February Sweeps - Day 52

I wonder if, a year from now, or ten, I will be much more curious about the Covid-19 virus scare/plague than in what stories I'm working on, how much exercise I'm getting, or if that long-forgotten-by-then girl said hi to me or not.*  This is truly, as the Chinese curse goes, an interesting time.

Someone today said that school is closed until May 1st, as opposed to mid-April as it stood Friday.  If that's true, I am going to dance about in joy and relief come the First of May (any takers on what song I'll be singing that day?).  The kids have been home all day, and they're just out of control, screaming and running around from the break of day until the sun sets in the west.  Tensions run high, and even though it's the children that are draining our vitality, my sister and I have been butting heads more than usual these days.

I hear people complain about not being able to go to clubs and concerts and basketball games and public stonings and bars, and I feel for you, I really do.  When you get those things back, take me with you, would you?

I may have told this story already, but I'll tell it again: my mother is very much opposed to me going out to stores, as I am wont to do.  I hadn't been to Walmart since last Monday, when I only looked for groceries, but she's got it into her head that I keep toy-hunting at the dozen or so stores that have been on my rotation every week for, what?, four or five years now?  On Friday, I was going to go to GameStop to pick up a two-player Minecraft for the kids, but my mom's worries that I would get infected and then infect her made me stay home.  I thought about going on Saturday and Sunday, but both days, went to the park and the storage unit instead.**

Today, she asked me about Walmart, and how irresponsible I am to keep going there, and I told her I hadn't been to any of them in a week.  "Oh," she said, "well, if you go, here's a list of stuff you can pick up for me."

That seemed amusing to me, in a sad way.  Honestly, I'm not trying to be cavalier about this disaster (does it qualify as a disaster yet?  Abigail Hilton is out of work, hanging out in her house all day writing novels about murderous/horny pan-sexual rodents, so I'd label that as at least close to a disaster), but I go to the grocery store and there's no rice, there's no wipes, there's no pasta, there's no soup, and there's no bread . . . so why would I be done with shopping?

So, I did go to the grocery store, stand outside GameStop, hit Walgreens, and the one Walmart of the week.  It felt like the old routine, which I appreciated.

I did my running today, and it was the best I've ever done.  I won't go as far as to say that I enjoyed it, but I never stopped, and after the first few blocks, I got that second wind Billy Joel wrote a song about (honestly, it was my first exposure to that concept), and during the last song that played ("Burn Down the Mission), I actually sped up instead of slowed down.  Oh, I'm still fat, don't get me wrong, but maybe I'll run a marathon in September as well, just to be rid of her.

Hey, so I did find toilet paper at Walmart today.  There were only six or seven packages of it left (the employee had just moved on to putting out paper towels), and it was the insanely overpriced most famous name brand--probably what Jennifer Lawrence wipes with (if she even has to wipe, I'm not really sure how that works with her)--but I bought a pack, because my big sister's house is apparently running out.  One day, whether we survive this or not, we'll all talk about the toilet paper the way people talk about burning draft cards during the late Sixties or businessmen jumping out of buildings in 1929.

Afterward, I went to the little park where I used to take my nephews to catch fish, and told myself I would write for a half an hour.  I nearly set a timer, but thought I could trust myself to actually do what I set out to do.  And I got nearly two thousand words done (took an hour, but that's what you get when you don't set a timer).

I am actually closing in on the end of this D&B story, "Meet the New Clerk, Same as the Old Clerk."  It tells of Meechelle, who quit working there years ago after something unexplained happened, and now is working there again, but is afraid of something unexplained.  I called up Big today to talk to him about my idea of what it is that she's afraid of.  He didn't tell me it was a sandbox pail full of crap, so I guess that's what I'm going with.  I'm also experimenting with her relationship with her coworkers, going from disdaining to liking Natalie Whitmore, then back to disliking her.  And she occasionally looks at Mason like an awkward geek, then like a little brother, and then like someone she's attracted to.

I don't know if that works in the story or not, but I certainly know people that I waver in how I feel about them.  That guy Tanner, for example, I go from really admiring him to wishing he were my best friend to, "Hey, where did Tanner go?"  "Oh, he's on vacation in Montana this week."  "Folks do that?  Go to Montana?"  People are complicated.

 I haven't done any jogging today, but this'll seem strange: I'm looking forward to it.  (I initially wrote "I'm actually looking forward to it," but I recognize that I overuse the word "actually" in my posts, so I did a search to see how many of my thousand blogposts used that word . . . and it was all of them.  So, I'll try to use a different word from now on.

If one actually exists.

Words Today: 1908
Words In March: 31,746

*She did not.

**And then today, I discovered that GameStop has closed to walk-in customers.  You can order stuff online, and pick it up at the store, but they'll bring it out to you.  I guess the kids didn't really need more video games anyway.