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Be Patient with Each Other

Back in March when everyone was beginning to shelter-in-place, I remember someone saying that moving to stay-home mode would be easy compared to re-opening mode.

Now that we’ve begun that stage of the journey, I’m talking to friends and family who might agree.

Mood Music:

  • There are the endless procedures now necessary for people to return to their shops and offices.
  • There’s the long list of questions for how families safely resume gatherings.
  • As summer drags on, discussion about how and when to open schools will create enough stress to fuel a thousand migraines.

I don’t want to argue about whether the lockdowns or all of the re-opening precautions are justified. The arrows directing movement in buildings will be there for some time, as will the mask wearing in public.

Instead, we all need to:

  • Try to understand each others’ concerns as we head back out into the world,
  • Not brush someone off as paranoid because they’re worried about exposure to their households, and
  • Not take every question you get about your own precautions as a sign that the person asking doesn’t trust you.

Some will stride out into this new world more enthusiastically than others.

It’ll be easy to look at someone who wants to go through all the safety procedures before a gathering and believe they’re overthinking it.

It’ll be easy to take offense if you’re asked about your own potential exposure to COVID-19 — especially when you’re taking every safety measure known to humanity.

This is one of the more insidious things about the pandemic — it’s tendency to pit people against each other. I don’t mean the “it’s a hoax and it’s tyranny” crowd, or the “you went out in public because you don’t care about saving lives” crowd.

I mean the mistrust over how exposed someone is. About friends and family eyeing each other with suspicion over who is being careful or reckless.

It’s easy for mistrust and frustration when we don’t know for certain what all the right answers are in the first place.

As we move forward with each suggestion of a small get-together, there are a few things I hope we can all keep in mind:

  • A lot of us miss each other terribly and want to be together again.
  • We also have different feelings about how to come out of sheltering and having family events again.
  • Everyone’s concerns should be taken seriously and not be dismissed as overthinking or not being trustworthy.
  • If you’re gathering as a family for the first time in three months and one family member wants to know how it’s going to work, that’s a valid thing to ask about.
  • It’s entirely appropriate to ask what everyone’s exposure has been.
  • It’s entirely appropriate to let people know what your own exposure is.

It’s good to be at a point where we can start to think of doing some things together again. But make no mistake: We’ll be in this pandemic for many months to come.

We can’t stay locked away, and that means extra precautions. It’s a hard, complicated pain in the ass, so we have to keep working together, be more trusting and more patient with each other.

"Spectre of the Past" by EddieTheYeti is a black skeleton with skeleton wings on a brown and black background.
“Spectre of the Past” by EddieTheYeti
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Playing Addiction Like a Piano, Part 2

When an obsessive-compulsive guy like me puts down the addiction that’s most self-destructive, a few smaller addictions rise up to fill the void.

It’s a lot like playing a piano: I may stop playing the song about smoking or binge eating or consuming alcohol, only to find my hands playing different keys. There was quitting smoking and vaping instead. There was a massive uptick in caffeine to replace the overeating.

Now, after putting away the vape pipe and feeling edgy about it, I’ve turned to something else to take the edge off — Nicorette gum.

Mood Music:

I know it’s not the healthiest thing to do. After all, there’s nicotine in it. But when I look at all the other things I could be doing to take the edge off, it seems the safest choice right now. Eventually, that habit will have to go too. Then … who knows?

Some of you might want to say, “Bill, just don’t do any of it.” That would be nice, but a brain wired with addictive impulses can’t compute that concept.

If that makes me weak, so be it. The important thing is that I try hard every day to beat back the demon, and I’ve overcome a lot: the binge eating, the smoking, the drinking.

Those demons are always whispering in my ear, but I’ve been fighting them off successfully for some time now. The exception is the vaping, which I had quit and restarted. In April I quit again. So far, so good.

You just do the best you can, one day at a time. And so I will.

Cartoonish Joker with a wall of ha-has behind him
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Good Things Are Happening (Updated)

With all the turmoil going on in the world — a pandemic, polarized politics — it’s important to remember that every day, even amid the bad, good things are happening. Here’s the current slice of that from where I sit.

We’ve entered a new phase of space exploration

NASA astronauts Robert Behnken and Douglas Hurley blasted into space Saturday in the first launch from U.S. soil since the space shuttle program ended nine years ago. Unlike past launches when NASA ran the show, this time a private company, SpaceX, is in charge of mission control. The company, founded by Elon Musk, built the Falcon 9 rocket and the capsule, Crew Dragon.

The curve is flattened

We still have a long way to go in this pandemic and it’s widely expected that we’ll see a second wave in cases — and deaths — later in the year. But for now, there are clear indications that the COVID-19 virus is slowing down, showing that we can gain the upper hand. (How best to keep that upper hand will be a fierce debate for some time to come, but the optimist in me feels more confident that we’re going to get better at learning to control spread without keeping everything shut down.) This New York Times chart tells the story:

We’re rediscovering old pleasures

One example I’m excited about: the return of drive-in movies, something I remember doing as a kid in the 1970s.

Business owners struggling with the shutdowns are increasingly repurposing their properties for this old pastime. Outdoor cinema venues are popping up all over the country.

Retirees are beating isolation by hosting a radio station

Radio Recliner is an online pirate radio station hosted exclusively by elderly DJs from assisted living communities across America. It was started in April by marketing firm Luckie to entertain lonely seniors and keep their spirits up.

The Good News Network notes that Luckie only planned to air daily 60-minute shows for a month, but the project has taken on a life of its own. Radio Recliner now has a team of 18 senior DJs.

When bad things happen in the world, good things happen, too — always. The pandemic is just another example of that. We can take solace in knowing that in the midst of such uncertainty, humans continue to shoot for the starts and achieve acts of innovation large and small.

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Truth-Based Fears: Helping Us Adapt

This blog has dealt extensively with fear, specifically how I’ve let it disrupt my life in the past — ruining what should have been moments of joy and causing moments of embarrassing behavior.

Mood Music:

The topic has returned to the forefront amid COVID-19. There’s the personal impact of fearing the unknown, and the societal fear where we hand government too much power in hopes of being safe.

It’s a tricky subject to write about because, like anxiety and depression, fear has many different facets. I’ve focused mostly on the bad and perhaps not enough on its usefulness in helping us adapt and meet challenges. I’m gaining a better perspective lately, especially when trying to apply things like the OODA Loop to daily routines.

I’ve been re-reading John M. Barry’s The Great Influenza: The Story of the Deadliest Pandemic in History, and it has helped clarify where fear helps and hurts amid the current pandemic.

He writes about two kinds of fear:

  • The kind built on mistrust and distortion, where people make tragic choices because federal, state and local officials refuse to be straight with them about the extent of the contagion’s spread
  • The kind based on truth, which scare people at first but quickly give them the wisdom to adapt

In order for an authority to maintain the public’s trust, it can’t avoid some scary truths. Barry writes:

The final lesson of 1918, a simple one yet one most difficult to execute, is that those who occupy positions of authority must lessen the panic that can alienate all within a society. Society cannot function if it is every man for himself. Those in authority must retain the public’s trust. The way to do that is to distort nothing, to put the best face on nothing, to try to manipulate no one. You don’t manage the truth. You tell the truth.

—John Barry, The Great Influenza

How leaders tell that truth matters, though. They can’t talk solely in abstractions and euphemisms. “A leader must make whatever horror exists concrete,” says Barry. “Only then will people be able to break it apart.”

Barry expanded on that second point in a recent interview, saying:

Authorities need to tell the truth, even when it’s uncomfortable — especially when it’s uncomfortable. This is important for two reasons. First, it lessens fear. People are always more afraid of the unknown. When people don’t think they’re getting a straight message they feel uncertain. In a horror movie, it’s always scariest before the monster appears. Once the fear becomes concrete we can deal with it. We can deal with reality. Second, if you want people to comply with your recommendations — and compliance is crucial to success — they have to believe you and trust you. If they doubt you they will ignore you.

I’d like to think I’ve abandoned the unproductive, panic-inducing fear that’s based on the unknown and put the truth-based fear to good use.

My approach is admittedly fatalistic on the surface: I’m just assuming we’ll be in this fight for a long time. I take nothing for granted — my job, my health, my ability to avoid episodes of depression. Losing ground in these areas is all within the realm of possibility.

By accepting that things are and will remain bad for some time and that anything can happen, I can adapt and focus on what’s in front of me — and what’s in front of me is pretty good.

In the face of the current crisis, we are already seeing humanity’s ability to adapt: we’re keeping business and learning going remotely, repurposing plant operations to churn out medical gear and moving from lost hospitality jobs to those that are in demand — grocery stores and medical facilities, for example.

To adapt is to survive and thrive. But we can’t adapt unless we face our truth-based fears first.

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COVID-19 Gratitude: Live Online Performances

One thing I’m grateful for amid this pandemic: musicians and bands doing free performances from their remote locations. Check out my favorites so far.

Dave Grohl: “My Hero”

The Rolling Stones: “You Can’t Always Get What You Want”

Samantha Fish: Facebook Live Fridays:

https://www.facebook.com/samanthafishmusic/videos/574754296727437/

Joan Jett and the Blackhearts: “I Hate Myself for Loving You”

https://youtu.be/_O6w418sL6U

Paul Stanley talks “Love Gun” & More:

Sully Erna: “Hometown Sessions:

Eddie Vedder: “River Cross”

Billie Joe Armstrong: “Wake Me Up When September Ends”

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Grinding Beans for Anger Management

This past week brought the anger/rage/tantrum portion of this pandemic program to my mental doorstep. The dumbest, most inconsequential things sent me into sharp bouts of anger and rage — things that might annoy me in normal times but would never send my temper boiling over.

Mood Music:

I’m usually very slow to lose my temper. I always strive for the cool-headed approach. But these days, my usually long fuse is burning its way to the nub.

Example: The song above played on a loop in my head Sunday morning when I ventured out for groceries.

I wore the mask and gloves, doing my part to limit risk. A lot of people around me were doing their groceries without taking the same steps. I called them names from behind the mask. I wanted to ram a guy in the canned vegetable aisle for going the wrong way. Arrows on the floor now direct the flow of traffic to help keep the social distancing, and this guy and two others seemed to be ignoring it.

In the cereal/coffee aisle, I realized something: I was going the wrong way.

The grocery store was the clearest example of my jagged temperament of late, but it’s been there in other moments, when people would talk over each other in Zoom meetings, when a takeout order was missing an item, when a computer monitor arrived two days late without the right adapter.

Luckily, I’ve found a new tool to help me manage it. Erin got me a manual coffee bean grinder for Easter. When I feel anger getting the better of me, I pace around the house clutching it in my hands, cranking it as fast as I can, turning beans into powder.

Who knew this thing could work like a punching bag?

Saturday I cranked it for a good hour, grinding up half a bag of beans. The coffee brand, appropriately, is Battle Grounds.

To anyone I’ve blown up at in recent days: I’m sorry.

To those I’ve gotten judgmental toward: I know I’m a hypocrite.

Hopefully, I’m hitting the peak of the anger curve and am about to head back down to some level of normal (for me) temperament.

Meantime, I’m super grateful for this simple bean grinder.

Maybe for balance, I should pick up the guitar I’ve struggled to play in recent months. (Yes, you should. — Ed.)

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Trolling in the COVID-19 Era

Many of my friends and I troll each other a lot online. Those who doesn’t know us might think we’re mean-spirited old geezers. But really, it’s how we show affection and even respect. It’s how we know we’re buddies.

Mood Music:

Today’s Mood Music is for my pal Dave Marcus, who is vain and no doubt thinks this post is about him. Also, Faster Pussycat will annoy him. (Too bad Def Leppard never covered the song.)

In this era of lockdowns and political dysfunction, a lot of people are easily offended. That was true before the pandemic, too, but with life as upended as it currently is, people have reached new levels of prickliness.

This post isn’t about how people should behave. Who am I to tell anyone what to think or how to feel? It is, however, about how I personally choose to carry on with people whether I agree with them or not.

My friends fall into the following three categories:

  • Group A thinks all the mask wearing, school closing and economic lockdown is a government plot to enslave us.
  • Group B thinks Group A is a bunch of right-wing thugs willing to let people die to preserve their economic comforts.
  • Group C tries to urge calm and point to sunnier days ahead, sometimes ignoring realities staring them in the face.

I’ve jumped between the three groups since the pandemic began. I don’t think current safety measures are a plot to steal our freedom, though I do worry about government amassing levels of new power we won’t be able to claw back.

I don’t think all of those who oppose social distancing and lockdowns have their head in the sand. Some have prepared for many kinds of emergencies as a matter of course.

I agree with those who believe that if we freeze the economy for too long, there won’t be much of an economy left when it’s all over.

I mostly fall into the C group. I always go looking for the bright side, sometimes to a fault. No apologies here — we need hope to battle through the tough stuff.

I’m going to continue to share articles I believe are from reliable sources and have details we can use to plot our way forward. Some of those will be scary articles about China and bio warfare (never thought I’d share from The EpochTimes, but I trust the writer). Some will paint pictures of economic depression, because we have to be realistic about what we face and plan accordingly. Many will show the better side of humanity during this emergency, because we need reminders that humanity is capable of good.

Some of my friends will affix the laughing emoji to the comments and drop memes and gifs suggesting that I’m overreacting. Others will use the comments section to question my sanity, conclusions or whatever else comes to mind.

I see people on Facebook who hate being questioned or disagreed with. They respond with words like “asshole,” “liberal,” “fascist,” “communist” or just react with the standard “fuck you.” That’s unfortunate, but I wish them well.

To those in my orbit who want to troll: Have at it. You may be idiots, but you’re my idiots.

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Gripped by COVID-19 Fear? Look to Cancer Survivors’ Coping Tools

"The Scream" by Edvard Munch

I’ve spent a lot of time here chronicling efforts to keep fear from rendering myself and others inert. This morning, an article in The New York Times captured it from the vantage point of people living with cancer.

There’s much to unpack in this narrative by Susan Gubar, distinguished emerita professor of English at Indiana University who has battled ovarian cancer since 2008.

Her storytelling and personal reflections are not to be missed. Read it all. But for the sake of some quick takeaways, I’ve distilled it into the bullets below.

Mood Music:

Gubar sets the stage by describing things cancer patients have to worry about daily in a world teeming with contagions and how steps that are standard operating procedure for them are the very things that still seem weird for the rest of us who now must do these things:

Having survived months or years of living intimately with the mortal threat of cancer, the members of my cancer support group — who now connect via email — manage to carry on while keeping as calm as possible during the current health crisis. Not fully resistant to bouts of contagious terror, we nevertheless find coping mechanisms.

We know that fear can be debilitating, but it can also be self-preserving. The chronic patients in my support group cultivate vigilant fear: They use their trepidation to do everything they can to extend their survival without being capsized into despair, hysteria or paralysis. One of us picks up her shopping wearing Nitrile gloves, just as she did when in chemotherapy. Upon returning home, she swabs what she has bought with a disinfecting wipe.

Gubar describes the usefulness of fear as the trigger to make people take the necessary safety precautions while acknowledging that fear unchecked will grind people to rubble. To combat that and maintain a degree of mental health, she describes some of what cancer patients have put in their toolboxes.

The ultimate value is that these tools help distract people from their fears, even if only for a little while. Routines and challenges allow them something they can exert control over. These are not new by any stretch, but the the solace they bring illustrates their continued value. They include:

  • Breathing or stretching
  • An intriguing task to accomplish
  • Baking/cooking
  • Nature walks
  • Knitting
  • Volunteering for a cause or organization: food banks, for example
  • Practicing a musical instrument
  • Painting

There are many more I could add to the list, and it’s important to acknowledge that if fear has pushed someone into depression, the motivation to do any of these things can ebb.

But when confronted with disease and other threats, it’s good to have these lists lying around.

Wishing you all peace and strength, amid cancer, COVID-19 and everything else that threatens our well-being.

Painting by Jon Han based on Edvard Munch's "The Scream"
Image by Jon Han

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Day 23: How I Try to Stay Sane

It has now been three solid weeks since I’ve been in my office. I miss:

  • Leaving the house every day to go somewhere before dawn
  • Walking Boston’s North End, wharves, markets and common
  • Having face-to-face interaction with colleagues

But I’m fighting the good fight. Here are some things getting me through the doldrums.

Mood Music (in memory of Adam Schlesinger, dead of COVID-19):

  • Keeping my health program going, maintaining weight loss and taking daily walks around the neighborhood and wooded hills behind our house.
  • Drinking lots of coffee to stay alert (the house is well stocked with my beloved Death Wish blend).
  • Reading print and audio books. In a possibly ill-advised move, I spent a free Audible credit on John Barry’s The Great Influenza. I’m trying to learn ways forward by studying our history.
  • Taking naps, which has become an important tool for breaking up the days, which can get intense between work and the claustrophobic feelings that come with distancing.
  • Keeping in touch with friends via video hangouts, including last weekend’s session with these nutjobs:
  • Being with my family. Though we frequently drive each other crazy, I’m grateful to be together with Erin and the kids and am amazed at how the boys have been able to keep up with their classwork by video.
  • Streaming services like Netflix, Amazon Prime and BritBox have been a godsend. We’re watching a lot of Star Trek, Battlestar Gallactica, Call the Midwife and Midsommer Murders.
  • Sleeping more. Though I continue to be an early riser, I’m taking advantage of the lack of commute to sleep an extra hour each night.

What are you doing to stave off the crazies?

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3 Thoughts for 30 Days

The past three weeks have been surreal, like existing inside Salvadore Dali’s “The Persistence of Memory” painting. If the U.S. government’s plan holds, we’ll live in this world for another 30 days at least.

How do we get through it?

I have three thoughts on that.

Mood Music:

1. Leave Predictions to the Experts

Peruse Facebook and you’ll see a lot of people clutching straws, slicing and dicing numbers for signs that the COVID-19 death rate will be low, and sharing charts that predict when cases will peak and drop. I’ve done it, too. It’s not helpful.

All we can control is the present. All we can do is be there for family and friends, get some exercise and do our work (if we can). To do that, we have to…

2. Accept Reality and Adapt

The government estimates that 100,000–240,000 people will die. The lower number happens only if we do everything perfectly, but either way there will be many deaths. We don’t know who will die. We don’t know how long we’ll shelter in place. If we fixate on how unreal all this seems, our despair will build.

My approach is admittedly fatalistic on the surface: I’m just assuming we’ll be in this fight for a long time. I take nothing for granted — my job, my health, my ability to avoid episodes of depression. Losing ground in these areas is all within the realm of possibility.

That sounds bleak, but there is a positive: By accepting that things are and will remain bad for some time and that anything can happen, I can adapt and focus on what’s in front of me — and what’s in front of me is pretty good.

In the face of the current crisis, we are already seeing humanity’s ability to adapt: we’re keeping business and learning running remotely, repurposing plant operations to churn out medical gear and moving from lost hospitality jobs to those that are in demand — grocery stores and medical facilities, for example.

To adapt is to survive and thrive.

3. Learn from History

This is the craziest thing many of us have experienced in our lifetimes, and the memes telling us that we have it easy — that all we have to do is sit on the couch and watch TV — ring hollow. We have to keep our families, jobs and finances going, after all. But there are shreds of truth in those memes, particularly on two points:

  • Our parents and grandparents lived through The Great Depression and WWII. They emerged stronger.
  • People survived the Spanish Flu a hundred years ago, at a time when there were no antibiotics, no 24-hour news to keep us informed and none of the comforts we take for granted today.

History gives us perspective. In fact, we’re already drawing on what our elders did to get through the present.

As we stock our pantries with enough food to last a few months, it’s hard not to think about our grandparents and how they struggled to keep well stocked.

It’s hard to look around us and not think of black-and-white images from the Spanish Flu — people in masks, keeping their distance.

This will only get harder as the weeks pass. We’re going to hear a lot of bad news along the way.

What we do now can make us stronger and heal some older societal wounds. Call me a naive optimist, but I believe it because I’m a history buff who has studied the past.

I’ll end with this wisdom from CNBC’s Ron Insana:

It seems extremely important to remember that there are things that are truly unprecedented and new and those that are, however tragically, new to us.

Yes, of course, there are elements of this tragedy, now playing out, that are truly unprecedented. The speed of the economic shutdown, the emptiness of major cities and a few other realities with which we must come to terms.

Other aspects are just new to us. The 1918 flu required “social distancing”…. 

For our parents, or grandparents, World War II, by itself, raged on for four long years.

We haven’t yet sat still for four weeks.

We’re being asked to sit on a couch and watch TV. Come on America. We got this.