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.

Dr. King didn’t shrink from controversy. He spoke openly about American imperialism, unionization and labor rights, economic issues, and more. He was targeted, even called a ‘communist’ because of it. It’s on all of us to pick up where he left off. A Tweet by Representative Alexandria Ocasio Cortez

We’re still in the Civil Rights Movement & don’t have the luxury of complacency. To honor the legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., we must abolish the Jim Crow filibuster, protect voting rights & legislate like democracy depends on it—because it does. A Tweet by Congresswoman Ayanna Pressley @RepPressley

Dr. Martin Luther King was not treated very well by us White people while he was alive. As Representative Ayanna Pressley said: Dr. King wasn’t murdered because he was a preacher, pacifist with a dream, that is revisionist history. He was murdered because he was a radical disruptor of the status quo, considered by the FBI & white America to be a threat to our country. The FBI even tried to blackmail him, suggesting that he kill himself. He didn’t become an American hero until after he was dead and no longer a threat to White supremicy. Today is a good day to remember that.

Donald J trump was kicked off of Twitter about a year ago – January 8th, 2021 to be exact – and Margery Taylor Greene got kicked off last week so I wanted to make a couple of coments. I really like Twitter, it is my  social media indulgence and I really don’t like Margery, still kicking people off bothers me. I know she was warned five times to stop yelling inflamatory fasehoods the same as Trump, I know that Twitter is a private company and not subject to the First Admendment, and I have no alternative plan, but it bothers me. Twitter is,  in many ways, a public space and controlling who gets to say what seems like a slippery slope. But I like Twitter and they have to do something and it’s not a easy job.

I like Twitter because, it has it’s own, improbable, personality  A couple of days ago, when I opened my account, these were the first three Tweets. 

The Bill McKibben article is well worth clicking through to but the headline, alone, is enough to brighten my day. But, even without the article, seeing Shoebills popping up in my feed makes me realize that the world is a wonderous place. Shoebills, by the way, are about four and a half feet tall and members of the pelican family although they used to be classified as storks. Enjoy.

It was immeasurably important to me to have a role model who was a woman. Besides showing me what the architecture of writing nonfiction could be, Joan Didion made me feel it was possible to have the life and career I dreamed of. A Tweet by Susan Orlean who defines herself as Writer, writer, writer. Oh, I also write.

There is much in Didion one might disagree with personally, politically, aesthetically. I will never love the Doors. But I remain grateful for the day I picked up “Slouching Towards Bethlehem” and realized that a woman could speak without hedging her bets, without hemming and hawing, without making nice, without poeticisms, without sounding pleasant or sweet, without deference, and even without doubt. It must be hard for a young woman today to imagine the sheer scope of things that women of my generation feared women couldn’t do—but, believe me, writing with authority was one of them. Zadie Smith in The New Yorker.

I didn’t know that Joan Didion was such a giant, I think I thought she was a fringe player, maybe nothing more than a cult favorite, so I was surprised at the number of people, especially women, especially women writers, who were inspired by her. She made her living by writing and I – then ensconced even more in my white male bubble than I am today- didn’t understand how hard it was for a woman to make a living writing fifty years ago. I loved her writing but I didn’t always love what she wrote. It often made me uncomfortable.

Didion was a true Californian, a fifth-generation Californian – one set of her ancestors was actually part of the Donner Party until they left the main group, near the Humbold sink, to go north, taking the Oregon Trail in the fall of 1846 – and she was pretty haughty about it, but she didn’t see the same California that I did. She saw a darker California, a California that I didn’t want to acknowledge, that didn’t match the fantasy that I still hold on to so tightly. Still, the way she wrote, that was a revelation to me.

Democracy was the first Didion book I read and I loved it’s take on politics, but Slouching Towards Bethlehem was the second and, while I won’t say I hated it, I sure was bothered by the pictures of a California I didn’t want to exist. When she writes about a young woman from San Bernardino, who killed her husband, This is the California where it is possible to live and die without ever eating an artichoke, without ever meeting a Catholic or a Jew. This is the California where it is easy to Dial-A-Devotion, but hard to buy a book … the country of the teased hair and the Capris and the girls for whom all life’s promise comes down to a waltz-length white wedding dress and the birth of a Kimberly or a Sherry or a Debbi and a Tijuana divorce and a return to hairdressers’ school. “We were just crazy kids,” they say without regret, and look to the future. The future always looks good in the golden land, because no one remembers the past, it seems so nasty, so petty and even today, I don’t want it to be true and am so afraid that it is a spot-on description of inland California.

Over the last couple of days, I’ve been reading excerpts – highlights if you will – of her writing and I keep being reminded of why I liked her so much when I first read Democracy, and then Play it As It Lays which starts with a paragraph that, somehow, has been tattooed on my brain. Maybe that is the best place to end this post, with a typical Joan Didion paragraph in which everything is wrong – what does it even mean? Why does she say she would not ask about snakes and then ask about snakes? what is she trying to say? and where the hell are the question marks at the end of the questions? – and the paragraph is perfect. So ominous, we have no idea what is happening, but we know that it’s not going to end well. What makes Iago evil? some people ask. I never ask. Another example, one that springs to mind because Mrs. Burstein saw a pigmy rattler in the artichoke garden this morning and has been intractable ever since: I never ask about snakes. Why should Shalimar attract snakes. Why should a coral snake need two glands of neurotoxic poison to survive, while a king snake, so similarly marked, needs none. Where is the Darwinian logic there. You might ask that. I never would, not anymore.