Loner's Fortnight

Well, here on Planet Panic, it looks like we’ll all be spending some time alone as everything in this cancel culture of ours has been, well, canceled.

The girls’ schools have closed for the next two weeks. So have the malls, my wife’s working grounds. My superiors here at work are in the process of providing me with a souped up laptop to do payroll and all its assorted tasks from home. Soccer tournaments, matches, and practices have been canceled. Heck, even the libraries are closed, so there’s nowhere to go this weekend to score some interesting reads. Have to avoid the internet, because no matter where you go the soundtrack is REM’s “It’s the End of the World,” droning on and on and on.

I, for one, am looking forward to this.

No more crowds. No more chatty parents on the sidelines. No more rushing to do this, rushing to do that, hurry up and wait here, hurry up and wait there. Yeah, the economy is going to suffer. Family Hopper will lose $5,000-$10,000 because of the Wu Flu shutdown, and that’s only if things pick back up by April Fool’s Day. But, hey, anything to whip the herd to panic mode to vote blue in November. Or get more clicks.

Now, I may sound cavalier, but a small percentage of me is worried. Maybe 2 percent. I do have family members in the red zone so to speak. I myself have a defective lung from my hospital follies a decade ago. Other than that, though, my spidey sense tells me this, like just about every other black swan in 21st century America, is overhyped at exponential velocities. It used to be the-trial-of-the-century-of-the-week. Now it’s the end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it-hot-on-the-heels-of-the-last-end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it.

I feel fine.

I’ve been upbeat. Listening to a lot of Sinatra – particularly his definitive, caricature-like tunes, like “Come Fly With Me” – if you can use some exotic booze, there’s a bar in far Bombay – and “I’ve Got the World on a String.” They’re fun, mindless, PC antidotes. The girls and I have been watching Season 1 of “Jack Ryan” on Netflix starring Jim from the Office, so we’ll finish that. Patch will do her Dribble-Up every day (that’s soccer foot drills on the iPad), the Mrs. will crack a book, Little One will binge on The Twilight Zone and World War II in Color.

I will work on my book. I am in the zone, that area I unpredictably visit a handful of times a decade, and I am in heaven. In the book we follow four men, three on one side, the other on, uh, the other, during the course of one battle during the Civil War. I have a dozen maps, charts, pages and pages of notes, a plot with potential, character names and a skeleton of an outline. This weekend I want to flesh out the character histories and get a fully-formed working outline.

Then, to begin the first draft. The mindless melding of the mind into that vision beyond the whiteness of a blank Word Doc, where one loses oneself in time and space and creates at the speed of a thousand words a day. Three, four months later, the first draft is done, and the right brain brushes its hands in triumphant satisfaction. Then, the left brain shoves the right one off the chair and says, “Now it’s up to me to make this mishmash make sense!”

So that’s where Hopper and Co. stand on the brink of the Great Curve Flattening, our country’s first offensive in the war against the Rona Virus.