The mask conundrum

 

In these relatively early days of the normalization of Covid, the issue of masks seems to be settling out. Looking about my library I work at, most people don't wear masks now, though a tiny minority still do. I take no great Internet-appropriate view of this situation. This means that I am not particularly outraged about any aspect of it. Wearing a mask is mainly a personal risk mitigation issue at this point. Wearing one properly will decrease your chances of contracting (and spreading) airborne diseases. Wearing a ventilator would be even better protection. I don't wear either, but I understand that it's all a matter of how much risk one is willing to expose themselves to. 

Nevertheless, there is one kind of mask wearer I regularly see at the library that is mystifying to me. 

Or let me put it another way: Of all the kinds of mask wearers during the pandemic; the face shield wearers, the pristine N-95ers, the bandana folks, the "free handouts only" surgical maskers, etc., the very last kind of people I would have guessed to be still at it in the masking game are what I call the chin maskers.

Chin maskers are the people who walk around with ill-fitting masks either not covering their nose, or dangling from their face like they just emerged from an exhausting bit of surgery, or who have simply let the mask end up strapped below their mouth like a chin guard. These are the people who, when talking to you (the most important time to wear a mask), would lower their mask out of the way so as to be heard clearly. And to my total surprise, it turns out that these very people, the people who use masks ineffectively, of all people, are the ones who continue to sport masks. 

At the height of mandatory pandemic masking, I thought these chin maskers were garden variety political lunatics, passive aggressively expressing their contempt for any law that would dare try to... stop... a... plague. 

But since they have not abandoned masks, long past when they freely could, clearly I was wrong.

It turns out they believe in masks more passionately than almost any of the rest of us.

However, it turns out, their belief is more religious than scientific.

The fall of 24/7 America

 

It does seem unwholesome to complain, in a First World Problems sort of way, but America is falling apart. And I thought I should mention it. 

A co-worker, from Thailand, was sharing an amusing story about how a restaurant in Thailand remained open during a flood. It was very popular during the flood, and the guests seemed to enjoy the adventure and danger around the whole thing. My Thai co-worker was terribly amused by it.

I was just a little jealous.

"We used to have gumption like that in America!" I cried.

Open during a flood, ha! 

I'm not saying we shouldn't have closed down for the pandemic, or that we shouldn't be careful now as we limp into, if not quite the end of the Pandemic, more like the Pandemic's new ragged permanence. But I am a little bit freaking out about all the local coffee shops, cocktail bars, and cafes, the ones that have bothered to reopen at all, only being open for 12 hours a week. I am a little concerned about 

OUR CULTURE DYING!

Sorry.

But who are these people? Were all these small shop and cafe owners and local foodies just running bistros for fun? Were they all so rich they realized they can merely work 12 hours a week if they want and if someone wants to go out on, say, a Wednesday, they can just suck it? Or have all these clever, industrious shop owners gone to work as Vice Presidents at Caribou and Target? Starbucks and Taco Bell? Hewlett Packard and Costa Gravas? Cheeto Lay and 3M, where they can pull down 200 grand a year doing marketing. 

Or is their $4,000 a month rent so not a problem for them to cover that opening up itself is optional, and making one or two hundred more dollars a week, by being open any time other than peak hours on the weekends, is simply not worth the trouble? And don't tell me about the staffing shortage because I have come to simply not believe in it. Yeah, maybe a section of unemployed people with other options is spurning the $10 an hour jobs, but the places I'm talking about? They usually pay better than that, especially counting tips, and these places could probably manage to even pay even a bit more if they were as interested in The Community as they like to profess they are. 

But far more importantly and tellingly, I am not seeing "We're Hiring" signs in any of these windows. 

You know what kind of signs I'm seeing in their windows?

Closed signs.

Target is open. McDonalds is open. Boring corporate soulless America seems to have recovered, and that's just... great. Fucking great. But an interesting beer at my charming local cafe, an actually properly made cappuccino? No, that's only available for a couple hours every other Friday.

I've puzzled it out. The answer is that America is doomed. Poor people still work like dogs, sure. But for everyone else? Not a single one of us works anymore. From the lowest of the low middle to the highest of the high, everyone is just collecting paychecks and looking busy, creating nothing in particular. Jobs are boring and not that hard or productive. Really making something, day in and day out, 60 hours a week, takes effort.

So make your cappuccino at home, or buy the fake ones from the chains.

The dream is over. 

Except on Thursday, Friday, and Saturday, from five to nine.

The balance

 

My friend Richard asked me to read something his childhood friend wrote in the Star Tribune, our main city paper around here. Apparently this friend writes an occasional opinion piece for the paper. I was a little hard on it. Probably because I feel I should have a daily column in the newspaper to intoxicate the citizenry with, and I curse all who keep me from it. But it was a reasonably nice piece. It was about walking in the woods, paying respect, and how we who have found some dominion over the natural world, like with this vaccine for covid, should try to be worthy of it. 

Fair enough.

So I went for a walk in the snowed over swamp behind the library. And I thought: I don't believe there is a balance between good and evil. I believe that while solving the problems caused by our own malfeasance averts disaster, it does not make us special in the Universe. I believe that what makes us special in the universe is solving a problem where there is no problem, it is in the acts of committing good that is untethered to any evil.

Joe Biden undoing some of the damage of the previous president doesn't make him a good president. Fighting the battle of correcting our mistakes is a losing battle because one can only lose ground in failure, or conversely not lose ground in success, but one can never improve or advance. There is only attrition in it.

Many dots of hope have been reported from this new government like victories, but there aren't really victories there. There is no $15 minimum wage to report. There is no $2,000 stimulus. If a green new deal comes it will be 20 years late and a fraction of the size needed. We're still a country trying not to drown. Just because we're giving it a good go on trying not to drown, improved as it is, doesn't mean we're swimming.

It was a nice enough piece my friend's friend wrote. But I say that for all we have stolen from ourselves the vaccine is our right. 

If we want to be worthy of something we should aim higher. 

Hand Sanitizer

Who would've thought we'd get a full half year into this Pandemic before we sat down and had a serious discussion about hand sanitizer?

I heard hand sanitizer is just a stopgap until you can do a proper handwashing. What happens with hand sanitizer is you throw a cocktail party in your hands for the virus until they get so drunk they all pass out. This is okay for awhile, but only until they groggily wake up in your hands, look blearily around, and then try to work out how to kill you.

It's just their way.

Oh, disclaimer. This isn't science.

At my library we have three kinds of hand sanitizer.

1. A weird paste-like substance provided early on by the county in a pipe stand dispenser that no right-minded person has ever used a second time. Ever.

2. The nice Purell Gel that is the last of our pre Covid cache from a large order in January or February. We lack the pull to ever get anymore of this stuff. Ever.

3. A mysterious, watery liquid that has been put into our Purell bottles and runs all over everything when one squirts it out.

This third, our main hand sanitizer, is not as bad as it sounds. I like to clean things by heavily saturating paper towels in it. I find its smell agreeably boozy.


And so, in conclusion:

1. Wash your hands anyway, as soon as you can.

2. If still unclear on any of this well researched scientific examination of all things related to hand sanitizer (Disclaimer: this isn't science), simply reread. Or, skip to...

3. You must be doing something right. You have not died of Coronavirus!

Bad luck

Currently at my library you can request things online, or over the phone. You are notified when it comes in for you. And then, during any of our many open hours, you can come in, pick up your holds off of the request shelves, and check them out at a self check out or with a plexiglass protected library worker. There is no browsing collection. There is nowhere to roam. There is nowhere to hang out. There are just lots and lots of requested items that you can come in and pick up.

When people come to pick up their holds, even though the area for it is fairly large and spread out, we limit capacity to five at a time. A couple or even a family merely counts as one for our purposes in this method. And though we have a steady flow of library patrons, we almost never reach our capacity of five. Sometimes we'll have a busy run, but it is not uncommon for a day or two to go by without ever having to tell a patron to wait at the gates for another patron to exit.

So when I was in the front lobby this evening, and the library was growing quiet, it did not seem at all likely I would have to pay much attention to how many people were in the library.

Someone came in and I explained the hold system and sent them through. Another came and knew the system well already. A mother and child came through. Someone wanted a library card and I sent them to the front desk. It was getting exciting. No one was leaving yet. A couple came and knew the routine. We were at capacity!

If only someone would come.

I was on the edge of my seat.

Then someone arrived. It was a miracle.

"Unfortunately we're at our maximum capacity. If you'd please just wait on the circle at the gate you can go in when the next person leaves." I said.

The patron took it pretty phlegmatically.

"This almost never happens." I added. "It's like you've won a reverse lottery."

"I've got time." The person replied peaceably.

I guess there are a lot worse reverse lotteries a person could win these days.

It's flowers all the way down

This is one of those extra posts, so I don't have a lot to say except:






I like how when I look closely at all these flowers it's sometimes like they're made of more flowers.

And then two of this following tree blossom to give the full sense of it:

These look like they're just about to bloom:

A dense field of flower buds at the heart of a flower.

And this is already a tiny blossom, here with its little yellow tulips in the middle.

Housekeeping

Housekeeping is a novel by Marilynne Robinson. It came out 40 years ago. It is a slow, beautifully written book that I actually read all of, a feat that never ceases to amaze me. I mean, it seems like the kind of thing I might occasionally mean to read, but not the sort of thing I would actually read. It's just so... literary. It's like if during this pandemic I boldly proclaimed that I am going to read all the works of transcendentalist writer Ralph Waldo Emerson!

Because I'm just not. But if I tried hard enough I could convince myself I was going to for maybe a few hours, or until I started on the first page, whichever came first.

But I actually read Housekeeping!

However this post is not about Marilynne Robinson's brilliant 1980 novel Housekeeping. I just started today's dissertation with the title "Housekeeping" because I thought I'd say some things about some of my coming up plans with this blog, some 'housekeeping', but then I started writing and, well, words came out, the very words you just read, albeit with a few small edited changes for clarity. Er, maybe not "changes for clarity", maybe more changes to add stuff in because I have so much to say!

Which leads beautifully into the issues of my housekeeping here today. I have a lot to say, although I am not clear on what, exactly, it is until I start saying it. Also, I have said a lot! I am a little more clear on what that is, and at least I have the numbers to tell me- over 2,600 blogposts and counting, and I am definitely counting. So I thought with more of us increasingly pinned down to our computers like a collection of butterflies in cases,  it might be fun, or engaging, or probably both (or neither, isn't that the way it goes?) to provide a lot more content on clerkmanifesto. I am thinking old posts, links, pictures, songs, more essays, and random... things. I am still trapped pointlessly at work, and while my Governor's "Shelter in Place" order seems likely, it is by no means sure at this point (well, yes, actually, it's going to happen if it hasn't already at time of this publication, because the rule is: Everything that happens in this pandemic is predictable, but it all happens two to 21 days after it should have- and we are in that time frame now). So when I am officially hunkered down with my lovely wife and my cupboard full of canned tomatoes, and way too little Galliano and orange cognac, the usual rules of clerkmanifesto will be going out the window and anywhere from a little more to a ton more content will be showing up here.

As it currently stands I will continue with my simple 8:30 a.m. post every day format. But when I am sheltering in place officially I will issue forth my new status under the code:

Pandemic Rules Instituted.


So stay home. Don't go anywhere unless you absolutely have to. And watch this space, obsessively! 

Or not, it will all happen either way. It's all a matter of how bad, how good, and how soon.