Sore pandemic
This morning I woke up with a sore pandemic.
The cause: the lifting of boxes, the sweeping of floors, the shredding of financial documents dating back to 2012, the difficult decision-making process of what pieces of art and which poems to throw out and which to keep that took place in our garage yesterday. The effect: sore pandemic located in the femur of the left hip.
If this was a normal emergency I wouldn't be so concerned, but this is an abnormal, super-sized emergency in which good people are infected and then dying, or having died first, that is never having been born, a human condition first proved possible by Carl Jung and then interpreted by Samuel Beckett, are being re-infected with a virus that is completely anti-life.
As stated, this is not a normal emergency, this is an emergency that requires a national shut-off valve.
That stated, this morning I wiped off the keyboard of my word processor with a self-conccoted solution of tears, cheap Russian vodka, soap, and just to be on the safe side, clay-of-the-spittle torn right out of the pages of the Gideon Bible I stole from a Motel 6 in Moab, Utah, and got right to work. No soreness of the pandemic could stop me!
First, I explored the conection between democracy and one's own sense of mortality. This is interesting to me as a person who truly believes that the dead vote, at least in the primaries where the one-person one-vote mantra is not observed by the Democratic Party machine and the votes for Bernie Sanders are mysteriously delivered to Joe Biden. And why is it that in virtually every election I've taken part in during my life as a citizen of a democratic republic have I felt like dying when the results are announced?
The next move was to clear out my in-box, all the messages of concern and consolation received from friends and family, all the news briefs, CNN alerts etcetc that had stacked up to the point of paralyzing any clear thinking I might have done otherwise. I was able accomplish this even with my sore pandemic, sitting ergonomically, as advised by my health care provider, and having taken not 1 but 2 Tylenol 8HR Arthritis pain pills. Those tablets really take the edge off and have allowed me to continue to do this important work.
I needed to be as pain-free as possible to think more about the shocking, horrific sights I'd seen yesterday on a short trip to Berkeley, CA--the camps of the homeless beside the I-80! People living in little tents or other sorts of cobbled-together shelters underneath freeway overpasses, people living in squalor, people gathering more squalor, hoarding the squalor, as it were, adding to it. All this talk about shut-ins--and I am one of the the shut-ins--what about those shut-out, the homeless? Or are the shut-outs actually the ones shut-in, and I and those like me, the shut-outs? These were things I found worth thinking about, even with a sore pandemic.
What if we regarded the homeless as 'refugees'--people who have fled a foreign country seeking refuge or safety--instead of seeing them as we now see them? As crazy, substance abusing losers, as nobody we'd want to know, as social throwaways. And made public policy regarding the problem from that standpoint?