2020: An Unexpected Prison

You have to admit that you didn't think things would roll out this way.

I didn't think that I would need to take a detour and live out part of the rest of my days as a near hermit: selecting all of my existence to be nearby; staying away from nearly everyone; engaging no one in casual conversation waiting in line, at a stoplight, buying bread; making sure never to linger anywhere for very long.

I never imagined not going to movie houses, bookstores, libraries, art museums, theaters, the things that make urban living an enjoyable, interesting thing, the reason I wanted to settle in one. Most of the time, I might have been just as likely to function in little Princeton, Wisconsin, where I once had a place, population a thousand and something, where nothing ever happens and no one ever makes loud noises. It does have a nice flea market on spring and summer Saturdays, but that would be a major superspreader event. I'd have to stay away from that. Too.

Instead, I must look over my shoulder endlessly in Milwaukee, lest someone unsuspectingly tries to end my life by giving me an infinitesimally small virus that's apparently thousands of times smaller than the period at the end of this sentence (hat tip to Fareed Zakaria in his book Ten Lessons for a Post-Pandemic World). That can make me horribly sick. That, combined with my triple by-pass two and a half years ago which narrowed the freeway to my heart, can kill me.

And there is no interest to be accrued for being a good and observant practitioner of social distancing, hand cleaning (whether with soap or alcohol-based goop), and mask wearing. Each day starts from zero. Each day could be the start of a rapid, painful, lonely, panic-filled demise. I have forgotten my mask in a store exactly once and felt really stupid. A very nice gal at the counter gave me a one-time usage mask. I got away with it, which is to say: No sickness.

Nobody who is healthy can stop living. Everyone must get food and for people like me, their prescriptions. That the supply chains haven't run dry yet is a major accomplishment, or perhaps a stroke of good luck largely ignored by the pundits. Nearly everything I need is a block away, a nice addition to the convenience I sought when I originally got the apartment. I had no idea it would be so vital.

Some nine months we've had to put up with this. But for a great deal of it, we've had to run in place while an incompetent, uncaring federal administration used obfuscation and grandstanding instead of doing the hard work of figuring out what to do and assuming a leadership role. It is a major reason, perhaps the major reason, it isn't being allowed to continue.

Journalism has helped reduce the paranoia, but the science remains: This can kill you. And is killing hundreds of thousands of us, even those who are observing protocols. There is a randomness to this that is maddening, that you have to blot out of your mind lest you stay in bed all day.

The virus has spread. It is worse than ever before. Nine months later, it's as if we've done next to nothing at all. Testing is nearly futile because of the slowness of the report following up. We now have a couple of vaccines, a remarkable development in the history of science, but their distribution is one-tenth of what's been predicted. The president has yelled at everybody he accuses of being against him, but never once at someone who's supposed to get this vaccine passed out to us. But since he's gotten sick himself, it really doesn't matter, since it's always been solely about him.

And there are those, still, who refuse to pay attention, those who think it's just God evening things out, it's just bad luck that nobody can do much about. I know there are stupid people out there, and I never had to believe I needed to have anything to do with them. But I know they've been around me, though nearly everyone in my local area now wears masks. I have to do more than shrug my shoulders in the presence of stupid people now: I have to protect myself from them.

We know nothing for sure: Who's supposed to get the vaccine in what order, when to expect it, where to go to get it. No one has said anything. No one has said who's going to say so.

And coming up on 350,000 killed. The numbers increase. The dead pile up. Hospitals in some parts of the country are simply overrun. Terrible triage is near.

I don't know if I'm merely lucky or I really have succeeded in raising the odds of my survival. But I do know two things: Until I get a vaccine, I'm in a survival mode; and the uncertainty of it all is beginning to wear on me. Even the vaccine has its own uncertainty; nobody knows how well it will work and for how long. It's like the commercial that suggests: A chance to live longer.

Because every day, I'm forced to endure the monotony of my existence. I get up at the same time, do about the same things. I know there is only so much I can possibly do without exposing myself to major risk. My world has shrunk. It is tolerable, but it is something of a prison. Nobody guarantees my safety.

Now there is a mutated form of the virus in at least Colorado and California. It is supposed to spread faster than the original one. Scientists don't think the vaccine will fail with it, but nobody knows right now. It's enough just to get the vaccine out there. More than ever, it seems to be a race against time.

Granted, we rid ourselves of the menace in the White House. Another four years of him are unimaginable. The battle we had to fight, though, was an enormous disappointment.

This is not how I envisioned spending most of 2020. I thought I'd be traveling for a project I began two years ago, which was bearing interesting fruit. Until things return to something close to normal, it won't do me much good to continue it. 

The places I plan on visiting will have to engage in decent commerce and casual exchange of information and access, or else it will distort my findings. To get the kind of information I seek, I have to visit, among other places, bars and mom-and-pop restaurants, the kinds of places that are now dangerous if they are open at all.

I am sixty-nine years old. I won't live forever. Time is now being stolen. The kind of patience that Buddhists observe is easy when you're forty. But the clock stops for no one.

In the totality of human existence, this will be reflected upon by historians and scientists and journalists forever, I suppose. But I don't have forever. I don't have all that long. I need to be freed from prison.

2021 promises that, but nobody can foresee when, partly because we remain under the cloud cover of incompetence for another twenty days. It is a torturous slowing of time. We are in the same kinds of cages that those poor people on the border are in, with something promised but indefinitely on hold. Justice delayed is justice denied, but this time cannot be returned. It is gone. The year is lost.

But I still live. A year from now, I want to write about the good things that happened, the interesting places I went, the friends and family I mingled with. I want to be hopeful instead of wary. I want to trust people again.

That will have to be its own journey. Being vaccinated is one thing: Restoring my faith in humankind is quite another, having seen plenty of reason to doubt it, having seen previously unfathomable meanness and stupidity. That will go more slowly. Nobody can vaccinate me against cynicism. That will have to be a self-cure.

But I don't want to leave without thanking those of you who have taken the time to read what I've written here. You are valued more than you know. And I plan to be here, every couple of days or so, to ring in 2022 as well. After all, we made it this far.

Happy New Year, everybody. May you gain new energy and hope. May it still be possible.

Be well. Be careful. Wear a mask. One day closer to a vaccine. With some luck, I'll see you down the road.

Mister Mark