Yesterday, I was smug about how easy it is for me to socially separate, because I live on a farm, I work from home, and I'm an introvert. It's not hard for me to distance myself from others. It often takes some effort to do the opposite.
But today, I feel unfocused, as though my brain has blown a fuse. I can barely find the words to write a sentence.
It's a complaint of the privileged, I know. Feeling generally and profusely muddled is far better than having an acute, specific worry--like not having enough money or food or shelter to get through the next few weeks.
My neighbor, a retired doctor, wrote in a text to me last night, "I hope you are all able to stay safe during this difficult time and that you have plenty of food on hand which will last weeks. Things may get a lot worse before they get better. It is possible we will all be quarantined for some time. That will really be tough if it happens."
And I realized: we did not have enough food on hand to last us for weeks.
So this morning, after breakfast, rather than sitting at my desk and poring over a manuscript that needs to be transmitted to production, I did some well considered panic shopping.
I thought about renewing my Costco membership online and making the Coronavirus pilgrimage to the great warehouse of bulk items. Maybe the lines wouldn't be too long, at 9:30 in the morning, a time when most people are at home or at work.
But standing in line would afford very little control over how much separation I could have from the people behind and in front of me. And if I was going to stand in line for ten minutes or longer...
Suddenly, Costco seemed like the last place I wanted to be.
I could go to Bill's, our local supermarket. There wouldn't be much of a line there--maybe no line at all. I know where everything is at Bill's. I could be very efficient.
On the other hand, Bill's was smaller than Super Target, and I would feel badly about taking too many boxes of cereal and other staple items.
Target definitely had more inventory, at lower prices. And since I was preparing to shop for several weeks' worth of food and sundry, lower price points were not irrelevant.
The fact that I had to think this decision through to this degree conveyed a peculiar gravity upon the errand.
I felt like Sarah Connor (in Terminator) or Carrie Matheson (in Homeland), driving north on South Fish Hatch and turning west on M toward the Target.
It would have been obvious to anyone glancing at my cart (which I had wiped down with bleach solution) that I was shopping for the zombie apocalypse.
The prices of things that people needed had been kept deliberately low, which made me feel warm and tender about humanity, and more profoundly scared.
It's the little things that start to sink in, like what kind of Godzilla must this be for the House and Congress to amicably pass enormous rescue bills, practically overnight?
Mitch McConnell is going to agree to send every American citizen a check for $1000 not once, but twice? Andrew Yang was my #1, but who would have dreamt that Basic Universal Income would be approved by this Republican Congress?
And the news: Italy. Their mortality rate spiked to 9 percent. Nine percent. Nearly one out of 10 people infected die.
That was the tipping point, I now realize, rolling the numbers around in my head. Too many dead to properly bury.
I had to pause from my daily work to sit with this new information and let it sink in.
I know, we all must carry on as best we can. We all have our jobs to do, and I'm very fortunate to be able to do mine from home.
But I also need to make time to not be socially separate. Life goes on as normal in my own bubble world. But when I tune in to what's happening out there in the world, and especially to people at the epicenter of the unfurling disaster, I have to stop, and pause, to take it all in.
Today, it's overwhelming.
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