Dream

In the summer, a lot of discussion in the media turned to "Covid Dreams" and whether the population was having more traumatic or more vivid dreams because of the lockdowns and stress associated with the pandemic.

So I had this dream on the night of July 15th into July 16th. Was this my pandemic dream? (The following text is a cleaned up version of the original text file I banged out quicky before working that day.)

...

I was on a field trip. It was for a group of high school students, but at times I felt like I was being brought along as a student, other times as a teacher.

Regardless, we traveled via interstate I10 westward over to Mobile. The class visit was to a maritime museum in that city. (Now that I've been awake for an hour, I can tell that my mind dredged up the museum and surroundings of the USS Alabama Battleship as the basis for the city having a maritime museum. I've travelled there several times on my own and with Boy Scout/ Cub Scout camping trips.)

Once there, we left the bus out front, reminding the driver to pick us up later at this spot. (The drop off location reminded me of the area where myself and the wife were dropped off for a casino trip to Biloxi in May 2019. The drop-off zone was wedged between large HVAC unites and lots of piping, a parking deck, and a small entrance into the museum.)

We entered the building and the first stop was to have lunch, so we all sat together in what looked like a ship's mess hall (again, thinking back to trips with the Boy Scouts to the USS Alabama) and ate. Once we had finished, we could go back through the line for dessert, but most offerings were trays of maybe a dozen cookies and I knew we had nearly a hundred students so I skipped taking treats from most trays, ending up with only a few cookies off of more plentiful plates. (Again, in real life I've been trying to avoid sweets and dessert, so dreaming this scenario doesn't seem unusual.)

After that, we were supposed to go swimming, but I hadn't brought either or swimsuit or flipflops. We were gathered in front of navy blue lockers like the ones at the UWF pool. A museum guard was there helping out, but he was suddenly hurt and on the floor. He was injured but I knew that he would be okay, until a sudden gunshot from nowhere fatally injured him. As he lay on the ground dying, at this point I felt like I was watching a TV show; I could see the injured guard and similar to a CSI show, there was even a brief overlay of illustrative computer-generated graphic explaining how the bullet entered the body and the damage it did, but I could not change my frame of reference to see anything else going on nearby, indicating that I was watching a static camera shot. Hands came in from the side like they were a medic or some other helper, but a distinctive voice came from offscreen, "JUSTIFY YOURSELF TO HER."

It was Terry Pratchett's Death. I knew instantly that I was watching a Discworld movie. (I like those.) But despite the limited dialog, I knew that Death was letting the dying guard know that he had time to send one text to his wife and in that text was the chance to tell her and vicariously the world how he wanted to be remembered, more importantly WHY he should even be remembered. (Yeah, I watched Hamilton on Disney+ last week for the first time.)

With the guard dead, every school group was being evacuated. We had to grab our bags and line up and get to the busses and we were walking outside to the busses up an incline along a curved wall/embankment. But I suddenly figured out that because of maritime law, I knew who killed the guard. (This insight stems from a long love of shows such as Murder, She Wrote or Columbo, so my mind had pieced together all the clues to solve the mystery.) The museum was abusing a law that required anything recovered from sunken ships be turned over to the closest (as the crow flies) maritime museaum for safe keeping, and someone of the staff of the muesum was going to steal from recovered items.

I didn't know who specifically was responsible for the murder, just that it was someone on staff at the museum. Additionally, I knew that letting everyone know that I had figured out the reason behind the guard's murder would get me killed, so I tried to pretend that I had made up a cool polt for a novel but nobody in my school group wanted to hear it. They wanted to leave, so I tried to find someone safe from the museum to tell quickly but I was separated from my group. We had so many stairs to go down and different groups were being led off different corridors or walkways (imagine a needlessly complicated parking deck stairwell) and soon I was in the backstage area of the museum where pipes and sheet metal lay stacked and the roads are dirt or gravel and a few rusted hulls lay forgotten.

I had given up telling people about the murder and just wanted to go home and I knew that I had to get out front to the bus before it left me stranded in this distant city but I did not know the way.

I talked to a guy and he was super reluctant to help me. I kept asking over and over how to get there until he finally described the path, and then I instantly knew I'd never make it in time wealking, so could he drive me instead?

This discussion also went on for some time, until he finally said he could get someone to take me, at which point other workers showed up under the building (I could tell we were deep down in the bowels of the museum) to get their shifts for the day. One worker made a comment about the guy making sure to give out the right job that the worker had paid for, and I realized that I had been talking to the foreman and he was taking bribes to assign tasks for the day and I should have bribed him right away to get a ride to the bus. (It's the Trump era. Everyone is corrupt.)

He asssigned a kid to take me to the bus (again, walking, not in a vehicle). We walked over the scrap metal that was stacked up on a hill to get to the front of the building. But the metal and pipes were stacked over large pits and holes so I knew that one misstep would cause me to fall, possibly to my death but as me and the kid kept walking toward the entrance, we met teenaged girls were sitting on the piles of pipes and metal, talking as we walked by them, but they shut up as the kid and I walked by. The girls were using a secret way to talk so as to not let us know that they had been raped but could warn other girls which men to look out for. I wanted them to tell me who were the rapists but they wouldn't and were upset that I kept trying to make them tell me.

...

...

...

And then I woke up. I had time enough to write down this dream before starting my work from home.

Even editing the original text from months ago, I can still picture several of the scenes in my memory, despite the fact that none of this experience was real. 

Runaround

This post will be one take, stream of consciousness, because I just got back from picking up take-out and...

I FEEL LIKE I'M TAKING CRAZY PILLS!

The Florida Panhandle had a massive Hurricane tear through less than a month ago (Sally) and just dodged another (Delta) but both times we were on the eastern half of the storm so it was rainy and windy and BAD. Debris litters the roads even today as I drove around. (Conversely, the western half is surreal in how serene the weather can be. Michael was a strong Category 4 Hurricane when it ripped up the Panhandle east of us less than a hundred miles away but the local weather provided the rain and wind of an above average storm along the Emerald Coast.) There are still downed trees impacting traffic. We have new leaks showing up in the roof. Life is not back to normal from Hurricane Season yet, and the season doesn't end for another month!

Oh, and does anyone remember the pandemic? Because nobody around here acts like it!

Florida didn't release Covid-19 case numbers and everyone just shrugged! The governor wants bars and restaurants fully open despite the fact that aerosolized coronavirus is an easy way to spread the disease if you spend lots of time indoors without wearing a mask.

It blows my fucking mind that this nation has been perpetually TWO WEEKS away from containing the pandemic, clamping down on community spread, locating the cases and then quarantining the possible infections through rigorous contact tracing.

But no, we get none of that. We're shutting down testing sites. Few local governments are mandating that we wear masks when in public. (I tried to find a definitive list but the only jurisdiction mandating masks that I could locate is City of Pensacola. Counties and other local municipalities don't seem to care.) The president is acting like he single-handedly inhaled every last infected droplet and Regeneronned the disease into oblivion.

So today, I made four stops:

1. Pick up a special order an my FLGS
2. Pick up essentials (shampoo, detergent, etc) at Target
3. Order take-out from my favorite Indian Restaurant
4. Drive-thru Wendy's for the son who wants a burger

How did that go?

Pick up a special order an my FLGS

I have been trying to encourage local businesses to stay in business. I'm fortunate enough to have a job and the ability to work from home. I am incredibly insulated from the virus.

In the #BeforeTimes, I played Keyforge competitively. As in "travelling to different states to fight for the top spots and a chance to go to the World Finals" competitively. (I did not earn a trip to the World Finals in May and am glad of that, obviously.) I also ran local demonstrations to encourage new players to discover the game and join in tournaments. (It's like YuGiOh but the rules are better defined and the game play is more contemplative and requires a lot of deliberate strategy. You can be too cautious and lose. You can be too audacious and also lose. Be like water and your opponent will fall.) But since the virus is spreading without let or hindrance across this country, I have not been to the local game stores to run demo games or tournaments for months. (I had hoped to run an April Fool's Themed Reversal Tournament but yeah, not happening. Very little I planned this year happened.) 

So I get there as the store opens to avoid crowds. But neither the owner nor the other customer inside was wearing a mask, and the owner was coughing pretty noticably. (Both were white guys since gaming is still dominated by white guys, even if women and minorities are making some of the most incredible contributions recently.) If I get Covid because I picked up some games, then that will truly be the stupidest consequence from living in this stupidest state during this stupidest timeline. Because I'm connected now to the coughing proprietor who is connected to every coughing wargammer and coughing roleplayer that has loitered playfully in his store for hours on end any time in the last two weeks since the governor has decided that Covid is over.

I am so fucking dead.

But that's a small business. Surely things will be better at a major company with deep pockets hoping to avoid the liability minefield that is this preventable pandemic.

Pick up essentials (shampoo, detergent, etc) at Target

I didn't go to my usual Target. The Indian Restaurant I enjoy is pretty far away, so visiting the Target near Cordova Mall made more sense.

OR SO YOU'D THINK!

The roads to Target were packed by drivers in such inordinate haste. I ended up going out of my way, skipping a shortcut down Tippin and also driving through the parking lot of Cordova Mall to avoid insane drivers that were speeding up and weaving thoughout traffic and braking unexpectedly and turning without signalling. Even trying to park, cars were zipping in and out and backing nearly into me and pedestrians darting between cars convinced that I would both notice them and not flatten them. Upon arriving I sat in the car just staring forward, not convinced that I should leave the safety of an aluminium frame and specially engineered crumple zones, but I left it anyhow.

In the parking lot, I spotted one departing patron not wearing a mask outside, no mask in hand, and no sign of having recently removed a mask. Meanwhile I've been masking so consistently that my right cheek has a patch of skin that has been rubbed so raw that it bleeds. But maybe I just didn't spot their mask. There's still a pandemic, and surely everyone inside is masked. It's dangerous.

There were so many maskless people inside that I lost count. A black guy and his white girlfriend immediately inside the door heading to the restrooms. An unmasked white father with his masked wife (also white) and two masked daughters not yet in their teens. The heavily mascara'd women with light brown skin and a red shoppping cart looking at furniture in the Home Section. After that, I don't even remember the details of the naked faces, just where they were. Two people near the groceries. One more person near the greeting cards. A person looking at razor blades. (At least the young black guy with the thick curly hair looking at deodorants has a mask on. Nice cloth mask, not the surgical type. He wanted to know if I worked there. I'm guessing it was my constant look of horror and disbelief.) But nobody working there (who WERE all masked, thankfully) were asking patrons to mask up. Have they been worn down by the uncourteous entitlement of patrons? Is that Venn diagram sliver or apathy and entitlement going to kill them? Do they already know that terrifying fact deep in their bones?

I was so unsettled that I forgot to look through the Toy Section for Clearance Priced LEGO Sets. I NEVER forget to look for Clearance Priced LEGO Sets. (I'm still pissed about that missed opportunity.)

I did get everything else on my list, but it was not easy between ALSO juggling my bewilderment and keeping a running tally of the unmasked shoppers (which I failed). I even got more than I intended, since Target had a promotion where buying 4 beauty products earned you a $5 Gift Card. I only needed ONE shampoo. I bought FOUR of the same item to qualify for the deal. I am an obedient consumer whore.

I honestly hope I don't die before running out of that shampoo.

Even as I was checking out, I still had to endure my anguish in silence. A lady in her fifties with recently permed hair and hints of either pale pink or peach color in her grey coiffure AND NO MASK got behind me in line. Not six feet away. At least she was pushing a cart so there was that space. But this crisis is not over yet, people. Two weeks from now, this lack of foresight and imagination might prove fatal.

Order take-out from my favorite Indian Restaurant

More driving, but this jaunt was a simple path on one road, straight through several lights and then a right turn onto W Street and a right turn into the shopping center. How hard could that be?

Oh My Fudgy Goodness! What the hell has gotten into people? More erratic lane shifting, more people going extra slow in front of me while people behind me are in an unexplained frenetic rush. This time I stayed in the right lane, did not pass around anyone and just patiently tried to get to the restaurant without an accident or incident.

I succeeded. Hooray for small victories.

But pulling up to the restaurant, I was convinced that the place was closed. There was only one car parked in front. The entire strip mall looked deserted.

Which scared me. I had only found this establishment in February of this year. I have been able to eat there TWICE and loved the food. Please PLEASE don't let Covid take away yet another pleasant experience.

But the glowing sign said, "OPEN" and I'm the generally credulous type so I went in.

Only the brown skinned guy in a mask behind the register. Not another customer.

I ordered naan and samosa and lamb korma and he was nice and gave me a 10% discount and I overtipped and then I noticed the refrigerated drinks and asked to buy one while I waited and he gave it to me for free and then I sat outside the restaurant until the food was ready. It was a pleasant human interaction of the sort I have missed deep within my soul. I cannot justify going to church in person. (Don't even ASK about Communion.) I can't hang out with strangers to enjoy board games or TTRPGs for hours across a table. I want people to let me know that we will be okay. I want to let other people know that we will be okay. But the incompetence at the most fundamental layers of society has stolen that assurance from everyone except the obscenely wealthy or the grotesquely powerful.

Seriously, there's a list of prominent people who have died from Covid-19. Some were rich. A handful were powerful. A few were even white. Nobody on that list was all three.

Spoiler alert: the food gets home safely and was delicious.

Drive-thru Wendy's for the son who wants a burger

To keep the virus from spreading, I avoid leaving the house if possible. Thusly, any trips outside are deliberate and well considered in advance. I had planned this trip out so carefully. Mostly right turns in a big circle through central Escambia County: Nine Mile to Davis to Creighton (to Tippin) to Ninth to Bayou to W Street to US-29 to Nine Mile to home. The hot food picked up last, the sundries first, everything in its place. So now I turn right onto W Street going north and stop at the Wendy's on US-29.

Except getting behind a slow church bus in the right lane. But I know I'm turning right into Wendy's soon, so I stay behind it. But again the people in my rear view mirror are in a hurry and the bus stops suddenly, even though I'm sure they drive this route EVERY Sunday. My sudden application of the brakes sends the half-full bottle of unsweetened tea flying but I hold the food in place and the car behind me doesn't hit my wife's sedan.

The Wendy's is deserted. Nobody in the parking lot, only me in the drive thru. I order, get a bag of burgers quickly from a masked employee (that smelled REALLY good) and pull out into the nightmarish traffic that is still in an unexplained rush. Why are the roads packed but the stores (except for Target) so vacant?

I had not been to this section of Escambia County since Hurricane Sally. Huge trees were down everywhere, some still sticking slightly into the road. Tarps on roofs, signs blown away, fences flattened. We are beset on so many sides today and we need each other more than ever, which makes the insular "us versus them" rhetoric from the ruling party and state media seem even more ludicrous. A Tom Thumb on W Street, just south of the Escambia County Emergency Management Control Center, had lost every part of its facade and showed the slats and panels that made up the actual building. I spotted a tree a little farther north where the top was shorn off roughly and the remaining trunk split in two and the halves curving around each other like DNA strands, clear evidence of a powerful tornado. We are trapped in a disaster that was not manmade but has been exacerbated by our actions (or lack thereof).

And we are definitely exacerbating it. The Chipolte Restaurant near my house was overwhelmed with partrons. People parking on the soggy grass kicking up huge muddy divots because there are no more legitimate parking spaces. Every table full, nobody wearing masks. We are not safe yet. I would like this catastrophe to end but it's not a wish to Santa Claus that someone else will fulfill. We have to do the work ourselves.

That's really all I have to say. While writing this blog entry over the last four hours, the delicious food has been consumed, the sun has set. I'm a little less mad about how selfish people are being, but only a little.

I don't want to die from a stranger's selfishness.

Exposure

I started writing this entry back in May but haven't touched it since May 17th. If this country was lurching uneasily into the future before May, by summer everything had definitely gone sideways. And my frustration has definitely morphed into paralysis.

At that time, I was still working from home. My wife, a teacher, was still working from home. My older son had just finished his sophmore college year from home. My younger son had just graduated from high school with classes from home but an actual ceremony at the Pensacola Civic Center.

It was the first time I had seen the inside of the Civic Center since February when the building housed the Vendor Floor and Artist Alley for Pensacon. Even on February 29th I was still nervous about being in large crowds, but nobody was physically distant at the time, and wearing masks was absolutely out of the question since we were told the masks were in short supply and any masks we bought and used were masks that were unavailable to nurses and doctors. And it would still be a month before the April Fool's Day when I joked in the morning that Governor Ron DeSantis was finally taking the pandemic seriously and in the afternoon he actually accounced limited statewide restrictions to slow the spread of Covid-19.

So while the unemployment rate reaches 14.7% and millions have lost their income, the number of people under this roof with jobs has increased by one. The younger son has started working at a business that didn't exist before coronovirus swept this nation. He is working at a drive-in theater that didn't exist in April. The operation is built around two inflatable screens and hastily spraypainted lines on the ground. My son is directing traffic, connecting speakers and delivering food orders at the Pensacola Fairground. All the workers wear masks, but I still fear that he will contract the virus. But he's also getting exposure by meeting entertainment professionals in the area that are also working at the drive in. He'll have references and connections for future theatrical opportunities. He's learning about wages and paychecks and banking and routing numbers. He's discovering that he enjoys the hand-on work of electrical systems and he's really good at it. He was also exposed on his last day working there to a rave, including some unexpected nudity, recreational drug use, and even an overdose as the ambulance was called to the Fairgrounds to respond to an emergency. He was shaken by what he saw but horrors exist in the world and nobody can pretend them out of existence.

But I still think about what "exposure" means. So much of this universe is unknown to humanity. Just over five years ago we did not know that the planet Pluto had a "heart" waiting to be discovered. Much of America had not experienced the prevalence of violence directed and Black people until the brutality was exposed in a series of videos that kept coming starting in early May with the revelation of the video showing the death of Ahmaud Aubrey and escalating with two disgusting videos over Memorial Day weekend. Exposure means the introduction of the novel and potentially unexpected to a given audience.

Some exposure, like to a deadly virus, is harmful. Some exposure, like to entertainment professsionals that appreciate your enthusiasm and creativity, is beneficial. And some exposure, like police reliance on tear gas and rubber bullets to attack protestors and reporters, is hopefully leading to changes in how cops interact with citizens.

Regardless, exposure means everything changes after that point.

COVID19

Note: This was the first blog post I wrote on April 6th at 0230 Central because I couldn't sleep. I had just started working from home and Florida had only recently closed the beaches. It felt like everything was spinning out of control. Reading back, I changed nothing from what I wrote that night. It ends abruptly probably because exhaustion finally caught up to me. But I wanted to share it since the raw text captures where I was over a month ago.

I'm writing this blog because I can neither sleep nor relax. I'm filling my days with food and games and other ephemera that will mean nothing after I die.

I worry because I have health problems that make my death more likely if I fall sick. But here in Florida, so many people are acting like this disease cannot touch them. I don't envy their sense of invulnerability because if I were similarly reckless, I would be sick in short order.

Only weeks ago I was attending Pensacon with huge crowds to see "Weird" Al Yankovic and the cast of TRON and visit the dealer floor packed full of people. I drove to Mobile, Alabama to participate in a card game tournament and did rather well. I visited Arety's Angels because it had looked closed when I had driven by weeks ago. I considered going to see "Onward" the day before the cinemas closed entirely. Hell, I almost drove over to New Orleans and Mardi Gras only a few hours away. The whole time, in the back of my head I knew that the virus was spreading across the globe. But it was in China and in Italy and on a few cruise ships. I believed that the technological and scientific prowess of this nation would soon be targetting this threat and keeping us safe. Because we're America and we can do the impossible.

Other nations showed us very quickly that ignoring the threat was deadly. Testing and tracking the virus needed to be done early and often to prevent spread by asymptomatic carriers. Asking people to please stay home was worthless; they had to be ordered home and every possible public distraction shuttered. But without an immediate danger, this country failed to act. Our country responded similar to a teenager who thinks about saving money for the future. There is no penalty in failing to act today. Only later does the teenager realize that they cannot save what they need in the time they have left. By the time the future arrives, it is too late.

This country also chose inaction. We assumed that our leaders were receiving the most accurate information with the most carefully considered contigencies laid out before them by experts. But leaders didn't want to stop the party. So rather that shouting, "Last call" and sending everyone home, our leaders told us again that the parties and the beaches and the bars were open for business and to live it up. (See Isaiah 22:13)

So I'm recording my thoughts about my life in these months because the world is about to change. It's not just the disease and the death, but that will traumatize every generation alive today. Parents and grandparents and even siblings and progeny will perish alone and afraid. Loved ones will inadequately grieve because there will be no funerals where we can gather to mourn. Will families believe that the departed are truly deceased if they never see the body? That is the emotional landscape that we are pushing humanity into because we trusted leaders and neighbors that failed to overcome selfishness and pride and hubris.

The economic disaster will take at least a decade to unwind. Our next president (or two) will have an unenviable task. That president won't be leading this country or the world to a greater future. That person will be dragging us back to where we were before this catastrophe cratered the financial system and destroyed most of our businesses and industries and jobs.

History

If you are reading this blog contemporaneously, then you know that we are living through history.

If you are reading this blog at some random point in the future, know that the Covid-19 pandemic caught nearly everyone by surprise. Nobody felt like we were living through a momentous event until it was well underway. And, as cliche' as it sounds, it was already too late.

By this time, rumors about the disease have survived long enough to become some facsimile of fact. I am washing my hands regularly, trying to stay two meters from anyone else, and limiting my trips outside the house. I am lucky enough to be working my accounting position with the Credit Union from home. Not a vacation, yet feels entirely different. But yesterday I left the house on one long trip:

• driving across Nine Mile Road to pick up a birthday cake for my son's 20th birthday
• driving west along Nine Mile Road to pick up a pair of glasses ordered weeks ago
• driving further west to the Corporate Office to grab a computer monitor for teleworking
• driving back east on Nine Mile Road to pick up sodas and oatmeal and shampoo
• driving back even more on Nine Mile Road to grab a last minute birthday present
• driving across that parking lot to pick up a family's worth of Chinese takeout for dinner
• driving back across Nine Mile Road to return home

The proprietors at some locations like the optometrist office or the Chinese restaurant had arranged the business to allow completion of my transaction without close contact to any human.

At the two supermarkets, despite my best efforts, people usually began lining in xtremely close, crowding together in the aisles. The staff at the two locations (which I'm not naming) were as conscientious as they could be, but they cannot force the shoppers to adhere to that same level of caution. Taped lines on the floor marked the recommended social distancing margin when approaching the cashier but people would walk between waiting patrons. And that doesn't include the patrons that aren't even trying to stay away, in one case bringing the whole family including their four kids to just saunter around without a worry.

I worry. I have a heart condition, although I am not taking any of the medications that increase my danger of a severe bout of the disease. Coincidentially, I am taking medication that greatly increases the likelihood of death if given hydroxychloroquine, so I guess no "miracle" drug for me. Nonetheless I cannot stop going out altogether.

Like I said earlier, the rumors have lived long enough to coalesce into an ersatz truth, and so now everybody knows that you lose your sense of smell and develop a cough three to five days after catching the virus. A fever will arrive two or three days after that and then the fight really begins. So every time I leave the house and face the outside world, I start the countdown all over again.

This evening, I made three stops:

• drove to the gas station on my block to get gas
• drove west down Nine Mile Road to withdraw $600 at the ATM
• walked across the parking lot to deposit cash at a different ATM
• walked back to my car and drove directly home

None of these stops involved interacting with potential vectors, but I had to touch pumps and buttons and screens that had certainly been touched by others. So the first step upon arriving home was washing my hands with soap and hot water.

Long ago I learned that intelligence agencies have mathematic models that determine how many people will learn a secret within a given amount of time, based on the chance of the clandestine information either being gleaned through research or being delivered interpersonally. For this reason, I have always been reticent to share information, seeing each time I divulge private information as the first link in a path where that information reaches the wrong destination. I was frightened of accidentially giving away too much when waiting for my episode of "Who Wants to be a Millionaire?" to air, causing the producers of the show to void my winnings. Thankfully my wife was my co-conspirator so I did not have to withhold any portion of my escapade from her, which honestly would have been impossible.

I now think about the spread of coronavirus in a similar manner. Every surface I touch, every person I approach, every journey out for groceries or gas presents another chance to link my web of interactions with the web of a contagious individual.

It feels like it is only a matter of time. The game is to push the inevitable far enough into the future to when scientists develop efficacious treatments or even a vaccine prior to that fateful conjunction.

Because my life, much like history, is a confused jumble of happenstance at this moment but will undoubtably appear fated when viewed retrospectively.