Author’s Note: Sorry for the scattered birdshot nature of what follows, but we Peach State citizens are as of today the country’s first open-uppers. Connecting the associated YGTBSM open-bowling-alley-n-tattoo-parlor dots has become harder given the likely length and careening backs-n-forths and ups-n-downs of our new reality plague health requirements.

-Marlow

Is there anything less sensational or entertaining than plague? Despite the efforts of our media – old and new, be it broadcast, cable or streamed — great misfortune over long periods of time is monotonous. To us these grim days of plague aren’t ravenous and inextinguishable fires and flames but more like an unseen deliberate thumping forward and crushing of the hapless in its path.

In this sense the plague becomes more potent due to its commonplaceness. Our loss of fierce resentment we all felt during the first phase of the plague, the panicked one, led temptingly to despondency, if not resignation that we felt during the second phase and then acquiescence during this, the plague’s third stage — the new reality phase. It is notable here by the ubiquity of people wearing masks in public. BTW local US Army bases started requiring masks be worn to access the base commissary and post exchange very, very early in April. They had already instituted mandatory hand washing before entry into these stores back in mid-March.

We held steady and resisted listlessness, indifference, boredom and apathy. We figured out that where we were at was not a waiting room. It was more like a tunnel where light and warmth awaited us at the exit.

—–

Our town and county’s upward curves of new infections and deaths began seriously bending lower from its low plateau during the days leading up to Easter Sunday. A week later, our curves were close to being flat lines with new daily cases becoming onesies or twosies save for one blip up vice the daily dozen plus before Easter week. Was the Empire beginning to rise?

—–

During the early days of the plague’s second phase — let’s call it the ignorance or naiveté stage, we paid attention to the small details that meant so much to us as individuals. When comparing those things of ours to those of others, we realized, perhaps for the first time for many of us, the uniqueness of our lives. Now during the plague’s current phase, our wellbeing will center on what interests everyone else and therefore what binds us together as humans.

The rhythm of our lives and deaths, the media, subsiding grocery store panics and other transformed formalities like the ugly muted whine of local ambulance sirens transporting the critically sick and dead became the sour bread of the second phase’s citizen banishment to our homes.

Our slowly modifying exile during this third phase, the one of the new reality, will morph into an inert mass within us, a sterile indeterminate sentence that our hearts and minds will quickly encapsulate.

No longer should there be any active revolt as we saw during the plague’s second stage in assorted northern states. The panic-generated energy of the plague’s first phase is now gone. Local law enforcement didn’t really need its drones to shoo us into our homes from the parks and squares.

—–

At a certain point in the near future of the new reality stage, I feel the news’ 24/7 horror show and blame game will fail to horrify any longer. It will become a monotonous norm or habit. Maybe this has already arrived.

There will come a slow growing sense that there will be no more need for “marking time.”

It will be at the some point following today’s opening up that we shall realize how exhausted and strangely indifferent to everything we have become.

Unknowingly, I think we civilians will then become like a fighting man in a great war feeling worn out by the incessant strain and mindful only of the duties daily assigned to him, and ceasing even to hope for the decisive battle or the bugle-call of unconditional surrender and victory.

—–

Switching back to our former focus in the small carefree details of the pre-plague life and times will seem at first a bit impossible.

Even now there are marked differences in our masked faces that may shock some — absent former smiles of hip irony and perpetual youth are replaced by dried slightly parted, pursed lips that betray an agedness and the wastage imposed by our time thus far under the plague.

We have grown bit harder, a bit brittle but still unsnappable, while at times we remain the prey of our emotions. We knew this hardness of heart and steadfast calm were the only ways of carrying on. In any case, we have lost our illusions and are left only with a new approach to life and world.

We still have no cure but we should be able to diagnose quicker and more accurately.

Shrill cries of “Doctor, you’ll save him, won’t you?” now have better chances of being answered positively.

It will be more possible for the docs and nurses to dispense medical solutions and not just information of bad luck stats.

These new reality times will rid us of a fair part of our cultural predilection towards sentimentality. We will more clearly see things as they are; that is to say, in the garish light of the unfairness and hideous, witless justice of pestilence. A bleak enlightenment.

On the plus side we will almost all become ready listeners and agreeable companions. With the new release of energy that surviving the plague brought us, we will profoundly comprehend what being really human is and will be always ready to talk, listen and understand.

Hopefully we will blossom out — more congenial and better humored. Accepting and reacting to the big letter T truth that everyone’s in the same small boats. The thing we will most detest going forward will be being cut off from others;

We as a people will hang together, since we had a long spell of plague exile.

We will keep on the right side of others and be much more obliging of those who have lost their way.

—–

Will our past ill humor return when we begin anew to flock to nice restaurants, line up to watch the latest movie blockbuster or band tours at jammed theaters and music halls, and flood boisterously out into our town’s squares and parks? Or will the pilot light of our former shrinking from every uncomfortable, not-like-me contact be relit?

I hope not.

—–

This abrupt but hopefully slow transition from a life of idleness to the former one of constant motion might again bring us a void of thoughts or energy. We incessantly talked back before the plague washed up on our shores about impending escapes – job changes, vacation, relationships, new friends etc. Will we now, feeling the release from a plague death sentence, choose excesses of drink, food, spending, and assorted other behaviors? Stay tuned.

—–

Early on in phase three we shall get used to our masks bulging a bit and the growing moistness of our upper lips as we speak through our masks. This’ll give a sort of unreality to our chatter as if we were dialoguing statues during a summer drizzle.

—–

A series of rain bands with high winds blew through town on the first days that followed Easter Sunday. The pollen was gone while tree leaves were fully greened and enlarged by the torrential downpours that accompanied the thunderstorm winds.

At the end of the week an unusually persistent spell of chilly weather settled in and seemed to crystallize the blue skies over the Coastal Empire. Rarely have spring skies over the Hostess City been so blue. Day after day an almost icy radiance flooded the town with brilliant sharp light. The air was refreshingly high altitude frost-cleansed while the temps were in the mid-60s.

—–

Soothsayers like Nostradamus will be once again in vogue as multitudes of government and academic modelers appear in our midst. They’ll be consulted daily, and always with happy results, only if we strictly follow their thoughts. Indeed, the one thing these cable TV prophecies have in common was that, ultimately, all are reassuring in the long term. Unfortunately, though, the plague was not.

—–

Meanwhile up north, a Midwest state governor extended his stay-at-home edict to citizens through the end of May, while hospital groups in Colorado are furloughing staff at under-utilized hospitals. We crazed Georgians salute and feel you.

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