A Journal of the Plague Year: #9

Just a few observations today in no particular order, or, rather, more accurately, in the order in which they occurred to me:

• War of the Worlds seems to be our binge-show of choice at the moment. There’s nothing like a great end-of-the-world story to get you through a pandemic.
• In related news: my son and I are considering the purchase of the tenth season of The Walking Dead. It has been a thing of ours for years, ever since the day, when he was way too young, that I discovered he was secretly watching it on the iPad. Terribly aggrieved, I made a deal with him that watching with Dad was the only way he could continue with this deranged and terribly violent show.
• Yesterday’s outing was successful. I pulled up curbside to Music Millennium, my favorite independent record store, called inside, and a blue-rubber-gloved young clerk come outside with my vinyl order: a 200 gram, remastered “25 O’clock,” the new Boomtown Rats album (the first in 37 years!), and a collaboration between The Flaming Lips and Deap Vally: Deap Lips, of course. The spelling is theirs, in case you were wondering. Music Millennium is closed to in-store customers. On-line and curbside sales only. If you have a favorite business operating this way, and you are able, try to help them out.
• The liquor and grocery store excursion seemed like any other liquor and grocery store excursion, except that I could tell people were being conscientious about distance. But is it possible in these situations to remain six feet away from every human being? I don’t think it is. If I wanted to, I could have reached out and touched someone on a number of occasions. You will be happy to know that I did not do this, however. Some were wearing gloves. A few were wearing masks. Was it less busy than usual? Maybe. The most striking difference was in the drive. The traffic was light, but not alarmingly. But there were so many businesses hanging signs that said “CLOSED.” Cafes, restaurants, small shops everywhere, closed.
• The number of infected people in Oregon has nearly tripled since the last time I mentioned it. So has the number of deaths. 266 and 10, respectively.
• A letter from our principal, my boss, arrived in yesterday’s email box. Beyond the joke about his attempt at homeschooling resulting in the near suspension and expulsion of his own kids, the news about next steps is still fuzzy, except for the fact that we may be called into work on the 30th or the 31st. I’m interested to know what we might do for an entire month before students are slated to return. He makes a plea for flexibility, a guarantee that our “roles will look different,” that we “may be asked to do things that are not in our job description,” whatever that means. “We are in uncharted territory.” Ain’t that the truth. Some movement is afoot, it seems, and that’s a bit of a comfort. Kind of.
• The rhythm of our days has taken a dramatic shift. We stay up until midnight or 1 a.m., sleep until 9. Outside of a zoom conference call here and there, our schedules are wide open, but there have been a number of things consistently happening in the lives of the adults in the house. Chores. Meditating. Reading. Blogging. Drumming. News-binging. Social media-binging. Poetry-recording. Drum video-watching. Music listening. Meal-preparing and eating. Finally, evening movie or show-watching. The resident teenager seems to be engaged in a fewer number of activities, but engaged nevertheless. Video-gaming. Snacking. Drumming. Believe me, we’ve tried to get him outside. When the weather was good we played badminton for a half an hour. Now that the weather is shitty, getting him to come out of his room is a dicey proposition. Sometimes a meal will coax him out, or more snacks, or a grilled cheese sandwich. To be fair, he’s done some reading. He culled through some of his old toys. And he took a shower. Singular.
• I decided that I cannot live with yesterday’s reading of “The World Is Too Much With Us,” so if you go back to yesterday’s entry, you might notice a second video, a revised performance of Wordsworth’s sonnet–after the original. It might be instructive or interesting to compare them, because I think, a wrong word was not the only thing that made me unhappy. You’re free to skip it, of course, if you like. I recorded it mostly for myself–and my friend Tracy. It turns out to have some surprises, this new performance–and a new error! The omission of the word “And” in line 7! Aaarrghhh.
• As for today’s poetry reading: it will be, dear reader, viewer, listener, a commitment. It clocks in at about 10 minutes, baby. Almost everything I predicted about rereading the great “Tintern Abbey” poem was borne out through experience: the rereading, the weeping, the decision to record a sonnet instead. But then, I got a bug. Emboldened by the whiskey, perhaps, I recorded “Lines Written a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey,” which is not even the full title, by the way, and miraculously, I got all the way through it in one take. I don’t think I substituted “coming” for “rising” once in the entire thing. I could be wrong about that. No matter. This poem, as much, no, more so than Wordsworth’s sonnet, is a much-needed tonic. It was then, it is now, and it will be for all time a poem with immense super powers. I hope my reading of it does it justice, even a little bit.
• Final observation on “Tintern Abbey.” In the last section of the poem, Wordsworth directly addresses his sister. When I read it, and I got to that word “Sister,” I thought of her as a representative of all the women who have made such momentous impact on my life–and I felt like I was speaking to them, or to each one of them, individually. Some serious magical mojo going on there.