly prescribe you some statins.”

Sure. Why not? He sent me over to the pharmacy and I left with the drugs that very day. On the way home, Wife told me I miiiiight want to look up some of the side effects of statins. Umm, okay. I’m sure I’m not the only person who approaches the medical profession with confused acquiescence.

Okay, here’s what my robot overlord, Google, tells me are some statin side effects:

They might spike blood sugar. Hmm, I’ve been prediabetic for five years.

Liver damage. Hmm, I’m a borderline alcoholic.

Kidney problems. Well, at least it won’t make my gout worse.

At least I’m at Kaiser. One of the reasons I chose the Kaiser, aside from my love of old-tyme handlebar mustaches and pickelhaube helmets, is that you can see your test results online. Back when I was on a different plan, my doctor would tell me something in my blood was “a little elevated,” which could mean just about anything.

“So it turns out there’s some extra lead in your system.”

“Yeah, Doc, I came to you for a gunshot wound.”

But at Kaiser, I can see precisely where I am and, even better, what the standard range. When I got home from the “quick, take these drugs before you ask your wife about it” appointment, I looked more closely at my last blood test. The standard range for cholesterol is listed as anything under 239. My horrible, sky-high cholesterol that needed drugs right the fuck now was a whopping… 219.

Except, you see, it’s not just a matter of overall cholesterol. You’ve got to look at the good cholesterol versus the bad. Your HDL, or good cholesterol has to be over 40 or else you’re unhealthy, and mine was only at a measly 52. Oh, and that LDL, it’s the bad cholesterol and we should really look for a way to get it under 159. So maybe some drugs will improve my reading of… 150.

I’m not saying I’m the picture of health. But if all of my cholesterol readings are within the range that’s deemed “normal,” it doesn’t seem to be something I should be pumping my body full of side effects for. Sorry, Kaiser Wilhelm, if you don’t want me making uninformed decisions, then maybe you need to not let me see the information.

Why are they giving me pills to fix something that ain’t broke, especially if there’s a good chance it’ll break something else? I mean, if I take these pills to drop my cholesterol from an “on the high end” 219 down to an, I don’t know, 200? While at the same time spiking my blood sugar and losing both my vision and my feet to diabetes, I wouldn’t necessarily call that a “win-win.”

So I came home with the prescription but never used it. That worked for a while. Doctor got his kickback from the pharmaceutical company and I kept my liver. Actually, the next two times I got tested, my cholesterol went down, first to 199 then to 189, despite never touching the statins. Maybe I’m so magical that just convincing myself I needed to lower my cholesterol was enough to do it. It’s some Jedi magic.

Or else maybe my cholesterol fluctuates inside the normal range. There’s a reason it’s called a range, right?

But eventually they caught onto my duplicity. Not because my cholesterol changed, but because I never refilled the prescription for something I’m supposed to be taking every day. Or maybe they were onto me because my blood sugar didn’t spike enough. “People who take our drugs can’t be as healthy as you are.”

After a year or so, doctor sent me a nastigram that I better take my fucking medicine like a good fucking boy. I ignored him, so he referred me to the big boss. I started getting emails from some random dude, inside Kaiser, listed as “Pharm.” That might stand for pharmacist, but I assume he works for Big Pharm, which is where this entire push must be coming from. My doctor needs to get a new Porsche or something, and the gout medicine people just ain’t willing to cup his balls the way he likes on the reach-around. I mean, if there ain’t kickback going all the way up the wazoo, then why the hell are we not only prescribing cholesterol medicine to people who don’t need it, but actually following up to ensure that said individual is taking said unnecessary drugs.

By contrast, I also have asthma (hurray, mid-forties!) but I’m really bad about using my inhaler. Not the emergency inhaler. I use that one often. But there’s an inhaler I’m supposed to use every day that will prevent the need for the emergency inhaler. Problem is that when I’m breathing fine, I forget. So that’s another prescription I’m supposed to fill every six months or so but regularly go two years between refills. And not a single email from doctor nor pharmacist nor Pfizer lobbyist. Because if you can’t breathe, meh. But if your cholesterol is normal, well then that’s a problem we need to solve!

So there I was, foolishly accepting the call from a doctor with way too much time on his hands, knowing full well that he had some drug kingpin breathing down his neck to make sure he gets all his little cretins hooked, and wouldn’t you know it, he doesn’t want to ask me how my breathing’s going with all of the fires going on, like the snazzy new “Glass Fire,” proving that I’m a fucking Nostradamus who nobody heeds. Nope, what he really wants to talk to me about is how important it is that I get my normal cholesterol under control.

This time, however, I was prepared for the statin conversation. I asked for clarification, like why the fuck am I supposed to risk making some of my medical conditions worse in order to fix a problem I don’t have. It turns out that cholesterol medicine ain’t got shit to do with controlling cholesterol. Studies have shown that prescribing statins to people who don’t need them severely lessens the likelihood of, I don’t know, heart attacks and stroke and scurvy or something.

Honestly! Why, the drug company who has the patent for this drug has run bazillions of tests and, wouldn’t you know it, they all came back proving that their product rivals only the flush toilet and electricity in the advancement of the human race. And the proof is that, when they prescribed it to people who didn’t need it, those people ended up STILL not needing it. It’s kind of like saying that stitches help people who’ve been stabbed by a sword, but our tests show that unstabbed people who were given stitches ALSO didn’t exhibit signs of sword punctures. Stitches greatly reduce your chances of bleeding out in a medieval dungeon.

My doctor assures me that the DHS has signed off on this whole cholesterol-medicine-for-non-cholesterol-purposes thing. And boy howdy, if COVID has taught us anything, it’s that government agencies devoted to our health always know what they’re talking about. Like when the virus was airborne for, like, an hour before the CDC took it off their website because the president complained. A week later, it was airborne again. Hopefully you weren’t breathing in deeply for that week that the virus was noncommittal.

And yeah, I know that the Department of Health Services ain’t the same as the Center for Disease Control, but the only reason we’re focused on the latter is because they’ve kept us hostage all year and we’re suffering from Stockholm Syndrome. Even if the DHS whims can’t keep me chained to my refrigerator for the next fortnight, my eyebrow’s still rising over them suggesting what we really need in this world is more random, never-ending prescriptions. Those bacteria ain’t gonna develop antibiotic immunity by themselves, y’all! For all I know, the Orange One has a bunch of stock in the statin company and that’s why they’re now suggested for everything from hemorrhoids to gunshot wounds.

Then again, I’m just now realizing that the DHS is the British single-payer system. Shit, is my doctor running my blood tests in metric? Maybe that’s why my numbers don’t match what he’s saying.

Or maybe he’s talking about the other DHS, the American one that likes to look at your browser history. In which case I better get me some statins, because unlike some mamby-pamby doctors and pharmacists, you DEFINITELY don’t want to ignore the suggestions of the water-boarders.

Then again, if it’s the Department of Homeland Security, then they need to update their sales pitch.

Lower your cholesterol! Avoid heart attacks! Now with fewer anal probes at the airport!!!

Sold!

COVID Scoreboard

A.B. Kelly · August 16, 2020 · Blog Entries, Musings · 2020, coronavirus, COVID-19, education, quarantine · No Comments

Am I the only one this happens to?

I return home from some socially-distant walkabout, or perhaps I put on my HazMat suit to buy a dozen eggs, and immediately go wash my hands, as I was told might be important back in March, but I haven’t heard one medical or political leader mention since then. But the running water makes me have to go pee. Then I have to wash my hands again. I’m starting to think Bath, Body Works, and Zoom is behind this whole COVID thing.

Yes, I list Bath and Body Works as two different entities, which I assume merged in the late Middle Ages, like Buda and Pest.

It’s been a while since I’ve checked in. In that time, the world seemingly ended and then started to come back before deciding that, meh, maybe it needs to hit the snooze button for another six months or so.

I blogged a fair amount back when it all came crashing down. But then I stopped because every post ended up being the same. Even when I went beyond the COVID stuff, what the hell else was I supposed to write about? A fancy new restaurant I discovered? That new movie that’s become water cooler scuttlebutt? Try as I might, I can’t milk 1000+ words out of washing my hands and then peeing.

At least not on a weekly basis.

But here on the cusp of a the second full decade of COVID, it’s worth another check in.

What’s that? It’s only been five months? Regardless, Daughter and I are both heading back to school this coming week, so I guess now is as good a time as any to take the rectal temperature.

Of course, “heading back to school” might not be 100% accurate. We’ve started education via shiny screen, at any rate. In my last post I mentioned my district was bloviating about sending all the kids back to schools and starting teacher death pools as a new fundraising apparatus. Then they said the students didn’t have to show up at school but the teachers still did, because only one of those two variables are important to the educational process and their bottom line. After that, the teachers agreed to let them blame pushing back the start of the school year by a week on us to the parents. As a result, we’re allowed to teach from home. So now I’m live-streaming 12th grade AP right next to Daughter, who is live-streaming first grade. My students are very jealous that we can’t spend a whole day on “how to use crayons” like the other talking head in the room.

I called it, of course. I knew that no school district was actually going to go through with the whole “no social distancing, everybody come back” threat. Wait, what’s that? Georgia, you say? Too bad they suspend people for taking pictures, so we’ll never see what that looks like…

Looking back on my earlier posts, I was right more often than I was wrong. I thought we were overreacting and, I know this is an unpopular position, but I still think we’re overreacting. Or maybe not overreacting, but focusing on the wrong things. Much like the TSA, half the crap we’re doing is designed to look like we’re trying instead of actually keeping us safe. If there was really virtually no spread at BLM rallies, then half the stuff we shut down didn’t need to be shut down. As another example, in baseball, they have to sanitize the bullpen phone after each usage, even though the bullpen phone is answered by the same person every single time.

And no, I don’t think that’s where the entire Marlins team caught the ‘Rona. Unless there’s a bullpen phone in South Beach night clubs.

Speaking of sports, I was also right that baseball is a relatively easy game to socially distance. What I forgot was that the owners and the players would rather stick their heads up their collective asses than to take advantage of months where everybody is stuck at home watching Frozen II for the seventy-fifth time. The owners were convinced they were going to lose ALL of their money and then, lo and behold, opening night was the highest rated in years. Imagine if it had happened back in May. Or April, if we’d never shut it down in the first place.

Of course, two teams have gone full COVID. Double digit cases on both the Marlins and Cardinals, which is made even worse by the fact that those two teams don’t play each other. Had they caught it from each other, we might have a good test study. But they’re in different time zones. Again, it probably would’ve been better for MLB to start up in April or May, when the players couldn’t go to bars after the games. But when you hold off for three months because it’s “unsafe,” then say, “Okay, things are safe enough to return now,” then people are going to act as if they’re safe. It’s the lesson that the entire United States learned during July.

That’s why the recent cancellations of most of college football was obvious from a mile away. And the conferences that are still “contemplating it” are only doing it for the optics. College football is a fucking pipe dream. Take all of the problems MLB has had and add in teenagers without millions of dollars on the line. Or proper health care beyond a team doctor who gets paid to say, “Yep, he can play.”

Closer to home, the recreational soccer league we signed Daughter up for back around the time her softball season was canceled after one game seem intent to go on with soccer this fall. With only “slight modifications.” Such as there won’t be any actual games. Only practices. And parents can’t hang out at the practice. But we can’t leave practice. We have to sit in our cars the whole time. How quickly can I opt out?

Here’s what I don’t get: how would putting my daughter on a field with 10 other six-year-olds and a couple of parent coaches be fine, but putting her on a field with 20 others be where the problems come? Yes, I understand the law of averages, but if the implication is that at least one team will get COVID and they don’t want to spread it to others, then maybe they shouldn’t be having team practices in the first place.

The soccer league is just taking a cue from the general sense of “othering” tied up with COVID. My team is okay, it’s those other teams that we have to fear. I know all of my friends are clean and safe, it’s those OTHER people who are disgusting and COVID-y. Right before my curling league shut down, somebody proposed that we keep our leagues running, because we know all those people, but maybe stop doing Learn-to-Curls, because the GENERAL PUBLIC can come to those. I responded that the members were just as likely to have it as non-members, so we shut the whole thing down.

Conversation with my father-in-law: “The mask is not just to protect you, but other people.” “But I don’t have it.” “How do you know?” “Because I’m healthy.”

Which is not to say I’m immune to this othering. Whenever I hear of someone catching it, I ask, “where did they go? What did they do? In what way did they bring this on themselves?” And when they caught it at church, I breathe a sigh of relief.

Somebody at my wife’s work caught it. Oddly enough, it wasn’t the guy who frequented every bar in the greater Sacramento area the day they re-opened. It’s one of the conscientious ones, my wife claimed. He’s got three kids at home! It’s totally random!

Turns out he went to Tahoe, which is pretty much the hottest of hotbeds in our state. “Don’t have COVID? Well, come on down and we’ll fix that right up!”

Back in March and April, I thought we forced shut down too quickly, before we could see if the distancing and hand washing would help. And masks, although back then they lied to us by telling us masks didn’t help. In fact, masks were probably bad for us. The lie was totally reasonable. One look at the toilet paper aisle was enough to realize that if we thought we needed masks, no doctor would be able to cover his or her face until 2025.

But the short-term gain from that little white lie came back to haunt the CDC, didn’t it? Might be a teachable moment in there. If we were allowed to teach anymore. Most people (certainly not all, but most) are willing to go along with scientists changing their minds as new evidence comes in. What we’re less thrilled with is the “Oh yeah, we knew all along that you should be doing this, but we didn’t think you could handle it. This time we’ll keep the football down, Charlie Brown.”

So yeah, I still don’t understand why we shut down camping and miniature golf and contactless car washes. Perhaps if we had taken a measured response at the beginning, told people that if they wash hands and wear masks and be careful about how close they are to people, that we can do certain things. Instead they told us we couldn’t do a goddamn thing for two months and then were shocked that we crammed the beach so closely that we were cupping the balls of the dude three blankets away.

Most of us have figured out the measured approach on this second go around, yes? We wash our hands and wear our masks. We let people take out temperature when we go inside. I don’t understand what good that does if the main problem with COVID is how many people we spread it to before we have any symptoms. Once your temperature hits 100 degrees, it’s game fucking over. Last time I went to Kaiser, they didn’t stop me to take my temperature, so I figured they were acknowledging it as pointless. Nope, the nurse informed me, they’ve just gone all Big Brother and are surreptitiously scanning us from afar.

I hate going into Kaiser, because they make me lie. “Have you been experiencing any shortness of breath?” Um, I’m here to get allergy shots, meaning it’s been many weeks since my last allergy shots. And I have allergy-induced asthma that gets worse the longer I’ve gone without shots. So have I been experiencing any shortness of breath? I just assume they mean “more than usual” and say no.

The mask companies finally caught up and made fancy, fashionable masks so we can accessorize with our favorite sports teams or pop culture references or works of art. We carry our hand sanitizer with us, even if it smells like a noontime drunk. Seriously, I’ve got some alcohol-based hand sanitizer in my car and, let me tell you, if I ever get pulled over after using that shit, I’m going to jail. Granted, it’s 100 degrees on the average day in Sacramento, but that stuff is straight rum coming out of there. Is that how we fixed the supply problem? Hand sanitizer: all gone, Restaurant alcohol: wasting away undrunk. Get me that Bicardi, stat!

I think the biggest failed lesson from the first lockdown was that the lockdowns had fuck-all to do with people’s actions. Herr Kommandant Newsom told us all to stay home and, lo and behold, we all stayed home! He hath spoken and we hath listened! Except that’s not really how it happened. What actually happened was people started hoarding and staying at home and started freaking out about whether or not they were going to go to work. On March 12, for instance, March Madness was canceled and Disneyland closed. And seriously, if those two organizations that put profit ahead of their very souls, are shutting down, then why the fuck am I going to work in my cubicle?

Seven days later, after we had all purchased enough toilet paper to survive a nuclear shitstorm, Herr Kommandant told us, “Hey, why don’t you stay home? Go ahead. It’s on me.” Then, instead of trying to figure out how it spreads or if masks work or if a bear shits in the woods, he spent the next two months patting himself on the back that EVERYBODY in his state was listening to him and his fancy hair.

I assume they’re separate entities, Newsom and his hair. I only wonder who is the one that’s truly in charge of the symbiotic relationship.

Then people got tired of being trapped at home, so they started going out. And the Governor, not willing to admit people weren’t following his directions, came up with some bullshit about Phases and R-1s and how if we do our best to watch all of his press conferences and maybe get our Senator put on the national ticket so that next year he can pull a Blegojevich next year, then maybe he’ll let us go to bars, but only if they serve us fatty foods with each drink.

Seriously, at one point everybody went to the beach and he said if we kept going to the beach, he wasn’t going to open anything. Then there was one windy day in SoCal where people didn’t go to the beach and he said, “Since everyone listened to me, you can go to the beaches now. And movie theaters, too.”

But still no camping. And still, in late May, nothing about masks.

Remember when Georgia had a “Partial re-opening” and it was lambasted as short-sighted and dangerous, while at the same time California had a “phased rollback of restrictions,” which included about 90% the same things, but was somehow lauded as a studious approach based on evidence? Of course, nobody’s saying that about California now as we’ve surged past all the models.

So yeah, I still think I was right about a fair amount. About toilet paper and social distancing and the likelihood that schools would never have on-location education ever again. At one point I said that if we all hunkered down for two months then all returned to the wild, we weren’t really “flattening the curve” so much as “delaying the curve.” I think I get a fucking gold star and a cookie for that prediction, yeah?

But there were definitely some things I could not have been more wrong about. Top of that list is how many people want to burn the whole thing down. I mean, I assume they want to stay in lockdown forever, or else they’d wear some fucking masks, right?

Seriously people, if y’all put on your masks and stopped practicing fully-clothed sodomy with each other, we could be out of this in a manner of weeks. But today I had some 80-year-old lady crawling up my backside at the checkout counter at the grocery store. Y’know, those carts are almost six feet long, so all you have to do is stand behind your fucking cart and we’re good. And yeah, I know you have to take stuff out of your cart, but this lady stood right behind me and pulled her empty cart in behind her. Then she LEANED TOWARD ME!!!

And now everybody’s trying to follow the letter of the rules without following the intent. Bars are selling a single french fry to go with your drink. Restaurants can serve outdoors, so they’re throwing up giant tents to keep all the COVID trapped around you in a nice moist environment. Others aren’t even pretending to follow the rules. A waterslide park outside of Sacramento recently reopened in violation of a state mandate. They’re being fined $500 a day.

Five hundred bucks a day. They run a water park in a Trump-voting county where the average temperature is over 100 degrees. I think they make back that $500 in the first twenty minutes they’re open. That’s kinda like making me pay the extra five-cent sin tax on my beer. It’s not really doing jackshit to dissuade me from drinking.

Oh wait, it’s not a sin tax, it’s a recycling tax. I’m supposed to get it back if I recycle. Except all the recycling centers have closed, and that was long before COVID. Probably a topic for another time.

I’ve got plenty of time, after all. With tent dining and opened water parks and a bunch of Anti- Masxxers, to say nothing of the 100 students waiting patiently on a Zoom call to turn a freeze-frame screencapture of my nosehair into a Tik Tok, we’re going to be here for a while.

Back to School, Sort Of

A.B. Kelly · July 14, 2020 · Blog Entries, Musings · 20-21 school year, 2020, coronavirus, COVID-19, education, quarantine, teaching · No Comments

My school district is threatening to start school up again in a few weeks.

Yes, I used the word threaten. I don’t think they intend to go through with it. I think it’s a negotiating strategy, an “I WILL turn this car back around” opening gambit. I don’t know who, exactly, they think they’re negotiating with. The teachers union, the parents, the media. Probably a mixture of all three and more besides, considering their scorched earth approach.

IF Y’ALL WON’T SIGN UP FOR DISTANCE LEARNING, WE’LL INFECT ONE STUDENT PER DAY UNTIL OUR DEMANDS ARE MET!!!

I’ve been involved with many school districts in my life. Between the districts I’ve worked for and the ones teachers and admin I know have moved on to, plus throw in the fact that my daughter is (allegedly) starting first grade in less than a month, I have understanding of the inner workings of upwards of ten different school districts.

This might shock y’all, but school districts are a fucking mess.

The average district office is an awkward mishmash of former teachers who couldn’t wait to get out of the classroom and lifelong bureaucrats who are most comfortable when articulating the subtle differences between form 47(f) and 72(q), and don’t forget to write hard enough for the goldenrod triplicate and page twelve requires two initials and a signature. Add into that mix the Board of Education, a group of would-be politicians who aren’t savvy enough to win a competitive election like, say, dogcatcher.

So it’s no surprise the the average response of the average district is to put their heads in the sand and hope that the issue de jour blows over before there’s any blow back. Which isn’t to say they don’t spend money. They spend shit-tons. We get guest speakers for some fancy new fix that’s going to have all third graders solving differential calculus. Then we move onto another fix the following year, long before we get any data about if those now-fourth graders can do any third-grade math, let alone z-axis graphing.

Most districts think that REAL education occurs far, far away from the classroom. If you’ve never encountered a child, you’re probably the best educator in the world. After all, those fucking students fuck up all of our well-laid plans. During the budget crisis a decade ago (returning soon to a school district near you!), my district laid off close to fifteen percent of the teachers along with about five percent of the district staff. After all, a teacher with a class size of forty is a minor issue compared to an assistant superintendent cutting down to ONLY two secretaries. How the hell can she get ANYTHING done?

Here a good example of how my district meanders its way through the average “catastrophe”. After Sandy Hook, the federal government sent a bunch of money out for security improvements. My school wrote out a proposal for keyless (badge) entry to our buildings. The proposal was approved. Everything was set to be installed over summer. When we came back, we had the same shitty doors. The district decided they would “test run” the keyless entry at the district office. Because, you know, it’s EVERY DAY we’re bombarded with horrific stories of school (district office) shootings. We all know those horrific stories of the admin assistant who quietly ushers all of the NCR paper into a closet seconds before…

Even better, they only gave badges to district office employees. Why the fuck would teachers want into the district office? We are inconsequential in the business of running a school district. We have to check in through the front door like the rest of the riffraff.

The badge system worked so well that they added a second one to the elevator. Personnel and Benefits are on the bottom floor, they argue, why should any teacher need to know what’s going on up there on the second and third floor? If we really have legitimate business there, we can (I shit you not) call whomever we’re supposed to meet and they can go send the elevator down to us.

Here’s another example: During that budget crisis, we negotiated a reduction in the school year. We got rid of the two bullshit “teacher development” days plus five student days. That way, we could say we agreed to a two percent pay cut while actually taking an eight percent pay cut. When the recession was over, they gave us back the seven days and added three more bullshit days. But not the two percent pay cut.

The bullshit days don’t have to be bullshit days. But they’re always bullshit days. You see, the year we negotiated the days back, the school year calendar was already set. So we just threw the now five extra non-student days on at the beginning of the school year with the idea that we’d move them around the following year. That was back in 2013. Want to guess where the bullshit days fall on the current calendar?

If we were serious about using these days as development days, which is what they’re called, or if we were interested in legitimately following through on whatever we’re working on the first day, we’d spread them out throughout the year. Have two of them at the beginning, then check in at the beginning of each quarter to check progress and reassess. Instead, we go to six hours of meetings for five straight days. By the time we see a student, we’re fucking exhausted. And any bright a-ha moment we had on day one has been lost behind a fog of tardy policies and dress codes. Come mid-October, somebody in the lunch room will throw out a, “Hey, weren’t we supposed to be doing something with vocabulary this year?” and none of us will the slightest idea what the fuck he’s talking about.

So remember that these institutions are the ones responsible for reinventing their entire industry in the span of a few weeks.

I hear you saying, “a few weeks? Haven’t we been shut down since March? What the hell have they been doing since then?”

And the answer is, mostly, twiddling their thumbs and hoping everything was going to be better.

My district ran fourth quarter in a “no-harm/no-foul” mode. If you liked the grade you had when we shut down, you can keep it without doing a fucking thing! Distance learning where everybody gets a trophy. The result was predictable. The A students continued to do work, because they’re A students. Some B students did, if they were bored. C and D students didn’t do a fucking thing, because what if they do an assignment and it lowers their grade? Even though we set the rules that, not only could your end grade not be lower than it was in mid-March, no SINGLE ASSIGNMENT could lower your percentage at all. So if you had a 76% in my class and you sent me a picture of feces, congratulations, you just got 16 out of 20 on that assignment. A few F students did enough work to get up to a 60%.

But it’s okay, because by August, we’ll have licked COVID and everybody will be excellent at social distancing and wearing masks and washing our hands. Movie theaters and sporting events and restaurants would be alive and well, right?

Oops.

To be fair, we’ve had a whole bunch of meetings over the summer. My department chair is part of the “High School Task Force,” so he’s regularly come to the rest of us with updates and to ask for suggestions. We’ve come up with alternative schedules whereby only 25% of the students are on campus at any given time. One batch comes Monday AM, another on Monday PM, then two more on Tuesday before we cycle back to the Monday peeps on Wednesday. Friday’s an “all distance learning” day, which is also a teacher catch-up day, because if I only have my students in my class one hour a week instead of one hour a day, I’m going to be spending most of my time in front of the classroom. I can’t exactly give them seat work so I can update my blog like usual.

Of course, this schedule wouldn’t work for younger students. High schoolers can legally stay home by themselves on the three days they’re not at school. I don’t see that working for elementary school kids. I’ve been faced with that option for my daughter. We could send her back full time or two days a week. But what will we do with her the other three days? Send her to daycare? Isn’t that pretty much the same as sending her to school, only without the education? Her school is also offering a full distance learning option. But again, where would that distance learning happen? She’d probably be sitting in my classroom with teenagers getting a whole DIFFERENT type of education. Daddy, what’s a fucktard?

But it doesn’t really matter what our task force or the middle school or elementary versions thereof came up with, because the district replied with a nice, resounding hell-to-the-no. Comically, the Board of Education isn’t even involved with the negotiation, and they weren’t there when we negotiated the shutdown back in March. They just told the superintendent to figure out the minor stuff while they focus on the important educational stuff like, I shit you not, spending millions of dollars on a fence around the district office because one time there was a homeless person nearby. The fence would only be passable by people with badges, which the teachers don’t have. Not sure how we’ll get to personnel or benefits now.

Oh, and on the same board agenda as the gate was starting to look into pay cuts for teachers next year.

What the district did decide on was a two-fold approach. Parents have the option to sign up for 100% distance learning for the entire school year or 100% live instruction for the entire school year. No switching from one to the other after you’ve made the decision, which they gave parents one week to ruminate. Who needs more time than that to decide such a minor thing?

Now the numbers are in. Clearly I’m not the only parent who went with the “what the fuck am I supposed to do with my kids when I’m at school?” option. Not that my district offered a hybrid option. Still, the results are informative. In my largely low-income, two-worker family district, only six percent of parents opted for distance learning. In my daughter’s district, where there are a shit-ton of stay-at-home parents and lots of personal computing devices, not to mention a hybrid option, only ten percent opted for some sort of distance learning.

So yay! Only 94% of my students will be in my class on a typical day. So now my class of 40 students will have… 38.4? Super easy to socially distance those 38!

And all of that was before the COVID spike. Now districts are scrambling.

Last week, Daughter’s district blanketed us with phone calls and emails about our county potentially being put on Herr Kommandant Newsom’s “watch list.” Great name, Gavin. You know we were already putting your face on the principal from The Breakfast Club, right? Like you can keep this up all weekend? And your response is to come up with a “Watch List.” Only it’s not a watch list. Because once you’re on the watch list, you’re already shutting down. If you’re saying, “this county will probably go on the watch list the day after tomorrow if x, y, z doesn’t change,” isn’t that county already being watched?

Anyway, when it was reported that my county might go on the watch list, Daughter’s district alerted us that, even if we opted for in-school instruction, we might still be starting the school year at home. Be prepared, they told us, for a kooky, crazy school year where we oscillate between in-school and at-home based on how many COVID cases we have and how many of Herr Kommandant’s hairs are out of place. Just kidding, none of his hairs are ever out of place. Have you seen that guy? Only person in America who stayed groomed during the entire shut-down.

Meanwhile, my district, which is in a county that’s already on the watch list and has been surging like a motherfucker, shrugs and says, “what’re you gonna do?” Even on their FAQ, they claim that social distancing is only a suggestion, not a requirement. Kinda like flossing twice a day. So they’re going to jam us in like sardines and just give a vague answer to the dentist. The good news is some of us will start dying off, which should relieve the overcrowding issue. Unless it’s the teachers, which’ll cause the classes to become even more crowded. Because if I die, they’ll need to combine my students with somebody else’s. I doubt they’re going to have a ton of success hiring a sub to go into the classroom where the last teacher caught COVID and died.

Speaking of catching COVID, we’ve been told that if any of our students test positive, we need to quarantine ourselves for two weeks. If that happens, we have to use our own sick leave. We get ten sick days a year. So after we burn all of our sick leave on the first quarantine…

But as I said at the beginning, I think this is just a negotiating tactic. The district broke off talks with my union saying they couldn’t meet again until the week before we report for the five bullshit days. My inner Nostradamus can predict exactly how that conversation will go”

“We can’t open. Our teachers will die!”

“We’ll give you distance learning for a five-percent pay cut. After all, you won’t need to buy as many school supplies, etc, if you’re teaching from home.”

Or not teaching from home. The latest I heard was they didn’t like giving us that much autonomy. If there is any distance learning this year, they want us doing it from the classroom.

And that’s pretty much the only thing that’s been “fixed” about distance learning. All that stuff you’ve heard about teachers being trained to do it better this year? Ain’t happening. It’s going to be another big shrug and “figure it out.”

So my union will probably agree to the pay cut in order to not have any students. Which is great, because then my district can finally build that moat around their fortress.

Yosemite, COVID Edition

A.B. Kelly · July 7, 2020 · Blog Entries, Musings · camping, child rearing, coronavirus, family vacation, hiking, Yosemite · No Comments

Just got back from a couple days in Yosemite. This trip was quite a bit different from those of the past.

I’ve been going to Yosemite since before I was cognizant. Probably been there around forty times total. This was Daughter’s third trip and she just turned six. So if there are two things I know in life, they’re probably Yosemite and being a snarky asshole. The latter I’ve done far more than forty times.

Used to camp there with my family every summer, when it was still possible to get reservations. They used to sell them through Ticketmaster (or maybe Ticketron?) on a rolling basis, whereby tickets became available eight weeks before the date of travel. So some would be released every day. My dad used to camp out at the local record store to get in there the minute they went on sale.

Nowadays they release an entire month’s worth of reservations online at the same time. If you take the time to consult your calendar six months out to ensure that day isn’t somebody’s birthday or something, you’ve already lost them to somebody else. And whereas it used to be first-come, first-served as to which campsite once you got there, you now have to pick the specific numbered site when you reserve. The one time I tried to reserve, I went off to find a campground map to make sure I wasn’t getting the one right next to the shitter, and by the time I came back, it was taken. I guess next time, I’ll learn to love the vault toilets.

So ever since the age of twenty or so, it’s been day trips. I used to live a couple hours from the park gate. Nowadays it takes a solid three/-and-a-half hours to get to the valley floor. That necessitates a bit more planning, usually a stay over the night before or after. Because the last thing I want to do after four hours in a car is the 2,000-foot elevation gain hike up to Nevada Falls.

Last year, it was just Daughter and I who went. Wife had an excuse called “having to go into work.” Clearly that’s not a thing anymore. I packed Daughter in the car shortly before her bedtime and drove through the night while she slept, because three hours in a car with a five-year old is torture for her and I. We stopped at a B & B in Groveland around 10 pm, and we were in the valley by 10 am the next morning, “hiking” up to Mirror Lake. If you’ve never been, the walk to Mirror Lake is literally on a road, a leftover from when they allowed cars more places. The road is also still usable if you have a disabled placard. The hike is 1.2 miles with an elevation gain of a whopping 100 feet. But this was enough for Daughter to ask “Are we there yet?” fifteen times and bloviate about the horrific workout I was forcing upon her. That’s about the time I scrapped the whole Vernal Falls idea.

The Vernal Falls hike was a rite of passage for me. From when I was about my daughter’s age, my dad would hike us up to the footbridge, the first spot you can see the actual falls. The following year we went a little further. The first time I made it to the top, we took the back route, but my dad showed me the infamous Mist Trail. It’s effectively a staircase made out of misshapen granite that’s slippery as shit because you’re under a constant deluge of splash from the falls. You’d think it’s rain. My dad didn’t think I was able to ascend the Mist Trail that year (good call – at forty-five, I’m still a klutz), and promised we’d attempt it the following year. The following year we went to the Grand Canyon. And Zion the following year. Bullshit! Three years later I made it up.

The only problem with making it to the top of Vernal Falls is you then realize it’s not even the cool waterfall on that hike. Nevada Falls, an extra two miles and another 1,000 feet up, after already going up 1,000 feet in the last mile-and-a-half, is one of the quirkiest waterfalls in existence. It’s crooked like Bill Clinton’s penis. I might’ve been in junior high by the time I conquered it. Nevada Falls, that is. Not Bill Clinton’s penis.

After that we found a cool trick. Get up to Glacier Point and take the Panorama Trail DOWN instead of up. Of course, that’s when I was a teenager. Nowadays I feel like going downhill is worse than going up. Not as strenuous, but it moves muscles in ways they’re not supposed to move.

My original plan was to try the Vernal Falls footbridge this year, then start Daughter on the same Trial by Hike my dad put me through. Except this year, the shuttles aren’t running as a result of COVID. Which is the impetus for this post. Obviously I can wax nostalgic for thousands of words about Yosemite, but that would be exciting for an audience of one. I know it usually seems like I only write this shit for myself, but it’s not entirely masturbatory.

After closing for three months, Yosemite opened to the public a few weeks ago. As soon as I saw they were reopening, I jumped online to get a reservation. We planned to go up Sunday morning, stay overnight near the park, then go back in Monday before driving home. As an added bonus, Yosemite was limiting entry! Yosemite without visitors is about as close to heaven on Earth as it gets. Just like John Muir intended. Unfortunately, a lot of other people had that same notion. And those rat bastards were parked EVERYWHERE!

Obviously they weren’t limiting entrance too much. They were aiming for half of the usual summer crowd. So the trails and meadows weren’t super full, but without the shuttle buses to get us around, we were on our own. Usually you drive to one of two or three parking lots and then ride the bus around everywhere. This time it was find a spot and walk as far as you have to.

When I heard there’d be no shuttles, I grew curious about a bus-only loop at the east end of the park. On it are two main attractions, the Mirror Lake “trail” I mentioned earlier and Happy Isles, which is where the trail to Vernal Falls, et al begins. Surely they can’t block those spots off, can they? Or are they going to make me walk the mile from Camp Curry just to get to the trailhead whence I have to hike another couple miles straight up? I mean, I’ll happily climb the 1,000 feet in elevation gain over a mile and a half trail, but adding on an extra half-mile of flatland? I think NOT!

Our first day there, a Sunday, before we parked at Camp Curry, we drove ahead to check out the bus-only loop.. It was now car accessible. Sort of. We could drive to Happy Isles. Tons of cars were parked there. But we couldn’t get all the way to Mirror Lake. Not surprising. There’s plenty of space at Happy Isles for a makeshift parking lot. I don’t know how they’d do that at Mirror Lake. We went the other way on the loop and found the farthest we could get was North Pines/Stables, which is how far you can drive under normal conditions.

Okay, no problem. It was late in the day by then. I was mainly using Day One to figure out what was open, what was closed. Make some plans for tomorrow when we could hit the ground running. And maybe, if we could drive all the way to Happy Isles, but not Mirror Lake, this would be the year we tackle Vernal Falls, after all. Start Daughter on the same rite of passage as me.

Except when we came back on Monday, the road to Happy Isles was closed. What the fuck? And naturally, the parking lot at North Pines was jam packed. So back to Camp Curry we went. At least there was a yummy-looking food truck there the day before. Its version of chicken & waffles was served in a waffle cone with a maple drizzle. Delightful. We passed on it because we had picked out a dinner spot near the hotel, but we were looking forward to it for lunch the next day.

But sure enough, that shit was as closed down as Happy Isles on Monday. What the fuck, people? It’s COVID time. Nobody’s working. There shouldn’t be huge differences between Sunday and Monday. The taco truck was open both days. But when you’ve got your heart set on chicken tenders in a waffle cone, carne asada ain’t gonna cut it.

Perhaps we could get around the loop on wheels. I had the brilliant idea to bring Daughter’s scooter about the eighth time we stopped on the way to Mirror Lake the year before. But we forgot to pack it. Oops. So we looked into renting bikes. Twenty-four bucks each for a half-day. Okay, so seventy-five bones for the three of us? It was a distinct possibility. After all , it’s not like we’d be spending money on scrumptious lunch options. Only one thing dissuaded us. The extra five bucks for her to rent a helmet. It wasn’t the cost, five bucks is excessively reasonable after the exorbitant cost for the rental itself. But something about putting something that’d been worn by every other kid on the face of the earth seems a bit too far these days.

Ironic, I know, since under normal circumstances, they probably wouldn’t have cleaned that shit since last century and it would be filled with colonies of every head lice ever invented. This time, they’re probably disinfecting it every night. And yet…

In the same vein, Sunday night was the first time we’ve been in a hotel since the beforetimes. It felt weird. The one thing going for us was that, while Yosemite was closed, this hotel was either closed or getting very little action. But I never realized how the carpeting in a hotel room looks straight outta 1979, which was probably the last time it was cleaned. That’s probably Jack Tripper’s chest hair down there.

On the other hand, it’s refreshing that the feces and DNA left behind by previous guests are no longer my primary concern. Go ahead and bring in a black light. Spooge splats are fine as long as there aren’t any Mexican-beer-drinking viruses in the man batter.

After discovering that there was no parking close to Happy Isles or Mirror Lake, we parked at Camp Curry and walked through one of the empty campsites to the river. There’s only one campsite open in the whole park. Man, if I had been one of the lucky few to reserve one of the other sites back in February, I’d be pissed. That’s like winning the lottery only to find out that you won the wrong lottery and the money’s going to somebody else.

I don’t see why they only open one campsite. If they’re trying to encourage social distancing, shouldn’t they open half of two different campsites? Then again, as I’ve opined before, camping is about as socially distant of an activity as we’ve got in this world. Especially if we’re to believe the newest reports that it’s very difficult for the virus to spread outdoors. True, Yosemite camping isn’t as socially distant as most campsites. Even though there is zero campsites available when you try to reserve, they jam ya in like sardines once you’re there. When I camp there, I actually have to pee IN THE BATHROOM! The Horror!

Just as John Muir intended.

Speaking of which, halfway across the abandoned campsite, Daughter decided, as six-year-olds are wont to do, that this time, and no other time, was the proper time to vacate her bladder. But it’s cool, even if the campsites closed, they can’t be locking the bathrooms, right? Turns out that yes, they can. Could she make it across the street to the open campsite? Maybe three minutes? If you’ve ever encountered a kid in early elementary school, you know the answer was a resounding no.

Of course, this was also the moment that a few rangers were walking through the campsite, checking it for, I don’t know, viruses and such? So we took Daughter behind a tree to hide from them, which probably was doing no such thing, and it was off to the races. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not opposed to peeing in public. I’m a guy, the world is my urinal. But that’s why I usually camp out in the middle of nowhere. It’s crowded at Yosemite. If I randomly whip it out, I’m liable to splash on hundreds of people. But I guess society is a bit more forgiving of a six-year-old than a mid-forties dude.

When we finally made it through the campsite, I finally had that “passing it on” moment. We were standing on the rocky bottom of the frigid Merced River, throwing rocks and sticks into the current, and Daughter absolutely loved it. Couldn’t get enough. Sure, my feet were slicing and dicing and turning into icicles, but Daughter’s eating this shit up. And I’m reminded of all the times I walked across or laid down on an inflatable tube or mattress, with nary a thought of internal temperature or why the fuck couldn’t they put some goddamn sand at the bottom of this stream as John Muir intended.

It’s such a rare feeling, that I’m doing this parenting thing right. Sure, I might’ve exposed her to spooge marks and COVID the night before. And sure, I let her play on her Nintendo for all three hours both ways. But dammit, we gotta take the wins when we get them, right?

She even said she’s excited to go back to Yosemite next year.

I’m sure that’ll change once I make her hike Vernal Falls.

Camp with no Tathalon

A.B. Kelly · June 12, 2020 · Blog Entries, Musings · 2020, camping, Camptathalon, coronavirus, male bonding · One Comment

Camptathalon, that annual bacchanal of fart jokes, was supposed to happen last weekend. It did not. So those of you tuning in to see timestamped musings of whether or not anal sex counts as social distancing, unfortunately you won’t find that here. Nor in February, when I normally get around to jotting down said timestamps.

There was some camping this weekend, which in and of itself is a phenomenal bit of normality in these apocalyptic times. But because 2020 can’t do anything without a nice fuck-you roundhouse to the nuts, the camping was neither in the expected place nor with the expected crew. Nor with toilet paper.

For those who think a roundhouse kick cannot connected with testicles, I might’ve agreed with you before this year. Now I’m not so sure.

We picked this weekend way back in January. Like good conscientious citizens, we reserved and paid for our preferred campsite. Then the COVID hit. In case you weren’t aware.

When the entire world shut down, so did camping. Not that most camping spots were open in March. If you read last year’s Camptathalon, which I typed up ten months later, you’ll note the campsite we went to last year was opening the weekend we were camping and we had to wait till they chopped down some trees before we could get in.

This year it’s been a pretty temperate winter, so there wasn’t much reason to delay opening until July. Well, except for that whole social distancing thing.

Honestly, I don’t get that. I understand keeping Yosemite closed, because that place gets so crowded in the summer that a visit to Camp Curry usually requires swimming through a morass of other people’s buttsweat. You have to stand on the bus with another guy’s crotch up your butt, and not in the social-distanced loving way.

But the types of campsites my friends and I frequent aren’t the ones that most of the city slickers flock to. We’re polite enough to know that if we’re going to be talking about and engaging in shenanigans, we probably don’t want to be camping next to family of four venturing out into the outdoors for their first endeavor. Three hours out of town and 6,000 feet elevation are usually minimums for us. This past weekend was 2.5 hours and only 3,500 feet. Might as well have been flat land.

In mid-May, we got a notice from our campsite that they would not be opening until July 1. They didn’t cancel the reservation, per se. They didn’t give us our money back, because, after all, the Forest Service is a government entity and they’re holding on to every dime until they legally have to return it. And if they have a chance to change the law between now and then, they might not have to legally do shit. Regardless, we started to look for other options.

Our original campground, called Running Deer on the picturesque Little Grass Valley in Northern California, is one we camped at a few years ago. Next door was a campsite named Little Beaver, leading to all sorts of jokes about parole conditions and being that close to a little beaver. Ha ha, fucking hilarious. Since then, we’ve tried to return to Running Deer twice and been shit out of luck both times. Last year it was still snowed in, this year it had the ‘Rona. Little Beaver 2, campers 0. Take that, motherfuckers!

Also, for those keeping track, the one time in the last four years we didn’t try for Little Grass Valley, our campsite burned to the ground four hours after we were evacuated. Little Beaver up 3-0!

When we looked at what other options were available, we couldn’t find much. As late as the third week of May, the cupboard was bare. The first-come, first-served sites were all still closed. The reservable spots were both closed AND booked, a double whammy that does not comport with social distancing.

Look at how adult I was to pass up the first-come, first-served joke. But I couldn’t in good consciousness let a double whammy go by.

It was about this time we lost the first of our potential seven contestants. He’s a city slicker, through and through, who’s been threatening to come to Camptathalon for years, but has never come. He’ll only come under the best possible circumstances, and a Camptathalon where the first event is breaking into Little Beaver probably doesn’t fit that description. He would also need to fly up from Southern California, so not being sure what awaited him on the other side, that flight credit might be better used elsewhere.

While a couple of us pored over the various websites that show camping sites, one of our group who was on a job site in a national forest asked some rangers what they knew. Of course, we could’ve changed our plans, pushed it out a month, whatever. But we’re all middle-aged dudes. Changing our plans would be tantamount to asking for directions, an admission of defeat our suburban upbringing from baby-boomer fathers and greatest-generation grandfathers ensured made no imprint on our DNA.

Luckily, one of our ilk knows all the out-of-the-way, off-the-beaten-path, Ted Kaczynski-esque “dispersed” campsites. Basically, dispersed means no shitter. Sure, they also don’t have tables or firepits or garbage or water pumps, but let’s be honest. We can bring water and tables, we can throw together some rocks to make a fire ring.

But the no shitter thing definitely gives pause. Sure, I can dig a hole or, if the flat we choose is wide enough, we might not even need a hole, just a long walk. But Jesus, I’ve got gout and am out of shape and half the time my shit is runny as hell, especially if I’ve been living off of Doritos and beer for the past two days. How the hell am I supposed to squat and not get it all over the heels of my shoes?

It should come as little surprise that we lost our second camper shortly thereafter. He blamed it on the COVID. His wife’s parents have the sniffles. They might have the Virus. Of course, this was still ten days out and a lot can change in ten days and he wouldn’t be able to visit them in the hospital anyway, but sure, sure. Stay home and comfort your wife. I’m sure her parents will be as fine as all of my students’ grandparents, who magically die every time a term paper is due. How many fucking grandmas you got, kid?

The five who remained spent the second part of May preparing ourselves for the inevitable. We made a tally of folding tables and ez-ups and extra chairs. We re-thought chili as the Friday night dinner plan. We opted for canned beer instead of bottles, the easier to pack-out what we packed-in. Five years ago, this would’ve been a no-go, but now you can get good beer in cans, too.

On May 22, some campsites started to reopen. Not many, but a few. All were first-come, first-served. The following week, a handful of others opened as well. On May 29, the guy that made the reservations got another email from the Forest Service. Running Deer still closed, reservation still not canceled. But whereas the first email said they didn’t foresee opening until July 1, this one didn’t specify a date. Hope springs eternal. Perhaps everything would open up again on Monday, June 1. Because if this virus has taught us nothing else, it’s that nature really loves to follow the Gregorian calendar. I mean, shit, the first of a month AND a Monday? After months of viruses and impeachments and murder hornets, 2020 was finally giving us a break.

Unfortunately, that was not the case. The first of June came and went and we still couldn’t come within ten miles of Little Beaver.

We zeroed in on a couple of first-come, first-served campsites. Instead of heading up Thursday evening, a couple of us would leave earlier. In-charge guy checked the sites out the previous weekend, as they aren’t far from his in-laws, and they looked fine. The sign for one of the turn-offs was missing, but it was our back-up plan and we were heading up super early, so no problem. And hey, shitters!

Turns out the shitters didn’t have toilet paper, but whatever. Take what you can get. Canned beer leaves more room for toilet paper.

Around this time, we lost two more of our ilk. You’ll note I mentioned the impeachment and COVID and the murder hornets. But those references are SO mid-May. In case you hadn’t noticed, we’ve had something of an eventful last couple weeks as well. One of the guys didn’t feel right leaving during the unrest. He had to go away overnight for work once (when he spoke to the ranger) and when he came back, his wife and kids were feral. Two to three nights just wasn’t an option.

Then a guy remembered, a few days before we were set to leave, his anniversary was that weekend. Okay, I’ve blamed a lot of this on the shitshow that is 2020, but I think in this case, COVID and BLM and the Iranian air force can take a pass. He maybe should’ve been a little more on the ball. His wife told him it was fine with her if he went camping, but we all turned into instant Admiral Akbars on that one.

So our seven had become three. We’ve done Camptathalon with three before. But only two of the three going this year were what we might call regulars. Of the eight Camptathalons, two of us have been to all eight, one guy has been to seven, and another has been to six. Nobody else has been to more than one. The third guy who still hadn’t canceled this year, this would’ve been only his second Camptathalon, and his first one was canceled by fire. Come to think of it, maybe he’s the weak link, not Little Beaver.

Plus, we really didn’t want to do the Butter Toss. Didn’t want to look at a single sliver of butter if it could be avoided. So the two of us who have been to Camptathalon every year, but who also don’t mind camping for the purpose of camping, made the executive decision to cancel Camptathalon. This trip would be tathalon-less.

Good thing, too, cause I don’t know if the city slicker-types would’ve even been able to find the campsite. Our first one was all full. It was not much past noon on Thursday, and all 30 spots were taken. I guess that’s what happens when you only open ten percent of the usual campsites.

Three or four of the “taken” spots were bogus. One had nothing but a chair and a lantern. Others had a “paid for” receipt on their post but not a single item to denote occupation. I assume the people in the sites next door nabbed these spots for friends coming up later. Bullshit, if you ask me. First-com, first-served does not mean you get to hold seats for your buddies.

But with reservation spots and hosted campsites still closed, we’re in the wild, wild west. So it was onward to the next site on the other side of the lake. And we hoped the fact that the turnoff sign was gone would have kept it hidden enough, because we were out of cell range and had no Plan C.

Or I suppose we were on to Plan D now. Plan A had been our reservations, Plan B was the dispersed site. I expected all sorts of “morning after” jokes if it had been a legitimate Camptathalon, complete with journal. But when we went beyond Plan B, I wondered if anal sex might might be Plan C. It requires a little more forethought, realizing you don’t have a pill for the following morning. Now that we were on to Plan D? What, a handjob? Not nearly as fun as the first three options.

Fortunately, our final option became an actual option. Only three or four of the eighteen spots were taken. The third guy was in a different car, leaving at a different time, and he missed the turnoff. He had to double-back a half-hour to get into cell range to reenter the coordinates into his Google Maps (which does a damn fine job of tracking you through places with no reception), but he showed up a few hours later. We settled in for an extended weekend of relaxation and kayaking and reading, but surprisingly few fart chokes. Trust me, if this had been a true Camptathalon, the journal would’ve been a snoozefest. Something along the lines of:

11:35 Started Chapter 5

11:47 On to Chapter 6

11:56 Everyone up for a round of cornhole?

True to the new normal, even this second-choice, off-the-beaten-path campsite was almost entirely full by Thursday night. Everybody was pissed about the taken-not-taken spots at the first campground. I bet if I wanted to, I could’ve raised an army to march on the fat cats. Who said we left all the rioting back on flat land?

We picked a big campsite with a mini campsite next to us. We thought about paying for it, in the same vein as the assholes at the first site, just like upper classmen hazing those behind them. Except we would have actually occupied it. We woulda manspread all out like German lebensraum against their Sudetenland. It had maybe enough room for one tent, although I actually think that spot belonged to our plot or theirs. I was going to pitch my tent to dissuade latecomers, but decided to do the other side of our site since there were already people there. Face the enemy you already have instead of the one who might never materialize. They were a big-ass family of twelve or so, taking up two spots. Their license plates said Washington and they talked about the Seattle Mariners. Shit, I thought we were taking a gamble coming all the way from Sacramento without reservations. Imagine if they’d driven twenty hours only to find the campground closed or occupied.

The people who finally “camped” in the mini spot, the last one to be taken in the campground, didn’t have tents. I fucking hate camper people. If I don’t have a tent it’s because the weather’s going to be good enough for just a cot. If you’re sleeping in a car, it ain’t camping.

Speaking of the weather, it turned to threatening Saturday morning. Half the campground went home. We were prepared. We put up tarps, knowing full-well that if we didn’t, it would rain, but if we did, it wouldn’t. Took us a half-hour or so to get everything secure. It never rained, although we did hear some pretty ferocious thunder in the hills.

One other ritual we couldn’t observe this time was the greasy spoon for breakfast on the way out of Dodge Sunday morning. The first place was closed. The second place was take-out only. So we bought breakfast sandwiches instead of the usual bacon grease covered in gravy. Ate them in the parking lot and said our good-byes.

Camptathalon still might happen. The usual brain-trust is sorting through potential dates. So if everything goes right, there might be an Official Camptathalon 2020 Journal, after all.

But given the way this year’s gone so far, I wouldn’t hold my breath.

Quaran-Geddon Part V: The Re-Opening

A.B. Kelly · April 20, 2020 · Blog Entries, Musings · corona virus, coronavirus, COVID-19, quarantine, reopening, self-quarantine, shelter in place · No Comments

I was ready to walk away. My journals were getting redundant. The world was flooded with enough blowhards shouting out of their asses about this Black Death Zombie Apocalypse Shutdown. Who the hell wants to hear from a stay-at-home teacher who used to have too much time on his hands, but is now in charge of implementing remote learning for a kindergartner while also organizing remote learning activities for high-school students? Especially when there are such learned individuals like Hollywood actors and athletes and the president talking out of their own asses, too?

Oh, and I’ve got to do a Zoom staff meeting this afternoon because clearly my principal has lost his faculties. Shit, I hope he’s more effective at muting the nimrods in this setting than at real staff meetings. Come to think of it, can we add that “mute other’s mic” function to reality when the world comes back? Doubtful. I’m still waiting for the ability to pause and rewind live conversations like I can on tv.

Hold on a second. I need to get my two schools in order. While I’m sure my AP European History students would love to analyze “If You Give a Dog a Doughnut,” I don’t know if Daughter’s kindergarten teacher is ready to analyze the causes and effects of the Irish potato famine.

Sorry, where was I? Oh right! I was walking away. Washing my hands of the ‘Rona. I needed to get on with my blog life. Sorry Virus, we’re done. It’s not me, it’s you.

I prepared a few non-COVID posts. Random thoughts on stuff around the house, some posts I was planning to write before the world ended. Maybe I should finally get around to post the Camptathalon journal from last summer. Especially since Camptathalon might be dead on arrival this year if Governor-Commandant Newsom with his fancy slicked-back hair doesn’t open up the campsites even though camping is about as socially-distant of an activity as exists in the 21st century. But one does not become Governor-Commandant if one is willing to acknowledge nuance and/or listen to the ideas of anyone who’s not currently speaking from more than a nose’s length away the Governor-Commandant’s ass.

And I thought losing Camptathalon to a fire was bad.

But then, just like the victim of an abusive relationship, here I am coming back. You don’t understand, guys. You only see the outward signs. I know I complain about the definition of social distancing, and the constantly moving goalposts, and the toilet paper. But then he does something that draws me back in and I’m all, “WHY CAN’T I QUIT YOOOOOOOOOOOUUUU?”

The Governor-Commandant (I don’t know if this title is official yet, beyond in his own mind, but it’s only a matter of time before it gets snuck into a rescue bill that legislators won’t be given enough time to read but will be demonized for voting no on) called a press conference last week. Because he has to have one every few days or else how will he know if his hair is slicked properly? He doesn’t allow himself mirrors, as a) he can never tear himself away from their gorgeous visage, and b) seeing himself in the mirror might prevent him from holding press conferences where not only he, but his entire fiefdom, is granted the privilege of viewing this modern-day fusion of Adonis and Apollo.

But before I get to what he said, did you see that Stanford study about the COVID? No? Well do you remember when you had the sniffles back in January? Well good news! If you’re in California, you’ve probably already had the ‘Rona and are now immune. The whole state, it seems, might have herd immunity. It doesn’t mean we’ll get to leave the house any sooner, but maybe we can stop scrubbing our hands down to the bones.

Speaking of which, when I was driving in to school to pick up the next few weeks (Honestly, Herr Kommandant, I was out for an essential reason. Not that, in your wisdom, you’ve deemed education as “essential.” Can’t wait till that comes up in our next round of salary negotiations.), the Amber Alert sign said, “Soap and Water will defeat COVID-19. Wash your hands.” Um, Amber Alert dude? Haven’t you heard? Washing hands is sooooo March 20. We gave up on washing our hands long before we could determine something as pointless as if it will defeat the ‘Rona. The only way we can beat it now is by sequestering ourselves for a decade or so. And maybe by extending a governor’s term to life.

I certainly hope the Governor-Commandant doesn’t discover the Deep State rebel in the Amber Alert office or dude’s gonna get canned. Just kidding. I think I’ve written about that asswipe a few times, and I’ll be the first one donning a Brown Shirt if Newsom ensures that those signs are only used for emergency information. Of course, I only support the removal of said employee if firing employees is still the preferred method of removing non-party government officials. If we’ve already moved on to summary execution, I guess I’ll keep being electronically scolded on my commute. If I ever have a commute again.

Although now that I think about it, Newsom seems more of a Mauve Shirt kinda guy.

Sorry, where was I? Oh right. The Stanford study. I remember headlines back in February saying “Coronavirus set to hit what has already been a brutal flu season.” That flu season was BRUTAL, y’all. Why, people were having trouble breathing, with a dry cough and high fever. Then some of them died. Horrible flu season! Oh, did I mention we never actually tested any of these people to see if it was really the flu? Hmm… what else could cause those symptoms…

BTW, I googled “Coronavirus symptoms” to write that last paragraph. I’m sure I’ll be getting a friendly visit from a concerned government worker soon. After all, they’re talking about letting Google and Apple use our cell phone records to see if we come in contact with any of the COVIDs. I can’t think of anything bad that would come from giving the government unlimited access to all of our phone and location data. What’s this? Why is there a speeding ticket in my mailbox because I went 37 in a 35 zone last month?

I didn’t get this “Brutal Flu,” but I know a few people who did, and they all now swear it was the ‘Rona. The people at Stanford agree. They say nothing else explains why California’s infection rate is so much lower than New York’s. I can think of a few reasons. For one thing, New Yorkers do crazy things like come in contact with other New Yorkers. They walk on the very same sidewalks that other people are walking on. At the same time! They also commute in a giant metal tube amongst thousands of their brethren. In California, we drive by ourselves in our cars, like decent human beings. We park in the parking lot and, if you time it right and work in a cubicle, you might never come within “social distance” of another human being for the entire day.

As a result, we also spend a large portion of our time walking through a smoggy haze. It’s tough to breathe through that atmospheric soup. And I suppose if we can’t inhale oxygen, it’s tougher to inhale viruses, too. Except now that nobody’s commuting to work anymore, the air quality in LA’s drastically improved. Not that we give a shit about saving the environment, mind you. California showed its true colors when we banned reusable bags at grocery stores. We love trees and all, but as soon as there’s a 1 in 2,000 chance we’ll get sick, after which there’s a 2 in 100 chance we’ll die from it, then Woodsy the Owl can kiss our collective ass.

That’s right. At this point in California, a state of 40,000,000, we’ve had just over 1,000 deaths, making it roughly 1 out of every 40,000. This, of course, doesn’t count all the people who caught it before March when we were calling it “the flu,” but even so, it’s a hell of a lot safer than driving, which is something, last time I checked, we didn’t tell people to stop going to work over that statistic.

The Stanford study (and there’s another one going on at a Southern California university, too) posits that, since the virus originated in Asia, and a large number of Asian flights land in LA and SF, that like a Snobby Doo villain, if we could unmask that wily villain, the “Brutal Flu” was COVID all along. And he would’ve gotten away with it, too, if it weren’t for our meddling herd immunity. And just think, we did got through it all while still going to work and grocery shelves filled with toilet paper.

Not sure how this Stanford study will explain Seattle, since the Asian flights that don’t conclude in California gotta be going there. Sorry Portland.

Okay now, where was I? That’s what tha 2020 is like. I can’t go off on my tangents in class anymore, where a discussion about Martin Luther, Jr. posting his 95 Letters from a Birmingham Jail on the door of a Wittenberg church bombing can randomly turn itself into a discussion of how the video for John Cougar Mellencamp’s “Ain’t Even Done with Tonight” is the perfect summation of the Jimmy Carter presidency. Remember gas lines?

So right, I was talking about Herr Obergruppenfuehrer Newsom’s press conference. The one where he totally ignored the Stanford study. What else is he gonna do? The quasi-Marxist probably can’t give credence to those liberal think-tanks.

It was the first press conference I checked out in a while, because he had been meeting with the governors of Oregon and Washington the day before to hammer out “The Re-opening.” Alas, poor Oregon. Working with its two big neighbors, never realizing that when we all secede to start the New Pacific Order, they were doomed to play the role of Poland.

But nope. No reopening in sight. The low numbers, according to Newsom, have nothing do with herd immunity. Want to guess why Californians aren’t “Doin’ the ‘VID”? Because we listened to Gavin. Sure, we were shutting shit down a week before he said boo, but it’s all thanks to him. We heeded his demands!

And dammit, if we don’t keep doing exactly what the fuck he says, he’s going to infect one person per hour until he’s all the way up to the 25.5 million that he promised four weeks ago. What, you didn’t think he was serious? You doubted his ability to do basic arithmetic? Well, the second you head back to work, the CHP will pull you over and plunge a syringe of virus into your arm as soon as you roll down the window.

He set out some guidelines for reopening which make it crystal clear that we will never reopen in our lifetime. He laid out six things that need to happen, and I can guaran-fucking-tee that at least one won’t happen. Schools will need to ensure social distancing.

Now I’m not a math teacher, but I’m curious how I keep 40 students six-feet apart from each other in a room that’s maybe 300 square feet? One option would be to build a bunch of new schools. As in triple or quadruple the current number, with a commensurate addition of teachers and staff. Either that or they’ll turn schools into round-the-clock enterprises. My forty students get chopped into four groups of 10, with one having school at 8:00 AM, the second at 2:00 PM, the third at 8:00 PM, the fourth at 2:00 AM. And unless they’re planning on making the teachers stay there 24/7, they’re still going to need to hire more teachers. And I for one don’t really want to teach 24 hours a day nor take a 75% pay cut.

So it’s never going to happen. We’re never going to reopen. There is no feasible way to build or staff any school at a 10:1 ratio. I hope you’re enjoying home schooling, because that’s going to be sticking around for a while.

Comrade Gavin has made it clear he won’t let us go back to work until he can ensure that no Californian ever dies ever again. Nothing about making public transportation that would cut down on car crashes, though.

Some of Governor-Kommandant’s other “benchmarks” will be coming a lot sooner, though. For instance, his missive for “a data-tracking system that provides an early warning” of future shut-downs. That’s front burner shit for his ilk.

Comrade Gavin wants to figure out a way to go through this whole fuckamamie bullshit again. Because he might need to stop us from going to work again in the future. Not to cut down on car crashes or help the environment, but to remind us of his magnanimity. Stalin and Hitler loved making their birthdays national holidays, after all.

So one more time, but with quickness and pizzazz.

He doesn’t want us getting comfortable. Rights aren’t, you know, natural or anything. They’re given to you by your benevolent overlord. And he’s not opposed to taking them away again it again if we do irresponsible things like purchase groceries.

And the way he’s going to do it? Why, Yep, we’re back to the whole government commandeering Google and Apple. Although maybe, if they won’t narc on us, he can devise his own system.

Like maybe a two-way television screen on every wall. With his face on it. We’d never leave the house again.

Quaran-geddon, Post IV

A.B. Kelly · April 6, 2020 · Blog Entries, Musings · corona virus, coronavirus, COVID-19, family, journal, quarantine, self-quarantine, shelter in place, stay at home · No Comments

The world has seemingly settled into a new normal. It feels like the sparkle is off this journal. But the problem is what the hell else am I supposed to write about? It’s not like I can go out and make pithy observations of my fellow human beings. I can’t regale you of stories about those crazy teenagers in my classroom. Do you want to hear my thoughts on Frozen II? Trust me, I got plenty o’ thoughts on Frozen II.In the meantime, here are more oddities and frivolities from the Great American Stay-Home:1. We’ve been playing restaurant at mealtimes. Evidently we eat out often enough (or ate out, back in the Before Times) that Daughter feels uncomfortable without someone bringing food to the table. So she plays server. She takes our order, picks up our food (which Daddy Chef left on the counter before taking his spot at the table to have his order taken) and brings it to the table. We’ve allowed exceptions for wine and beer, which requires a grown-up “sommelier” to deliver. Not for any moral reasoning or anything, but because we don’t want her sloshing out the good stuff.The first time we did this, I said, “Garcon, coffee!” She just responded with “Okay,” not yet familiar with the proper response of “Garcon means boy.” We gotta wait until at least week four of quarantine before I make my five-year-old sit through Pulp Fiction. So naturally, she thought I was naming her Garcon. That it was maybe printed on her name tag. So now, she asks if she can play Garcon, like it’s some alter ego.She’ll be sitting at the table and realize she needs more water. So she’ll ask Wife or I to ask Garcon for water. Then she leaves the table and, wouldn’t you know it, Garcon shows up. It’s like Clark Kent and Superman. We’re supposed to tell Garcon that our daughter is at the bathroom but she’d like another water. Then when she “returns,” the drink’s there. Just like Mia’s food in Pulp Fiction. I’m tellin’ ya, Quentin Tarantino predicted my quarantine to a T over 25 years ago.She needs to work on her pricing, though, if she’s hoping to stay in business beyond the pandemic. Odd things are included and others aren’t. The coffee’s included, but not the creamer. Cereal’s free, but the milk will cost you. Our breakfast bill came out to $117 the other day – everything was included except for the bacon ($17) and the coffee ($100). I mean, at least she’s got the concept of demand down pat.2. I love all the advertisements and mail circulars I’m seeing that were clearly written before Quaran-geddon started. The first week or two of grocery store circulars were comical. Oh, they think pork is on sale this week? Have they seen their meat section? Good thing they don’t list toilet paper. They understand the concept of inelastic demand.Sorry, I’m a stay-at-home social-science teacher right now. If I don’t point out portions of our history or government or economy, I might just burst.A batch of coupons I received a few days ago came in an envelope encouraging me to tune into the XFL. That league stopped all of its games and canceled the rest of the season weeks ago. Others made reference to St. Patrick’s Day. Or “Get Out for Spring!” Or “Happy Easter!” Is Easter still happening? Can we postpone it for a few months like they did the baseball season?Of course, the obsolete advertising that I’m seeing the most is related to March Madness, the college basketball championship. Then again, maybe some ad exec knew it was canceled, but figured “Get into the Madness” still works perfectly fine.One company that seemed to miss the whole March Madness memo as Great Clips. I was near one the other day that had three postings. The first was a poster of a basketball spinning on a finger that read “This March, we’re getting in on the Madness.” Oops. There were two other sheets of paper on the door. The first, dated March 18, said that the health of their staff was their first concern, so please don’t come in if you’re sick. The second, dated March 23, said they were closed until further notice. Somebody had handwritten in “But don’t cut your hair until we’re back.” Tacky much?That’s what the NCAA gets for picking Great Clips as the Official Haircut of college basketball. Sports Clips actually has TVs where they show sports. Of course, most of the time those TVs are pointless because live sports don’t happen at the same time of the day as haircuts. But during March Madness, that’s a key selling point. But go ahead, NCAA, partner with a business that has no TVs and doesn’t show your product.3. The brewery that I was heading to for weekly growler fill-ups is now delivering beer.I’m going to let that one sink in for a bit: Hand-delivered craft beer.Obviously they can’t deliver growler refills. But two “crowler” cans has the same amount of beer as a growler. And four crowlers, which is what I ordered, equals 128 ounces of beer. That’ll keep me busy for a bit.Technically I live outside their normal delivery radius, but they were willing to extend it for me. Either because I’m a regular customer or because I just ordered 128 ounces of beer. Or because, I don’t know, what the hell else are they going to do?When the guy dropped off my beer, he thanked me profusely for the business. Like, he seriously wanted me to know how much it meant and how he’d be willing to extend their official delivery options any old time I wanted to sit on my ass and get beer.Again, I’m going to let this one sit for awhile. Some dude was delivering beer to my front door. And I was somehow the hero in this scenario!4. “Want me to brew another pot of coffee?” I ask, shaking the empty pot to indicate its emptiness toward my Wife.”Wasn’t that already our third pot today?””Yeah, but it seems too early to switch to beer.””What time is it?””10 am.”5. Thanks to Josh Gad reading bedtime stories on Twitter and Mo Willems doing lunchtime doodles on YouTube and Weezer’s hilarious video for “Lost in the Woods,” where they do a shot-for-shot remake of the scene in Frozen II in which the song appears, complete with Kristen Bell, the real-life voice of Anna, in the place of Anna from the movie, Daughter is becoming more familiar with the actors and writers behind the scenes of her favorite media.This led to the following back and forth.”So Anna’s not a queen, is she? And Elsa’s not either?””Well, they were both princesses. Elsa was queen for most of the movies. Anna was a princess who became queen by the end of the second movie.”(Oops. Spoiler!)”No, I mean that Kristen girl isn’t a princess or a queen, right? So Anna’s not REALLY a queen.””Oh, no. Kristen Bell and Idina Menzel are Americans. Our constitution says we’re not allowed to take titles of nobility unless we renounce our citizenship.”So, wherever you are, jut think that it could be worse. You could be quarantined with a stay-at-home social-science teacher right now, like my poor daughter.6. Okay, since I broke the seal on Frozen II, here’s a shot of Daughter watching it:You’ll notice she has an iPad next to her with a face on it. That’s her and her friend Facetiming and watching the movie together. And no, this isn’t because the friend doesn’t own a copy of the movie. This is just what they decided to do. Video call your friend, then instead of talking face-to face, turn it around and watch a movie together.Can’t wait to see what generational hang-ups will manifest themselves in 20 years. I’m already prepared for a drop in my high schoolers’ reading abilities in another six or seven years.7. Lots of parades these days. All the teachers and most of the staff at Daughter’s school paraded through our neighborhood. Thirty or forty honking cars, decorated with the school name and mascot and elementary teachers leaning out the window and shouting, winding up and down all the streets in their attendance area. Thank God my school doesn’t come up with some bullshit like that. I’m all for “show the kids we miss them,” but I can accomplish that with a well-timed reference to the Zombie Apocalypse. And explanations of constitutional provisions against titles of nobility.Then all the local emergency services followed suit a few days later. Fire trucks and police cruisers and ambulances, sirens and buzzers blasting. I guess when society shuts down, we don’t need to worry about being on-call for crime or fires or non-COVID patients requiring rides to the hospital. Ha ha, just kidding. Non-COVIDs don’t get medical attention. Sorry, grandma on Life Alert.Allegedly this was for community outreach, but I’m not so sure. I figure their income’s gotta be through the floor with nobody driving. Gone are the revenue streams for speeding or rolling stops or parking violations. And isn’t anyone who leaves their home to see the parade violating a government mandate? I figure they had a whole bunch of pre-written fines and were tossing them out like beads at Mardi Gras. I was a few neighborhoods over when it all went down, and all I could hear were sirens and horns. I assumed every blast was another $100 coming toward our fair city’s coffers.8. Corona just stopped brewing because of COVID-19. Mexico has determined it to be “non-essential.”To repeat: No more Corona because of coronavirus.I don’t think there’s anything else I can say.

Coronavirus Quaran-geddon Part III

A.B. Kelly · March 30, 2020 · Blog Entries, Musings · california, corona virus, coronavirus, family, Funny, quarantine, self-quarantine · No Comments

I’ve got a shirt that reads “It’s all fun and games until the beer runs out.”

I usually wear it when I’m man camping or doing some other weekend-style, fun-time activities.

When I threw it on the other day, however, it took on quite a different meaning. The beer running out seems far more imminent a threat now than when I’m out golfing or rafting. And when it runs out, it won’t just be a temporary message that maybe I need to cut back.

That’s a lot scarier than the toilet paper situation, if you ask me.

We’ve shut down all of society to stop the spread of a disease that might kill one percent of the people who catch it,. But it probably kills substantially less because that one percent relates only to those showing enough symptoms to warrant a test. When they started testing more people in South Korea, it seems a lot of people have it but show no symptoms and probably aren’t dying. So maybe the death rate is closer to, I don’t know, one-tenth of one percent? One-hundredth of one percent? That sounds like a good estimate. That would mean that only one out of one hundred who have the virus fit enough of the tick boxes to get tested, and of those, one in one hundred die.

It isn’t so much the death rate, the experts say, as the contagion rate. Each person infects three people, whether they’re on quarantine or washing their hands or whatever. You could lock yourself in your house and that virus will jump out your window and knock on your neighbor’s door. Then those three people will infect three other people. Whereas the flu, which only infects 1.3 people, will grow to something like 14 people, the exponential rate of Coronavirus, they say, means that one infected person will infect 59,000 people by the time you’re done reading this blog post.

At least that’s how it’s being reported.

We’ve had just over 6,000 cases in California, so I guess we only started with 10% of one infected person? We’ve also had 33 deaths, in a state with some 40,000,000 people. Am I prepared to have that number double? Triple? Quadruple? When all it takes to stop that death toll is by shutting down the entire state. I mean, who cares about an extra 5,000,000 unemployed if it can save 20 lives? It’s not like being unemployed and homeless has a high mortality rate or anything.

Although, to hear those in charge, those people are losing their jobs and it’s not even helping. Nothing we’re doing is working. Otherwise why would they continue to change the rules every day? Closing all the bars and restaurants didn’t seem to work, because the next day, we were stay at home and the day after that we were shelter in place. It couldn’t just be that Newsom and Trump love nothing more than seeing themselves on tv, and people might stop tuning in to their press conferences if they aren’t making up some cockamamie new rules. f they’re we’re need to have a new press conference every day. To get eyeballs, they gotta ban something new. Gotta double down on what we did yesterday, regardless of its effectiveness.

Maybe I’m coming at this from a different angle because of where I work. In California education (and I assume education across the country, but California education burns through a lot more money), we continually jaunt and jump from one “fix du jour” to the next. Somebody at the district or county office finds somebody who’s written a book or has a website about how education can be fixed and they pay him or her $10-20,000 to come present to teachers at a specific school or district. One year we had some lady from Georgia who yelled at us about using academic language. I don’t think she intended to yell, but maybe volume modulation isn’t part of academic language. Then we had a principal from a Newsweek article who raised test scores up 100 points. At the end of his presentation, he said maybe if we followed all of his directives (and paid him an extra $100,000 to visit more often), we could be on the cover of Newsweek, too. Of course, after raising his school’s test scores 100 points, they were still 60 behind us. And since he’d started spending more time promoting himself than them, they’d dropped back down, so we were about 100 ahead of them. But tell me again how we can get on the cover of a news magazine? Another time it was a woman who said that she felt sorry for her daughter’s teachers when she goes into parent-teacher conferences, because she knows that teacher already knows who she is and that she’s such a better teacher than they are. It must be daunting. Shocking that the room full of teachers that she said this to didn’t all jump up and applaud, huh?

But I’ve sat through all of them. Sometimes we pretend to follow the new directive for a whole year. Most of the time it’s forgotten by Winter Break, because somebody at the district office has found the next manna from heaven. Or, more realistically, has found the next kickback from the next dude who’s getting $100,000 from us. Sometimes they still give lip service to the previous fix, but usually they don’t even bother. After all, this new thing is a panacea, so who gives a shit about academic language?

We never see any of these things through, even if the presenters themselves say it’ll take a few years to see quantifiable results. So at the end of the year, our test scores go up or they go down or they stay the same. But what caused that change or non-change? Who can know? Ten things changed and maybe one of them had an effect or, meh, maybe it’s just a good/bad batch of kids this year and next year, it’ll be completely different. And if it’s not necessarily a good batch, but rather something we tried for a year back when they were in third grade, then who the fuck cares? We’ll change something again next year to even it out.

That’s what this Coronavirus shut-down has felt like. Every day they come out with new things that they’re shutting down. But there’s never any data to back it up. There’s never any discussion about if anything we’ve done has been effective so far. And how can there be? We barely test anybody, and if we did, it would take too long to get the results. Any numbers they give us now are the people who felt sick two weeks ago and got tested a week ago. They were probably sick before we even started washing our hands. But who needs data?

“We shut all the schools, but there’ve been ten new cases, so now you can’t go to restaurants. We shut the restaurants, but there’ve been five new cases, so now you have to stay at home. Goddammit, people, you’re not listening to us. We’re up to one hundred sick people! Fire every single person from every single job!”

The governor actually took the nicer approach. He commended us for doing what we’re supposed to be doing before saying that it isn’t working, so we’re going to do more of it.

At least we’ve determined that education isn’t “essential.” I guaran-fucking-tee my district will use that as their opening salvo the next time we’re negotiating a raise.

I assume the reason they did this piecemeal was because they couldn’t go for the whole pinata at the beginning. If they told us to shut down on day one, we would’ve said no. So instead they told us to wash our hands and then told us that wasn’t enough, despite no evidence to back that up. The real reason we’re on lockdown now is because Newsom and Trump saw that everybody went along with it, no questions asked, then took the next step.

Great and all, if you buy their rationale, but that’s kinda what Hitler did before World War II, too.

Newsom said if we don’t follow his orders, 25,500,000 Californians will contract the virus. Despite the fact that only 500,000 people worldwide have had it. Think about that. For every one person worldwide, an extra fifty-plus people in California will catch it. And that’s evidenced by the 3,000 or so in the state who already have it.

Now he needs another 50,000 hospital beds for “the surge in cases.” What surge? Where is the evidence of this surge? The few times I drive out, isolated in my car, nobody is out anywhere. Airplanes are flying with seven passengers aboard.

Every day we’re being bombarded by reports of who has it now. Two players from a hockey team. A senator. An actor. A member of a rock band. And each one of them is treated like an HIV diagnosis in the mid-1980s. It’s a surefire death sentence. If the NHL ever comes back, how will the Ottawa Senators field a team with two dearly departed, and I’m sure the rest of the team will have it soon, too. And poor Tom Hanks will never be able to make a movie again. And the Senate… Meh, fuck the politicians. But how dare he go to work when he didn’t know he had the virus? Talk about non-essential…

My local Kaiser has stopped taking non-emergency medical conditions, so I can’t get allergy shots anymore. The last time I went in (the day before shots got shut down like I was Indiana Fucking Jones grabbing his hat as the door dropped) they greeted me at the door with soap and asked me what I was there for, then sent me around to avoid any contact with anyone. But that wasn’t enough, so they shut the shit down. My primary care physician sent a mass e-mailed saying don’t come it unless it’s an emergency. And chances are, any non-COVID emergency will be told to shelter in place. We don’t give a shit about your terminal cancer, fuckface, this county has 50 Coronavirus cases.

Wait, did I read that right? My county currently has 50 cases. Two deaths. So they shut down the entire medical facility for 50 people? How big is this hospital? The good news is that I know of a doctor and a facility that’s more than ready for Gavin Newsom’s 50,000 phantom victims.

Flatten the curve. I get it. But are we really flattening the curve? It seems to me that if we’re just pushing pause on life for three to six weeks. Then we’ll go back to giving hugs and everyone will catch the virus anew. We’re delaying the curve, not flattening it. Okay, maybe the curve will have 50 fewer people in my county.

Unless washing our hands works. Too bad we didn’t bother doing our due diligence to find out.

Maybe we’ll reopen society in stages. We could do some businesses, then the others. But how would we decide who opens first? There doesn’t seem to be gradation in essentiality. You’re either essential, in which case you’re still open, or you’re not. So then maybe we should have every business reopen with only 25% of their staff. We can have a lottery. Then, once those 25% all turn into zombies, we send them home, wait a week, and pick the next unfortunate saps. That would flatten the curve. And it worked really well in World War I. I mean, aside from the whole 60,000 British casualties on a single day of battle.

I know, I know. Y’all don’t come here for the vitriol. You come for the pithy. So let me put away my tinfoil hat and come up with some of my more run-of-the-mill observations. To wit:

– We’ve been doing some spring cleaning. What the hell else are we supposed to do with all of our time? Get to know our family? So I did a really good job of going through some of my old books to clear some space on the bookshelf. So did Wife, and even Daughter okayed a few hand-me-downs.

But what the hell were we supposed to do with these books now? All of the used bookstores are closed and something inside me cringes if I have to throw a book away. It seems so wasteful. And it takes up vital trash space for all the plastics.

Fortunately, we have a Free Little Library. If you aren’t aware of these, people build little wooden mailbox-sized houses with clear doors out where people walk. If there’s a book in there you want, you just take it, and if you have a book that you are done with, you can leave it there. Great. I can just dump all of these books there. Except its got limited real estate, and I notice that it’s filled up recently, probably because every other household in the neighborhood’s doing the same thing as me.

So now I’m like Andy Dufresne taking rubble out to the prison yard in his pants. I’m taking one or two books each day and trying to slip them in. At last check, seven of the thirty or so books came from this house. And I’ve still got a stack ready and waiting. Come on, neighbors, read the shit I’m putting out there.

That might be the motto for this blog, too.

– We’re trying our best to support places that are still open. We’re doing takeout. We’re doing drive-throughs and curbside. I keep going to my favorite brewery to refill my growler. On one trip last weekend, I ran into the Sprouts (a grocery store that doesn’t have the same foot traffic as the behemoths) while Wife did curbside pickup at Joann’s. Then she did curbside at Target, which is super fancy. You don’t have to call them or anything. Just open your app when you’re in the parking lot and Big Brother heads right out. Then I went to the BevMo to pickup my online alcohol order. They’re not quite as high-tech – I had to call somebody to meet me at the front door with my booze – but really, I was picking up booze that I had ordered online, so who the hell cares that they weren’t to Amazon Prime delivery yet. I keep wondering to myself if those in charge would’ve been so ready to shut the whole shit down if we weren’t already living in the future.

But there are other businesses that I want around after the shitshow who aren’t quite as conducive to supporting while in quarantine. There’s an Indian place with a wonderful lunch buffet. Sure, I could order from them a la carte, but that just seems wrong. Why pay for one entree when I’m used to having ALL the entrees. Plus I probably should’ve been paying closer attention to which dishes I like all those times I partook. But then, what’s the point of a buffet if not mindless scooping?

Another favorite that doesn’t have a to-go option is Mongolian BBQ. Perhaps I’m being obstinate with the Indian food, but with Mongolian, I really don’t see how it’s feasible. You have to stand in line and put your grubby paws on the same food that other paws have already grubbed. Even if I could put that into a Doordash order, there’s no way the chef’s going to know the proper number of spicy versus sweet versus salty sauce scoops. I don’t even know. It’s a touchy-feely things, like those old grandma recipes that said q.b., short for quanto basta, meaning “How much is enough” or “as much as needed.” But I don’t think Doordash has a q.b. option.

We need restaurants or businesses like this to establish Patreon accounts. I’d be willing to send them some money to keep them around. And if they want to make it good for a meal when this thing is done, great. But if not, consider it a much better pay-it-forward than buying that fat fuck behind me’s Frappuccino.

Sure, I could get gift cards in the meantime, but if the business doesn’t have an updated website (and let’s be honest, the Mongolian and the Indian restaurants aren’t likely to be the most technologically savvy), that means I have to go in. But are they even open?

So they just need to establish a Patreon. If it’s good enough for podcasts, which don’t even give me an egg roll on the side, it should be good enough for brick-and-mortars.

-The grocery stores seem to be restocking some of the staples. Bread and ramen still seem a little sparse. Meat is still hit or miss, but it’s better than all-miss, as it was a week ago. It’s almost like, follow me here, our economy produces enough for us to consume, as long as we don’t freak out and try to buy the whole goddamned store.

I’m reminded of FDR’s first Fireside Chat, after he’d closed all the banks. Well, he didn’t close all the banks, he only declared a bank holiday that ended up lasting the better part of a week. Back then, can you imagine, presidents and the government actually thought there were limits to what they could do, who and what they could command to stay indoors and close their doors. So when the banks were about to reopen, he got on the airwaves to tell the people to not be numbnuts the next day. Banks, he explained, only keep enough cash on hand to cover normal withdrawals and the rest is tied up in mortgages and shit like that. “[A]n amount which in normal times is wholly sufficient to cover the cash needs of the average citizen.” But if all ya numbnuts go and try to get your money at the same time, it won’t be there.

The same could be said for tortillas and ground beef and pasta. If we had all bought what we needed for, say, one or two weeks worth of isolation, instead of six months, there’d be plenty to go around. Unfortunately, our current commander-in-chief doesn’t seem quite as concerned with calming and quelling the populace. His fireside tweet would probably go something along the lines of, “Go Fuck yourself. Pull my Finger!”

-Somebody posited that the run on flour wasn’t so much hoarding as it was a byproduct of most Americans baking at home for once. Makes sense, since the flour that goes to bakers and restaurants is probably direct from suppliers. I don’t think Krispy Kreme is heading the the Piggly Wiggly each day.

But what does this say about the toilet paper? Are we finally shitting at home instead of work?

-Has everyone else lost track of what day it is? Holy crap!

I was thinking about buying a Nintendo Switch to introduce Daughter to the joy of video games, and possibly Wife and I to the joys of a moment of goddamn peace. Sure, Daughter’s watched me murder some nasty Brits in Assassin’s Creed III on my fancy, high-tech PlayStation 3, but maybe it’s time for her to learn of the existence of non-violent games.

Turns out there are no Nintendo Switches for sale, like, anywhere. Not available on Amazon, no Target or Best Buy or GameStop (before they closed) within 200 miles of me had one in stock. I did a little research and discovered that this shortage was coming even before people were going to be shut in for months. It was just sped along by the Quaran-geddon.

All is not lost, though. Amazon might be able to get some once they end their moratorium on non-essential restocking. The article I read suggested mid-April. No problem, I thought. Why, mid-April must be coming any day now.

What? It’s still March?

Fuck!

Coronavirus Lockdown Journal Part 2

A.B. Kelly · March 20, 2020 · Blog Entries, Musings · california, child rearing, corona virus, coronavirus, health, health care, quarantine, teaching · No Comments

It’s academic time right now.

As I write this, my daughter is sitting next to me, working through a store-bought “Kindergarten skills booklet” that appears to have been written for kindergarten skills back when I was in kindergarten (Which is edible: paste or vegetables?), not what they’re doing now. So she’s burning through these. After all, if she can burn through a Dr. Seuss book, I don’t think having her trace the a at the beginning of apple’s going to vex her much. We’ve limited her to one page a day in some books, but we still have to give her enough busy work to get through the recommended one hour of morning Academic Time before our magical robot overlord, Alexa, tells us it’s time to move on to our next time allotment.

Such is life in what I’ve dubbed Quran-geddon(tm).

Is that how trademarks work? Can I just throw a ™ after something and now I get paid if anyone else uses it? In whatever quid pro-quo replace US Dollars in the sportless future when Alexa finally tells us it’s okay to go outside.

But just bear in mind I occasionally have to help my daughter with some of these things. So if I suddenly write, “no, baby, it’s six, not five,” assume I just gave Daughter instructions that included the “fuck-stain shit sickle” intended for this post.

I haven’t checked in since last Friday, back in the nascence of this Brave New World. I picked up Daughter from daycare and told her that her school and softball and dance class were all canceled, along with that little trip to Disneyland we had planned for this week. Then she and I spent about 72 hours in line at the grocery store in order to buy seven items, because the rest of the world was purchasing the entire store. The only thing they weren’t buying at that time was corned beef. So I figured I’d wait and come back after the weekend to buy that.

Oops.

To be fair to the hoarders, that’s totally on me, and I should know better than to wait until March 16 to buy corned beef. Although usually there’s a shit-ton of it, even on the 18th when I can buy it on sale.

My second foray to the grocery store showed some some through-lines from the previous trip and some anomalies. There seems to be a run on meat, in many ways the most perishable of items. My local store has filled up most of their meat refrigerators with salami packs, spread out so as to appear like there’s variety, in lieu of the normal beef and chicken and pork.

People are fucking horrible at hermitage. Why aren’t they buying the stuff that doesn’t go bad after a few days? They probably think they’re living off the grid by running a VPN while having their Google Maps giving them directions.

Bread and tortillas also seemed to be in shorter supply on Monday than they had been on Friday. Flour was gone, but sugar was there. Thank God there doesn’t seem to be a run on coffee or beer. All the beans were gone, too. Not sure if that’s a great idea for people with limited toilet paper options.

My family made it through the rainy weekend, but only through inertia. You know it’s bad when the parents are begging the child to watch Frozen II just one more time and the child’s not having it.

We broke the not-then-official quarantine both days. In fact, I’ve left the house for something or other pretty much every day. Usually it’s just a visit to a store or to get some take-out, and it’s substantially less than it would’ve been on normal stay-at-home days. Saturday we hit the bookstore to get the aforementioned workbooks. I also found a cool Marvel Comics 1000 dot-to-dot book. That’s for Papa while Baby works on her minuscule 20 dot-to-dots. Holy crap, they take a long time! “Daddy, I’ve already done, like, five and you’re only at, what, three-fifty?”

We also went to a furniture store to finally buy a desk we’ve been eyeing for a while. The vulturous salespeople there are annoying on a regular visit, hovering behind a nearby pillar at all times, ready to pounce with a “Can I help you with anything? Would you like to borrow my tape-measure? Here’s my card. You can call me even though I’ll never be more than six feet away.” They knew social distancing long before social distancing was a thing.

We knew going in that, with both the rain and the Quaran-geddon(tm) diminishing the quantity of customers, the salespeople would be even more omnipresent than usual. We braced ourselves and it still wasn’t enough. We finally glommed onto one just to ward off the other vampires. But their pheromones must not be working, because when she went to go check on something, they descended. Her tape-measure did nothing to ward the hordes off. All is fair in love, war, and commission jobs right before an economic meltdown.

Sunday we went to Michael’s to get more things to occupy Daughter and Best Buy to look at laptops for me. I thought about buying a Nintendo Switch, but they were sold out. I almost bought a PlayStation 4, but I’ve held out this long and the 5 is on the horizon. Fortunately I held firm, although I’m still wavering because “MLB: The Show 20” might be the only sport action I’ll be seeing for a while.

As an aside, I’m worried that MLB is one of the arbiters of when we get to go back to normal. The last time we shut down sports was for 9/11. The NFL canceled its games the following Sunday, and baseball dithered about when it should start up. One week later? Ten days? Then the NFL said they’d return the following Sunday and MLB followed suit the next day. Unfortunately, there is no NFL to act as the leader this time. Maybe the NHL will start up for the playoffs. But if not, it’s all on the MLB, and they aren’t known for being proactive. Last I heard they’re looking at June. That’s totally going to fuck up Mike Trout’s chance to win the all-time WAR title by the end of his career. I know: priorities!

Why isn’t MLB playing? It’s the only sport where players don’t regularly come in contact with each other. Social distancing? Take a look at the real estate between the average right fielder and center fielder. The only time they’re close to each other is when they’re in the dugout, but if there are no fans in attendance, they can just spread out in the first three or four rows of the stands. And they could play all day games because it’s not like any of us are at work. They’d make a killing on TV ratings.

Back to the present, I just had an argument with my daughter about an orange crayon. Because the first orange crayon I gave her to circle all the fucking words that start with an s wasn’t orange enough. It was too yellow. Looked orange enough to me, but that’s coming from a high school history teacher, not a kindergarten teacher. When did World War II start? Kinda sorta 1939, if you’re counting the main European conflict, but it wasn’t until 1941 that all of the major actors came in, with Operation Barbarossa in the summer and Pearl Harbor in December. Of course, the Pacific Theater could have been going on as early as 1931 with the Japanese invasion of Manchuria.

So don’t ask a fucking history teacher what “orange” is.

This has been my life this week. We’re using one of those charts that have been circulating online. One hour of “academic time” followed by one hour of “creative time.” There’s some outside time sprinkled in throughout the day, plus breaks for lunch and chores and quiet or reading time. I usually try to engage in whatever she’s doing, both for solidarity’s sake and to help stick to a routine myself. Of course, I don’t know if what I do counts as academic or creative. Most days, it’s probably neither. But the online time charts don’t put time aside for masturbatory self-flagellation.

It’s not like I can lesson plan during academic time. Well, I could, but by the time the hour was up, it would already be obsolete. The governor says schools are closed for the year and, I shit you not, I received an e-mail from my district the following morning saying, “That’s certainly his opinion.” And now it looks like the AP Test that my students have rightfully been freaking out about is going to change as well. Two separate test dates and they won’t cover anything from the twentieth century. So all of that nineteenth century remote learning I was working on can be stretched out. Plus the AP test will be online now, which means the motivated kids will spend the next six weeks trying to devise ways to cheat instead of studying for the exam. So there goes my pass rate.

I also liked how quickly the e-mails changed over the course of last weekend. Up until Saturday, it seemed like every company wanted to tell me how clean they were. They’ve been scrubbing every surface inside every business. Toilet paper and hand sanitizer might be things of the past, but there’s enough Lemon Pledge for every company, and then some. And when I say “every company,” holy crap! I didn’t even know I had done business with half these guys. How do they have my e-mail address? Has the government just provided every company with everybody’s e-mail address? It’s not like there are civil liberties or privacy anymore, so who cares what the government with our personal information?

Then on Sunday morning, all of the e-mails quickly switched from “look how clean we are” to “hey, we’ll deliver!” My favorite 180 came from Twin Peaks. If you aren’t aware of it, it’s one of those “breastaurants” whose main reason for existence is to see scantily-clad women. Oh, and maybe get some food. Think of Hooters and then take away 60% of each server’s clothing. Although to be fair to Twin Peaks, their food is substantially better than Hooters.

On Friday, Twin Peaks wanted me to know that all of their bikini-wearing servers will be on their hands and knees, polishing knobs during each shift. Wait, that might have come out wrong. They were cleaning everything, is what I meant to say. The message didn’t make me feel much better. In a standard restaurant, I only have to worry about the servers’ hands being clean. At Twin Peaks, ninety percent of their skin is touching everything. Fortunately, they did the economy-wide switch on Sunday. Turns out they deliver. But again, the food’s not their selling point. Customers aren’t missing the french fries, but rather the French maid outfits. And if the Doordash dude shows up wearing bikini bottoms, those fries aren’t going taste very good.

My county wasn’t on stay at home orders until yesterday morning. Then last night, the governor, who thinks he’s the most wonderful specimen of humanity and way smarter than everybody else, put the entire state on lockdown. A dictatorship is okay, after all, if the dictator is dashingly handsome and, let’s face it, better than you. Silly me, thinking we had freedom of assembly.

There seems to be some sort of distinction between “Stay at Home” and “Shelter in Place.” I’m not sure which is which, but the cities and counties have tended to start with one and then go to the other. Maybe one of them is a suggestion and the other is a mandate? I also have no idea which one the state of California is doing. We can still go to get food or medicine. And the good news is that beer is considered food.

I’ve actually taken my growler to my favorite local brewery to be refilled once, and I’m planning to go back. We’re also eating takeout for lunch more often than we need to. Because I’m on salary and I want these places to still be in business if we ever come out the other end of this. What’s the point of the checks that the federal government’s going to send out if there’s noplace left to spend it? Maybe that $1,000 will go to purchasing one roll of toilet paper on eBay.

Can’t wait to see the effect these lockdowns have on things like probable cause. Can a cop pull me over because I’m driving on the freeway? Do I have to make up some “essential” business I’m on my way to? I can’t give him the real answer, which is that that I’ve been stuck teaching academic time to a five-year old and wanted to listen to a grown-up podcast, which I’m way behind on because I don’t have a commute anymore.

We’re also allowed to go out to walk the dog or get exercise. If I don’t have a dog, can the cop arrest me if I don’t seem to be getting my heart into the cardio zone? “Come on, pansy, you call that exercise?”

Scratch that. The cops don’t need to catch you. Sacramento County just came out with an edict to call 311 if we see other people breaking their stay at home orders. Neighbors ratting out their neighbors. Getting more and more Stalin-y by the day.

I’ve got other things to say, but I think I need to flesh out a few thoughts. Better to post it here.

At least the rain isn’t coming back till Monday.