In the time travel shows I so love, one character often has occasion to say to another, "You shouldn't be here." Exactly. I shouldn't be here. I should be at JazzFest in New Orleans and visiting with friends and family. To ease the pain, WWOZ has created the beloved cubes and filled them with legacy performances from the last 50 years. Using their app I have been streaming it pretty much nonstop. Great memories of sets I actually heard live (Gregory Porter in 2014, Bonerama in 2012, Aaron Neville in 2010) and others that were new to me (Raymond Myles, Alvin Batiste). I'm looking forward to the second weekend. Another thing that helps is watching the series The Good Fight. It is super political, the West Wing of this time. We zipped through three seasons of it and now have to pause as they figure out how to make episodes while all isolating in various places. In the opening credits, things blow up, things like TV screens with Trump on them. Highly satisfying.

I Facebook messenger call twice weekly with my 4 sisters who live in Louisiana and Mississippi. I did a Zoom meeting for our last Planning Board meeting. For UBR Board, we are using Google Meet. Melissa does two Zoom meetings a day for work. The Google Meet is my least favorite among the online tools.

Fintan O’Toole, writing in the Irish Times, nails how our great country is now pitiable and inept.

"It is one thing to be powerless in the face of a natural disaster, quite another to watch vast power being squandered in real time – wilfully, malevolently, vindictively. It is one thing for governments to fail (as, in one degree or another, most governments did), quite another to watch a ruler and his supporters actively spread a deadly virus. Trump, his party and Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News became vectors of the pestilence.... What are supposed to be daily briefings on the crisis, demonstrative of national unity in the face of a shared challenge, have been used by Trump merely to sow confusion and division. They provide a recurring horror show in which all the neuroses that haunt the American subconscious dance naked on live TV.

Rebecca Solnit writes about how we are in a journey of uncertainty and about reading fairy tales to people. She says the protagonists in these stories are right for the time.

Underneath all the trappings of talking animals and magical objects and fairy godmothers are tough stories about people who are marginal, neglected, impoverished, undervalued, and isolated, and their struggle to find their place and their people. Fairytales are distinct from hero tales at their most banal, the stories in which exceptionally powerful usually male figures defend and enlarge their power (and in which the power is often the power to harm that we call violence)

Possessed of no such capacity for superior force, fairytale characters are given tasks that are often unfair verging on impossible, imposed by the more powerful--climb the glass mountain, sort the heap of mixed grain before morning, gather a feather from the tail of the firebird. They are often mastered by alliances with other overlooked and undervalued players--particularly old women (who often turn out to be possessed of supernatural powers) and small animals, the ants who sort the grain, the bees who find the princess who ate the honey, the birds who sing out warnings. Those tasks and ordeals and quests mirror the difficulty of the task of becoming faced by the young in real life and the powers that most of us have, alliance, persistence, resistance, innovation.

A note on the church bells task. In a phone call to the support guy in Pennsylvania (they don't make parts for the thing anymore, but they are happy to help, )I reviewed the settings on the console and although everything looked good, the bells had stopped ringing. Then came a late season heavy wet snow storm that knocked out power for days. When the power came back on on Depot Street, the bells were right back on schedule. It never occurred to me to reboot the thing.

We have nothing to complain about. Our shelter at home life is easy. We have walks and car rides and reading time and puzzles and good food. Still, people are suffering and struggling and dying and I am furious that evil people let this happen to our country. The pandemic was not avoidable but the incredibly incompetent and cruel mismanagement of it by the worst president and administration ever was entirely avoidable. I despise him more than I can say, and I have to cut off my responses to people who support him lest I unleash fiery fury upon them. An article in the New York Times today points out that the original word for apocalypse in Greek -- apokalypsis -- means an unveiling, a revelation. It has revealed how broken our world is. There will be no normal to go back to. Normal was already fucked up. I can only hope that this unveiling is the beginning of a revolution.

Walks are the best anxiety reliever I can find. We parked at the post office and walked one day over the bridge and up to the college, and another day down Kanokolus and then down the railroad tracks to the trestle. Found some J's along the tracks.
Last night we finished watching "Modern Love" on Netflix. Good actors and sweet stories in New York in the Before Times. I have never been one for audio books; I usually blast music in the car. But the oval track at the high school is good for mindless miles and I bought a few titles on Chirp (no monthly fee). Pastrix by Nadia Bolz-Weber and Dancing at the Edge of the World by Ursula K. LeGuin. Bolz-Weber is a "public theologian." The book makes me smile a lot.

Every few days I unload the bags and boxes (wearing gloves and mask) from the donation shed into the thrift shop. I date the bags and put them aside for several days. Now I can begin opening the bags I tagged over 10 days ago. I put a simple desk in the front room that I think of as a conference room and Lyn L. donated a comfy chair. The 100 mgbit WiFi shouldn't go to waste. I can let people use the room for school and work, one at a time, sanitizing between users.
I keep messing with the bell player settings to get it to play at noon and 5pm and to play popular hymns rather than christmas carols. The bells are part of downtown ambiance and I don't want to lose things we don't have to lose, like the thrift shop. Thinking about the puzzle of the bells, I remembered this great Connie Willis time travel novel, the Doomsday Book (1992), and the important role of the bells. In the book she time travels back to the time of the plague in England while in her own time there is a pandemic. The bells toll when people die and she tries to figure out exactly where she is by the bells. A reviewer of the book notes, "The future Earth of 2054 has suffered a global pandemic in which 65 million have died — with a disproportionate 30 million deaths in the US because of its libertarian resistance to public health measures."