Worldwide cases top 415,000. U.S. cases at 50,000, with 685 deaths, climbing fast, especially in NYC, where Governor Cuomo (who’s emerged as the nation’s new “Daddy’s Home,” in the vacuum left by our trainwreck leadership) now pleading for respirators from the federal government, along with enough hospital beds for the estimated 140,000 cases expected to hit the city at the rapidly-approaching apex.
Trump still hasn’t enacted the Defense Production Act. States and cities are now begging him on live television for help. He’s now, in defiance of all health experts, talking about “opening the economy” again before Easter. I don’t know if it’s possible for me to hate someone more than I hate him. It’s made worse by being a helpless hate.
The fact that we live in a country divided has always worried me, but it’s begun to feel personally dangerous. If, for example, hypothetically speaking, your boss was a vocal Trump supporter, and Trump gave the all clear to reopen for business, would that boss, in defiance of every public health official on the planet, require you to come back to the office? Would you go? At what point do you go to war?
I’ll try to take comfort in the state of Massachusetts, and a governor who more or less has the smarts to prevent that boss from doing so.
Without gym, fresh air, AA meetings or sex, my moods shift wildly throughout the days. With the future looking like the edge of a cliff, where do set your faith? Smooth Operator got me crying last night as I again inched down the thorny imagined path of lost job and homelessness. “I have your back,” he told me. I don’t actually believe that I’ll lose my home (job loss may be likely), but the fact that I cried at his reassurance tells me that under my usually calm veneer is a roiling pot of panic.
Every day I shove that pot onto the back burner to clear my head and get shit done. But it boils up sometimes, like when my bonehead GP wanted me to come in for a consultation and labwork for a routine prescription he could phone in. Requiring me to come into a healthcare setting for a non-urgent task right now just seems pointlessly cruel, especially for a doctor. I went around him and got what I needed from some random online clinic, fuming as I clicked away on the trackpad.
Drove to the drugstore through traffic that was light for rush hour but not apocalyptically empty. The pharmacy had set a card table in front of the counter to give the techs extra distance. I swiped and pressed the keys of a credit card machine like it was a nuclear device. They had tape marks on the floor throughout the store, which looked to be about six feet apart, probably a guide for keeping distance from fellow shoppers. I thought about confirming this hypothesis with the store manager on the way out, but we’re at a point now where you have to factor in the risk of a mundane human interaction (do you have the virus? do I?), so instead I slipped out in silence and sanitized my hands before they touched the steering wheel. Hit the grocery store on the way home, with its Soviet-level shelves, another radioactive credit card machine and the bag boys asking me to stuff my own bags. The woman behind me in line crowded me, and I tried to inch away, keeping mental track of every surface I touched, willing my hands away from my face. I moved like a new, clumsy character. Navigating it all felt like playing the tutorial level of some role playing game on PS4, learning the alien ropes of a treacherous new world.
Came home to news that playwright Terrence McNally, who wrote Love! Valour! Compassion! had died from COVID-19 complications. He’d survived the AIDS epidemic, COPD and lung disease, but passed away at a hospital in Sarasota, where I’d gone to college. He left behind a husband.
As my bud Tiny Dancer put it, “Why couldn’t it have been Ivanka instead?”