Quarantine Chronicles, Part 1

Holy shitballs. If you'd asked me three months ago where I thought the world was going to be in April 2020, or what my life was going to be like, or what major events might transpire in the first part of the year, I don't think I'd have gotten anything right. Coming into 2020, the word of the year that N and I had chosen over sushi one night in December was "exhilarating" - we'd both believed that this was going to be a really positive year. While there are still eight months for things to turn around, I don't think I've ever been quite so wrong.

For the last four months, the world has been under various degrees of lockdown and quarantine as a result of a new virus which first appeared in China in December 2019. Roughly 2.7 million people worldwide have been infected^[1] and almost 200,000 people have died so far, with over 51,000 dead in the US and about 500 or so in Colorado. Most states have enacted and still continue to adhere to some measure of a stay-at-home order that's been in place for the past several weeks, and while some states are now loosening restrictions to some degree or another, at least here in Denver, the quarantine remains in place until 08 May. Businesses that are considered "essential" have been allowed to remain open (and what qualifies as "essential" varies on a state-by-state basis) and everything else is closed.

The stock marked dropped like a rock back in March, demand for air travel has dropped 95%, concerts, sporting events, and festivals have all been cancelled or postponed, and you can no longer go out to eat or go to the gym. We're all being told that when we do go out for such things as groceries or other such essentials that we should wear masks (in some cities / states they've required this) and that we should stay at least six feet away from other people to reduce the risk of transmitting the virus. Congress has passed several economic relief bills to the tune of, I believe, over a trillion dollars, and both federal and state government even extended the traditional April 15th income tax filing deadline until June 15th or July 15th (varies by state).

Work proceeds at laboratories around the world on various clinical trials of existing drugs that might have some effect on this new coronavirus, as does work on possible vaccines, but up to this point, nothing has been shown to be effective. Basically, if you get infected, you're either going to be fine and just have a mild illness (or experience nothing at all) or you might croak, and while they've found that most of the people who have died have been old or have had some other underlying medical condition, it's ultimately a crapshoot as to what will or won't happen to you.

And while all of this is going on, Donald J. Trump puts on the most ill-timed display of presidential ineptitude in modern history. In the beginning, he didn't take the outbreak seriously and wasted valuable time that the US could have been using to prepare for the coming pandemic. Just recently, he suggested that people inject themselves with Lysol as a means to get rid of the virus, and not surprisingly, some folks actually took him seriously. He's touted unproven drugs (well, to be more accurate, drugs which have ultimately proven ineffective) as possible treatments, blamed the whole thing on China to one degree or another, and probably will end up firing the only scientists that are still left on the coronavirus task force before this thing is through. There have been issues with test kits being both insufficient in number and inaccurate, shortages of ventilators and protective equipment for healthcare workers, and as is usually the case in America, the rich and famous were able to get tested for COVID-19 much earlier than John Q. Public.

Holy shitballs. But wait, there's more.

Priss is, I think, starting to really feel her age. I took her to the vet a couple weeks ago because her purring had started sounding kinda weird, and the more she purrs, the more likely it is to turn into a cough or even sometimes throwing up. It sucks getting old, whether you are human or cat. The trip to the vet was a shitty experience in itself - they weren't allowing people into the building, so I had to basically meet the vet tech in the parking lot, hand over my cat, and then wait for them to call me while I sat there in my car, and I could hear Priss' meowing through one of their open windows. Even in the absence of all of this virus shit, cat sickness would stress me out; she's been with me for over 19 years - two marriages, two divorces, three different states, the list goes on.

My job has finally pissed me off^[2] to the point where, if it weren't for this whole virus business, I'd probably quit. I did well enough in the IPO that even after paying C her divorce settlement and a ridiculous amount of income taxes, while I might not be able to fully "retire" - I could certainly take multiple years off and do something else if I were so inclined. Except that travel is largely impossible right now and everything that I was looking forward to this summer has been cancelled. Even ski season ended months earlier than it should have. So, I keep working - simply to stave off the boredom. I might be pissed at the company, but the work itself is still interesting, and what else am I going to do all day? Might as well keep collecting that paycheck - at least I have a job where I can work remotely (which I was already doing anyway) and don't really have much to worry about in the way of possibly getting laid off, which is a lot more than I can say for millions of other people right now.

In yet another sign that the world is ending, I got an email out of the blue from S, the first person I ever had a relationship with, over 25 years ago. We haven't spoken in years, and in terms of bad breakups, I'd say that ours was beyond dumpster fire. Back in the day, she did some shitty shit to me, and I did some shittier shit to her, and it all just ended very badly. The fact that we've been exchanging emails these past couple of weeks and are trying to build a friendship is, like I said at the top of the paragraph, another sign that the world is ending. Despite the things that went down, I never held a grudge against her or felt any ill will towards her, but I also never expected that we'd be talking again.

Much of the above all came to a head during the week I had to take the cat to the vet, plus I found out about several deaths of people I knew or those connected to them (not all of them were a result of the virus), and so I was in a pretty unpleasant mood that week. Then the girlfriend starts giving me grief about how we hadn't had sex in the last few times we hung out and how her needs weren't being met. My response to her was basically along the lines of, "that's just too damn bad." That was a rough week, and it took a massive effort on my part to hold my shit together, so this was last thing I was interested in hearing about, especially when she started trying to make the whole situation all about her, even after I'd told her repeatedly that it wasn't. So this didn't exactly make my week any better. You take care of yourself so that you can take care of others, and when you don't do that, everyone loses. Today actually marks six months of us dating. How much longer will this relationship last? I don't know. I'm not optimistic, but it's less about personality differences and more about me coming to conclusions as to the kind of relationship I want to be in, and I don't think this is it. I guess we'll see what happens.

Oh, and I bought a new car. Two months after purchase, it still doesn't even have 1000 miles on it, because, well, there's nowhere to go. I managed to get in a ski trip, but otherwise it's just been driving to G's house and back a couple times every other week. I'd probably be a whole lot more excited about my new wheels if I could actually wheel on them.

I think that brings us up to the present, more or less. I've been thinking a lot about what the future is going to look like and the impact that all of this trauma is going to have on our collective psyche. This shit isn't going to be over anytime soon. In some ways I'm probably better equipped than most for extended periods of isolation, because I don't like people to begin with, and I enjoy being alone, but the ways in which I typically would offset my lack of social contact have all been taken away. The boredom is, at times, crushing - I can't read all the time. I worry about my cat. My mom says that she worries about me, but I told her that as long as Priss is OK, I'll be fine. If something happens to her in the midst of all of this coronapanic, then I'll probably lose my shit.

Anyhow, this post is basically just background information. There are a lot of different ideas I want to explore over the next set of posts, assuming that I actually take the time to write them. Hey, it's something to do, right?