Covid: Horrific Random Killer, or Focused Societal Upgrade?

By Paul Clark
(aka motomynd)

Killing more than 550,000 people in the U.S., Covid-19 has been a national disaster. Lost in that huge number are individual stories of immense personal tragedy, along with some wry moments that almost make Covid-19 seem like a thinking killer with a dark sense of humor.
    Donald Trump mocked Covid in general, and people who wore masks in particular; UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson did the same. Covid struck both, not hard enough to kill them, but hard enough to destroy Trump’s first term as president and any chance he had at a second; Johnson’s experience with Covid seemed to affect him enough to make him sound almost civil for the first time in his political career. In between were the countless examples of preachers and churchgoers – mostly across the South – who confidently stated “God is greater than Covid-19” and refused to wear a mask or take social-distancing precautions – and wound up dead from Covid. Tragedy, tinged with irony.

Penny for Her Thoughts: Life with Hair

By Penelope Griffiths

So let me start by saying I am not a vain woman! However, I do have standards, but the last seven months have taught me that they’re not that high!
    I have had many hairstyles and hair lengths through my life. As a child my mother would cut my hair “bowl” shape. From small child to teen, I was mid brown colour but going blondish through the summer. At several points through my early days my mother would perm my hair; I had an “afro” before they became fashionable!

Who identifies with fake stories, fake lives?

By Paul Clark (aka motomynd)

[Publisher’s Note: Paul Clark’s reflections below were prompted by a conversation that developed after he remarked, “This virus has a wicked sense of humor – the preacher who proclaimed ‘God is greater than Covid-19,’ only to be killed within 30 days by Covid-19, and the ‘virus doubters’ who have been afflicted, like Boris Johnson and Trump. This virus is like that serial killer character you admire, not just killing to kill, but to have impact, to express wit – who was that character, the man who walked safely among hogs instead of being eaten by them?”

Penny for Her Thoughts: Lock down...Day 123....

By Penelope Griffiths

The struggle is real. My whole body aches with longing to get out of this pandemic prison I’m locked in…Who am I kidding? – it’s a blast!
    So, the coronavirus continues to spread and devastate everywhere. Wear a mask, don’t wear a mask, stay three feet away – no, stay six feet away! Don’t socialize or, if you do, be responsible. Think of others, don’t be selfish – this and even more advice is given, but many people are ignoring it.

Goines On: Pushing up

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One morning, Goines had a pronounced feeling that death was drawing close. He felt this so strongly that on his walk that morning he did 60 pushups at one go when he reached the electrical box off which he routinely did them.
    He may have felt death’s closer approach even the day before, because he had told Mrs. Goines about managing 50 pushups that morning and felt he might be ready to go for 60. He believed he had actually done 51 on a recent walk, the most he had ever done at one go. And even as a vigorous younger man, he had never, so far as he could remember, done more than 30 at one go. But now, this year, he had often done 40 at one go and sometimes done two or three sets, a couple of times doing more than 100 in a day.

Memes to minds as viruses to bodies

By Sharon Stoner

meme noun
1: an idea, behavior, style, or usage that spreads from person to person within a culture

Memes (discrete units of knowledge, gossip, jokes and so on) are to culture what genes are to life. Just as biological evolution is driven by the survival of the fittest genes in the gene pool, cultural evolution may be driven by the most successful memes.

—Richard Dawkins

—Merriam-Webster Dictionary

Some believe in Trump so badly they can’t comprehend the mistake they made in voting for him. They literally soak up his pronouncements into the sponges of their minds, devouring any memes that seem to justify their support for him and whatever else he wants them to believe.

In This Difficult Time

By Shirley Skufca Hickman

Our county of Tulare in California has had 3,000 cases of the coronavirus and 95 deaths. What have I been doing during this difficult time? I’ve made over 100 facemasks for our hospital, three cradle quilts to give to children at Christmas, and revised a romance novel. I’m also writing a book about my days at Cal Poly and my involvement in the Civil Rights Movement.

Fiction: The Virus

By Ed Rogers

Most people think the virus started in the city of Wuhan, China, sometime around December of 2019. Scientists from around the world have scrambled to find the origin of the virus. Most have settled on the stalls of live wild animals being sold in the open market within the city. However, they still haven’t explained how two different viruses mated within these animals to come up with a wholly never-before-seen virus.

Sketches from the Twin Cities: Spring Sounds (like)

A sort of poem: similes of middle-school music students

By Geoffrey Dean

A recent distance learning music lesson of mine asked middle-school students to listen to Vivaldi’s “Spring” from The Four Seasons after reading his sonnet “La Primavera” (in English). Asked what spring “sounds” like to them, most wrote birds chirping, but a number of the 200+ responses were “one-of-kind.” I was moved by the many thoughtful and beautifully-phrased answers, and amused by some whimsical or even slightly jaded ones.

Coronavirus Math & Russian Roulette

Dr. Anthony Fauci

By Paul Clark (aka motomynd)

[Re-posted with corrections.]

After listening to Dr. Fauci the other day, I began to wonder if a 1% death rate from coronavirus was imaginable in America. Seems far-fetched, but the flu of 1918 killed somewhere between 700,000 and a million people in America – when the population was in the range of 103 million. Our population is approximately three times that today, so take 700,000 and multiply by 3 and you get 2.1 million. Factor in modern health care, modern communication, etc, and you maybe cut that number. But factor in a couple of screw-ups by the fed...imagine...and you could get to a 1% death rate.

West Coast Observer: American Hypocrisy

By William Silveira

In the New York Times article “A Former Farmworker on American Hypocrisy” (May 6, 2020), Alfredo Corchado accuses our government of hypocrisy when it says workers formerly considered “illegal” are now “essential.” Much of what Corchado discusses was known to me. I grew up in Tulare and have resided in Tulare County my whole life. My father was a farm owner with 400 acres of farm land south of Tulare. At the time I was growing up, we raised sugar beets, cotton, milo, barley, and alfalfa. We also had pigs. My brother and I irrigated these crops and cut, mowed, and raked the alfalfa. In our spare time we were expected to help out with the pigs – fence maintenance, health care, and feeding.

Snow Hiking in Colorado High Country

Detail

Introduction & Afterwords by Chuck Smythe

Photos by Ed Schmahl

A couple of friends and I have been doing weekly “social-isolation hikes” out here in the high country of Colorado (Caribou Top). Colorado in the spring, it’s wonderful! Ed Schmahl’s photos from our April 30 hike try to illustrate it, but, as Moristotle’s poems attest, if you weren’t along you can’t really get the wonder. Ed sent me the four photos that appear here with the note, “Let’s go someplace up there again!”

Goines On: More masked men

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On their trip to Costco that day, the next piece of music was lively, and Mrs. Goines said it sounded like ballet music. An image of Trump dancing on stage and reciting tweets forced itself onto the screen of Goines’ imagination. He slapped the steering wheel with some glee. “Someone has to be composing a comic opera of Trump. History claims no bigger fool…Would the role be for a tenor or a baritone, do you think?”

Goines On: Curled sidelocks

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The Goineses had been watching the Israeli TV series Shtisel, a fictional story about a conservative (Haredi) Jewish family in Jerusalem who adhere strictly to their interpretation of Jewish law and values. The men wear religious vestments and curl their sidelocks. The Goineses found these people’s customs fascinating. But hardly anyone in the huge Shtisel family seems happy, and it was impossible to watch the series without sharing their sadness.

My Life [8]

Coping with COVID-19

By Jim Rix

Boldt Words & Images: The First of Many

Fiction?

By Bob Boldt

[Editor’s Note: An earlier version of this short story appeared on Moristotle & Co. on August 29, 2015. The author has revised it for our world four and a half years later.]

Overhead, bullets whistled past me in the cold dark amid the falling drizzle. Some shells made a complaining, metallic clank as they struck the side of the overturned dumpster I had scrambled into. I was trying to dodge the first barrage that had made the street a sudden killing zone. In the process, I smashed my head on a large hook that protruded out of the side of the damned thing. Doing my best to ignore the stinging pain, I cautiously ran my hand up the side of my face, hoping for the best and dreading the worst. Moisture. Not the wet of the rain, but a thicker substance. Blood? I licked my probing fingers, and the warn, salty, iron taste on my tongue confirmed my fears.

Acting Citizen: Sightseeing

Road trip

By James Knudsen

With the exception of some twelve months in the 1980s, equally divided between Tennessee and Okinawa, and a similar amount of time in 2001-02, spent in Korea and Thailand, I have lived all of my 55 years in California. One would assume I know the Golden State quite well. I don’t.

West Coast Observer: A slap against Devin Nunes

By William Silveira

The title of a March 14 article in the Washington Post asks its readers to “Raise your hand if you have not been sued by Devin Nunes,” implying, of course, that Congressman Nunes has sued a lot of people. Columnist Dana Milbank states that “The top Republican on the House Intelligence Committee has, aided by a lawyer with a colorful past and a flair for invective, sued just about everybody who criticizes him.” Everybody who criticizes him. Well, that includes me, and he hasn’t sued me yet, so I guess I need to raise my hand. Or, maybe I’m next.

As the World Turns: Golden Years

By Ed Rogers

“Golden Years” is what they call this time in my life. I sure don’t understand where, or who came up with that name. I know David Bowie sang a song about it^*. I liked the song but never really understood how it related to me.
    I’m also not sure if your Golden Years start when you go on Medicare at 65 or when you retire at 67. At any rate, mine started with colon cancer at 64. I turned 65 the following January the 3rd and Medicare paid for my last chemo. We were lucky; my wife, Janie, who worked for cancer doctors, had very good insurance. So, along with my life insurance, I had a cancer policy that covered everything.

Penny for Her Thoughts: An explosion heard ’round the world

By Penelope Griffiths

I was all set to write a piece on Brexit, since Britain had at last left the European Union. But Nature had other ideas, and “boom!” COVID-19 exploded in the world.
    The first we knew of this new viral threat were the headlines of a flu-like disease in a particular area of China that was infecting people and killing many old ones.