Don't want nobody coming by without calling first ...
-- Warren Zevon,
"Splendid Isolation"
Working from home isn't a sacrifice.
A sacrifice is cutting yourself off from your family for the duration because you're a health-care worker determined not to expose your kids to a virus. If you can work from home, that means you have a home. And you have work. You should take neither of those things for granted.
Over the years I've probably written most of what's been published outside of the newsroom. While I like the burble and energy of the newsroom, it's not the best environment in which to try to write stuff. There are a lot of distractions, and attending to those distractions feels like work.
I've got a good situation; a lot of technology, reliable Wi-Fi, the option to sequester myself upstairs in my studio or take my laptop downstairs, where I might be softly distracted by one of the various dogs we have strategically deployed around the house. I was upstairs yesterday, and the dogs took shifts on the chair outside the studio door. In the afternoon, after the bulk of my shoveling was done, Paris took a few steps inside the door and laid down.
I took a break and we all went for a five-mile walk.
I doubt that I got within eight feet of any other human. Maybe one of the bicycles on the River Trail whizzed by a little closer than that, but no handshakes, no warm embraces, not any "namastes" on our adventure. I just saw people. They were walking, riding their bikes.
I'm sure there are others who can sense the microbes suspended in the air. I try not to touch my face but adjust my glasses a dozen times an hour. For the first time in my life I am thinking about all the surfaces and door handles there are to touch in the world. I can push with my shoulder or my forearm, but pulling without bringing a hand into direct contact with a handle requires ingenunity. Maybe lasso the handle with the loop of my umbrella, maybe carry a short length of rope? Maybe stay home and touch only familar doorknobs?
Karen has been going into the office; she's among the 10 or so people who need to as there are things she can't do easily from home. I don't worry much about that; she follows all the guidelines and has even been using hand sanitizer, a product that, in normal times, she avoids like, er, the plague.
She doesn't like the way it smells, she thinks it's no more effective than regular hand-washing. Up until a couple of months ago, there was a debate about its efficacy and whether in the long run prolonged and obsessive use of it might be bad for you. But it's a a quick way to kill a lot of germs. Given the circumstances, let's all use hand sanitizer. Maybe in three or four months we can go back to making fun of it.
Three or four months sounds like a long time right now. I'm having trouble wrapping my head around the idea that it might be that long before I can go to my gym or out to a restaurant or a ball game.
Maybe it won't be that long. Maybe in a couple of weeks, we'll feel like we over-reacted. That would be the best-case scenario.
But maybe feeling like you've over-reacted is how you feel when you've done enough to mitigate whatever bad thing is coming your way. Maybe part of the reason we had relatively few problems when the cosmic odometer rolled over from 1999 to 2000 is because people got so worried about what Y2K might bring. Just because some people have more tolerance for risk than others doesn't mean the cautious are wrong.
I have a pretty good tolerance for risk. I had no problem going places and doing things after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001; we take risks any time we step out of our house, and the best thing to do when someone is trying to disrupt your way of life is to keep calm and carry on. There are ways we can make our world safer, but we can't make it safe. As much as we might like to hang around for as long as we can, at some point the decision gets made for you. Like the bard says, we'll never get out of this world alive.
But that was different, because after 9/11 we had each other. We could go out and be together because to stay in and cower was to let the terrorists win. After 9/11 there was a brief season of good feeling when Americans all felt like part of the same tribe, regardless of how we looked or who we prayed to or who we loved.
Now we're got to go through a slow-motion plane crash. It's just begun, we're all in it, and none of us have any idea how or if we're going to survive while isolating ourselves from each other.
At least physically.
This social distancing stuff isn't as hard on me as it might be on some others; like a lot of people in the business that chose me, I'm genuinely shy. Journalists are not generally extroverts; most are better suited to pouring over documents. Contrary to what you see on TV and in the movies, it's a relatively quiet profession made up of observers.
I dread making small talk and always mark the exits when I come into a room. I don't mind being the center of attention--I can give a talk or play a song--but I'm always tempted to slip out the back way as soon as any event is over. I'd rather text than talk.
Social media, for all its horrors, has been a boon, allowing me to connect with friends I never see and people I would have met in real life (IRL). While in a world where 30 to 40 percent of the population has rejected rational fact-based truth in favor of wishfulness and superstition and people tend to seek validation rather than information, it's dangerous to give every wacko and wahoo the wherewithal to publish fever dreams and connect with like-minded wackos and wahoos, I still think it's potentially a social good.
It's a way we can be together without actually being together. And while you may never have thought you needed that, we all need it now.
pmartin@arkansasonline.com
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www.blooddirtangels.com
Editorial on 03/22/2020