Way too alert to the ever-changing news, I find I’m getting more caught up in network waves of hopeless thinking, sadly-speculated scenarios and general maladaptation to the new normal than I would like. And I suspect I’m not alone.
It’s no help that I haven’t seen nor touched a living human being in weeks and now witness more televised refrigerator trucks full of dead bodies than any healthy psyche should. I’m on my 17th day working alone from home 40 miles from everything and everyone I cherished as normal, welcome impositions to my day. I’m now thinking some of what I’ve considered temporary accommodating changes may soon become eerily permanent.
We’ve been told who and what is essential, and my head is working overtime without permission connecting all the dots of what’s to come, weighing alternate endings, and being entirely futile at the expense of decent sleep. So many possible end games. So many tipping dominoes of a world and economy likely to continue its decline long after I’m gone from this earth.
Having lost our health and wealth and so many departures of loved ones before their due dates, the only way to break from this gloom is time travel.
Set a future date, go there, and envision life without this black swan. One thing unique to our species is vision. It pulls us into, across and through tragedy and we have always, always emerged victorious. This ain’t the end. Not even close.
Where there is no vision, the people perish.—Proverbs 29:18

Our city is now the nation’s worst provider of affordable housing with only 12 affordable living units available per 100 seeking households. Fixed-income seniors comprise well over ¼ of these households and senior communities are at capacity with waiting lists up to two years. Their rents are elevating well beyond thresholds of fixed income affordability. They’re stuck where they live, paying higher and higher rents first at the expense of food, then medicine, then utilities, and having neither the physical nor monetary means to absorb the effort or costs of moving to lower rent residences even if they were available. Priced out of apartments beyond their capacity to pay, they are soon evicted with a credit black mark making it virtually impossible to rent anywhere again. Housing programs which exist to provide rent subsidies to the lowest income seniors are backed up 2 years for applications and another 2 years for placement. With few remaining possessions and fewer options, they move into high-priced weeklies until the money runs out, sending them to capacity homeless shelters, cars and city streets. The fortunate few may rent rooms from strangers, becoming easy marks for cons, theft and crime. And for all of them, options dissipate eventually cycling them back to those same shelters and streets they fought to avoid. Most are 70-95 with progressive health conditions, few if any basic computer skills to navigate sparse online resources and no available surviving family to intervene. An entirety lost, neglected and unemployable generation with no remaining resources, transportation or connections, their final days are spent on the streets, some in abusive nursing homes, and others in the silence of mortuaries.
This is the actual real life progression of old age for so many elderly you will never ever meet.
If this makes you sad, don’t miss the more important opportunity to be angry.
If you want to be part of the change, help #TeamHopeLink stop this now.

These efforts to stop the virus are at the very least counterintuitive. Humans are programmed to expect that a deliberate action is supposed to create or build something that will thrive. To act now to create the exact opposite result seems entirely unrewarding and counterintuitive to our very nature. It’s a new way of thinking toward a solution for so many but a smart and necessary one. #thenewnormal

Every end is a new beginning, and the backside of these events will have unimaginable takeaways to address and resolve. The calendars and economies of every household, community, state and industry will necessarily restructure to recover the losses, consequences and fallout. So when this event has subsided, voluntary, peaceful, patient cooperation will be more necessary than ever. Unprecedented times. Unprecedented measures. Unprecedented consequences.
But we are Americans, an unprecedented nation of overcomers who can show the world how it’s done if we will replace selfish ways with generous ones and welcome a new normal. Adapt and change, emerge and thrive again.

The past 72 hours has changed our way of life more than anyone ever imagined and more is coming faster than most will be able or willing to process or unfortunately for some, believe. Apathetic underreaction and panicked overreaction are now strange bedfellows—both enemies of a solution that can save lives and preserve sanities at a fraction of the cost we might otherwise pay to our future. Be smart and do your part so we can look back on these awful times more sooner than later. Adapt, change, live and thrive.

By anyone’s count, he was seven times older but never once left her side.
He was her warmth, her comfort, and the one with whom she cuddled with each night and woke each morning. She prepared their meals and they took walks both mornings and evenings while she reminisced about the days when they were younger souls on longer journeys. Her companion and protector, together 15 years without so much as an argument, they were best friends until last week when he curled up at her side never to wake again.
Others may pass but loneliness isn’t quite as lonely when you’re old and have enjoyed a lifetime of love and loyalty with a dog.

It was a massacre as each interracial soul poised as my victim, lined up in three uniformed battalions fifteen deep, my capture under the cover of darkness. I ripped open their tent for a ruthless ambush without warning. Then one by one I ripped out their guts single-handedly relishing each kill, twisting their mangled bodies, drowning their carcasses in a pool of milk until no more Oreos remained.

As garnishes go
I’m not much of a pro
But here I will state my opinion.
Tall and verdantly so
I love cilantro
The blessed flora of my herbal dominion.

Rough night I had,
I hardly sleeped.
Climbed out of bed,
But alas, I leaped!

Hopped into the shower,
Jumped into my pants,
I tried to walk,
But skipped and pranced.

Then I recalled,
To my chagrin,
It’s still last month,
Not March I’m in!

He fell in.

Years of dancing around the edges and flirting with false senses of moral resilience and immortality, such daring made his succumbing all but eventual and indeed, inevitable.

The fall broke him in so many places he hardly noticed, as quickly, its many promises of hedonistic freedom and bawdy heathenry which, like me, had long lured him, were now magnetic opioids blurring his pain with fantastic new pleasures and emergent lies which laid just beyond his newly found recognition.

Highly demanded by those who’d fallen in before him, the purity of his soul was rabidly consumed until he sold each remaining small piece of his best self for promises that no longer came true and relations that soon regarded him simply as just another one who’d fallen in as they once did, ravenously hungry and blind.

From one who escaped to one still imprisoned, I wish you freedom and resistance and feel all your pain of which you are now utterly ignorant and numb.

I miss who you once were, and who you may yet become again.

I lost a friend last night who’d been missing for many years. He was stabbed at the hands of another addict promising to make him feel better. Killed by a tiny bubble of nothing that punctured and invaded his tormented heart, ending all hope he would ever be found. I will both miss him and forever wonder at the price he paid for his peace. #usingislosing