The Coronavirus is Slightly Inconvenient

A man at the counter turned to two women, mother and daughter, standing nearby and greeted them. I detected a creeped out reaction from the daughter tho both replied politely. After a moment recognition occurred. He runs the gym program at the base or some such. We all forget how masks work. I won’t mention not recognizing Beth when she came in one time.

The man spoke of the gym just opening now. Only active personnel, not yet open to however the women got use of it. Still working out procedures, he said. Aint we all?

A customer who works at a restaurant said his restaurant set up tables outside, to accommodate social distancing. And then a couple evenings ago, a hellacious downpour. Add an investment in umbrellas to the budget.

The return of sports resonates with nervous desperation in these fraught times. Yes, the palliative normalcy of sports would feel good. Talk shows and sports pages have been gassing these past few months. The world would prefer Phi Slamma Jamma to bemoaning how uncomfortable masks are.

Our boy Tom Brady flouts a league-recommended advisory by gathering players on his new team together for private work outs. What would you expect from a monomaniac? He is shameless, and shameful, enough to hawk his TB12 products as questionable defenses against Coronavirus. Don’t stop there, Tom! He quotes Roosevelt’s “You have nothing to fear but fear itself”. Which is prime shit on rye, consistent with a total phlegm-wad. From Golden Boy to snake oil salesman, Tom Tom Tom Tom Tom. But no, the Coronavirus is not afraid of you.

Football players, the thinking goes, can just push on thru illness and injury. Clemson’s vaunted football program has confirmed close to 50 covid cases. Ten percent of the program, and I don’t think they have gotten down to brass tacks yet, football-wise. I don’t see how any of the sports can safely proceed—football particularly is tantamount to mud wrestling— but the murmurs grow louder to have fans gather.

Yesterday a customer came in and asked if masks were necessary. I assured him that they definitely are. He put his on. I said it is a state order, or something like that. He had a knowing smile from which I inferred doubt. He wasn’t the sort to cite the freedom from masks part of the Constitution. I assume he just wonders what all this brouhaha is about. The state order has been in effect close to two months. Every store has signs. This, sir, is the world. “Live it or live with it” as The Firesign Theatre had it.

The Crusades, Yeats, and the Poetry Word

I am reading a book about the Fourth Crusade (The Great Betrayal by Ernie Bradford). That’s the Crusade that saw Christians of the North ignore their papal directive and attack and sack Christian Constantinople. Because where would we be without schism and strife? And then I thought of Yeats’ poem, “Sailing to Byzantium”. Yeats hearkens to the spent glory of that city. I have read Yeats over the years, tho not recently. The fact is, I don’t seem to read poetry much at all these days. Instead, I make my own, or think I do. I guess that’s lax of me. I lean toward reading history. I am no scholar but the agitations that history books invoke involve me in the pertinence of language. The mysteries of political moments engender the mysteries of language and communication. By political moments I mean our interaction with what we see and hear of ‘the world’. Yeats’ mysticism leaves me completely flat but when his gaze goes hard into instants and words, and with his consummate craft, I feel a twitch of the nerve. He was, after all, politically-minded, for all his Celtic Twilightiness. I don’t know what number Crusade the world currently suffers but we are certainly learning the simplest things last.