Today is like the 210th rainy day in the Commonwealth of this wild and not so wonderful year. A Monday, in fact, which used to have a special significance in the working week. The beginning of the daunting mass of tasks, memos, calls and conversations to manage over the other four days. All of which end with the letter “Y.”

Coincidence? I think not.

But this was a Monday that had excitement in it. An appointment with a physical therapist at 0915, or what would have been the end of the first in a long series of meetings. I won’t bother you with the details, since they are all the same these days. The appointment demanded the use of the proud Mercedes, which has settled nicely into the role of a driveway decorator under most circumstances.

You know. There are new routines and new lists to accomplish them. I found the keys, and disconnected the phone to place in mobile mode. The wallet, which holds the critical insurance papers and a couple of negotiable pieces of paper, slid neatly into the pocket on my sweatpants. Then the teeter with cane down the back stairs, remembering only at the bottom that my Marlboros were resting happily on the table in the back deck, socially distanced from my Bic lighter.

I am following a treatment list. This included a first visit to a new office, happily collocated with the aquatic center, and I managed to forget the new world and the face mask jammed down in the cupholder. I mention all this only because for a moment there, I thought things were back to normal.

I assume your lists are better than mine. I have stepped away from what used to be life in town and was mildly surprised to encounter what you do all the time. I was greeted by the little circles on the floor that keep you appropriately socially distanced. I forgot my mask, of course, though it was on the list and was routinely handed one that obscured my mouth and vented warm moist air over the lenses of my glasses. A card to place on my seat to indicate to health officials that it needed to be cleaned.

You already know all that new stuff, but I have been following the commonsense defense of staying home, avoiding close approaches from other citizens, and washing my hands with alarming frequency. This was in order to be sealed up in a treatment room with a nice therapist a foot or so away with my mask down so I could speak without fogging out.

You also probably know the rest. Aqua therapy prescribed. Directions printed and handed over with the advisory that therapists were not actually permitted near the water due to inability to communicate with pool management in the same building. Just another one of those little discontinuities that form the residual essence of our lives together.

It was all OK. We are all in this together, as I heard on the car radio. Well, except for the five or six people who were shot over the weekend. There were plenty more shot in the course of normal business, and that is the part I don’t get. We shut down the country- and the world- over an unfortunate death in Minneapolis. A couple rioters, both of whom were armed, got shot dead in an altercation with a juvenile in possession of a firearm in an otherwise mostly peaceful town in Wisconsin. There were a lot of lists involved, since they were there due to something that happened earlier. People from Chicago were so irritated that they drove up and burned down the town over the unfortunate death of a martyr who did his level best to piss off a few cops who had their guns unholstered. It is quite a list of things, and he almost succeeded in dying.

He lived, though he may have time to think about the several laws he had violated in the process of getting shot. A cop- handsome young black man- got shot somewhere else for reasons that are unclear.

Another guy foolish enough to wear a hat and walk down the street alone was murdered by an asshole the local district attorney released on firearms possession charges “without complaint” several hours before.

So, I get the minor social inconvenience of state-enforced social regulation. With the other stuff happening in the background, I am just pleased I did not have to shoot my way into the therapist’s office, nor call for fire-team support to get back to my car. I mean, I forgot my mask, which is at the top of some lists.

But the part that defies my ever-fertile imagination is that we have permitted this sort of behavior to actually happen with all the lists around. In my list to get ready to leave the little house in the country- the whole list- right after the wallet, I considered whether or not this little trip required me to be armed.

That is something new for all of us, you know?

Copyright 2020 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com