I keep hearing calls for data, data, data. Then, there are the data plotters on Facebook, keen to jockey and posit their own political agenda under the guise of scientific neutrality.
For the purposes of full disclosure: I am not a scientist–I am a writer with experience as a journalist. The kind of journalism I cut my teeth doing didn’t consist of culling stories from Twitter feeds, either.
With that said, how would you rectify my very primitive spreadsheet comparing previous flu season data from the CDC with the Covid-19 numbers?
Flu virus by the numbers
Then, read what I think is a reasonable thought piece from an actual doctor, on balancing the needs to keep people safe overall, with the hysteria that’s been whipped up by members of the media and many of you on Facebook. He certainly has more legitimacy than most of you projecting holier-than-thou screeds about masks, distancing and a host of other things. Like, why do you have such a need to virtue signal with your unproven call for everyone to don a mask?
Someone tossed their dirty Crona mask on our front lawn.
What sayeth all you Einsteins and fear-foggers out there?
Resilience:
That ineffable quality that allows some people to be knocked down by life and come back at least as strong as before. Rather than letting difficulties or failure overcome them and drain their resolve, they find a way to rise.
Resilience Road Sign
They say that adversity is a fact of life. A rabbi once wrote a book about “bad things happening to good people.” It would go on to become one of those best-sellers that people turn to when the floors of their lives disappear beneath them.
According to a well-known psychology publication, resilience is that quality that some people possess. They have some kind of inner resolve and strength that helps them climb out from the wreckage of caused by events that turn their lives upside-down.
Then, there are those who are forced to come to terms with one of life’s truisms: causes have effects. I won’t go into all the elements of why the current pandemic was long overdue other than to say that we’re collectively experiencing the effects caused by living as one of the most narcissistic, self-centered cultures that’s ever inhabited the planet. Continue reading →
I came home from work on Wednesday. My guitar lesson was cancelled for the third successive week. Not to be deterred, I wrote “Stuck in a Nightmare” in the span of about 45 minutes. A few edits and I had a playable song be the evening.
The song touches on our current belief that staying at home and “sheltering in place” will somehow deliver a magic result. Somehow, we’ll avoid harm and in a few weeks (months?? years??) all will be well and we can go back to our lives of buying junk we don’t need.
The fear-fogging line is one I had to laugh about. Other than my sister, I’m the only other person that I know who has appropriated this excellent phrase that captures what the media does best.
I wrote a paean to Rachel Maddow late in 2019, but she’s become one of the biggest fear-foggers out there. As a result, I’ve stopped watching her show.
For me, who knows better than anyone (other than my wife), some things are beyond our control. In fact, Choice Theory is something I now understand and try to frame how I view the world. Yet, I see the disavowal of something that’s clear—we can only control ourselves. The other stuff we need to let go.
I’m still trying to find a way to up my fidelity on these home recordings. At some point, I’ll figure all this out. Maybe then, we’ll be released from “house arrest” and be allowed to go back to bars, clubs, and other venues and actually play real, live music again.
Feelings. They’ll deceive you every time. Yet people project them like projectile sneezes. Can we please enact some social distancing to this kind of BS?
As Radiohead sings, “just ‘cos you feel it, doesn’t mean it’s there.”
Daily, we are inundated with these projections. The morning news is pregnant with stories, all designed to touch our feelings, but almost never does it appeal to our intellects—our capacity to think. “Stupid news” I call it.
Coronavirus-related news seems to be tracking in a narrative rut. The talking head says, “there are now _______ confirmed coronavirus virus cases in ________.” Fill in the number and fill in the state. They’re all the same.
If we asked better questions, would we have better answers? I think so (regardless of what you feel).
Epidemiology is a bit like baseball. Knowing that a ball player has gotten 134 hits isn’t that informative. What is informative is knowing that those 134 hits were made during 335 at-bats, which translates into a batting average of .400. But we can only know the batting average if we know the player’s total number of at bats and hits. It’s the same thing for the coronavirus: We need to know the number of all tests in in each age group and each locale, as well as the number of positive ones.
Merely reciting the number of cases in a state, a nation, or the world, along with deaths, is a litany that lacks any real context. It does elicit fear and even hysteria. Perhaps that’s what’s pushing the uniformity of the current narrative, I do not know. It’s maddening to me, someone who, as a writer, truly believes that words do matter.
On Facebook, someone posted some absolute balderdash, equating what people are feeling societally as “grief.” Unless you’ve truly gone through the depths of despair and hopelessness that grief and loss visits on you when you lose the dearest person in your life, someone you loved more than your own life, then you can’t talk about grief with authority. And if you can’t then shut the fuck up! In fact, if you’ve ever experienced the kind of grief that my wife and I have been living through for 3+ years, you’d have never posted such bunkum. It’s hurtful, triggering, and it makes me like you even less—and I don’t like humans much at all.
Yet, despite my never-ending disdain for humanity, I’m cursed with empathy for them. What the fuck! Caring about others, even when you don’t particularly like them is akin to a curse.
The only place I find solace and relief is when I have my guitar in hand. Who knows when even that won’t suffice, as we’re forced to endure the equivalent of house arrest forced on us by a bunch of so-called experts who are rarely ever right. But we trust them. And the sheeple enable it.
Note: I actually stole the title of today’s blog post from this book, one I just learned about and plan to read.
These are uncertain times. During upheaval, decision-making can be affected. Formerly easy choices become more difficult: for some, paralysis sets in. Of course, if the height of choice difficulty for you is deciding what over-priced, foodie establishment to eat at, you are in luck—you won’t have to contend with that dilemma today (or for the near future).
Doubts about what may happen tomorrow can lead to hearkening back to the familiar—those places where we’ve found answers or solace in the past. Insecurity causes dissonance and discomfort. Fear in turn forces us back to places of familiarity.
The internet can be a source of trusted information. It’s also a breeding ground for the dubious and even fallacious.
I’ve been a blogger since 2003. Over that period, I developed go-to sites. These were written by fellow blogging travelers I developed trust in. When lost without answers, I could go back to them by default. I also incorporated ideas and ideologies from them.
Many of these sites are now shuttered. If still online, it’s been months (or even years) since they’ve been updated with a new post. Disappointing for sure, I simply moved on. Meanwhile, I’ve stayed with it, even following the floor of my life opening-up. I’ve shared with readers from a place that at times felt like freefall. Persisting in the face of dissonance, upheaval, and even tragedy is what resilience looks like, especially if you fancy yourself a writer. Continue reading →
A week ago, the world seemed fine (or normal) for most people. The day here in Southern Maine was warm for early March. The winter of 2019-20 hadn’t been a particularly harsh one, as Maine winters go. There was a sense common in northern regions that signal spring and that place-based “rebirth” that many of us hearken to and anticipate during the dark days December and January.
For people living on the other side of grief and loss, the past three years have been a journey of darkness, sadness, and pain. But to remain here in this life, there must come a time when you get back to “living life.
For me, having lost a son in January, 2017, so much of the past three years have been lived inside-out. By that I mean, grief for me turned me inward. I lost my usual gregariousness and the ability to feel joy. I didn’t want to be around people. I was becoming a misanthrope.
Late last summer, after conversations with my better half, the mother of my son, we made a decision for me to leave the house where I’ve been barely existing as a freelancer and take a job outside. Not some evening tutoring gig or part-time sub teacher stint, either. No, applying for and being hired by a firm that provides healthcare to Mainers and patients just across the border in New Hampshire.
This new role placed me in a new contact center just shy of being open for a year. The woman who interviewed me and subsequently hired me was the sister of someone I graduated from high school with. Continue reading →
Fear is a powerful emotion. The threat of harm, pain, or even death is a motivator like few others.
Those in power know how to stoke fear. So does the media. That doesn’t mean that fear has no purpose, or that fear isn’t valid.
To live in our time of technological ascendancy, the temptation to believe that all things can be fixed with just a little more tech is a default temptation. “It can’t happen here,” or “now,” or “we’ve evolved beyond that” are all common refrains that technology has empowered.
The facemask as daily wear.
On New Year’s Eve Day, we first learned about several flu-like cases in Wuhan, the capital city in the nation’s Hubei province. The city has a population of 11 million. People were being quarantined and Chinese authorities were trying to parse the source of the outbreak.
One week later, investigations ruled out that this was bird flu, a type of seasonal flu outbreak, or even SARS and MERS. The number of suspected cases had grown to 60 people, with seven Chinese citizens in critical condition. Health officials hadn’t confirmed human-to-human transmission. Continue reading →
After last week’s debacle in Iowa, where nearly a week later, we still don’t know if the results are in fact valid, the chattering classes are asking, “why Iowa?” and even, “why New Hampshire?”
The horse race to November’s presidential election has begun in earnest. And as it’s been done now since 1920, presidential wannabes, political insiders, and self-appointed front-runners are forced to trudge through the cold and chill of a New England winter writ large. Running the gauntlet of retail politics is still being done in the age of Twitter—as it should be—in a very white state that doesn’t always mirror the rest of America. But to New Hampshire they all come.
During past campaigns, both my wife and I have traveled to Maine-based events together or on our own. I’ve seen Democrats like the Clintons, John Kerry, John Edwards, and Dennis Kucinich in-person. When I was a Republican, I attended events for George Bush. There’s something about seeing candidates in live settings that surpasses merely seeing them pixelated on a television screen.
On Saturday, we decided to make the 35-minute drive from Southern Maine and cross the border into neighboring New Hampshire to hear a long-shot candidate, Tulsi Gabbard. She was hosting a town hall in Rochester, at the Elks Lodge.
Why Gabbard? Both of us have been intrigued by her commercials running on the Portland station where we consume our morning news and get our weather from. Like other candidates I’ve supported: Kucinich, Ralph Nader, and in 2016, Jill Stein, Gabbard projects something different than the typical business-as-usual politics common during DNC-influenced dog-and-pony shows passed off as debates. Continue reading →
I’ve heard Arthur C. Brooks before. I apparently didn’t pay close enough attention.
Perhaps I saw that he was president of a think tank that tilted away from my ideological proclivities. Or, like often happens in life when you first encounter something that will later possess greater meaning—you pass on it once, or several times.
Book TV, which broadcasts on C-Span 2 each weekend, is what the network bills as “television for serious readers.” It’s 48 hours of nonfiction books and authors discussing their works. For someone like me who gravitates towards that genre, it’s a place I usually end up at some point each week.
I finally read The Great Gatsby. It was shorter than I expected it to be and I read it in less than a day.
A former friend (I have lots of these) who reads very little, was fond of referencing F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “Great American Novel,” like a talisman of sorts. It made her appear urbane and well-read—neither of these were actual qualities that she possesses.
I have been tutoring at a school where most of the students don’t care at all about academics. I wage futile battles with my charges to get them to put their phones down and do schoolwork, nightly.
I’ll refrain from being overly critical: the school is close and the pay is great for part-time work. It’s at night, too, so I have my days free to write and be creative. Oh, and there is the additional perk of having an old-fashioned library full of books like The Great Gatsby. None of the students ever take them down off the shelves and look them over, either. They’re too busy Snapchatting or playing with their phones.
Last Friday night, Turner Classic Movies ran the 1974 Robert Redford version of the movie adapted from Fitzgerald’s classic. Here’s some “inside Hollywood” for you about the film: the script for this 1974 big screen adaptation was actually re-written by Francis Ford Coppola, after the original script by Truman Capote was rejected by director Jack Clayton.
Coppola remembers that he spent weeks locking in a Paris hotel room, an ocean away from the hype attending his own breakout Hollywood tour-de-force, The Godfather. He told an interviewer that the “key to cracking the script” for him was simply reading Fitzgerald.
The movie turned out to be enjoyable. I vowed I’d finally get the book and read it.
Monday night, I found six copies of The Great Gatsby waiting for me at the end of the night. I planned to take it home and return it. I didn’t expect to read into the wee hours and then finish it the following day.
The novel still seems very relevant in terms of class and privilege. Despite technology taking over our lives, most humans are still basically the same shitty creatures they’ve been from time immemorial.
I’ll save the synopsis. They abound across the interwebs.
