Category Archives: Blogs' Archive

The pattern is continuous
so it should not seem strange
the only constant in our lives
is that things always change
we can’t go back to normal
and we never will because
there’s no such thing as normal
and, in fact, there never was

I wrote that today in response to a post about what life will be like after the quarantine. In fact, I think it will go back to pretty close to normal, if you’re defining normal as the way things were before. There are some inevitable changes, like for instance everybody knows a situation like this can happen, and people will be a bit more paranoid and maybe stocked up with dried foods.
But there’s a truth in the poem that goes beyond the current situation. You can’t step in the same river twice, you can never truly go home again. I saw an ad for Joe Biden today, which contained not one bit of policy, or even one bit of Biden speaking. It was all voice over, and it was all platitudes, but it seems the big issue he is running on is a return to normal.
Well, normal’s not good enough. Normal sucks. Normal is a world in which some people own yachts and private planes and others are struggling to make their monthly rent. Normal is a world in which we drop million dollar bombs from billion dollar aircraft on people who make nearly nothing, just because the weapons manufacturers need to stay in business. Normal is a world in which we are burning the rain forest rather than saving it, building oil pipelines rather than wind turbines and solar panels, and still sending most of our garbage to landfills.
Normal is not only an unattainable thing (because the river keeps flowing and every time you step into it, it is a completely new river), it is an undesirable thing. We need to embrace change.
Or die.

I must confess, I was a bit skeptical about the world wide reaction to the Corona virus. I was one of those people saying “Eh, it’s just the flu, deal with it.” Not so much that I would buck social standards, or the law, but enough that I would quietly grumble about it, or maybe make an occasional sarcastic comment.
But, a lot of people are dying of it, so I’ve come around to the view that it’s best to stay mostly at home, and to wear a mask and maintain distance when I do go out. Here, it’s the law, so there’s that as well.
Apparently, a lot of people in the U.S. are not being so compliant. A lot of people are out having protests, saying the lockdown (when you say quarantine like that, it sounds so much more ominous) should be ended, and of course they are waving guns around and being big Trump supporters as well.
There are a couple of ways this could work out. Maybe, if it is a lot of overblown hysteria, there will be no, or very few deaths directly attributable to these protests. From the photos, a lot of them are young and healthy, so maybe they’ll be all right. If they go home and infect their elderly relatives, the causation will be less clear.
If it’s as highly contagious and deadly as they are saying, quite a few of them will die.
In all likelihood, there will be anecdotal evidence working both ways, and people will come out of this crisis with the same views they had when they went in. People are like that.
I’m not rooting for the Corona virus, and I don’t really want large numbers of these people to die. They are idiots, but they are not the cause of the world’s problems. However, somebody had to step up and be the test group, and I’m glad it was them.

My aunt Bernice, my mother’s older sister, would have been 107 in October. And she liked counting her age like that, she was like a 6 year old looking forward to being 7. She was totally lucid, and witty, right up to the end. We often used to say that she was immortal, that she would outlast us all, and I think in a way we’d started to believe it. This morning, at 10:30 a.m. New Jersey time, she died.
We don’t know if it was Covid related , but it doesn’t really matter. She was 106 years old. Eventually the body gives out.
I’m very proud of the fact that she made it to 106, I always tell everybody about her who will listen, because that’s a family brag, but she was also witty, and funny, and outgoing and loving. She wrote poems, she wrote stories, she wrote songs, some very funny songs, she made puppets and gave performances.
I remember the story of the Princess Shklooby Blootch, that she read to us as children. We thought it was hysterical just because of the name. I read it once as an adult, and it was a bit more than that. She was a rebel princess, didn’t like any of her suitors, and she had a vegetable garden if I remember right, and then she married a gentle prince, who was a vegetarian but he had a large herd of cattle to satisfy her appetite for big, juicy steaks with the blood squirting out of them like fountains.
A bit ahead of her time, really.
She was a fun aunt. I will miss her.

Just watched a couple of episodes of The Crown, which I’m not recommending necessarily, unless you’re into that sort of thing. I’m liking it O.K., though, as a bit of a history lesson, and it’s one of the few programs my wife and I can agree on.
She refuses to watch anything with robots, aliens, time travel, alternate dimensions, or superheroes, which pretty much rules out all of my favorites right there, and I don’t care for her crime shows – she likes the really dark, miserable ones, preferably set in a seacoast village, and I don’t like any of the Czech soap operas, either, and she watches them all.
Anyway, re The Crown, it’s mostly a lot of people standing or sitting and looking miserable for long periods of time. It totally reinforces my opinion that rich people have too much money, and most of them are arrogant jerks without any sympathy at all for the average classes. But the last episode I watched was quite interesting, and focused on JFK’s visit to London. Apparently, Elizabeth was bitterly, irrationally jealous of Jackie’s popularity and good looks. Also, the Kennedy’s did not come across looking like the perfect couple, exactly.
The whole show is a peek behind the curtains. This was a peek behind the curtains at something that was interesting, and intense.

I am slipping badly on the blog regularity, from last thing at night to “Screw it, I’ll write it in the morning,” and then since we’re in quarantine anyway there’s no pressure to actually finish in the morning and it slips back into the evening but if it goes too long I actually miss a day and that is bad, very bad.
It’s hard to pick a topic though, because I really don’t have anything special to say about Covid-19. It’s a disease, I think pretty much everybody in the world is against it. We’re sad about the people who’ve died, we are sympathetic when anyone’s sick, we all agree that doctors and nurses are great people.
The only other topic is politics and it seems to have already solidified into the “turd sandwich vs. ground glass” argument that got shouted back and forth non-stop in 2016. The conversation has become dull.
Nobody’s talking about universal health care, nobody’s talking about saving the environment, nobody’s talking about ending private prisons, or legalizing marijuana, or absolving student debt.
And they probably won’t be, for the next 4 years.