Surrounded By Joy

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In the midst of it all, I live in a land of magic and wonder.

Dancing daily with dragonflies and humming birds. Honking, bleating, and chirping with an assortment of frogs or singing with wrens and a constant chorus of finches. In regular repartee with witty woodpeckers and chattering squirrels.

In the evening I take census of timid, ghostly house geckos. Check tree frog tadpoles slowly developing in the cozy environs of their nursery. Investigate if the cotton mouth is visiting the pond or any koi have gone missing. Play Where's Waldo with anoles who've crawled up to tuck themselves in on the highest fronds of the fern bed.

And I get to share it all with the beautiful soul of kindness and gentleness.

Missing

I miss . . .

. . . the theater. We were going almost every Friday, now I can't even remember the last performance we saw. (Something at Shreveport Little Theatre?)

We watched the Disney+ performance of Hamilton this weekend and were all blown away. The performances were great, but I was particularly caught up in the brilliance of the story weaving around itself, evolving thematically. I'd been wanting to plan a trip to New York, now that want's been moved up to intent, with a live performance of Hamilton as the center piece.

. . . the coffee shop. I'm desperate for a good cup of espresso and a brainstorming session. To sit in Silver Grizzly with an almost narcotic cold brew, watching people move through their individual coffee shop performances, synchronizing my own, planning in a frozen moment the set of next steps into some aspect of my future.

. . . the museum. Five years ago my relationship with art wasn't even aspirational, now there are days I know I'd be thinking and breathing so much better if I could stand quietly in the Longview Museum of Fine Arts surrounded, submerged in color and shape and story.

. . . travel. Trips with my wife to see concerts, visit museums, and be awed by nature. Personal workations to unwind my thinking about projects and processes. Trips overseas with family expanding our sense of wonder. Arkansas and Austin. Iceland and Ireland. I've finally gotten to a healthly place of acknowledging and dealing with the wanderlust that's been a drive most of my life, but now I'm getting a bit bound up again. Luckily with it being Spring and Summer, the orchard is providing a surprisingly joyful stand-in when I need to untie internal knots.

. . . the gym. I tried for the first few weeks of lockdown to create some kind of training regimen at the office with what was on hand, but that dropped off even before I had to move to my home office. All my 'gains' are going back to my waist, and it's a bit crushing.

Covering

We finally got N95 masks in for the staff thanks to the diligent efforts of our office manager.

Masks are one of the last bits required to open the office up again, the other being COVID testing, which we're doing today. It'll still be another week before we have patients back in for visits, but I'm bringing the staff back next week to start prepping.

We need to clean, take inventory, re-set up equipment which had been moved to employee homes, make sure we're all on the same page in terms of implementing safety precautions, and then check to see if there's anything else we can do to keep patients and staff safe when we fully open the following week.

I'm quite over this whole COVID19 thing myself, but I'm also well aware COVID's not over us. If I take shortcuts out of emotional exhaustion and apathy I become culpable for causing harm which is not a situation I'll accept.

Our daily visits are down about 30% for reasons both real and specious, but our income is down by almost 50%, so while keeping staff and patients safe, I do need to figure out how to ramp things back up in shortest possible order, which is going to be the most stressful part of June for me.

I still have issues accepting I can't control all the parts of a system and, in a situation like this, non-acceptance is just fuel for a raging bonfire of anxiety. Managing that fire will be as important as solving the problem stoking it.

I also have to figure out what to do about the world at large. My wife and I have been on lockdown for the last two months, but once staff and patients return our quarantine is over. I'm unsure if or how to take advantage of that.

They gym opens back up next week, and I miss lifting, but I'm not sure it's a reasonable activity to engage in at the moment. I also need building supplies for projects at the house, and I likely will be making a Lowe's trip at some point.

I also miss the theater terribly, and while so far none of our venues have announced any performances, it's going to be a hard call when they do.

In the meantime, Gordi's released a brilliant EP out ahead of her next full album:

Community

I'm a very late comer to the show Community.

I like watching people be kind to each other. Thinking about it, I realize now it's one of the main reasons I'm so attracted to Robin Williams.

He was sharp as a whip and twice as fast, so there was the joy of an engaged intellect in watching him, but more than that he was charming in a way which usually came from being kind. His wit often did make others the butt of a given joke, but it rarely felt malicious, and his general behavior exhibited a genuine sense of empathy and kindness.

Similarly, Jimmy Stewart's take on Elwood Dowd in the movie Harvey. A sot, certainly, but also a person with a genuine interest in others and their well being. People were worth both his time and attention.

Community has it's share of standard sitcom characters in Jeff, Britta, and Pierce, and Shirley's depth of kindness is shallowed by the enforced connections to a judgmental form of Christianity, but Abed, Troy, Annie, and Dean Pelton are characters grounded in true affection for others. They find intrinsic meaning in treating each other with dignity and joy, even when they aren't receiving it, and I love watching them interact when they're firing on those cylinders.

I wish more shows would be brave enough to leave the sitcom snark and soap opera drama behind to tell stories about people just enjoying each other's company.

"Am I a frame in your bigger picture?"

We received our Paycheck Protection Program loan, as well as a small loan directly from the SBA, so despite our revenue having dropped off by around 50%, we should be able to keep everyone employed and insured until August. Hopefully by that point there will have been enough improvement in treatment, PPE supply chains, and general management of things that we'll be able to be in a more normal operating position.

As it is, we're down to 2 N95 masks, were only able to order more this past Monday, and those have a 2 to 4 week lead time. So even as Governor Abbott in all his wisdom has decided to drop his shelter orders even as the Texas rate of infection climbs, I'm not opening our doors until we have the equipment to keep staff and patients reasonably safe.

I am flabbergasted by the Open Now protestors, even as I understand the anxiety they must be feeling and how easy it is for anxiety to express itself through anger. Still, the combination of ignorance, conspiracy theory, white nationalism, and right wing astroturfing leaves me almost aghast.

I've mentioned before, we've been fortunate in so many ways, even more so with these loans coming through. I would be in an incredible state of panic if I were in the employment circumstances so many people have ended up in, but I can't imagine risking other peoples health and lives just to vent that panic.

Of course the cherry on top of all this is the Yam in Chief for whom black men kneeling in protest of murder are sons of bitches, but armed white men storming public buildings for the right to spread infection are good citizens.

This has always been the county I was born to, but it is not the one I was unsuccessfully indoctrinated into believing in.

But music! Because Noah Kahan put out a new EP:

Faouzia has another new single:

As does Fenne Lily:

And a wonderful new song from Gordi:

And if that's not enough, I recently ran across a song by Scars On 45 from their eponymous 2011 album:

The charm of this song lies mostly in witty clichés: "Of everything I've lost, I miss my mind the most." "And if a look could kill you'd need a license for your face."

But the chorus holds the lines which truly capture my imagination and adoration: "If I could be just a train fare richer I'd change my needs"

For me, the story is told just in that simple phrase: A woman trapped by need and circumstance to a person and place making them want to be someone else somewhere else, who believes scraping together the cost of a ticket and the will to board a train would lead to a whole better life just a ways down the track.

Fortunate

In the scope of things we've been incredibly lucky:

  • We can do the core of our work remotely via telephone or video
  • The nature of our work as an internal medicine clinic means we haven't seen as much customer drop off as many other businesses
  • Because of our aggressive move to digital workflows over the past decade our employees have all been able to work almost exclusively from home with little issue or extra effort
  • We automatically received a small support check from Medicare because of our on going relationship with them
  • We've been able to keep all our employees on full time with their healthcare to this point
  • None of us or our loved ones have so far gotten sick

We have seen our weekly visit load drop by just more than a third, which means we are approaching a potential crisis point in terms of keeping everything/one fully funded. We applied for the PPP program as soon as our bank, Chase, accepted applications, but like so many other businesses, we ran into a host of errors during the application process and the initial funds for the program ran out well before they got to our application.

The program has received another round of funding, and our application is actively being reviewed, but that doesn't mean we'll be accepted or that they won't run out of funds again before we get to the end of the process. We can only wait and see, and investigate other solutions in the meantime.

Our patients mostly continue to work with us with a negligible amount of push back, mostly from patients who don't seem to be taking the risk seriously.

I don't really have a problem with informed people deciding they're comfortable risking their own lives, but I've always taken issue with people who think it's OK to risk other peoples lives for their own convenience/profit, and I'm deeply disturbed by the volume of disinformation being distributed by the likes of Fox News, Breitbart, and, of course, our Yam in Chief, and the way their faithful adherents reject reason for propaganda.

I do have to start planning for when and how we're going to open the office back up. Even if we can finally get the PPE we need, much of which our supplier still won't even let us order, I'm struggling with how to secure the office from becoming a vector of transmission from one potentially infected patient to an uninfected other.

I found the idea of taking temperatures at the door to be absurd from the get go as the threat continues to be more from asymptomatic infectees. Add to that the fact that the virus can stay airborne for hours means it wouldn't take much for the waiting or patient rooms to become potential death traps, and I don't have a good solution for that yet.

Maybe if we just inject everyone with Clorox and have 'em swallow a UV light?