Category - Digest

It’s been a few weeks now since a mob of fugitives from reality staged their clown-show coup attempt on the Capitol.

In the weeks since, millions, probably billions, possibly trillions of words have flashed across digital screens to assess the damage.

Here now are my two-cents worth of pith in that vast ocean of virtual verbiage.

Cent The First: In which I offer some high-altitude observations about technology and the way our brains process information in an attempt to make the case that America doesn’t have a political problem – it has a mental health problem. The ‘net effect’ (pun intended) of all this new technology is a raging, widespread – dare I say, pandemic? – case of undiagnosed #BrainDamage.

Cent The Second: I keep coming back to an historical analogy that struck a few days after the siege at the Capitol. I’ll get to that near the end. Bear with me, this is a long one…

1. #TMITM

Peer with me now into the verbal kaleidoscope through which I have viewed all things since roughly 1968, when I first encountered the work of a certain Marshall McLuhan, who wrote in 1964 that “the medium is the message” (#TMITM).

That expression gets tossed around a lot, but it’s not clear that any of the pundits who do the tossing really know what it means, so herewith a simple explanation from the pen of the master himself:

“Societies have always been shaped more by the nature of the media by which men communicate than by the content of the communication.”

–– Marshall McLuhan,
The Medium is the Massage, 1967

Writing at the peak of the broadcast era in the mid 1960s, McLuhan described the impact of electric communications on a world that until that point had evolved around print media:

After three thousand years of explosion, by means of fragmentary and mechanical technologies, the Western World is imploding… Today, after more than a century of electric technology, we have extended our central nervous system itself in a global embrace…

…which extension, McLuhan coined further, led our arrival at the outskirts of a ‘Global Village.’

Fast forward to the 21^st Century. What would Marshall McLuhan make of the Internet? We cannot know, because McLuhan died in 1980 – about the time I first went online with a 300baud modem, dialing up a service called ‘The Source‘ (and later Compuserve). That was 13 years before I first learned of the actual Internet: In the late fall of 1993, I discovered Listserves and User Groups. The first Netscape web browser arrived about a year later.

Absent McLuhan’s mystic oracle, it falls to a new generation of witnesses to adapt his theories to these new media, networks, and devices.

In the introduction to his 2010 (think MySpace…) book – The Shallows: What The Internet Is Doing To Our Brains (hell, just the title oughta be some kind of clue) – author Nicholas Carr picks up the torch that McLuhan set down when he moved on to that great media lab in the sky. Carr combs through the dense, often opaque verbiage of McLuhan’s seminal works from a half-century earlier to distill the pertinent elements for the digital era:

“McLuhan understood that whenever a new medium comes along, people naturally get caught up in…the “content.” The technology disappears behind whatever flows through it – facts, entertainment, instructions, conversation…

“Our focus on a medium’s content can blind us to [its] deep effects. We’re too busy being dazzled or disturbed by the programming to notice what’s going on inside our heads…

“The effects of technology do not occur at the level of opinions or concepts,” McLuhan wrote. Rather, they alter “patterns of perception steadily and without resistance…”

(italicized emphases added)

In other words,

“Media work their magic – or their mischief – on the nervous system itself…”

To underscore that point, consider this (only slightly) over-simplified illustration of how a brain on paper pages differs from a brain on digital ‘pages’:

As you read these words on a screen, does it occur to you that the characters, sentences and paragraphs you see are not really ‘there’?

When you read a book or a newspaper, you are reading solid characters inked onto a fixed surface.The letters are permanently imprinted.They are ‘there.’

Now consider for a moment how a movie works. What the brain interprets as ‘moving pictures’ is based on a phenomenon called “persistence of vision” – each frame of the projection remains impressed upon the retina when the next frame appears a fraction of a second later, creating the illusion of motion in the brain.

Persistence of vision is at work when you read text from a screen. Printed words and images exist outside the brain; digital words and images exist only inside the brain. On a computer, smartphone or tablet display, the characters you read are painted in pixel fragments before your eyes; the characters don’t really exist until your brain assembles the pixels into what you think you see. Compared to reading printed text, the brain is working very differently, lulled into the illusion that it is reading ‘text.’¹ The brain circuity is effectively re-wired to recreate the experience of reading printed text. Therein lie the origins of America’s mental health crisis.

Returning to The Shallows, Nicholas Carr concludes,

[We miss] what McLuhan saw: that in the long run a medium’s content matters less than the medium itself in influencing how we think and act.”

By now, how we act is fairly obvious: we’re staring at shiny glass objects in our hands all day, massaging them with our thumbs in an infinite quest for both tactile and psychic gratification.We can’t so much as stop at a red light without at least feeling the impulse to reach for your gizmo.Got any new email? New likes? What’s that sound?Oh, the guy behind is me honking cuz the light’s turned green…

All of that is in the realms of what we think. How we think is less obvious – until an event like January 6^th seizes our collective attention with a mind-altering what. the. fuck?

It should be equally obvious by now that ‘what the fuck?’ is really pretty simple.

It’s the Internet, stupid.

All this new technology has ripped a galactic tear in the fabric of our information universe and torn loose the underpinnings of the political and economic foundations of society. We witnessed the culmination of all that disruption in the halls of Congress on January 6^th .

Where McLuhan was writing in 1964 of a cultural ‘implosion’, we must now assert a new, opposite conclusion: Over the past fifteen or twenty years, that implosion has reached a critical mass and has reversed course, exploding in a universe-altering Big Bang of cognitive dispersion and dissolution.

Think of that clown-car horde swarming the Capitol. Then return to McLuhan describing television in 1964, like a barbarian order:

“The electric technology is within the gates, and we are numb, deaf, and blind about its encounter with the Gutenberg technology, on which and through which the American way of life was formed.”

Translation: Our Constitution was drafted as a compromise between large states and small, slave-holding and free. But that was just the ‘content’ of the time; the dominant medium of the era was print. The Constitution was cobbled together in much the same way that a printed page was assembled in the 18^th century – at a time when the fastest information could travel was the speed of a galloping horse (“the Redcoats are coming!“). It’s a genuine marvel that it has lasted this long, more than a hundred years after information started to travel at the speed of light.

Imagine Marshall McLuhan writing fifty years later, in 2014 – two years before Twitter and 24- hours cable news produced Donald Trump.

Barbarians at the gates, indeed. They are everywhere. There is no longer a single point of origin, like a newspaper printer or a radio or television station. Now the points of origin have reached parity with the points or reception. Everybody who has a laptop, a tablet, or a smart phone is a printer and a broadcaster.

What humanity is undergoing now is nothing less than a complete reversal of the cultural trajectory of the past five hundred years, mandated by the fragmentation bomb of digital technologies.

There are no gatekeepers.

Hell, there aren’t even any gates.

No wonder it was so easy for a mob of digital Visigoths to storm the ramparts of Congress.

*

2. #BrainDamage

From the first ape with a thigh bone to the first nerd with a slide rule, cultural evolution has followed technological disruption.

If you can entertain the premise that the advent print in the 15^th Century produced the Reformation (Bibles for everyone!) and The Enlightenment (Principia for everyone! Shakespeare for everyone else!), then you may begin to appreciate how the advent of digital communications has produced the chaos that we seem to be living through now.

Starting in the mid 1990s, when personal computers became common household appliances and we all got charmed by the chime of “You’ve Got Mail!”, to the early ‘aughts when broadband delivered the Celestial Jukebox into our pockets and purses, with all the collected knowledge of human history at our disposal with a couple of finger taps, that was enough to alter the way even the soundest of brains work. Most brains are not so sound.

Per McLuhan: The way information is organized, disseminated and gathered affects the way it is processed in our brains – and therein lies the root of our current dilemma: the Internet has rewired our brains, and a not-small percentage of humanity has gone from their brains being ‘rewired’ to actual #BrainDamage. What else can you call the widespread inability to distinguish between that which is real and true and that which is fabricated and conspiratorial?

In the third decade of the 21^st Century, America is not suffering from a political divide; it is suffering from a mental health crisis.What is perceived as a political divide is not between left -v- right, it’s between the #BrainDamagedand the nominally functional who can still wrestle effectively with the vestiges of the Enlightenment: science, reason, and some grasp of objective facts.

In a recent episode of his podcast Another Way, the legal scholar Lawrence Lessig makes this straightforward observation:

“You can’t have a democratic republic if there is no foundation of shared truth.”

What the internet (and its older cousin, 24-hour cable news) has done is compromise the underpinnings of that foundation.The atomization of information has given every smartphone, tablet, and laptop user the ability to define their own reality – and more importantly, find at least some small cohort that will echo that vision.

I’m not a psychiatrist – I’m just playing on one the Internet – but it seems to me that the inability to process or live within the constraints of an objective reality would warrant a clinical diagnosis: schizophrenia². I dunno, maybe there is a better DSM category for ‘unable to process reality.’ But how else would you describe a condition where otherwise seemingly functional people are suffering hallucinations of a free, fair, and certified election being ‘stolen’?

The mass delusion started settling in on January 20, 2017, when newly inaugurated President of the United States Donald J. Trump invoked the catchwords that will be carved onto the tombstone of his four years in that office: “American Carnage.”

But the real destruction – to the “foundations of shared truth” – did not begin until the following Sunday, when Kellyanne Conway went on Meet the Press and inaugurated the Era of Alternative Facts – at which point the Lawrence Lessigs of the world became headless statues, relics from a vaguely recalled, ancient past.

The content here is ‘alternative facts’; the message is, ‘you can’t have alternative facts without a media environment comprised of infinite sources and echo-chambers.’

Four years later, in his 2021 Inaugural address, Joe Biden spoke of “this uncivil war” – an oblique allusion to the rhetorical excesses of the previous four years.With that prompt, and for the sake of argument, let’s see how even a ‘shared foundation of truth’ can lead to a real Civil War:

America’s Civil War was the unfathomable penance the country was forced to pay for the absolution of its Original Sin. There was a deep and long-standing disagreement over the moral propriety of the ‘peculiar institution’ of slavery: Advocates from the South, like Kentucky Senator Henry Clay or Confederate Vice President Alexander Stevens could argue that the enslavement of humans from another continent was morally justifiable; abolitionists in the North considered the whole idea morally repugnant, degenerate and evil.But nobody denied that slavery in America existed. Nobody from the South had the temerity to say that slavery did not exist on the cotton and tobacco plantations.However objectionable, there was a ‘foundation of shared truth’ in the obvious, odious fact. The opinions around that factwere sufficiently entrenched on either side of the Mason Dixon line that the bloodiest war in American history was all it took to finally decide the issue.

That’s an example of struggling for the moral center of the Republic over a generally accepted fact – and going to war over the attendant difference of opinion.

The trouble is, facts are not so agreeable in the 21^st Century as they were in the 19^th. The late Senator from New York, Daniel Patrick Moynihan said, “everybody is entitled to their own opinion, but not their own facts.” I haven’t spoken to Senator Moynihan – he’s been dead for almost 20 years – so I think it’s safe to say that he is glad he did not live long enough to encounter the psychic carnage of ‘alternative facts’ and the mental instabilities of QAnon.

In November 2020, there was an election.The votes were counted.More than 60 court cases in countless different jurisdictions determined that the results of the count were free and fair, and allegations of widespread voter fraud and a ‘stolen’ outcome were universally dismissed.

But not so fast if you live in your own Internet-generated reality. Despite all the evidence, the forces of opposition cannot even agree that the conclusion is a certifiable, reliable, acceptable fact. Allegations of impropriety persisted despite their demonstrable falsehood. I contend that what we are witnessing is the message in the medium – in the form of digitally-induced brain damage.

I also think we have seen the worst of it. The fever dream is breaking.

*

3. #TheHighWaterMark

 

Finally, I have arrived at the history lesson that was the genesis of this entire screed. Sometime shortly after the Spectacle in the Capitol, the expression “high water mark” began bubbling in my brain.

This is something I learned during the Civil War Sesquicentennial through my work with The 1861 Project.

Pickett’s Charge was the final Confederate offensive at the Battle of Gettysburg on July 3, 1863. Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia was already on its heels after falling short over the previous two days, but Lee decided to launch one more daring assault.

Lee ordered General George Pickett to advance his division across a mile of open field toward a Federal entrenchment on a rise appropriately enough called Cemetery Ridge.Despite monumental losses at the hands of Federal forces firing down on the advancing Confederates,the surviving element of Pickett’s division managed to reach the top of the ridge and briefly penetrate the Federal defenses.

Had that penetration held, had the Confederate forces prevailed on that day, then Lee and what was left of his Army might have been able to achieve their ultimate objective – advancing another 80 miles south to take the Capital at Washington, DC and end the War with a Union surrender.

But the Federal forces rallied, closed the breach in their line, and forced the Confederate Army back down the ridge.

That was the closest the Confederacy ever got to winning the Civil War. There is a monument that marks the spot where the Pickett’s Charge broke through as “The High Water of the Confederacy.”

Despite the Union victory at Gettysburg, the Civil War ground on for another brutal year and a half before Lee finally surrendered to Grant at Appomattox in April, 1865.

That image of Pickett’s Charge (which I am probably seeing in my mind’s eye from the 1993 movie ‘Gettysburg‘), is what comes to mind when I watch footage of the Capitol siege.

The element that stormed the Capitol that day were the victims of a con, susceptible by virtue of the #BrainDamage they have suffered from the disorienting effects of digital technologies.

And while there are still voices of derangement in Congress and elsewhere, those elements are now, finally, being pushed back to the fringe where the lunatics belong.

And I predict that someday in the not-too-distant-future we will look back on January 6, 2021 as “The HighwaterMark of The ConLunacy.”

The Federal Forces of Reason reassembled around an agreed upon foundation – beginning later that same day when Mitt Romney stood in the well of the United States Senate and declared of the fringe element: “we have to tell them the truth.”

At that moment, a long-absent concept was re-introduced into the political discourse: Lawrence Lessig’s ‘shared foundation of truth.’

Like a newborn infant, that concept struggles to survive. The forces of obsequious, sycophantic partisanship have not yet been driven entirely back into the intellectual swamp from whence they came.

Remember: although it took a year and half before Lee finally surrendered, the die was cast that bloody day in the summer of 1863.In much the same way that the forces of Union, democracy, and emancipation were not ultimately victorious until the spring 1865, the forces of reason and competence, science and data have been restored to the Federal government in 2021 – and will ultimately prevail in some near-if-unforeseeable future.

Some things are facts. Some things are fabrications.And even with the Internet (and all the gizmos that deliver it) undermining our print-engendered, Enlightenment-fostered processes of thought and reason, there is too much common sense in the world for an ideology based on fabrications to persist much longer.The tide has turned, the ConLunatics have been forced off the ridge, and ultimately, the Union of Common Sense and The Foundation of Shared Truth will reconstruct the Republic of Shared Truth.

We are seeing the nascent signs of the return of reason, even as the media continue to focus on the bright, shiny insanity of people like Marjorie Taylor-Greene. The Kevin McCarthys and Lindsey Grahams of the world cannot help themselves. They live in the partisan confines of their own derangement. They cannot tell that their brains are broken, because they live inside them, like a fish does not know it swims in water. But there are a few – like Romney, like Adam Kinzinger or Liz Cheney, whose brains are not broken, who have managed to wade through the digital muck and arrive at a semblance of objective facts reality, and truth.

I am, for example, encouraged by one prominent conservative columnist who dares to wonder aloud , “Just How Nuts Is The Republican Party?”It’s about time somebody inside the tent started asking who’s pissing into it.

And there are indications that even the most deranged among us are capable of seeing the light, can repair their own #braindamage, and begin to put this Internet-induced mental-health crisis behind us.

*

4. #FutureSoBright

There is still a lot of work to do.My God, there is a lot of work to do.

How much longer can we continue to be governed by (ageism alert!) septuagenarians (I get to say that because I are one) and octogenarians whose brains are more cognitively attuned to the workings of a rotary dial than a smartphone?

How much longer can the fate of the republic rest in the hands of one individual who presides over a legislative body where ten sparsely populated states have the same representation as one state with forty million people?

How much longer can we live in a republic where the chief executive can be elected with something other than a majority of the electorate?

And for God’s sake we have got to eradicate the notion that ‘corporations are people‘ and ‘money is speech’.

Something’s gotta give, so that we can return to the kind of governance where, when things are running well, we don’t have to think about it every waking minute of every day.

We should not have to worry about our national political structure; we should just go about our daily lives.

But when the entire nation is in the grip of a pandemic, then that political structure has got to unify around in a common objective without the interference of a delusional fringe caught in the grip of a mass hallucination.

Further, we Boomer types have got to pave the way for the next generations.

Beside the words “All men are created equal” and “We the People,” we must enshrine the words of Amanda Gorman: “We are striving to forge our union with purpose. To compose a country committed to all cultures, colors, characters, and conditions of man.”I’m sure that is a very different state of affairs than the republic of propertied white men that the Founders envisioned, but it is also the natural result of the trajectory they set in motion.

I am also encouraged by this recent commentary that surmises a peak in the swing of America’s pendulum, reaching the top of a forty-year cycle that started with the ascendance of Reagan conservatism (and the long since-discredited ‘voodoo economics’) in 1980. The pendulum is beginning to swing back, into a 21^st Century embodiment of the sort of collective purpose that the country experienced beginning with the election of Franklin Roosevelt in 1932.

After four very dark and strange years, we have finally emerged into the proverbial light at the end of the tunnel. The light is dim now, there are still shadows from the darkness, but the worst of the darkness is behind us, and the arc of history bends again toward justice.

It may be summer or fall before the light shines brightly, but once the pandemic is behind us, 2022 could be the start of another Roaring 20s. Only this time without the Prohibition.Too bad I don’t drink.

In addition to this viral pandemic, maybe by then we’ll have found a way of treating our nationalmental illness pandemic as well, and we can begin to welcome the digitally deranged back from the fringe. The deliverance of a prosperous and healthy nation will make it that much harder for a fringe element to gain the sort or traction this period of chaos has provided.

It’s really not like a grizzled curmudgeon like me to express that degree of optimism.

But… there it is.

Where are my shades?

 

– – – – – – – – – – – – –

This clip depicts the climactic moments of Picketts Charge from the 1993 film Gettysburg – the only Civil War movie ever filmed at the actual location. Click here for a playlist of the entire sequence of scenes from the film.

– – – – – – – – – –

Footnotes:

1: I’ve gotten push-back on this line of thinking in the past.Here’s my push-back push-back:When you put a newspaper down, set it aside, are the letters and words still on the page?When you close your laptop, or put your tablet aside, are the characters stillon the screen?No?I rest my case.

2: There may be a more accurate term for the condition exhibited by the Delusional Branch of the Republican Party.Maybe it’s just dementia.Like said, I’m not a psychiatrist, I just play one on the Internet.Your mileage may vary.

The revolution may or may not be “televised” – but it is definitely being “packet-switched*.

I see a video like this and I think: oh good, the truth is finally breaking through.

Tulsa? Rosewood? Never heard about that on ABNBCBS, did ya?

This is what’s different between now and, say, 1968 – the last time convulsive dissonance tore a hole in the fabric of our cultural universe.

In the 60s, the media environment was dominated by three primary channels. Even when The Whole World WAS Watching, the message was homogenized and filtered through those three channels. Three points of origin transmitted that carefully pasteurized message to an infinite number of points of reception. Yeah, the police are rioting, and clubbing kids in the street, but… Laugh In! Mary Tyler Moore! Power structure intact!

This is what’s different now: The internet has produced a world of channel parity. Every point of origin is a point of reception. Every citizen has their own channel.

And the truth is finally breaking through.

We are all transmitters and receivers. And when a man gets murdered on the street in broad daylight, there is always somebody there to record it. As Will Smith said: “Racism is not getting worse, it’s getting filmed.” Because we have all these gizmos in our pockets, there is no longer any corporate or political force that can control the narrative.

And finally, the truth is breaking through.

Kimberly Jones lets us in here on the Dirty Little Secret: The system IS NOT broken, it is working precisely the way it was designed to work. The forces that we were taught are here to protect us are actually protecting the now obsolete narrative

We are all Kimberly Jones now.

And the truth is finally breaking through.

I use the hashtag that begins this post a lot. #TMITM = “The Medium Is the Message.” When he coined that expression in 1964 Marshall McLuhan explained: “Societies have always been shaped more by the nature of the media by which men communicate than by the content of the communication.”

In other words, it is not until the media environment changes that new content can be delivered. The printed Bible fostered the Reformation; newspapers fostered republican democracy; first radio and then television reorganized society around broadcasting towers. The advent of the Internet reversed those trends toward ever larger audiences. Everybody is a transmitter, everybody is a receiver.

After a decade of smartphones, the truth is finally breaking through.

When I first got on “the Internet” in 1993, with McLuhan’s maxim in mind, I wanted to believe that this fundamental change in our media environment would ultimately foster a fundamental change in the way our society functions. The advent of the Internet fed whatever idealism was left over of my sensibilities from the 1960s.

I have despaired over past decade, as I have watched ‘social media’ poison the world’s discourse and flood it with disinformation and crazy talk and unleash a whole world of stupid. Even as the movement of the past few weeks erupted. I’d lost hope that the promise I thought I saw 30 years ago had foundered.

Kimberly Jones has restored my hope. This video is by orders of magnitude the most information-packed three minutes you will see this week, this month, this year.

It has taken almost 30 years since my first packets of hope were delivered, but the truth is finally breaking through.
– – – –

H/T Heather Larkin Vogler

– – –
*”packet switching” is the fundamental technology that made the Internet possible. When you Google those keywords, the result will be delivered in “packets.” You could…umm… Google it.

 

Every year, around the middle of March, as the cold and dreary of winter wears on, I will say of the season, “Winter: it goes on until you can’t take it any more – and then it goes on a while longer.”

The same can now be said of the spring of 2020.

And quite possibly the summer.

Maybe the whole fucking year.

It can likewise be said of the past 5 years, when speaking of the descent that started with that ride down the escalator that has no bottom floor. 5 years later, new bottom after new bottom, and still we descend…

Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln….

I really have no reason to complain (but I’m Jewish, why should that stop me?) as I have been comfortably ensconced out here in West Bumfuque for the past nearly three months. My cupboards and freezer are filled with provisions, and “essential workers” have made the trek out here each week to drop off more.

It gets pretty damn lonesome at times, but I figure I am better off this way than if my ex was still around. I am grateful that all resolved itself well before I had to lockdown, otherwise the operative hashtag would be #MurderSuicide instead of #HomeAlone.

I wish I had more to show for all this time I have had to myself. I have ventured furtively into various creative endeavors, but let’s just say “the input exceeds the output.”

I set up the ‘studio’ in the back of house – the space with the big picture window that I cleared of all but a mediation cushion once I had the house to myself – to attempt some audio and video recording, but the first attempts at actually recording something sounded so bad that I have not tried again for a week or so.

I have not really been writing much. I lament that most of my verbal energy gets dissipated into Facebook posts and comments. Facebook has become my go-to distraction and frustration. On the one hand, it offers the illusion of some kind of contact with other humans. On the other hand, the conceit of keeping an open mind and peering outside my own bubble opens the window on a stream of crazy nonsense that melts my brain.

I really didn’t leave the house for about two months, except for #LifeIsBetterWithTheTopDown joy rides along the back roads between here and Ashland City most afternoons. This has been the season for a convertible, and I have not let it pass without making the best of it, nearly every day.

As for writing… heh.

I’ve written a couple of accounts of my life in isolation, that, again, mostly got posted to Facebook. But I also made some notes about my visit to the doctor last month for my annual physical, posted to my website in two parts here and here.

I have been missing my job at the Apple store. The store closed on March 14. The good news is that Apple has so much cash (like $2-million-per-employee!) – and continuing revenue through online sales – that they haven’t laid anybody off. We’re all still on the payroll. I had a personal experience there that has transformed how I feel about that job and the company:

As the Coronavirus Panic reached its first crest of frenzy in mid-March, I started to worry about the risk for my age bracket relative to the rest of the personnel I work with (many of whom are literally a third of my age). I called the store on Friday March 13 and expressed my anxiety, telling a couple of mid-level managers that while on the one hand I didn’t want to ask for any special dispensation, on the other hand… I’m old and 3-to-5 times as likely to die if I get the Covid. A couple of hours later the Lead Manager called back and said “we’ll take you off the schedule and make sure you get paid.”

That moment brought me almost to tears. No, wait… actually… it did bring me to tears, to the extent that this emotionally-arrested old man is capable of them.

The next day they announced that the store would close indefinitely and offered a similar arrangement for all personnel. But I felt like the universe had singled me out in a way that I felt like somebody had my back – as my therapist pointed out – maybe the first time in my life.

And then I settled into my confinement. They have tried to keep us busy with online training and video conferencing – just more glass and silicon and mostly looking at my own disembodied image on the screen.

In preparation for what remains an unscheduled reopening, I actually went in to the store for the first time on Tuesday for several hours of “socially distanced retail training.” I wish I could say it was anything other than just fucking weird. It was great to be in the presence of other actual humans again but of course we were all visible only from the eyes up. And seeing people for the first time in months but… no hugs, no physical contact of any kind. Wearing a mask and trying to communicate through it… not fun. Also very itchy with the beard. And, of course… don’t touch your face…

The other thing I have done in the past couple of weeks is return to what I am now calling “The Pile” of letters that my parents exchanged with each other in the year between their meeting and their marriage in 1943. I have been reading the letters and dictating them into a digital document. I don’t know what I will do with this stuff. I have reached the point now where I feel like I just need to stay with “the work” such as it is and eventually something will manifest. I have been circling the idea of weaving my own memoir (remember the 1969 stuff?) with some of this material. I just don’t know yet.

As I’ve been dictating/transcribing these letters into a Scrivener doc, I’ve stored some on Dropbox so my sister in Connecticut can read them. Here’s one from Harvey, and here’s one from Ellen. I’m pretty sure there’s a story in there somewhere…

It’s not quite so lonely out here for the past two weeks… as some of you know (via Facebook), I got a kitten… Her name is “Buster” (she was gender-confused when she first arrived) and she’s about 8 weeks old. I’ve posted pictures of her on Facebook almost every day over the past two weeks.

Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln….

(continued from here)

As I suspected, the hard part was just getting to the clinic from the parking garage.

The elevators, they’re easy to find, they are centrally located in a red-walled glass box in the center of the garage. But the stairs? Good fucking luck.

The parking lot was fuller than I thought it might be, but I was pleased that everybody I saw was wearing a mask.

After I’d parked the car, I searched for a stairwell in what amounted to wandering around in a dark concrete maze. I saw a couple of gentlemen in scrubs (and masks!) conversing near the entrance to the elevator lobby, so I approached, and from a socially safe distance asked,

“Do either of you gentleman know where I can find the stairs up to the Frist Clinic.”

“The stairs are locked,” the gentleman in the navy blue scrubs muffled to me through his mask.

I took this news rather incredulously. “The stairs are locked?”

“Yeah,” Mr. Scrubs repeated, “on account the virus. The elevator is the only way up…”

Let me see if I’ve got this straight: Because there is an infectious virus a-loose in the land, the only way to get to the doctor is by getting into a small enclosed chamber with a bunch of strangers?

One of the more vocal members of the Committee Inside My Head said something like “if that’s true, that’s the dumbest fucking thing you’re going to hear all day.” I’m not sure, but those words may have gotten through before the committee member that holds my tongue could stop them.

It wasn’t easy, given the labyrinthine nature of this particular parking garage, but I managed to find the vehicular entrance/exit, thinking I’d just go out on the street and find the entrance to the building that way. But the way these buildings are arranged around Centennial, I couldn’t even find the entrance to the building I was trying to get in to.

I went back into the garage, and after a little bit more dialog with Mr. Scrubs, resisted the Covid Wheel of Anxiety -induced urge to just get back in my car and go home. I resigned myself to getting on an elevator in order to proceed with my mission: to risk my life in order to get a clean bill of health. #IronyAbounds

Not so fast…

I wanted to wait for an empty elevator. Two people with masks got into the first car that opened, and I figured “what the hell…” and got in with them. But before the doors could shut… another woman got in. She was not wearing a mask. I got out.

The next car that opened, there was just one other guy – with a mask – waiting to get on, so I took my chances with him.

I put on a rubber glove and pressed the “4” button. #ParanoidMuch?

The door closed before anybody else could get in. In the few seconds available, to us, we exchanged our mutual surprise that there was no stairwell access to the building. He got off in the lobby and again, mercifully, nobody else got on. 30 seconds later I had finally reached my desired destination.

I’m sorry I didn’t think to grab a photo of the lobby of the Frist Clinic. It’s usually a pretty bustling place, but this time it was nearly empty. Most of the seating had been removed, and what remained was all socially-distanced apart. There were signs saying everybody had to wear a mask, and a Miranda-like warming that “if you don’t have a mask, one will be provided for you…”

I waited a safe distance from the counter for my turn to check in. The receptionist asked me for my Insurance card, and I made a mental note to thank Apple for keeping me employed and insured while so many millions of people are losing not only their jobs but also their health insurance – at a time when they are really going to need it. Note to America: this is fucking stupid.

After a short wait the nurse invited me in.

“How are you?” she asked dutifully.

“Right this moment… I’m pretty agitated!” I replied, launching into a concise summary of the Ordeal of My Arrival and repeating the profane conclusion that the Committee Inside My Head had arrived at earlier.

Then she sat me down, took my blood pressure – and rattled off a number that didn’t sound right.

“Is that good?” I asked, sensing some alarm.

“No.” was all she said.

She left me in the room to wait for the doctor while I wondered if being forced to ride an elevator could actually elevate one’s blood pressure.

Eventually the doctor arrived and I told him the story of the limited choice of conveyance. He was surprised that somebody had told me the stairs were inaccessible. We talked a little about the Strange Times we’re living in, and the exam commenced.

I’ll spare you the sordid details of the ensuing poking and prodding. The highlight for me may have been the discussion around my weight. He didn’t say anything, but I did express my concern that I have add a few lbs from “sitting on my ass for the past two months.”

“Yes,” he said, “that’s been a concern for a lot of people.”

“Yeah, that’s what happens when the grocery store has run out of chicken but you can get all the Oreos you want…”

When the exam was over, the doc took me out into the hallway and showed me an exit to the stairs. “That’ll take you right down to the parking lot.”

Before I left, he took my blood pressure one more time.

“Normal,” was all he said.

Whew.

So, yeah… riding an elevator in the spring of 2020 is definitely not good for your health.

Of course we won’t really know the full impact of this penetration into the Infection Zone for another 12-14 days so… y’all standby!

We keep hearing the phrase “these uncertain times,” but it is not that the times are uncertain so much as the quality of time itself has changed.

It is May and there is no baseball.