When Coronavirus Hits Home

Our hometown of Wichita largely locked down at the moment, a response to the increase in coronavirus that followed a brief unlocking, and that’s unsettling enough. Worse yet, we’ve learned that we’re in the most infected part of town.

The 67203 zip code is a nice area, comprised mostly of the picturesque Riverside neighborhood and the adjacent historic Delano district, and the folks here are mostly friendly and don’t deserve this. We attribute the high infection rate to facts that it’s in heart of the city, and that Riverside’s many parks and art museum and botanical garden as well as Delano’s popular nightspots draw many visitors from all around the city. Also, people here tend to socialize with their neighbors more than in other parts of town.

These are usually selling points for the area, but not during a coronavirus epidemic. Suddenly it’s better to be of those boring suburbs no ventures into except to deliver packages and nobody even knows his neighbors.

There’s not much to do about it except to stay at home as much as possible and wear a face mask when forced to venture outside. We’ve already been doing that for what seems an eternity, and try to be even more strict about it until given an all-clear signal by the local health officials. At this point we’re willing toke our chances, but we don’t want to put any of our nice neighbors at risk.

— Bud Norman

Technical Difficulties

We’re writing this in a booth at The Vagabond, a friendly little hipster dive in the historic Delano neighborhood just across the Arkansas River from our even friendlier home office in the picturesque Riverside neighborhood. because our got-darned internet service went down. All the hipster dives have wi-fi these days, as we’ve long noticed from all the bearded hipsters we see staring into their machines instead of talking with one another and sharing dirty jokes and hitting on the hipster women the way human beings used to do in a bar, so for tonight we’ve reluctantly taken the old laptop on a rare trip out of the house and joined those lonely hipsters in their solitary musings.

It’s an infuriating inconvenience, and although we’re doing our best to be cordial to the pretty and pleasant young barmaid who generously shared the wi-fi password we’re starting to run out of patience with our internet provider. We’ll not mention any names, but it’s a long established company that was once so beloved that Americans called it “Ma,” and until very recently they had provided us many decades of reliable landline phone service, but we’ve recently cancelled the landline and had the number transferred to one of those newfangled cellular phones that everybody uses these days, which took way too many hours of bureaucratic hassles and time on hold to accomplish, and given that the switch-over happened at approximately the same time the internet went down we suspect that has something do with the problem. Several hours on the phone with people speaking hard-to-understand accents and quite a bit of time on on hold failed to rectify the problem, and they’re promising to send someone by between 8 a.m. and 8 p.m. to solve a problem that we’re sure could have addressed without that hassle, and we’re not at all confident it will be resolved even by a real live human being in the flesh, but at this point we’re drinking one of the $2 beer specials and hoping for the best.

Back in the good old days before all this technological progress we were somehow content without any internet at all, but these days we seem somehow estranged from the entire world without it. We were reading up on the latest news from a variety of old and new sources, and contemplating the witty and sophisticated response to it all that we would send out to entire world, but that got-darned red light that started flashing on the modem wound up reconfiguring the whole got-darned day. Thanks to the The Vagabond’s wi-fi and the password that pretty and pleasant barmaid shared we’ll get something out to you, and with some hope that a real live human being in the flesh will be able to set things straight we plan another post for tomorrow, hopefully having something to do with the rest of the world, and w’ll try to restrain our temper in the meantime.

— Bud Norman