A radio drama in two acts

ACT I

(Interior of family car, night. En route to martial arts class.)

ME: Rock and roll for the road, boys?

LITTLE GUY AND BINO: Sure.

(I turn on the radio, already dialed in to the modern rock station. "Meant to Live" by Switchfoot is playing, halfway through.)

BINO: Dad, this is not rock.

ME: What? Yes it is.

BINO: Nope.

ME: Fine.

(I switch to the dinosaur rock station, just as "Wayward Son" by Kansas begins.)

ME: Is this rock and roll?

BINO: (with unshakable conviction) Yes.

ACT II

(Interior of family car, later the same night, after martial arts.)

(I turn the radio on, the dinosaur rock station is playing commercials, so I switch back to the modern rock. "Hey Ya" by Outkast is playing, halfway through.)

ME: Is this rock?

BINO: No.

ME: What is it, then?

BINO: (same unshakable conviction as earlier) Funk.

ME: Do ... do you just put all music in the five categories from Trolls World Tour?

BINO: Pretty much.

ME: (under my breath) He's not wrong, though.

CURTAIN

232

Two hundred and thirty-two days is not nothing. The U.S. has been dealing with all of the primary, secondary, etc. effects of a pandemic for seven or eight or nine months, and some things we've gotten accustomed to (some of which might even weirdly be changes for the better) and some things we haven't. Most things that were going to happen have happened, all at once in a confusing jumble at the beginning, and the passage and repetitions of time merely allow realizations to come clear. But every once in a while there's a new first, and yesterday, I had one.

I am in no way shape or form a fashion-forward individual. I tend to conform to expectations, and am quite content to clear the lowest possible bar of socially acceptable attire for a given situation. I can get dressed up for a wedding or a job interview and know what I'm about. I can do casual-but-nice for family gatherings where there might be photos taken. But left to my own devices I go for comfort over all. I am 100% that guy with a vast t-shirt collection who wears cargo shorts for 2/3 of the year and blue jeans the other 1/3.

Recently it has been brought to my attention that some people do not find blue jeans comfortable, as they are too restrictive. Compared to pajama bottoms or yoga pants, I agree they are certainly more restrictive (and, Gender Injustice Alert, it goes without saying that women are instructed by society to wear jeans that flatter and accentuate their curve, as opposed to the baggy-ass broken-in denim I prefer). But whether it's hardwired into my proprioceptors or just the result of years of habituation to my go-to pants, jeans are in my maximum comfort zone.

After the first few months of my office being closed for social distancing, I hit upon a pretty standard routine: I wake up in the morning and get things rolling in my pajamas. I help the kids with their breakfast and start my workday, unshowered and not yet dressed. If I have any meetings, I leave my camera off. Around lunchtime I exercise (the treadmill in the basement feel more and more like one of the best investments my wife and I ever made) and then, finally, take a shower and put on grown-up clothes. Which, again, means cargo shorts and a t-shirt, or maybe a polo shirt if I have any afternoon meetings with people I want to project bare-minimum professionalism at. This worked pretty well through the summer and early fall, and I certainly had plenty of pairs of cargo shorts to rotate through (tbh, I rotated them on a weekly or fortnightly basis, not daily, but still).

Yesterday was pretty chilly, which would normally be my cue for the switch from cargo shorts to blue jeans. But for the first time in longer than I can remember, I just didn't want to put on jeans. Didn't have it in me to deal with a zipper, I guess? Instead, after my midday ablutions, I put on a gray polo shirt and black sweatpants. Because why not, right? Comfy, cozy, and no one is going to see my from the waist down anyways, right?

What I had forgotten was that I do not wear sweatpants in public, unless there is some kind of medical reason, and have not done so since probably fifth grade. OK, no, I hadn't forgotten that, but I had forgotten that on Monday nights my boys have martial arts class and I drive them and sit in the school while they train, which meant I was going to either wear sweatpants in public (which, again, I Do Not Do) or else change out of the sweatpants after dinner (which, ugh). A strange situation in which to find myself, but then again, this is a strange year, an unending string of stranger and stranger days.

So yeah, yesterday, I had a personal COVID first: I left the house and spent time in a public place while wearing sweatpants. And lived to tell the tale! Who knows what other uncharted territories I may explore before this whole thing goes away?

228

Last night I was finishing up the kitchen cleaning before bed, which mostly consists of doing the dishes. (My wife had already done most of the task, so emphasis on "finishing".) The dishwasher was full, with no way to fit anything else in, even if I had undertaken some aggressively Teris-style rearranging, so I was handwashing. And I imagine that happens on a regular basis to everyone, especially with the larger pots and pans. But in this particular case it was pots, pans, a bowl, some measuring cups, some drinking cups, a bit of Tupperware ... if not another full load for the dishwasher, at least a good start of one. And you may ask yourself why I didn't just leave it all in the sink, and in fact allow it all to be said good start on the next dishwasher load the following day. To which I would answer, that's what I'd been doing all week. Dinner last night hadn't been crazy elaborate, generating more dirty dishes than usual. We're just (and this is the minor revelation that prompted me to compose this post) constantly dirtying dishes these days. I wanted to record, for posterity, that one of the stand-out attributes of this whole coronavirus quarantine lockdown office closure school closure gauntlet we're running is the feeling that I'm constantly either folding laundry or doing dishes. All. The. Time.

First world problems, as always, I know, I know. And not all of it is directly attributable to the pandemic. The little guy is not so little anymore, he's 12+, a tween, growing and eating constantly like a teen. His younger siblings aren't that far behind. But on the other hand, they are at home every day eating lunch at the kitchen table and using plenty of plates and silverware to do it (the little girl especially has a fondness for Chicken and Stars soup). And I'm home too, no longer a growing pre- or mid-adolescent but certainly prone to stress-eating. I try to do as much of that off paper towels as possible, but there are always some contributions to the dish pile from my quarter. Meanwhile my wife is trying to be conscientious about packing lunch when she goes to work, and there's no excuse not to have plenty of groceries in the house, so that's the Tupperware in high usage.

Meanwhile, I've been (humblebrag alert) exercising more since I'm stuck at home, and I sweat like a pig at Bacon-Fest, so that's several extra outfits a week going into the laundry. My wife has been working at a barn in exchange for horse-riding lessons once or twice a week, so she also has dedicated outfits for that which require laundering after each use. The kids, as far as I can tell, just wear the same amount of clothing as pre-shutdown beforetimes ... oh except that the bino has recently started taking martial arts classes, so that's another uniform in the wash, too.

That's it, random observation about how spending way more time confined to the house leads to more housework. More deep insights coming soon!

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)

Fiend Financial Folio

Random bit of free association today. I was looking at my online bank statement and saw a recent charge for an online takeout food delivery service. After a matter of seconds of staring at it I was able to parse the name of the service and the name of the restaurant from the unbroken string of characters, but for those first couple beats I genuinely thought GRUBHUBKABULKABOBHOUS must be the name of a minor demon from Dungeons & Dragons or something.

I'd like to say that denizens of the infernal planes of a roleplaying setting leapt to mind so readily because I've been running a campaign for my wife and kids for the past year and a half, but let's be honest here. It's mainly because I'm a geek down to the very core of my being, and I've always got one foot in the fantasy world, mentally at the very least.

GRUBHUBKABULKABOBHOUS!!!

Dead Trees and Fermented Grains

Non-COVID post! Well, mostly. A couple of weeks ago the extended fam (on my wife's side) and I went on vacation, renting a beach house as we usually do. We did it in as circumspect a way as possible, minimizing stops on the way down and back, ordering groceries for curbside pickup, eschewing our usual dinner date nights with grandparent-provided babysitting, and of course wearing masks in public and washing hands and all that. Because COVID. But it was still nice to get away! A week of no work, morning walks to the beach to take a dip in the ocean, afternoons lounging in and around the pool, family board games at night ... good times.

In fact, above and beyond the appealing features listed immediately above, I always look forward to a beach vacation primarily as an opportunity to indulge in two of my great loves: books and beers. And indeed, every single day we were there, I spent some time reading, and enjoyed a variety of cold ones. I could actually cite exactly how many books I read (finished a novel I was in the middle of, read an entire novel, and started a third one, plus two comics trade paperbacks) and how many different beers I sampled (six) because ... I am a giant nerd and I track these things via apps.

I reserved this post for a Social Media Tuesday because it was specifically the involvement of apps that tickled my amusement and made me think "yeah if I were still blogging regularly this would definitely be a post." Because, on the one hand, remember in the olden days of the early 00's, before the supremacy of Facebook, when lots and lots of websites and apps were trying to be "social media for NICHE INTEREST GOES HERE"? I do, because I was very late to Facebook, like 2014 or something, but before that I got into GoodReads and I definitely said, out loud, at some point, that that was "basically the same thing". If people wanted to connect with me and see what I was up to, they could do so on GoodReads! I read all the time (commuting via mass transit) and posted detailed reviews of every book I read, sometimes directly on the site, and sometimes by linking from my GoodReads entries back to this very blog here, where of course I would use book reviews as autobiographical jumping off points for reflections on this crazy modern world we live in (yes, ha ha, 2007-me thought that moment in history was so-o-o-o cra-a-a-a-a-zy). Anyway, obviously Facebook now is what it is, and I got onboard for good or ill (both, most days) and yet I have remained a devoted GoodReads user because I am a completist and once I start something I don't want to stop. I got much more slack about posting reviews but I do enjoy tracking which books I read, and how many I read per year, and so on.

I got into Untapped, the beer-tracking app, much later and not at all as a substitute, close-enough kind of social networking. Again, I just like cataloguing and tracking and measuring things, and Untapped does the job. And, okay, every once in a while I will get a "toast" from one of my friends on the app, and "toast" them back, which is always a nice bit of pleasant, low-stakes, virtual interaction, even moreso now that we're all quarantining and isloating and whatnot (sorry, everything comes back to COVID, dammit).

The other hand I wanted to acknowledge for sheer ridiculousness has to do with the metrics and numbers games, because as it happened I got to see two different ends of the spectrum playing out in the respective apps over the course of the beach week. Within GoodReads, I had set a goal for myself of reading 52 books this year, which seemed moderately achievable and also would have the effect of finally getting the total number of books I had read and tracked in the app up over 1000. Anyone who loves tracking numbers especially loves big round numbers, and I am no exception. Of course I've fallen a bit behind pace this year because I haven't been commuting, and thus haven't been listening to audiobooks as fast (DAMMIT, COVID) so it was nice to get a chance to play catch-up a bit and see the grand total tick up from 971 to 972 to 973 etc. Meanwhile over on Untapped, I've been using the app for three or four years and managed to try a little over 300 different beers. The app itself automatically subdivides things, tracking the individual beer style families (e.g. porters, stouts, brown ales, IPAs, wheat beers, etc.) in a way I probably wouldn't bother to do myself. Although, I have discovered that since I like what I like and tend to drink beers within the same styles, it sometimes gets hard to try new-to-me beers just because the options within my preferences are limited. Beach week, in particular sharing a house with other adults who have different tastes in beer, provides an opportunity for me to freely (in all sense of the word) expose my palate to beers I would never buy for myself.

And thus Beach Week is a real prime time for pumping up my numbers! But it did make me laugh, as I'm working my way towards a thousand recorded books and plowing into my fourth century of beers, that I tried one of the IPAs that my brother-in-law brought to the beach, and dutifully recorded it in Untapped, and got a little notification ding for earning a badge. A completely meaningless but nevertheless unironic electronic attaboy which basically said, "Good for you! You've now tried FIVE different IPAs! If you make it to TEN, you'll get another badge!" A bit of newbie encouragement, delivered to me because I'm just so finicky, apparently. I thought that was hilarious.