Life in the time of Coronavirus

On Thursday morning, my CEO sent a Slack message to the company ( 🙄) telling folks who hadn't already started for the office that they now had the option to work from home, and that, from Thursday on, we were encouraged to work from home. On Thursday afternoon, my team waved to each other and said "hey, see you in two weeks."

We worked from home Friday, and it was fine. We worked from home Monday, and it was fine, but the stock market kept butting into everyone's day. Today, Tuesday, my new work-ordered monitor arrived, and I have Coronavirus alerts coming into my feed every fifteen minutes or so. (The stock market, showing what feels eerily like Gibson-predicted instability, appears to have spiked up in recovery, only to tank again after hours. I have to wonder about the volatility of the markets since 2016. Are we being tinkered with by forces from alternative continua?)

It's hard being here right now.

Since my last blog post here, I've settled into City life. We've gone out, we've stayed in, I haven't made any new friends per se, but I've been happy and contentedly active. In the past two weeks we went to the SF Symphony twice, visited our favorite tiki bar a few times, gone to a lecture and movie, and did a number of other social things out and about in the City. And now we're all waiting, fretting, to see if we're part of the 14- or 24-day cohort of covid-19 incubation. Because we know that, like the killer in a horror movie, that it's out there somewhere, and also like a horror movie, not everyone is going to survive this.

And yet it's spring. Last night was warm, and the supermoon hung over Mount Sutro like an orb spider in her web. Someone's backyard trumpet flowers are blooming, and the smell comes in through the back kitchen door in the evening.

But the muni trains passing in front of my front window are empty at unusual hours. The commercial district two blocks away on Irving is quieter than I've ever seen it; the businesses open shorter hours, with wary proprietors tucked behind glass and masks and blue nitrile gloves. We're all watching the numbers rising, wishing that there was some way to know if we'd been exposed - but the absolute lack of testing in the state has made it impossible to do anything but wait.

So in the meantime, I'm doing what I can in order to find something beautiful at least once a day, and photograph it. If you follow me on the socials, you'll start seeing them, and I'm going to try to post them here, as well.