130 days and 80 blog entries ago, I wrote my first self-isolation post to chronicle our time staying at home. This was going to be a daily post about what promised to be an extraordinary moment in our lives. We made the decision to self-isolate before San Francisco committed to a lockdown and a full two weeks before our state of Arizona decided it was in our best interest to issue a stay-at-home order. After less than two weeks, the writing task grew burdensome, becoming a reflection of anxiety triggered by watching a country doing everything wrong to suppress the outbreak. Documenting the lunacy was going to make me crazy, so I diverted my attention. More than that, though, I never thought back then that things would be getting worse by the middle of summer, no matter how incompetently state and federal officials were acting.

But here we are, and I feel like some kind of update is in order. I’m in need of new shoes as I’ve put 581 miles on my current pair in less than 90 days. I’ve walked 903 total Covid-miles since we locked our door and threw away the key. At some point, our bodies seemed to be craving junk food,  but the In N Out we opted for wasn’t the greatest, which had me feeling I was losing the taste for fast food after all this home cooking. On another day, I picked up a pizza that did, in fact, hit the spot. So did the brisket from HEK Yeah Barbecue. And two stops out in Globe, Arizona, for Mexican food were both terrific, so I’m not fully against going out for dinner again. That’s pretty much our extent of eating out in 130 days, besides the obligatory visits to grocery stores. My trusty digital travel companion Marlene (my Surface Book) grows dusty as it sits on my right, aging without purpose. I think Caroline has been in our car maybe half a dozen times since mid-March. Our lives remain different and stuck in the loop of a virus.

While this new stage in life has become routine, it still feels temporary and that, somehow, things are going to change. I have some thoughts about that change.

Predictions:

I’ve never been in the driver’s seat when it comes to predictions, so this exercise in making them is nothing more than folly. For some background on my lack of ability to ordain the future, let me share the following: In 1977, I heard punk rock for the first time and thought it was the next big thing, but by 1979, I’d moved on to the next bigger thing, industrial music and, a year after that, power electronics or noise. Punk took off in 1991 with Nirvana, while industrial and noise still haven’t had their moments in the sun. In 1988, I installed Turbo Silver on my Amiga computer, and two years later, I clamored to get the very first copy of Imagine, another 3D software application, while I was in Germany. I just knew that everyone would be learning how to model and animate wrong. My internet cafe in 1995 didn’t have private terminals to view porn, so the draw didn’t quite work out. Then, in 1998, I was certain there’d be a revolution in clustered computing, giving kids the power of supercomputers – yeah, that never happened. Jump to 2014, and virtual reality was going to be explosive – nope, again. My career as a trendsetter has an abysmal record, and I can now see that those things I enjoy might actually suffer from finding popularity due to my interest. Jeez, I wonder how many authors I’ve hurt and how many musicians I’ve kept in poverty? Anyway, this entry is not a mea culpa of my personal cultural failures; it is about my predictions for our dystopian future so that my being wrong once again saves humanity from my skewed sense-certainty of what comes next.

There will not be a return to normal as we once knew it. Over the past few days, the news is trickling in that antibodies against COVID-19 only last about 90 days, and with that, it is likely that immunity from a vaccine will also only be good for about 90 days. So, if this trickle is destined to be a flood on confirmation that the best we can hope for is about 90 days of protection, that means this virus will continue to devastate humanity. As far as the vaccine is concerned, my money would be that people who are willing to travel by air will be one part of those on the priority list of who receive it. Law enforcement, health care workers, educators, food handlers, farmworkers, and the military will be the others at the top of the list.

I believe that sporting events, restaurants, concerts, and theaters are all going to be greatly altered and, in many cases, will just close up shop. For the anti-vaxxers, anti-maskers, and flat-earthers, I’ll posit they will be marginalized from performing their economic consumption online and eating at home as they’ll be barred from entering establishments that will be barely hanging on. Travel as we knew it is over as how will communities know if those visiting aren’t carrying the virus with them? As tax and tourism revenue disappear, so will health services, which will drive a deeper wedge between locals and visitors.

The movies, theater, concerts, and other shared public gathering experiences will be too potentially harmful to return. One has to wonder how movies will be created unless they, too, become part of the critical workforce that will have access to a vaccine. Regarding that vaccine, if the average time for antibodies to be active is 90 days, then what about those people where antibodies are only active for a few weeks and the risk they will still pose in infecting others?

Without a demand of the American people to adapt and contribute to themselves, their communities, and an evolving workplace, we’ll wither in stagnation, which will fuel national despair that we may never dig out of. Malaise will be where the United States heads under our current lack of leadership. There are moments that are starting to feel like we could reach a tipping point that will flash over our country like a raging storm, and once that panic sets in, we’ll be hard-pressed to return to anything remotely normal.

If you are old or poor, America is done with you. If your children attend public school, your life is expendable. If you work in healthcare, you may die treating the old and poor, but if you work in an upscale facility that caters to the wealthy, you’ll have the supplies you need while you’ll be able to afford private online tutoring for your children.

Instead of declaring a national emergency and creating a new Manhattan Project where the objective is to educate our citizens, broaden our tolerance for the spectrum of cultures that live upon our lands,  and share the wealth and opportunity across the country, we will continue testing the limits of cruelty.

As the virus mutates and continues to take its toll, many people will question bringing children into the world, and subsequently, not feeling a serious purpose or hope for a positive future, we’ll see a surge in suicide. Despair will then give America exactly what it wants, a dystopian reality where the shit hit the fan, validating our fear of the future.

Over the past 12 months, I’ve posted 166 blog entries totaling 208,897 words for an average of 1,251 words per post. While this is factually accurate, it doesn’t take into account that I posted the book I wrote a decade ago about the Grand Canyon, and over those 19 days, there are 85,401 words belonging to it. So, of all my other 147 exercises in writing, those missives were a mere 840 words each on average. If you pick up an air of mild disappointment, you wouldn’t be wrong, though the fact that I wrote nearly every other day is nothing to be sad about.

Last year, for 37 days, from early May to nearly mid-June, I walked the streets from Berlin to Zagreb, and during that time, I wrote every day without fail. I was prolific and was able to pen 77,458 words in order to capture a thousand details that would have been lost in time had the effort not been spent organizing electrons on digital paper. That was 2,093 words per day, which, as far as I’m concerned, proves to me that I should travel a lot more.

Since January 1st, 2019, there have been 550 days; of those, I’ve made 278 blog posts totaling 328,205 words. Why do I know this and the above numbers? I’ve started a spreadsheet where each line entry is the title, date, and word count that will ultimately detail each of the 2,333 blog posts I’ve made public here at www.johnwise.com. Maybe this is a silly exercise, but I’m curious how many words I’ve written since started blogging back on January 1, 2005, when I was 41 years old. At this moment, I’m calculating that it will be somewhere near 2.2 million words, but maybe it’s closer to 2.7 million, which means I only need to write about another 280 blog entries to reach 3,000,000 words. That raises the question: what value will it have been to have written 3 million words? You know, I don’t have a really good answer, but when I reach that point, I can assure you that I’ll lament that I’ve not reached 5 million.

Trends that start to emerge that should have been obvious is that I like writing a lot more when we are traveling. In November 2019 we visited Oregon, and I found 20,089 words with which to write about our vacation, which is extraordinary when you consider how many times we’ve been up there. One year prior, we were again in Oregon at the same time of year, and all I could muster was 15,334 words for an equivalent amount of time. We had a 21-day vacation in Europe in 2018 that took us to Germany, Austria, France, Switzerland, Italy, and Hungary. I had 47,457 words that needed recording so our memories could be enhanced as time passed. Then, there was a trip to Alaska back in the summer of 2017 that started less than two weeks after I fired my entire company. As emotionally distraught as I was, I was still able to draw 18,057 words out of me, but this was one of the most difficult trips I’d been on due to the baggage I was carrying.

Back in 2014, I started a new company, and even before that, I was deeply immersed in all things virtual reality. To a degree, I thought I was a bit burned out on blogging as I’d lost sight of it being an exercise in writing and advancing those skills. To have written only six entries on my own site during 2014 and then another three that were posted on the VR site was certainly a low point. The year before, we were in Germany for the first time in 18 years, and I didn’t miss the opportunity to document every minute, so with 40,338 words and somewhere between 200 to 300 photos, we have some terrific memories to reflect on. At this point in counting words, I’m back on April 3, 2013, with 543 blog entries consisting of 539,616 words. I’m 25% of the way through, and my average word count has dropped to 994 words per entry.

While cataloging my word count from 2012, I just learned that from the two trips we’ve made to Alaska to raft the Alsek River, we’ve spent a total of 26 days in this remote corner of North America, and I’ve shared 41,000 words exactly about our experiences. But then I crawl further back into 2011 and the writing is on the wall. It seems like I could barely be bothered to blog very much, and when I did, it wasn’t as verbose as I appreciate now that I’m older. I’m happy that there is a loose record of things, and on many of our trips, there are extensive musings, but I certainly considered my photography as the more important aspect of what I was documenting.

This brings me to a point I believe I’ve made before somewhere here on this blog: writing should be an activity that is a matter of habit for everyone. Even if it were just once a week, though I’d insist that daily writing while traveling should be obligatory, I believe people would have a better perspective on how amazing their lives are and how important it is to fill their days with moments and activities that are worth remembering. I just relearned that Caroline finished her first big weaving project, where she made yellow and purple towels back on June 18, 2011. By July 10, 2013, I was immersed in playing with graphics software that was about to lead me to the Oculus Rift and virtual reality. On August 15, 2016, Caroline and I saw King Sunny Adé perform at the MIM. I still have 1,696 blog entries, of which I need to record the title, date, and word count; I’m sure I’ll be finding other surprises and also wishing that I’d filled in the gaps.

Midway through 2010, Caroline must be tired of my obsessive-compulsive disorder as she asks with only minor indignance, “Are you really going to go through all 2,339 blog entries to figure out how many words you’ve written?” My answer was something like, “Hey, I’m already through 701 of them, so yeah, that’s exactly what I’m gonna do.” Ten minutes later, she’s installed WP Word Count and shows me that I’ve published 1,127,519 words over the years or about half of what I thought I’d find. I immediately saw that my shortest blog entry was just two words, and the longest one, excluding my book, was about my journey into synthesizers, which is 5,298 words. My average blog entry is 474 words long. When I started blogging in 2005, I kept up a great pace until the spring of 2008, when I published my 1,000th entry. It was originally my intent to publish a “Photo Of The Day” with a blurb about the image for one year. After more than three years, I slowed down as I needed a break.

I’ve got to admit that I’m a bit disappointed that between 2008 and 2020 I’ve only added about 1,300 more blog entries. On the bright side, during 2005, my first year blogging, I was averaging 235 words per entry, while in 2019, I averaged 916 words per entry. Not that more words are better, but I think over the 15 years of writing here at johnwise.com, the craft has become easier, and at times, there are levels of details I could have never captured back then. Since January 1st, 2005, there have been 5,664 days between now and then, which means, on average, I’ve written 199 words per day. Ernest Hemingway recommended writing 500 a day and Jack London hammered out 1,500 a day, but I never aspired to be a writer. My inspiration was to compel myself to take more photos and have some intention behind them while practicing describing what I was seeing. So I shouldn’t be disappointed at all as I certainly progressed in the task I gave myself at the end of 2004.

Finally, I was looking at Marcel Proust’s “Remembrance of Things Past,” which rings in as the Guinness World Record holder as the longest novel at 1,250,000 words well, I’m almost there, but if I want to reach 2,500,000 lifetime words in the next ten years, I’ll need to pen 376 words on average per day. That would allow my internet writing to compare to a book of over 6,000 pages. I can get this. As for the earlier note of maybe seeing 5 million words, well, that would require me to write more than 1,000 words every day between now and my 67th year. That sounds tough.

One hundred and ten days of self-isolation! I was hoping it wouldn’t be this long, but by now, I’m not going to be surprised when, at 220 days, I’ll be sharing a self-isolation update. “But what do dead birds, panties, and taco sauce have to do with self-isolation, John?” I hear you asking. Well, I’m happy you asked. You see, while Caroline and I were out on our early walk that starts the day, I had my bucket and grabber with me. The first 3/4’s of our walk was your normal stuff like plastic bottles, straws, rubber gloves, plastic bags, dead birds, single-use cups, lids, scraps of paper and candy wrappers, fast food bags, pieces of shit-stained toilet paper, napkins which also appear to have been used for public defecation, a couple of bags with dog feces, half-a-dozen empty mini-bottles mostly of Fireball cinnamon whisky, and aluminum cans. Those are the normal things.

On the last leg, we stumbled into an explosion of a homeless woman’s gear. However, I can’t be certain if this cache belonged to a homeless woman because how many homeless people would be traveling with a dozen pairs of panties? Not that any of them were big, but most would qualify as butt-floss. Whomever they once belonged to, they now belonged to the street. Being the dainty type they were strewn down the street for quite a ways. I’ve got to say that picking up clothes, rags, socks, and shoes on these litter collections is kind of grody. You see, I’ve picked things up that can elicit a deep retch when the smell of the thing is overpowering. You never want to look too close once the decision is made to eliminate the eyesore from public view, but you just know I had to inspect those women’s drawers. The first, second, and third pair after a quick glance, all looked fine. So much so that I started thinking that maybe somebody was moving and something fell from the vehicle until that one pair showed up I wished wasn’t in the clutch of my grabber. The ubiquitous thong, when worn during ovulation, does exactly what the euphemism says it will do: it flosses the folds below. That caked and dried goo was exactly what greeted my trained eye as the grabber moved them toward the bucket that was only an arms-length away from my face. Of course, at that moment, I wanted to throw my catch back into the stream of blowing underwear, but then I’d be littering, which would negate exactly what I was trying to do, and so those encrusted funky panties laid atop the rest of the trash until I could bury them below something else.

So, where does the taco sauce come in? I could tell you that what was in those underwear resembled taco sauce, but that would be too easy a pun to play. No, the taco sauce was found in a dozen packets in the street, just down the way from the panties. Strangely enough, while I do find lots of small plastic containers with those small snap-on plastic lids that Filiberto’s hands out and a lot of empty ketchup packets, I don’t find many mustard, mayonnaise, or taco sauce packets. When a bunch of unused taco sauce was obviously emergency-ejected from a passing car,  one might wonder just what happened to the frantic minds in the car that panicked and had to rid the vehicle of all that still unopened taco sauce? It’s not like we ever find partial bottles of Fireball, half cans of beer, little baggies of white powder, or marijuana buds littering the street.

Enough about panties and taco sauce; this is an update here on Day 110 of Self-Isolation. A recap of some stuff: at 60 days, Arizona had 12,674 cases of COVID-19; at 90 days, we were at 34,600; and now, just 20 days after that, we are ripping right along at 87,425. Why is this? Our governor, in order to gain favor from Trump and company, went cowboy and unleashed the horde, and now the horde is releasing mayhem upon our hospitals. Personally, I’d love nothing more than for our healthcare workers across America to go on strike, demanding that every citizen, without exception, other than small children, be required to wear a mask. Nobody is asking people to wear a pair of these skanky panties I was picking up off the street, just a simple old mask for the 15 minutes or so they are in the store. Sadly, our rodeo clown culture is more interested in tempting fate of the Coronabull and is running around bareback. A meme has gone through the American illiterati that masks are harming people as though no one has worn a balaclava during the winter, nor have doctors and nurses worn masks in surgery.

Back to the numbers: Germany today had 503 new cases out of their population of 83 million, while Arizona, with a population of 7.3 million people, saw over 3,300 new cases. To me, this is the difference manifested by an educated populace on one hand and a citizenry made up of idiots on the other. This old song has been sung here far too many times, but to this day, I regularly speak with people who don’t recognize our shit situation nor understand or care to understand what the underlying causes could be. Many call it our desire for freedom; they kid themselves, it’s their comfort with mediocrity.

You wanna know something? I’d rather go find that nasty encrusted butt-floss and slap it over my face and squirt the taco sauce into my eyeballs rather than be surrounded by this cowboy culture of Johnny Badasses who want to show the world how toughening up will protect them and their families from a fake pandemic. It’s nearly comical when one looks at these fundamentalist patriots and their fatalistic outlook and contrasts their hysteria about masks and minor restrictions with their alleged understanding of democracy and freedom. I should have just shared my story about the panties, huh?

Warning: My apologies upfront to those who may feel I’m making a VERY poor analogy in this blog entry that appears to be drawing similarities between one of the most heinous acts of the 20th century with our current epidemic. I must insist that I’m not trying to equate our current situation with the tragic events from World War II, but I am trying to strike a chord of relevance and contrast of the violence manifested upon a people due to their religious beliefs back then and that a kind of intellectual holocaust has been waged against the American mind over the past 50 years. It is not meant to be implied that the Nazis’ attempt to exterminate a people is in any way equal to our current moment, where the situation surrounding a pandemic is requiring people to self-isolate and take precautions to protect others’ lives. By using such an egregious moment out of history, I meant to provoke the idea of the futility of trying to perceive a new day when it seems that all hope is lost. Out of my experiences, I cannot see another time in the last 100 years that affected humanity as deeply as the carnage of World War II. Let me reiterate: I am not suffering at the direct hand of madmen; I’m trying to say below that I feel imprisoned in the straightjacket of a society bent on manifesting the horrors of stupidity and that I cannot see what life might look like on the other side. 

I cannot find my intention at this time of great uncertainty other than living without contracting COVID-19. There are no plans about life away from home as we do not know how we’ll recapture the social order of being in public. While I could direct my attention to returning to what was, that would be foolish as that modality of existence is now extinct. Those not understanding this rupture, in reality, are currently increasing the envelope that COVID-19 inhabits and are putting at risk large swaths of society. Should a vaccine arrive in the next six months, I do not believe that by the time humanity embarks on new journeys into our world, they’ll be going about their travels as they had in 2019. I admit that I have no real basis for making this type of supposition beyond my weak understanding of history and how events have played out over the course of time.

For those who are unaware of the term “phenomenology,” the best description I’ve found is from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, which states: “Phenomenology is the study of structures of consciousness as experienced from the first-person point of view. The central structure of an experience is its intentionality; it is being directed toward something, as it is an experience of or about some object.” An example of how this relates to life after our current pandemic might be something like this: you cannot know how and when you might be in Italy again after global travel restrictions are lifted, and even when they are, will you be able to visit St. Peter’s in the same way as before, or eat in a crowded restaurant? It’s easy to assume that we’ll return to what we’ve known, but there is no good reason to think that will in any way be possible. So, even if you should be able to visit Rome, you may be having an experience that is miles away from what it had been. This shift will change the nature of expectations, and the previous laissez-faire travel attitude could be a relic of another age.

It’s a given that life could just return to its treadmill existence should a bulletproof vaccine show up that can be manufactured quickly, but there is some likelihood that this will never happen. In that situation, I’m curious, once we start experiencing our altered future, how will we start to rewrite the narrative of what our trajectory is? How will our intention find its footing?

The person I’d most like to talk to about this would be a concentration camp survivor. After witnessing so much barbarism, death, loss of hope, and resigning themselves to the idea that they’d likely die in such a cruel place, what was the adjustment to “normal” life like after the camps were liberated? While I can in no way equate our situation to the insane environment of the Nazi death camps, I will take the chance to be just stupid enough to draw some very weak parallels. The barbarism practiced against the Jewish people of Europe in World War II, I’ll try to equate to the stupidity of our media-saturated, undereducated masses that must be endured by many. Death comes in the form of the disease of violence, racism, lack of social safety net, poverty, and illness that ravage people unable to afford an escape. The loss of hope is all around us, and yet we apparently do not have the needed momentum required to demand real leadership, nor do we have the knowledge to know what that might look like. Finally, I’ve nearly accepted that our jingoistic banality will smother me with its brand of wretched anti-intellectualism as it tries to suffocate the thinking out of people. Without a dream of freedom, both intellectual and movement-wise, I feel that many in our society are prisoners of their situation.

Now that I’ve drawn such a repulsive analogy from what was truly a period of horror compared to our own vapid time of pandemic ignorance, I can admit that I do not have the ability to see beyond the barbed wire of modern propaganda and cannot imagine what life might be like in a post-Boomer liberated land where selfishness and hate have ruled for too long. So, my first-person view of the future is stunted. It’s as though as this coronavirus struck us, it threw us in a kind of weak prison camp or maybe it just woke us up to the fact that many have been there all along. It didn’t occur to me that this is where many around me might be living as Caroline and I had the ability, desire, and means to venture out of routines into 952 days of travel over the past 20 years. That’s 214 times we left the Phoenix area to go out and do something other than being at home. Our vacation time per year was averaging 48 days. Without the distraction of television, interest in professional sports, or the lives of celebrities, we easily afforded ourselves a filter that made our lives look charmed in our view. Little did we know or quite realize that other people’s treadmills now appear like this self-isolation routine to us.

Sure, they had gym memberships, episodes of their favorite series, season tickets to whatever team they professed their love for, and bars in which to drown the sorrows that come from an unrealized life that is a product of the larger product that informs them as to what their lifestyle is supposed to be. Now they are without their life-support systems just as we are cut off from travel, but instead of lamenting how dearly we’d enjoy a trip to the Oregon coast right about now, we are on other adventures that involve our hobbies, our minds, and our culinary curiosities. But out of my curiosity, I’m trying to map our path to where we might be headed six months or a year from now, just as I’d map our travels, sometimes 18 months into the future.

I can’t see out more than a few weeks at best right now. Maybe if we had leadership in America, there could be something to hang a hat on and hope that our collective efforts might produce the kind of result that will allow us to even have a future. At this time, our tomorrows are clouded by a moribund stupidity that has calcified a recalcitrant man and body of government into stasis. While out here in the woods of curiosity, I become the pariah, the wolf, the untamed beast that is a danger to the soft, petulant horde that holds up its bravado with a clenched hand clinging to a gun that lends the idiot strength of force instead of force of mind.

We are at a profound turning point, and we don’t know it yet. The collective delusion of seeking out a return of yesterday is part of the old windbag’s song of making something great again when what was never returned due to humanity always having to face the new day. Our psychosis and fear of the future are blocking the people of America from embracing the necessary change that is inevitable. Just as the Nazis terrorized people of Jewish ancestry and stole not only their dignity but their hope for a better day, our greed, fear, and selfishness have stolen America’s dream for a better tomorrow. Sadly, there is likely no force aside from Martians that could possibly defeat our bulwark of dim-witted, incoherent, feeblemindedness unless we find it within.

How has my life come to this? I’m talking about my recent interest in Chinese YouTube phenom Li Ziqi. She’s one part Martha Stewart, one part silent pop star, maybe a small bit MacGyver, and at least in front of the camera, she’s all about aesthetics. Li rides horses, kills and butchers her own goats and chickens, spins wool, felts cotton she planted and harvested to make comforters for her mom, grows soybeans that she makes into soy sauce, picks all foods fresh from her farm and from the local mountains where she stocks up on flowers, ginseng, mushrooms, and other elements she requires to make the traditional Chinese craft or food she’s working on. With nearly no dialogue and a lot of soft-focus with just the right depth of field to bring our attention to the most beautiful part of what’s being framed, this powerhouse of a YouTube star has about 2.5 million more subscribers than Joe Rogan.

Li Ziqi came to my attention first from my wife Caroline, but of course, when she was telling me of her, I was listening with half an ear, if that. Then, somehow, as though YouTube heard Caroline better than I did, it suggested Li Ziqi as something I might be interested in. For days, I would see the thumbnail and wonder why. Finally, it worked on me, and I clicked it. Now I’m watching an episode every other day and have to admit it’s become a guilty pleasure. Why guilty?

Li’s is a fantasy world that removes the viewer from any concerns about modern issues or strife found in everyday life. There are few machines, lots of wood and bamboo tools, wood ovens and stoves, and comprehensive knowledge of all things that might be required to live in this natural setting while looking gorgeous and making everything look so easy. Just then, she breaks out the guitar and shows us that she can also play it and sing to boot. As far as her life out in the southern mountains of China is concerned, she’s the ruler of the domain, but that’s not all; she produces and edits her own videos and has an online shop where you can buy all types of things from the life of Li Ziqi, also spelled Liziqi.

Beyond the gigantic body of knowledge one would need for this kind of existence, I’m enchanted by her grace and movement in every task she tackles in each five to fifteen-minute ambient adventure into rural bliss. It’s art and movie magic to sell an idea that slows the world down and offers us an enhanced peek into a version of life that might only exist in fairy tales. While I don’t feel I’m the right target market, I find this to be similar to when I was 17 years old and listening to Brian Eno for the first time as I discovered a musical alternative universe. If I had to guess how long I’d remain interested? I’d venture to say I could watch another 20 episodes before redundancy sets in, but until then, I’ll sit back, lower my heart rate, and enjoy the quiet sophistication and cinematic hand that alters reality to bring me into Li Ziqi’s imagination.