Notes from the Red Bird House

Because you gotta find the bright side, right? Look, people are sick, dying, out of work, overworked, stuck at home, stuck away from home, lonely, overwhelmed, anxious, depressed, unsure, confused, bored, broke, self-isolating, quarantined, out of TP, hoarding TP, essential, non-essential. Some are heroes; some are fuckers; still others are just trying to survive. The world, like almost literally the entire world, is closed. To say these are unprecedented times doesn't quite explain what's going on. It's not a zombie apocalypse nor an Old Testament-esque plague, but it's pretty f***ing devastating by first world twenty-first century standards. Before mid-March when just about everything in America shut down (and food delivery found a resurgence), what was the worst we dealt with on a daily basis? Traffic jams, micromanaging bosses, our kid's asshole soccer coach, the occasional internet outage, a busted washing machine? Now a month later, we're rationing toilet

I'm exhausted so I don't know how this is going to go. Normally, I wouldn't write; I'd wait until a better day, a day when I was better rested or more in the mood. It's not really that I'm not in the mood. I'm simply too tired to even have a mood. Regardless, I feel I should write. Today. Now. There's nothing else to do except sleep and read and sleep and read. And I've done far too much of that in the last week. It's been a crazy week, though in far from the traditional sense of "crazy." That's what I feel I need to at least write a few words about. Last Saturday, April 4, I finally acknowledged that my lungs were feeling "funny." I'd felt a little off - unable to take a deep breath - for a few days previous, and, while I thought maaaaybe it was the beginning of something (i.e. coronavirus), I was able to play it off as just my imagination or allergies, even though I'm not allergic to much of anything. The follo

Maybe it's because it's only 11:30am and I'm already drinking. I dunno. I don't normally day drink. Hell, I don't normally drink. I'm blaming this on the 'Rona (a.k.a. the Coronavirus; a.k.a. COVID-19). I bought a six pack of Angry Orchard on Monday afternoon and at last count, I only have two left. What's more, I had rum and coke last night. Granted compared to normal people, I'm not drinking much at all. Compared to me under normal conditions, I'm a f***ing lush. We are living in unprecedented times. I'm drinking on the regular and there's a toilet paper shortage. I'm also trying to find some humor in an otherwise humorless situation. God, I gotta find something good in all this. And humor is good. Of course, I'll probably end up crying before I hit "Publish." I cried already today. I teared up as I hung up the phone after calling in to the job I never call into. But f*** I just couldn't bring myself to do it. Be