Love In The Time Of COVID-19

Well look at that--big fat flakes are coming down and things could hardly look festiver. It's mid-March and this is certainly not unprecedented, but it's still a surprise, and I can't remember if we had any snow this winter. In fact the winter has seemed unusually mild. Our normal winter days are rainy and top out in the mid-forties, but it's been a good ten degrees warmer than that, enough to make me wake up in the middle of the night and kick off my beloved slab of blankets and fret about what summer will be like on our new, remodeled planet.

What else? Oh. There's a new virus in town, perhaps you heard. If you drew a Venn diagram of People Who Should Be Real Worried and Me, you'd have one big dark circle. Nevertheless I find myself not real worried. This is mainly a matter of principle. Worry has always been the least helpful tool in my kit and often as not I can't even find it in among the store receipts, pennies, and itty bitty screws.

I am not yet a complete dunce, however, and have adopted all the protocols recommended by scientists in the Deep State, a.k.a. the remaining still-functional bureaucrats whose salaries I am happy to pay with my tax money. Even though I am well over sixty I believe I would survive an infection. I worry more about Dave, who, despite being apparently bionic in fundamental ways, was a smoker of long standing, and the creative things he can do with a simple respiratory ailment are legendary around here. We're hunkering down.

The thing that's weirder about my state of mind is that I find all of this actually exciting, in almost the same way I find our imminent mega-earthquake exciting. I'm always impressed by massive real events beyond our control. Things that shake us up. In this case we have a tiny item, a virus, which, like all other living things, is doing its level best to reproduce itself, which it must do inside a "host"--in this case bats, or us. "Host" is a mighty accommodating word and suggests a degree of hospitality we might not actually feel. "Mark" might be a better term. The virus catches a ride on a suitable cell and shlorps itself inside, where it cajoles the cell into helping it replicate, slips on a new jacket, and busts out of Dodge, which is real bad for Dodge, and then it hops the next available mark, eventually existing in, conceivably, half the world's human population, plus a number of bats.

Meanwhile, we continue to hurtle toward environmental doom, even though we know full well what we need to do about it--because we knew we needed to do it fifty years ago. No politician on the planet could overcome the stubborn short-sightedness of our rapacious consumption. The disruption to our economic system would be so severe that people will not consider the far heavier price of doing nothing. The entire system needs to be overhauled, and there's little support or political will for that. Certainly not among the plutocrats, and not among the powerless serfs so easily gulled by them. I always vote as hard as I can, but it's clear to me that only some crazy outside catastrophe could turn this ship around.

But looky here: commerce is grinding to a halt. The transportation sector is nosediving. Unearned treasure is losing its value. The systems are crumbling. A crafty 120-nanometer sphere of protein and DNA has done this. It's a little viral miracle.

Scientists don't agree on whether viruses are living or not. They can't generate their own energy or live for long outside their hosts. But they're hardly inert. They're as successful as an internet rumor. Or xenophobia, which spreads rapidly but can't exist for long outside Fox News.

So that's what's filling my sails. There is something right now that has managed to bind all us individual hosts together, all over the globe. We are in a state of heightened awareness of each other's basic humanity, of what we have in common, what we each need, what we need from each other, and what we can live without. And we finally understand that what we do affects everyone else. This virus dissolves false boundaries.

We might as well call it Empathy.

Newts In Love

It's spring, and--I know you're all with me on this--our thoughts invariably turn to amphibian sex. It's obvious to me, as a volunteer Frog Shuttler, that frogs are highly motivated to reproduce; the males somewhat more avidly, I think, but I could be projecting. Male frogs are hoppiting to the vernal ponds well in advance of the females, but the females do get it in gear eventually, and then there's lots of hugging and cuddling and things squirt out and new frogs happen.

All of that sort of makes sense to most of us. The frogs reproduce by means of external fertilization, meaning they need to provide the materials for tadpole assembly, but it all happens outside of the bodies of the consenting adult frogs. Still, we all recognize an embrace.

It's the salamanders that always seemed more problematic. The literature is straightforward. With few exceptions, they fertilize internally. Now you're talking, we think. But no. The male deposits a sperm packet somewhere, usually in water, and then the female meanders over and picks it up later with her hoo-hoo. And then the internal fertilization takes place.

This doesn't make sense to us. It feels remote. There's not enough...friction, let's call it. Even Louis C.K. never said "If you don't mind, I'm going to jack off over here, and then, what say you come over and sit on the wet spot?" Nobody really wants to sit on the wet spot. Although, of course, if it's underwater anyway, it's probably not such a big deal. Still, where's the female's motivation?

Newts, as anyone staring into a pond in springtime knows--and isn't that all of us?--are very handsy. They are all over the females and they aren't interested in letting go. Sometimes a lot of males are all over one female, creating something called a Newt Ball. Nothing about this seems sexually persuasive, and in fact, females have been known to drown in the attention. Although in many species across the animal kingdom it is the females that choose their mates, this may not be the case for newts. However researchers have discovered that there is at least one newt species in which the female sometimes gets out of the situation by feigning death. You do what you have to.

Well, what apparently seals the deal with salamanders is our old friends the pheromones. The males produce pheromones that entice the females to swell up in the critical sperm-packet-reception area, which probably feels better than it sounds, and in some cases they lead the female to the junction as well. In one observed species, the male deposits his sperm packet, which probably feels better than it sounds, and then wafts pheromones toward his female of choice (basically all of them) and coaxes her to follow him as he backs up toward his packet of Genetic Legacy, and then when she's in the right spot he turns sideways in a blocking move.

It all seems to work and I doubt there's anything clinical about it. We are not in turkey-baster territory here. Probably I've been thinking about it wrong. We all know how it feels to be massively attracted to someone clear across a room, even before any friction is involved. We don't really understand that either, but it is undeniable. So that's the deal with spring salamanders. It isn't only about sex.

It's love.

Buy Tulips!

Meet our little friend. We don't know what he's made of, but if you put him in water, he gets ten times bigger in a couple weeks. Take him out again and he shrinks down to his original size. Apparently you can do this over and over. We call him Stockmarket.

383 years ago the market for fancy tulips crashed and devastated fortunes in the Dutch Republic. It seems odd to us now that people were speculating on tulip bulbs like that. It's not like they're beanie babies. They jammed the parking meters and rolled off the bar counters. But speculate they did, until some unworthy peon planted one of the suckers and became unacceptably wealthy a year later.

Nothing has any value except what we agree to. Paper money is worthless unless someone is willing to trade you something for it. Right now you can buy a company using nothing but ones and zeroes. You don't even have to have your own ones and zeroes if someone else is willing to loan you some in case you make more with them later. And with all that non-money, you can buy back shares of the company and give it to yourself instead of investing in the company, and after a while there's no company, no product, and no employees, but you have fancy tulips right out the ass.

And you can take them and give them to the fairies that are holding up the stock market and pull the lever on the slot machine and hit the big time, and eventually you can see that the whole ill-gained lot of it goes to your shitty kid; and somebody out there will tell us the shitty kid earned it and should be left alone in case he sprinkles jobs over the economy somehow.

But then of course because the entire structure was glued together with unicorn snot, it all comes crashing down one day when someone sneezes importantly and everyone tries to get out at once. And that really screws the people who had a bit invested in the hopes they could retire some day, having been encouraged to contribute to the casino by the people who took their pensions. But it would appear to be not so vital to the 50% of the population that isn't in the market at all.

Except it is. Because now people aren't going on vacation so much and don't need their hotel rooms cleaned, and are holding off on regular haircuts, and cutting down on donuts and lattes, and what with one thing and another people are going to have to be let go.

Which proves who the real job creators are: regular people with adequate wages and enough cushion to be comfortable who like donuts and need their hair cut.

The thing about the stock market is it rarely measures anything meaningful. How can you point to an overheated market and say it means the economy is doing great when so many people are living in tents by the freeway? And when other people are so wealthy they could lose 95% of their treasure and live exactly the same?

We have a market in free-fall because of a virus that might take a divot out of the population, but it soars with the success of the energy sectors that fuel the global warming that will take us all out. But we're not worried about that. Climate change is a legacy catastrophe. We're over it.

I'm not sure this particular version of the market is worth preserving.

Of Ducks And Dicks

Dave and I took advantage of a wafer of sunny February weather and walked to the Rhododendron Garden. It's a bit over six miles away. Twelve mile walks are no big deal for us; there's a brewpub in this town every other block. And they're really no big deal if you're going to see a mandarin duck, which ordinarily requires a trip to Asia.

Nobody knows where this mandarin duck came from. They're not subtle. The Rhododendron Garden is slathered in ducks, with an emphasis on wood ducks, which are stupendously gorgeous birds, unless they're paddling next to a mandarin duck. No fair, the stupendously gorgeous male wood duck thinks, then. Might as well wear an old sweatshirt. The females of both species look a lot alike, and you gotta figure some of those female wood ducks couldn't help but notice. You could at least make an effort, they're thinking.

The species are a bit similar though and are related. But the mandarin duck doesn't normally live here. People are so impressed with them that they get scooped up as pets, and sometimes those get loose. There are a few small populations in other places, notably England, where some of the looser ones did some raping and pillaging. Ducks are not nice birds, sexually. Ducks are among the few birds with penises and apparently being a dick about it comes with the package, as it were.

I guess this particular mandarin duck left in December. One does wonder where he went. If he were to show up at some random wet spot along the flyway, you'd think somebody would've noticed. This is why I think  he's probably in Vegas with the show girls, blending in. Any time a rare bird is found, word gets out. We had a stray indigo bunting here at a refuge a few years back, just sitting in a tree bunting away, and the parking lot was stuffed with birders, because they don't belong here. I'd just come back from West Virginia where you dang near had to scrape them off your binoculars to see anything else, so I was pretty serene about it, and set off in search of a bittern.

So if anyone is keeping track of the various perambulations of Dave and Murr, we have now walked twenty miles to not see a platypus at the zoo, and twelve miles to not see a mandarin duck at the Rhody Gardens, both of which feats could have been accomplished in a lot less time, with the same amount of beer.

Let's review. The wood duck is as snappy a dresser as you can get outside of the tropics. Green helmet with white chin straps, pale sidewalls with racing stripes, bronze breast with stars. The mandarin duck has all that plus three colors on the helmet and a purple breast and full golden beard and a giant bustle off the butt you don't ordinarily see outside of Project Runway. Presumably the bustle is made of a matched pair of overachieving individual feathers.

Look at that, the female wood duck says to her mate. If you're just going to let yourself go, you could bring around a couple of snails now and then. To which her mate replies: He's obviously compensating. And snails? I ain't no chickadee. Screw you. And then he does, because he's a dick.

Gravity 101: Mad Mike Edition

The world was shaken by the death of daredevil Mad Mike Hughes the other day, or at least the portion of it that his rocket smacked into.

Mr. Hughes was attempting to shoot himself 5000 feet into the air in a homemade rocket in order to see for himself if the earth was flat, or more on the rotund side. He was not the sort to take other people's word for anything, although he might have done well to take a tip or two from rocket scientists.

A former limousine driver, he had not previously succeeded in killing himself despite many attempts to do so, including a world-record 103-foot jump in a stretch Lincoln Town Car.

The generally accepted model of our planet, according to the Flat Earth Society, is a disk rimmed in a wall of ice the rest of us call Antarctica. This closely resembles the design of the United Nations logo, only with ice in place of olive branches, and in fact the UN logo is taken by some to be further proof, for some reason, of the validity of this model. The designer of the logo had to fiddle with it to make it fit on the head of a lapel pin and not leave any countries out.

Flat Earth theory, in contrast, merely has to fit in a pinhead.

People believe the earth is flat because they don't want to be the ones hanging upside down from China. Their entire notion of "gravity" comes down to things being either "up" or "down," and as long as you're on the"up" side of the disk, you're in good shape. There's no suspicion that people might just float off (or "up"). If nothing else, Mad Mike contributed a stunning demonstration of gravity, here defined as the degree to which the disk sucks.

I am among those skeptical that Mr. Hughes was, himself, a Flat Earther. I think he liked to do scary things and didn't have enough dough to make them happen. I am assuming he was let go from the limousine company after he launched the Lincoln. He had tried to raise enough money to make a crappy rocket in 2016 but netted only $310. Not until he signed on with the Flat Earthers did he reach his financial goal.

In other words, Mr. Hughes claimed to be a Flat Earther in the same way others of prominence claim to be Christians in order to be elected to a position of power and wealth. If Mad Mike had contacted a random Koch brother or Vladimir Putin he could have had the hell funded out of him. They'd be all over that flat earth business. Flat Earth people believe NASA's space program is a hoax, and anything that leads people to distrust experts, scientists, and government agencies is red meat for a libertarian or autocrat.

The fact is, you can get people to believe any fool thing. Already you have people believing billionaires earned their money, and their shitty kids did too. You could have a president say "I don't know, maybe the earth is flat, who knows? People are saying that, you hear people saying that. We'll see." And whammo, just like that politicians will win office by promising to shim up the world just enough that the icky greasy people slide out of America.

Poor Mr. Hughes. I'm told I shouldn't make fun of the dead, but nobody says I can't right up to the moment of impact. In any case I believe it would honor him to have him buried at the very edge of the disk, with the planet rolled up over him like a burrito. This is not currently possible because of the fifty-foot rim wall of ice otherwise known as Antarctica. But the ice is on the way out, happily, thanks to the efforts of more gullible people and billionaires, and he should be easy to maintain in fresh condition at the ice wall until it disappears altogether.

I Can See Clearly Now. EEEEK!

I've been disappointed in my eyeballs of late. I think they've let themselves go.

It isn't any one thing. It's a bunch of things.

They do amazing things with prescription lenses. You have portions that you look through to read a book. Portions to see the computer. Portions to identify the hawk in the distance. Little sidecars up top for your mind's eye. A fold-out bit for examining your conscience (optional for Republicans). Used to be your eyeballs did all that by themselves, but now that they've let themselves go, your glasses have had to step up.

And they're still not enough. I have trifocals and still can't read sheet music from the piano bench. So I got special piano glasses. And they never worked. I could see the top staff but not the middle one. I could see the bottom line if I held my glasses out a half-inch, which isn't practical. I thought about wedging a tampon on the bridge of my nose. Theoretically I could just yank on the string when I got back up to the top line and reinsert the tampon on a held note.

It wasn't suitable for every piece.

And then my regular glasses came up short. I found myself peering over the top to read and having to take a step back from friendly people to get them in focus. My prescription was only a year old, so I just put all this down to old eyeballs. I figure parts of my eyeballs were petrifying and other parts were going slack like the skin on my inner thighs. Maybe my eyeballs had gone squishy too. Didn't have enough structural integrity to hold a pose, and the lenses went rigid just to try to restore order. Throw in some elaborate floaters and it's like seeing the world through soup. Also, the last time I was at the optometrist's, he said I had a little cataract but there was no plan to discipline it until it was a teenager.

What the hell. I went in again, and this time I also measured the distance between my eyeballs and the sheet music. "Twenty-one inches," I told my new doctor, and she made a note of it, and didn't just assume some standard middle distance like the old doc probably did. I didn't hold out much hope.

But I will be damned. I can see the music now. I can see GRACE NOTES! Grace notes are teeny tiny notes that the composer puts in out of a general lack of commitment to the real notes.  They're like the real notes' pets. Now I can see their little noses and tails.

The optician placed my new trifocals on my face and asked how the distance was. I looked out the window at the newly crystalline West Hills and gave him a big thumbs-up. Then I read the teeny tiny print on his card. Then, because I had no idea how my glasses looked on me because I couldn't see myself when I tried the frames on, I turned to the mirror EEK EEK a foot away EEEK. I still don't know how they look. All I saw was my actual face EEK the way it apparently has been for a while. It was clear as hell. There was a dried-up mudflat cracking into plates, strands of gravel, a network of arroyos and drifts of rabbit-brush and prickly pear, lizards sunning themselves, tortoises lumbering through dry canyons. Pulled myself away just before the Lunar Rover hove into view.

"I see fine," I told the optician. "They work way better than the old ones."

I'm not saying that's a good thing.

Of Footcoats And Dickeys

When I'm awake, my brain gets to go on play dates with other people's brains, has a schedule, and is expected to put its toys away at the end of the day. When I'm asleep, supervision is out the window. Things I might have encountered during the day tumble around in there and problems might be tackled, although not well.

Other times the dreaming brain just rolls around like a raffle ticket spinner and you don't know what's going to drop out.

Last night I woke up and had one thing only on my mind. Spats.

Spats. I had questions. Mainly: What the hell?

I like spats because they always make me think of the bottom end of Fred Astaire, and then I work my way up. But I always assumed they were just for fashion. No! Evidently, spats are little raincoats for your shoes. They're short for spatterdashes, and they keep the water and crud out of the places they could leak in at your shoelaces. They have a little strap underneath the shoe and go on exactly like a raincoat on a dachshund. That's how they got their start, but later they were worn purely for fashionable effect after the King of England made a public appearance in them. Similarly, dachshunds wearing coats are now mainly a personal fashion statement for the owner, and are unrelated to dry dachshunds.

Spats continued to be very popular for formal dress until the 1920s, when the King of England showed up spatless and tanked the industry in one day. Everyone noticed. According to some, the kingdom was littered with discarded spats after that.

In a way, the spat is a bit like a dickey for your feet. The Dickey, of course, was originally known as a "detachable bosom," and wouldn't that be handy on those slimy hot summer days, ladies? Men wore dickeys as a false front of their shirts so that they could just clean those instead of the entire shirt. Laundry has always been a pain in the ass and was even more of one in the olden days when you had to soak, soap, boil, rinse, wring out, mangle, dry, starch, and iron, and probably make your own soap. That's the story, but the story doesn't really wash either. It leaves out the important tidbits such as that the vital armpit portion of the shirt is now going unwashed, and also didn't they have people for doing all that cleaning? Specifically, womenfolk.

Today we think of dickeys as those cloth turtleneck types that men can wear to get the full sweater effect without the nipple abrasion, but although the originals were linen, there was a time when they made dickeys out of rigid celluloid ("hard dickeys").

But dickeys did allow clothing to last longer. Now, of course we mostly do not wear dickeys, since the invention of slave labor in the third world has revolutionized the practice of discarding clothing on a whim, and even purchasing clothing that never gets worn in the first place. Spats, however, should be due for a comeback.

Scottish Highlanders do still wear spats, which seems like a great idea. I don't know if they have hard dickeys. And it had never occurred to me to check if their spats were highly polished patent leather. Until now.