Ponderings and Musings

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.

The 24 hour CVS around the corner is no longer 24 hours. They’ve scaled back their house to 8 a.m. to 6 p.m. seven days a week. They’re closed more than 7-11.

The pub down the street closed down at the beginning of shelter in place, but now they’re selling beer out the front window. I walked by in the morning so I didn’t stop by for a beer, though there’s little else to do in the neighborhood. It’s been raining and very windy. Everything is closed or prefers to be delivery over takeaway.

The liquor store that offers convenience three doors down went from scaled back hours to completely closed through at least the 7th of April. That may change if we extend all this to the 30th of April.

I’ve been chilling out and being a geek for most of the day today. I’m rather sick of Netflix and television in general. I look forward off the wall pop culture things from the 70s and 80s on Google and that’s how I spend my days off from work.

I’m looking forward to flying again. I have no idea when that will be but I’m hoping soon.

I remember I was in elementary school when my dad first let me behind the counter at the family hardware store and lumber yard. It was in the mid 1970s and while cash transactions were recorded on a very early 20th century cash drawer that required hand written receipts as well as recording transactions by hand, the adding machine on the counter was quite nifty.

It was identical to the one pictured above: a Sharp Micro Compet.

The display was groovy. Though not shown in the photo, the zero was represented by the bottom portion of the “6” or the “8”, resulting in this half-height number. Unused digits to the left of the number being displayed were filled in with this zero, all eight digits were populated at all times.

It was an adding machine and not a calculator in that the addition and subtraction functions worked as an accumulator instead of doing arithmetic. It’s the accounting way of doing things and if you’re unfamiliar, think of it this way. You have a bucket. You add things to the bucket by pressing whatever number and pressing plus or minus. If you wanted to add two things twice (2+2), you’d hit 2 += 2+=. If you then wanted to subtract one, you’d then hit 1 -=. The display would read, in sequence, 2, 4, 3, as you completed each operation.

You’ll also notice the combination of multiplication and division on one key. The result was dependent on which equals key you hit: 2x÷2+= would result in 4, 2x÷2-= would result in 1. Even at a young age this made a lot of sense to me.

Per the Wikipedia page, this calculator was the first mass produced calculator using integrated circuits. It sold for $395 in 1970 and came with a leather cover.

My grandfather invested in good technology from time to time.

I remember checking my math homework from 2nd or 3rd grade with my father’s assistance. He cautiously watched me work the keys on this technological marvel; probably because it was so expensive. I can still remember the first time I entered a number on that adding machine and being so entranced with how it worked.

It’s no wonder I became such a dork.

Watching television tonight it felt like this week’s episode of “Schitt’s Creek” was more disjointed from reality than usual. It was then I realized the episode was taking place in a world where people could walk next to one another without worrying about being contagious. Groups were gathered in various scenes and people were having a great time.

In a way I was reminded of what it was like watching 1990s sitcoms at the end of 2001. I feel like we’re rapidly moving from something that was to something that is. And it’s not better.

I feel like there’s a lot coming at me: concerns about money, concerns about my family, both here and back East. Concerns about work. Concerns about the folks on my team at work. Are we ready for what the future holds? Can our existence whether any further upheaval?

I told my husband I want to put life on pause for just a few moments so I can catch my breath. I’m thinking we might have to make the car a quarantine-mobile, with all inclusive meal service, and I might have to go find an open lot or a beautiful prairie view or something to catch my breath. Despite walking nearly five miles a day and getting as much fresh air as humanly possible at the moment, I feel like the world is closing in.

It’s a side effect of not flying. I realize that’s part of it. Watching flight videos, while I found them initially helpful, I’m finding that I’m now envious of the pilots that made these videos before quarantines became so chic here on planet Earth.

We will get through this one way or another. I’d like to think we’ll be the better for it, but I’m not confident that we will be.

I envisioned a new world come 2020. This is not what I envisioned the experience to be.