Day: March 6, 2020

There is something to this idea of ritual. Haruki Murakami said, “When I’m in writing mode for a novel, I get up at four a.m. and work for five to six hours. In the afternoon, I run for ten kilometers or swim for fifteen hundred meters (or do both), then I read a bit and listen to some music. I go to bed at nine p.m.” I’m not doing that, but the idea of shaping my own ritual–giving temporal importance to the craft is meaningful and worthwhile.

I am strongly considering starting my day with the blog. Consider it a ten minute wake up call for the brain. As long time readers no doubt can tell, the evening blogs are terrible. I mean really low-brain output 8 out of 10 chances. That is because I am largely low brain by the time late night rolls around. The truth is, I spend too much time messing around early in the day and wind up with the day largely gone and the work largely undone.

Ritual matters. Making the time for craft truly matters. In the same article where I rediscovered the Murakami quote I found one from E.B. White that goes, “…the members of my household never pay the slightest attention to my being a writing man — they make all the noise and fuss they want to. If I get sick of it, I have places I can go. A writer who waits for ideal conditions under which to work will die without putting a word on paper.“

Ideal conditions are sheer folly, as is the right time to right and the right conditions. Writing is about dedication–butt in chair and words on page. I can say this over and again, but my partner keeps waiting for the next story. Those two ideas cannot exist simultaneously, so I need to move closer to ritual and further away from doing it ‘when I can’

Some Thoughts:

1. I keep having this dream about a house. It is a large house–maybe 4 stories. The middle two floors are always left untouched, with the last owners stuff still in all of the rooms. The dreams are usually about going into those rooms and cleaning them out. I don’t know what it means…

We all have it and we are all going to die. The end.

A Slate article argues this is completely not the case. Instead the article suggests the true death rate of the disease is farm more complicated. The author goes on to suggest that the cruise ship provided a quite accidental test study given that only one patient boarded the ship with Covid-19 out of the 3711 on the ship and of that group 705 tested positive for the virus and 6 died. That is actually only a .85 rate of death, which is much lower than the 2-3% number bandied about thus far.

This is good news. This is news that people infected with the disease or fearful of infection will likely not rationally see as good news, because it is not a 0% mortality rate. Any chance of death will be sensationalized, because the media engine runs on fear, like the power grid in Monsters Inc (Man, that was a deep movie).

So what? So, chill. I recently came to terms with the fact that I could easily be a carrier for Covid-19. I’ve been sick with flu symptoms since mid-February. I spend half my week less than 100 yards from the ASU Health Center where the one case was diagnosed. I have not been tested. Nobody I know has been tested–including kids who’ve gone to the doctor for sickness. I am willing to argue that most Americans have not been tested, and have come into direct contact with other ill people who have not been tested for this specific virus. This is why cases keep popping up in random places in the US. People are getting tested. Yet we know from these cases that testing happens so far removed from the point of infection that backtracing the route of infection is impossible. If this were a slow incubation disease with a higher rate of mortality (say 10%), we would be reaching a critical mass of infection by now and not even know it.

In sum, we are very bad at containing infectious diseases early enough for it to matter. Everything we are doing now feels a lot like playing catch up in a race against Usain Bolt. We probably never had a chance with a head start, so we might as well shift focus to finding a vaccine.

Some Thoughts:

1. 23 days out I have not had any real conversation about the numbering system for the blog. It matters. Each iteration of the numbers have held a special meaning to me that does not correspond with the start of the new year but instead the start of a life year for myself. How then do I move forward with that?