April 16, 2020

Thursday mundane, just another day

Woke up to the alarm set intentionally about an hour after the sun rose and hit snooze only three times until I sat up. It was garbage day so the racket of garbage, recycling and green trucks assured an early wake up. They’re still working. Good. Grateful.

Checked the news feed on the phone to make sure Trump hasn’t started a war or done anything more obnoxious than usual to fuck up the situation we’re in. Read a Reddit article about the stars to make sure NASA was still a thing. Watched some dogs fighting over a bone being play by played by a house bound sports announcer. Checked Citizen. No alerts in our area last night. My Wyze alerts for last night showed no repeated clusters of motion events on any of the perimeter cameras so most likely they were wind or some critter or a car setting them off. No need to investigate further.

Dogs decided it was time to go outside so I changed my pants from the bed boxers to the pajama pants and let them out. Dash was down and around the yard in ten seconds. I held Sailor’s collar loosely at each step to the ground so he didn’t stumble on his way down and gave him a big Good Boy at the bottom.

Outside my relatively new delightful neighbor wasn’t at her car smoking to get away from her roommates. She likes to converse with Bird and I, but there was no social distance interaction this morning. I admired my plants. Checked the tomatoes. Felt the sun peek through the fog, warm on my face intermittently as the marine layer moved along above. Sailor wobbled over and ate cat poop from the unplanted garden beds. At this point in his life if eating cat poop gives him joy, why not. Less poop for me to clean up.

The little red headed hummingbird who lives in the cypress I planted eight years ago flew onto his line and watched me. I watched him back. He’s a good guy. or a her or whatever.. I don’t know.

Fed the dogs and cat. Giving the cat half a can of wet food now. She never ate the whole thing and it got gross. We’ll see how this works. Half a can in the fridge with our last aluminum foil over the top. Gave the old dog Sailor his pills. Noted that he’s got enough to make it three months at this point with yesterday’s boxes delivered, thrown over the fence in the usual spot. Not stolen, so good.

Made coffee, heating up yesterday’s cup that was still in the press so as not to waste any. We only have ten bags left. Heated up a breakfast burrito. Only 5 of those left. Put some salsa on it. Have two and a half of those left. Might have to hit the eggs and make my own burrito soon. Or just do the store thing. Next store run I’ll prep for a month instead of two weeks. I heard something about the food supply being interrupted. Who knows what’s real and what isn’t at this point.

Logged into work. no client video conferences this morning, just internal screen shares so no need to really clean up to look presentable. Long discussion about how we help our customers get through this. Quick Revenue, User engagement, Branding through difficult times. Retail Therapy, Simple Returns.. yesterday Jenny said it would be good to add a link to help with COVID relief so when you’re shopping you feel like you’re helping something. After introducing that and hearing it was very “out of the box” we decided “Compassionate Shopper” was that demographic. Regional messaging, etc anything to help businesses survive through this.

More meetings. More people in meetings where the COVID is the first five minutes of discussion. How are you all doing, well… kids, isolation, furloughs… but there will be an end to this and how do we survive it.

Finally a break to go downstairs, visit Jenny in her studio where she’s finishing up her show but reliant on things like frames that aren’t being shipped and scans that can’t happen and driving paintings to Los Angeles where shelter in place is a thing. I throw the ball for Dashing in the side yard, smell the flowers blooming all around. To breathe the air and soak in the sun. Pull treats, pill pockets and batteries out of Dad’s van, the quarantine van where all packages go. The ones on the left have been there at least a week, long enough for the COVID lipid covering to have dried up and the RNA shell inside. Yea it’s RNA not DNA. I read that last night in a delightful virologist’s post. There are also viruses that infect other viruses. Interesting stuff. Science is good. https://www.uah.edu/.../ok-we-are-dealing-with-covid-19...

This after Trump’s Kellyanne Conway said there were 18 COVIDs before this one no one took note of, when COVID-19 was named after 2019… but I digress. So much stupid..

Then back to work for more meetings. At noon I tune into the California Gavin Newsom briefing on Facebook. Why not.. He’s more of a leader than what we’ve got anywhere in the Federal criminal incoherent miasma right now. In the beginning these were Californians commenting about questions they had, saying the Gov was doing a good job, people telling him to run for President, asking about services and what we were doing to stem the spread etc. In the last couple days, I guess Fox or Breitbart or someone alerted Trump’s base California was handling this well because we realized early the Feds were a clown show, and people started flooding in with the trolling. I’d been following the comments and would post the COVID response site, to the Cal Public Health or EDD sites. I researched where tests locations were and would post those. On the fly info because being a citizen means something.

But a couple days ago the briefing comments were overwhelmed with every kind of troll crap from 5G to the flu is worse, to Pelosi and all the bile every Trump loyalist and Russian IRA troll can conjecture.

So now I’ve developed a simple public announcement to derail them that uses FB’s architecture I post when one of them pops up. Reply to the jackasses saying the COVID was here in November — you have immunity so go out and risk infection, you think you’re so “science” well god will strike you down, what about your civil liberties the Dims are trying to take away to implement SOCIALISM?? Gagging on the fucking stupid.

I just click on them and reply:

Please Block this troll by clicking the three dots next to their name in their comment. We can eradicate their influence by blocking them. Don’t reply to them, just block them and they lose effectiveness to spread dangerous disinformation.

It works so well most of them stop posting. It’s nice to see the troll thread turn into Blocked, Blocked, Blocked by people who actually live here. I saw some other people in the FB room copying my posts and going after the trolls with the same technique. And the beauty of this is the trolls won’t block anyone. That would limit their viral infection that encourages Californians to die. Because when it boils down to it.. that’s what they want. They want civilization to collapse so they can dance on the bones of the dead. They are the ones who burned the libraries. They only have influence over the desperate. They’ve been with us as a species forever. And Trump is their Savior.

Californians as a whole don’t suffer fucking interlopers who want us to fail. Regardless of who we are, and what we believe, most of us will defend our West Coast bloc.

Yea, I’ll be a regionalist. California Strong. Go have 1000 people at your church services, go protest with Betsy Devos’ money to be Tea Party COVID hot spot 2.0 in Lansing MI, go don’t care about spreading COVID to your parents and their friends because you’re a narcissist product of some beaten down authoritarian horror show in your own state. Let’s see how that works out for you. The virus couldn’t care less what your politics are and your concept of your god isn’t going to keep you from dying. A great culling of Trump train stupid is in our immediate future.

But I digress from my day.

So lunch is over at that point. Adrenaline rush. For the trolls who reply, I click on their walls and most are from out of state, Idaho, Arkansas, Australia and Georgia today so I reply asking why they care about California so much sand I tell them to take care of their families and themselves so they don’t get infected and possibly die. That usually shuts them down. For the California trolls I just ignore them, and put that down to you can’t fix stupid.

More meetings, some trainings until I go pedal on the air bike Jenny got right before the pandemic hit. Lift some weights. Throw the ball for Dashing some more. He’s enjoying this pandemic. Lots of ball in the side yard. I add aluminum foil to my long once a week leaving the house for provisions list. Going to Home Depot Friday to secure what I can and to get wood to replace our failing fence on the West of our property. Need screws, wood, paint to do that. I live for those masked, gloved and goggled forays into the outside world.

Then I take a shower because we’re having cocktails with our friends Isabel and Marcos at 5:00 on zoom at our back yard bar. I venture out into the yard all showered and wearing real pants. Dash is ahead of me and I see a blade of grass under his large tail just bouncing along as he struts. I stop him and yes it’s coming out his butt. So I slowly pull on it and end up with about six inches of grass blades that didn’t make it out with the last dooker he took. pulling it out wasn’t that gross and probably helped prevent some later possible issue.

The Golden Gate delivery boxes appear out front and I glove up and put the boxes on the back table and open them. Jenny washes the fruit and vegetables as I listen to Trump’s moronic press conference. He didn’t go off the rails today like he’s done the last couple days with declaring himself king or attacking journalists asking him questions. No women asked him questions. For some reason they trigger him more than the others. He let Fauci speak. These WH briefings are more fun with Trump getting agitated and showing he’s the most unqualified person we’ve had since Hoover to deal with a crisis. Trump lied, Americans Died.

I set up the laptop for our party Zoom out back and Dashing, who likes to have a little stick in his mouth like a cigarette, grabbed a bigger stick off the wood pile and was running around the back yard, throwing it up in the air and catching it. He was loving his new stick. It was the greatest thing ever. He’d run around the corner of the van with it in his mouth, offer it up, then run away. We ended up with me throwing the stick to him for a while before the party. And out front where I eventually started throwing the stick from into the back yard, the hummingbird was on his line, the bees were in the bird bath drinking, a couple kids were riding their scooters up and down our street.

Had a great time with Isabel and Marcos but had to disable our phone WIFI and turn off Jenny’s streaming in the basement. We need a repeater to make the back yard more robust. We talked politics, how we’re dealing with the changes, art, gardens. I miss hugging them. When this is all over I want to fucking hug everyone I love. Zoom is a replacement, but damn.. being in their house all warm with everyone packed in, bouncing around to the music, eating cookies and drinking and singing and conversing face to face. That seems so far away. It’ll return. Periods of abject flipping of the norms help you realize just how much that norm was precious.

Bird is back to her studio painting. I’m out at the bar writing this. Going to go up and read shit I wrote over the last 30 years and see if there’s anything in there worth saving.

Alexandra Davies
I wouldn’t mind them Darwin’ing themselves if they didn’t infect anyone else. Good update. Makes me wish I had a backyard bar, but at least we have a decent sized front porch, plenty of feet above and away from the sidewalk.

Tish Tomlinson
Thanks for this glimpse into your daily life

Glenda Solis
dooker…….heehee

John Schroeder
Hi John & Jenny. Appears you are doing well…

John Mosbaugh
Yea e’re getting by. You look like you’re getting through the pandemic in family style too man. We can get through this!

Isabel Samaras
I love your Corona chronicles — save all this! So terrific to have some hang time w/ you n’ Bird, love and miss you guys❣️

Lyn Alcantara
John I’m reminded again how amazingly you express yourself. Do you have a blog? I love you SO MUCH

Nelda Barchers
Thank you John.