Post 73 - May 23, 2020
Day 73…
A million years ago in another place and time, Kelly Devine got me hooked on a TV show.
We were out of town somewhere and I needed something to watch and Kelly suggested Grey’s Anatomy.
It’s a medical drama set in a hospital in Seattle.
When I first started watching, it was a good show.
The writing was good, as were the actors.
I was hooked.
A few years in, however, like all shows, it jumped the shark.
Jumping the Shark is the point at which the writers of a TV show create a situation so ridiculous that you can look back and point to it as the thing that finally ended the show's run.
The term came from an episode of Happy Days where the ultra-cool character, Fonzie, is waterskiing and actually jumps over a shark.
While wearing his trademark leather jacket.
It was absurd.
It was a moment so removed from the original inspiration of the series that looking back on it, you could see that it was a clear harbinger of the end.
The writers had run out of things to say.
The shark moment on Grey’s Anatomy came about five seasons in when one of the characters started a relationship with a ghost.
The Dead Denny arc pretty much ended any little credibility the show may have ever had, but, despite that, the show continued on.
And on.
And on.
It just finished its’ sixteenth season and, as a loyal viewer, I have to tell you that it is now truly unwatchable.
Every character has now slept with every other character.
There have been multiple disasters - two plane crashes, several major natural disasters, epidemics, bombings, you name it - this one hospital has seen it all.
It is completely ridiculous.
Terrible, though, that it is, I can’t seem to stop watching it.
It just drags on shark or no shark.
I think that The COVID-19 pandemic has jumped the shark.
Yesterday, the White House did a particularly early briefing.
I’ve long stopped watching them, but yesterday it came on before I’d turned off the TV from the morning news.
At the top of the briefing, the President marched forcefully up to the podium, announced that places of worship were essential services and that they needed to be reopened immediately.
Churches, synagogues and… mosques… (He choked a little on mosques.)
He confidently announced that if Governors don’t comply, he will override them.
With that, he finished his little speech and marched right off.
The whole thing took less than a minute.
Dr. Birx, the White House coronavirus response coordinator, dragged herself up to the podium and proceeded to drone on about COVID numbers and COVID actions without ever responding to this rather astonishing announcement at all.
She nattered on about cases on a state by state basis referring to graphs that, as usual, we couldn’t see properly, as if nothing out of the ordinary had happened at all.
To be clear, the President has no authority whatsoever to force Governors to reopen houses of worship.
Many of the worst outbreaks of the virus can be traced back to religious gatherings.
Nothing about his little outburst made a lick of sense.
Whatsoever.
Even a few weeks ago, this announcement would have occasioned an endless amount of TV chatter.
Yesterday, the response from TV commentators was more like, “Umm… No.” and then they moved on.
The endless repetition of COVID coverage on TV is mind-numbing.
We aren’t really scared of it anymore.
The virus, in and of itself, is no longer even interesting.
While waiting for the Mayor to come on, I just watched 10 minutes of coverage of how Gatorland in Orlando is planning to reopen.
I’m not even really listening to either the Mayor or the Governor anymore, I just have them on in the background.
These days, I am not sleeping as well as I used to.
It’s not because I am anxious, it’s just that I am just not all that tired.
We get to the end of the day and we go to bed because it’s time, not because we’ve exhausted ourselves.
We are all experiencing extreme quarantine fatigue.
In 1983, as the HIV/AIDS crisis raged, the only way we knew to fight it was to not have sex.
That's what we were told.
Great, but sexual abstinence does not work.
Most human beings aren’t wired in a way that makes abstinence possible in the long term.
To try and deal with sex in a way that actually incorporated human behavior, a group of activists finally came up with a document called “How to Have Sex in an Epidemic.”
It provided some guidance on which sex acts were riskier than others.
The document also provided early suggestions for condom use.
Richard Berkowitz and Michael Callan knew that strict abstinence was not going to work.
The solution to the problem HAD to deal with human reality.
We are going to have sex.
Yes, intellectually, total abstinence from everybody would completely stop the spread of HIV/AIDS but for most people, that would, over time, never happen.
Berkowitz and Callan, with a virologist named Joseph Sonnabend, tried to come up with the next best thing.
Staying at home forever is not going to work any better than refraining from sex did during the early HIV/AIDS era.
In New York, staying at home for the last two months has seemingly accomplished what it was designed to do which was to keep our hospitals from being overrun.
It was never going to cure the virus.
The testing that we have already done pretty clearly indicates that most of the population is still completely susceptible to the virus.
They haven’t had it yet.
Our numbers in NY are down, but people are still getting sick.
Every day, still, over 100 people in New York die from it.
We cannot, however, continue quarantining forever.
We are not going to be able to stand it.
The human psyche is not equipped for this much isolation.
We are moving towards reopening.
We have to figure out how to do it properly so that we won't just end up right back to where we were.
The virus hasn’t gone away, it’s just hasn't been able to jump as effectively because we have been keeping away from each other.
Safe Sex is a myth.
The only completely safe sex is no sex.
Saf-ER Sex, however, is achievable.
As we start interacting with each other again this summer, we are going to need to figure out how to achieve the same thing.
Saf-ER interaction.
Because, regardless, we are going to interact.
We NEED to interact.
It’s kind of a miracle we’ve been able to keep this up for as long as we already have.
Going to a restaurant and eating outside, distanced from other diners is probably going to be better than eating inside.
It may be better, in the big picture, to go running with a friend, at a distance, than it would be staying at home alone and becoming depressed.
Just like in the HIV/AIDS epidemic, low income communities are going to have a harder time keeping themselves safe than wealthier communities will.
We are all going to need to learn how to judge the risks for ourselves.
People's risk thresholds are going to be different.
Like with sex, we are going to have to respect that.
The federal government has basically muzzled the CDC, so we are going to need to rely on our state and city health departments to give us recommendations.
Reopening, as much as we all need it to happen, isn’t going to be all or nothing.
As we have learned how to practice safer sex as a result of the HIV/AIDS pandemic, we will need to learn how to practice safer interaction as a result of this one.
Some of the behavior we learn now may be a part of how we behave for the rest of our lives.
I really don’t think that we can continue this total isolation that much longer.
It is going to get harder and harder as the weather gets warmer and warmer.
Shaming people for breaking social guidelines, much like shaming people for unsafe sex practices, is just going to drive the behavior underground.
We have a White House that seems to be purposefully spreading misinformation.
There's a lot of information - good and bad - coming from all sorts of sources.
Trying to make some sense of it all is daunting.
What does seem apparent, though, sifting through the slagheap of information, is that we can’t all just jump back into the pool.
Reopening can’t just be flipping a switch.
Too many people could die.
As painfully boring and depressing as this quarantine is, I think we have to stick with it a while longer.
We are going to start reopening in as soon as a few weeks from now.
We should take it slow.
We should be as safe as we can figure out how to be with the information that we currently have.
The alternative is that we could all end right back where we started.
Nobody wants that.
We want out.
We want to be with each other again.
I want it so badly, I can taste it.
I miss you all.