Emergency shut off valve

Capitalism seems to be unhappy with all of us, but I am carrying on to the best of my disabilities.

It's the pause that refreshes. San Francisco has never looked so beautiful to me. Postcard clouds, clouds that Wallace Stevens, the great chronicler of clouds would think worth getting out of his grave to see. And the quiet I for one could get used to, far fewer cars, unnecessary bustle, cleaner air as noted by an eviscerated EPA. A brand new city in which I have time to think about things I've never thought about before.

Terrible tales from the crypt. People losing their jobs, their lives, people walking around as if their mortality is walking beside them, even young people. I can see it in their faces. What if Tony Bennet sang, 'I left my lung in San Francisco" instead of having left his heart here?

I become a pandemic thinker and writer--when nothing's funny everything's funny--with the inclination to laugh and then cry, or cry and then laugh. I think, if it can be called thinking, 'what if the next president is even worse?' picturing the ripe pink face of Mike Pompeo. Anything's possible, that's the trouble with it.

I take a bike ride out along the Great Highway and Lake Merced, stopping along the way to take little core samples of my fears. I hold them up to the light, careful to make sure each fear stays 6' apart from the other. Fear's such an interesting thing, its own kind of virus. Fear, a much greater motivator than love acc. Niccolo Machiavelli, who thought a great deal about the intersections of human life and politics. What am I afraid of? Death? I who've said more than once, if I died tomorrow I'd have had a great life.

(I guess I am afraid, for I can imagine the time coming that I become a man who carries a flask of Irish whiskey around with him at all times).

Returning home from the bike ride, needing a shower, there's no hot water. The emegency shut off valve to the gas line has been tripped, mysteriously. No hot water, no stove or oven, no heat in the house. I'd whipped up some eggs to scramble; they'll just have to wait.

What can possibly happen next? I thought. My next thought: o, maybe this is just the beginning. This is what's happening, there's no emergency shut off valve. This is the present condition and as much as I'd like it to be the past it isn't the past yet, it's the present and everything it's giving us will someday be understood.