keeping a distance

My diet these days is largely cottage cheese, orange juice and an occasional liverwurst sandwich ... largely, in short, gum food while I wait for a lower insert of false teeth (the old one got lost around this maw of stuff) to be shaped.

At the doctor's yesterday, my weight was down to 130. Once, when muscled, I topped 200. Eating is nice, but not that compelling these days. I'm not depressed about it.

The doctor, whom I visited and whom I like, told me that there has been a rise in requests for downers in this time when so many are so lonely at home.  "Eat what you like," he said. "But watch your salt." Naturally, salt is what I crave upon hearing that salt is somehow on the shit list.

Everyone wears a mask ... except Donald Trump, of course. In Europe, various countries have barred U.S. citizens from entering based on Trump's self-centered, lackadaisical and politically-charged posturing. As the Somali security agent once put it on TV when assessing a pirated western oil tanker: "If you do not share your wealth with us, we we share our poverty with you."

The U.S. is being shared with. A third-world country.

Masks give me a case of claustrophobia. They increase my desire for needed oxygen. They hide more of what was already hidden behind Facebook and other healing 'solutions.'

It puts me in mind of the schizophrenic patient once quote in a book I read: "The air is still, here -- the air between the things in the room. But the things in the room are no longer here."

Businesses of the cafe variety are getting clobbered. Churches are being clobbered. "Social distancing" (six feet/two meters) creates yet more rifts and schisms. Sports and their stadia are denuded. News outlets struggle and strain to say something new ... but there is nothing new: the drum beat hums like an impatient principal idly imagining what punishment to mete out. Fingers drumming on a desktop.

I wonder how many bank robbers are rejoicing: "I don't know what s/he looked like, officer. S/he was wearing a mask."