Hello, all you LITD-ers out there

I'm not huge on subjective, personal-life-account LITD posts. This is basically a blog of observation on cultural, economic political and world-stage developments, and what's going on inside my household and my head are not generally too germaine to any given topic of those natures.

But I've also rarely gone so long between posts and it probably merits a bit of explanation. Plus, in this time of social distancing, fostering a sense of community is something we ought to do whenever we get the opportunity, and you may find yourself resonating with some aspect of my experience.

I'm pretty much okay now. Yesterday was quite productive, really. As usual, I got up with the chickens and went to the radio station and recorded the weekend newscast. I wrote a piece at Precipice, my Substack newsletter site. Clyde and I recorded season two, episode six of the Barney & Clyde podcast, practicing, of course, responsible social distancing and each ensconcing ourselves at remote locations rather than convening for bracing beverages at the Libation Station. I made sautéed cabbage and smoked sausage for supper last night. It received kudos from the missus.

This afternoon I reached out to all the students in the course for which I'm the adjunct instructor at our local community college. Spring break had been extended to two weeks and the rest of the semester is going to be completely online, and I let them know how I envision it going down. 

It has not always been thus. The first week of sheltering in place involved some bouts of nuttiness, one of which probably qualified as a meltdown. My wife handled it graciously, moving past these with a remarkable degree of cheer. 

I'm actually rather surprised at the way I've regained composure, given that, numbers-wise, this thing is closing in on us here in central Indiana. The US Surgeon General, Dr. Jerome Adams, has deemed Indianapolis an "emerging hotspot." 

I think a serious effort to stay in constant touch with my Creator has been a major factor. The pastor of the church I attend has been mailing out weekly packets of prayers and readings, which I receive on Saturdays and eagerly delve into on Sunday mornings. God is sovereign in his Heaven and he loves us infinitely. 

It would help if our supposed leaders at the national level were not choosing to be infantile in their manner of engaging this moment. This was the subject of my latest Precipice piece. I wrote: 

The only players in the entire situation that merit veneration are first responders, the sleep-deprived nurses, physicians and therapists in the nation’s increasingly strained hospitals, and the experts on the task force, who unflinchingly give the public the straight, bracing truth every evening. 

Even these people lack adequate data to provide a comprehensive picture. They are beginning to drill down into what is happening on a county-by-county basis, but no one still has any idea how many asymptomatic carriers are among those we’re keeping a six-foot distance from when we go to the supermarket, or how many people become infected the day after being tested. 

The record book will not be able to note a figure bringing the requisite leadership at the overarching level in this catastrophe. History will merely say that our civilization - indeed, our world - muddled along in states of panic, despair and intermittent, fleeting hope, with bedraggled care-givers and researchers on the ground doing what they could, armed with what knowledge was available.

Congressional Democrats wasted precious days trying to cram a seeming infinitude of progressive wish-list items - demographic diversity requirements for corporate boards, fuel standards for airlines, funding for the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, to name a few - into what was supposed to be a clean and simple bill that would put cash money into the hands of businesses and individuals whose lives had been upended by the societally imposed (and entirely necessary) collapse of the economy.

Meanwhile, the pathetic nine-year-old with a Twitter account just today let loose with a string of tweets bragging on the ratings numbers of his nightly press briefings. What a small man. What a pathological narcissist.

He also has invoked the 1950 Defense Production Act to make General Motors convert one of its plants to ventilator production. If there was any doubt that he's harbored authoritarian ambitions all along, this dispels those.

Well, that's the lay of the land in these parts. I'll try to get back to something like the pace of posting to which you're accustomed.

But, as you know, maintaining some semblance of normalcy in this surreal time is tough. Damn tough .