Ponderings and Musings

ISS Astronaut Chris Hadfield offers some great tips for living in isolation. To keep things in perspective, while not as exciting, we do have it better than living on the International Space Station or off-planet in some other way (The Moon, Mars, etc). While it’s certainly possible I’ll see an off-planet colonization some time in my lifetime, this quarantine lockdown is the closest I’m going to get to the experience.

As a kid I was always excited about Easter. After the church service we would get together at Grandma and Grandpa’s house for a family dinner. Because spring does not reliably appear in the Lake Ontario Snowbelt it was a crap shoot as to whether we’d be playing outside in the lawn or playing in the barns, sheltered from the snow. When I got a little older I gathered up bikes left in the barn from when my Dad and his siblings were our age, get them working reasonably well, and orchestrate a bike ride with my cousins. The ride would be a couple of miles and we’d have a good time.

As I walk through the neighborhood this spring I’m very sad to see locked up playgrounds with police tape around all the jungle gyms and slides. There is no sound of laughter, no chattering among parents, no families gathering to see how they’re doing. We eat in small groups, hidden away in our quarantine locations. If we’re out, we’re most likely deemed an essential employee and thank god for our health professionals that are trying to fight this pandemic.

When you decide that it’s time to drain the swamp, and listen to media reports of a rogue email server, and buy into the demonization of what was probably the most qualified presidential candidate thus far in the 21st century, you end up with playgrounds wrapped in police tape. And an absence of laughter in the air.

Easter is a sign of renewal. Mother Nature is speaking. We need to listen.

So in the latter half of my 20s I had a red flattop. This was starkly different from the way I had worn my hair in my teens, but it was the mid 1990s and times were different. No longer did I have the fluff and go hair that could rival of Flock of Seagulls, but rather I had something that would make a military commander proud, if the likes of me were allowed in the military at the time. Because of the crispness of my haircut I tended to get it cut once a week and this was something I enjoyed. I had a couple of different barbers that I went to depending on which office I was working at when I felt my hair had gotten too shaggy. At some of the shops I would also get my mustache trimmed and if I had time, I’d get a shave as well. This was when there were still old-school barbershops with older barbers who were scary but really weren’t once you got to know them.

I remember I was at the shop on the former Air Force base when the barber indicated that perhaps a flattop wouldn’t be viable for much longer and would I rather buzz my hair down instead. The stark reality set in, I was going bald at age 28 or so. This was kind of weird to me because I had heard horror stories of men finding clumps of hair on the pillow and in the shower drain and the like but I was not finding this to be the case. Of course it was because my hair was so short to begin with, there wasn’t much to find on the pillow.

My husband and I were in our first apartment together when I decided to stop buzzing my hair (or getting it buzzed) and started shaving my head. Shaving my head betrayed my aging self and was already starting to become popular at the time. It was not as common as it is today but it was not unheard of. Plus, Gillette had recently leashed the “Mach 3” onto the masses and this made it easy to do.

I regularly shaved my head for over 20 years before I decided I was getting sick of it. I’m not able to “change up” my hairstyle in anyway. I either have hair here and there or I don’t. But I’m now in my early 50s and I’m not trying to hide the fact that I’m a naturally bald guy anymore. I’m not angry or upset about being bald, though all of my male cousins are blessed with full heads of hair. It is what it is and I’m almost at the point where I’ve been a bald guy for longer than I haven’t been a bald guy.

I’m just sick of shaving my head every morning.

So now I have a very short buzz cut around the fringe like every other bald guy in dad jeans in his mid 50s. I do miss going to the barbershop and hanging with the guys, though. Even when I shaved my head on a regular basis I would occasionally go to a shop for a head or face shave just because I could. Some men find it weird to have another person shave their face but I find it relaxing and I’ve never had a bad shave from anyone, young or old. The most startling experience was from a heavy Russian woman in Hells’ Kitchen in New York, but it was still awesome and she was friendly in a gruff, vodka laden way. The only disappointing shaves I’ve had from a barber have been in a past couple of years where the younger barber opts to skip shaving cream and just wipes some sort of thin, clear goo on my face and then uses a very cheap disposable razor to do the deed. That can be a less-than-relaxing experience.

The key is to find some of the old guys that are still working.

I’m curious to see how many barbershops and related salons close down permanently in the coming months because they were unable to survive the mandatory shut downs during this pandemic. Will I want a man or woman in such close quarters to me again as to allow them to drag a razor across my face? I’m not sure.

One thing I do know though, when this whole pandemic thing is merely a memory, I’ll still be a bald guy, whether with some bits on the back and sides or with a clean shaven cue bald head.

And I’m perfectly OK with that.

I’m opting to walk mostly through alleys these days. It’s the best way to avoid people on the street. While some folks are maintaining social distancing protocols, others are walking three or four abreast on the sidewalk, leaving others to walk around them out in the street.

One of the things I noticed from the alleys today was the sounds of people getting together in the backyards hidden by the garages and garbage cans. Kids playing in the back yard, even the sounds of a barbecue in progress. I don’t know how many people were in attendance at these ventures but it was nice to hear traditional sounds of spring in progress. I hope people are being sensible with their get togethers.

One of my husband’s friends wondered if we’d see the return of the Drive-In Movie to mainstream America. I’m wondering the same thing. While this pandemic may not drastically change “normal” in the long run, I’m thinking people are going to be skittish for the next year or two. Drive-In Theatres might be a great way for people to get out of the house and enjoying entertainment again. It’s not great for the environment though.

I know we have quite a few Drive-In Theatres that have been converted for other uses here in the Midwest. Maybe they can be brought back to their original glory.

Walking through the alleys it’s very rare that I see any of the critters that live back there, especially when walking during the middle of the day. On my early morning walks before work on weekdays though it’s not uncommon to see a rat or two scurrying from point A to point B. I see rabbits on the street and rats in the alley. I saw a coyote a while back, he was just hanging out. Maybe he was looking for rats as well.

I hope people start being a little smarter about social distancing as this thing goes on. People are anxious to get outside here in Chicago now that the trees are blooming and such. Some folks must feel invincible because they have a mask on. I’m surprised at the number of people with a mask on failing to cover both their nose and mouth. Covering only the mouth seems to defeat the purpose.

In the meantime, I’ll stick to my fair weather walks on the back side of the neighborhood. It’s not the best way to exercise and sometimes the fresh air isn’t as fresh as I’d like it to be, but it’s better than nothing.

And better than nothing is all we can hope for right now.

Last night the family got together and watched the series finale of “Schitt’s Creek”. As far as television series finales go, this was probably the best finale I’ve seen in a very long time. The characters stayed true to themselves, the storyline was believable, and most importantly, the future they painted was full of happiness, love, and realism.

I have been in love with “Schitt’s Creek” since I discovered it during its second season. While a very intelligently funny show, the world of “Schitt’s Creek”, which was absent of homophobia, made me, a middle aged gay man, feel more comfortable with who I am. You’d think after all these years I’d have it all figured out. I’ve marched in gay pride parades, I don’t shy away from my love for my husband and our family, but I’ve always seen myself as a “less than”. The honesty of all the characters on “Schitt’s Creek” helped me chip away at that.

I’m really bummed to see the show go off the air, especially during these unprecedented times.

My husband and I have already decided to rewatch the entire series and we’ll probably do it more than once. I secretly hope (though is it a secret when I write about it on this blog?) we’ll see the Rose family and friends again someday.

“Schitt’s Creek” is where we need to be.

I have always been fascinated by thunderstorms. Throw in some strong winds, a bit of hail, and the threat of a tornado and for me it’s a party. I try to be safe but I always want to experience most everything Mother Nature can whip up when she’s showing off one of her amazing light shows.

Of course, I must experience all of this on the ground. I will never, ever try to thread an airplane between storm clouds. As a kid I was in the backseat of a Piper Tri-Pacer with a friend of my Dad’s in the pilot seat and my dad’s best friend’s wife in the passenger seat. Dad and his best friend were ahead of us in the J-5A. We were flying along the Lake Ontario coast, a thunderstorm close behind. I remember bouncing around in the back seat of that Piper Tri-Pacer and seeing lightning flashes in the distance. We were barely back at the airport and in the hangar when the storm came bearing down on us. The hail could have damaged the fabric of the Tri-Pacer, but we made it back just in time.

Too close for comfort in my book.

I’ve flown close enough to a storm in the Cherokee 180 to know that I don’t really want to experience that again. “Just ride it like a boat on the lake”. A few hundred feet up, a few hundred feet down, over and over again.

Yeah, not for me in an airplane.

But on the ground? Bring on the lightning. Bring on the thunder. Throw out some wind. Saturate the world with rain. Pelt with hail. I want to see it. I want to feel it. I want to be in it.

It’s a good thing we don’t live in hurricane country.

I’m on our balcony watching lightning light up the sky. I feel entranced. I feel excitement as if I were a kid again, sleeping on the floor of the living room in the family colonial-style house, another severe thunderstorm coming through off Lake Ontario.

Chicago has its share of decent thunderstorms throughout the year. Honestly, I’d rather be out on the prairie where I can see more and the city hasn’t slowed the storm down, but I’m content with my urban view.

Mother Nature is so beautiful.

Fewer people are out walking when I go for my morning walk. The streets are busier in the afternoon, but at 6:00 a.m., there’s not a lot of people out running or walking.

I like the quiet. I don’t like why it’s quiet.

There is a lot less traffic on streets, even when compared with a week ago. People are riding out this pandemic. Will this be the new normal? Time will tell.

When the sidewalk have enough people and I have to start walking on the street to maintain social distancing I take to the alleys. I don’t particularly like walking in the alleys; you’ll see a rat once in a while and people are terrible with their garbage collection habits, but it’s the best way to avoid other people on the sidewalk.

But in the morning? It’s very quiet. I find my center to get a good start to the day.

Wise words from the incomparable Kate Mulgrew. I adore this woman.

Letter to my fellow Pandemicites,

All of the words and phrases du jour have already become cliche: unprecedented, social distancing, mitigation, quarantine, isolation, sheltering in place. They are clear, arresting words that evoke any number of sensations, depending on the hour, the news of the moment, the behavior of your loved ones. They are new words, quickly aging. To me, it is both fascinating and absolutely astounding that we have been united globally by a virus that allegedly emanated from a wet market in Wuhan, China.

It could be called: a wee bat shat and it was felt around the world.

We are in this together and we will climb out of it together. There are choices to be made. Big ones: will I be philosophical about this, or will I be furious? Will I be patient, or will I be impossible? Will I grow or will I atrophy?

Small ones: will I make the bed every day? Will I plan and execute interesting meals? Will I take a walk in the early morning and watch the sun, unmoved by this pandemic, untouched by our despair, rise as it has done for the past 4.5 billion years?

We are, in ourselves, utterly insignificant – but what we do with that knowledge is what raises us above the rest of the animals.

So I say: in this time of extraordinary challenge, exercise your right to be deeply human. Be surprised by your own generosity of spirit. Don’t be afraid of fear, confusion or anxiety. We are living through an Unknown Pandemic, and we have every right to be unsettled.

I have a suggestion. It is something that has always worked for me and might work for you, but you need to give it a good shot. A few hours of uninterrupted quiet. Enforced discipline, if you will.

Read. Start big, too, because life is short, and once you start you will probably find that you cannot stop. The following books have led me through more catastrophes and heartache than I can possibly count, because their authors understood the essential drama of being flawed, of yearning for love, of courage, of being deeply human.

Here’s a partial list of my all-time favorites. Try them. If you don’t come out of this a better human being, you will certainly be a wiser one. Bring new meaning to ‘sheltering in’.

• In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust
• The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
• Speak, Memory by Vladimir Nabokov
• The Country Girls Trilogy by Edna O’Brien
• War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
• That They May Face the Rising Sun by John McGahern
• The Rachel Cusk Trilogy:

• Outline
• Transit
• Kudos

I’m currently working on a novel, so that takes me temporarily off the hook. Which is to say, I’m reading Harlan Coben for my sins.

Stay in, stay horizontal, feed your ravenous brains.

xKate

We live in a world where The Happiest Place on Earth is closed.

We’re told to stay home and eat and watch TV while this virus passes, yet millions of Americans have no home, no food, no TV.

Americans are still forming sides as to which side of the aisle is the right and just side of the aisle.

We have an incredibly stupid, narcissistic man as the leader of this country. I won’t dignify him with the word “president”. That slot might as well be empty.

No one has travelled from the future to tell us it’s going to be fine.

No aliens have arrived to fix our woes.

We are headed into a period which will rival our history as being one of the worst financial eras of this country.

Where do we find hope?

My husband and I went for a socially distance walk in the neighborhood. Our favorite pub had one of its front windows open. They’re selling beer out the window. We stopped and said hello. No hugs were exchanged between friends. But warm words were said. Words of hope. A woman unknown to us stopped, maintaining her social distance, just to be near us. She wanted responsible companionship.

I should have taken her picture.

Drop the walls. Maintain the distance. Help each other out.

Growing up, when I stood on the roof of my Dad’s house and looked to the west, I would see the cooling tower of one of three nuclear power plants long before my eyes reached the horizon. Since it was the mid 1980s, entertainment television included TV movies like “Special Bulletin” and “The Day After”. Seeing what would happen when bad nuclear things occurred, folks in the community would tend to get tense when hearing the annoying two-tone signal of what was then known as the “Emergency Broadcast System”. Not to worry, it was always a test.

The newer “Emergency Alert System” doesn’t sound as dire with its “duck fart” noises but the sense of urgency remains, especially when everyone mobile device within earshot starts sounding an alarm simultaneously. It’s unnerving.

The State of Illinois fired of the Emergency Alert System today to let people know they need medical people to register at IllinoisHelps.net to assist with the COVID-19 pandemic. Because of my “training” of the urgency related to the use of EAS, I was rather unnerved by all of my iDevices screeching and vibrating at once to convey this announcement to Illinoisans. I wretched about it on Twitter; looking back I probably wretched too much, but I maintain that if EAS is fired off too often, people are going to start to ignore it. And then, universe forbid, we have a tornado, nuke, or asteroid bearing down on the city, people will ignore the EAS instead of taking precautionary measures, because they’ve been training to respond to it like an intercom system.

I fully understand what the Illinois officials are trying to do, and that’s raise awareness of the need for trained medical personnel. So I will restate this, if you are able to help, please register at IllinoisHelps.net.

Apparently the EAS notifications unnerved a few folks. After I wretched about it on Twitter I went for a walk around the block. A woman walking on the other side of the street was sobbing loudly into her phone, telling someone that the only place she feels safe is the cemetery and that’s because her parents are dead and they’re the only ones that know what’s going on. Another man was yelling into his phone about being newly unemployed. I turned the corner and another woman was yelling at someone on the porch about the “emergency tones”.

With today’s news that we are to remain “shelter-in-place” for the next 30 days, I understand it is a necessity but I am frustrated. I’m trying to smile and I’m going to make an effort wretch less on Twitter, but I’m really not enjoying this whole shelter-in-place thing, mostly because it’s not being consistently implemented across the country and I fear the non-sheltering states are just going to let their folks carry the virus all over the place while the rest of us sit at home. Of course, there’s no consistency coming out of D.C.; one minute the Orange One is screaming at a reporter for being mean, the next minute he’s adding tens of billions to the population of South Korea. Trump is throwing out sound bites as fact and showing obvious partiality to the states that matter to him politically.

We do not need more chaos in this situation.

I wanted to give a reassuring smile or gesture of some sort to the woman who spends her days in the cemetery but I can’t do that from two meters away. I realize now that complaining on Twitter isn’t going to solve anything either, so I hope to not do that again.

We are going to get through this and I’m hopeful we’ll all be fine when this crisis has run its course.

In the meanwhile, maintain your distance and smile, and try not to be alarmist. I’m going to do my best to do the same.