Zombie Apocolypse, aka COVID-19: The Show So Far

A lot has happened in the last week. I have too much time on my hands and too many emotions to just hang on to them. So here's what's been going on with me this week. I won't call it amazing writing or necessarily following a particular tense, or that I've edited lots.  A happy word-barf. And a delicious procrastination -- I should really be planning for the rest of the semester, or tending to the bread I'm baking today.
I am not trying to bitch or complain. I have a great life. I love my house, I like my spouse well enough to spend lots of isolation time with him. I am very lucky. I don't know how long all of it will last. I don't know a lot of things, and I'm lucky I can cope with a lot of "Don't Know." Just wanted a record of what it used to look like, BC.

Thursday, March 12, 2020, around 4 p.m.

That was the day my life changed, our lives changed.

We were setting up for Canoecopia and Jim had just gotten the network actually working. We celebrated for like, two minutes, and then Tucker came by boat pickup and was whispering. Don’t celebrate too much, Darren’s about to make an announcement that he’s cancelling the show due to COVID-19.

Ugh.

All that work.

All that planning.

Pack it up and go home.

We called Lili, who was going to be flying in for the show. She was in Newark, and getting back home would have put her there overnight before a rescue from Gordon. She flew to Madison anyway. She’s got family in the area; it wouldn’t be for naught. Plus, she loves us, we love her. Wanted to give her the opportunity to back out if she needed to.

Back to the impending announcement -- I felt like I’d lost a friend. I had no idea how much Canoecopia meant to me until then.

It was somber in the back office, as Darren gathered core staff to announce his decision.

He said it was the second hardest decision he’d ever had to make, which made me wonder what the first hardest decision was, but that wasn’t important right then.

He was in tears, his daughter Whitney was in tears. I was in tears that he was in such agony.

He’d made this call before anything had gotten really hairy. Before anyone started shrinking the size of gatherings.

Jason Aldean had pulled out of his performance next door at the Coliseum.

Darren had had at least 6 vendor cancellations while he’d been discussing the matter with his wife Stephanie.

After he told core staff, he gathered anyone who was in the hall to tell them the news. More tears. Applause and support as he explained his decision.

We all went home and cried. We made Cincinnati Chili and enjoyed our time with Lili. I drank my feelings and went to bed late.

This was really just the beginning.

Friday, March 13

Lili and I walked the dogs and I went back to the expo hall later than the call time of 9 a.m., to help tear it all down, pack it up, and get it back to Rutabaga.  The guys from Ascend were already well on top of tearing down the computers, putting all the printers back in boxes. I  ripped signs off the tables, the ones for “Make Checks Payable to Rutabaga” and reminders to donate to Josh Kestelman fund. How much money will that fund lose this year, I wondered. How much revenue will be lost for all the folks who couldn’t sell at Canoecopia, including Rutabaga. Ugh.

All through this day and the day before, my phone was blowing up with emails from school, first indicating that spring break would be extended to two weeks instead of just one, and then later saying that all classes would be finished online for the semester. A fine blessing for me, as the nutrition class I’m teaching this semester at the college was online anyway. I’d had no idea I was seeing my hybrid students for the last time that semester last Monday. That’s just weird.

We ate terrible, terrible pizza from the expo hall.  They require us to only have food from them, bring in no outside food, and it’s just impossibly bad. A trifecta of badness, in fact: chewy, kind of cardboard-y crust; a tomato sauce that’s more pasty than saucy and there’s far too much of it; and while the cheese pizza was passable, the pepperoni was like old, rancid, wet dog.  Or wet hog. I don’t know, I just never want to eat that pepperoni again. I commented to Kaitlyn that they’d have to work really hard to make this pizza worse. And that I felt bad for being or sounding ungrateful.

I helped shrink-wrap the little office supply bins with a newbie from Baga who happened to be from Elkhorn. Nice guy. I helped schlep computer bits into the truck, I think, and definitely helped strike the back office computers, got those loaded into Jim’s and my cars. Went to Baga and helped reconnect credit card machines, printers, and scanners to the computers on the floor. Hung out with Jim as he re-assembled the server, cursing as he needed to. I guess we were out of there by 4 p.m. or so.

We met up with Gordy and Lili’s sponsor friends, for lack of a better word, Heroes on the Water. It’s an organization that gets folks who have PTSD and other trauma on the water – they’re doing good things and saving lives in the process. And they’re neat folks to boot: Joe, Laura, and Amber. Some kindred southerners from Texas and Oklahoma – I really liked them all.

We went to Working Draft for a round of their beautiful beers.

We didn’t know it would be for the last time in a while. I’m hoping it’s not forever. Just now checked Facebook and they are no longer selling crowlers or food through online sales; it’s Wednesday.

Then we went to Monsoon Siam and ate all the lovely things. We hope it’s not the last time for that little treasure either – the tom ka looked so good, and the thing I had was delicious but I can’t remember what it’s called….Khao Soi, there it is.

It was sort of almost a normal Canoecopia Friday, except that we were not fatigued from a long two days’ work at the show, and we were not eating ridiculously late.

We got the news that the governor had decided to limit all gatherings to less than 250 people. Or was it 1000 at that point? Regardless, had we decided to go against the grain and open the show at 4 p.m. on Friday anyway, we would have been shut down at 5 p.m.  That would have been even worse, possibly more heartbreaking. We knew Darren had made the right call, but now it was confirmed.

We did flop into bed at midnight, though that’s probably early for a “normal” Canoecopia Friday night. I was smart and stayed away from the gin. But Jim and Lili did get into the bourbon a little bit. 

Saturday, March 14

What the hell happened this day? I know Lili went to the shop and sold life jackets. Jim must have gone in too, to continue putting computers together and such. Oh, wait, that’s right. Since the world was ending, we decided to stay in, but order pizza from Sal’s. I drove up to Sun Prairie to pick it up, and on the way I watched the most amazing, red sunset. I peeked in the kitchen through the back window of Sal’s, and I saw one of my students on the line, getting it done. I’ll miss that one and so many others.

The Heroes on the Water folks came over and we hung out at the house, drinking more beer we’d gotten from Working Draft (the last crowlers we’d see for a while), and enjoying one GF pizza and eating the hell out of a tomato pie and a Huntsman? Woodsman? Mushrooms and cheesy deliciousness.  Lili got salad fixin’s for Joe who doesn’t do dairy. It was a nice time. Amber is a cross-stitcher and a crochet-er and they admired my quilts and my mom’s quilts and the silly afghan I’ve been working on forever. At one point, Joe wanted a close-up of Cici, and Jim was trying to help, but she couldn't see the treat through his phone...this had me in stitches:

Sunday, March 15

Again, Lili went to Baga and sold life jackets, even gave a clinic on life jackets, those lucky staffers. Before that, we helped her clear out the last of her storage unit – some flooring, a lamp, a cooler, some jackets she took home. We met the manager on duty there, his name escapes me. And because he’s like, 75, his boss had told him to stay home, laid him off, no pay. What the hell, coronavirus? After we helped out Lili, we went home and napped. We made Mapo Tofu for Lili, as she’d never had it before. I think she liked it, and I know we loved it.

Monday, March 16

Lili left us early Monday. I’m glad she got home safely. Then it really sunk in that we were in this. Home. Isolated. For the forseeable future. Is it forever? Will it feel like forever? Jim went in to work. I bumbled around the house and sandwiched together my kayak quilt. Fantastic success with the 505 spray, that stuff is gold. A spray adhesive to hold the layers together. Now it’s just figuring out how to sew it all together. I waited till Tuesday for more time and inspiration.

Lili sent us a photo of O’Hare – it was a ghost town. Maybe 5 people in the whole photo, what’s normally one of the busiest airports in the world. Crazy.

Tuesday, March 17

This was the 8^th anniversary of my father’s death. I miss that guy a lot. But it’s overshadowed by being stuck in the house ALL DAY. It’s not really imperative that I go out and get the invisible thread I’m thinking of using for the kayaks. I have other thread and other quilts to tend to. I have time to tackle some thoughts for school and what changes I might make when we get back to business. May change lots, may change almost nothing. I don’t want to make more work for them. I think this was the day they said that bars and restaurants must close to prevent the spread of the virus.  I read more articles online and we’re just 11 or 12 days behind Italy. Our number of cases is small, but the growth or contagion is still exponential. It’s so fucked up.

Tuesday was also the day we’d set with Liz and her family to come over for a wallop of homemade pizza (pizza is suddenly a theme of my life, right?). No hugs for or from the family – elbow bumps instead -- kind of sucked, but we got to be together and talk. We were less than the required 10 people. Jim and I did the cooking/dough handling.

Wednesday, March 18

I knew I had to write down some of this, if only for myself. I read the paper too much and get freaked out. How people with the virus have encountered such red tape in getting tested. How some people don’t live after getting the virus. So today I’m trying to write it all down, some of the emotions of loss and sadness and being scared, lonely. I took a walk yesterday when it was pretty nice out, sun and maybe 40 degrees with little wind. Saw others out with their dogs, or other people talking at safe distances from each other. I even got off the sidewalk to the street to pass a person safely. Greetings are nods and not hearty hellos, more of a whisper, as if we are in a church and there’s something solemn and somber to revere. Solitude even amongst ourselves. It’s weird as hell.

I miss making music with actual people. We are all trying to figure out how to form a choir over the interwebs. I can’t remember right now which day it was that our choir and upcoming performance was plain old put on indefinite hold. When Canoecopia was cancelled, I was rejoicing that we’d be able to go to rehearsal. Bert emailed and told us we’d be rehearsing, but 6 feet apart. Then he emailed again and said the church had closed up; we wouldn’t be rehearsing at all or for the near future. Might try to reschedule our performance for June. But who knows. It’s super sad, as the music we were going to perform was pretty damned cool.  Check out Menotti’s The Unicorn, the Gorgon and the Manticore: https://youtu.be/gQBfZn3aNNM

And Gyorgy Orban’s Missa Quinta – we had worked on two movements from that. The Agnus Dei rattled in my head all day on Thursday and Friday, the text “dona nobis pacem” set against an eerie cello harmonic arpeggio. I miss real music. I need an outlet.  Ella may do, but it may be time to put my fingers to the keys of a keyboard for the first time in forever.

Jim showed me a video put up by someone in Spain, with his keyboard on a balcony, cranked up. Playing “My Heart Will Go On,” a song I could normally care less about, but playing to quarantined folks in their canyon of apartments, I lost it. https://youtu.be/HOLQnHhuHEM

Yesterday it was a link by a friend who was asking her students to record a verse of “How Can I Keep from Singing” and upload it to their Google Classroom.  Adorable.

Going to go tend that bread now, it needs a turn. Need to make a plan for the rest of the semester and go after it. Maybe some quilting. Maybe I'll venture out and pick up that prescription for the dog. I hate that the app keeps asking for her birthdate and I can't get it right (but I bet there's not one on file).

Holler if you want to FaceTime. I'm no extrovert, but this isn't easy for any of us.