It’s been 60 days since I last sat in a coffee shop, and here I am, stupidly taking up a spot at a table, knowing full well that Arizona is experiencing a COVID-19-related death every 20 minutes or 74 per day. Back in May, I launched into full-blown alarm when we were witnessing deaths hit almost 1 per hour or about 20 per day. Now, seven months later, South Korea is reporting a spike with about 17 deaths per day, while here in Arizona, we are playing like this is somehow normal. Has anyone else noticed that Arizona’s population is a measly 7 million compared to South Korea, with 52 million? Jeezus Christ, our population is nearly eight times smaller, yet our death rate is almost five times higher; what gives?

Now that I’ve typed this onto my page, I have to question why I am out in public, masked or not. Not wanting to be at home alone doesn’t seem like an adequate reason. I should stop and consider that the people that work here have not had issues and yet they deal with these people around them nearly every day. I shouldn’t panic, but there’s a part of me that wants to run right out of here back to the safety of home.

Looking at the calendar, I see that Caroline and I have been at this new way of life for 291 days now, and while the vaccine is finally being administered, it feels like we are still years away from whatever we call normal at some future date. We’ll certainly be entering 2021 under pandemic circumstances, presidential leadership uncertainty, and a looming sense that all is not well in the hearts and minds of far too many people on our planet.

I should admit a kind of defeat in that our vacation to Oregon that ended 30 days ago only supplied a month-long reprieve from the overwhelming concern that has been with me since January. In only about 30 hours, we’ll enter a new year, but the knife’s edge of irresponsibility and dangerous narcissism looms large in a way that I feel we are collectively committing suicide.

Intellectual death is a slow and cumbersome process where rationality starts to feel like self-delusional assumed intelligence and has me questioning just what Kool-Aid I have drunk that gives me the right to feel that many around me are clothed in a blanket of crazy. What a sad place to be after all the evolution our species has been through.

There is much to be thankful for, such as love, companionship, food, shelter, sharing, learning, and even the occasional traveling. Curiosity and exploration are still alive and well in us, even if not always well-disciplined. Recently, during a 5-day fast, I fell into a pit of Korean cooking tutorials and finally learned that the side dishes I enjoy with my Korean BBQ are called Banchan. I now have 24 recipes to prepare on the docket, including a few that rely on some exotic-to-me dried veggies such as aster, bellflower, thistle, Deoduckchwi, Daraesun, and Gosari, which is also known as fern bracken and might just be fiddlehead fern (which we’ve had before but not the Korean version).

Regular readers likely already saw that we are hopefully going white water rafting this summer, and if the situation around vaccines and the proof of having one gets to the point where we can travel internationally, we’ll aim for a December trip to Europe. If we don’t maintain a dream or two and figure out how to expand our exploration of life, I feel that we’ll be inching closer to a kind of fatal exit. I’m not ready to give up on aspirations of finding new adventures in this life, even while I feel a certain amount of collapse happening all around me. Oh, how I wish this sense of gloom was just my perception because then I could feel justified in visiting a doctor to prescribe something to keep the darkness away, but I am resigned to the knowledge that we are collectively losing our direction, and no pill in the world will turn on blinders to that ugly situation.

I can’t say I like the tone of this blog post, but then how does one write about suicide and not swirl around the bowl of darkness? Leave things on a hopeful note, I suppose? There’s enough hope shown above, and then again, why shouldn’t this writing session end on a similar grim note as our year is about to?