Written Along the Way

2020. Wow! How my thoughts and opinion of this year have changed over the past several months.

When I first started hearing about the Corona virus, I downplayed it. Yes, it was more contagious than the flu and maybe more deadly, but it’ll turn out to be similar to the flu. That’s what I thought. I pretty quickly shifted that thinking and accepted the new facts that were coming at us. Very early on, I started calling what was happening “Coronamageddon”. I just wanted to take some of the dread away with a little humor. I was still working and we didn’t know if we’d get the virus and a lot of people weren’t wearing masks and it was stressful and Coronamageddon sounded right.

As 2020 continued to roll on and more things happened, people were talking about how horrible 2020 was and how it just kept getting worse. I was slow to get on board with that idea too. But eventually, 2020 got to me. How could it not? This has been a ridiculous year. 

Schools were closed, businesses were closed, people were only leaving their homes for groceries, sports were cancelled or postponed. Even doctors were cancelling all non-urgent appointments. Just stop and think about that. Even the gates on the outdoor tennis courts we use were locked up. That’s about as intense as anything in my lifetime (and I’m not as young as I look). 

Let’s pile the rest on now: Murder hornets. What a lovely name for an insect. This was a real thing. Murder hornets pose such a threat to other bees, our pollinators, that even 3,000 miles away, on the other side of the country, I was reading about these hornets and the scientists search for their nest(s). 

To stick with insects, how about Eastern Equine Encephalitis (EEE) in Michigan? I’ll bet a lot of the country had never heard of EEE, but here in Rhode Island we’ve known about it for years. Apparently, there were cases of EEE in Michigan and it was enough of a concern that people were told to stay inside. That’s two viruses in the same year that are a serious enough health threat that the Michigan government told people to stay home. 

You may also be aware that large portions of California and Colorado have been on fire this year. It may seem easy to dismiss the fires because it’s become more common to hear about seasonal wildfires in the West. Honestly, that in itself should be a concern, but these fires were also worse than “normal”.  I happened to be in Colorado while the fires were burning and I couldn’t see the mountains as I drove west to Boulder from Denver. If you’ve never seen the Rocky Mountains, they are real mountains. Not the stuff we have on the East coast. Those mountains should have been staring back at me on the entire drive west from the airport but they weren’t. They were hidden behind a smokey haze. 

Every year many people die and every year people die that have affected our culture or have had an impact on us personally. So, this isn’t unique to the doom of 2020 but it’s still a part of it. The list of deaths that you took notice of or were affected by will be different than mine but here’s a few lives on my mind:

Kirk Douglas

Kenny Rogers

John Lewis (As an entitled white American male, I didn’t know how important this man was until after he died.)

Ruth Bader Ginsburg

Tommy Heinsohn

Gerry Browe

Eddie VanHalen

Sean Connery

Toots 

Hey, how about Black Lives Matter? Yes, they certainly do matter every year, but this year a lot of non-Black people finally started thinking about what Black Lives Matter means. A lot of people started opening up their minds a little bit. But a lot of people also dug in and resisted. One of those people was our president who took the opportunity to further the divide and the hatred and the fear in our country instead of using this opportunity to further the dialogue and bring about some small bit of mutual understanding.

Then the schools reopened. Whichever side of that decision you fall on, it was an added stressor in our lives. Not just making the decision but then living with it. Be careful what you wish for. If you wanted your child home and chose that option then you got it. All the time! No more breaks from each other and get ready to be the IT department and the teacher’s assistant. If you wanted your child in school, you got that too with all the exposure to other kids, with the positive Covid results and last minute school shut downs. And Covid cases continue to peak in October and November. We are not through this and schools are open now with more cases than when the schools were shut down in the spring.

But possibly the biggest stressor this year has been politics and the election. There’s enough here for me to create an entire post just about politics. I’ve been disgusted and worried and confused and even angry. I ain’t no Republican but I ain’t no Democrat either. For me, this is not just about disagreeing on foreign policy or fiscal policy or whatever your policy priority might be. This is about what we say it means to be America. This is about decency and humanity. And part of my turmoil has been how it isn’t about that for more people. 

And we all have our own personal events that have added to the Darkness of 2020. For us, we were going to take a road trip in April down to South Carolina. Part of the trip was about seeing where my grandfather grew up. After a few years of trying to get this trip to happen, I’ve still never seen where he grew up. Still on the to do list. We were going to see a River Dogs baseball game while we were there too. They were affiliated with the Yankees. But, in true 2020 fashion, the Yankees broke ties with the River Dogs this month so even if we do get down there, in the future, we won’t be seeing a team of Yankees’ prospects. 

Much worse than the canceled road trip was getting the phone call telling me that my friend, Mark, had been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. His diagnosis came early on in the Covid mess. Cancer is never good news. Pancreatic cancer is especially never good news. But blending that up with Covid has made it more complicated. It’s been more difficult for people to visit Mark and it continues to be a factor as his holiday visitors have had to cancel their travel plans due to the ever increasing number of Covid cases. 

If you kept reading because you thought I’d wrap this up with some positive tidbits or a silver lining, this is the part where I disappoint you. I’m writing about 2020! This is a piece about the Darkness that has been spreading and growing throughout the year. The Darkness that has covered us and made it hard to see the horizon. 

The only positive 2020 spin I can think of is that I’m still here to write this. I never really knew what burn out meant or felt like until now. Despite being burned out, I’m still plugging along, trying my best to snap out of it, trying to get through the day and trying to appreciate the little good moments that pop up during the day. Trying just like you are. My feelings of gratitude are helping to keep me moving forward, but they are not waking me up from the burn out. Living through this year has become like walking through mud. Each step is harder, heavier and more tiring. Even if we make it out of the mud, we won’t really be done with it. We’ll still be wet, tired, and covered in heavy mud. 

Good advice is only as good as our ability to remember it and apply it. There’s plenty of good advice out there about how to live our lives and how to handle the bumps in the road but most of it doesn’t do me much good. It just doesn’t stick with me. It’s not in the front of my mind when I need it most. I need to have a comparison. I need a picture to imagine. I imagine us all as surfers. Surfers don’t control the waves and we don’t control what we encounter throughout the day.

Surfing is a romantic notion. Riding on water. Feeling the power of nature and gliding along with it. I’ve never surfed but based on my paddle boarding experience, I’d probably be horrible. But the idea of it sticks with me.

We can be surfers. We can take what we get and find a way to ride it. Find a way to use the energy coming at us. Surfers aren’t just out there trying to ride the wave to shore, they’re trying to have fun with it and do tricks. How different would our days be if instead of looking at every bump in the road and every annoying person as a hassle to deal with, we looked at them as a wave to ride?

It’s a good comparison. Surfers can’t control the weather or the waves and we can’t control what’s coming at us or who we’ll deal with during the day. Sometimes the waves are sloppy. Sometimes they’re big. Sometimes there’s a lot of other surfers in the water that need to be avoided. Sometimes everything falls into place just the way we wanted (and we still might miss the wave). And lots of times, we may find ourselves surrounded by bumbling people barely keeping their noses above water getting thrashed against the rocks by the waves.

No one is going to catch a wave, perform a trick, turn that energy into something fun and ride it with grace unless they are focused in the moment. Aware of the energy coming at them and open to it. We can be like that in our daily lives. We can take what’s coming at us, handle it with grace and ride it to shore. We can have fun and perform tricks throughout the day instead of getting bashed against the rocks. 

It comes down to the mindset with which we enter each encounter, whether or not we accept that we can not control what’s coming at us and whether or not we are trying to transform that energy into something good and have some fun. We get to choose. Are we out there just trying to keep our heads above water, trying to survive or are we trying to take the energy coming at us and do something good with it? 

My son’s “spring” little league season ended on September 1st. They won the championship and I was glad for them. But I felt a bit of melancholy about it ending too. Would I have felt that way without the shadow of Covid over our summer? I doubt it. This baseball season felt so long but I still didn’t want it to end.

The whole summer was strange. “Spring” baseball turned into summer baseball because that’s when it was decided that it was safe to play. I was the only parent who stayed to watch the first practice. How could I have been the only parent who wanted to see what Covid baseball practice would look like? How could I have been the only parent who wanted to know if these coaches were going to take the Covid precautions seriously? I was sitting there texting different friends, asking these questions. One of my friends, who was also a coach in the same league, responded that there were all kinds of new rules due to Covid and he would be happy to explain it to me. I knew he was trying to be helpful, but I responded back, “rules are only good if people follow them”. 

Once I got used to letting my kid play baseball during Coronamageddon, it became the lifeline that got me through this unusual summer. We still had to deal with people not wearing masks at the games. It was usually just us and one other family wearing masks. And even one of the umpires didn’t wear a mask. But the good that this little league season did for our summer far outweighed the frustration. It would be such a strange summer. So many of our usual activities were unattainable. So much confusion. Information was constantly changing. We typically go to the beach as much as possible but even that wasn’t going to happen like normal this summer as towns put restrictions on who was allowed at their beaches and how many people would be allowed at the beach at the same time. 

So instead of the beach and our other normal summer activities we had little league. We had many practices. We played catch in our yard. My son really likes outfield and on many of his previous teams the outfielders were definitely neglected during practices. Not on this team. Everyone did the same drills and even though my son didn’t love it, he learned second base and third base and would play both positions in games as well as playing outfield. 

Then the games started. Major League Baseball would eventually start too. We bought the Yankees season on the MLB app. There were no concerts to go to and not really any other sporting events to watch on TV or to see in person so our summer was about little league and the Yankees. The rhythm of our summer was created by the baseball schedule. It was usually two games per week and probably a practice fit in too. And because of the condensed MLB season, there was a Yankees game on almost every night (except when they got postponed due to a positive Covid test). 

Besides having events scheduled on our calendar and live entertainment to attend, this season was a light in the Covid Darkness on a more personal level. My son grew on and off the field. I enjoy sports for so many reasons and a lot of them are about how sports relate to things off the field. How the lessons we learn in sports translate to other aspects of life. This was a good season of growth to witness and because there was so little else going on, I got to witness a lot of it. 

And then it ended and so did the summer. When the season ended we were left to face the reality of school and how that would play out. We chose to keep our kids home. It’s great to have so much time as a family while they’re doing school at home, but the flip side is that we get almost no breaks from each other. Time apart is good for any relationship. Being stuck with each other all the time lowers our threshold for frustration and annoyance. With school comes other concerns. Will they even learn much from home? Will they be self-sufficient students? What will we do when they want to play with a kid who is attending school? 

And the end of the little league season meant that the season was changing. Summer was slipping into Fall and everything was changing the way it does every year. For me, it also meant that I was about to become painfully busy at work. Our whole vibe was about to change. 

But I am grateful for the summer little league season. It got me through this Covid-stained summer.

There’s a constant underlying theme in my mind. The little picture versus the big picture. Keeping my shit together is more than a full time job. Taking care of myself, my family, my responsibilities, work, play, learn, grow. But there’s always the big picture stuff going on as well. Right now, it seems really intense. I thought it was intense with George W. but that seems small compared to what’s going on right now.

What’s the answer? How do we balance our attention and energy between our personal lives, our personal journey and the larger societal drama that’s going on? Is there even room for both? Are we foolish to even engage in the large scale stuff? Or are we irresponsible to not engage in the large scale stuff?

I’m becoming freaked out the more that I think about the large scale stuff and the more that I read about it. I’m starting to wonder if things now really are any different than they’ve ever been. There’s always been people with power running the show and most of us are just trying to make our way through the hoops that are being laid out by those people in power. Is it really any different right now?

The people with money have always wanted more money. I don’t think they’ve ever cared more about race than they cared about money. They might hate people who look different than them but not as much as they love money. It’s just a convenient coincidence for them that they can kill two birds with one stone by getting richer upon the backs of people with darker skin than theirs. But they don’t give a shit about poor white folks either. The racial tensions they sow are a great distraction to all of us who aren’t rich and powerful. We’re fighting amongst ourselves instead of uniting against our common enemy.

The whole system is rigged. Health insurance companies are for profit entities. How is that in the best interest of our health? I pay for insurance but I have a deductible so when I get a bill, I’m the one paying it, not the insurance. And not every bill even counts towards the deductible anymore. The rules keep changing. Not in our favor. It’s like we’re running a race but if we get too close to the finish line, the officials change the course and move the line.

When the housing bubble burst under George W., I bought into everything the news media was selling us about how we needed the government to bail these financial institutions out, etc. But what really happened back then? Did your life change? It was just a fucking scam. The rich got richer off our tax money.

That sounds familiar.

All the stuff that’s happening now…I want to believe that there’s a chance that things really are going to get better for non-white people because of all the conversation right now. Because a lot of white people are finally waking up to what’s been going on all along. I want to believe that things will get better for trans people and so many “others”. Maybe things will improve. But by how much? Probably just enough to let people feel like they got a victory but it’s a shell game. While they’re throwing you a bone with one hand, they’re reaching into your pocket with the other and taking something else away.

It really seems like Trump is so much worse than other presidents and it’s a scary time. But the Democrats get money from the same companies and lobbyists that the Republicans get money from. Is this just another decoy? Someone pulls a fire alarm on one end of town so they can rob a bank on the other end of town.

It makes me feel hopeless. And it makes me feel like I should focus on my personal life and what I can actually control there. But I also want to believe that we can create change and make things better. But now I’m so far into this typhoon of confusion that I begin to wonder if my feeling that we can create some change is just part of the game. We get to vote and we get to demonstrate and protest so we think we have some influence and that just keeps us playing the game and as long as we’re playing the game, the rich are getting richer and their grip on the real power is getting tighter and we’re just spinning our wheels in their game the whole time.

I am just a dumb white American male. Dumb not stupid. I pick dumb because I’ll never know what it’s like to be anybody else. I’ll never really know about discrimination, about the fear of being constantly judged because of my skin color, or the fear of being killed because of my skin color. I grew up in an almost completely white town and went to a super white college after that. Of course I had interactions with people darker than me and was friendly with some people over the years who didn’t look like me but I didn’t have lots of opportunities to hang out with many people of color. 

Time went on and I had more opportunities. When I was going to school (again) in Colorado, I knew and was friends with several people from the Middle East. Several Muslim people. They weren’t terrorists and they didn’t hate me or want to hurt me because I don’t believe in the same god that they believe in. I had always thought that the way all Muslims are painted as terrorists was so stupid but when you know someone who is Muslim it really drives home the stupidity of it all. And it also gave me the opportunity to see the other side of what that generalization and behavior means. One of my friends shares a lot of articles about the conflict between Arabs and Israelis. And there’s plenty of information out there about all the drone strikes the United States has perpetrated in the Middle East over the past few years. 

At one of my jobs in Denver, I worked with a bunch of gay people and I’ve gotten to known other gay people since then in many different situations. Again, no surprise that them being gay didn’t have any impact on my relationship with them. It didn’t matter that they were gay and it didn’t matter that I was straight. 

When we moved back east, I got the chance to work with a few black people. They are super cool people. I love them. I got to see the foolish side of racism when customers would mistake two black coworkers for each other EVEN THOUGH THEY DO NOT LOOK ALIKE AT ALL.

Did you ever watch the Jerry Seinfeld show “Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee”? There’s an episode with Chris Rock (in a fabulous Lamborghini) where they get pulled over by the police. Jerry is so casual but Chris Rock looks worried. It comes off as a joke in that show but that’s real shit for people who have darker skin than me. I don’t like getting pulled over but I’m not worried that my life is going to end right there on the side of the road. 

As I read over these first few paragraphs, I think it sounds like the typical white guy saying “Look I have friends who are black. I’m not racist.” But I didn’t know people of color or different religions or people who are openly gay growing up. I also didn’t think that those people would be different than me but if you aren’t actually experiencing relationships with different people in your own life then discrimination and racism are just ideas. They may be ideas that you don’t like and sound awful, but I think it’s too easy, especially for white people, to not take it personally enough.

We can sit back and know that any kind of discrimination based on skin color, religion or sexual preference is stupid and illogical. As an intellectual exercise we can realize this, but the depth of the ridiculousness of it didn’t really hit me until I began to get to know people from all these groups who are discriminated against. The depth of the sadness and anger became a part of my response to racism as I got to know people who are different than me. 

I didn’t consciously isolate myself from people with darker skin than me or from people who had a different sexual preference or religion than me. I grew up in an almost entirely white small town. No one ever talked to me about racism. The people who raised me were not racist. Even though my grandfather grew up in South Carolina, way back before the civil rights movement, I never saw him judge somebody based on anything other than their character. But if I didn’t have opportunities to get to know people who were different than me and nobody was talking to me about any of this then what the hell did I know?

I used to openly judge and question the rioters after any type of highly publicized police brutality. I think, for me, Rodney King, is the first time I remember really hearing about anything like this. Why would they riot? They’re only making it worse. They’re only reinforcing the beliefs of the racists anyway. Yup that was me. Just a dumb white guy judging people for something I did not understand. 

I’m not judging anyone this time. I am not ok with more violence or rioting. But if I can be this full of anger at another murder by police and I’m not directly affected, then what must it be like to be a person of color and see this happening AGAIN? What alternatives are left to express such rage? Peaceful protests are not stopping these killings. Our President is a fucking racist. We are so far past the time to be judging rioters. We need to be trying to understand why they would resort to those actions. We need to be really looking at what the fuck is going on in our country and in this world and get out of our shiny white lives and fucking join in to make some positive change. 

I don’t really know how to do that. I’m writing this to dump these thoughts and feelings out of my mind. Maybe this will get some other white people to think in a different way or maybe not, but at the very least, I’m trying to organize my confusion and anger about all of this. 

I was going to research and compile a list of black people killed by police in the United States but I don’t need to redo the work that has already been done by others. Here’s a link:

83 Black Men and Boys Killed by Police

As a white person, when you first started hearing “Black Lives Matter”, did you think to yourself, “but all lives matter”? That’s what I thought, then I heard Ice-T explain it like this:

“It’s unfortunate that we even have to say Black Lives Matter. I mean, if you go through history nobody ever gave a fuck. I mean, you can kill black people in the street. Nobody goes to jail. nobody goes to prison. But when I say “Black Lives Matter” and you say “all lives matter”, that’s like if I was to say, “gay lives matter” and you say “all lives matter”. If I said “women’s lives matter” and you say “all lives matter”. You’re diluting what I’m saying. You’re diluting the issue. The issue isn’t about everybody. It’s about black lives at the moment.”

I don’t know what to write next. I don’t know how to wrap this up. I am disgusted with discrimination of any kind. I am full of anger at the loss of life. But my disgust and anger don’t seem to mean a fucking thing. Right now, I’m embarrassed to have such pale skin. I must be too simple-minded to understand how someone is better than someone else just because of the way they look. Even as an isolated white kid growing up in a white town that shit didn’t make any sense. I didn’t have enough life experience to think too hard about it or maybe even to care too much about it, but I knew that it was fucking stupid.  

There is a strong minority in this country that may never go away. We can be upset by this or complain about it but we would be better off accepting it and rising to the challenge. As a white person who wants our country to be better, it’s time to be vocal. We can not let the the racist minority in our country be louder than the rest of us who want this shit to stop.

Additional Links:

NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund

Here’s a black man talking to white people about white privilege and what we can do now.

That Ice-T quote

I want to move on from the idea of gratitude, that I wrote about last time, to discuss the perspective that we view the world from. Being grateful is one perspective of looking at the world. Last time, I argued that there is value in looking at our world through the filter or perspective of gratefulness. We are always looking at our worlds through filters or from a specific perspective, but we may not realize that that is what we are doing.

Let’s start with something everyone has heard before. Is the glass half full or half empty? If there is a glass on a table in front of you, with a twelve ounce capacity, and it has six ounces of water in it, is it half full or half empty? There’s been plenty of other people who have developed arguments as to why it’s better to be optimistic (half full) or why it’s better to be pessimistic (half empty) and I’m not going to redo that here. 

There is a third option that some of you may not have heard discussed as much. The glass contains six ounces of water. Stop. End. Period. That is what is in front of you. If we don’t see that the glass contains six ounces of water, because we are seeing it as half full or half empty, then we are applying a filter to what we are seeing. Truly, the glass is half full and half empty at the same time. To pick only one of those descriptions is to apply a value judgement to the glass. This is not an original idea. Here’s a video that I saw a while back explaining this and discussing how we make value judgements about what we encounter and how we can accept what the world offers us.

Let’s take another step forward with this idea of perspective. Imagine a brand new car. Whatever your favorite car is in your favorite color. Now imagine that someone walks up to the driver’s side of the car and smashes it with a sledge hammer a couple of times. If you are looking at the driver’s side of the car, you see the damage. If you are looking at the passenger’s side of the car, you are looking at your brand new favorite car in your favorite color. Maybe if you’re looking at the car from the front or the back you can see the damaged side and the undamaged side. 

If you are on the passenger’s side and you are unable or unwilling to see the car from the driver’s side, you may never know that the car is dented. How many things in our lives are like this? We see things the way that we see things and we may have no idea that there’s another way. 

I think people are like this too. People are like crystal prisms with many facets. We show one side of ourselves to our parents (maybe not even the same side to both parents), one side of ourselves to our spouse, one side to co-workers, one side to our children, and on and on. So who are we? It depends on who you ask.

How do we ever know what something really looks like if we see things from only one side? We walk around and look at something from multiple positions. We can literally walk around something and look or if it’s an idea, we can make it an intellectual exercise and examine the idea from different points of view. It seems like, in general, we are getting worse at this. American politics has become one side yelling at the other without actually trying to hear what the other side is saying. When people search online for information, they are only searching for more pictures of the side of the car they are already looking at instead of trying to see the view from the other side. Some people do this intentionally and some people probably don’t even realize that’s what they’re doing.

I have become really interested in finding out what things look like from the sides that I’m not seeing. I like hearing about the other sides that other people see. When I was younger, I was an argumentative, know-it-all prick. 

< Pause for laughter…some of you that know me are wondering why I put “when I was younger, I used to be” in there, right?>

I just came out into the world as an argumentative contrarian and I didn’t know that’s what I was doing and I didn’t know that I was being an asshole arguing all the time. But it’s like the glass half-full thing, can we accept what the world gives us and make it a little better? Since I started out arguing all the time that just became the way that I am. But I didn’t used to care about what things looked like from the other side. If I wasn’t interested in it, then I didn’t want to learn about it.

But I’ve been able to get past arguing just to argue. Now, I push back on people because I really want to hear about their side of the story. I push back so that I can hear them defend their side of the argument and that way I really get to learn about what they’re seeing over on their side. Now, it makes me super happy if someone changes my mind because it means that they showed me a side that I had not seen before. 

And now I like hearing about other peoples’ lives that are different than mine too. Where I used to just be closed off to things that didn’t seem interesting to me or that I couldn’t relate to, now I’m excited to learn about these other experiences and life stories. I’m only ever going to be me, so by hearing about other peoples’ experiences and adventures and struggles, I can live vicariously through them and get a view of all these different aspects of life that I’d never get a peak at if I stayed closed off. It improves my ability to feel empathy and compassion too. It’s hard to feel empathy if we don’t allow ourselves to imagine what it’s like to be the other person. While we can’t truly see through someone else’s eyes, we can try to put aside our biases and imagine someone else’s view of the world.

It’s a big world with a lot of things to see and a lot of ideas to think. We can only see something from one side at a time but that doesn’t mean that there’s only one side to see. Remembering that there are a lot of other sides is a good reality check. Realizing how many other sides might exist is a good ego killer. Really listening and finding out about these other sides isn’t always going to change our minds but it can help us get along. And we can see how wide and wild a world it really is when we hear someone’s story and someone else’s experience. 

By now everybody has probably heard or read about the power of gratitude. It’s recommended as a treatment for people who are depressed. They’re told to write down one or two things that they are grateful for each day. It just shifts the focus off the sadness and onto something good.  Our family does this thing where we have a jar and whenever we want, we write down something we’re grateful for on a little piece of paper then we fold up the paper and put it in the jar. On New Year’s Eve or New Year’s Day, we all sit down together and read the little notes (not our idea, can’t remember where I heard about that). The point is that being grateful is good for us and even in dark times there are things to be grateful for. 

Here’s my Coronamageddon Gratitude List. 

• Getting some of my money back from the government. Go ahead and stimulate me Trump. I even got a check in the mail for my mother and she died in 2018. That’s how Trump rolls. But yeah, I’ll take money deposited into my bank account any day.

• More family time. Before Coronamageddon, my kids had school and several other activities. I worked some nights and every other weekend. Now, my kids are home all the time. They have school at home and the activities that they do still have are at home via video too. That means I get a lot more family time. It’s unavoidable. Everyone is always home when I get home from work and they’re always home when I have days off from work. Kids aren’t going to be kids forever. Time together while they’re still kids is premium time. 

• We have a better pace. Because most things are cancelled and everyone is home all the time, we are usually moving at a better pace. Less rushing to be somewhere at a certain time. Less trying to squeeze some time together in between work and other activities. So, not only is everyone home all the time but the whole vibe is more easy going because the pace is more mellow. We were already trying to not be over-scheduled, but when you have more than one kid, even if they both only do one activity that’s still a few more appointments per week. Our new, mellower pace suits me just fine. I like going with the flow and not always having to have a detailed plan in order to fit everything into the day.

• More time to work in the yard. I love being outside and I love doing stuff in the yard. This time of year there’s always stuff to do in the yard but I don’t usually get to do everything on my list. I’ve usually got to fit yard work into the schedule with my job, the kids’ school stuff and other activities, and family stuff we’re doing. That makes doing things in the yard feel like work sometimes. But now since we’re home all the time, there’s more chances to do stuff in the yard. More chances to just putter around outside. More opportunity for it to be enjoyable. Doing yard work and landscaping, for me, is like a big version of those Zen sand gardens. I like moving things around and sculpting the environment around our house.

• Reconnecting with friends. Since we’re all stuck at home and feeling a little isolated, people are reaching out. I’ve been in more contact with several people who I normally don’t communicate with regularly. I’d like to communicate with them regularly but it just wasn’t happening before. Now we have more desire and opportunity to reconnect or stay connected with people. There are more cracks in the schedule. We aren’t seeing people out so if we’re craving that conversation we have to go after it and people are doing just that.

• ZOOM. This is really a point filed under the previous point, but ZOOM deserves it’s own spot. It’s been great to be more in touch with people but with technology now and being able to video conference, it’s a whole other level. We had a game night with four other families a while ago. Honestly, I wasn’t excited by the idea of that but it turned out to be fun. And doing a ZOOM call with friends is a trip. There’s people who I’ve talked to and stayed in touch with over the years but to be able to see each other while we talk is so cool and when you have a group of friends all on the same video it’s wild. We can all be in the same room when we’re really thousands of miles apart. 

• Beer Karma. A group of local guys has been delivering beer to each other. Not only is that as good as it sounds but every time it’s happened it’s fallen on my day off. What’s better than an unexpected, unsolicited beer delivery? An unexpected, unsolicited beer delivery on your day off!

• Live shows. This is another technology  thing. We can have video calls with friends and we can have live concerts or live comedy performances right on our own TV. We have a local friend who is a musician. He can’t play out right now because all the places he normally plays are closed. So, he’s playing in his basement and broadcasting his shows. We watch our friend play music on our TV and listen through the sound bar! It’s so cool. And bigger bands are doing the same thing. Even though we’re all isolated, we can feel like part of the crowd watching these shows together from home. And the kids get to enjoy it too because it’s not late at night out at a bar or something.

 • Fudge Brownie M&Ms. At work, I’m surrounded by junk food. I try hard to resist and usually I’m pretty successful at it. But, damn, it’s Coronamageddon now! If I’m walking down the aisle and I see Fudge Brownie M&Ms, I am going to try them. They are good. Almond M&Ms are still my favorite followed by peanut, but these fudge brownie ones might be even better than the regular M&Ms. 

• Limeade & Bourbon. Another indulgence. I haven’t done much grocery shopping in years. It just doesn’t fit our schedule well with me working. But with Coronamageddon, I’ve been doing some of the shopping. I’ll stop after work since I’m already out in the virally infested world. Lemonade was on the shopping list the last time I was grocery shopping. Right next to the lemonade was limeade. I like limeade better anyway and there was some buy 2 sale going on. Then it hit me…limeade and bourbon! So, I bought the limeade and yes, limeade and bourbon is great. It’s too great. I don’t think it’s a good idea for me to have limeade in the house regularly.

Ok, there it is. A few happy things that are happening right now in the midst of Coronamageddon. You’ve got good things going on too. Don’t forget the good stuff!

P.S. I don’t know why I can’t get the Fudge Brownie M&Ms point to format like the rest of the points. I swear I’m not getting paid by M&Ms to make that point stand out (but they are really tasty).

During Coronamageddon, everything gets coronafied…

It’s Sunday afternoon on the last day of my vacation, I’m sitting on the front porch. It’s too windy but sunny. I’m drinking an over priced beer that my brothers-in-law sent me from California. Don’t be fooled. Even vacations during Coronamageddon are fraught with emotional ups & downs and turn out to be not as relaxing as needed or hoped for. This is a tale of my coronacation. It’s not just a journal, it’s an illustration of how deeply this pandemic has affected me (and probably you).

I have been wanting to make a trip to the place where my grandfather grew up for years. It was finally going to happen this week. We were going to drive. We had a plan. We found things to do that would appeal to both adults and kids. The first thing to note about my coronacation is that we did not have the vacation we had planned.

Once I got through the disappointment, I was still happy for the week off. I’d still been working. I didn’t get fired or furloughed and I could not work from home. I am grateful to not have to worry about paying our bills but it’s been stressful, frustrating and anger-provoking. I wasn’t handling it as well as I would have liked and I was happy for a break from it, even if it wasn’t the break we had been looking forward to. 

So much about Coronamageddon is frustrating. Probably, just like you, I have a physical exam once per year. That keeps me in good standing with my primary care doctor and the insurance company. I see the dentist twice each year. In the last few weeks, my physical and first dentist appointment of the year were both cancelled. Adding to my frustration about that is the fact that I continue to get prescriptions for pets everyday at work. You can bring your cat into the vet but I can’t see my doctor or dentist! Awesome.

I worked the weekend prior to my vacation. I woke up on Sunday and my left lower eyelid hurt. I got home in the early afternoon that day and was free for seven days. The kids had school at home on Monday and it was raining. I did stuff at my desk, around the house and it was fine. Mellow start. My eye was swollen when I woke up Monday.

Since we couldn’t go anywhere, I had arranged to have mulch and soil delivered. Tuesday was the day. I had hoped the delivery would be in the morning so I’d have most of the day to spread the soil and not have to rush and be stressed about it. It was going to rain again that night. The delivery arrived around 2pm. I spent the next 4 hours going non-stop to get all the soil spread. What could have been a productive but chill day in the yard became a morning of frustration and an afternoon of rushing around.

That night two friends came over and we drank by a fire in my backyard. We were positioned in a triangle with the fire between us to burn up the little Coronas we might have been exhaling. It was really enjoyable but I drank more than I needed to.

So far, so good, right? But it hadn’t started in a relaxing and smooth way like I wanted. I had been nursing ankle and knee injuries and that already limited what I’d do on vacation. There was my swollen eyelid. There was the frustration of the late delivery on Tuesday. When I woke up on Wednesday, my eye was almost normal but my ankle and knee really hurt.

All little things, but little things that were conspiring together to keep a low level of frustration active inside me. It was all just feeling unsatisfying. I really was grateful for the time at home with family but the little turbulence kept me from being able to feel at ease. This coronacation wasn’t doing for me what I needed it to do. I was realizing how deeply the strain of Coronamageddon had gotten into me.

By Thursday night, I thought I had broken through the crust that working during Coronamageddon had left on me. Shaken it off and ready to feel at peace for the remainder of my vacation. But it wasn’t a vacation; it was a coronacation. Thursday night found me around another fire drinking with one of the same friends in his driveway. The soil was spread and seeded. All the mulch in the front yard was done. The kids didn’t have school on Friday and even though it’s difficult to find places to go, in the midst of all the closures, I had planned a field trip.

After dinner Thursday, my son complained of belly pain, but thought it was just a gas bubble. It wasn’t. Shortly after I got home that night, he woke up and shortly after that he threw up. He didn’t sleep. I did sleep but my wife didn’t. He threw up several times throughout the night.

No Friday field trip. The field trip was replaced by worry. Then in the evening we had a field trip after all. I brought him to the nearest children’s hospital. We were only there for four hours. We left the hospital with appendicitis ruled out (at least for the moment). And since everything is an opportunity, it was a chance for him to handle some hardship. A chance to get comfortable dealing with the unknown…how to live with these things that are out of our control. He did excellently.

So much for thinking I might get those peaceful last days of vacation (Yes, I did just make that about me. It’s my story, damnit!). But, again, things really weren’t so bad. Just enough turbulence to keep me uneasy. And enough to stay a little worried as we continued to watch our son’s symptoms.

What am I doing with this writing exercise? A little for me, a little for you (I hope). Before my coronacation, I would say I wasn’t handling Coronamageddon great but I was doing ok. I was drinking more and eating more sweets, but overall, still maintaining a lot of other healthy behaviors and not (most of the time) bringing my frustration home from work. A passing grade but not excelling. 

And that’s about how I’ve been doing during my coronacation. Passing but not excelling. I’ve navigated through all the turbulence just fine. The problem has been that I was really looking forward to peace not turbulence. This is where the you part of this exercise comes in. If you are feeling like everything is a bit harder right now, if you are feeling a continuous low level of turbulence in your life, if you are feeling like you just can’t quite be at peace right now, you are not the only one! I was on a damn vacation and I still couldn’t find peace! 

(As an aside, you may have noticed, in that last paragraph, that I wrote that “The problem has been that I was really looking forward to peace not turbulence”. Are you seeing what I’m seeing? When I was writing about my son’s experience in the hospital, I wrote that it was an opportunity for him to get more comfortable dealing with the unknown. A chance to get comfortable with the uncontrollable aspects of life. But I just complained that my vacation did not match up with my expectations. Isn’t that the same thing? I set myself up for feeling unsatisfied by creating these expectations that I then compared to how things actually played out. I can’t really control how things play out and by having these expectations, I am creating the problem. Comparing what happens to what I want to happen is the problem. Getting comfortable with what I can’t control, just rolling with it and navigating it is the way to solve that problem.)

I suggest to myself, and to you, to set our aim a bit lower. We could try to find satisfaction in just being able to navigate the constant turbulence we are experiencing. If we ever find calm waters again that will be great, but holding it against ourselves because the waters we find ourselves in are choppy is self-sabotage.

My coronacation was not what I wanted. It wasn’t what I needed or expected. But I steered the course that was laid before me successfully and it was mostly ok and some of it was a lot better than ok.

AFTERWORD

I’ve been back at work for one week. It turns out that my coronacation may not have been what I had wanted or expected but it was still what I needed. Apparently, even when we don’t feel at peace or feel satisfied with how we are handling things, we can still recover some emotional energy and recharge the batteries a bit. Going back to work didn’t produce any anxiety and being there hasn’t been as frustrating as it was before my week off. We’re finally seeing less people in the pharmacy and my staff did great while I was gone so I didn’t have to put any fires out when I got back. 

It does seem like the effects of staying at home so much are starting to really show themselves though. I heard a story about a woman, who is supposedly a teacher, yelling at some kids playing in a park. She got so heated that she told the kids she hoped they got the virus and died a painful death. I heard the audio. It’s messed up. 

And dealing with our kids at home for this long of a time has whittled away our patience for their kid behavior. We’re trying to turn that into an opportunity for these young people to realize, even just a little, that we are not here to serve them. Parent does not equal servant. The world is bigger than the little child ego. Every time a thought or question is generated in those minds, is not necessarily the time to blurt it out or expect our attention. 

On and on we all go into the great unknown. That is not really any different than before Coronamageddon. Have you noticed that I write about the same things all the time, over and over again? Coronamageddon is just an extreme example of the unknown, of what we can’t control. Every normal day in our lives is really just another something that we can not control. The unknown is waiting around every corner we turn. We just need to keep our shit together and keep taking steps forward. It’s like in Indian Jones and the Last Crusade, when Indiana steps off the cliff but his foot lands on an unseen bridge. Every step forward is a step into the unknown. Every next moment of our life is unknown until it happens. 

If we are fearful of the unknown, we are fearful of our own lives. The more comfortable we become with what we can not control and the more comfortable we become with the unknown, the more comfortable we become with our own lives.

We are in the thick of Coronamageddon now. We’ve all been feeling a lot of feelings and having to deal with those feelings and the real changes that this virus has brought to our lives. The real fears that it’s brought to our lives. Let’s sum up some of it to start.

This virus was like a huge boulder rolling down a very long, gentle slope. We all should have seen it coming, but how much did any of us do about it? How much did our “leaders” do? A lot of people didn’t see it at all. A lot of the people who did see it tried to downplay it. “That’s not a boulder. It’s just a little pebble. You’ll see when it gets closer. Nothing to worry about.” Other people who could see the boulder for what it was must have been paralyzed by the enormity of it and were just stuck, unable to act. Or maybe they thought they could wish it away and hope that gravity would stop working and the boulder would just stop rolling toward us. 

All of this has made me feel a lot of frustration and anger. Apparently, our “leaders” got an early warning about this virus. I haven’t looked too deeply into this but sounds like all they did was pull their money out of the stock market but did’t do much else to help prepare us for what was about to happen. 

My anger and frustration continued once we did start doing something. I still have to work and I’ve seen all the people still out in public and often they’re not out for good reasons. I’ve been like a fucking yo-yo feeling frustrated and angry then calming down then frustrated and angry again over and over. It hasn’t felt good. 

Some of us are feeling scared, anxious, worried and all sorts of other unpleasant emotions. Worried for loved ones or maybe just worried and sad for all the other people that you don’t even know that are going to die from this virus. Perhaps terror is not too strong a word to describe how some people are feeling. 

Those of you who have lost jobs have real money issues to add to your worry and anxiety. Some of you who are working at home might still be worried about how long it will be before your job is back to normal or if it ever will be.

The uncertainty makes these feelings difficult to pass through. We don’t know when this will end. We don’t know who will get sick. We don’t know if we do get sick if we’ll be one of the lucky people, who don’t even know they’re sick, or if we’ll be less fortunate. There are young, healthy people succumbing to this virus. 

These are real fears. It is normal and rational to feel these feelings. If you haven’t been taking care of yourself the way you’re used to, I get it. If you’ve been drinking more or eating more or sleeping more or whatever, I get it. If it feels like you’ve been operating inside a lingering fog and you just haven’t been quite as sharp as you’re used to, I get it.

But I’m not writing this to commiserate. I’ve started here to acknowledge where we are, to admit the seriousness of our situation, to confirm that your feelings are justified. But this is a CALL TO ACTION.

Everything we encounter in our lives is an opportunity. Some events are so extreme that finding the opportunity and trying to look at it that way may truly be unreasonable, but Coronamageddon, for most of us, is not one of those situations. How often have you wished that you could have more time at home with your family? How often have you thought that your life and your children’s lives are over-scheduled yet you still couldn’t cross any appointments off your calendar? How long is the list of projects you have to do around your home? How many times have you not started exercising or meditating or going to bed earlier because you just couldn’t find the time to make it happen? 

I’ve already written about all the feelings this virus is bringing up for us and I’ve agreed with you that these feelings are justified. It’s been a few weeks now and we don’t know how much longer this will go on. I challenge you to accept and move on. 

STOP. 

I am NOT suggesting that you should leave your house and start hanging out with all your friends again and giving everyone hugs and kisses. EVERYONE SHOULD STILL STAY THE FUCK AT HOME!

I am challenging you to accept what this means for your life right now and to start living again. We do not live in the past or in the future. Our entire life is in this moment and right now this is what our life is defined by. So are you going to live or are you going to get stuck in all these feelings and fears and just keep giving yourself excuses to wait for things to “get back to normal”. 

There are plenty of things to do at home. Plenty of ways to make yourself feel better. Plenty of ways to feel like you’re actually living instead of just waiting this thing out. You can come out of this as a better version of yourself, who has embraced this moment that you can not control, or you can come out of it with your only great accomplishment being a new ass-shaped dent in your couch.

YOU GET TO CHOOSE. This does not mean that you ignore your feelings of worry and fear. This means you acknowledge these feelings and you keep living. 

There are ways that we can act from home to impact the larger world around us too. Many of us were already concerned about so many of the larger scale issues that are now having light shined on them. Did you already think our health care system needed improving? Did you already realize that the American worship of capitalism was great for the few on the top of the pile but pretty shitty for the rest of us? It looks more like a modern feudal system than an open opportunity for all to succeed, doesn’t it? Were you already unhappy with the way our government was handling environmental issues? 

I have good news for you! You have a lot more available time now to shoot an email or write a letter or make a call to your Senators and Representatives. In between binge-watching Netflix, home-schooling your kids, and doing yoga on Zoom, you can get in touch with your elected officials and make sure they know what your priorities are. 

As long as we are alive, we should keep living. The dead can’t dance but we can. If you are living in fear that’s ok, but keep living. Don’t let all of this paralyze you. Live your life!