the hundred years war...

it's day 4 billion in quarantine...I exaggerate, but you all get it...yesterday Governor Cuomo extended our pause until May 15th...if you are from Long Island you should recognize this constant end-date revision...it is like driving home on the LIE...5pm...any Friday...in the summer..."Delays Exits 13-21"..."Delays Exits 22-35"..."Delays Exits 36-45"...I'm gonna shoot myself Exits 46-62...at least at the end of LIE torture you get some drinks at a bar and ocean breezes with breakfast...here you get homemade hand sanitizer and a mask that keeps popping off one ear as some stranger walks within that 6 feet in a empty-shelf supermarket...and for extra pleasure as we sit captive at home...we can watch those of dubious IQ protesting shoulder to shoulder in states far away...no masks...no gloves...demanding an end to this pause...some calling it a hoax...or worse...angrily doubting Fauci and the CDC...and any other scientific approach to stemming the spread...and as the Governor of Michigan sadly stated...spreading infection further with these protests...ensuring longer quarantines at home...we have now entered the real danger zone with dealing with this pandemic...we have food being dumped and lines of people waiting for food...we have small businesses being shut out of loans so desperately needed...and airlines who were given exorbitant bailouts signaling layoffs (United)...which begs...where the fuck is oversight...leadership...I keep looking for it when I look through my fingers covering my eyes when our President talks each evening...and then eviscerates those asking the tough questions...and then I have to turn it all off...and I'm dreaming of that beautiful, tremendous, terrific ocean at that end of a long road...sitting here foot on the brake...waiting to hit the gas...

"april is the cruelest month..."

Oh, T.S. Eliot, if only you knew...the trees are budding, and flowers gently awakening from a winter that wasn't...soon the grass will be lush and green...tulips opening to the sun...but we won't...we will briskly walk past them...if we can...peering above our homemade mask lines...plodding onward...afraid to really breathe deep...and we will be the lucky ones if we do...I have come to my own conclusion based on whatever brain cells I have left in this 59-year-old brain...a few weeks away from 60 and entering an age group of dubious risk...I conclude that no one knows what the hell they are talking about...as I mused about before we entered our initial lockdown, as it were, in my blog about life during war time, and the Talking Heads...and talking heads...we truly are at war...but without weapons...and with an invisible enemy...how quaint it was when our enemy was only terrorism...when our enemy were angry factions of starving nations who hated our excess...when life was stripping in airports...adjusting to code orange or red or whatever the fuck they called it that week...now we occasionally find solace in a governor who was hated weeks ago for a half-assed policy that left New York City streets brimming with crime...and now the streets are afloat with viral remnants...we look for hope in a little doctor's messages...he looks like that nice uncle that gave you a dollar at the seder...we crave hope...directions...levity...light...and then bury ourselves in distractions...hoarding...binging Netflix without chill...in need of that old school religion, we suffer without the benefit of dedicated clergy...they look at us with compassion through computer screens...our ears denied the solace of choir and community prayer...where does that leave us all as so many enter this holy week...I truly do not know...should we be anointing doorways with blood to protect us from plague?...and the irony...it's National Poetry Month...and with each new poem I read or write...I find myself returning to Eliot's "The Waste Land"...April is the cruelest month...