Corona Hunker Down

Everyone is affected. No one is immune. You will be exposed. You may become sick. After that, who knows how your body will react to it.

It cuts across all ages, races, religions, political parties, and social strata, except perhaps those hunkered in bunkers in Montana and other places remote and inaccessible to us.

It feeds on the weak, the sick, the elderly, and men with blood type A, and sometimes just for the heck of it, it kills children and people in perfectly good health.

It plays hide-n-seek. No symptoms, negative test results, no fever, no nothing except a slight cough and a headache. Maybe you won’t be able to smell or taste things. You’ll treat it like the flu for a couple weeks and then it attacks you in earnest when you think you have it beaten, or it lets you infect hundreds more before it lays you low.

It takes your lungs and your breath. It takes your love away, the girl who took your breath away with her beauty. As desperately as you want to hold her and talk to her, you dare not, unless you expose your most precious to the savagery of the virus spawned from a bat out of hell.

It has ravaged New York, New Jersey, and New Orleans. Albany, Georgia has the highest per capita death rate in the country.

Normal life has become surreal. We binge on Netflix and Amazon Prime originals, and watch Trump’s latest reality TV show every day at 5 PM for the scores. Each number is a collection of data points. Each data point is a statistic. Each statistic is a tragedy. It is abstract if viewed as a whole. We have a hard time visualizing more than five or ten people at a time.

You can go out to exercise but you can’t go to the park. You can walk, but you cannot drive. We’re warned to stay away from the grocery store but it’s no problem getting a take-out order if your favorite restaurant happens to be serving. We cannot get toilet paper, but there’s plenty of beer and wine.

We watch and wait for the “curve to flatten.” We don’t want to think about wave #2 coming six months from now.

In the meantime we try to live somewhat normal lives. I mostly use photography and music to pass the time. I also pray for miracles. The flowers brighten my somber mood. They proclaim life and renewal and just as quickly prove the brevity of it.

Easter is coming. The Resurrection is the only reason for Christian faith. It stands in defiance against the virus.

Selah