Still here

We are bitter and ragey in the best of times…..and these are not the best of times. It seems so long ago that we made our way down to California from Oregon, but it was only about a month ago. The state of California had just declared shelter-in-place restrictions, and it wasn’t clear if we’d make it down the coast. Would hotels be closing? Road or highways? The traffic was as busy as ever in Oregon, but once over the border, we entered the New Dystopian State of few people, few cars, most things closed.

It had such a sense of surrealness to it all, that we found the still-normal ads on the radio jarring, as if we were listening to relics of time gone by, tinny voices from the past when things were as they were. We were outraged by all the cops in their usual speed traps –didn’t they know that people were just trying to make it to wherever they urgently needed to be, as quickly as possible?

And then of course there was the fuckery of discovering that my mom was unable to eat because of the terrible mouth and throat sores from cancer treatment, which led to taking her to the ER, which led to the Pandemic Chronicles. We’ve been tracking this shitshow on FB, but quite frankly, it will come as a surprise to no one that we feel stifled by the tendency towards the pithy on that channel. And we are not pithy. It will never happen. We will never be sparse with words. So be it.