I had to take a pause from the self-isolation updates as, for one I didn’t want to interrupt the flow of posting my book about the Grand Canyon titled Stay In The Magic that precedes this post and covers the previous 18 days. Secondly, self-isolation had become a routine by the 1oth day; capturing the minutiae that define a day of trying our best to remove ourselves from going out due to the threat of this virus invariably leads me to think about the whole political situation, which is a serious dead-end. It was time to focus on other stuff, anything really, except continuously recognizing being thrown out of sync with the way things were before COVID-19.

What follows are random thoughts and memories that were happening over those days and came to define a new normal.

— We sit here reading more of The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann which talks about whiling away time when isolation, healing, and staying in place demands that one no longer pay attention to every minute – it feels ironic. In Caroline’s and my extra time, we’ve taken to watching the habits of our neighborhood birds, which become obvious when one takes the opportunity to peer into their lives. Birds have favorite perches and songs for the morning and calls for later in the day, or so it seems. Momentum has its own habits, and time spent in a new routine can make nearly anything feel normal. As I post my words about our journey down the Colorado River 10 years ago, I can see again how those nearly three weeks had gathered their own momentum, propelling us into new habits punctuated by time for thoughts and observations on a level previously unknown to this mind.

— Since November 1st, 2019, when I started picking up trash on a one-mile loop around our neighborhood, I wanted to think that the majority of the trash was stuff that was blowing down the street or that was falling from trash trucks as waste was being collected. I was wrong. I’d venture to say about 85% of it has been tossed from vehicles and the rest by pedestrians. I come to this conclusion based on the scientific guesswork of picking up cigarette butts. I’m only picking up about 15 a day during The COVID-19 Days, while prior to the reduction of traffic, I was probably gathering up at least 100 a day. It used to be common to have a nearly full 5-gallon bucket of trash on my outings now, I barely drag a 20% full bucket to our trash can. It often happened that I’d have to stomp down what I’d collected as no more trash would fit; I don’t do that anymore. So it is obvious that it is the careless and inconsiderate nature of people in their vehicles and walking through neighborhoods that cannot be bothered with taking their waste to a proper receptacle but instead feel comfortable enough that they should simply despoil the places we all share. If, on my one-mile walk, I’m collecting about 4 pounds less trash per day, I can only wonder how many millions of pounds and tens of millions of pieces of trash per day would NOT hit our streets if people could be a little more conscientious.

— The agitating noise of industrial silence has subsided, leaving a quiet unheard except on the rarest of holidays in our cities. The idea of what is quiet is being redefined as the more typical din of the ever-present machine of commerce chugged along but now finds its roar brought to a whisper. It’s difficult to capture what I don’t hear outside our open windows and our walks in a neighborhood where previously the sound of motorcycles, airplanes, a freeway that’s a mile away, and the myriad of other noises never subsided. Not only were we accepting the pollution of our streets, the pollution of the air and water, light pollution that obscures the stars, and the pollution rising out of the molecular world in the form of viruses, but we are also constantly bombarded with audio noise as a form of pollution. This audible smog arrives in ads, jingles, in-store muzak, espresso machines, automatic door openers, street lights and crosswalks, sirens, speakerphones, car and motorcycle exhaust systems that pander to egos, and not the quality of life of those who live in earshot. From my computer fans, room fans, refrigerator, washing machine, dishwasher, and a/c or heater, there’s noise that is now a constant part of the cost of modern life. Never should we get a break from other people’s horns, car stereos, or even the phone calls that can be heard through closed windows, along with ring tones and other notifications that are too often heard 50 feet away. This noise is like a constant subconscious reminder that the speed of progress and the gathering of wealth is the machine that rumbles on our behalf, reminding us that we are one of the deep cogs helping to make it all go.

The machine, though, has come to a slow idle. I’m certain that the majority of our fellow Americans won’t notice this effect as they likely turned up the noise around them to ward off boredom or the fear that their lives might be without meaning while they are forced to endure the non-existent dialog of a mind that doesn’t know how to converse with itself.

— I want to travel somewhere to see the wildflowers, sit down for Mexican food where chips and salsa are brought to the table after sitting down, fill up on gas, and get something to drink without considering social distancing and what surfaces I’m touching. For nearly a month now, my path has been mostly reduced to an area I can walk to. I have been to Costco, a German bakery that’s 14 miles away, a friend’s BBQ joint to support him while business is off, and a couple of nearby stores for some incidentals we needed, but other than that, I’ve not ventured out to see the larger world.

— Caroline’s made our first homemade surgical mask. They are time-consuming, to say the least, with the better part of Saturday and Sunday spent between washing, cutting, trimming, sewing, and fitting me with my first one. Experimenting with size and materials without certainty how they’ll work is a bit stressful as we do not have an infinite supply of stuff, and getting it from Amazon or Joann’s is not a certainty. No matter, though, as the next time I have to go to the grocery store, I’ll be wearing my “cat mask” and feeling a bit better about being amongst others.

Speaking of shopping, I’ve got a list going so I can minimize visits, and so far, it’s mainly fresh fruits and veggies, along with replenishing of eggs, yogurt, and soy milk. We are finally making a dent in our refrigerator of other fresh foods we’ve been eating for the past two weeks.

— Trying to maintain the momentum of posting my book Stay In The Magic here on the blog, but it’s so much work going through the images, titling them for browsers, transferring text and checking it quickly for the worst mistakes, and then finally posting a new day on each consecutive day.

— To divide my time, I’ve also returned to the stupidly long page that, as of this moment, is now 501 images long, where I’m posting an image and a quick snippet of the text of each and every day Caroline and I have traveled since we started shooting digital images back in 1999. The entry is listed on the right side of the page under “Other Pages” and is titled Travels in the Digital Age. Be careful about visiting it as there are a lot of photos. The reason I’m doing this idiotic exercise is that I wanted to see a snapshot of each and every day we’ve traveled over the previous 20 years, and I want to see them sequentially in one stream.

— Toilet paper has been a hot topic, and we certainly have enough until sometime in the future; just how far into the future was our question. We dated a roll on the 23rd of March, and by the 30th, we still had a few sheets on it, so we know we can get a week per roll as long as there is no surprise diarrhea. Yes, we are well aware that we have too much, but we had no idea before isolating ourselves just how much we’d need if we were both at home. With 30 weeks of TP in our cabinet, knowing we don’t have to buy it again for half a year gives us confidence that the shortage will be long over before our asses go dirty. [Before the gentle reader assumes that we have a storage closet full of loo rolls, I should add that our TP supply consists of one-ply rolls so that the overall volume is about equal to one of those big Costco TP packages – Caroline]

— I made more granola over the past day as this mixture, which relies heavily on nuts and seeds with oatmeal and oat groats, is acting as my comfort food. In two more days, it will be properly dehydrated and ready for munching.

— Time goes by, and I record nothing here. Maybe things were meaningful but not in any way that warranted notes or reminders.

— Per Caroline’s request, I’m capturing this recipe I made for our main meal of the day, which seems to be shifting to our midday repast. Yesterday, I emptied a 1-pound bag of dried crowder peas into the crockpot with a 32oz box of chicken stock. Added an onion, some chopped celery, diced bell pepper, a diced jalapeno, two cloves of minced garlic, and a chopped 8oz piece of tasso. I think I wrote about this Louisiana meat before, but as a reminder, it is a brined and smoked pork shoulder that I purchased from Cajun Grocer. I think this costs about $13.00 to make a full crock of stew/soup that should serve up two full meals for the two of us or about $3.25 per portion. I added a splash of vinegar to mine, which I thought enhanced it, while Caroline liked it the way I had prepared it.

— The isolated mushroom in the photo that accompanies this post was found along the path of our walks. I can’t figure out exactly what species of mushroom this is, but it’s rare that we find things other than weeds and cactus growing out of rockhard desiccated soil.

There seem to be two types of people, probably more, that are dealing with our current circumstances. Those who are bored and need to find a way out, to go drink, who don’t want too much of their children in their lives, and who have an imagination that envisions chaos. Then there are those with satisfying hobbies who are far from bored but have issues choosing what they want to do. This latter group can play in myriad ways with activities that satisfy the mind and consequently the soul. The former is tanked up on sugar, pop culture, and cheap beer; they don’t need hobbies as their purpose is to be in the moment of the now, where NOW means doing shit that lets others tell them how amazing they are. Back to the second group, they’ve been on the outside and the margins of what’s considered “cool” their entire lives. Colin Wilson wrote a great book about them back in 1956 called The Outsider. Well, it was a great book back when I first read it somewhere around 1986. I’d order it from Amazon, but they aren’t delivering non-essential items for between 3 and 4 weeks right now; that’s how overwhelmed they are with shipping food, I’d guess.

Not much to offer in how things went today, as I guess this is starting to become our routine. I did try to buy some more of the large white beans from Hungary that we had last week, but that little East European store is nearly gutted. Across the street, I dipped into Yussef’s Middle East Grocery and was able to get a few cans of fava beans so I could make us some foul mudammas (look it up) along with something called suho meso, which is hickory smoked dried beef. Over at Albertsons, I was able to pick up four boxes of chicken stock that is essential to my bean dishes, but the entire soup aisle is nearly empty. Dinner was a concoction that was pretty meh, as the Sechuan peppercorns ended up overpowering the veggies and shrimp that were cooked with it.

Today ended up being a bit of a blur, really, with not a lot of thought given to much of anything. There was the gecko that hung out for a while on our wall; that was riveting. I have one more walk to do, and I need to prep tomorrow’s chapter for Stay In The Magic. Maybe I should try out some mindless entertainment? That won’t really work, though, as by the time I’m done with blog duties, it’s shortly before 9:00, and I feel like a shower after finishing this post.

Steps were right at 19,000 for 8.8 miles or 14.3 kilometers, giving me a solid 185 minutes of activity today.

Walk, read, and work on organizing photos. As we are no longer driving anywhere, there’s no opportunity for Caroline to continue reading Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann to me. Our routine for over 30 years now has been for Caroline to read out loud to me while we drive unless the view is so spectacular that she must watch it or she starts getting sleepy, which causes her to stumble in focusing on words and their order, it’s kind of comical really.

I returned to organizing the long-neglected images we dragged back from Germany in the mid-90s and I’m done removing duplicates and things that would never again have a purpose. Regarding any perceived purpose for those images, the idea is that they’ll fall into the back of my blog, posted as close as I can get to the dates we created them, and some future civilization will reassemble the trajectory our lives were taking back then.

Going through our fresh food, it turns out that I make too much of anything I’m preparing, and instead of particular foods being consumed and moving on to something on the next day, we are saddled with at least four portions of most everything. A week ago, I made egg salad with a dozen eggs, figuring it would disappear with the two of us home in a few days – wrong! Only today are we done with it. Similarly, toilet paper for the two of us is not being used as quickly as I thought it might. I believe it took a solid week to go through a roll, so today, we dated the inside of the roll then when it’s finished, we’ll know exactly how long it lasted. If this is true, I’m embarrassed at how many weeks of TP we have. Then again, I’m not feeling sorry for anyone else as for 31 years, we ONLY use single-ply toilet paper, and nobody likes that stuff; we’ve even had complaints from visitors.

Then I go out for yet another walk and marvel at just how beautiful the sky is today. No, I did not take this photo the other day when I posted a similar photo; it’s seriously been this nice. To be honest, almost every day in the Phoenix area is so nice, and it seems like we rarely have clouds in the sky under most circumstances.

Back home and needing a break from the computer, I head to the bathroom to scrub the shit out of it. Oh, we are out of Comet after I clean the toilet? No problem, I’ll just order some from Amazon. Nope, they are sold out. Home Depot is sold out, too. I can guess EVERYONE is sold out of scrubbing cleansers of any type. While everyone is talking about the shortage of toilet paper, I see nobody talking about how it seems that all cleaning products are out of stock. Merde. Insult meet injury: I just broke the mop. Please, Store Gods, have a mop waiting for me as I venture out into the zone de pest… I’m back from my outing, and in an uncrowded Albertson’s, I scored the mop, two replacement heads because I swear that after I buy a mop, I can never get new heads (and they change the design to thwart my efforts), some window cleaner and nothing else, because I didn’t need anything else.

For ten days straight, maybe 9 (I don’t want to reread Day 0.5 right now), one of many silver linings to this situation is that Caroline and I walk together multiple times a day, not just early morning and after dinner. I’m able to prepare all of our meals, and we get to eat together, well as much as two people sitting at their respective desks can do such a thing. I hope that answers your questioning mind right now where you might wonder if we have a dining table; no, we don’t. While we’re on this subject, we don’t have anything like a couch or guest chairs anymore either; we do have one folding chair and a weaving bench if we need a second place to sit. Obviously, we don’t own a television, and our bed is a futon that sits low enough to the floor that my 56-year-old knees sometimes groan as I get up in the morning.

Caroline has requested I be a bit more vigilant in my noting of our menu as she’s finding our isolation rather luxurious so far. Tonight’s meal was a flash-fried ranchera steak covered in a ton of garlic sauteed in butter along with Calabacitas, which is zucchini, fresh corn, onions, and lime juice. With the dishes done, it’s time yet again for a walk.

Earlier today, I put together Day 1 of Stay In The Magic so I can publish it in the morning. Funny, after not reading a word of it in 8 years, it’s like I just finished it yesterday. Well, I’m about done with this day and need to pass this on to Caroline for proofreading, and then we can both just chill out. Walk stats for today were as follows: 18,147 steps for 8.5 miles or 13.8 kilometers and 147 active minutes.

Sunday mornings are typically quieter here in Phoenix, but today, with traffic reduced because so many people are trying to self-isolate, it’s exceptionally quiet. It nearly feels like we are somewhere on vacation as the songs of the birds are heard from far and wide.

Breakfast on Sunday has been had at a restaurant for so long that it might be our one real food habit. Today, for the first time in countless years, we are at home enjoying a relatively peculiar breakfast of Nduja Rustica, which is a slightly spicy spreadable Calabrian sausage made of mangalitsa pig that cooks up like chorizo and to that, I added some leftover Sahlen’s Smokehouse Dogs from Buffalo, New York, and cooked it all together in scrambled eggs.

Now’s the time to start dreaming about our next vacations, and at the top of the list before we consider flying is a drive to the Oregon Coast, maybe including a swing through Yellowstone, too. Then, there are restaurants to visit to celebrate the freedom of choice after these quarantines come to an end. What will our first concert be?

My day was spent far from the news, working on preparations for publishing my book titled Stay In The Magic – A Voyage Into The Beauty Of The Grand Canyon here on my blog, the first time it’s been available electronically.

From there, I also worked on consolidating and subsequently deleting a couple of thousand images that had been hanging around since the early 1990s. I kept the important ones that were truly representative of our work back then in Frankfurt, Germany. The image above is from March 1993 and is the incomplete cover art for a record on Rising High Records out of London. Sadly, or maybe just whatever, things got tossed around, and sometimes files were corrupted, fonts lost, or software companies stopped supporting products that are more than 25 years old, so what happened to the complete cover with text is beyond my scope of knowledge. Of course, we could scan one of the old CDs or LPs, but it wouldn’t have the same quality as the digital copy. We had just gotten a copy of some software that I think was called ManneQuin, and with the help of Photoshop 2.5, CorelDraw 3.0, 3D Studio 3.0, and a lot of hash, we made stuff as we explored the world of 3D. Believe it or not, by this time, we had already been using either Turbo Silver or Imagine on the Commodore Amiga or 3D Studio 1 & 2 and then 3.0 for about three years.

That was pretty much day 8 of self-isolation, but of course, there was walking, though not as much as the previous days. Step count comes in at 16,424, giving me 141 active minutes to cover 7.6 miles or 12.4km. For the week ending today, I managed 127,673 steps, climbed 118 floors, and burned 27,712 calories, covering 59.4 miles or 96 kilometers. For my German readers, that’s Frankfurt to Marburg up north.

What a horrible time to be in Arizona after the rains and a wild bloom of allergens. How are we supposed to differentiate a dry cough caused by coronavirus from a dry cough brought on by pollen? Add a bit of early morning headache due to slightly sensitive sinuses, and in minutes; one might diagnose oneself with full-blown COVID-19, never mind that there’s no fever. A couple of hours later, whatever hysterical symptoms we thought we were feeling subsided. By midday, after being home all day and snacking a bit too much, a nap starts to sound good, but is this a sign of fatigue? Better go for another walk. With all the walking and beautiful sunshine, it’s easy to feel pretty good over the course of the day.

Out on our walks, the landscape is still lush due to all the soaking things have gotten and the birds of spring are active and full of song. Caroline has taken to bringing our binoculars with her while we are underway, and along our path, she’s been spotting Gila Woodpeckers, Starlings, House Finches, Anna’s Hummingbirds, and Great-tailed Grackles. Occasionally, we spot a lizard in the sun, but not for long before it scampers out of view.

It being Saturday, this is typically a good day to connect with the Engelhardt’s and that’s what we did this afternoon for about two hours. Skype with video connectivity is a treasure, but jeez, do I wish we were in Germany right now? If they shut down that country, there will not be looting, but here in America, that’s a situation that authorities might have to contend with. Oh, how nice it would be to be somewhere where people are going to sing or simply accept the free time to dig deep into their hobbies and minds and not fret about the end of the world.

Caroline is busy over at her sewing machine trying out how to make face masks. It’s a slow process making the first one as she’s checking out what size to make for me and what size would be best for her. What works for me sits nearly over her eyes, so adjustments are being worked on.

Time for another walk while trying to avoid the larger world and its heavy questions.

How long until the call for the removal of an ineffective president? How long will we stand for those in office who profited off their knowledge of the pandemic while not warning Americans or simply staying quiet as they watched the storm approach? Who will work to reassure an America that is likely on the edge of panic?

Our current situation has been exacerbated by a narcissistic mirror image of who many Americans had become themselves: shallow and greedy, content to simply look better than someone else. We are on the precipice of reaping what we’ve sown. Years ago, in learning computer programming we were taught about GIGO – garbage in, garbage out. After fifty years of Twinkies, sitcoms, reality TV, Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous, celebrity for celebrity’s sake, and the worshipping at the foot of wealth, we are not prepared intellectually to understand the gravity of our self-obsession and preoccupation with banalities that make the group dumber and produces the damage of garbage in, garbage out.

We could rise out of this better, or we can wallow in the fear of uncertainty. Sadly, our leadership is directly responsible for creating much, if not all, of the uncertainty. Why nobody around the maniacal enfant fickkopf is sidestepping him to speak the truth feels like a catastrophe. I see kowtowing of officials as if Nero, Stalin, Pol Pot, Hitler, and Kim Jong-il were all rolled into one man who has become a kind of Mango Mussolini. It is almost 30 days since this high school dropout, former drug addict, idiot savant, whose major questionable skill is talking, first wrote about the COVID-19 tsunami. Senators with firsthand knowledge of the implications of what was taking place moved two weeks earlier than that to liquidate stock holdings to protect themselves while toeing the line of Commander Sycophant by not saying a word about their impressions of the impending problems. By mid-day, most of the Senators were cleared of having acted in bad faith, but one still stands out, and while he says his decision was driven by what was in the news, it still appears untoward.

With Trump abdicating the traditional role as president, it appears we’ll fracture into 50 or so statewide presidents in the form of our governors while the Justice Department is trying to suspend certain constitutional protections, including habeas corpus, as long as they decide their definition of emergency warrants it. So while the rest of the world just deals with their shitty hand, we have a government that is apparently afraid that we’re going to have an unmanageable uprising with looting and other fuckery. That’s it; my daily political screed is over.

Today is the eighth day of eating at home, and while we certainly stocked up for a solid two weeks (actually a bit more), I’m curious how much money we are saving by not going out to eat. Then, just as I wonder how much we are saving, I also start wondering how places like Dominick’s and Eddie V’s are doing, considering they are on the top end of luxury dining here in Phoenix. Turns out that both are still open and offering food to go. Visiting Dominick’s website, I learned that not only do they deliver, but you can drive up, and they’ll bring your meal out to your car. Well, this, then, is one of the world’s most expensive drive-thru “fast food” joints I might ever have the opportunity to visit. The idea of eating a tomahawk ribeye and Caroline enjoying their amazing scallops after we pull around the corner to snarf our $150 lunch down as though we just picked up food at In & Out is an opportunity too surreal to pass up. I’ll post impressions after we visit Dominick’s Drive-thru.

Committed to not diving into another pool of bad news, I tuned into a documentary about Darwin, California, on the edge of Death Valley so I could be witness to their tragedy, which might make my own seem less impactful. Hmm, this is the first movie or feature-length anything I’ve watched since October when we took in Lighthouse with Willem Dafoe. Not sure I can finish it as at 22 minutes into the film the trainwreck is on a collision course with tragedy.

Walking took me 19,182 steps around the neighborhood. It took me 175 active minutes to cover almost 9 miles or 14.5 kilometers.