197

This is a very minor thing but I suppose not everything in the COVID diary can (or even should) be epic and earth-shatterng.

I haven't gotten a haircut since the lockdowns began back in March. At first it was because the salons and barbershops were all closed, and I wasn't really due for one. A couple of months in my wife borrowed hair clippers from a neighbor and buzzed the boys' heads, since the weather was getting warmer. I did not go under the blades myself, mainly because it seemed like one more task in the crazy new way of things that I didn't want to burden my wife with. This was also somewhat ironic because for the last few years I've enjoyed and looked forward to buzzing my hair low-maintenance short for the summer, and the only debatable bit is how close to Memorial Day it needs to be for me to go ahead and get my "summer cut". Whereas the little guy, now that he's just old enough to have the beginnings of a sense of personal style, prefers his hair a little longer and messier and hates getting haircuts. But, y'know, he's 12 and when his mother says it's haircut time, it is. And I figured I would get my own ... eventually.

Also around this time, my shaving mirorr fell off the shower wall. I started shaving in the shower almost twenty years ago, because in all that time I've always had a van dyke or a full beard, and only needed to shave some or all of my cheeks and a bit of my neck, all of which takes a trivial amount of time and a minimal amount of soap lather rather than shaving cream. It's much less cleanup to just do it while showering. In any case, I buy cheap shaving mirrors that attach to the shower tiles with a suction cup, and every so often the cup loses suction and the mirror falls, and when it falls just rght it cracks and I buy a new one, but most of the time I just reaffix it next time I shave. However, given the pandemic and my lack of exposure to pretty much anyone beyond my household (low-res video conference calls notwithstanding) I stopped shaving altogether. My beard scraggled up my cheeks and down my neck a bit, but who cares. So when the mirror fell in May(?) I didn't bother putting it back up. I still haven't as of this post.

And when summer started and I still hadn't gotten my seasonal buzz, it seemed like I might as well wait until right before we went to the beach, to make the most of combining low maintenance and vacation. We did in fact buy our own set of hair clippers for that express purpose. But then I never found time in the lead up to beach week. Also, the early summer was right around the time when people started actually protesting the lockdowns. Make no mistake, I thought these people were selfish idiots and I still do. It boggles my mind that the extraordinary measures taken by governments during a once-in-a-century virus outbreak could be politicized. I didn't choose to politicize it, but some people apparently did. And so the images of entitled jackasses holding signs that said "I NEED A HAIRCUT" as if they were demanding civil rights and equitable justice were burned into my brain. Which of course caused me to reflexively dig my heels in and say, "Hey, guess what? Nobody needs a haircut." And so the locks continued to grow.

So here we are, six months and counting into the surreal gauntlet the world has become, my beard is woolly, my hair is long enough to cover my eyes in the front and doing a ridiculous upflip in the back, and I don't know when or if any of that is going to change. It's become almost talismanic, like if I can hang in there until we turn the corner, then the corner must be getting closer, but if I cave now and go through the grooming rituals I'm just accepting that things will be the way they are for a long, long time that I can't just wait out. So we shall see how long this impasse holds.

(For the record I do still trim my nails. To neglect that would just be gross.)

193

It's Friday and I'm working from home. Been months since I specifically did a "COVID-19 Diary" post but we are still very much living through it. (In case it wasn't self-evident, the numbers-as-titles for the COVID blog entries are the number of days since my office closed.) It's still surreal, just the endless sense of waiting, for things to get better, or worse, or go back to normal, and somehow none of those things ever do happen. It's just weird and different and we're all habituating to it, and sometimes I feel like I can actively feel it happening and sometimes not. I don't really know if I'm up to the task of making sense of any of it.

But I can certainly record random little bits and impressions for posterity's sake. And since it's the cusp of the weekend, I'll keep it light. At some point I'll go back and document the bad parts, of which there have been no shortage, but I acknowledge fully and freely that as far as these things go, my family has been extremely lucky. None of us have actually contracted the disease, which is honestly part of the whole large-numbers weirdness of this whole pandemic. It is a pandemic, it's real, and it's affecting our country in an outsize way because of a dearth of competent leadership, but I haven't gotten sick, no one in my household has gotten sick, and no one I know personally has gotten sick (that I know of; it's complicated.) and maybe that's because I live in a bubble of educated, rational people who take all the recommended precautions and therefore minimize risk, maybe(?), but whatever the underlying logic orlack thereof, it's something to be grateful for. And I still have a job, and can do it from the safety and comfort of my home, and my wife also still has a job, and although she still has to go to campus and that's not ideal and she's not thrilled about it, it's only three days a week on campus and at least her employer provides some PPE. My kids' schools opted for 100% distance learning and even provided laptops for every child, and from what I can tell so far (school started about three weeks ago) the teacher spent a great deal of time and effort over summer vacation preparing for the new model so it's going well from an educational perspective, even if my kids do miss their friends, their little slices of independence like riding the school bus alone, and so on.

However! Keeping things light! So like a lot of privileged, advantaged, fortunate least-vulnerables the big problem has been sheer boredom. One of the first things I turned to back in the spring was music. I'd dabbled previously in online music streaming services but never very much because at heart I am a CDs'n'mixtapes'n'FM-radio 80's/90's kid. But we are two decades into the 21st century after all, so fine, I signed up for Spotify and started making some playlists. This was a vaguely social activity at first, as well, as my college friends and I traded track listings via email in an effort to define the ultimate "quarantine playlist". (I will put mine at the end of this post.)

Reconnecting with the solace of pop music might, in and of itself, be a silver lining but the real bright spot was the fact that my kids noticed me playing with Spotify and asked if they could to. Of course! And that's been an absolute delight, not gonna lie. I should specify the little guy (recently turned 12(!!!)) was not among the 'my kids' here, but the little girl (9 and a half) and the 'bino (7 and a half) were all over it. When I was a kid, my dad worked in Manhattan and would often visit J&R Records and come home with 45 rpm singles, then pla them on the stereo turntable while recording them onto blank cassettes. Yes, I learned the art of miztapes from my father. And he would pick up singles for me, too, if I paid for them out of my allowance (they were literally 99 cents a pop back then, I believe) and I would make my own mixtapes accordingly. Spotify, even better, is free, so the kids could go crazy compiling their own playlists. In the case of the 'bino, this meant snagging most but not all (not the sad parts) of the Hamilton soundtrack, a few songs he knows from the radio, a Bad Lip Reading Star Wars song from the internet, and the song that plays over the closing credits for Into the Spider-Verse.

For my little girl, it's a bit more all-over-the-map: radio pop, Disney music (Descendants, Frozen, and the Aristocats of all things), more Spider-Verse tracks and ... several Christmas songs. I am downright awed by the fact that she is so non-compartmentalized. Why have two separate playlists, one for everyday and one for Christmas songs, when she loves Do You Hear What I Hear just as much as she loves Old Town Road?

At any rate, the intermittent "Dad, can I add something to my Spotify?" requests have been a bright spot as we've been hunkered down and missing out on a lot of other things that used to be regular diversions.

As promised, my quarantine playlist follows. Of course, as is my wont, I had to build a story arc into it, which is roughly thus: emergence of the virus (tracks 1 through 4); attempted social distancing and self-isolation (tracks 5 through 7); obligatory medical song (track 8); shut-downs, misinformation and their effects (tracks 9 through 13); mental deterioration and the collapse of civilization (tracks 14 through 23); eventually coming out on the other side (tracks 24 through 29).

1. The Stand - Prophecy (The Alarm)
2. Come on Eileen (Dexys Midnight Runners)
3. Laid (James)
4. Mr. Brightside (The Killers)
5. I Think I'm Paranoid (Garbage)
6. Suspicious Minds (Elvis)
7. YOLO (The Lonely Island)
8. Tommy Gets His Tonsils Out (The Replacements)
9. My Old School (Steely Dan)
10. Run-Around (Blues Traveler)
11. Crazy (Gnarls Barkley)
12. Spreading the Disease (Queensryche)
13. Among the Living (Anthrax)
14. Panic Switch (Silversun Pickups)
15. Godzilla (Blue Oyster Cult)
16. Crazy Train (Ozzy Osbourne)
17. It Falls Apart (Odds)
18. Everything Sucks (Reel Big Fish)
19. Lonely Boy (Black Keys)
20. Nobody Told Me (John Lennon)
21. Freakin Out (Death)
22. It's the End of the World as We Know It (R.E.M.)
23. (Nothing But) Flowers (Talking Heads)
24. Recovery (Frank Turner)
25. This Year (Mountain Goats)
26. Keep On Keeping On (Curtis Mayfield)
27. I'll Be Back Up on My Feet (The Monkees)
28. Tubthumping (Chumbawumba)
29. Top of the World (Van Halen)