Kurt R.A. Giambastiani

I’m avoiding pretty much all topics today because, to be honest, if I allow myself to start in on what I see around me, I’m liable to just go off, and it’d be hard for me to stop. In fact, I have about five posts in my Drafts folder that I will never publish, long screeds filled with passion, rants on topics of which I’m sure you’ve already had a bellyful, and of which you do not need another helping.

So, instead of holding forth, I’m turning it around . . . Howzit goin’?

Seriously. How is it going with you? Are you in a location without restrictions, or like me, in hard lockdown? What’s the mood, where you are? If you’re self-isolating, what have you noticed about your routines, your family, your time? Feel free to share down in the comments.

My wife and I are in our fourth week of a fairly hard lockdown because (a) Seattle, and (b) she’s had respiratory issues all her life and has higher risks of complications from C19. As a result, I am the family “red shirt” (which is cool by me, as I’m in better health, and I’m better insured), the guy who goes to the shops and interfaces with The Outside.

We thought we’d be filling this at-home time with long-delayed projects—writing our books, learning a language, taking online art classes—but we simply do not have the mental capacity for any of that. We’re distracted, we’re sleepless, we’re on edge and easily upset, we’re fighting depression, and we get emotional over the silliest things. Luckily, we are not getting on each other’s nerves; all of our sturm and drang is directed outward, at the world, at . . . nope, I’m not going to go there.

What we have been able to do are small things. I’ve begun baking bread again, and have made tremendous strides in that regard. We’re making face masks, for ourselves, our at-risk neighbors, and local hospitals. She naps a lot, and I play video games. We bamboozle the cat (Portia is not amused by this). We take the occasional walk down to the ponds. We watch a lot of stand-up comedy, as laughter helps lift our mood. We send postcards to friends, to let them know that we’re thinking of them beyond social media.

It’s gratifying to see that the actions we Seattleites have taken—shutting things down and implementing physical distancing techniques—is helping flatten our local infection curve. We’ve cut the infection/transmission rate in half with these actions, and that has been helping our hospitals, which in turn saves lives.  But still, we are grieving, as I’m sure you are as well. Grieving the loss of lives near to us, grieving the loss of our normal patterns, grieving the passing of a World That Was. This last bit is perhaps the hardest to deal with; I don’t think we’re heading to an apocalypse or that Life After will be all doom and gloom, but I know that life will be different on the far side of this and will be different in meaningful, substantive ways. It’s possible that we will all come out of this better than when we went in, and if I pray for anything, I pray for that.

I pray that we learn, as a society, as a species, and become better as a result of this experience.

Stay safe. Stay healthy. Stay home.

k