I am a slight superstitious, I guess you could say, because things sometime have a way of running off the lines of the paths I’ve tried to set up. Clearly this is not just something I am afflicted with right now since so many are now joining me, but yes, Don is home, and no, neither one of us appears to have the virus though I’ve gotten a slight ballsy lately and have gone to the grocery store twice inside, over the past few weeks. It’s more about ensuring his convenience and comfort, because previously my go-to solution was order it, pick it up with my trunk popped open and go home to disinfect.

Going to the grocery store right now is its own perfect traumatic experience–people are generally afraid and tend not to invade pockets of space for very long at all–it’s like an adult game of lava where everyone is kind of qberting up the aisles, everyone is in a mask with varying degrees of horror and violence implied. Mine is the real deal–looking more like the Bane mask, I’ve been told, than anything delicate, but it is an N99 so its construction lends to a newer setup with the mouth area kind of beaked out. People stay away from me, and if I catch anyone peering too long I will open up my sweatshirt or coat and usually right there is a giant red reminder of why some of us cannot fuck around. I know my coronaprone badges will be helpful there, but I need to get the screenprinting shit going to get that done properly.

So Don is home and I can finally breathe again–there isn’t much to remark on when you are spending all of your time alone aside from skype calls—I feel like we will be okay through most of the Winter but will have to be careful towards the end of the year because I think the saturation point will be slightly obscene–aside from the fact that you get only 6 months of antibodies after infection as a general rule, this could prove to be a messy next few years. Telling you, 2023 is the next good time.

Right now he is focused on where he wants to send for the next job because he has a special pass that just opened pretty much every door for the type of job he has–secure Video Teleconferencing–think Zoom for the military, hospitals and courthouses. He is now eligible for 98% of the jobs out there in his field, which definitely means a flexibility and freedom to move, if that’s what we want to do. Hawaii is a direction we are goaling for, but there are some other things in Colorado Springs which would be….ehhhhhh. It would probably not be a safe place to be given people’s reliance on mythical things to save them doesn’t mean they accept science or health as anything they have any part in creating–the irony is sometimes unbelievable to me.

Since Don has been back I have been reading more and I’ve realized it’s almost time for the memoir to get done—I have the arc I think, though you’d want something high to end up with–though right now such a high seems to be a mythical and crazy thing to imagine.

Now that we are past the window of worry I feel a little more free to breathe. I have Don here, I have Duke, we are safe and okay for a while and could live for a few months without working, though he’s not feeling great about not being useful or counted on for much besides me. I am a little too easy, perhaps–I require so little to sustain–I don’t even had a wedding ring for crying out loud–I don’t require shoes, clothing, just the ability to take care of my skin, which has become a budget experience as well. I am going to have Don do my hair here soon–I am not one to go to the hairdressers more than 3 or 4 times a year at max, but at this point it is unclear if the steps hairdressers are taking even work so better to keep yours in-house.

Now that my brain has settled and is not totally in survival anxiety mode all fucking day long anymore, I can relent and start getting all my projects organized. So many websites, so many crafts, so much time spent agonizing over what-ifs and the terror of not being touched for so long…it is not easy—I do not think humanity would do well to not touch for too long, but I also wonder as well how well the past would think we have it now and how annoyed they might be that our resilience is not very thick at all. Yeah, it sucked. I didn’t think it sucked enough to want to kill myself since I have things I still want to do and killing yourself without Covid seems to be a bad idea, but all in all I think that when you are seriously ill and spend as many years as I have afflicted with heart ailments that have even impacted my brain–that you feel so alone anyways that being physically alone isn’t as bad as the anguish of sitting in your envelope of sick that nobody can understand, let alone even try to empathize enough to comprehend.