Pandemic Diary: Author's Note

I stopped taking frequent notes for this blog sometime in the massive disruption of late March/early April. Not on purpose, but just because of the chaos and the sudden loss of everything that would mark time and events; there weren’t any “events” and it was (and still is) hard to remember what day or even month it is. 

The immediate totality with which our daily lives changed was pretty shocking; in the course of a single day, we all became more or less shut-ins. R. and the kids went literally nowhere; I only went out for a once-a-week, gloved-and-masked grocery shopping trip (covering our house and G&G’s), which was fraught and scary and an absolute king-hell bummer and took all damn day, thanks in part to social distancing requirements (waiting to get into stores, staying back six feet waiting my turn while somebody else rifled through the ice cream freezer), partly to actual disease precautions (having to wipe everything down with a clorox wipe before putting it away), and partly to the fact that I often had/have to hit three or four stores to get such basic staples as pasta, eggs, or flour; shelves would randomly be totally bare, like a snow day back in Texas. Then, too, there was the fact that I was suddenly having to make three square meals a day, every day, with no outsourcing — no takeout, no delivery, no picking up hot items at a grocery store. (As of August 24, as I write this, R and I have had exactly three meals we haven’t produced ourselves in our own kitchen: tamales from the farmers’ market twice, and burritos from Chavez once.) That’s a lot of planning, prep, cooking, cleaning up — I told friends more than once that what I do with my life is: I load and unload the dishwasher. And that’s what it feels like, a lot of the time. (I fully recognize the extreme privilege of our situation, btw: We have our health, enough money, a roof over our heads, groceries in the pantry; nobody is on the front lines, nobody’s an abuser or other kind of monster, and we all like each other — so if your worst problem is that you have to cook for yourself, you’re doing all right. AND YET — in the words of the poet-philosopher Joe Walsh, “I can’t complain, but sometimes I still do.”) My other job, at least through early June, was to ride herd on Lukas; the kid absolutely did not take to distance-learning second grade, and his teacher did her best but FFS, she has a full-time job and then suddenly had all three of her kids at home doing remote school as well, so …. 

Anyway, I didn’t write a *word* from early March to now, either on this blog or elsewhere; motivation and time were at all-time low levels, and getting through the day was the best I could do. So to catch us up to the present day, I’m gonna write free-form and in a non-strictly-chronological order, going by my camera roll and what little was written in our iCal — Pandemic Diary, that’s some good times.