The Bubble

The COVID circle continues to tighten.  A close friend got it.  Then Alec's work closed down due to a co-worker having a confirmed case.  Alec had worked with the person and had to get tested again.  It was much different than the first time, he was there over three hours in a line of cars that snaked through a neighborhood and was told to wait seven to ten business days for the result.  It's just coming closer and closer.

School decided to begin classes virtually and re-assess the situation in September.  I am relieved but would really like more information.  Is the teacher start date the same?  And in this talk of budget cuts and furloughs....can we discuss my payment for the next fiscal year, which started on Monday?  Again, I am incredibly relieved that they are not going to force us into an unsafe situation on July 27th.  I just wish we could minimize some of this uncertainty, especially when we are talking salary and schedule.  And as for the Housing Authority, that is still up in the air too.  And it's about 500 degrees in Atlanta right now, Georgia is clocking in at over four thousand new cases a day, the redneck governor is trying to silence our mayor and all of our heroes are dying.

Strange products keep going missing.  I'm not talking about the early explicables like toilet paper, masks, hand sanitizer, yeast, flour and Emergen-C, but really odd, inexplicable stuff.  Windex is gone, which I don't get.  It doesn't have all the anti-bacterial stuff of the other sprays, it's just like benign blue chemical.  My niece tried to make seafood and couldn't find Old Bay anywhere.  Fresca is like a black market item at this point.  Radishes are AWOL.  For a bit, cooking spray was some sort of hot commodity.

Two years ago, I began my thirteenth year teaching, crossing my fingers that I could make it through one more year of abusive bosses and weird-ass interdepartmental insanity, before making a change.  I didn't make it and asked out of my contract during the second week of the school year.  They let me out about six weeks and eight hundred dollars later and I embarked on an extensive tour of schools that lasted four months, only to decide on an ESOL job at a Title I school that actually felt right.  I finished the school year and felt revived, finally, about my place in the universe.  Year fourteen brought COVID and March school shutdowns and the shift to virtual teaching.  Year fifteen begins soon, online.  For almost two years, I have had the sensation that I can't imagine what next month might bring, or how different next year might be and I wonder even more now.  I found it kind of exciting at first.  It still is, but with an underlying feeling of not so nice uncertainty.

Whistling Past the Graveyard

Tell me what you know about dreamin', dreamin'
You ain't really know about nothin', nothin'
Tell me what you know about the night terrors every night 
5AM cold sweats waking up, to the sky
Tell me what you know about dreams
Tell me what you know about night terrors...nothin'
You don't really care about the trials of tomorrow...
I'm in the pursuit of happiness and I know
Everything that shines ain't always gonna be gold

There are a lot of different ways this could have gone down.  I'm not going to start with December, when the U.S. could have had an ear to the ground and started amassing testing kits, PPE and contact tracing.  Let's just go to March, when the cat was not even seeing the bag in its rear view window.

We could have really gone with this.  Stay in.  Get groceries delivered.  Chill.  For a bit.  Watch Netflix.
When we flattened the curve and were reporting few new cases a week...we could have moved to stage two.
People could go out with masks to the grocery store.  Maybe start getting some of those routine, medical appointments done that we get annually.  We really wouldn't need to go to Target or get our nails done or our hair cut.  We can cook our own food instead of making restaurant workers take risks because we are shitty cooks.  We could maybe not go to that lake in a neighboring state this summer.  That could wait.

And then, maybe we would have had this thing under control enough to think about restarting the school year.  We could start later then we normally do and maybe go farther into the summer, in hopes of a vaccine by January.  We could do some sort of small class sizes, everyone with masks and the desks spread out, with kids coming in in stages so that all of them get some sort of in-person instruction and we could make sure they have the technology to work at home a lot of days, or indefinitely, if we had to shut down again.

There are a lot of things that could have been done.  But, they didn't do it.  People simply couldn't behave themselves.  Everyone did the minimum and shot out of the house the minute that they could.  And now, our numbers are crazy and everyone wants their kids to go right back into those classrooms, even though most of society only added to the problem we are having now, instead of doing the right thing.

Alec got sent back to work a couple of weeks ago.  Since then, the circle of people I know with COVID has narrowed.  Before, it was stories I read in the newspaper.  I didn't disbelieve it, but it wasn't anyone I knew.  Since then, a store in the market where Alec works had to close because of a COVID positive case.  The restaurant where my niece and sister work had to close down two locations, because of COVID positive cases.  My niece's best friend got sent home because someone tested positive in the bar he manages.  A friend from college had to close down two of his restaurants because of positive cases.  And then, a close friend of mine contracted it in late June.   The circle is closing.

School starts in the fall, our in Georgia terms, in a little more than two weeks.  My district has not released a plan, but I anticipate full roll out, without even limitations on mask-wearing.  I could spend a lot of time discussing that, but I'm too tired right now.

It's been really hot.  I jogged through the park anyway, with my mask, trying to run some of this out of me.  I heard the man, the whistling man, in the park.  I saw him on his bike, whistling to the trees, to the air, to the world.  I could hear him for blocks.

*Lyrics, Kid Cudi, Pursuit of Happiness