With the Omicron variant spreading rapidly, the country is averaging more than 500,000 new cases a day, January 10th, 2022, New York Times.

covid is fucking horrible let me just say i dislike having it very much A Tweet by Talia Lavin @swordsjew queer jewish journalist. author of award winning book CULTURE WARLORDS. Writer, The Sword & The Sandwich.

“Our view is this is an extremely dangerous situation. We’re now at a stage where Russia could at any point launch an attack in Ukraine.” White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki

Every day the New York Times shows a series of full-color maps that show the status of the plague in the United States, broken down by County. Pale yellow is the best – well, less awful, actually, no color is good but nobody has had that for the last twenty-two months – and deep purple being awful, terrible, bad. It’s been a fun image to go to because our area of California has, up until recently, looked very pale. Now, the entire map is almost all purple. San Mateo County, where Michele and I live, has a population of about 767,500 and we are now averaging 4,157 new cases a day. Each day! As the number of cases keeps growing, so does our fear and now both the number of cases and our fear are hockey-sticking.

As our fear grows, going out, eating in a restaurant, even outside, or going to a small party seems scary and foolish. So, we stay home, keeping cooped up, and our fear grows. “Oh, don’t worry about getting toilet paper, we can go out and get some tomorrow…or use leaves.” With inertia, comes isolation, and with that, acceptance. Not going out is beginning to feel normal again. A normal I don’t want.

Well, normal except that we are worried that Michele has been exposed. She was out walking with her friend Carol when they saw a fellow walker with a beautiful French Mastiff. In the admiration conversation that ensued, they got close enough to pet the dog, at that point the guy casually mentioned that he has been bedridden for the last fours days because of Covid. So we are now in the same house, masked when we are in the same room, but, usually, we each retreat to our desk for the day, where we even have Zoom dinners. I am truly surprised at how much more isolated this makes me feel.

Well, normal except that, in the background, the sounds of war can be heard just over the horizon. Russia wants Ukraine, they want it as a buffer between NATO and their Homeland because Mother Russia is afraid of being attacked. That seems like a very logical fear to me. Wrong, I hope, but every time a European country, or group of countries, got strong, it attacked Russia starting with Sweden – a couple of times – then Poland, France, Germany, even the United States had an expeditionary force in Russia (in the fall of 1918, we really were threatened by Communism). During the Cold War, Russia used its occupied Eastern European countries as a buffer, but, after the end of the Cold War in 1989 NATO gobbled up Russia’s buffer zone and Russia is pissed – or afraid – and is acting out. If this makes it sound like I’m minimizing the crisis, I don’t mean to, this could very easily end up being both a human and ecological crisis.

Sadly, what is becoming normal again, is that, over the weekend, another group of Jewish people has been attacked by another terrorist while praying in their synagogue. I used to get in low-grade arguments with friends who think Trump is the worst president ever because I’ve maintained that he was a pretty ordinary Republican with extraordinarily bad manners. But Trump’s bad manners were really just a cover for his racism and sexism. Trump’s racism made racism fashionable again. Maybe not fashionable, but OK and that is doing tremendous harm to our body politic.

Lastly – for today – according to National Geographic, the new normal will include more giraffes. There are about twenty percent more giraffes today than there were in 2017 (although some of that may just be better counting). As an added bonus, according to people who decide these things, there are actually four different species of giraffes and three of them are thriving. Also thriving are the California Condors, huge birds, with a wing span of up to ten feet, which, because of lead poisening, had gone extinct in the wild by the mid-1980s. A captive breeding program was started by the San Diago Wild Animal Park and Los Angeles Zoo and, as of today, there are over 500 California Condors with 92 flying in the wild in Central California and 225 spread out in Baja, Arizona, and Utah (171 are in captivity). They are still very rare and I’ve never seen one but we will be driving through Condor country in a couple of weeks, so we hope to.