May 4, 5, 6: Coronavirus 2.0, Current State of Mind, Poem from "Kyrie"

Yes, I missed May the Fourth, with all of the opportunities for Star Wars references and allusions.  And I missed Cinco de Mayo, although I did pick up some Taco Bell for dinner last night.  Did not have any Magaritas, though.  Now it is the sixth day of May, and I am on day three of pure exhaustion.

My teaching semester has ended.  I spent much of the weekend (and Monday) grading papers and final exams.  It was one of the most difficult grading experiences I've ever had.  So many of my students struggled because of the switch to fully online courses mid-semester.  I had students who were battling depression, anxiety, unemployment, illness, and the death of relatives.  I ended up feeling like any student who actually finished the school year deserved some kind of medal.

I myself have sort of been battling my own array of demons these last few days, as well.  Worry laced with anxiety dappled with sadness topped with stress.  While I won't discuss all the causes of my current state of mind, I will say that I have been averaging about four hours of sleep a night for about a week.  On Monday, it was three hours.

The world is starting to reopen slowly.  Businesses are unlocking their doors.  I just found out today that my home church will begin to hold weekend Masses at the end of May.  Now, I know that we weren't going to be sheltering-in-place forever.  However, after only a month or so, suddenly flattening the spread of the virus is taking a backseat to the economy.

As my last post detailed in not very subtle terms, I am not a fan of this premature relaxation of social distancing and isolation.  I am diabetic.  I also have asthma.  Those two conditions don't mix well with coronavirus.  Throw into that the fact that I work in a hospital, and you may get some idea of what has been keeping me up at night. 

So, you'll forgive me if I'm not lighting off fireworks right now.  I don't see much cause for celebration.  We've made it through the initial outbreak of the virus.  And now, people are going to start moving, travelling, returning home.  Coronavirus 2.0 is on its way.

That is why I've decided to practice a little more self care.  That doesn't mean I'm going to become completely selfish in my actions.  It means that I'm not going to neglect my body or mind or spirit.  I'm going to be more self aware of things/situations/people that could possibly be detrimental to my health and well being.  And I will not allow that to happen.  I will make changes.

Call it Saint Marty 2.0.

poem from Kyrie

by:  Ellen Bryant Voigt

Circuit rider, magic leather credential at my feet
with its little vials of morphine and digitalis,
I made my rounds four days at a stretch
out from the village, in and our of their houses
and in between, in sunlight, moonlight,
nodding on the hard plank seat of the buggy--
it didn't matter which turn the old horse took:
illness flourished everywhere in the county.
At Foxes' the farmhouse doors were barred by snow;
they prised a board from a window to let me in.
At the next, one adult already dead,
the other too sick to haul the body out--

May 3: Getting Antsy, Pissing in Swimming Pools, Poem from "Kyrie"

DISCLAIMER:  This blog post was written after the consumption of a couple glasses of very strong blackberry brandy.  If you have delicate sensibilities or offend easily, please skip tonight's post, and we will return to our regularly scheduled programming tomorrow.  Thank you.

Some people are getting antsy.

That's the best (and kindest) way I know how to put it.  After sheltering-in-place for over a month, crazy is starting to take over.  That means that people who mistrust science (or outright reject it) are deciding to gather in protest.  (That most of these gatherings look like white supremacist family reunions is a whole other issue.)  And now we have the anti-vaccination people jumping on this band wagon, as well.  All of them say that their rights are being violated by forced government shutdowns.

As a person who has been immunocompromised since the age of 13, let me explain something to these oppressed citizens of the United States.  Your right to gather and spread this virus doesn't simply stay at your end of the gene pool.  If you go swimming in a public pool and decide to piss in the water, your piss spreads through the entire pool, touching every person in it.  That means that, eventually, everyone around you in that pool is covered in your urine.

That may seem like a funny analogy, but that is pretty much the way it works.  So, dear oppressed citizens, I am not against you practicing your ignorance in ways that do not harm other people.  Find some plot of land somewhere, away from everyone else, and stay there, sharing this virus freely with each other, pissing in your own swimming pools.  And when you get sick, don't come to our hospitals seeking treatment.  Because the the only cure for stupid is education, and that ship has already sailed for most of you.

I'm sorry if I sound angry, but I'm tired of people only thinking of themselves and their ability to go out and wear their stupid red hats and chant their racist slogans.  There is another outbreak of Covid-19 coming.  It will be worse than the first outbreak, if history serves as any indication.  If we extrapolate from the lesson of the Spanish flu of 1918, two to five million people died during the first wave.  In the second wave, it was 20 to 50 million deaths worldwide.  As of today, May 3, 2020, the death total from Covid-19 in this country is around 66,000.  That means, dear citizens of the United States, that the second wave of this pandemic could claim, conservatively, 660,000 lives in the coming months.  And a good portion of those lives will be people who are already immunocompromised.  People like me.

Now, I know this higher math and logic will not change the minds of anyone who storms into government buildings armed with guns.  (By the way, these are not "good people.")  It won't stop science-ignorant parents from letting their children play together in public spaces.  Everyone has the right to be stupid in this country.

Saint Marty has just one simple request:  keep your stupid asses out of Saint Marty's swimming pool, because he doesn't want to be coated in your urine.

Here's a poem that paints this picture a little more eloquently . . .

poem from Kyrie

by:  Ellen Bryant Voigt

A large lake, a little island in it.
Winter comes to the island and the ice
forms along the shore--when the first got sick
others came in to nurse them and it spread,
ice reaching out from the island into the lake.
Of course, there was another, a larger shore--
Germany and Spain, New York, Atlanta,
ice also building toward the island.
By ice I'm thinking just those in the ground;
the sickness was more like brushfire in the clearing,
everyone beating the brush with coats and hands,
meanwhile the forest around us up in flames.
What was it like?  It was small, I was sick,
I can't remember much--go study the graves.

May 2: Heroes, My Students, Poem from "Kyrie"

Spent most of today doing end-of-semester grading.

This semester has been a tough one for my students.  Many endured financial problems--loss of employment, parents laid off, businesses closed.  Some dealt with other struggles--mental health, physical health, deaths of loved ones.  Like I said, it has been a hell of a couple months for these kids.

Some simply disappeared off my radar, despite my best efforts to reach out to them.  They just stopped communicating.  Others missed due dates or assignments completely.  I have found myself acting as both instructor and mentor and counselor, trying to guide them through the landmines of March and April.

This past Wednesday night, I had my last Zoom class meeting with my writing students.  As I've said, this group of individuals have been through a LOT.  At the end of the class, I said this to them:  "You know, everyone is talking about heroes in the middle of this pandemic.  Nurses and doctors and healthcare workers.  Let me tell you all this:  you're all heroes in my book.  You've all dealt with the craziness of this semester with grace, courage, and humor.  You all deserve medals for surviving."

Heroes come in many guises.  Some wear face shields in emergency rooms.  Others wear badges and face down gun-toting domestic terrorists who call themselves protesters.  And some take on extra jobs to help their parents pay their bills, and they still submit their papers, take their final exams, and show up for virtual classes.

Saint Marty prays for his students tonight.  For health and safety.  Rest and happiness.

poem from Kyrie

by:  Ellen Bryant Voigt

Snow heaped like a hat, square gray face,
the drift a shawl gathered at the neck--
a mailbox left unshoveled can be the sign,
a spirit crouching there beside the road--
I was at hand, I followed the doctor in:
Go ye therefore into the highways.
Renie had bee the warning, months before
the universal pestilence and woe.
We'd had a late frost, a ruined spring,
a single jay was fretting in the bush,
quick blue smudge in the laden spikes of lilac:
it was an angel singing--don't you see:
it might as well have been a bush on fire.

April 29 & 30, May 1: My Religious Phase, Music in the Church, Reset Button

Merton goes through his adolescent religious "phase" . . .

And the mentality of the red-faced, innocent English boys was a change.  They seemed to be much pleasanter and much happier--and indeed they had every reason to be so, since they all came from the shelter of comfortable and secure homes and were so far protected from the world by a thick wall of ignorance--a wall which was to prove no real protection against anything as soon as they passed on to their various Public Schools, but which, for the time being, kept them children.

On Sundays, we all dressed up in the ludicrous clothes that the English conceive to be appropriate to the young, and went marching off to the village church, where a whole transept was reserved for us.  There we all sat in rows, in our black Eton jackets and our snow-white Eton collars choking us up to the chin, and bent our well-brushed and combed heads over the pages of our hymnals.  And at last I was really going to Church.

On Sunday evenings, after the long walk in the country, through the lush Surrey fields, we gathered again in the wooden drill-room of the school, and sat on benches, and sang hymns, and listened to Mr. Onslow reading aloud from Pilgrim's Progress.

Thus, just about the time when I most needed it, I did acquire a little natural faith, and found many occasions of praying and lifting up my mind to God.  It was the first time I had ever seen people kneel publicly by their beds before getting into them, and the first time I had ever sat down to meals after a grace.

And for about the next two years, I think I was almost sincerely religious.  Therefore, I was also, to some extent, happy and at peace.  I do not think there was anything very supernatural about it, although I am sure grace was working in all our souls in some obscure and uncertain way.  But at least we were fulfilling our natural duties to God--and therefore satisfying a natural need:  for our duties and our needs, in all the fundamental things for which we were created, come down in practice to the same thing.

Later on, like practically everyone else in our stupid and godless society, I was to consider these two years as "my religious phase."  I am glad that that now seems very funny.  But it is sad that it is funny in so few cases.  Because I think that practically everybody does go through such a phase, and for the majority of them, that is all that it is, a phase and nothing more.  If that is so, it is their own fault:  for life on this earth is not simply a series of "phases" which we more or less passively undergo.  If the impulse to worship God and to adore Him in truth by the goodness and order of our own lives is nothing more than a transitory and emotional thing, that is our own fault.  It is so only because we make it so, and because we take what is substantially a deep and powerful lasting moral impetus, supernatural in its origin and in its direction, and reduce it to the level of our own weak and unstable and futile fancies and desires.

I have gone through many phases in my life.  Unlike Merton, when I was an adolescent, I went through a "nonreligious phase."  I would head out early on Sunday mornings, telling my mother and father I was going to an 8 a.m. Mass.  Instead I would hit Mr. Donut or Hardee's, and then drive around for a couple hours, eating and listening to the radio.  So, my Communion involved cream-filled pastry and sausage biscuits, washed down with Diet Coke. 

I'm sure my mother knew about my heathen Sunday mornings.  Nothing much escaped my mother's notice.  She never said anything to me, however.  I was the last of nine kids, and she had pretty much seen it all.  My refusal to go to church was small potatoes, I guess.  I wasn't doing drugs (much) or drinking (much).  I wasn't having indiscriminate sexual encounters (not from lack of trying).  No, I was just driving tree-lined roads and paths, ignoring God.  My mother knew that, eventually, God would catch up to me. 

Now, some 30 years later, I can say that God did get me.  He turned me into a church musician.  (I use the pronoun "He," even though I don't really place a gender on my Higher Power.  God, for me, is both paternal AND maternal.  I mean, God gave birth to the universe.  Nothing more maternal than that.  No, using a male pronoun is just a matter of convention, like eating turkey on Thanksgiving.)  Music has kept me close to God for over three decades now.  Up until the pandemic hit, I was playing on a fairly regular basis for three churches of three denominations (Catholic, Methodist, and Lutheran.). 

Of course, I have no idea how this pandemic will shape music in church when we return to communal worship services.  It is going to be far different in form and practice, I'm sure.  Large choirs (or even small choirs) will be a thing of the past, for a while, at least.  In fact, I'm not sure the singing of congregational hymns will be a sanctioned practice.  Too much air intake and expelling.  Too much chance for asymptomatic transmission of the virus.

Make no mistake.  Music will still certainly play a part in worship.  What part it plays is the question.  It's kind of difficult to breathe through a face mask, let alone sing.  And I truly believe that people are going to be very leery of large gatherings for quite some time.  At least until some kind of viable Covid-19 vaccine is in widespread use.  Even when a vaccine becomes available, I don't think that the world will go back to business as usual.  That would sort of be like TSA agents disappearing from airports after the 9-11 attacks.  It's just not going to happen.

I've been thinking about the post-pandemic world quite a bit.  Losing sleep over it.  Before you start calling me an alarmist, let me give you some statistics.  Of those diagnosed and hospitalized with Covid-19, insulin-dependent diabetics die at a rate of 29%.  For some studies, that rate climbs up to 42%.  Having been an insulin-dependent diabetic since I was 13 years old, those odds frighten me more than a little bit.  I think about this shit a lot.

Another little piece of information: I have a friend who's a nurse.  Early in the outbreak of the pandemic in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, she was diagnosed with Covid-19.  She hasn't been back to work yet.  It has been almost two months.  I can only assume that she's still testing positive for the disease.  That's a long time, and she doesn't have diabetes.

The world is a very different place than it was two months ago.  In another month, it will look different again.  The citizens of this planet have been pretty complacent about our place in the universe.  Feeling safe.  Self-satisfied.  Superior.  Not so much anymore.  The universe has set the reset button, and the Himalayas can now be seen again in India.  The pollution of the human race is lifting.  I think we're being given another chance to get things right.

In the end, God may hand us this shiny new thing, like some polished lake rock, and say, "Don't fuck this up again."  It's our second chance.

We will interact with each other differently.  Worship God differently.  Exist on this third rock from the sun differently.  Writer Annie Lamott says this:

You've heard it said that when all else fails, follow instructions.  So we breathe, try to slow down and pay attention, try to love and help God's other children, and--hardest of all, at least to me--learn to love our depressing, hilarious, mostly decent selves.  We get thirsty people water, read to the very young and old, and listen to the sad.  We pick up litter and try to leave the world a slightly better place for our stay here.

Those are the basic instructions, to which I can add only:  Amen.

Saint Marty is adding his Amen to that tonight, as well.