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

Quote of the day: "Calibrate yourself and your expectations so that every morning you aren't waking up disappointed." -Cuomo

pandemic scrapbooking

waking up to dogs on my pillow

leaving messages

birthday w an emergency candle

rereading a book

evidence of housecleaning everywhere ft nobody risks garbage picking this gorgeous table

I take a walk in the evening. People are out with dogs sometimes but less and less, and everyone crosses the street to be many many feet away. I sometimes talk on the phone as I walk, work meetings that start early and go late. I notice: I have to stop talking now if a car goes by, all the cars out are missing a muffler / pieces of shit, only the poor people are still going to work face to face. I see an older woman lugging groceries toward the rent controlled housing unit nearby. She crosses the street to get further from me.

VIRGO (Aug. 23-Sept. 22). Somewhere in the world, a person thinks about you with love and beautiful intentions. In a related story, you'll fall into a good mood with no obvious reasons for why you're there.

"There" as in still above ground, I am assuming. 

I should run but there's nowhere to go and too many of us to move. I'm fucking terrified.

https://www.politico.com/states/new-york/albany/story/2020/03/24/cuomo-to-trump-administration-you-pick-the-26k-people-who-are-going-to-die-1268833

Spanish Military Finds Dead Bodies And Seniors 'Completely Abandoned' In Care Homes : Coronavirus Live Updates : NPR
https://www.npr.org/sections/coronavirus-live-updates/2020/03/24/820711855/spanish-military-finds-dead-bodies-and-seniors-completely-abandoned-in-care-home

Dr. Gale Burstein said if you have traveled in your community, you should assume you were somewhere with a possibility that you were exposed to coronavirus.

Shit, God dammit 😖

I work loooong days now. Cmon and ZOOM! Remember when what I did for a living was find ways to keep students from flunking all day? That again.

samantha fish - chills and fever

Lost sense of smell is an early indicator that you're carrying the virus. Test yourself, like sniff an onion or something (?) Those little wake you up with a bad smell if you pass out things that used to be taped on walls in hospitals, smelling salts?, are they still there?

This wasn't a good time to break my nose :/

Neil Diamond




Ok ok I take it back about Whitegirlrapper :/

I had to leave safety to go get appliances delivered, then run to campus for a minute to send files home from my work pc. I filled up with gas, bought the last of the milk and bleach at that gas station, then came home and passed out cold from the expenditure of mental energy that it took to be out in the world for just that long.

I drove by the park, it was packed with people, jogging and walking in groups. Baby strollers. Skate boards.

I thought: I didn't know that was safe, maybe I should stop being such a paranoid introversionaniac, and go to the park...

Then Cuomo came on to plead with people to get out of the fucking park, like right then as I was driving by it.

People are not listening. Maybe they CANNOT. Hear what the birds are saying.

hope that dude isn't gonna die ft just getting by

Update, it's actually not my imagination. Air and water quality are rapidly dramatically improving. It sure has seemed like birds are losing their minds, chirping at midnight wtf.  San Francisco has a nearly 40% drop in smog as of today. So I guess the birds DO care about pandemics, i.e. they feel like I left a week or so ago (woohoo!)..

I wonder of butterflies will rebound 🤔

Bonus: nature cams

-_0 birds don't care about pandemics

I want one last hand rolled cigarette. That sluttysexydamp tobacco. Filigree paper. Just one. Just one loooooonnng draaaag.

Shit

Ok this isn't that much fun anymore. Especially since we all figured how to fucking zoom. Now we're all going to die AND I still have to go TO MEETINGS.

Plus I'm trapped inside with two college kids, one of whom just got home probably carrying the damn plague AND AS CRABBY AS ALWAYS.

Ugh.

"write like colson whitehead," etc

careerus swandiveous magnum opus

jeezus, that was like 3 weeks ago, I was nearly 'done', maybe I should take a cruise, I wondered..

..

 I was full of so much NOOOOOO that I secretly suspect I summoned a petulance, like the haboob

🤔