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Ch-ch-ch-changes, part 1: cower in place 41

– In which Dorn is transformed by the pandemic in small but insignificant ways.

Overall, I feel that I’ve come through 2020 and the covid pandemic relatively unscathed, so far—if it’s been alternately frightening and boring, at least it hasn’t been devastating to me and mine, as it has for some. If my retirement travel plans and ability to see my family have been upended, at least we are still covid-free, and receiving our pension checks.

That’s not to say that the experience hasn’t changed me psychically and physically. When the news of the virus first came out in February, and no one knew exactly what to expect, and toilet paper and hand sanitizers vanished from the shelves of grocery stores, Kathleen and I went into zombie apocalypse mode. We didn’t seal ourselves into the basement (couldn’t—don’t have one), but we did stock up as best we could on survival-type items like food and no-fridge-needed milk, just in case. And why not? Who knew when next we’d be able to enter a grocery store?

We started on a diet regimen that, looking back, I see was rather spartan compared with our usual gourmand lifestyle. We prepared our meals with a limited palette of ingredients that were selected for hardiness and longevity rather than sumptuousness. After a few months, I was pleasantly surprised to see that I had lost a significant amount of weight. Bully for me, I thought. If I can keep this up, I’ll be at my healthy goal before the year’s out, without even trying.

But the hysteria and hoarding subsided, businesses reopened, and grocery stores perfected the art of online ordering and curbside pickup. Huzzah! We could now get most of what we bought before. So now, we could add a new activity back into our daily routine: fancy cookin’! You’ve probably guessed where this is going: since I wasn’t really trying to lose weight, and the external circumstances that allowed it were going away, by mid-summer I noticed an alarming trend. My weight was inching back up! If I didn’t want to regain it all back, I needed to get more mindful about my weight-watching.

Fortunately, one of my late-summer activities was to clean out the shed in the back, which had been gathering junk indiscriminately for the last 15 years. I’m not kidding, there was some OLD stuff in there. There was my entire collection of cheap tourist thermometers from around the world, and even an old 45 of the forgettable “Edge of the Universe” by the BeeGees.

(Children, by “45” I’m not referring to a gun from the Old West, but rather a data storage medium that went obsolete long before you were born. It was designed to store mainly audio data, and was in vogue about half-way between the Compact Disk or ‘CD’ (remember those?) and the piano roll, that rolled-up scroll of paper with holes punched in it that you fed into your player piano. You can still find 45s in use today if you look hard enough for them. Piano rolls too, for that matter.)

But more importantly for this story, I found a photocopy of a diet given to us by Kathleen’s old family doctor, Dr M—. This was so long ago that I bet that when Dr M— was just a young upstart, he knew a old doctor that claimed that he used to make house calls. (“House calls”, children, are another obsolete technology. They were kind of like Door Dash or Instacart, except instead of groceries, they delivered a doctor to you who gave you medical advice or treatment right in your home! You can imagine how long a business model like that was able to sustain itself.)

It’s a relatively simple diet, consisting of three days’ worth of meals, showing exactly what you should eat (do they even make saltines any more? Or beets?), and how much, and not allowing any deviations. I could tell this diet was a relic from a simpler time, because it said right on the diet itself, “This diet is based on science, and is proven to work.” Such confidence makes me nostalgic for the days when we had things like science to believe in.

In a shocking plot twist that I’m sure none of my readers could have anticipated, this story doesn’t conclude with me actually using this diet and re-losing all the quarantine weight I had re-gained. No, just finding the copy of the diet has made me confident enough in my ability to lose this weight that I no longer worry about it. Besides, Christmas is coming!

The next change in my story, though, resulted in a much different conclusion…

TO BE CONTINUED … Here!!!

Thanks,
Dorn
12/6/2020

Der Gestank der Angst rollte auf die Straße – cower in place 40

– in which Dorn shares his deepest fears.

We got a hot tip from our neighbor, the one who knows everything and everybody about the neighborhood, that the covid has visited several families living six or seven houses further down our street.

I’ve known a few people who have had covid (including famous Immunata E— R—, whose bout with the disease left her unable to communicate, except in memes). Learning of someone’s illness would trigger my sympathy response and my anxiety response for their well-being (depending on the timing; most of them had the disease and recovered from it before I even heard about it).

But when I got this new knowledge of people just down the street with the disease, my overwhelming response was FEAR! They could infect ME! I mean, sure I like them fine, the few I know who have it (the grapevine had some gaps in its bulletin, such as most of the individual names), and I feel bad that they’re sick and all, but when danger strikes too close to home, some primal self-preservation instinct kicks in that tells you to RUN! HIDE! SAVE YOURSELF!

The fear that washed over me felt a bit like déjà vu, from back in March when covid was a huge, dangerous mystery, and all the precautions—the handwashing, the masks, the hoarding of toilet paper—were brand new and fraught with ominous meaning.

And now it was even worse. All year while we’ve been precautioning, we’ve been keenly aware that (a) the longer we did the Anti-Covid Rituals, the harder it would be to keep up this level of vigilance, and (b) Winter Is Coming, and with winter the virus will get a boost of new contagious energy. So there’s been a slow but steady uptick in dread throughout summer and fall, fighting a losing battle against the fatigue of being skeert all the time.

The dread struck me so forcefully because it was fully emotional, with no rational component. It’s like what I feel when I stand too close to a sheer vertical drop. No matter how safe I am, no matter how well my mind knows it would be impossible for me to fall, the sensation is gut-wrenching. When the virus is finally beaten down, we’re going on a road trip to the Grand Canyon, and we’re going to the “Skywalk”, a huge overlook structure made out of transparent glass, where you can not only look out, but look straight down into the chasm below.

(We don’t really have a plan to do that. I wrote that to see if just writing it down would raise my pulse and blood pressure. It did.)

Or it’s like that helpless fear that I get whenever there are hostile bombers flying overhead. This has never actually happened except in terrifying fever-dreams as a child, brought on, I think, by that 1939 anti-war cartoon, Peace on Earth. Given the date of the cartoon, it didn’t do much good at preventing war, but it sure made a big impression on me! It’s one of my most vivid fake childhood memories.

So anyway, now we were too scared to walk down our own street, so I asked Kathleen if she wanted to walk over in the park? Kathleen was vehement: “No!! It’s cold, I’m comfortable, I don’t want to take my slippers off and put on boots!”

Half an hour or so later, she asked me, “Aren’t you ready yet?” “For what?” “You said you wanted to go for a walk in the park!”

For a moment I was at a loss how to respond, because (a) I never said I wanted to walk, I just asked her if she wanted to, and (b) she distinctly and adamantly said no she didn’t.

I reasonably and calmly pointed this out, and she replied that of course she didn’t want to go walking in the park, she was quite comfortable where she was, and it was cold outside. But she recognized the value of a healthy brisk walk, so she would do it for the sake of her mental and physical well-being.

This was when I finally learned a valuable lesson in vocabulary, after only 41 years of married life: to Kathleen, the phrase “do you want to” means “are you feeling warm and fuzzy about the idea of”, and doesn’t in any way mean “do you intend to”. It was a real MAFMWAFV* moment for me!

Here’s another Kathleen story, maybe more to the point of this post.

Last week Kathleen was especially afraid of a box that was addressed to someone that I’ll call A—, a few houses down the street, but was mistakenly left by the UPS guy on our stoop. I treated it with the same care, and the same quarantine protocols, that we treat our own deliveries, but the fact that it was addressed to someone else made it seem (to Kathleen) especially dangerous. “Don’t touch it!”.

“Don’t be silly” I chaffed, and suited and gloved up and plopped the package on the stoop of their house, and left, no prob.

But she was right! As usual! Flash forward a week, to when we got the chilling news of the covid cases down the street. As I said, the news didn’t include the names of those sick, except for one: this self-same A—! What a narrow escape! I hope!!!

I’ll never doubt Kathleen again! I made a promise there and then that on my tombstone I will order the words inscribed “She was right after all. Here I lie, but I stand corrected.”

Thanks,
Dorn
11/16/2020

IT RETURNS! A Halloween Tremble-in-Place

– In which Dorn spins a terrifyingly true tale of a fight to the death—and beyond!

he wounds, both physical and emotional, from my bloody battles since July with Arum Italicum are slowly mending. The blisters on my hands from ripping these agressive aliens out of the ground by the throat have broken and healed, and the angry red weal on my leg where I was splashed with their alien acid-blood has gradually faded to the dull pink-gray of an ancient war injury.

I had hoped my repeated skirmishes with the wily Roman weed were now behind me, only fodder for whispered tales (retold here, here, and here) to scare the virtual children around the virtual campfire on a cold dark night.

Yesterday I was puttering around in the yard, and something out of place caught my eye—there in the yard, towering high (well, several inches) above the struggling grasses and weeds that make up our turf, was a single broad, variegated leaf growing straight up from out of the ground.

What could it be? I wondered. I hadn’t seen a weed like that before in our yard. Do we have a new immigrant? Suddenly, I felt my stomach drop and a wave of paranoia washed over me (you know, like when you first see the zombie out the window illuminated by a lightning flash on a dark stormy night)!

During all my fights with Arum Italicum (also known as “Italian lords and ladies” by those who have fallen under its imperious grasp), I was always fixated on the bright festive cluster of berries that make it such a sought-after ornamental plant in its native country of Transylvania. Well, that, and the hard-to-extract corms buried deep underground like frozen tundral mastadon corpses, from which the heinous herb shoots out its fruiting bodies. I realized I didn’t even remember seeing any leaves, or if I did, what they looked like.

Google to the rescue! With trembling thumbs, I did a quick query of “variegated spear-shaped leaves” that brought up a page full of images. “Maybe“, I told myself, “it’s some harmless plant, like spearmint, or, I don’t know, arrowroot. After all, this is far from my old Arum Italicum battleground. It’s not even downstream from it.” I held my breath as I clicked on the image that most resembled my lawn find, only much, much bigger.

“ITALIAN ARUM!” screamed the caption! It was the same fiendish fern that I thought I had consigned to a deep earthy grave in the local landfill!

So I was donning my hazmat suit (fool me once, you acid-spewing triffid!) for another turf war (ha-ha, get it?) with this invasive, Facebook-friending herbaceous hooligan, when I had another chilling thought: “If one of the plants was able to escape and propagate way over here, what might be happening at the original invasion site?”

So I calmed my trembling limbs, crept carefully over to the area of the original landing of these invaders, and peered at the ground illuminated with a single flickering candle (and the sun, of course)….

They were EVERYWHERE! An army of them! They were my own personal Birnam Wood coming to destroy my Dunsinane! If anything, it seemed like there were more of them than took part in the original invasion.

And all pretense of finery was gone—no bright berry caps raised up on jaunty stalks, just row upon row of these fierce jagged leaves, coming at me, closer, closer, CLOSER…
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHH!!!!

Thanks,
Dorn
10/21/2020

More and better updates! Cower in place 39

– in which Dorn again avoids thinking of new topics.

1 In my post looking forward ten years post-Covid (here), I joked that Facebook had achieved the status of a sovereign nation. I’m now reading a book that takes this conceit to a whole new level: Qualityland by the writer and (apparently) cabaret artist Marc-Uwe Kling. Reviews have called it “hilarious and terrifying” and compared this book to the love-child of a three-way between George Orwell, Terry Pratchet and Douglas Adams.

The premise of the book is that the newly-renamed country of “Qualityland” has allowed all the commercial and information-management techniques of Amazon, Facebook, and Google to run to their logical extreme conclusions. All citizens are fully characterized by ubiquitous AI algorithms, to the point that all the goods and services they want or need are predicted and delivered to them “without the hassle of having to ask for them”.

But warning: the book is so chock full of clever ideas that it gets headachy to read sometimes, and the consequences of business decisions that seem plausible in today’s world, while almost always funny, are also sometimes horrific to Third-Agers like me who grew up in a world without AI. Also it trash-talks Pride and Prejudice.

Still, give it a shot for a good funny, scary read. Or just wait—I hear HBO has already signed for the movie rights to the book!

2 I now have objective proof that Mark Zuckerberg is the devil. After my bloody battle with invasive Arum Italicum, (chronicled here and here), I had hoped that I’d seen the last of that particular invader from the Old World.

But the evil Arum showed up again to get me when I was at my weakest—reading Facebook! I was innocently checking up on the doings of my friends and relations, when up popped an unsolicited ad, actually tempting me to pay money to get some new Arum Italicum plants. Oh, insidious! See how the invaders get in your head—if they can’t invade by one route, they find another.

3 I mentioned my own miminal contributions to finding a Covid treatment here. When I agreed to lend my computer’s down time to a massive computing project searching for Covid antagonists (literally, it’s the least I can do!), they gave me access to online statistics that claim to show the size and importance of my contribution. (That sentence ended up sounding pretty cynical. Can I believe nothing from the internet any more?)

Anyway, my contribution must be pretty significant, because they awarded me a medal for it. And not just some cheesy participation medal, this is a Gold medal for 90 days of partipation! Why, I have returned almost 600 computational results to the OpenPandemics project, and am now ranked as the 234,099th most prolific contributer worldwide (no lie!). It’s still not too late for you to join!

4 It would seem that the Illustrious Order of Immunati (revealed here) has a new member. President Trump yesterday announced his Covid immunity amid congratulations from his fans, skepticism from the medical community, and a flag from Twitter for “misleading Covid-19 information”. As a courtesy to my millions of micro-readers*, I will not make jokes that support or disparage any individual candidate, but I will repost an unattributed quote I saw on Facebook: “I got the China virus and I beat it, beat it very badly. Do you think Sleepy Joe would’ve beaten it? I don’t think so. Weak on crime, weak on immune systems. SAD!”

Illuminati spokesbeing E— R— would not come out from under the bed to comment.

Editor’s note: E— R— did not really refuse to come out from under the bed. In the patois of modern medical pseudo-journalism, she has been “Fauci-ed”.

Thanks, and, depending on your bent, Happy Columbus Day/Indigenous People’s Day.
Dorn
10/12/2020

Higher power: cower in place 38

– in which Dorn looks at another tool in the covid fight.

On a recent Zoom chat, one of the people mentioned that he had been out from work for the past week with a bad cold. I hope you don’t have “the big C” I quipped, then immediately worried that he might think I was asking if he had cancer. He didn’t misunderstand me, of course—it was obvious to all that I was asking if he had contracted COVID.

I’ve had cancer on my mind lately because a few days earlier we ended our six-month record of not entering any other buildings by visiting a dear friend in hospice. When we got there, her unmasked husband hustled us into the living room to say high to visiting family members, all unmasked, before heading to the back yard for an all-too-brief visit. Her spirits were high, though her energy was low, and it was good to see her. Still, afterward, we were rattled by the idea that we had gone into a house full of unprotected individuals who had gathered from all over.

I can totally see why coronavirus protection wasn’t high on the minds of our friend and her family—they had bigger and more immediate concerns. But it wasn’t just preoccupation, they seemed genuinely unworried. They are Republicans, so they might have some skepticism about the covid’s contagiousness and severity anyway, but more important, I think, is that they are devout Christians, and their faith is allowing them to see the bigger picture in a way I cannot.

I’ve heard some faith leaders try to explain the covid epidemic. The more sensational consider it a message, warning, or punishment from God for some discretion that the speaker, coincidentally, also thinks punishment-worthy.

More commonly, the message is to have faith that even the covid is part of some master plan that is a mystery to us mortals. The question of what caused the epidemic is left to natural science to explain. In this regard, the religious approach to covid is pretty much the same as the 17th century approach to the plague, as I discussed here. Daniel Defoe wrote of the Great London Plague of 1665:

We must consider it as it was really propagated by natural means, nor it is all the less a [divine] judgement for its being under the conduct of human causes and effects; for, as the Divine Power has formed the whole scheme of nature and maintains nature in its course, so the same Power thinks fit to let His own actings with men, whether of mercy or judgement, to go on in the ordinary course of natural causes.

Now, as back then, prayer is encouraged, to avert the disease, or to understand it, or simply to make one’s peace with the epidemic and its ravages.

An interesting paper was published online by Jeanet Bentzen recently on VoxEU, in which the author measured the effect of the coronavirus pandemic on prayer by counting Google hits. In her abstract, she writes:

In times of crisis, humans have a tendency to turn to religion for comfort and explanation. The COVID-19 pandemic is no exception. Using daily data on Google searches for 95 countries, this column demonstrates that the COVID-19 crisis has increased Google searches for prayer (relative to all Google searches) to the highest level ever recorded.

Strong words indeed! But Bentzen’s data seem to bear her out. Google searches related to prayer follow an annual cycle, peaking around the most common religious holidays (Easter, Christmas, and especially the start of Ramadan). One of her graphs shows the normalized fraction of Google searches for prayer from the beginning of February 2020, when the world was just learning about covid, to April before the expected seasonal spikes for Easter and Ramadan:

To provide a sense of the magnitude of the prayer searches, Bentzen compared them to other searches that had massive increases this year as the world was shut down. The increase in prayer searches was greater, she found, than the increase in searches for takeout food, and was even in the same ballpark (about 1/8 the size) as the increases in internet searches for Netflix.

Of course, googling prayers is not the same as praying, any more than googling Netflix is the same as subscribing to it. A recent Pew survey addressed self-reported changes in actual prayer behavior. It found that over half of all U.S. adults say they have prayed for an end to the spread of the coronavirus. Among those who said they’ve prayed were Americans who don’t identify as Christian or any organized religion, and people who say the rarely or never pray.

I fall in the categories of people who don’t identify as Christian, and of people who rarely or never pray, so I can’t speak from personal experience about the place of prayer in the country’s response to the pandemic. But that could easily change, if the threat of covid became more personal. There have been times of great stress, when someone in my family has been sick or injured, where I’ve felt the emotional need to pray just in case, and I have done it, fervently and with all my heart.

But for now, I’m concentrating on staying healthy, being careful and listening to the medical experts. For those who can also draw on a higher power to get you through the pandemic, more power to you.

Thanks,
Dorn
10/4/2020