Thirty-five days that’s how long I lasted in the outside world during the ongoing pandemic known euphemistically as 2020, otherwise referred to as COVID-19. September 24th was the day I began trying to explore an old routine, but I’m not proving very receptive to the half-measures I’m forced to witness, so I’m pulling the plug. From my limited purview, it appears that we are willingly running into behaviors that are counterintuitive to the fact that the virus that shut down the global economy is surging. Wear masks? Only when it’s convenient. Social distance? Whatever, let me crowd your space. Ventilate the space? But it’s cold outside. Hospitals are filling up! Fake news.

It’s been 229 days or seven months, two weeks, and one day since Caroline and I first entered our own self-imposed isolation. Caroline started going back to the office a couple of days a week on the same day I put myself into the coffee shop, where I’d often write early in the day. Fortunately, the days have turned cooler, and I can return to the table on my balcony where masks, ventilation, and distancing are not of any concern. As we enter these chillier, shorter days leading us to a new year, I can’t help but think of Steinbeck’s “The Winter of Our Discontent” and how our own intellectual corruption will make for a bleak landscape ahead. Sadly, we have no unifying voice of reason in a world where reason has been eschewed for feelings and intuitions delivered by charlatans capitalizing on being influencers with the hope of striking Adsense dollars. And so, modified self-isolation will drag on.

We’ll still head out for vacation as long as the country doesn’t shut down, but our version of taking a holiday is to do so on a cold, wet coast in lodging removed from mass gatherings while avoiding restaurants. We hope to remain safe and maybe even more isolated than we find ourselves at home. One of the goals while out and about is to stroll no less than 110 miles along the Oregon coast by foot, weather permitting. I have a good idea that we’ll encounter a good amount of defiant belligerence as many on the rural coast of Oregon are not only conservative but resentful of those they think are trying to influence them with their liberal thinking. That should be kept to a minimum as it’s our intention to visit the quietest beaches and trails in a landscape that we feel good about not wearing masks in, hence our minimizing shopping and shunning restaurants. There is one caveat I can’t help but mention: We are painfully aware that this will limit our financial contribution to a region hit hard without the tourism that helps it survive, but I’m not willing to subject Caroline nor I to situations where my anger might boil over at those with something to prove about their own will to stupidity.

And so it is in the city where I live; the risk of angering potential customers while also trying to integrate the suggested rules for operating safely is balanced by the need for money, but not mine. Rather than have one more source of frustration, I pull back and withdraw. My only sense of defeat arrives with the incredulity of witnessing this will to stupidity. Schopenhauer would certainly find disappointment that 200 years after writing “The World as Will and Representation,” humanity still hadn’t learned to appreciate the opportunity to find themselves, but instead, we’re too busy defining a caricature using tropes, artifacts, and jingoistic posturing.