John Wise

I come to a blank sheet of paper, in this case, my online editing window, and quickly try to find something to write about. Rarely does a day go by that I don’t think, “Hey, I should pen a note to my best friend and wife, telling her and the whole world how much I love her.” Then, without her right here in front of me, whatever distraction crawled into my minuscule attention span guides my brain down other paths and I’m off trying to figure out the cures for society’s problems.

Well, now I’m here and ready to start spilling sappy poetic musings out of my heart, but where does one begin extolling those passions with puny written words? I look to my blog, searching for how many other times I’ve shared this sense of Amore with my wife, and the results show me 430 out of 2,294 published posts having a reference to the word love. I don’t think the post about Crispin Glover qualifies for this list, but the WordPress search isn’t the smartest, and Glover does have the word love in it.

I then wondered: was there a thread that tied these references to love to her? Or was I speaking generally about her, the trees, oceans, and other things? It doesn’t really matter, I figure, as it was part of the subject matter, and I don’t have the time right now to read 430 blog posts of varying lengths to pull the context of a particular word out of them. The next best thing is to look at tags, and very quickly, by those and the titles of these entries, it becomes obvious that I use the word love a lot when we are traveling.

Off the top of the bat, the tag “Coast” appears 51 times, and “Oregon” shows up 37 times. What this tells me is that when Caroline and I are on the coast, we are maybe more aware of our love of one another than at other times. This is only sort of true as we know all the time where our love is and how it pulses through our days. The difference is that when we are traveling, especially in coastal regions, our time together is amplified by the fact that we are out at the edge of the ocean and not preoccupied with history, architecture, food, or other destinations that await us. We are effectively at the totality of what the day will be made of, looking at the sand and sea.

There’s another element at work when we are traveling: we are taking time for ourselves outside the routines of daily life. The time preparing for these travels and saving money for them all starts to make sense as soon as we are underway but really starts to resonate when we start to get close to 100 miles from home because, at that point, we are definitely going somewhere. With no work, chores, or the familiar to pull us into what we know, we turn our awareness on to full observation mode of what is different and what new sights and sounds await us.

The excitement of being with someone else who is enjoying this sense of adventure as much as the other makes everything all the easier. Every minute that passes builds the smiles and anticipation for what awaits us out there. We know that no matter what we find, we’ll discover something about the environment, weather, trees, surf, local eateries, history, street life, churches, museums, odd characters, lodging, or even a table we took a minute to sit down and knit and write at that will enchant us, convincing us that this trip is on track to be the greatest ever.

This comfort with each other is had at home, too. We are doing great being at home during the outbreak of COVID-19 because it’s given us even more opportunities to be together and be outside our routines. So, in many ways, this time is like a vacation, and as we get further down the road of self-isolation, I remain giddy in love that we are traveling into unknown places.

Wake up; we are not returning to normal anything. Amongst our leadership, we have a fatal complacency that is not allowing them to act in the country’s best interest; they are afraid and paralyzed. Nobody wants to call out our president, federal or local officials, or our business leaders for their failure to do something, anything. We leave it to the same old talking heads on the same old news media outlets as though Americans have lost their voice. The same voices on the right are still blaming the left while the drama of squabbles appears to be Nero’s fiddle. The world is on fire, and we don’t have a bucket to help douse the flames.

We just want tomorrow to be yesterday so we can get on with our lives as though nothing happened. That’s NOT going to be the way it is.

At least in Europe, they are already recognizing that streets are going to be repurposed for bicycle and pedestrian traffic. Without airplanes working, there’s a great rail network that will still get people around the continent. Even if we were to add to our rail service, it would be decades before we could overcome the bureaucracy and failure in vision to give us a working high-speed system that would whisk us across America. Any spare commercial space over there can easily be converted to residential space, as there’s always the need for that. But what is New York City going to do with all of its high rises?

So here we are, and we know full well that it’ll be years before air travel returns to what it was. We know that this will impact hotels, restaurants, other services, and elements of the gig economy. Real estate will take a hit if too much commercial space becomes available due to more people working from home. More of us working from home means we lose a lot of the reason behind owning a car; even in Arizona, we could rely more and more on a bike or delivery. High contact crowded workspaces will operate how? I’m referring to meat processing, in particular; I’m guessing we’ll see robots in that space sooner than later. Sporting events? Ha. Then the really big question, what about school?

School cannot be the same for at least a good while unless a vaccine is found, but then everything changes with that. Meanwhile, New York is seeing kids with something akin to Kawasaki Syndrome that appears to be coming from COVID-19. Even if we insist that kids return to the classroom, we exponentially increase the risk of killing their parents and creating those social issues. Then, if we do figure out social distancing and, temperature checks and proper hygiene for students, there will be the issue of allowing children to participate in sports such as basketball, football, and baseball. If high school and college sports are upended, where would the pros recruit players from?

When real estate, sports, travel, transportation, education, and cultural sharing are all set off-kilter, we have a looming crisis that is going to require imagination that pushes hard into a new vision. Our current political and business leadership has FAILED us in that department, and yet they will be who society turns to as the masses are afraid of the unknown, and they are about to learn just how primitive we are. Leaving us all in lockdown would have been the smart thing to do as at least then we were waiting for the return of normal but by leaving that cocoon, we are accelerating the masses, seeing just how unprepared we are for our new lives.

Sure, to me, it’s all quite easy because I’m an uneducated idiot unschooled in the fine art of political waffling, but I certainly have ideas of how to address most of it.

First and foremost is education; we must enhance our online education to embody virtual reality learning in order to maintain social gatherings. Within that virtual space, or maybe with some type of augmented reality goggles, we could even create new online group sports. To build this virtual world, we’d have to employ hundreds of thousands to build and decorate such a world, make books, lessons, and props, and create the mechanics and physics of how things work in a world meant for education instead of shooting.

Commercial real estate will either be converted into residences, though working with high-rise buildings might never really work again when elevators are dangerous places to contract a virus, so maybe we would have to mothball them. The problem is that we have scavengers and hooligans who would see this as an opportunity to steal, deface, and burn these properties in a society that sees this kind of anarchy as “giving it to the man.” Tear them down? That might be the alternative.

Travel could be made better with a combination of rail, car, and bicycles, with the added benefit that walking and bicycling are good defenses against diabetes and heart disease, two comorbidities that contribute to fatal outcomes for those who become sick with COVID-19. If we can materialize $5 trillion in 60 days to deal with a bad situation, we can also materialize $15 trillion to rebuild the framework that connects us to our country and each other.

Work, cultural sharing, and elements of travel and sports could be reckoned with by moving some of these activities into virtual environments. By moving jobs into the virtual space, we are inviting people to learn skills, practice a new type of crafting, make videos, create art, and have an environment where a lot of people can gather, share, and conduct business.

We could address land use, the environment, and city density while services and luxuries are delivered to the home no matter where people are geographically located in the United States, but all of this requires those who are most afraid of change to let go of outmoded ideas and help guide a new generation to taking the reins while making a serious effort to improve our nation.

That, or we can wait until we are all beggars.

Maybe not today, certainly not yesterday, but maybe tomorrow we will all leave the cave. By a trick of nature, its invisible and unseen hand shoved us back into the cave this year. Most were unprepared for such a primordial act and could not understand that there was a cave to be shoved back into, though I often believe that many of them never left the cave in the first place. The modern sheltered world had become a new form of Plato’s Cave with HD moving pictures on the walls, and even though the masses thought they saw daylight, they were still cowering near the flickering light of fading embers that barely illuminated their existence. To leave the cave again requires a strategy, but we are stunned that we must negotiate this exit that is so unfamiliar. The door we entered through is gone, closed by a seismic event called COVID-19. Yet we can feel the wind blowing in from somewhere, so we know that out in the darkness, a path must exist which we may be able to negotiate ourselves back into the light of day.

Our minds should be washed clean by this isolating power and safety found in the shelter of the cave, but it will require extraordinary strength to expose ourselves to the danger of being among the elements of a changing world that requires new tools to navigate our path forward. The gatekeepers of the old way were few, while the masses representing the bulk of the tribe wandered within the darkness of the false luminance of our artificial world. The controllers stood hidden at the edges, obscuring the exits; they are our politicians, the wealthy, the 1% we trusted to stand between our exposure to the larger hostile world and our safe harbor. Celebrities joined them as dancing jesters, asking us to avert our gaze from finding something within ourselves. The jesters have shown us their foolishness, and the politicians have put on display their decrepitude, their calcified minds, and spirits, which grew comfortable while keeping others from navigating between the known and unknown.

Nature, oblivious to our tragic plight, ransacked the stage on which the same old show had been playing well beyond its best by date, kicked the actors off their platform, and showed the people that these privileged few were fragile just like us. We are now witnessing that their amassed wealth offered an illusion of power, propelling them to tower like fanged beasts on gilded thrones over those who dare challenge their status. The rules of life, though, are not a complex of arcane hoops and treacherous passages; they are observances of graciousness, respect, cohesion, collaboration, and, above all, love.

We lost love. Our minds and hearts have become machines that do what we are told. We find our purpose in adopted personas that are contrivances of the mediocre within an echo chamber that affirms benign affability. The creature of discovery, music, and poetry has been rendered useless, a prop in the servitude of a system that cannot reward the unknown, the difficult, the other. Pledge allegiance to your brand, your team, your colors, or your colored ribbon, but do not give to your mind and soul.

Twenty-four hundred years ago, Plato warned us that society decays and eventually becomes a tyranny, but we blurred that image by throwing up caricatures such as mass-murdering lunatics with funny mustaches or evil overlords in the movies as being the perpetrators of mayhem, not the benign fatherly figures of polite men who are refined non-vulgarians. We were massaged by our media until this point today, where we are being bludgeoned with a total uncertainty of what is real. This frantic grasping at deception is because the cave door exit was beckoning, and the politicians themselves have become the jesters trying to ward off the commoners. We, humans, must once again pass from darkness to light and rebalance the roles of society due to the abdication of our souls and love. Those trusted to govern are frightened tyrants in love with the luxury rendered out of an insipid culture of idiots.

Think back to the days, if you are old enough, when we were convinced that love was old fashioned, sappy, ephemeral, new agey, gay, pedophilic, betraying, and impossible to find in its true form. Love, you were told only exits on the ethereal plane between you and your creator; it isn’t available to those who are unclean and still walking the earth. Love was being diminished and relegated to the afterlife while substituting career, money, and obligation to the state as the cure-all for the gravity of existence in an uncaring, cold world wrapped in fear and potential war. This was and maybe still is the fabric that those in power would like us to cling to, but who among us doesn’t feel right now that our politicians and celebrities look nakedly ineffective and inept? Have they become largely impotent as we are being asked by nature and a virus to reconsider just what it is we are doing, who we are, and how we want to continue?

There are troglodytes among us who are unevolved and afraid of life in the light of the mind and discovery. They are begging for a return before we’ve even left the cave, as watching the shadows on the walls is enough reality for their liking. Sadly, we have a media that is in step with power, trying to convince us that we do not understand enough about self-governance and money to be trusted with living our lives. Maybe they are right? Maybe with our current level of education, we would act like locusts and decimate all remaining systems on our planet; we have seemed bent on doing just that. So either we recognize our shortcomings and start elevating one another with the encouragement of finding knowledge, or I guess we’ll just have to sit back and watch this redundant and boring shadow puppetry we are all so accustomed to.

Well, that’s enough for concern; time to prepare ourselves for wholesale death by the bucketload. Sixty days of the masses being bored were enough for the armed thugs who supposedly had all been prepared for the apocalypse to demand and gain their release from lockdown. Of course, there’s the other part of this: how can our President get out and campaign if his voters are told to stay at home? Finally, if their fearless leader doesn’t need no stinking mask, obviously, they will be immune to this fake virus with fake deaths created by the fake media.

If you’ve not picked up on it yet, I’m a fake writer, a bot put here by Hillary but meant to look like I’m a stooge for George Soros and the global elite. Everybody knows the truth: those who are protesting are patriots looking out for their grandmother’s social security and will take a hit if people aren’t working. The nice thing about being a fake blogger is that I can write anything here (and often do) that not only nobody reads, nobody cares about, and nobody even sees. These words don’t really even exist right now. They are electronic representations of fantasy meant to convey nothing meaningful in any meaningful way, and yet they blink into existence on your screen and will just as quickly give way to the void, just like those protesting for their freedom by joining large groups of like-minded idiots not wearing masks.

Sixty days of having to watch spring giving way to summer, though when you live in the desert, it feels more like sorta warm, giving way to the season of really hot. Sixty days of getting used to cooking at home all the time, except those days we picked up In & Out Burgers, had a pizza and wings delivered, had Mexican food on our only drive more than a few miles from home, and the take out we grabbed from a friend who operates HEK Yeah BBQ just down the street. Sixty days of spending nearly 24 hours a day together and still smiling at one another and complaining that we still don’t seem to have enough time for each other. Sixty days of feeling like we are not part of the potential problem might have been helpful in not contributing to the premature death of someone we may have never known.

Sixty days of wondering where our vision is and why nobody has told the nearly 40 million recently unemployed to sign up for online classes of any sort and that the educational institutions should bill the government. Sixty days of wondering about our next travels and sixty days of exploring our hobbies nearly every day. Life’s been good from our perspective.

During these days of reflection and skill honing, I’ve now walked 952,972 steps, or 443.85 miles, and climbed 744 floors, or 8,928 feet. This means I average about 7.4 miles a day, 12.4 floors a day, and 15,883 steps. This was the equivalent of walking from the Lincoln Memorial in Washington D.C. to Myrtle Beach in South Carolina or from Kansas City, Kansas, to Minneapolis in Minnesota. Regarding all those floors, I’m about 1/3 up Everest by comparison. For my friends in the metric world, I’ve walked 719km, which is nearly equivalent to walking from Velika Kladuša, Bosnia and Herzegovina, across Croatia and Slovenia, climbing over the Alps of Austria and up the road into Pilsen, Czechia, for a beer.

Back to the bucketloads of death: Arizona saw its first infected person back on January 26th; on March 20th, the state had its first death, and now we have 12,674 cases of people infected with COVID-19 and 624 deaths from it. So in 55 days, we went from our first death to averaging about 11 a day, and now that we are seeing between 20 and 30 dead Arizona citizens every day, our Governor has decided that things are as good as they’re gonna get and that it’s time for us to get busy again.

Tomorrow, everything will be normal, and it will be like the virus never even happened, except for the 85,000 Americans who didn’t die from not-COVID-19. Funny how we were involved in Vietnam for 11 years between the Cold and Hot War, and during that time, we lost 58,000 servicemen, which was considered a NATIONAL TRAGEDY. We have a government that, by inaction and wishful thinking, is in part responsible for the death of 85,000 Americans in 60 days, and that’s just the way it goes. Yes, we are that stupid, but in 60 days, I was able to walk the equivalent of going from Nouakchott on the coast of Mauritania out to Tintane, Mauritania, on the edge of the Sahara. That’s in Africa, not that this has anything to do with anything but that’s just the way it is, kind of like tomorrow.

Today’s photo is the wretched view from a Self-Isolation Prison that I must stare at when searching for words I claim as my own.