The Champlain Towers South collapsed a couple of weeks ago and it pushed everything off the front page. To me, that seemed sort of ghoulish and exploitative. Yes, it was a tragedy and I don’t want to downplay the horror of well over a hundred people dying in one awful night, but it was a specific tragedy. It was on the front page every day and presented as a cliff-hanger however we all knew, early on, that the missing people were not really missing, they were under the rubble and most of them, if not every single one of them, were not alive. But as I started to think about it, I’ve come to realize that that the Champlain Towers is an example of how we – we being almost everybody – treat a slow-moving disaster. In a way, Champlain Towers is a scale model of the way we are dealing with the Global Climate Crisis and, I fear, the end result will be similar.

Champlain Towers had been deteriorating for years with cracks in the concrete structure getting bigger allowing water to penetrate, causing flaking concrete and corrosion. It was something that the owners had been arguing about for years. We are all susceptible to wishful thinking and a large enough number of condo owners did not want to acknowledge the problems. They were worried that, if there really was a problem, or. even worse, problems, their property value would go down. They preferred to let sleeping dogs lie, there is no point in looking for problems. Eventually, as things continued to deteriorate, enough recalcitrant owners agreed on getting an inspection and, in October of 2018, the engineers issued a report which detailed numerous structural problems and pointed out that they were getting even worse and were potentially dangerous. On one level, everybody already knew that and the majority of owners who did not to hire a consultant in the first place were now worried about the cost of repairs.

It turned out that the repairs were going to cost a lot of money, something like $175,000 per condo, and nobody has that kind of money kicking around. Additionally, they found some city engineer who said that the building was safe, so starting the repairs dragged on with nothing happening.

Until it did.

Vermont and South Dakota are actually very similar Both have slightly older, white, rural populations Have comparable median incomes Both have Republican governors And these days, they look super similar on infections Here they are over past 2 months

Vermont has vaccinated (1+ shot) nearly 75% of its population SD? 50% Vermont has a high degree of immunity through vaccinations So how does SD have high population immunity? Prior infections Here’s how pandemic has played out in both states

and you can see it in the suffering of the people of the two states Deaths per capita from COVID in VT vs SD Nearly 6 times as many folks in SD died from COVID as VT 40/100K in VT versus 230/100K in South Dakota

So both states have landed at high population immunity Good But SD got there by having close to 50% of folks infected And suffering high death rates during the fall and winter months So yes vaccines or infections work for population immunity One is much better End

A couple of days ago, our cat, Precious Mae, bit me. I had been sitting on the bed, putting on my socks, and she bit me. Well, actually, I had just finished putting on my socks and was reaching for my watch when she bit me. Both Michele and I agreed that it was my fault. Let me explain.

Precious Mae loves smelling and – for lack of a better word – cuddling shoes. Michele has a tendency to leave her shoes scattered around the house wherever she happened to take them off. Precious Mae can be walking through a room on her way somewhere else, see the shoes, and go over to spend fifteen minutes smelling and cuddling them.

In this case, Precious Mae was on the bed, cuddling my watch -which I’ve probably worn for at least 300 days during the last year, giving the leather band a smell, I guess, that entices Precious Mae even if I can’t smell it – when I reached for the watch. She instantly bit me, striking like a mongoose. I was shocked. My first reaction was that it was my fault and I said something like, “Oh, I shouldn’t have done that.”. For some reason. the ridiculousness of the whole thing, besides making me laugh, somehow reminded me of people making excuses for their Jaguar breaking down.

Today, Jags are pretty reliable – nowhere near as reliable as a Japanese car or Korean car, but slightly better than a BMW, about the same as a Mercedes – but that wasn’t always the case. They were often very fast and usually gorgeous, but, up to about ten, fifteen years ago, they were notoriously unreliable. Because of their reputation, Jags didn’t ever sell very well which gave them an aura of exclusivity and that, along with the promise of speed and their good looks, meant that there were always some people willing to overlook the reliability problem. I have known three of them – a 4.2 liter E-Type, an XJ12 sedan with a magnificent 5.2 liter V-12, and a 3.8 liter IX Saloon – and all of them were astoundingly unreliable. The buyers were from different eras of my life and didn’t know each other but had one thing in common, when something broke, which almost always happened, they had a sort of excuses that basically amounted to, “It’s my fault, I shouldn’t have driven it”. People willing to defend their cars – or cats, or dogs – at the expense of themselves, I find very appealing, in a quirky sort of way (being one of them, I guess, so, duh).

But I’ve always wondered why. And why do I defend Precious Mae in the same way? I’ve come around to the opinion that it is just good ol’ cognitive dissonance reduction.

Psychologists, like doctors, like to use very precise words, and the longer each word the better because it makes it more precise. As an aside, enginers are the same and Formula One is all about engineering, so, tires don’t wear (out), tires degrade and the distance left before they have to be changed is judged by the rate of degradation. But Formula One is run by racers so everybody just calls it deg as in “I’ve got a lot of deg on the right rear.” End aside. I’m not sure that there is an equivalent for cognitive dissonance reduction so I’ll use the full term.

The theory behind cognitive dissonance reduction is that we can’t hold two opposing beliefs in our mind at the same so we change something to make the opposing beliefs line up. Sometimes, we change the facts or the weight of one of the facts, an unfortunately typical and especially debilitating example is, My spouse is s great human being who has had a hard life but he beats me…so I must be wrong. it must be my fault. One of my favorites is I love watching the animals in our backyard, each one is an individual, living a life, wanting to prosper, wanting to live, but animals are so delicious…it is Ok to eat pasture-raised animals because they have had a good life (except for that one very bad last day).

It is shocking how powerful – powerful mostly because it is not conscience – cognitive dissonance reduction is. We think we are so logical but most of the time we are operating on deeply buried beliefs that we’ve changed the real world to match.

“After all, we are our bodies…and something else.” Michel Foucault to Simeon Wade at Artist Pallet in Death Valley. `

What a great time to have a birthday, the Covid Pandemic is not over – there were 11,310 new cases in the US last week; 28 new cases in San Mateo County, alone – but the panic part of the pandemic seems to be over. Here, at least, where the sushi restaurant in San Jose, where we had gone to get takeout, was full of maskless diners. Life hasn’t returned to normal yet, but we are close enough so that it is starting to feel like normal. It is a new normal, however, not quite the same as the old normal. While we were squirreled away in quarantine, the world seems to have slightly changed, but, the reality is that I, along with everybody I have seen during the last couple of weeks, have changed. We are a social species; it is our interaction with others, after all, the bumping up against the walls of other realities, that define who we are and we’ve not had that in a long time.

I know this, still I’ve come to like the solitude of being home, the selfishness of not bumping up against other realities, the torpor of watching TV. After months of isolation, the thought of seeing other people brings up my innate androphobia. That’s only the thought, though, the reality of seeing other people is actually one of joy and Love. The reality is the sweet feeling of fam Love, and being loved, that I’d forgotten while in quarantine, is even sweeter after the absence.

Just before my birthday, Michele and I had a birthday dinner with my daughter, Samantha, her husband Gabe, and our very grand grandkids, Auggie and Charlotte, at their newly remodeled home. They all seemed the same, still, like the house, they, we have all been slightly remodeled and improved. Being together, after months of absence, felt natural and comfortable and extra special.

On my actual birthday, Michele and I had dinner at Camper, a new – to us – restaurant in Menlo Park. Sitting outside in the cool of the evening, eating a meal freshly cooked by someone else, seemed almost magical.

Last weekend, Courtney, Tracy, and Richard came over to our place for dinner and it turned into another birthday celebration. It felt so normal, almost as if we hadn’t been in quarantine for the last fifteen months. But we have been in quarantine and it has changed us. We have slowed down, opened up, and softened.

We live in a world that is far from perfect and, in many ways, seems to be getting worse. I still have no idea of why I am anemic – although I have been getting iron infusions for the last three weeks and I feel much more energetic – and I have no idea how, or even if, we are going to face Climate Change, but this year, right now, as spring turns into summer, Life feels Grand.

A week ago, I started this post as a sort of medical report on my cause-unknown anemia but, then, my eighty-first birthday snuck up on me. A couple of weeks ago, I sort of put the cat on the roof with my anemia and then left, so, first, here is an update. The results of my capsule endoscopy generally showed no blood leakage although there were a couple of spots that weren’t covered because the capsule camera had been occluded by residual barium chalk that was still in my lower gut. My heart, lungs, and GI tract seem to be fine – well, as fine as can be expected – so what I really need is a good hematologist. I asked both my GP doctor and my cardiologist for recommendations and they both suggested the same woman from UCSF who is now treating me. Well, not exactly treating, she ordered a series of three iron infusions that are different than the ones I got in the hospital. At the end of the month, I will get a blood test to see what my reaction is, then she will treat me. Right now, the hematologist thinks I do not have a leak because my few red blood cells are small which indicates a red-blood-cell creation problem. I don’t think that is particularly good news.

Actually, I’m not sure there is an answer that is good news. Certainly springing a leak is not good news. but that a leak is not the cause of my anemia is not good news either. Still, I’m OK with that. Physically, I feel weirdly pretty good and emotionally great. As irrational as it may be, I feel like I am basically healthy with a couple of niggling problems that can be fixed. That may be because the iron injections are giving me more energy, or that just may be because I’ve completely lost track of any feeling good baseline. From last summer until I went into the hospital in late Spring, I increasingly had trouble breathing. For the last several weeks, I was on the edge of panic, feeling like I was drowning – not that I have any drowning experience to set a benchmark – so, not feeling like I am drowning is a big improvement. I am aware, however, that, if I had felt this way when I was twenty-five, I’m sure I would not have said I feel pretty good. That is the good news, in my case, at least. For me, the effects of getting old, in general, are buffered by both the loss of body memory and a greater acceptance of reality. I think of body memory as that unconscious feeling in our body that remembers what our body can do, and that changes as we change. A couple of years ago, I remember watching a group of girls in Charlotte’s soccer team, sitting on a grass field in a circle talking. When they were finished, they all just stood up. I don’t think any of them even used their hands to help. They just stood up by straightening their legs. My first thought was, Wow, I could never do that, but, of course, I could, it has just been a very long time and my body has even forgotten that it was not only possible but so easy as to be unconsciously automatic.

Feeling good, or good enough, really, I think comes with age. My years of teenage angst lasted way past my teenage years but, now, they are so far in the past that it is hard to even remember them. I have read that, if you give a person too many choices, it is harder to choose. I know that has happened to me and, often, it is not only harder to choose but I go away making no choice, putting the choice off for another time. Now, I have way fewer choices and it is easier to make them. And, no matter what the result, it never seems as catastrophic as it once did.

My dad died in 1968, at 61, which, at eighty-one, now makes me twenty years older than my dad – Daddy – was when he died. It got me thinking about what I would have missed if I had died at the same age as my dad. The first thought that comes to mind is that I would have missed the Obama Presidency and then, of course, the Trump Presidency. What a contrast, Barrak Obama, the first Black President, aloof and intellectual, and Donald Trump, all Id, the first President to deny he lost the election. I would have missed the first pandemic in a hundred years; my dad was born in December 1906 so he was about eleven when the October 1918 Influenza Pandemic hit. To me, this pandemic has been a big deal but I don’t ever remember my dad – or my mother, for that matter – talking about their pandemic, which I now find strange.

I had a cell phone in the 1980s, but it was a regular phone handset that sat on a box as big as a car battery, and we called them car-phones, but I would have missed the smartphone revolution which started in 2007 with the iPhone (and an Android in 2008). My dad would have loved the car phone, he was a phone fanatic and knew the location of every public payphone from here to Sacramento. Driving somewhere, he would constantly stop and check in with his office, usually several times a trip. Of everything that I would have missed including the pandemic, the smartPhone has most changed my life as well as our day-to-day world.

Maybe twenty years ago, Michele and I were talking about what was called Global Warming then and I said something like, “I won’t see it, I’ll just skate through.” and Michele answered, “Don’t be silly, Global Warming is coming faster than you think; you’ll see it.” Michele was right and, although I hate what we are doing to our poor planet, the only home we’ll ever have, I’m glad that I haven’t missed it.