Two and a half miles in before 8:00 and no ugly virus news that’s triggering deeper thoughts of gloom.

Last night, I caught Pablo Vazquez on the Blender channel (3D stuff, if you don’t know) announcing that he’d be doing daily broadcasts of various things while the world is quarantining.

Then, this morning, Colin Benders is on again broadcasting from his home in Holland. Colin is a musician who, in this incarnation of his career, has been exploring Eurorack synth stuff. While this is just awesome, it’s going to overlap with Pablo’s stream when he starts up at 9:00; good thing all this valuable content is recorded so we can catch it at any time. Early in the stream, someone mentioned watching Hainbach just prior, and my initial understanding was that he was live streaming, but alas, it’s a recorded video – still worth watching though. Just minutes later, after contacting Hainbach in Berlin, I learned that he would be streaming tomorrow night yay!

It’s becoming rapidly evident that many creators are stepping up their streaming game in an effort to help distract people from the isolation of being quarantined. Meanwhile, Caroline is trying out a guided meditation with jellyfish in the background, courtesy of the Monterey Bay Aquarium’s Facebook channel. What a great start to the day.

Ten thousand steps in before lunch and merely a perfunctory look at the news makes me feel that my mental health is already improving.

Fifteen thousand steps before 3:00 p.m.

Working on Caldo de res Mexican beef soup and enjoying all the cooking at home. we’ll see if I’m still singing that song when we break into the soy curls.

I struggled yesterday and this morning as I consider just purging the next few paragraphs. What I’m writing about seems so self-evident in light of everything that’s going on, but then I think that in some years, as I look back at all of this, regardless if I was way off base and far too concerned, maybe I’ll better remember these moments where the entire global population was dealing with something most of us could have never dreamed would actually happen in our lifetimes.

Fuck, I had to go and look at the news. Today has already seen 4,836 new cases in America and 57 deaths. California is projecting that 25.5 million people in its state alone will be infected within the next eight fucking weeks. So, we are waiting to shut everything down for what? Is Donald Trump waiting for the stock market to jump back, for his poll numbers to improve, and for Hillary to join the race? We have panic shopping and hoarding with only 244,000 people infected globally, and California is anticipating 100 times that in the next 60 days. This would be an absolute failure of the American government to have acted when in China, with 1.38 billion people, they only have 81,000 cases after nearly 90 days of this shit? Mental health is moving back out the window. Hey, U.S. government a-holes, what are we going to do as a country when California grows so much of our food sees an epidemic that cripples one of the most important areas of farming for our ENTIRE COUNTRY?

Fleeting moments of panic are not where I want to go, as anxiety won’t see any of us through this.

This is just stupid. Not only must I avoid the news in the morning I need to stop looking at it during the day. The problem is that I can’t be objective, and I can’t not project where this could go. Sure, 600,000 to a million dead in California is not the end of the earth, but the ensuing chaos and how to dispose of that many bodies in a short period of time when those corpses are infectious, meaning people will need hazmat suits to move them at a time when nurses are allegedly already using bandanas in lieu of proper masks, presents a logistics nightmare where I could see people trying to escape the horror of that state.

While I want to look away and stop putting my own flavor of paranoia atop an already shit situation, I feel I must look and consider these things (though true, I’ve always been a horrible reader of the future) as this is a catastrophe of proportions I’ve never witnessed. I’ve tried imagining the despair felt during plagues when an invisible enemy hunted you down and killed you, and now here we are in the age of the internet and we are watching the slow-motion creep of terror wash over the earth in real-time.

The bigger deal, though, is that there’s a risk of these crazy events overwhelming me when what I should be doing is nothing more than enjoying my time with Caroline. Cooking for her, stopping to hug her while she works, and enjoying our 24/7 time together.

Finally, my walking routine hit 22,139 steps with 10.3 miles (16.7km) and 196 active minutes to get there.