28 June 2020

Be Thankful for it All

Around the 15^th of July our household will hit the point of four months isolated.  We have had a couple of socially distanced, social interactions but for the most part we are isolated totally, completely.  Depending on the moment it is either easy or very hard to be alone here in the Spaceship Todd.

We have settled into a very predictable set routine.  The centering points of our activities are the meals my wife has been preparing.  A great deal of love has been involved in the baking and grilling and planning. With nowhere to go really, smoking a chunk of meat for 8 hours is a whole lot more doable than it used to be.

Now there is time for mowing and weeding and cleaning and sorting and all the other tasks that were not appropriate when work demanded so much from us. Now there is even time to listen to new music, or at least music that is new to me.  Truly I have been down various rabbit holes of song. All those things that were just a few minutes too long to be worked into my schedule are now penciled in.

The one thing I have not been doing that at the start of the pandemic isolation I thought would become a matter of course, is reading novels.  I read a great deal.  I read newspaper articles.  I read magazine articles.  I read essays.  There was a David Foster Wallace story of a high dive experience merged with becoming an adolescent that was a great read. But novels have not been holding my attention. A friend suggested one author, an Irish writer, and I did follow up on that.  The novel was odd but well worth the read.

During my time within these four walls, I have been working very hard on keeping my level of blasphemy and profanity to a minimum when I am reading the news. During this period of isolation, it has not been an easy task. So many dunderheaded moves by so many folks that seem to be trying out for Luddite the Movement.

Oh well that is it for this Sunday.