The end of books did not occur to me, yet here it is.

Yesterday after closing for the day, our library system announced that it is closed until further notice. Since I am very much in danger of losing my job during this crisis, I really can’t afford to spend $10 every time I read a book. So now I have lots of time for reading but nothing to read.

This seems like a pretty big problem to me.

I wish they would have given us even a day’s notice, though one might rightly point out that this was predictable. My husband and I spent a lot of time yesterday gathering information on the virus, and now we are convinced that social distancing is the right thing to do. Too bad we were doing that research late at night, so we were unable to rush to the library.

I feel it is pretty easy to go to the library and engage in social distancing. If they provided gloves, and reminded people to maintain six-foot spacing, I think it would be perfectly safe.

I mention gloves because the most surprising new thing I learned yesterday was that the virus can persist on surfaces for nine days. One fellow, who may or may not be creditable, opined that every doorknob, elevator button, and ATM keypad in Seattle has virus on it. I imagine virus could hang out on books as well.

Another new shock for me is I can’t see my doctor, even now, with not much in the way of confirmed cases in our county. I am a person who sees my doctor every two years for a checkup, and now’s the time, but they aren’t doing any live checkups, just video checkups. So I’m paying $1200/month for health care and I can’t get any.

I went to the grocery store yesterday and managed to get most of what was on my list, though certainly not all, and there were some empty shelves. Again, we are in the very early days, so I have to assume it will get much worse. The only US quarantine I know of is in New Rochelle, NY, where the National Guard is bringing food and medications to homes and maintaining public spaces. I’m guessing they are not getting organic, fresh food.

No health care, no healthy food. We may avoid the virus, but if the situation persists for long, we will emerge less healthy, and dumber.

We are always living through history, but some events end up being more momentous than others in hindsight. Covid-19 is starting to loom as potentially the most momentous thing I have lived through, something that could affect most of the humans now living.

At the risk of unmasking myself as a female codger, I have lived through quite a few momentous events. Even though it was afoot before I was born, the early space race placed me into a generation of kids given an educational system that enabled us to pursue careers in science and engineering. Being born between the Gilded Age and the Triumph of Capitalism allowed me to experience upward mobility and to accumulate wealth. During my lifetime our country moved from government-trusting to government-averse, for so many reasons: the Vietnam war, Watergate, the de-emphasis of civics as a school subject, identity politics, and well-funded disinformation campaigns. We also changed from mostly healthy to mostly ill, primarily because of the removal of nutrients from our food supply, which happened because market-driven profits trumped science in agriculture and in medicine.

When I was a young adult, an airline ticket was a scrap of paper no more personalized than a concert ticket, and airline passengers were barely scanned for weapons. I think. Did we have to walk through a metal detector? I flew fairly frequently during college, and I’m not sure. All that changed after 9-11, as did our willingness to submit docilely to various indignities we have been told thwart terrorists.

My career coincided almost perfectly with the rise of the Internet. I used punch cards in college, had a summer job working with the precursor of HTML on minicomputers, used email at work starting in 1985, and had a Unix-based personal home computer by 1987, which I could use to log in remotely to work. It feels like I was an extremely early adapter when I lay it out like that, but I certainly did not a) cash in or b) predict the spread of misinformation and rise of networks of hate groups that primarily characterize the Internet today.

Do you disagree? If so, have you been trying to get information about Covid-19, and getting hits like, The virus was caused by 5G? If not, lucky you. Your computer must really know how to search.

I started off this blog in a serious mood, then I veered away. In case Covid-19 turns out to be a major reset of the lifestyle of humans, I think I will try to capture it as it happens, rather than just living through it, though living through it is also very much my intent.

Last night I learned that the US has close to 1 million hospital beds, and that about 35 million of us are hospitalized each year. I wonder if that means 35 million different people, or 35 million different hospital visits, some of which might be repeat visits by very sick people like my brother, who is in the hospital for multiple-day visits at least four times a year. I think these numbers are more or less real.

I also heard some estimated numbers last night, namely, that about 70 million Americans would ultimately contract Covid-19, and that 15% of those, 10.5 million, would need hospitalization. That would be about a 30% increase in demand for hospital beds, and since most Americans are not reacting to the current virus threat by eating right, exercising, and reducing stress, I’m guessing the baseline hospital need is not shrinking. A third seems like a big increase, but there are a few pieces missing.

One is the timeline. Simply by using the 10.5 million and the 35 million numbers together, I’m assuming they are both annualized, but I know that. Was the 70 million prediction over a month, a year, or the entire run of the virus? Since at least some experts suspect SARS-CoV-2 is endemic now, the entire run could be years or decades.

Another is the reasons for the hospitalizations we already have. What percent are elective surgery,  cosmetic surgery, or minor procedures? If lots of Americans are suddenly really sick, we might be able to open up a large number of beds by prioritizing on real needs. Maybe birthing centers would come into their own at least.

The numbers I chose were also the minima of the set presented, with the worst case being projected as 150 million contracting the disease and 20% of those requiring hospitalization. Those numbers are starting to look dystopian, especially if they occur within a year.

I think this may be the last normal week for a while. It wasn’t even completely normal, because so many activities were either poorly attended or cancelled, and friendly, affectionate people swapped hugs for elbow nudges and foot taps. Patients in the office where I work want details on the inter-patient cleanup routine as well as swabs for the pens they use to sign credit slips. And the rumors, oh my goodness. Best one today was that Trump was infective: logical karma, but not true. I also heard that hand-washing doesn’t help since the transmission is airborne. Please ignore this.

I am in a bit of mourning for my life before it even changes. I keep thinking about the SFS season, for example, and thinking I should buy tickets, and then thinking that the whole season will probably be cancelled. If we can’t even have Scottish country dance classes, how can we fill symphony hall? Thinking about the music that was to have been made not being made brings me down before I even know whether it will happen.

If we all lose both our jobs and our access to fresh food, the symphony will seem like a frill even to me.

Perhaps my focus should be my own mother, an 81-year-old living in a skilled nursing facility with multiple co-morbidities, any of which could be fatal. High risk?

I feel like something big is happening and that I should do something, but I don’t know what that would be. So I just submitted my incomes taxes, and now I am blogging. Perhaps I’m waiting for events to overtake me.

No, not the four-leaf variety that pigs and people like to be rolling in, the sort that cows eat to make their milk sweet. This Clover is a cash register system used by my employer in her supplement shop/wellness center. It’s very high-tech, with a clean, swoopy outline, a cunning credit card slot that soundlessly absorbs and ejects cards, and three options for how to receive one’s receipt, including via email. It automatically computes tax and tracks inventory.

I work in the medical office, where I shove credit cards into one of a pair of clunky boxes, triggering the second box to ask me for an amount and then contact the credit company, by Internet when it can, by phone when that fails. I have to know what is taxable and to compute the tax in advance, and it prints paper receipts which I retain and use for manual reconciliation the  next day, plus a copy for patients. I also record all transactions on a paper ledger card and in a binder. I compute totals at the end of each month and quarterly, using a flat, simple calculator, not even a proper ten-key adding machine, patented in 1914.

Naturally, I am jealous of the Clover and wish I had one in the medical office. Last week, though, our Clover started disconnecting from the Internet randomly and frequently, wreaking havoc with sales. The workaround worked only occasionally. The Clover people, the wiring people, a general computer expert, and our Internet provider all came out, all found something, yet all failed to fix. Next step is replacing the device.

Having trouble with our electronic tools is no surprise, but I was startled today when I went to the True Olive Connection and their Clover refused to connect to the Internet. Could I have carried a virus from our Clover to theirs?

A silly idea, but in Santa Cruz I am embedded in groups of people who believe that 5G is responsible for Coronavirus, that Whole Foods doesn’t sell and has never sold anything organic, and that when Mercury appears to move backward from the perspective of Earth, humans are more likely to make mistakes. If I were to actually bite my tongue every time I figuratively do so, it would be severely damaged.

I don’t think I know everything, or even that everything is knowable. I do think that having a method of discriminating between likely and unlikely truths is comforting and fear-reducing and clarity-inducing. I would be willing to share that knowledge if I knew how.

Maybe no one would be interested.

The confusion of corona virus starts with the name, which was changed sometime in February. The disease caused by the virus is now known as Covid-19, and the virus that causes it is severe acute respiratory syndrome-related coronavirus 2, or SARS-CoV-2. As that implies, scientists now think is it a variant of the original SARS.

I have a SARS story: at the time of original SARS, the only person in NH who contracted it was a co-worker of mine. He had been traveling in the Far East and was quarantined as soon as he got back to the US. I don’t remember many details, and with this new virus being called SARS, Internet searches now don’t turn up anything about the original one. My husband keeps telling me one can search the Internet by date, mostly because I complain about all the ancient info that pops up, and someday I’m sure I will decide that adding that skill is important enough for me to spend time doing so.

Another confusion has to do with the rumors, which spread at the speed of the Internet, and of course create general confusion about every aspect of modern life, especially for people who have not developed a reliable system of separating fact from factoid. Some SARS-CoV-2 factoids:

• No one is confusing beer with a virus.
• The virus was not created as a bioweapon.
• Antibiotics do not help.

For any topic, the site for truth-finding is Snopes.com, and everyone who doesn’t know that will soon, I hope, go there to check it out and to contribute some money. It is literally the only site on which I have never found contradictory info, and I’m definitely including nytimes.com.

The public is starting to get onto the handwashing bandwagon, but there’s plenty of confusion about soap vs antibacterial soap vs hand sanitizers–and this is also addressed on Snopes, BTW. Short answer is, regular soap is best! Wash every time you cough or sneeze. And for all you geezers out there, for everyone’s sake, stop stashing partially used tissues for later use, I mean forever, as in, never do that again. Yuk.

Another topic of confusion is virulence. We all seek one number for the percent of people who die from this virus–even Trump wants one number, just not any of the ones that science is suggesting–but that may not make sense. The 1918 flu, which killed 50 million people worldwide over more than a year, had a wide range of death rates, from 0.1% in Tasmania to 20% on one of the islands of American Samoa to 90% in some Alaskan villages. That last is some sadly Columbian death rate. The mortality rate overall was more than 2.5%, as compared to 0.1% for seasonal flu and 3.4% estimated for Covid-19 at the moment (WHO, March 3).

Rates of infection are also confusing. Here is California we do everything by county, and for each county we have a count, not even a rate. In Santa Cruz county we have one case, discovered two days ago. In the city of San Francisco, aka San Francisco County, despite what you might assume about Chinatown or offshore disease cruises or big cities, there are 2 cases. In Santa Clara county, the heart of Silicon Valley, there are 24, the most in any US county I believe, certainly in any California country. Is that really the most dangerous place, or just the place where testing and counting are popular activities? How many total people live in each of these counties anyway? No idea.

What is not confusing is, this is a great time for commercial air travel. At the moment, ghost flights fill the sky because airlines are reluctant to give up their gate slots, which are use-or-lose. Unless the virus unexpectedly abates, I imagine the airlines will eventually give up this plan and their slots, but now flights are cheap and empty. Of course, if someone with the virus does sneak on, you will definitely be exposed to it in the recirculating air system. I guess that’s why the wealthy are chartering planes and boats, and sheltering in place at their vacation mansions.

My husband and I are going to a contra dance tonight, which happily has not been cancelled. As is often the case, we’re feeling lucky!

I’ve obviously been trying to push myself to blog every day, and I think it shows up in the quality. Which is to say, the recent quality has been low. It is a chore to complete, so I don’t spend a lot of time either researching or rewriting. I had stopped for a while because it takes me to long–at least an hour, sometimes two–but if I do it this way, it doesn’t take an hour, and that shows.

I also had read that in order to write, you just have to write, but I think that is also wrong, or at least insufficiently nuanced. You have to Write, which means write, rewrite, and, for me, mostly wait for the theme to pop. Where am I going with this? What is the point? Why do I want to write about this anyway?

My best blogs, most of which I think were written in the first year or so I was blogging, are the ones in which I figure out something new. It’s great to be scrabbling around, not too sure where things are going, then suddenly to hit on the arc, the twist, the point, the meaning, whatever you want to call it. I feel that hasn’t happened in a while.

It hasn’t happened in a while in my life, either, or at least not as often as it once did. I’m reasonably happy in my life, with a low resting pulse and few escape behaviors, and plenty of happy contentment with my companions and my lot. However, I also have fewer Wow days.

Actually, I have a lot of Wow moments in my inner life, in the idea arena, shall we say, but not so many in my visceral life, those once-in-a-lifetime moments when you think, I’m so glad I am alive for this, and I will probably never see/hear/feel/experience this again. Maybe you just can’t have so many of those as you get older, because you’ve seen/heard/felt/experienced a lot of things, so it’s harder to find unique ones.

On the other hand, some things are always Wow. Hummingbirds are one example for me. I never tire of hummingbirds. Also the ocean, in any weather or light level. Seeing mountains in the distance…

Seems like I have managed to find a good place to settle for a lot of daily Wows.

I am pretty unhappy about the primary results, and bolstering myself for what I see as the inevitable Trump victory in 2020. I am doing this is a positive way. I’ve decided to make each day count for what it can, enjoying my small victories and pleasures where I find them. I’ve resigned myself to the likelihood that I will have to continue working for the rest of my life, while realizing that I am lucky to be able to work with people I like, and to not have to worried about not having a place to live. I’m redoubling my efforts to do something I like to do anyway, which is to focus on my health, which will both enable me to work and reduce my spending. I’m really going to push myself to enjoy the natural beauty of this great State, which is for the most part free and certainly mood-enhancing.

I was thinking about this during the run-up to Super Tuesday so I mentioned some of these resolutions to the friends we saw this weekend in NJ. The woman was very supportive, and felt I had just the right attitude, making the best of what is likely to be hard times ahead. Trump or no, no one in the US thinks we will regain the equality of the fifties, or more unequal but not extreme inequality of the 1990s.

The man, although understanding, felt that my resignation to a Trump re-election could have the effect of making it happen. I have a lot of respect for this person, but I am having trouble working that out. Certainly I don’t feel like an influencer of any. I’m not sure how much I influence my own family! However, I think he may have meant that a groundswell of people like me, people who give up on societal gains and just try to do what we can with our lot, could make that no one is pushing for a more just society.

This is a true point. My main goal from here on is to completely ignore the presidential race. California will vote Democratic, so I don’t even have to vote, at least not at the top of the ballot. Clearly the people have decide on something short of reaching for the sky, and who am I to rebuke them? On the other hand, if no one reaches for the sky, we will surely dwell forever on the ground.

My husband thinks I’m overreacting, that maybe Bernie could still get the nomination. I’m just too tired of waiting for Democrats-the Committee, the lawmakers, the citizen–to do something bold. Everyone else seems to be hedging bets, playing it safe, trying to keep the boat level.

Just like they did in 2016. Hillary had to win, right? She was the only adult in the race, certainly the only person who was going to take care of the boat at all. Trump kicked a hole in the boat, wore it as a hat, then sold it overseas. It you can’t get good health care, or afford an education that leads to a job, or stop working as you age, you might as well be entertained by the antics of a paradigm-exploder.

We’re on a plane heading home after six days in New Jersey, all but the last one sunny and the penultimate one even warm. We had great fun visiting our younger son and his friends, as well as two friends of ours who moved back east from Santa Cruz last year. We swam in the heated pool in our hotel, used the gym, and sat in the hot tub. Central New Jersey is very spacious, with large houses on large lots and lots of fields. Even the hotel seemed enormous, with lots of spaces to hang out and lovely views of a stream running among the buildings. There’s lots of parking almost everywhere.

This last day was mostly spent getting to the airport and waiting in the airport, watching planes slithering through the drizzle in dim light. Finally we took off, and five minutes later, the plane rose above the clouds to meet the sun. Now we are flying west over a beautiful cloudscape, chasing the sun toward the edge of Earth. I know it will set before we land, and I plan to see it. As with our incoming flight, Bill and I have a full row to ourselves, six seats across.

It’s Super Tuesday, but most of the country is still voting and I’m not thinking of that much, except for sending occasional dark thoughts Biden’s way. Coronavirus is prominent in the news recently, as far as we can tell from checking it about once every other day, and we do have a couple of masked passengers. I hope they are trying to avoid getting an infection, rather than to contain one they have already contracted.

In the spirit of getting most news from comedy shows, we watched John Oliver’s coronavirus-focused episode of Last Week Tonight, and thought his advice was sound: Don’t get too fearful, but don’t ignore it, either. Wash your hands a lot, cover any coughs or sneezes, and if you get flulike symptoms, Stay Home. It seems pretty simple, but will people do it? Actually, are people who don’t watch John Oliver even being asked to do this? I have a vague impression that Trump is sending the message, I’m doing a great job, which is not that useful.

The book I have been reading most on this trip is Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel. As it happens, this book is about a much more serious disease pandemic that spells the end of civilization as we know it. I’m sure those of you who are avid readers will understand why I keep confounding the world of the book with the world I am in, especially with talk of viruses and wearing of masks. I found myself wondering, for instance, how many more planes would be able to leave after ours, before there weren’t enough people to do all the things that people do to keep planes in the air.

Although this is a fictional book, it reminds me of a non-fiction work called World Without Us. That book is a thought experiment based on the premise that for whatever reason and by whatever method, all humans simply disappear one day. What would happen then? I remember being surprised by how quickly all traces of humanity would be erased. The George Washington Bridge in NYC, for instance, is constantly painted, derusted, and cleared of acidic bird droppings, and when we stop taking care of it, it fails rapidly.

Station Eleven reaches many of the same conclusions, with all things electric basically gone within a couple of months, most of them within a couple of weeks. In the fictional book, though, there are a few people who survive, perhaps 0.1% or so. Many of these are initially violent, unfortunately. All of the ones who survive have to learn how to hunt and butcher animals, so they can eat, and how to defend themselves against human predators, so they can survive.

I feel like the book focuses perhaps a bit too much on people’s efforts to preserve culture, or at least the memory of culture, and not enough on how they manage to survive at all. I agree with the author that people would want to preserve culture, but I don’t think they would be able to spend much time doing so. Feeding oneself without food production and delivery infrastructure has got to be time-consuming.

The cloudscape is turning a very rosy color now, not even thirty minutes after takeoff, so I’m going to watch the sunset for a while, reminding myself that the sun is setting on a world not much changed from yesterday, at least for the nonce.

Yesterday we visited the Princeton Art Museum, an eclectic collection of items donated by alums. And what alums they are! I missed the part of life in which one finds oneself the owner of a bust from the Roman Empire or an anthropoid coffin from ancient Egypt, complete with mummy. Were those items bought, found, officially “discovered,” wrested way, stolen, packed and moved by their former owners who later became servants on one’s estate?

However acquired, all of them reached the day when someone said, I’m tired of dusting that 15th century Madonna and Child, do you think Princeton would take it? Or perhaps more likely, when the reading of the will revealed that all the art and artifacts were off to the museum.

In any case, although clearly not a curated collection, the items are pleasingly presented by the museum, including a lot of helpful explanations that bring them to life. Generously, Princeton allows the public to view the nearly 100,000 objects seven days a week for nothing more than an opportunity to donate a few dollars. It was a pleasant way to spend a sunny but cold afternoon.

The collecting of art and artifacts from everywhere strikes me as a byproduct of the age of colonization, an activity I associate with Europeans and, later, Americans during the 18th through 20th centuries. Just as learned folks from those countries hied to “preserve” the last of any species by shooting them, they plucked the treasures of any continent proudly, for the enjoyment of the home team.

I wonder if museums, large or small, in Teheran or Tianjin or Quito contain art and artifacts from all over the world, and if so, acquired them by fiat or finance, though even purchasing art and artifacts has a frisson of force. I guess what it comes down to is, I wonder how odd my world is. Would people from less powerful countries gape to find their treasures in a relatively minor museum? Would they be outraged, saddened, impressed? Or are there enough antiquities for every town to have some?

In the US we often hear how our wealth accumulation, societal stratification, and employment opportunities are still shaped by centuries of slavery and racism. It seems possible that the colonial era plays a role as well. Modern folks may think of history as past, yet we are immersed in it. For some of us, trapped would be a better word.

Such fun we had last night, enjoying our son’s graduate school recital and hanging out with him and his friends afterward. Such grief I felt this morning on learning the results of the South Carolina primary. I suppose I should pin my hopes on Super Tuesday, since I am a Californian now. But it’s hard not to see this as the lead-up to another term for DJT.

Remember how DJT got to be president in the first place? The lords of the DNC decided that the people’s voices should be ignored, and replaced the popular favorite, Bernie Sanders, with the person whom they felt should have been elected instead of Obama, Hillary Clinton. Clinton was the kind of candidate only DNC insiders can love, a money-raiser beloved of the wealthy who toed the line with centrist policies that keep the inequality machine pumping and push the middle class into the healthcare-free gig/service economy.

That is, no someone anyone could get excited about backing, other than the fact that she is female. That would have been historic, but it just wasn’t enough. No fire, just the controlled burn of corporate marketing flares.

Biden will be the same, except much easier for his corporate overlords to control. In a Biden v Trump matchup, everyone under 35 will realize that once again, no interesting change will happen in America, so many of them will stay home, or do what they did in the last election, go to the polls to vote in the down ticket races and leave the presidential choice blank. Two old white guys, one demented and one illiterate, who cares?

The media seem to think SC results were driven by the choices of black folks. If so, I wonder whether they have forgotten Anita Hill. I wonder if they really want the racists to continue to rule, or somehow believe Biden would reverse that. I wonder if they believe that it is possible to have policies in our country that help people like them. If they don’t believe that, I suppose I should not be surprised.

I think I will go to an art museum now and stop thinking about politics until Tuesday.