https://youtu.be/EjFN5iVKn6w

um, I think this means that I have great oxygen (no covid) ft the heart rate of a squirrel (yes crazy) 

Mondays are still Monday. I wake up, still not sick but tired to the bone, I just don't want to anymore.

Gratitude. Turn it around in my head. I still have a job. I lie here turning my Mind over, like a fat semiconscious patient in my skull, prone to bed sores, I shove it onto its stomach. Feel. Fucking. Grateful. "I want a cold pressed juice and a yoga class." I know Mind, we all want things we can't have any more. "What is the point?" Don't ask that, just move. "Or what?" Sigh, I dunno man, we just gotta stand up and go turn on zoom and do the dishes and shit. "No." Siiiiigh, how about I jack you up on a momentary high?, let's buy a shirt or something on Amazon. "Amazon is evil." It is, Mind, but you're busted and won't work without little doses of serotonin like a tweaker fuckbrain. "Ok show me the tshirts." A woman in a man's t-shirt and boyshorts, c'mon, you can get out of bed for that... "Oh okay 😤"

"aging in place"

streaming "Waco" 

Today
I saw teenagers on bikes and old people walking beagles, all too close and without masks.
I saw a garbage can belonging to elderly neighbors still on the curb 48 hours after pick up, and I wondered what to do.
I saw construction workers parked in driveways, skulking illegally back to work and spitting on the ground.
I saw a hanging basket of pansies and wondered, Where the hell did you get that?
I saw a young man in mask and gloves deliver beer and sandwich meat to my door for our dinner - he waved, I felt guilty, I tipped him more, I bleached the bag of ham (on the outside), and then worried anyway about touching/eating it (but we did).
I saw everyone on zoom looking like they had to pee and found out it was something called "fitdesk".
A friend texted me: "New game: your pandemic alcoholic name is your first name followed by your last name" and I laughed then coughed.
I smoked too much pot then coughed.
I started to think, I might never hug anyone again - the last person I held was TJ, midfight I scooped him to me and held on tight, a week ago. I was in a zoom today with NOLA Guy, remembering what it was like to kiss him, wondering if I would do it again today. Wondering if I'll ever have anyone's face that close to my own again. If I could put my cheek against anyone's, my arms long for the baby girl above all, I concluded. Hers would be my last hug if I had to choose one. But nobody gets to choose.

retro : when it was a choice

Me: hi Dad
Him: I'm lonely
Me: understandable, good thing you hate people
Him: but not like this, I haven't seen a face in weeks, my friends like to text but I want to hear a human voice
Me: (that's just what Nebraska says, drives me fucking nuts) what did you do today?
Him: I have a trap.under the birdfeeder, a live trap, when the squirrel falls in I leave him there and go around him with the lawn mower
Me:
Him: just for the day, off and on to scare the shit out of him
Me: whhhhhy?
Him: so he won't come back
Me: are you in front of your computer?
Him: I'm on the phone with you
Me: dude you can do both, go turn on your computer
Him: ok it's on
Me: open the email I just sent you, then click the blue link
Him: nothing is happening
Me: it's not magic dad, give it a second...
Him: I CAN SEE YOU O MY GOD YOURE GORGEOUS
Me: (that's just what..) hi
Him: HI
Me: how about we stop torturing small animals for fun? I hear that doesn't end well, psychologically
Him: I let him go!
Me: right, that's the crazy part dad, he's game meat
Him: YOURE GORGEOUS
Me: (sigh)

Trump’s Idea to Inject Disinfectant to Kill Coronavirus Alarms Medical Experts https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-04-23/coronavirus-dies-fastest-under-light-warm-and-humid-conditions speaking of bonkers

https://www.wkbw.com/news/local-news/catholic-health-to-furlough-up-to-1-200-workers

Oh that'll be great for morale ft as we rush to open a new facility for them on campus.

check in challenge

text me when you get it (it took me an embarrassingly long time, lolol)

Android sent an update that killed my ability to communicate yesterday for 4 hours, and I saw very clearly my breaking point.

I have a friend I love dearly, he is an angel among people truly, pushing 70, didn't respond (he did but I couldn't get it), he's in Boston with his wife, usually sending me pics of his grandkids

every few days to "check in". Then, he seemed "gone". And I buckled.

My dreams are raw worries that I repress all day in order to work. I wake up tangled in fragments of fear.

It doesn't matter anymore, any prior gnarly reason why you stopped, now every "I am ok / you ok?" is humane.

Set your humane benchmark now and then hold yourself to it as this gets worse. Which it will.

https://youtu.be/1Sw2JJ5nSbM

If you don't get close to anybody (which mostly I prefer anyway), not close enough to 'share droplets', then maybe you won't choke to death 


Bonus track - Get yourself an oximeter 

I've been thinking

pandemic scrapbooking

black pumas - confines

I want a 5guys cheeseburger

First death in my family. Of course it's one of the black people. My son-in-law lost an uncle and is losing his mind worried for his ma. She left quarantine to go grieve with her sisters, after not being able to be with the dying. Hence risking more dying. Grief, worry, fear all rising like flood water.

I like to listen to students, their stories, their existential reflections. I don't honestly give a damn about their commas. I care even less about works cited, apa vs mla. I never cared about that crap. I faked it.

There is a formidable number of people like me who feel the same and now they're flying out the closet -  to us, our students don't need to understand structural inequities vs THEY LIVE THOSE. Blue collar scholars, a huge body of knowledge lives in them. Think about the life and death difference for instance between 14215 (where my Glow lives) and 14214 (literally so close I could touch her but I CANNOT). 14214 is professors. 14215, 14222, 14201 - in Buffalo, each means a specific group of workers and ethnicities, facing a particular set of pandemic impacts. I know where the nurses are versus the cnas veraus profs versus the docs. ALL OF them are dying now, in each their own way.

And now I CAN listen. With funding, my salary and student research assistants to crunch data. But. How do I get health professionals to talk authentically? They want to speak, I know it, I CAN FEEL IT.

And for whatever it's worth, I want to HEAR IT.

First aid kit - emmylou

Fiona Cash - Someone Else 

Tags: always trying to remember what this song is called

Song








Two of my kids have been sexually assaulted. That I know of. Not like by strangers in a dark street, I mean like domestic abuse. Their "intimate partners", in each case their first, them still just teens. I don't remember my first assault, only the burning infection, the cold washcloth "down there", the searing relief of that cold. I was Glow's age.

Black men like my adopted boy K are dying at 7x the rate of any other group from covid. They are dying outside of prison and inside it at the same rate. Is that new(s)? I have known him since he was in 5th grade. He is so fucking sweet.

This pandemic changes everything but in some ways it changes nothing at all, it only makes visible what was already there. Healthcare workers are treated like chattle, it's a ticket to a middle class life at a high cost of debt and high risks of harm. Racial disparities, class disparities, structural disparities = death. The healthcare workers are not better off than their patients in most regards but they need to believe they are, duped into it, enlisted into playing their 'part of the problem'. The healthcare workers, their parents have the same diabetic toes breaking off in their shoes. It's no wonder they trend toward heartless over time.

And speaking of heartless, our minds, where the human heart abides, it gets the least relief. No cold wet wash clothes to ease the burning of the brain. Imagine this: all the people who for all these reasons and more have lived hurt before, parts of them on fire, their bodies violated, their babies hurt and abandoned by medicine or fathers or (for the particularly unlucky) abanonded by both. Imagine all that math of pain and resulting distrust. And now imagine: anyone who can go undiagnosed and survive WILL DO THAT. You will never know them. They'll just survive, carry the virus as a result, and kill you with it. You would too.

Are you listening? Is anyone?

I have 5 kids now total, just mine, no daddies alive or around, no other basement full of rice. 2 are victims, 1 is statistically doomed, the smallest has been on oxygen many times already. So if you see me trying to gasp for breath, it's because I feel like I MUST.

new lows

watching tiger king with django

I woke up to a blizzard. FUCKING SNOW.

Then when I tried to meet the latest manic deadline for a spreadsheet, my computer died. Ears got it to come back while I stormed around the house furious crying.

And I caught jasper eating a marker. He's just trying to commit suicide or some shit.

I had to give up. Called everyone in to a meeting and ordered everybody to turn on out of office replies until Monday. Don't reply to me. Don't talk to each other. Then I smoked some pot, took half a valium I've been hoarding, and laid down to listen to the HAIL in April. And to touch my fucking face.

A social distancing no distance nightmare is what this is. As if Facebook and Microsoft had an Omen 666 baby in the form of a pandemic so we'd all be forced up each other's digital asses a mile. It is driving everyone "working from home" into mental illness, clearly, the little zoom boxes are the padded cells they're straightjacketed within.

Metaphorical puppy

Pandemic Pandemonium all day every day in every way. I can't even. I'm struck dumb.

Music helps. Sometimes at the janitor hour.

Pandas, that's who thinks this is sexy!

I mean, at least someone thinks so, you go Ling Ling ✊

shiiiiiiiiit

Mos Def-MsFat Booty
 I looked at the news for a minute today. I can't imagine what it is like to be there, HERE, in a hospital now, as either giver or taker.

Jasper has today a giant eye ulcer, perfect timing, there is no vet, I look it up online. But then, stop and just LOOK - is that a pressure outward to relieve with a cut?, I ask myself. Like the bible advises, if a wound offend thee too much?

When is it time to cut a thing loose? A loved one, a limb, a cornea, your own life?

For today at least, I didn't have to decide. I unflunked students. I relieved my African American son from needing to enter a store with a mask on because I had aplenty. And I found the blue and white tube of goo that I hope relieves superelderlydogeye pressure by morning. ( I moved that goo from Lewiston that aaron knew what it was for cow medicine, wow so lucky...)

I still have it easy.

Bucket list revision 1 - Add: learning to hulahoop.

This is badass.

I am starting to seriously lose my marbles.

1: I am totally crazy, and now that I can't move, I can't outrun it.

2: I read the news, I should not do that anymore, I thought after listening to Train's hospital stories that nothing could shock me, but "there aren't enough thermometers" is batshit crazier than anything he ever told me, and he told me shit like lost dildos up asses and nurses drinking on the job and fucking in closets for Christ sake.

3: The relentless sound of ambulance sirens.

trust me

dancing in my underwear in the kitchen making pasta sauce pre jerkoff nap Sunday playlist

thinkin and drinkin - harpdog brown

Is it Me - Lucky Peterson
hard workin man - andrew alli
Slushy Blues - Holly Hyatt
the worst is yet to come - keb mo

Pandemic Mimosa: teaspoon hoarded frozen orange juice concentrate, a shot of wild turkey, dregs from last nights wine, seltzer

Play me a song?

VIRGO weekend love horoscope: Wonderful conversations happen with unlikely contenders for your heart.

this motherfucker is bona fide batshit

But I can't say I'm sane, tbh. I'm awake about 20 hours a day, exhausted, manically working slowly.

manic sitting still + zoom = bonkerz

I woke up at 5 a.m. today, too tired to move too pandemicbonkers to sleep. What can I accomplish in that state? A thought experiment: I will review my bucket list, with death looming that seems like a useful chore. So. What is on my bucket list that doesn't involve travel? (Italy is obviously off the table.) 🤔 I let my mind meander over the body of one of my friends for a while, unabashed. Oh but wait, no social contact either! (Alas I cross him off the list, and the scheduled zoom meeting later today will just be weirder now 🙄)

Ummmmm, damn, I had a really narrow bucket list, and not because I've already done a bunch of cool awesome shit 😐 Try to imagine what it do if I could do anything...without imagining going anywhere or fucking anybody I shouldn't...c'mon, THINK OF SOMETHING DAMMIT, THINK!...)

Shit 😐

TJ walks in, asks "Wanna learn Arabic?" Sure, what the hell. How do you say, Your bucket list evidences a lack of both daring and imagination in all but one pretty useless category (?) in Arabic?

try blackout poetry

Social media chatter "...if you graduate nurses early try to send them off with their own PPE cause ECMC and MERCY (ps Mercy is the WORST, DO NOT GO THERE IF YOU GET SICK!!) are saying they're only being provided with 1 paper mask PER SHIFT and no N95 masks 😮  Buff Gen seems to be doing ok though so far in terms of protocols top project both patients AND staff and they say they have PPE there.."

News: https://www.investigativepost.org/2020/03/30/covid-19-hitting-kaleida-staff-hard/

How to read the news and the chatter? My best guesses: it is worse everywhere than is reported; if a system is reporting low infection rates then they must not be testing their healthcare workers, gotta be; so if the reported rate is higher you're better off going wherever that is, logically; the rest of America is going to let New Yorkers die, they don't give a shit.

That last guess is an emotional one. But I'm from the There, and now I live Here, and Here and There never did give much of a shit about each other on a good day.

washed the pigment off my hands 

Quote of the day: "Facts are funny things." -Cuomo