On the Third Day

A place to stay, enough to eat

Somewhere, old heroes shuffle safely down the street

Where you can speak out loud about your doubts and fears

And what's more, no one ever disappears

You never hear their standard issue kicking in your door

You can relax on both sides of the tracks

And maniacs don't blow holes in bandsmen by remote control

And everyone has recourse to the law

And no one kills the children anymore

No one kills the children anymore

-Roger Waters, The Gunner's Dream

In a way, the inward focus of finding oneself ill with a serious and contagious disease can be a respite from the world. For the second morning in a row, I bid Peg to make her own coffee (she did not, based on the evidence in the kitchen) while I kept sleeping until nearly eight. The paxlovid suggested by one of her colleagues seems to have helped enormously, and now I'm just another guy with a raspy cough, a relentless sniffle, and a bit of a scratchy throat; all a far cry from yesterday, when the exhaustion would roll over me in near-hourly waves, and I would be forced to take a twenty-minute nap before going back to working and billing, working and billing.

Yep, I billed a full day yesterday. It was pretty miserable. What's worse, I felt cheated because our Guthrie family sent Peg home to take care of the little invalid, and she found herself with little to do because I was here at my desk writing and taking phone calls between naps.

This morning felt different. Have you ever felt so not bad that the lack of feeling bad actually seems like you're feeling good? That was this morning at 7:52, lying in bed and giving myself a couple minutes of just being before my feet hit the floor and it all began again.

I think I saw one of our ghosts last night, in one of those eye-rubbing moments that lead to a double-take with an expression of Don Knotts-like surprise. It was maybe three a.m., and a brief coughing fit had rattled me back to consciousness. As the room settled back into silence, I could hear a rumble in Peg's changing room, and a cat thumping into one of the cheap plywood doors to her closet. Wondering whether we'd trapped a cat among Peg's shoes and dainties, I rolled on my side to watch a dark wisp, almost like a swirl of smoke moving slowly along the wall on the far side of the changing room. I rubbed my eyes and yep, it was still there. Or she. Who know? Then I made out the outline of Slane running into the bedroom and away from his spectral playmate, and the apparition disappeared.

These are some amazing meds. What can I say?

But even with phantoms walking the halls at Tara, this feels like a benign space, kind of like pretty much everyplace else here in Corning. That's more than I can say about the world out there over the hill.

Another mass shooting, of children. The shooter was an eighteen year old boy (and yes, I'll use the term "boy" for that age, having been one myself and remembering just how mature I was not), apparently bullied and confused about his sexuality, told he would not graduate the day before, and of course legally armed to the teeth. Watching it all unfold, yet again, I feel not only for the parents of those dead children grappling with the new reality that the joy of their life was extinguished by some insane loner, but for the parents of the insane loner who must find a way to grieve a son while recoiling at his last chapter. As a father of three young men of uneven mental stability, I can't get that thought of the shooter's parents out of my head.

And, of course, one's political stripes preprogram one's response to this latest tragedy. If on the left, we'd all be safer if it was just a little more difficult to order a small arsenal and piles of ammunition online, as if that were the alpha and the omega of the problem. If on the right, maybe we should just make sure we have more guns in school so the teachers and cafeteria staff can engage an attacker in a shootout over the kids' heads until law enforcement shows up and has to sort out which armed civilian is the actual threat. Sure. Great plan.

Everyone has their opinion, and I have mine, half-baked and unfinished as it is. We all once lived in a social compact, or at least it seemed that way in my perspective. Work hard and play by the rules, and you may not become wildly rich and successful, but you'd have the chance for work with dignity and the ability to make a life for yourself. That was society's bargain with the individual. On the flip side, we recognized that a society is only as good as its component parts, maybe the worst of its component parts, and our individual arc through life wasn't just a quest (usually unsuccessful) for self-actualization, but the contribution of the one person toward making our shift on this planet a collective success. Maybe we'd even lay the foundation for kids and grandkids to live in a better world. A social compact with the future, all of us acting as stewards rather than owners, owing something to society.

We seem to have lost all of that. One side seems to have created out of a petri dish a mash-up of John Wayne, Ayn Rand, and the most obnoxious performance artist you've ever seen, and advances an "us against them" agenda that rests on the false premise that Donne was wrong, that every man is in fact an island. On the other side we have the malignancy of identity politics, of treating anyone who disagrees as an evolutionary throwback or worse. Both sides have a glib set of answers to disasters like Uvalde that have never worked, and that miss the fundamental problem: We're just not good people, not at all. And the "best" among us are often actually the very worst. And one can't expect much out of a society increasingly populated by the cruel, the stupid, or the broken.

But it's not all bad, and I'd be marking myself as stupid if I implied as much. Take young Zander Moricz, senior class president at Pine View School down in Florida. As you may recall, the attack chihuahua in the governor's mansion there signed a law making it illegal in school, at least at certain grade levels, to discuss issues of sexuality. One could make a good faith argument that teaching a kindergartener about transgenderism is as inappropriate as any sexual pedagogy at that age, but Moricz's situation illustrates the absurdity of such laws in application.

As it turns out, Moricz is gay, and one of the lead plaintiffs in a suit against the state challenging the "Don't Say Gay" law. So of course his principal warned him ahead of the graduation ceremony that he should not mention anything about the law or his own sexual orientation during his remarks, lest the administration turn off his mic and end the ceremony.

So Moricz approached the mandate like a lawyer, strictly following the letter of the law while still making his point in a way that has gone viral over the last few days.

https://news.yahoo.com/curly-hair-pine-view-class-175723205.html

If you can't say "gay", talk about the challenges of growing up with curly hair in a state that is especially tough on folks with curly hair.

If you can spare the seven minutes, watch the whole speech. It'll make you feel a little better about the young folks coming up behind us, who've been forced to spend their formative years dealing with Covid and, well, mass shootings every few weeks. The optimism gushing out of Moricz's speech is something I wish I could bottle and take a swig every now and then, when the crush of it all starts to weigh on me. Then again, mine is a pessimism born of luxury--someone at the very beginning of his or her adult life, with all the challenges ahead and often little resources for the journey, can't afford to focus on the bad.

Maybe just making that observation will provide that shot of optimism to get through this busy day until P gets home. It's a beautiful day here in the Southern Tier, and I have plenty of paying work. Not all bad.