Quarantine Bingo

Print this out and play along at home!  Or take a screen shot, or whatever.  You do you, just don't, you know, use a marker on your actual computer screen because you have already forgotten how to be a functional human being.

Syllabus #46

Hey hi hello, have you, like me, forgotten how to interact with humans outside of your personal quarantine pod?  It's going to take years to undo this damage.  I'm going to need occupational therapy to relearn how to respond appropriately to small talk, but I suspect I'm not the only one.

Yesterday, Andy and I went on a 5 mile urban hike because what the hell else can you do when it's 80 degrees and sunny, and every other asshole in the city rushes the outdoor spaces until the trails and greenways look like a goddamn Soviet bread line.  More like socialist distancing, amirite?

Anyway, it was a fine outing.  Sweaty, but fine.  Until we were just around the corner from our building and some disheveled, lanky, middle-aged man with Crazy Eyes walked past us and said hello.  We did the do not engage with crazy nod-and-wave and kept walking.  A few seconds later he calls back to us, "Excuse me, are you in a hurry?  I don't want anything, I just want to show you something!"

Yes, so sorry good sir, we're late for our not getting murdered appointment!  I am so sorry, we don't have time to look at the switchblade, dead baby bird, timeshare, or penis you would like to show us, but maybe next time.

Anyone else think now would be a good time for emo bands to make a comeback?

Stop everything you're doing and forget about the world and watch this.  This is the only time I laughed all week.

Relevant and practical calculations. How much TP do you really need?

It's Comrade Britney, Bitch

Sweet dreams are made of these.

The headline alone is worth the price of admission.  'Some Jabroni Brought the Coronavirus to a Kentucky "Coronavirus Party"'

Love in the Time of Corona.

This will be old news by the time I publish this post, but how RIIIIICH. 

This is horrific.  Stay home, please. 

Do you need a break?  I feel like I get this on a very deep level while also having no idea what is going on.

How long can this last?

David Sedaris bringing some levity to the situation.


Listening:

Terry Gross knocked it out of the park with her Fresh Air interviews earlier this week.  Her home quarantine interviews of Marc Maron and Max Brooks are on fleek, as no one says these days.

Watching:

Tiger King on Netflix.  If you. haven't started watching it already, do you really have an excuse?  We all know you're not busy.

Analog Reading:

The Great Alone by Kristin Hannah.  Holy hell.  This might be the only book I've read recently that represents a greater hellscape than our current world.  I've been reading to escape, but I was honestly glad to finish this book and come back to reality.  Maybe in another context I would have enjoyed it, but right now, no thank you.  I couldn't stop reading because I was invested enough in the story to need to find out what happened to the characters, but I hated this book.  It was deeply upsetting.  Also, the dialogue was trash.  It was impossible to imagine an actual human saying almost any of the words out loud.

Such a Fun Age by Kiley Reid.  This was the perfect antidote to follow a book that I thought I might legitimately need therapy after reading.  I'm like totally fine now, thanks Kiley Reid, you're the MVP of this week.  This book takes a topic that is serious and real and heavy, that is often portrayed through the lens of truly tragic or traumatic events and makes it...fun?  It grapples with issues of race, class, and privilege in everyday life, through a serious but ultimately low-stakes scenario where no one dies or truly has their life ruined.  There's space for humor and lightness without trivializing the issues at hand, and the characters and dialogue feel natural and real (especially in contrast to the above).  5 out of 5 stars, can't wait for Kiley Reid to write another book. 

An American Marriage by Tayari Jones.  Just started this one, so it's too early to comment, but I'm into it so far.

Syllabus #45

There is a cruel irony plaguing teachers in the midst of our extended corona-cation.  No, it has nothing to do with the scramble to conduct online learning.  I don't know about the rest of you educators, but whenever I'm not working, I luxuriate in the ability to go to the bathroom whenever the urge strikes, and sometimes when it doesn't, just because I can.  But now, I've been robbed of that carefree pee experience.  I can't appreciate that simple pleasure because every time I go, I'm one square closer to running out of toilet paper.

And, not that there are winners or losers here, but I think teachers are going to come out and take a bow when this is all over.  Everyone trying to homeschool their kids will be like, okayokay we get it, teachers have a really hard job and should be paid way more.  And teachers are like, yea, dudes, we know, andplusalso our immune systems have been roundhouse-kicking your kids' germs in the face for years.  We've trained for this.

look to the skies

So uh, some of us have had a lot of free time lately.  What have you been pretending to skim in between alternating bouts of screaming into a pillow and stress-eating?

Millennials, this is the moment we become adults.  When you have to get on the phone and scream at your parents to stop doing some (heretofore innocuous) activity, in the same way they would have screamed at you after learning you and a few friends once walked barefoot down the Ben Franklin Parkway at midnight to hang out on the Art Museum steps, you are now an adult.  (Hi Mom, that was like 17 years ago and I know better now.  I would totally wear shoes.)

This guy


She would like to speak to the manager.


"What solace do you think Butt Boy can offer people in these troubled times?"

I'm going to assume all of us need this advice right now.  I went to therapy on Monday, the 16th, against my better judgment.  The tornado caused me to reschedule a long-standing appointment and I didn't want to cancel again.  I wish I hadn't wasted that hour of my possibly very short life.  The uncertainty of the future was a convenient way to not schedule another appointment with a therapist I've realized is wildly unhelpful.  For someone whose whole job is listening to people, she did an awful lot of staring at her phone and paying zero attention while I was talking.  Two minutes after I tried to convey that I AM FREAKING THE FUCK OUT about coronavirus because of my parents and very elderly, 2-pack- a-day-smoking grandmother, she asks me if my grandmother is still living.   Then I tell her about my survivor's guilt following the tornado and my concern for all the local businesses and their employees in my neighborhood, and larger fear of the societal ramifications of this virus with so many workers unable to earn income, and she asks how I can enjoy my time off and treat it like a vacation.  DID YOU LISTEN TO A GODDAMN WORD I JUST SAID?  STOP PLAYING CANDY CRUSH ON YOUR PHONE DURING MY THERAPY SESSION, SUSAN!

Can you even imagine??  That is the opening sequence of a dystopian novel.  That is some Austin Powers being reanimated and finding out Liberace was gay type of stuff.

I would put this book on hold at my local library, but, you know, it's closed, so that's just one more thing that has disappeared from my life.

Ugh.  All she had to say was "people are more defensive about their hangovers" and I had some very unpleasant flashbacks to a morning-after-a-wedding flight.  That's not remotely the point of the article but all I could think about while reading it was how I threw up in the airport bathroom, somehow miraculously passed out for the duration of the PHL-GSP flight, and believed I had rallied until I made it to the Trader Joe's parking lot on the way home and had to slam the car into park, fling open the door, and puke.  Then I thought I was really fine, until I was paying for my groceries and had to run out the door with my cart, duck down beside my car, and puke.  My life choices are unassailable.  I am a woman of class and dignity.

Analog Reading:

A bunch!

I finally had time to read last month's Oprah magazine, and started in on the current issue, which just solidifies my belief that Oprah is a visionary:

'MO money, 'MO problems.

Finished On Writing by Stephen King.  It felt like solid advice.

Read A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius by Dave Eggers.  It took me a while to get through this, because it was heartbreaking.  Though it was written with a level of detachment and wit that made it easier to digest, it was still maybe not the best time to read a book involving both of someone's parents dying within weeks of one another.  I appreciated the liberties he took with stream of consciousness, dialogue, timelines, and composite characters in what was still largely a work of nonfiction.

Devoured Weather by Jenny Offill.  If there was ever a perfect book for me, presented to me at the perfect time, this book is it.  I've had this book on hold for weeks, and it finally came in on the very last day the library was open before everything shut down.  The main character is a librarian obsessed with the collapse of society, and the rest of it is also perfect.

Starting The Great Alone by Kristin Hannah.  Seems like another right time, right place kinda book.  Thank gawd for the library's OverDrive ebooks, because I might actually blow through my massive stack of print books before this is all over.

Life Lesson With Larry: A Cautionary Tale

Our creative writing homework one week included the prompt "lessons you learned from your father."  I cackled when I saw that one, and thought, hold my beer.  Except, as you will see, maybe don't.

Life Lessons With Larry: A Cautionary Tale

The ideal parent leads by example, demonstrating good habits and unimpeachable strategies for navigating life and relationships.  Good parents, as in most of them, try their best but have their faults. “Do as I say, not as I do,” is often their modus operandi.

And then there’s my dad.  Larry led by example, alright.  He was a walking, talking example of every page you should skip in the Choose Your Own Adventure book of Life.  Did he have his share of demons? Absolutely, yes. Was he, himself, a monster? No. At least his legions of friends didn’t think so.  Problem was, he met all his buddies through their mutual friends, Johnny Walker, Jack Daniels, and even, in leaner times, Evan Williams.

I know, I know, name dropping is so gauche.  I only tell you this so you understand that my dad had a lot of friends, and some of them were powerful figures.  With friends like those, demanding so much of your time and your money, too, you don’t have a lot of either left over for your family.

But it’s fine, it’s totally fine.  When he wasn’t disappearing for days a time and reappearing with stitches in his face sustained in a little tumble on a Las Vegas casino escalator, he did manage to impart some solid fatherly wisdom.  Larry was a man of few words, though. He was kind of cryptic, a cipher, an enigma wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in mystery and reeking of scotch. He wasn’t religious or even spiritual. He called himself a realist.  I believe he fell somewhere between pessimism and nihilism.

Take his go-to words of comfort, meant to be a salve to any misfortune or complaint.  “Life sucks and then you die.” Uplifting, no? I doubt he ever read any Hobbes, unless, wait, did Hobbes have a column in Playboy?  But he really bought into the whole, “life is nasty, brutish, and short” mentality. Not exactly the kind of parental platitude that you’d embroider on a pillow or weave into the theme of a didactic children’s book, but that’s what’s so refreshing about it.  Instead of catastrophizing every scraped knee, bombed test, failed marriage, or incarcerated child, just dismiss your struggles as yet another meaningless non-event in your meaningless non-existence.

Because variety is the spice of life (even a nasty, brutish one) sometimes he would switch things up and pepper conversations with a dash of, “You’ll have that.”  Among his friends, of both the bottled and corporeal variety, I’m sure he coarsened this to “Shit happens,” but the sentiment was the same. Setbacks are a part of life and there’s no sense in sugar-coating it.  You’ve heard of helicopter parents, who micromanage their children’s affairs? And bulldozer parents, who clear a smooth path, demolishing any obstacles that stand in their child’s way? Let’s say he was more of a Mad Max War Rig, barreling down the highway of life focused on his own mission while occasionally tossing debris in my path.  Also, frequently driving off-road, at least until that resulted in a suspended license. 

Where the aforementioned phrases paint a picture of Larry’s philosophical leanings, his most frequently used bon mot truly encapsulates his essence.  “Smoke ‘em if you got ‘em,” is not something you see on many, or any, tombstones, but I’m still kicking myself over that missed opportunity.  What a way to live! Nihilism and hedonism often go hand in hand, because everything is nothing and nothing matters, and any one of us could drop dead at any moment.  You can’t take it with you, so get your meaningless kicks while you can. If there is pleasure to be seized, no matter how temporary, seize it now. Remember how much life sucked just 5 minutes ago?  So go ahead, smoke that cigarette. Hell, chain-smoke 3, in the car, with the windows up and your child in the passenger seat. Are you thirsty? Here, scotch is basically water, and friends don’t let friends drive dehydrated.  

All that sounds like a horror show.  That wasn’t a saccharine ode to my dear old dad who molded me into the well-adjusted, stable adult I am today.  It’s all there in the title, though. This was a cautionary tale. Don’t be like Larry. I know it, now you know it.  I resisted the influence, and thankfully, my optimist mom gets all the credit for warping me into the delightful human I am today.  But yea, shit’s dark, and maybe I’ve bummed you out, but you’ll have that.

Flash Fiction - Something Ugly, a Plan, Food

Flash fiction based on mystery prompts is tremendous fun to write. If you're isolated at home with any other creative people, turn it into a party game! It can be a literary exquisite corpse, if you will. Turn it into a drinking game! Have a celebratory drink every time you complete a round without anyone using the following terms: coronavirus, COVID-19, pandemic, quarantine, social distancing, apocalypse.


Something Ugly

The siding was sea-foam green, at least after we gave it a good power washing in the spring. It wasn’t a hideous color for say, a throw pillow, but it was a curious choice for an entire house.  Of course, this was Idaho, and there was no accounting for taste, or property value. We paid cash and we moved in in a hurry, right before the winter descended on the panhandle like a straitjacket, stark white and restrictive.

A Plan

The plan was to fix it up, live there for a year or two, and sell it for a profit.  Problem was, our savings were gone and neither of us had ever swung a hammer, much less flipped a house.  The closest we came was a long, drunken night watching HGTV in a Montana motel room, but that’s how it all started.  To this day, I can’t hear the words “open concept” without feeling a bit of bile rise in my throat.

Food

The first part of the house we tried to reno was the kitchen, for the “return on investment,” another phrase I can no longer stomach.  We gutted the old appliances and sold them on Craigslist, only to find out the Home Depot would have to special order new ones to fit the proportions of our tiny 1950s kitchen.  Neither of us were cooks, it was no great hardship at first, but I sure wish we would have had a drunken night of watching Food Network before we acted in such haste.

Syllabus #44

We're in a lot of trouble.  What else is there to say?  It's like we bitched and moaned so much about January and then February turned to March and said, "Yo, I dare you..." and March said "HOLD MY BEER."

This sign is all of us

This. Is. Terrifying.

Cottage-core - can you handle it?  Twee escapism sounds like a generally insufferable idea but also exactly perfect right now.

Do you want your colleagues to actually read your emails?  Especially now that the entire world works from home and do other humans even exist?  Don't waste your time with this article, just make your emails funny.  Not all of them, just some of them.  Intermittent rewards. 

This is us.  We have a decent amount of space in this apartment, actually, but trying to store a Costco-sized quantity of anything in my kitchen would be like trying to stick a Real Doll in a Barbie Dream House.  Vulgar and physically impossible.  Also, we're in that limbo space of knowing we need to do the socially responsible thing and avoid contact with other people, while not really fearing for our own well-being given our age and general good health.

Slow clap, Katie Porter.


Stay safe out there on those streets, man, you're doing the lord's work.

Relatable.  I still feel like I can't justify a lot of expenses.  I get my hair cut more often than I used to, but still 3 or maybe 4 times a year at most, and an inventory of my clothes and shoes would reveal a disturbing quantity of items that would be old enough to vote if they were humans. 

Did you hoard?  What are you going to do with 150 rolls of TP?  Are you such a terrible home cook that you're worried about giving your whole family explosive diarrhea now that you can't go out to restaurants for a while?

Bottom line, stay the hell home.  Just stay home for once in your life.  There's no FOMO.  Nobody's missing out, we're all at home in the same pajamas we've been wearing for the last 72 hours, greasy hair and no makeup, it's a sight.  Call grandma on the phone, don't go dragging your disease vector ass over to her house.  It's like Little Red Riding Hood, only it's a deadly respiratory disease that will follow you through the woods and hop in grandma's bed. 

Analog Reading:

A lot, obviously.  I'm trying to pace myself with the amount of time we are likely to have on our hands over the coming weeks.  I don't want to end up like that guy in the Twilight Zone, finally making it to the place with all the books and then shattering my eyeglasses. 

Finished Caucasia by Danzy Senna.  I enjoyed it.  It explored the complexities of racial identity in America, which is a topic that I want to understand better.  Some of the family dynamics were similar to those in Margaret Wilkerson Sexton's The Revisioners.  In both books, the main character is a woman with one white parent and one black parent, and also a rich white grandmother with questionable motives.  It was interesting to read those two books almost consecutively and draw comparisons.

Read The Captain and the Glory by Dave Eggers.  Brilliant satire.  I read it in one sitting, and started out laughing, but by the end I wanted to cry.  The satire is perfectly on point and the story is ABSURD but the absurdity was achieved by basically taking our present political situation and changing some nouns.  It is so thinly veiled it may as well be Saran-wrapped.  Read it, you won't be sorry.

Reading Stephen King's On Writing.  There's a reason this guy sells millions of books.  I haven't actually read much of his fiction, but he has some clearly articulated ideas about the craft, and he is an engaging storyteller.

Flash Fiction - Madness, Greed

It seems we all have a lot of time on our hands right now.  Are you still working or are you socially distancing yourself?  Does social distancing fundamentally change the way you live, or have you always been a frigid introvert who can't stand to be within an arm span of most other humans? 

Are you binging Love is Blind on Netflix?  Or are you down to clown with something even trashier?  I'm planning to share some of the pieces I worked on in my creative writing class.  All two of you reading this who are not Russian spam bots are thrilled.  Some will be timed exercises we completed in class, others will be longer pieces completed outside of class. 

This first piece was an experiment in flash fiction.  The instructor passed around a little box with writing prompts on folded slips of paper.  We had to select two, but were allowed to look at only one before the timer began and we had to start writing.  After 5 minutes, we had to stop, look at the second prompt, and use the remaining 5 minutes to shift the focus of the story to incorporate the new prompt. 

Madness

He bit the nurse on the soft flesh of her upper arm.  It was an act of curiosity, of impulse. He was not in the midst of a struggle, she was not restraining him.  

He had been sitting in a hard plastic chair by the window, reading a fraying 6-month old New Yorker issue for the 3rd time that week.  When the nurse brushed past him to adjust the window shade, he caught a top-note of vanilla in her perfume, and imagined biting into the soft marshmallow flesh of her pale, doughy bicep.

Greed

In the space of a blink, he saw a boyhood camping trip.  There were s’mores. He loaded up his roasting stick, practically a sapling, with as many marshmallows as he could before the others finished building the fire.  

When the bigger boys set down the matches and turned to the stump where they’d laid out the supplies, they found 3 jet puffed marshmallows, a crumpled Hershey’s wrapper, and half of a smashed graham cracker.

It took the search party two days to locate him.  He suffered a bit from exposure and dehydration. He was never hungry.

Syllabus #43

What a stupid week. 

Here's some stuff I might have skimmed:

 This happened, in case you missed it.

This was well said. 

I wonder what impact the tornado had on primary results, since it affected one of the most progressive areas in the whole state.  Not only were people, you know, a little busy dealing with other stuff, but many precincts were inaccessible and voters were diverted to other locations that weren't meant to accommodate such heavy volume.  We waited for over 2 hours for Andy to vote (I had done early voting) but obviously not everyone had the luxury of just standing around for hours that day, or any day.

I hope North Nashville isn't violated twice, first by the tornado and again by a tide of opportunistic developers.  I also have no room to speak since I live in a neighborhood transformed by the last tornado, but I didn't realize that was the case when I moved here.

Some practical advice.


I tried to distract myself with something non-apocalyptic.  It didn't work, but maybe you'll enjoy it.  Deb Perelman is a national treasure.


Analog Reading:

Finished The Great Pretender by Susannah Cahalan.  Nothing like a book about mental illness and fraud to pull you through a dark time.

Trying to read Caucasia by Danzy Senna for my book club, but it's hard to concentrate.

We're Not Not in Nashville Anymore

I used to own a pair of red patent leather flats.  They were brutally uncomfortable but this was a time in my life when I hadn’t yet learned to prioritize comfort.  I wore them constantly at first, repairing the flaking leather with red nail polish, repairing my bleeding feet with bandaids.  Sometimes, on frustrating or boring days at work, I would make sure no one was watching and I’d click the heels together a few times, wishing myself home, wherever home was at the time.  

The shoes traveled with me from New Jersey to Idaho and back to New Jersey.  Then Utah, South Carolina, and finally Nashville, where I wore them exactly once before laying them to rest among the banana peels and eggshells in the kitchen trash.  After 13 years, I had outgrown the shoes. My feet hadn’t changed, but my attitude had. I was done trying to shoehorn myself into footwear and situations that didn’t feel right.  I’d rather look like a clod, but a comfortable one, in my old Doc Martens. I didn’t need those shiny red shoes to click my heels and wish myself somewhere else. Nashville was exactly where I wanted to be already.

I have loved living in Nashville.  More than in any of the many places I have lived, I feel at home here.  I feel like I am in this world, not just peeking in on someone else’s world through a cracked window.   In East Nashville, especially, there are weird people doing weird things, normal people doing normal things, constant sources of delight.  Space for all of us.

That’s not to say that life is perfect here.  Nobody knows how to use a turn signal, traffic is terrible, we desperately need a transit plan, bachelorette parties are a constant source of minor irritation, the rent is too damn high.  But the good far outweighs the bad when I pause to consider how fortunate I feel to live here.  

Sometimes we don’t pause to consider our good fortune in the moment, and it’s only in hindsight that we remember.  I wasn’t thinking much about Nashville at all when I went to bed the night of Monday, March 2nd. I was keyed up from looking at too many articles about coronavirus.  To try to come down and stop catastrophizing, I stayed up a little too late reading, promising just one more chapter, then just one more. I wasn’t worried about getting enough sleep, though.  The next day was Super Tuesday, and my library is a polling location, so I was looking forward to a quiet, kid-free day to accomplish some planning and organizing. I had no way of knowing just how little sleep was in store, or how little it would matter.

Around 12:30, we were roused from a deep sleep into a state of chaos and confusion.  The tornado siren was blaring, our phones were buzzing with weather alerts, police cars and firetrucks wailed as the sky lit up like 4th of July with continuous explosions of lightning.  Then a surreal hush fell as the air went eerily still and the sky took on a greenish tinge. Suddenly, a tidal wave of wind poured in from the west, bending small trees almost to the ground.  Just as quickly, the wind reversed course and seemed to suck all the air back like an ebbing tide at warp speed. It was at that moment the building across the street lost power.  

It was all very disorienting, like stumbling into the second half of a horror movie, all inscrutable plot and disturbing visuals.  We had no place to go except possibly the closet or the interior hallway of our 5th floor apartment. We were unsure what to do about the animals, or ourselves, so we milled around indecisively, foolishly looking out the blinds and refreshing the weather radar on our phones, as if either would provide us with any actual answers.  The animals were strangely unbothered by all of it. The cat seemed mildly interested in what we were doing awake at that hour. The dog, who is medicated for anxiety and fears everything from vacuums to plastic bags, flopped on his back angling for a belly rub.  

The tornado siren eventually decrescendoed into silence, and the weather app downgraded the status of the storm.  We never lost power. We tried to sleep. In hindsight, the wall of wind reversing directions was the tornado passing directly to the south of us, missing us by a mere few blocks.  From our north-facing windows, we had no idea what destruction lay behind us.  

Our alarm clocks sounded, as always, at 5:00.  I stumbled into the bathroom, exhausted and bracing myself for a day of making small talk about the night’s crazy weather with the elderly poll workers as voters trickled in.  At 5:01, my phone buzzed and flashed the school district’s robo-call number. School was closed. I was surprised.

I began looking at photos and stories people were posting on the Nashville subreddit.   I had grossly underestimated the severity of the storm. At first it was just shocking to recognize so many of these places that sustained major damage.  Then it hit me how very close the tornado’s path came to my own apartment building. Just a couple blocks, really. I started to feel ill, and the feeling still hasn’t left, days later.

I knew I shouldn’t have done it, I knew it was wrong, gratuitous, a form of ruin porn.  But I had to see what happened to my community, so I took a walk that morning. I wasn’t the only one, and I suspect we were all there for the same reason, feeling sick and helpless as we gaped at the shattered windows, collapsed roofs, uprooted trees, poles snapped in half like discarded toothpicks.

When you see images of destruction in far-away places, even places you once visited, you feel sadness, sympathy.  When you see it up close in the place you call home, it’s visceral. In less than two years, I have come to consider Nashville home.  I feel connected to this community. The sight of destroyed buildings is shocking, devastating, and yet I know it's selfish to feel the way I do.  In reality, the structures that were damaged or destroyed are peoples’ homes and livelihoods. For me, they were places I appreciated for aesthetic reasons, or places I liked to spend my money.  I am so lucky. I feel so guilty.  

I will never forget some of the things I saw on Tuesday, or continue to see each day now.  I will never forget that doused campfire scent of smoldering dampness coupled with the smell of ozone as if the air itself was still charged and tense.

I saw what had once been a gorgeous Victorian house with the front sheared off, like a horrible doll house, revealing the interior.  Ripped insulation dangled from the ceiling in one bedroom, in another a ceiling fan spun lazily in the breeze. Inexplicably, people were in the house, standing dazed in the exposed 2nd floor bedrooms as if a child placed them there in haphazard poses and then abandoned her play.  What is wrong with all of us that we just had to go look?  Why were we milling around, looking, when we should have been helping?  What could any of us have done?    

The most practical thing we could think to do was to vote.  We found out our normal precinct had been relocated, so we trekked on foot to the new one.  Poll workers and voters were in good spirits despite the circumstances. Four precincts had been consolidated into one gymnasium in a community center.  It was a warm day, and the power was inconsistent. A line of hundreds of people snaked across the basketball court, sweating in the stagnant air. All of us stood and shuffled, shuffled and stood, waiting for over two hours to cast our votes.  Elderly people, parents with small children, pregnant women, no one complained. All of us were alive, all of us still had the future to think about even if the present was bleak.    

The next day, Wednesday, I ventured down the street to a volunteer center set up at the high school.  They were at capacity, so I left and bought as many canned goods as I could reasonably carry and returned with donations.  I was still in a daze. I should have done more. I didn’t know what to do.  

Thursday, I arrived at the volunteer center early, and was put to work sorting donations.  It was something, but it wasn’t enough. Today is Friday, and I will be back out there. Tomorrow, Saturday, we are honoring long-standing plans to volunteer at a food pantry in North Nashville, one of the harder-hit areas in the city.  I know they will need more help than ever. I’m grateful for the opportunity to do something. I’m grateful so many others are helping. I’m doing my best. My best is not enough. I want to scream.

If I still had those red shoes, I wonder if I would put them on and close my eyes and click my heels, wish us back to Monday before the tornado picked up our city and carried us away to this new reality.  Truthfully, though, Nashville is still here, right where it has always been. It might look a little different on the surface now, and carry some scars that won’t easily heal, but the things that make this city special haven’t been carried away in a funnel cloud.  It’s best not to even think about those red shoes. Wishing won’t fix anything. It’s time to lace up those Docs, because there’s work to do.

If you live outside of the Nashville area and want to help, please consider making a donation to the Community Foundation of Middle Tennessee. If you live inside the Nashville area, chances are you are probably already doing the best you can.

Syllabus #42

How is it possible that we've made it to March?  We spent so much energy wishing away the month of January and then recovering from our collective January hangover that we failed to note the passage of February, despite the extra day.

It's been a glorious Sunday here in Middle Tennessee, blue skies and t-shirt temperatures.  I took advantage and went for a nice, long run.  Don't get me wrong, I enjoy this weather and the sun has me all "seasonal affective disorder, who?" but it's also terrifying.  It shouldn't be this warm right now, this is winter, dudes.  I think we should stop relying on the groundhog as a predictor of seasonal shifts.  The honey badger would probably give us a more accurate forecast, which is to say, he does not give a shit, so the weather is going to a hot, unpredictable mess from here on out.

This cat performs emotional labor for NO ONE.  She'll steal the dog's bone just to remind him that she calls the shots around here.

Speaking of ways the earth is a swirling vortex of entropy hurtling through space, I've been not even low-key obsessed with corona virus this week.  I'm not about calling it Covid-19, that sounds like a low-dose birth control pill and I already have one of those and have a hard enough time remembering its name when I go to pick up my refill.  I don't need that confusion in my life right now.

It's not so much that I am afraid of getting sick.  I'm not worried about myself, but I am a little concerned about older family members.  Mostly, it feels like we're watching the opening scenes of a pandemic horror movie.  It's unfolding in slow motion, but we're trapped in cushy movie theater seats and we can't fast forward to the end to see who lives and who dies and what parts of society have utterly collapsed.  Also, the floors are sticky, there's a teenage couple pawing at each other two rows ahead of us, and a guy behind us is just blatantly having a phone conversation.  All this is why I never go to the movies, and yet here we are and it's very stressful.

There could be worse places to be quarantined than the top of a mountain in rural Italy.

You could be quarantined on a cruise ship, which is a very compelling reason to never go on a cruise.

Of all the settings for a quarantine, though, a quarantine with children to entertain sounds like the absolute worst punishment.

As for me, I would embrace an extended school closure with arms wide open, Creed style, without a hint of irony.  I'm so ready.  I have a stack of books I'm ready to plow through.  Yesterday, I went out and stocked up on maybe an extra week's worth of yuppy survival provisions at Trader Joe's, ironically right as news broke that Trade Joe himself had died.  RIP, guy, and thanks for all the fish.  Seriously, your canned smoked herring is off the chain.

But it wasn't all doom and gloom and pandemics over here this week.

David Sedaris' new essay in The New Yorker did not disappoint.  We're going to see him when he comes to Nashville in April.  You know, if we aren't all dead by then.

Samin Nosrat's profile in The New Yorker just endeared her to me even more.  I can't wait to see what shape her next project takes.

How do you view the relationship between ride-share apps and your own alcohol consumption?  I'm a cheapskate and a lightweight, so the ability to binge drink without consequence has always been a myth, and one that has nothing to do with transportation.  The correlation between the two is thought-provoking, though.  Helping people avoid drunk driving is great, but what are the unintended consequences of enabling people to drink more without concern for a DUI?  I wonder how the drinking behavior of people in cities where walking or public transit have always been options compares to the drinking of people in more car-dependent places before and after the rise of ride-share apps?

Speaking of things that make more sense when you're drunk, let's talk about the Phillie Phanatic.  It's weird, right?  That's the point, and part of the charm, but still.  It grabbed my ass once and maybe I'm still not over that.  Also, while we're here, let's talk about how odd it is that Philly sports teams have so many completely conceptual, intangible team names and mascots not based on specific animals or historical figures or groups of people.  The Eagles are alone in their specificity.  What the hell is a 76er, really?  I mean, 1776, Declaration of Independence, I get it.  But as a sports team identity?  And the Flyers?  What is flying?  The puck?  The skaters?  The goalie's teeth?  And how, exactly, does Gritty factor into all this?  He appears to be the exact opposite of aerodynamic, the thing least likely to fly, except in the sense of being high as a kite.  He looks precisely as terrifying as I imagine a bad acid trip to be.

I know I've talked, perhaps ranted, about the inequitable division of emotional labor in heterosexual relationships.  I don't want to beat a dead horse, so we'll just leave this here for anyone who needs to read it.  After all, as the primary executor of emotional labor, I'd probably be too busy making burial arrangements for the horse to waste time beating it.  I'd be the one who already knew what kind of flowers the horse preferred and if it wanted to be cremated or shipped to the glue factory, and that "Old Town Road" was its favorite song and should be played on a loop throughout the entire open casket viewing for all its horse friends.  This is a weird metaphor, but I'm glad we all went on this journey together.  I know how precious your time is, and how you probably now feel guilty that you spent time reading this inane drivel instead of making grocery lists and scheduling dentist appointments and remembering birthdays and matching up all the socks straight out of the dryer.

While we're at it, let's ruin a couple beloved children's books.

Analog Reading:

Read Uncanny Valley by Anna Wiener.  I enjoyed it, but after a while it started to feel like a very long "it's not you, it's me" breakup letter to the tech industry.  It was a fascinating look into a world that seems so remote from my lived experience, and one from which she felt alienated even as she was living it.  The one thing that was kind of annoying was the avoidance of naming the names tech companies and well-known executives.  Maybe it was for legal reasons, but it seemed a little silly to bend over backwards to use the epithet "the social network everyone hates" when it was so painfully obvious she was referring to Farmer's Only.


Finished American Dirt by Jeanine Cummins.  Whoa, everybody.  Whoa.  I'm not proud of how quickly I finished this book.  I will give the author credit for writing a page-turner.  After reading the book and the author's note, and digesting a lot of the criticism lobbed against Cummins, I think this was a failure of marketing.  Based on the seven figure advance and blurbs referring to it as "the Grapes of Wrath of our era" it would seem that the book that was promised and the book that was delivered were two very different books.  The author probably genuinely cares about the myraid struggles migrants face, but she could have brought those issues to light with more realism and sensitivity if she had written a non-fiction book and gave people who actually lived the experience a platform to tell their own stories. 

Inventing a scenario in which unrequited love motivates a misunderstood, tortured-intellectual drug lord to murder a woman's journalist husband and 15 other members of her family trivializes the very real, not-at-all implausible horrors that people face because of gangs and cartel activity in their cities.  Giving this middle-class woman with considerable financial resources a super-human Rain Man 8-year old son also glosses over the extreme difficulties that must come from trying to complete that dangerous and grueling journey with a child.  I have interacted with hundreds of 8-year olds during my time in education, and I can't picture a single damn one of them behaving with even half of Luca's emotional maturity.  Most of them can't even tie their shoes yet. 

At best, American Dirt is a deeply upsetting beach read that will make you grateful the worst problems you have in that moment are seagulls tryna steal your hoagie and a kid kicking sand on your towel every time he runs by.  Which will make you even angrier when you notice the kid is probably Luca's age and yet he won't even make it across the hot sand back to the car without whining.