Ghost cat Edward remains a ghost cat. He’s moved out from behind the dryer, and also abandoned his hole under the spare leaf for the dining room table. He seems to have taken up semi-permanent residence in the bottom of the office supply closet. I check to make sure he’s breathing. Leave him some kitty treats and make sure there’s food and water in his bowls and that there are signs of litterbox use. He may decide to emerge at some point. He may decide that life is better hiding under a shelf with a large box of legal envelopes next to the paper cutter. And given the mass hysteria gripping the land eight days prior to the election, he may have the right idea.
So far today, I have received three e-mails and six text messages begging me to contribute to a national political campaign. I don’t watch commercial TV so I am spared the barrage of television advertisements. I tend to get my political news from a number of national digests that repackage AP, Reuters, the WaPo, NYT, NPR, and various other major dailies. My take aways are as follows. Is there actually anyone who has not yet made up their mind regarding whom they support in the presidential race? I think the mythical undecideds that the last minute push is chasing is a huge waste of money, which various consultancies and media companies are all too happy to accept. The Democrats great weaknesses are an inability to communicate how national policies will translate into actual effects for the majority of the population, especially regarding kitchen table issues such as the spike in housing, energy and food costs which have increased far beyond the ability of most wages to keep up. Combine this with the usual circular firing squad tactics and ridiculous ideological purity tests and there’s no way to shift middle America. The Republicans great weaknesses are a candidate whose behavior is, at best, reprehensible and who seems to be in the early stages of cognitive decline, and a replacement of seasoned politicos with fantasists who think that truth comes from belief rather than the other way round. I may crawl into the closet with Edward and remain there until long after election day. Somebody come in the morning and leave me pastry and coffee rather than kitty treats though.
The rehearsal process has started for Little Women. We have six weeks to whip it into shape. After a week of music rehearsal, the songs are starting to come together. We start blocking this next week. Now that I’ve had some time to study the script and score, I’m not as worried about it as I was. Everything I am being called on to do is well within my wheelhouse. I don’t have anything theatrical set for winter/spring as of yet but there’s likely to be some push on writing projects so it may be best if I do not overload myself too much. I always say that and then someone offers me a part I want to do or a show I love or the chance to work with others in the theater community whom I sincerely admire and we’re off to the races again and I’m running around trying to make sure that all the parts of life are evenly balanced and I’m in the right building at the right time on the right day. I can see myself coming down with an early dementia and singing show tunes while making house calls and trying to do histories and physicals on the stage crew at the theater. I have found, in my senior life with many years of experience under my belt, that showing up is the most important part of the task. If you do that, you can usually wing the rest.
My editor/publisher (who is becoming coauthor on the next series of books given the way they are developing) as all sorts of ideas regarding the material that became The Accidental Plague Diaries (and which I continue to dash off at uneven intervals – you’re reading today’s variation on a theme now). It seems to include websites. interactivity, artificial intelligence, and new publishing models. I don’t understand half of it. I’m letting him figure all that out. All I know how to do is write. I’ve told him tell me what you need an essay on and I should be able to get it to you by the end of the week. I’m fine if it becomes a living document with clickable links, and AI pulls from the historical record but I’m not the guy who’s going to figure that all out. I may have grown up four or five blocks away from Bill Gates but I did not get his programming skills. Must have been something in the water in our part of Laurelhurst. That being said, we may be beta testing some things in a few months and I will direct my readers (all six of you) at that time to read some things and try some stuff out.
The essay I am working on at the moment involves how the pandemic has changed our perceptions of time in various ways. It’s something I have noticed as being pretty universal among my friends and acquaintances. The accurate assessment of time and past and relative order of events has taken a blow due to two plus years of disruption in all of the usual orders and patterns of our lives. Whether we like it or not, evolution helped condition us to live with a certain rhythm of life, dictated by seasons and seasonal rituals, all of which went to hell in a handbasket in the early 2020s. I think becoming untethered form those cycles has had some rather profound effects. I’m not going to write them down today. I’m still working out my ideas and I want you all to have your interest piqued regarding the next writing project. (It does not yet have a title.)
I haven’t done a Covid update for a while so I took a look at the latest numbers this afternoon. We seem to be coming out of the summer surge. Test positivity rate has been dropping from over 10% to about 6% this past week. Waste water surveillance shows less virus. Deaths are under 600 a week nationwide (mainly in elderly and chronically ill individuals but there are still cases of robust healthy young people catching it and dying in ways that they did early in the pandemic). The updated Covid booster has been available since Labor Day. To date, about 30% of senior adults over 65 have been boosted. The general adult population is not racing out for their boosters though. They’re at about 13% boosted. Pro tip: the best reason to stay up to date with boosters is not to prevent the disease but to prevent long covid which can be disastrous. Even mild cases can turn into long covid in some individuals but the vaccine data shows remarkable protection against these complications.
There are still a large number of people opposed to the vaccine on philosophical grounds. I believe in bodily autonomy so I never argue with people about it. I will just take my chances with a vaccine with a documented complication rate of about 1/100,000 over a disease that killed one out of every 250 people in the country and has the possibility of crippling me every time I come down with it. But that’s just me.
Life, The Universe, and Everything 