The coronavirus crisis has had an extremely discombobulating effect on us. Isolated from society and thus loosed of any social obligations, we’ve gradually become completely nocturnal over the past several weeks.
From birth we’ve been night owls, but now we’re awake from sundown to sunrise, and only enjoy the last and first hours of sunshine. For the past few days we’ve had trouble getting any sleep at all, and yesterday — or was it the day before? — we gave up on tossing and turning and ventured out in the early afternoon to drive around on inexpensive gasoline and enjoy the nearly perfect spring weather. We spotted an old friend drinking coffee and smoking a cigar outside a quaint Riverside coffee shop which was still serving through a walk-up window and stopped to have a socially-distanced chat, which was our first human contact in a while.
We always talk sports or politics with this friend, and with no sports going on we wound up talking mostly about the politics of the coronavirus. Our friend remains a steadfast supporter of President Donald Trump, but he acknowledged that things aren’t going entirely well and we settled for that begrudging admission and happily avoided an argument. Another friend who works for the biggest store of the biggest local grocery chain showed up, and from a social distance he told us about all the extraordinary amount of disinfecting he’s been doing lately, and we wished him well with his heroic efforts.
Despite two large cups of coffee we were needing a nap by the time we arrived home, and it wound up lasting until about 10:30 pm, when we awoke in the middle of another very weird dream and checked in on the news. The death toll had continued to rise, Trump had announced the complete ban on immigration he’d been wanting even before the arrival of the corona virus, and Georgia’s governor announced an end to most of the restrictions that had been in place, the price of oil continued to drop and drag down all the stock markets with it.
Otherwise a very slow news day, so lacking the energy get outraged about any of it we decided to write this dreary slice-of-life tale instead. Here’s hoping you’ll all have a better day.
— Bud Norman
The Central Standard Times 