120 Days of Rona

On March 16 I woke up, got dressed, and joined the birds on my balcony for a cup of coffee. This was a bizarre aberration, for it was Monday, and I was not driving to work.

I tried to arrange the furniture to make a decent background for my first Zoom meeting. From our homes and couches the CSULB content team did our usual round-robin, sharing status updates on projects and generally figuring out how this was going to work. Everyone was bemused, preoccupied, and a little worried. The hoarding hysteria was hitting Long Beach in a sudden delirious peak, and even though the virus was almost nonexistent in Southern California, the madness of crowds is its own contagion. 

Sitting in our tiny conference room just a week before, the possibility that certain staff might soon be working from home seemed overblown, but day by day we were gathered to make precautionary arrangements. Staff read updates while the big bosses were tied up in constant panic meetings. The length of time we might be out of the office kept growing. Plans for classes, events, commencement were continually adjusted and discarded. We all kept one eye on our news feeds. Grocery stores were getting ravaged. That Friday, a very odd and drizzly day in Long Beach, I went to Ralph's on my lunch break and found a two hour line of overflowing shopping carts wrapping around the interior. I returned and learned the order had come down - our office would go remote indefinitely. Holy balls.

Now home was life, and still the universe was contracting. Lizett was still leaving the house to see clients, but her sessions were getting cancelled like wanking comedians. I was in the middle of planning her birthday, and one by one the activity options were disappearing. Shows got cancelled. Shipping became unavailable. Vegas was shuttered. The day itself became a series of Zoom gatherings with family and friends and began our pile of celebrations that would be postponed to a better time. I held out hope for Lightning in a Bottle, still two months away, but on that sad drizzly final Friday, even that domino fell.

I open the blinds and let the late spring mornings in. The coffee element blooms and churns in its golden sieve. Outside, a dozen chirping birds arrange themselves on the power lines like musical notes on a staff. An owl hoots in the distance. The problems of primates do not trouble their roosts.

I’ll be honest: working from home was my dream come true. I used to take sick days just to work on side projects. Saving a 45 minute commute would give me almost an entire workday’s worth of hours each week into which I could cram my many ambitions and projects and hobbies. (Narrator: It didn’t.). Now this virus, this sneaky Rona, had the world taking a sick day. My wish was granted by an asshole genie.

True, I no longer sit in surface street traffic up and down Katella each day. My car is covered in dust and has the same ¾ tank of gas it had in March. My polos are rotting in my closet. Our living room is a shared workspace with multiple Zoom backgrounds and procedures for HIPPA-compliant telehealth sessions. I get groceries twice a month instead of every week, cut my hair at home, and never leave the apartment without a face covering. Aside from a few weeks in April when I thought I had the rona, we exercise consistently indoors. 

The day is a rote series of incremental endeavors: work for 4 hours, eat lunch, work for 4 hours, exercise for 2 hours, do one chore, read for 30 minutes, try to write for an hour, make dinner, watch a short show. Sometimes there’s a few minutes to play one of the Switch games I’ve been trying to get through since 2017. 

I’ve refined every routine to the most time-efficient series of actions possible. Food and dishes are set out or cleaned, couches arranged for work or leisure, plants watered and recycling compacted in my wake as though by Disney magic. I am a ninja of efficiency. Wash cup in sink - move some dry dishes to cupboard - spin and open fridge in one move - swoop out brita and refill cup - top off brita as I drink - return brita and collect vegetables to prep. Economy of motion. 

I think we would do well in a Martian habitat. Living, working and exercising in close-quarters, tending a small herb garden, fastidiously donning protective gear to enter a caustic outside environment devoid of intelligent life (Orange County). The monotony of space and rona hold no terror for me.

Which is good, because there’s no escaping it; the rona is a fact of life. Every news outlet keeps a 24/7 ticker of the infection rate and death count. Sports teams have been replaced by drug companies racing to develop treatments and vaccines. Musicians stream sets from their homes and live shows are a profane antiquity. Virtual learning and workplace automation have been accelerated by a decade. Gatherings with friends or family are necessarily taboo. Corporate machines manufacture empathetic sentiments to the probable extent profitability requires. Marketers produce rona commercials to demonstrate that they get it. Masks, disinfectant, and social distancing are indelible facets of popular culture. All to summon a swell of world war-style national solidarity that was supposed to bring us together while we stayed apart, observing evolving but purposefully consistent scientific advice to stay apace with every other prosperous nation in starving the virus from our population within, at most, a few months. Well...

The bird congress is in vociferous debate by summer. Representatives large and small gather on the stacked horizontal lines and render their opinions about all manner of bird business. One plump little beepo screeches beak to beak with another, puffing and flapping in a manic fit. The other stoically ignores it. Some swoop and squabble on the rooftops below. On our front walkway, where the three layer cake of dwellings encloses the environment, birds can be found sitting in pairs on the handrails or exploring the spaces under awnings, loitering in the public areas like Poe’s bodacious raven.  

We’re very aware of how lucky we are to still have our jobs and health. Our friends and family are scared. Group chats became subreddits for stimulus FAQs. While some friends were getting laid off, others were called Essential and forced to continue to go to work and serve the people who weren’t taking the virus seriously. This is a cataclysmically bad time for so many people, but somehow fresh existential crises are still delivered to our doors free of charge every few days. At best, the constant stress of adjusting and figuring out how to maintain and be safe and help your people leaves little time to consider the myriad crises of our time, the assaults on democracy, the upsurge of racial injustice, the onslaught of automation, but the pervasive sense of doom is never far from mind.

There are many features of the past 120 days that are truly shocking. Among them is the overarching miasma of incredulity that characterizes every news cycle. We are shocked anew each morning, gasping at the bold-faced malice and fatal myopia of elected leaders, the failing of institutions, the utterly baffling rejection of science by our fellow citizens. For so many people life is in freefall, and in a few short months, that freefall has become normal.

So what really leaves me tripping, and spurred to scribble my thoughts in blog form, is the swiftness with which our conception of normal can radically change. Millennials grew up with one foot in a hundred different post-apocalyptic tangent universes; now we’re looking around and realizing we’re in the fucking middle of one. Regardless of politics or whether people think it’s right or wrong, all aspects of society have drastically changed, virtually overnight. 

And I think that’s the silver lining. We have seen that a new generation is capable of replacing every practice and prejudice of the one before it with something new. For the majority of humans, conscientious virus practice has become as normal as obeying traffic signals or wearing a seatbelt. Entire industries were able to contort and collaborate with science and government to prevent the spread of the rona or put out fires that had suddenly raged, breaking uncounted strictures of business to adapt to extraordinary pressure.

Growing up, there was always a new science special on TV about the myriad hypothetical ragnarok events that could decimate our planet with a bad roll of the dice. Comets, solar flares, gamma rays from the galactic center, primordial disease, so many hair-trigger threats that could inflict another global extinction without a care for the relatively intelligent life forms that had struggled into existence since the last one. And here it is. Our world has taken a blow. We have been damaged by pestilence as surely as by the strike of a meteor, or the eruption of some dormant volcano, or a sundering fault in the Earth. 

And there are exponentially increasing levels of hideous normal waiting around the corner. Climate change is all of those dooms and more rolled into one torture rack of human tragedy, and its dread increments are already cranking. It is normal that every year is hotter than the year before, reefs and rainforests are vanishing like ghosts, and the species extinction rate is hundreds of times higher than baseline. We know have the potential to meet the challenge with the same swiftness and conviction that many countries have mustered to squash the virus in their lands. We just don't know if we have the will. If we don’t have the will, climate change will make the rona a footnote in the final chapter of our era. Heavy. 

On a Sunday I come out to the patio with my coffee and a book. The musical staff power lines are empty, but the air is filled with the high-frequency tweeting of baby birds. All of the preening, probing, arguing birdos have paired off and gone to fill their nests and feed their babies. There is no rona in the bird world. Summer is here and there is much to do. All are occupied, except for one fellow who swoops over to the circuit breaker and says what’s up. All his friends are busy with their kids. If only he could play Mario Kart.