Sick thoughts

Somewhere out there, a young Goldfinch couple

I am tired of being sick, really tired of it.

A couple of days ago I noticed the 'Service Battery' notification on my laptop and started the process to do something about it. Among other things it involved running the battery down to nothing and leaving the laptop off overnight. Since I did not time things well, that meant a large part of one day and the following night. Now it's recharging but the 'Service Battery' notification is still there. Maybe it will go away when the battery is fully charged.

Having the laptop out of commission for most of the day I dug out a recently purchased but as yet unused Chromebook and started configuring that. Among other things it meant configuring my email and so I was more or less tied to email for the day. I have to say I am really tired of all my friends who crow about the amazing stuff they are doing in isolation. I feel like telling them all to just shut up.

One friend sent an email with pictures of the face mask she rigged up and I did kind of jump on her. Then I walked the dog and came back and wrote an apology. Haven't heard back. Think I'll stay away from email now that the Chromebook is setup and I'm done recalibrating the laptop battery.

The news is appalling. It's amazing how quickly the big issues of the day disappeared from the media, turns out they weren't so big after all. We're living in a century of huge life changing issues now. The pandemic is obvious, totally unexpected by all those predicters of future trends. Climate change was the one that was supposed to knock us off our feet, and in various localized ways that is happening. But the pandemic is everywhere, sudden, and having far reaching effects. It's not just people getting sick and dying, it's mass unemployment, markets crashing, politicians and medical experts taking over the airways, so on and so on. Maybe my parents' generation experienced something like this with the Great Depression followed by World War II, but that was kind of sequential, over a period of almost two decades. This is the whole nine yards all at once.

While writing this I am also corresponding with an old friend on the west coast who is a bit of a night owl. It's 8.30am here and 4.30am there. She has an online home business and she's an artist, her husband does kitchen installations and they live in a really nice coastal rural neighbourhood. Each home lot in the neighbourhood is over half an acre and surrounded by tall evergreen trees, the beach is a short hike away and there are lots of old logging road trails. So she's relatively well situated for self-isolation but she's living in a province that is pretty hard hit. She just told me a friend has Covid-19 and the friend's husband is in the ICU with it. You can live in paradise and still be vulnerable.

I phone another friend who lives in that same coastal rural neighbourhood and she has an underlying health condition in her lungs which will ultimately kill her. I won't be able to visit her again, so we talk on the phone regularly. I think I am suffering a bit of an oxygen deficit because after the call I am exhausted and out of air. Seems more tiring than walking the dog.

Anyway, she's a fairly devout Christian, if a bit eccentric about it, but she does firmly believe in an afterlife and feels sorry for people who don't. I keep quiet about my own beliefs, and I don't feel sorry for people who don't believe in an afterlife. Sometimes I think it would be nice to carry on in a brand new life after death, and sometimes I think, Oh give me a break, I'm done! Nighty-night.

She said she was pretty much reconciled with quitting this life except for one thing, she can't seem to get rid of her negative feelings about Trump. He really upsets her and she can get into quite a rant every time Trump says something obnoxious. I on the other hand think he is behaving according to expectation and only once did he upset me, after the Ukrainian flight was shot down over Iran and he said no American lives were lost. But that was personal (for me, not for him) and he didn't say anything unexpected.

In some ways he is a very stupid person and in other ways he is incredibly smart. I think that's what irritates people. I think a lot of what he says is deliberately done to keep folks off guard and he is wildly successful at that. Being ignored or treated as though he was inconsequential is the worst thing for him, so I try to maintain that attitude. He is consequential alright, but only because of his position, not because of any innate qualities. I try to explain my position to my friend but I don't think it helps, she still struggles with her perceived negativity. She wants to die in a state of benign acceptance and right now she can't do that.

Isolation does that to me too sometimes. I can spend days feeling benign acceptance and then suddenly descend into paranoia and upset. It's tough to claw your way back up again all by yourself. We're not really built for that.