American Currents: A Journal of the Plague Year . . . Week 4

I see I’ve gotten a little behind in gathering my thoughts and experiences related to our new reality. Here is Week 4 (I’ll upload Week 5 as well as more Portland Streetcar adventures shortly).

THURSDAY, APRIL 1

12:17 p.m. — I’m reading Milkman by Anna Burns for one of my book discussion groups.

It’s an odd coincidence that we picked this book — a Northern Ireland novel that won the 2018 Man Booker Prize, set in a vaguely authoritarian society (could be the past, could be the future; though there’s an occasional and startlingly specific reference to, say, a song by Alice Cooper that was a hit when I was in high school) . . .

. . . featuring religious/political enclaves and packs of roving paramilitaries . . . and we picked this book more than a month ago, well before we had any idea we would be sequestered in our homes, and planning to have our next meeting remotely by online e-conference. . . .

FRIDAY, APRIL 2

11:42 a.m. — When the governor of Georgia announces, on the first of April, that we “didn’t know” that the covid-19 bug could be transmitted by asymptomatic individuals “until the last 24 hours,” is he really saying:
1) I was so arrogant that I paid no attention to the news, medical authorities, and scientists for the past few weeks or months?
or

2) I didn’t pay attention to basic medicine and science in school?
(I guess it’s possible that both could be true. . . .)

12:03 p.m. — After many days of repeatedly calling both the toll-free line to the state Employment Department and the local number for the county branch office and getting nothing but a busy signal, I appear to have made it into hold-with-muzak-plus-periodic-recorded-welcomes Hell.

The last time I had to deal with the state Employment Department — following my sudden layoff in July 2009 as part of the last national recession — I remember waiting on hold for well over an hour at least once. I wager 50-50 odds it will disconnect automatically at some point.

FRIDAY, APRIL 3

10:13 a.m. — Okay, here we go again.
I THINK I’m in line to speak to a customer service rep at the state Employment Department because I’m hearing the same enervating muzak and recorded announcements as yesterday, before I inadvertently cut the line after an hour and 20 minutes on hold.

This time, I won’t make that mistake . . . and we’ll see how long it takes to effect a simple change of address.

12:11 p.m. — I’ve been on hold for more than two hours now with the Portland-area Unemployment Insurance contact center.

Frankly, I can’t imagine how all the other people waiting on hold manage to keep their sanity and stay on the line instead of going batty and hanging up to let me through, given the monotonous repetition of that insipid 8 bars of smooth jazz featuring a soprano sax that sounds suspiciously like Kenny G. . . .

4:46 p.m. -- At 7 this evening, I will join 9 other Portland actors in a live, streaming vocal performance of “Lights Go,” a brand-new short play by Ken Yoshikawa.

It is June 2020, and Malcolm has slipped into the Winningstad Theater with the help of stage and house manager Yuri to record a special, surprise video for his boyfriend Sam, still in isolation.

But Malcolm and Yuri stumble on some ghosts in the space: the characters from “The Journal of Ben Uchida” — the last production to appear on that stage — trapped in the theater when the show was abruptly canceled by the coronavirus pandemic in mid March.

A link will take you to the YouTube live page where, once the cast is gathered and ready, we will pop up in a live feed, and you can watch us read the script Ken composed less than five days after we lost our show in the middle of its run.

7:34 p.m. — We did it! If you missed our little livestream performance of Ken Yoshikawa’s “Lights Go” — a bit of salve for the pain for our lost show — you can watch it here.

8:39 p.m. — I’ve lost another 3 or 4 pounds! And it’s probably ALL MUSCLE MASS!

SATURDAY, APRIL 4

Feeling that my muscles had soften and my lungs steadily contracted over the preceding three weeks in solitary confinement (with spouse and dog), I took a two-hour, four- or five-mile walk and took photos of my neighborhood. So many pretty and odd sights I’d never seen before! I decided to make this a regular habit going forward.

4:23 p.m. — Strategies for taking a walk during a viral pandemic:
1. Aim for parking lots as much as possible; they have little to no traffic, and it’s easy to maintain 20 fee from just about anything and everyone.

2. Try to travel residential side streets. Again, there’s even less traffic than the sparsely populated arterials, so you can easily cross the street — even walk down the middle of it — and veer to one side or the other to stay clear of cars, cyclists, and other pedestrians.

And if you keep your eyes open, you may be rewarded for your efforts:

5:30 p.m. — Idle questions for a pandemic in which a 20-foot safe space between individuals in public has been recommended. . .

— Should I hold my breath in elevators?

— Should I keep an eye out for cars that have open windows, and dodge away from the street or hold my breath as they pass?

— Can dogs contract and transmit the virus?

SUNDAY, APRIL 5

1:46 p.m. — Other than a couple of long walks, today we took our biggest family outing in a month or more.

Over the past year, Pixie has gone blind in her left eye, which also developed an infection and glaucoma last spring that requires daily, multiple applications of medication. We cleared up the infection fairly quickly last summer, but the bulging eye has persisted — fortunately, without a concomitant rise in inner-eye pressure, according to the vet.

The canine ophthalmology specialist (one of only two in the Portland metro region, as I understand it) initially floated the eventuality of having to drain Pixie’s eye with a large needle, which would leave her overtly bereft of that eye, but we’re glad that hasn’t transpired.

Instead, our “Porta-puppy’s” left orbit bulges and waters, and sometimes looks a bit bloodshot — but appears to be holding steady under the drug treatments.

It had been three months since her last eye exam, so we decided not to cancel. Pixie LOVES to climb into her Sherpa® travel carrier, but she does NOT like the arrival at any of her vets’ offices. We try to walk her outdoors, just before going in, in an attempt to drain her excretory passages, but — catatonic with fear whenever anyone holds her but Carole or me — she often manages to poop on a vet or vet tech during her exam anyhow.

All things considered, the 12-mile trip to Clackamas via Zipcar (thoroughly wiped down with 91-percent isopropyl alcohol before we climbed in) went about as smoothly and quickly as it could have. Someone had evidently driven the vehicle just before our reservation, but thankfully, the gas tank was full, and I drove with latex gloves on.

Pixie forgave us instantly for her ordeal, as she always has.

MONDAY, APRIL 6

12:52 a.m. — When you walk through the deserted structures of Riverplace (the Strand Condo complex and The Douglas apartments) or along SW First near the Grant and Madison Towers of the American Plaza condo (at left) . . . and you see no cars on the street, few parked at the curb, and no other pedestrians . . .

. . . your mind readily drifts to familiar post-apocalyptic cityscapes such as the empty downtown of New York City in “The Day After Tomorrow” (1994), the instant ghost town of Piedmont, New Mexico in “The Andromeda Strain” and vacant highways and streets of “The Omega Man” (both 1971), or another version of deserted LA in “Five” (1951) . . .

. . . but the weird thing is, unlike those many imagined cataclysms, you know the buildings in front of you are teeming with life.

The people haven’t died. They haven’t gone away. They weren’t swept up by aliens or evacuated en masse to the coast or an overseas continent. They’re all pretty much still there — alive and in a kind of suspended yet lively animation. Still waiting to witness and experience the catastrophe that has happened . . . and not yet happened.

Somehow, reality has managed to diverge from anything our human imagination was able to devise.

9:33 a.m. — I KNEW IT!!!

Seriously, this takes me back the late 1980s when I was a newspaper reporter for a small daily in southern Oregon, and the first time our paper ran a photo off the wire that had been altered.

It was a night shot of an Iditarod musher below a bright full moon. Beautiful image, but a note attached to the caption acknowledged that either the moon had been digitally shifted or the dog team moved closer to the center of the frame to make a better composition.

Very minor thing, but I was quietly appalled, and I said so in an in-house comment to the rest of the staff. Operating as a news outlet, I argued, we had an obligation to present content to our readers in as accurate and unmanipulated a form as possible — otherwise, how could they continue to trust us as a reliable source of information?

Even if properly captioned — even when you explain such things to readers — some percentage will be confused, or fail to read the fine print, and will circulate the content as incorrectly interpreted. Worst of all, some will start to lose trust in the source.

The same thing happened with the cover photograph of a bestselling coffee table book that was published the very month I started that job at the newspaper, October 1987. It was titled A Day in the Life of America, the first of what would become a series of “one day” photo collections, and it the cover featured the silhouette of a cowboy on a horse, climbing a ridge with a fat crescent moon above them.

I read later that the horse and rider had been digitally shifted up the hillside to put them in closer proximity to the moon and a tree silhouetted on the left side of the frame. In other words, what the viewer sees is not exactly what was captured by the camera shutter.

At some point in that same general era, the big newspapers such as the New York Times and Washington Post started to run front-page stories labeled “news analysis”; typically thoughtful, fair-minded, and packed with thoughts and quotations from authorities, nevertheless they were no longer just news per se. They were the beginning of a creep into full-out opinion embedded in ostensible news reports . . . which I again found objectionable.
I would argue this was one of the many initial steps that led inexorably to the awful but undeniable reality of “fake news” — even if many of the stories labeled as such usually are not, while those offered in response frequently are.

10:58 a.m. — At last, I thought. The number of page views on my blog is climbing! All the writing I’ve done the past few weeks — thoughts on the pandemic and our new reality, memories of my play, collections of original puns — is finally getting readers!
But no . . . it’s the damn Russian bots showing up again.

Today was my second long walk, closer to eight miles to the southwest and back.

10:11 p.m. — A Facebook friend passed along a page from National Public Radio that contains graphs of projected peak date of deaths, highest number of deaths, and estimated total deaths, from the pandemic in each state. The data are generated by the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington, and apparently will be updated on a regular basis.

It predicts Oregon will peak on April 24 (Carole’s birthday) with 5 daily deaths, and an ultimate total of 172 for our state. We’re currently at 1,132 positive covid-19 tests, and 29 fatalities.

I have a powerful skepticism toward anything resembling false hope . . . but I yearn for this to be accurate.

TUESDAY, APRIL 7

12:22 a.m. — I’ve observed increasing behavior over the past few weeks that displays disdain for traffic regulations and social norms, such as
— a higher ratio of drivers racing red lights and rolling through stop signs
— a pool of (what I presume is) pet urine in the elevator lobby

I do not, on the other hand, believe we have descended into utter social chaos that necessitates my purchase of a firearm — or that what I’m about to describe is a signal of its imminence.
NEVERTHELESS, during the nearly five years we’ve lived here, the glass recyling bins have always stood in the same corners of the trash and recycling room, just inside the door to the left, and at the far corner to the right, and they are clearly labeled “glass only” . . . plus, the other recycling dumpsters are RIGHT NEXT TO THEM, so . . .
. . . why are there pizza boxes, aluminum cans, plastic bottles, and paper milk cartons in the glass recycling bin tonight?
It’s such a simple thing. Why are some of my neighbors, somehow, incapable of handling this correctly?

8:28 a.m. — My blog’s diagnostics are getting overrun by the Russian bots. Below are the totals for the past week as of this morning.

They’re not even looking at my recent good work. They could have targeted my commentaries on The Beatles and the movie “Yellow Submarine” . . . or my “non-interview” of Harlan Ellison or a memory of seeing him finish writing and reading one of his stories . . . my tale of how I met my wife, and our marriage with “separate honeymoons” . . . a sentimental favorite titled “In Praise of Oregon Rain” . . . or even my analytical pieces about Mark Judge and the Kavanaugh nomination, Colin Kaepernick’s kneel, how to deal with the current President . . . or my most-viewed (though maybe not most read) piece, “An Open Letter to Second Amendment Enthusiasts.”

But no. Instead, the numbers appear to be climbing due to single hits on some of the oldest pages, going back to whether to shop on Black Friday (Nov. 27, 2009), whether the Miss America pageant can survive (March 8, 2010), and the advisability of a boycott of Arizona for its passage of a racial-profiling immigration bill (May 18, 2010).

I’m NOT going to link those. The last two aren’t even my writing. This was back when a panel of commentators wrote for this blog; I pretty much took it over as sole author after 2011.

3:12 p.m. — The weird situation we’re in — shortages of toilet paper and paper towels, then bananas, then antibacterial wash, then coffee filters, then orange juice . . . the strictly controlled admittances to supermarkets . . . limits on items-per-customer — suddenly reminds me of a comic strip I saw in the early 1970s, during “stagflation” under Nixon:

The Wizard of Id points his wand at a pile of dirt on the floor of his lab and yells “DIRT INTO GOLD!” (zotz) and a grocery cart containing bags of food appears in its place.

In the final panel, the spirit who floats in a puff of smoke above a vat in the lab comments, “You can’t get much closer than that.”

5:56 p.m. — I managed to get into the phone waiting queue with the Employment Department a few minutes after 4:00 p.m. after calling the number dozens of times throughout the day.

I laid the phone on the kitchen counter with speakerphone activated while we chopped a fresh salad and heated soup. The ghastly 8 bars of Kenny G-style soprano sax/smooth jazz alternated with recorded messages about “a high volume of calls” and how to change your address online . . . while we sat through dinner.

Carole must have gotten sick of this, because after dinner she dove into the filing cabinets and managed to dig up a March 2012 letter from the department that actually included my 14-digit customer ID number (counting several periods and a dash), assigned more than a decade ago . . . so I was able to change my address online and hang up on more than an hour and a half of that mindless babble.

That makes this a successful Day 27 of the Great Coronavirus Isolation Exercise.