John Wise

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.

Of course, Millennials don’t care about protecting others; they are not Homo Sapiens. Some years ago, back in October 2015, I wrote a story for my TimefireVR blog about “A New Species.” In that article, I postulated an idea that Homo Sapiens at a genetic level had realized its species was doomed and that unbeknownst to any of us, our genetics had mutated with an effort to create a new type of person that would be ready for a future not based on our mindless locust-like tendencies. The earth needs a version of humans that will care for and respect the planet, while Homo Sapiens have proven they are not capable. This is the dawn of that new beginning. Look at the clear waters in the canals of Venice, the clean air over China, and soon the unpolluted air over America. The age of the selfish Sapien is closing, giving rise to Homo Intelligens. You can read my old story by clicking the date above or clicking here.

Back on February 27, 2010, I published an article about Universal Basic Income called the W.I.S.E. Theory or World Income Stabilization Economic Theory, which was premised on a made-up character named Dr. Joseph Marcusia (not the real name of the barista I used as a reference model). The main idea behind my concept was that each American is potentially worth $100,000 and is taxed at 100% until they start working. Then, over time, with further education, community participation, volunteering, etc., the person would move into lower tax brackets until reaching higher and higher incomes before plateauing, which would then allow them to opt out of the UBI. Read this article by clicking here or the date above.

Last November, my post was called, There’s No Time to Waste, about how precious our time here is and how much of it is flittered away. Right about now, I think there are a lot of people considering the conditions of what they have to look forward to and the danger that a resource that most take for granted is devilishly intertwined with the general health of the collective and not just the individual.

I Am The Toad was penned on April 24, 2019, and was written from the perspective of a toad that lectures us about our feeble 200,000-year existence on earth, where frogs and toads have lived for 370 million years, and how we were creating our exit due to environmental pressures we were carelessly exerting on our planet.

It’s as though my writing was building up for this time when we humans might reawaken to what’s important, such as all things beautiful. On March 14, 2019, I published my story titled Excruciating Beauty, which laments our ugliness and ends with me stating that We need to learn to share more beauty and create more happiness.

Writing one year ago this month was a busy time. My mind was engaged in larger existential questions and as I delve through these old blog entries tagged as Thoughts, I find many relevant topics that will hopefully find resonance in people should we escape the sickness that is just getting started. A day before the previous entry, I penned this one, titled Living / Dying, where I posited: It takes a man dying to let people know he’s lived a good life while a man alive may never let anyone know he is alive at all. We pop into existence with all the potential of something that approaches the infinite or at least as much as human capability allows. Then, too often, we squander our most limited resources before we pop out of existence to join the astral plane. What did we do to validate our existence, not necessarily for others, but for ourselves?

And then, just the day before writing of our very existence, I was talking about being Torn Asunder. This March 12th, 2019, blog post looks at our division and mistrust and now today, nearly a year later, we are being asked to trust and come together for the common good. Where was the leadership asking this of us when times were GREAT?

Just a day before, the flurry of thoughts that were consuming me had me ask, Here is our disconnect. While we’ve been entertaining ourselves to death, the force of nature has been busy creating the conditions that will task us with the herculean chore of rearranging the molecular structure that is embodied in the fabric of our existence and that of being knowledge-driven entities. How, then, do we go about placing the 21st-century equivalent of the shovel into the clutch of humans who need to get to work building our future? This is a fragment from The Enigmatic Age of Digital Complexity.

March 10th, 2019, I find myself writing Love Your Time as, over the course of all my years of sharing thoughts, it seems that LOVE has been an ever-present theme.

I’m going to end this Self-Isolation Day 6 entry with a nod to what I wrote on February 27th, 2019, titled We Are Neanderthals. Here’s an excerpt:

I feel overwhelmed by the awareness that we are squandering the resource of knowledge by pandering to a majority we dare not ask to abandon their primitive base nature. We are rewarding behaviors incompatible with a species at the cusp of ever-greater enlightenment…

…As a society and species, we are marginalizing the better half of our potential found in caring, thinking, sharing, and cultivating a culture that has largely been relegated as being secondary to a perceived constant threat from the “other.”

Then, before calling it quits, I remember I wanted to track my exercise regime here. I managed to eke out 16,600 steps, which comes to 7.7 miles or 12.5km, which somehow let me capture 152 active minutes. I was about to hit save when I thought of something missing from these previous days. To stay healthy during our plague, we must be vigilant in washing our hands and maintaining social distancing; meaning stay at least 6 feet or 2 meters away from others, exercise, get proper sleep, and try to minimize the need to visit shops or other people. While it’s not a forced quarantine yet, I’m guessing that’s coming right around Monday. *Update: Not 2 minutes after posting this, I go to Drudge Report and see that the Washington Examiner is reporting that as soon as the National Guard and Military are in place, this will probably be announced before the end of the weekend.

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.