Fatigue

Beltline hillside four ways

We're at the point where "pandemic fatigue" has replaced "unprecedented times" as the dominant cliched phrase in media reports about the Coronavirus.

Public health policy hoped in the early days of the pandemic to frighten people into supporting economy-wide lock downs and severe restrictions on meeting in groups.

That worked for a while. Then, as is so frequently the case (see smoking, speeding and needle drugs), the fear wore off. 

"Unprecedented" is a poor way to describe something that has happened to humans over and over again.  And "fatigue" hardly begins to describe where we are now. Rather than being tired of the pandemic, people don't seem to be able to get enough of it. 

The urge to throw weddings and family gatherings is, evidently, irresistible. The growing case numbers - twice and three times what they were when we were in lock down in April, May and June - do not seem to be scaring anyone but the Democratic party in the US, and, as always, the health scientists who wish they could protect us from ourselves.

The worst parts of the pandemic, along with the sorrows of great illness and unnecessary death, are the toll on health care workers and on the health system in general, causing delays in treatment for other ailments.

There's no easy way through this. 

As for me, I'm sitting here with a slight sore throat, a few sniffles and a clear social calendar because I have cancelled everything I was going to do in person next week.

Readers may recall my death-defying meal from my last post. That might be where I picked this bug up. Now that I have it, I resolve not to share it. My symptoms are mild. If they get worse, I'll get tested. 

Thanks for reading!

Happy Hallowe'en!

Karen

Seen on a transit stop community
bulletin board, Sherbourne Street

 

People Who Need People

No such thing as too many pumpkins. Front step in Cabbagetown.

Last night, I and about eighty other people had the exact same idea: we all wanted to eat dinner and drink a beer on a patio for possibly the last time this year.

Bruce and I and a friend sat at a socially distanced table on the patio in front of Blake House, one of the last grand mansions on Jarvis Street, a relic of the time before Jarvis became a barely habitable four-lane highway cutting from the tony homes of Rosedale to the high rise office towers downtown.

We wore our masks as we waited in line for a table to be ready, but, like everyone else except the wait staff, took them off when we sat down. For the first time this year, I had to strain to hear our conversation because of the roar of the crowd around us.

It dawned on me that I was not 100% comfortable. The situation was higher risk than anything we'd done since the first days of the lock down. These were the complicated thoughts that went through my head:

• I'm glad to be giving the restaurant some business before the winter comes and their income stream is reduced to take out orders
• I'm happy to be eating a tasty meal I did not prepare myself and drinking a draught beer I couldn't pour at home
• It's nice to see so many people
• I wonder if any of them has COVID
• We're outdoors, but there's not much of a breeze and we're under an awning and everyone's laughing and talking loudly
• Case numbers are higher now than they have ever been, so the chances are good that someone here is a loaded virus gun
• But even with the case numbers, hardly anyone gets COVID
• And even with the case numbers, all these people - some of them with small children and some of them elderly - seem prepared to take the risk
• Maybe we put millions of people out of work and drove thousands of businesses into the ground for no good reason
• I'm still not going to hang around here any longer than necessary
• There are still people waiting for a table
• There's still a pandemic

Thanks for reading!

Have a great week!

Karen

 

We Don't Need Another Hero

Allan Gardens chrysanthemums

Some of my readers know that I'm writing more than just the mini-memoirs that make their way onto this blog every week. There's a book in the works, some short stories and maybe a play.

To help me with these projects, I've been reading something called My Story Can Beat Up Your Story, a book better than its title that provides a by-the-numbers breakdown of screenplay writing. The formula goes in part like this: your sympathetic hero works her way through a series of increasingly difficult obstacles as she progresses through four stages of character type: the orphan, the wanderer, the warrior, the martyr.

You may be thinking now about the Harry Potter books, or The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. The movie exemplum of this structure is the first Star Wars movie. Luke Skywalker is orphaned, joins up with Obi Wan to wander, fights the Empire, and willingly risks his life to destroy the Death Star. 

There. Now you don't have to buy the book.

I found an ad in the back of My Story Can Beat Up Your Story for Christopher Vogler's The Writer's Journey, a venerable standard textbook in screenplay writing classes that does the same thing as the other book, but also cribs from Joseph Campbell's The Hero With a Thousand Faces. I'm reading it now.

Both these books are good guides for thinking about what drives a story (hint: it's the characters), what happens next (hint: it needs to be more challenging than what's happened before) and what are all the other characters doing (no hint; I haven't read that far in Vogler).

So even though I'm not writing a screenplay ... screenplays are old hat by the way; now everyone's doing one hour pilots for Netflix ... it's useful to have these concepts in my head as I write the book and the short stories.

After these are done, I'll try the one hour pilot.

Thanks for reading!

Have a great week!

Karen

  

Let's Get to the News

Coltsfoot Lane, Cabbagetown

For the first time since the townhouse condos at 280 Sherbourne Street were built almost fifty years ago, children have been born to families living here: Masie on October 1 and Charlie on October 9.  

Babies born in October 2020 were conceived in the month when the pandemic was among us but humanity wasn't fully aware.

 
For that first month of 2020, there were other things going on besides COVID-19, such as:

- the US assassination of Qasem Soleimani and 

- the shooting down by Iran of 176 civilians on an Ukrainian Airlines flight and

- Meg and Harry stepping back as senior members of the Royal Family and 

- Millions of hectares of Australia burning as koalas approached the brink of extinction and

- Donald Trump's impeachment and

- Harvey Weinstein's trial and

- Brexit.

Of course, January's events were nothing compared to the past week, when the fading-reality-television-star-in-chief was literally on steroids and taking crazy to new heights.

Among the ceaseless cymbal crashes of the news, every once in a while a voice breaks through with crystalline clarity. For example, this, from Jonathan Chait of New York Magazine:

The [Republicans'] premise is that liberty is a higher value than democracy, and they define liberty to mean a right to property that precludes redistribution. That is to say, the right views progressive taxation, regulation and the welfare state not as mere impediments to growth, but as oppression. A political system that truly secured freedom would not allow the majority to gang up on the minority and redistribute their income for themselves.

And

Republicans believe that the political system must retain, and ideally expand, its counter-majoritarian features: ballot-access rules that restrict the franchise to “worthy” citizens, gerrymandered maps that allow the white rural minority to exercise control, a Senate that disproportionately represents white and Republican voters, and a Supreme Court that believes the Republican economic program is written into the Constitution.

I don't know about you, but that sure clears up a lot for me.

With the pandemic, people newly isolated and unemployed turned online for their news, where Facebook lay in wait to radicalize them. Within no time, anti-lockdown rallies popped up. And Q-Anon had a line of merchandise and a candidate running for the House of Representatives.

I get that Facebook's algorithm is not a force for good in the world, feeding as it does people's preference for opposition. But that can't be all it feeds. My Facebook account swarms with puppy videos, animal rescues and the travel photography of a friend who sends this greeting every morning: "hello my lovelies." 

Congratulations to my neighbours for their impressive act of love and optimism in these batshit loonball times.

Thanks for reading!

Happy Thanksgiving!

Karen

No more line ups at Ontario COVID-19
Assessment Centres,
just a record level of new cases.

October Surprise

Little fires everywhere: honey locust gold dust in the back patio

Before Friday morning, I thought this blog would be about how I bought a new pair of glasses online. 

But, the world doesn't need one more person speaking up about Trump's case of COVID-19. So I'll just cut and paste a few things already out there:

Italian right-wing opposition leader Matteo Salvini tweeted: "In Italy and in the world, whoever celebrates the illness of a man or of a woman ... confirms what he is: An idiot without a soul...." CBC

And ...

In 2016, Donald Trump celebrated the illness of his rival Hilary Clinton when she fainted from pneumonia: 'She's supposed to fight all of these things, and she can't make it 15 feet to her car'. YouTube

And ... 

A senior Trump official responded to criticism of the maskless crowd at the RNC by celebrating COVID: "Everybody is going to catch this thing eventually." CommonDreams

In our corner of the world's ending, we continue to be surprised by raccoons in the darnedest places ...

Raccoon Santa testing how much weight he needs to lose by Christmas

 ... and keeping our fingers crossed that further restrictions in care homes won't mean that Bruce has to go back to not being able to visit his dad. For most of April, May and June, Bruce could not see him at all. Since the restrictions were lifted, Bruce's daily visits have brought his dad out of the fog that descended during the months of his isolation. 

Thanks for reading! Pop that bubble!

Karen