What week of lockdown is this? I’ve lost track.

I hope everyone’s holding up, well. I’m guessing many are not. Actually, I know many aren’t.

My daytime job involves taking calls in a healthcare setting. Since early March, I’ve listened to people cry, melt down, and I’ve experienced and uncomfortable level of fear being projected my way for the past weeks and now, months. This has got to stop!

As a parent coping with the loss of a son, I’ve been struggling with the feeling of sliding back into that “deep dark hole” that’s taken me months to get to the lip of, and then, up into the light of living again. Why has this pandemic triggered these former emotions that were more painful than any human should be forced to endure? I’ve asked the question “why me?” so many times I can’t even come up with a reasonable guess.

I’m not sure why, but often following Mark’s death, I was so fucking angry. I simply wanted to hit someone or worse. Rather than acting out on this urge, I simply turned inward. I remember a former radio psychologist, Dr. Joy Brown, saying that depression was “anger turned inward.” I’d concur. I was so depressed that I contemplated suicide.

Picking up the guitar saved me nearly two years ago. I’ve played my old acoustic (or my newer electric) nearly every single day since August 2018. I’m amazed that two guitars (and a Vox amp) could have made such a difference, but they have. Still, the past 8 to 10 weeks have been difficult as hell, even playing and writing songs and performing via the interwebs. There’s only so much shit that even my guitars can deflect away.

When the Covid-19 outbreak ramped up, there were conflicting reports of its severity. Initially, some said that it wasn’t any worse than the common flu and that “people were overreacting.” Then, protocols were established as cases exploded, especially in the large, urban population centers like Boston, New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles.

Social distancing began being rolled out in early March. That’s when this period of quarantine commenced. We’ve been in a state of purgatory (some would say, “hell”) ever since.

Initially, we were told that social distancing was necessary to “flatten the curve.” That made sense. Anyone who knows anything about America’s healthcare system knows that it’s broken at best. Beds were in short supply due to market mechanisms inherent in our current global capitalist (neoliberal) economy. Too many sick patients would “overwhelm” the system and cause it to crash. At least that’s what we were told and by-and-large, the good sheeple we are, we held onto that.

But, once it was apparent that the center would hold, governors and other lifelong political hacks recognized that this pandemic would be a terrible thing to waste. Power—the absolute kind that non-term-limited pols are granted in whatever system of governance we have in America—began to do its work—corrupting and corrupting in an absolute and monarchical way.

As someone ensconced on the American left for a good stretch, I watched first with interest that soon morphed into anger, how complicit the media was with shutting everything down. MSNBC and Rachel Maddow in particular, began fogging fear into my saloon, nightly. At one point, I turned to Mary and said, “I’m done with this bullshit.” I haven’t watched the network for six weeks.

I’m capable of holding multiple thoughts, ideas, and paradigms simultaneously. Many intelligent, well-informed people are. Yet, most of my left-of-center friends were melting down in front of me on Facebook. One guy I kind of know (got to know him as a result of Mark’s death), a former Portland restaurant worker, became a daily source of irritation to me. I’m not sure why. Perhaps it was his hypocrisy. But we’re all hypocrites in various ways. Maybe it was the way he flaunted his ignorance as a form of virtue signaling. He became one of the first people I followed on Facebook who engaged in mask-shaming. Mask-shaming with a barrage of f-bombs and personal attacks on a host of people, including the industry that allowed him a pretty damn good living simply because he could manage a busy bar in a city that was full of similar places catering to people who’ll pay $10 and $12 for a mixed drink.

We all have lost our shit in various ways. But the moral superiority and elitism coming from people I thought I liked was a bit too much for me. Once again, I was regularly muttering to myself that I “fucking hate humans,” just like I did in the weeks and months following Mark’s death.

At some point about a month ago, my anger and agitation was becoming a problem. I decided to begin limiting my screen time. I stopped watching all but a few minutes of morning news on the local network. I started listening to a few podcasts. One of them was Michael Savage’s. I know—I just outed myself to the “good” liberals who know me. I don’t fucking care. This might surprise you but I think it’s possible to be a hybrid of a Burkean Conservative seasoned with some sense of a Marxist worldview. But once again, for someone who most of you have abandoned to a world of nearly constant psychic struggle and emotional dissonance, I no longer give two shits what anyone thinks about me.

Savage had on a journalist named Alex Berenson a few weeks back. I listened with interest. As someone with investigative journalism chops and who actually has always tried to practice the basic tenets of journalism via my writing (in most instances), I’m appalled how the mainstream media has carried water for what’s become propaganda in the best connotation. Often, journalists simply lie to further their agenda. I know most of the media covering national politics loathe President Trump, so the constant drumbeat of “orange man bad” has gotten tiresome. Flip the record over because the tone arm is scraping up against the label.

When I left fundamentalism back in the mid-1980s in Indiana, I was working at a prison as a med tech. A number of former Bible school students I once attended classes with were guards there. A few of them would come into the med room I worked in shepherding sick inmates to be checked-out. One of these guards tried to impugn my decision in front of my co-worker. I basically threw him out of the med room and intimated he’d better not ever come back with his bullshit. I’d made my choice and just because he couldn’t abide by it, it was my right.

Listening to Berenson recount his own experience with former colleagues rang true to me. Berenson is a real journalist. A true journalist follows information where it takes you. Most media hacks today have an agenda and a narrative and they simply bend the notes to fit their own tune. That’s not journalism.

Maine’s governor—like most of her Democrat colleagues occupying governorships across the country—has erred on the side of caution. I guess caution’s okay: except when it guarantees many of your citizens are going to experience ongoing economic fallout from turning off the state’s economy. And please, don’t give me your tired lines about “safety and science.”

Every morning, I drive into work from Biddeford. I drive 65 to 72 on roads that have speed limits of 70. Regularly, cars blast by at speeds well above 80 and even higher than that. Speed limits are based upon clear parameters. By-and-large they are determined by what’s safe during ideal driving conditions: dry pavement, a vehicle with properly-inflated tires, functional tires and brakes that operating at peak levels. Then, there are elements of driver skill, etc. Driving 80 on the interstate is unsafe. Excessive speed kills. And every year, somewhere between 35,000 and 40,000 people die on American roadways from automobile accidents. Speed is a significant factor in many of these deaths.

Yet, some of the same Nazi assholes mask-shaming everyone and their neighbor, are the ones who violate a host of traffic laws and probably a whole bunch of other legal statutes. Hypocrisy? I don’t know: if the shoe fits….

All of these kinds of observations have afflicted me for weeks now. It’s what initially made me pissed off about masks.

Personally, I’m not totally on-board with the mask thing. But you know what? My chiropractor wears a mask. I have the utmost respect for his ability as a professional to keep my upright. He’s kept his practice open throughout the pandemic. So I wear a mask when I go to see him. If masks prove that they protect him and his staff from me (possibly being contagious, but asymptomatic like many of us), then I can wear something that I find uncomfortable at best.

While in Brunswick yesterday for an appointment, Mary asked me if I could get a few things at Morning Glory Natural Foods, the town’s health food emporium. Being vegan, there are some things we can only get at places like Morning Glory, like Violife vegan parmesan cheese. Pandemic or not: people gotta’ eat (and eat well).

Morning Glory limits the number of shoppers in the store to five people at a time. Walking down Maine Street towards the store, I saw a line outside. Most of those standing on the sidewalk near the entrance were wearing masks. I took mine out of my vest pocket and put it on. I waited patiently. In 10 minutes, I was in the store getting what I needed and I was out in another 10 minutes.

Come on, Jim! Put your damn mask on!

Wearing the mask didn’t kill me. It was me simply nodding to my fellow humans (who I don’t always like being around) and indicating that I respect them enough to do something I don’t know for sure that it’s effective, but this is the world we are now living in. It’s okay to have more than one mind about masks. I liked some of my ideas my sister wrote about, incorporating masks into a fashion statement—instead, much of our mask behavior has been pretty damn ugly.

Brunswick’s downtown is a veritable ghost town. The governor, bureaucratic hacks like Heather Johnson and their ilk will have a lot to answer for in the coming months. Maybe all the fear, dissonance, and very real suffering they’ve inflicted was necessary to keep us all “safe.” But I think (because I believe we could do much better) that creativity like places like Morning Glory and a manufacturing facility like Volk Packaging (they’ve stayed open and had no Covid cases) have exhibited could (and should) have been the public response, instead of shutting off the economy and impacting livelihoods (and the well-being) of working people under the guise of science and safety.

TPTB are creating ghost towns everywhere (Brunswick, ME)